‘Uphill?’
‘It’s a little hill.’
‘Are you tailgating?
‘I am now, because he keeps tapping the brakes.’
‘I guess anyone who wants to gets to be a jerk.’
‘That’s right. It’s an equal-opportunity society.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Just drive and drive and maybe I’ll hit something.’
‘You’re crazy. You’ll kill someone.’
‘People out here know the risks,’ Boggs said. ‘If you’ve put yourself out on the road, then by implication you’ve accepted the associated risks.’
‘I doubt that most people think of it that way.’
‘People do all kinds of shit without thinking.’
‘You’re not an asshole. Stop it.’
‘The problem,’ Boggs said, ‘is that you still want to think that we’re friends. Look at what’s happened. Look at where we are. What does friendship mean? This isn’t it.’
‘We don’t have to be friends. We don’t have to be anything. If you’ll just get some help. Just go home.’
‘You don’t really want me to go home and inject myself into Heather’s life again, go in and stir things and make a mess of the situation you’ve got.’
‘Whatever you need to do to work it all out.’
‘It would be a mess. I’m just thinking of your interests, Ellis.’
‘Sarcasm is the lowest form of humour.’
‘No, really you have to agree that puns are lower. I’ll take bad sarcasm over a good pun any day.’
‘If you have your humour, Boggs, then life’s OK, don’t you think?’
‘Not really. What’s the one got to do with the other?’
Ellis said, ‘You said right, right? But where are you going?’
‘Right, wrong. Left, right.’
‘What?’
‘With a W.’
‘Oh. Oh.’ Jacob Wright had been one of their clients. Ellis pulled to the shoulder and stopped the car.
‘Now we’re getting somewhere, huh? Get it? We’re driving, getting somewhere. It’s a pun, pretty low.’
‘We’re not getting anywhere.’ He wasn’t. He was stopped on the shoulder.
‘Now, that’s what makes it funny, because it’s sarcasm, too.’
‘Boggs,’ Ellis said.
‘Boggs. Boggs, Boggs, Boggs. Boggs, can I have a job? Boggs, can I have your wife? Boggs, can I have your sympathy? Boggs, can I save your life? Boggs, can I feel good about myself?’
‘I’m -’
‘Boggs, will you accept my apology?’
‘Shut up, Boggs.’
‘Am I bothering you?’
‘You can talk a circle right around me. Good for you.’
‘OK. Talk to the Dostoevsky.’ Ellis heard an audiobook playing. ‘That I should cast a dark cloud over your serene, untroubled happiness; that by my bitter reproaches I should cause distress to your heart, should poison it with secret remorse and should force it to throb with anguish at the moment of bliss. Oh, never, never!’
Then the silence of the dead phone line.
Jacob Wright had been a major defence client, a fat, affable attorney representing a manufacturer. Including everything, including even the jobs on which he and Boggs had only spent a few hours before everyone concluded that the case looked bad and should be settled, they must have worked for Wright on more than a dozen different jobs. Maybe twenty. Maybe more.
Ellis took out the map. The nearest Wright job that he could recollect lay – like a confirmation – 180 degrees off his current course.
He turned around.
Night had now taken the world completely. He passed an array of towering antennas with blinking red and white lights. An enormous solitary ghostly lit church. Fields where large numbers of fireflies were lighting, pale green sparks in great numbers all across the landscape – they glowed only as they flew upward so that they appeared to be always rising. Some rose over the road, and the ones that struck the windshield flashed brightly into green smears of phosphorescence that slowly, slowly faded. They began to mass in swarms that pelted the minivan – three, four on the glass before him, startling him with every impact, dead and luminous and beautiful. Then the fields ended with an eruption of residential housing developments; the fireflies vanished.
10.
THE ROAD, THE road: it came at him and spun out behind, varying without changing. Ellis knew – Boggs had taught him – that only four patches of rubber, each the size of the palm of a hand, touched the minivan to the road. They bore up its two tons of metal, glass, plastics and fluids, which in turn bore up himself and contained him and moved him in great comfort: climate-controlled, cushioned, radio and CD player at ready, cellphone charging, cup holders awaiting cups to cradle, visors set to block harsh sun glare, windows and mirrors powered at the touch of a button, cruise control to mind the accelerator.
His headlamps ghosted an interstate with a narrow median; a flavour of metal gathered in his mouth; cars came down the opposite lanes like fists. He drove until late, then slept in the minivan off a side road in a rutted open space. During the night he woke only once, with a raccoon crouched on the hood, staring with bandit eyes. Ellis pressed the horn, and the creature reared, smirked, loped away. Ellis watched a hanging half-moon and slept again until the sky was bluing. He woke cold but sweating. He turned the ignition for heat, but shut it off again and stood out to jog up the road a half-mile or so and back again. Swinging his legs and pushing himself forward without a gas pedal felt strange, and he returned to the minivan trembling and heaving, and rushed onward.
Like anyone, he could drive, he could hate it, and he could do it forever.
Sunflowers glowed in the window, endless bright heads peering upward. Black-and-white cows trundled over rolling terrain, drank at the foot of a madly spinning windmill. A haze filled the sky with the colour of weathered aluminum, and a monstrous Wal-Mart swam up out of the distance and flashed into the rear-view. Anything could be put rapidly behind; nothing could.
He felt very tired.
He spent much of the day at the place where a woman driving her daughter home from choir practice had stopped as a goose and four goslings crossed the road. While she waited on the geese, a pickup hit her from behind, and her daughter in the back seat died. Ellis spent more than two hours scrutinising the ground, moving up and down the road, but he could find nothing, so went on. Boggs wouldn’t answer his phone, and Ellis put off calling Heather. He despised himself a little for this, but he was angry with her, too. She owed an explanation for what had passed between her and Boggs on the golf course.
He drove amid squat glass ten- and twelve-storey office towers. A movie complex the size of a stadium. A row of car dealers, Nissans, Volkswagens, Audis, Fords, Chryslers, Suzukis, Saturns, Saabs, Hummers, closely parked, colourful and shining as jelly beans on a plate. Supermarkets and Starbucks and cheque cashing in little strip malls with names like Silver Water Square, Walden Center, Maple Grove Plaza. His stomach felt walnut-hard. His hands moved restlessly on the steering wheel. He examined the place amid alfalfa fields where two SUVs had met head-on, at a combined speed of 115 mph, and burned. One of the drivers died with his head – per the police photos – resting on the windowsill, his eyes rolled and exposed like a pair of eggs. Ellis stood on the road shoulder and scrutinised its gravel. After a time he moved forward a half-step. He tried to give attention to each individual stone. Moved forward another half-step. For this accident he and Boggs had developed an elaborate analysis involving Conservation of Momentum, Conservation of Energy and Taylor Series expansions, but he could remember none of it, only the photos of the dead. Limbs burned to stumps.