‘How?’
‘Could need a part out of it.’
‘Why is the toilet out there?’
‘Weather won’t hurt a toilet. Ceramic. Washes right off.’
‘You’ve lost your mind,’ Ellis said, and his father smiled.
Dust on the car’s upper surfaces had been disturbed here and there by the brushing and pressing of hands – presumably from Boggs’s visit. Wires spilled from the broken headlamp openings. The wheels were overtaken by rust, and the tyres were flat and cracked. Looking at the damage across the front he could see already that the estimate of the angle of impact that he had used in the PC-Crash simulation had been off by a few degrees, although it seemed unlikely to make much difference. The airlane nameplate was missing from the left front fender.
He retrieved a pen, notepad and three disposable cameras from the minivan, and he borrowed an old, worn retractable tape measure from his father; he could not recall if it was the same tape measure that they had had when he was a boy. He would have preferred to have several tape measures to provide measurements relative to one another, but his father only had the one. He found just inside the shed door a sack of wooden golf tees – he’d never known his father to play golf, but he didn’t ask – and used them to mark points in the grass around the car and measured straight lines between them.
He followed the same protocol that he and Boggs had developed over the years. He checked and noted vehicle make, model, year, ID number, wheel and tyre sizes, transmission type, brake type, overall width, overall height, overall length, axle positions, tyre conditions, brake-pad wear. At every six inches across the front end he measured depth of crush relative to the rear axle position, first at bumper level, and then again at hood line. The air was ripe with humidity, and as he made notes sweat fell on the page and glistened there in wet blisters. His father stood watching, then went to the toilet and sat facing the open fields, elbows hitched up a little as if he might giddy-up the commode into the distance.
Ellis stood fussing with one of the cameras until he realised that he was hesitating, unsure he wanted photos of this car. He circled, taking photos from each side and each corner, from low and high, then moved in and snapped close-ups of the wheels, licence plates, vehicle ID number, the place where the airlane nameplate should have been, broken headlamps and windows, then focused on the damaged area at the front and took photo after photo at every angle, nearer and further, with and without measuring tape for scale. A gust of wind ruffled his notes and made the trees along the road silvery and flickering. The clouds on the western horizon were closing in, black, rigged with claws of vapour. He tried the driver’s door but it would not budge, so he opened the passenger door and slid over to the driver’s side – he had to cram himself, thighs nudging the steering wheel, knees into the dash. He sat gripping the steering wheel. Then he took up his pad and noted the mileage, the fuel level and that the gear shift was in neutral. The dash appeared largely undamaged, though now riven with age cracks. He twisted himself down under the steering wheel to look at the foot pedals – wear of use looked normal. Remembering the headlamp bulbs, and wondering if they were on at the time of the collision, he climbed out but couldn’t find either of them. They might have been lost in the collision, or put into police storage somewhere, or possibly Boggs had taken them. He drew out the driver’s seat belt and examined its length and found a transfer marking where the belt had locked and pulled a little plastic off the D-ring during the impact. He took a photo of it, leaned across the front seat and pulled out the passenger belt, and it also bore a transfer mark.
A transfer mark on the passenger-side belt.
Ellis stared at it for a long while, then let the belt run back on its retractor and stood out of the car. His hands had picked up a layer of grime from the car, and he saw it in great detail – the grey thickest on the pads of his fingers, thinner down through the joints and onto the palm.
A transfer mark on the passenger-side belt.
He crawled in again, pulled out the passenger belt and examined the mark and then looked away and then re-examined the mark: a small black line across the width of the webbing, almost as if drawn there with a crayon. But it matched the colour of the D-ring, and when he pulled the belt away from the D-ring the impress of the belt into the plastic could be seen there. He photographed both – transfer mark, D-ring.
‘Got to put the car back before the rain,’ his father said behind him.
‘A minute.’
Sometimes load markings could also be found on the belt latch plate, but here he could not see one on the driver’s side, and on the passenger side he could only see a very faint marking that might have been a manufacturing effect. Inconclusive. He crawled into the back seat, which had only lap belts – no D-rings, and therefore no possibility of transfer marks. He checked the latch plates, but there were no indications of loading. He returned to the front passenger-side belt and looked at the transfer mark there one more time, felt its texture, turned it in the light. He let the retractor take the belt back. He stood out of the car. ‘Dad,’ he said.
Side by side they put hands on the damaged sheet metal and leaning and straining they rolled the car back. His father slid the shed door shut and set the lock, then started toward the toilet. He said, without looking around, ‘I’m sorry that your friend is dead. I liked him.’
‘I’m going to get going.’
‘Find what you wanted?’
Ellis didn’t answer. His father turned to look. ‘I need to think,’ Ellis said.
‘You always did.’
They watched the weed-infested fields and the sky, which darkened further, the reaching, dark cloud masses now advancing with visible speed. A wind pressed, died, then renewed violently. Ellis put his notes in a back pocket and stood hesitating. Odours rose of dust, manure, mud. His father sat unperturbed on his toilet. A piece of paperboard went by bouncing and spinning, and the wind took dust off the fields and streamed it through the air, making Ellis squint and blink. He wasn’t sure of what he was seeing until it had come halfway across the fields: the leading edge of the rain, perfectly defined, a curtain in the air, and below it the field turned black. The sight of this vast motion held Ellis until, although it seemed to be very slowly crawling over the open fields, the rain suddenly hit him with heavy cold droplets. A gust soaked the length of him. He squinted at his father – at times in the past he’d been convinced that the root problem of his life was that his father loved Christopher more than himself. But perhaps his father in his self-pity was right, and everything could be explained by errors of incompetence.
Then his father looked at him through the rain and howled, cheerfully, like an ape.
Startled, Ellis ran.
In the minivan, his father was visible through the windshield, radically distorted by the water moving on the glass, glowing in his white shirt. He remained atop the toilet and his white arm waved high in the air, like a captain committed to going down with the ship. Ellis waved, but his father almost certainly could not see the gesture. He backed the minivan to the road. The wipers flopped water aside but could barely keep up. The muddy gravel road spattered into the wheel wells. He drove slowly and watched the road and wanted to watch the gravel stones in the road, to watch each drop of water on the windshield – he did not want to think about the transfer mark on the passenger belt of his brother’s car and its meaning.
Abruptly he cleared the rain. Traffic moved densely on the interstate. Now the afternoon sun, which had stood over his right shoulder in the morning, stood again over his right shoulder. He powered the windows down and air entered clamorously.