‘- with the flashing -’ Boggs said. Traffic noise cut sharply behind his words.
Ellis still trailed to the right of the pickup when the motion appeared again, ahead and on the left, nearer now, on the edge of the pattern of pale light cast by his headlamps, a moving object, a figure, hunched, walking rapidly into Ellis’s lane. A sudden sensation of hopeless drowning seized Ellis – he fumbled for the brake pedal, turned the wheel to the right, not too hard, aware of people on the sidewalk. He could see that he didn’t have nearly enough distance to stop. But there remained a chance, if the shape in the street stepped back.
But the figure moved, head down, with deliberate speed. A tall, thick male figure in dark clothing.
‘- light -’ Boggs said.
‘Boggs!’ Ellis screamed into his phone, as he at last was able to get his foot down on the brake pedal. The pace of the pedestrian in the street faltered, his head turning, his mouth glinting. ABS kicked the brake pedal up against the pressure of Ellis’s foot. He dropped his phone reaching to put both hands on the steering wheel and fought down against the ABS. The figure in the street leaned back the way he had come, but nothing could be done now. Ellis already could not see the man’s feet, obscured by the hood of the car.
With a crack of breaking bone and plastic and a slight shudder of the car – amid the continuing ABS-driven stutter and squall of the tyres – the pedestrian swung sideways, pivoting unnaturally at knee height, and came down on the hood, striking sheet metal with hip, elbow, shoulder, a calamitous metallic noise, and he balanced there an instant that went long, one leg up in the air, ribs and shoulder on the hood, an arm thrown out, his head approaching the windshield. Then Ellis shut his eyes. He also began to scream. But over his own scream he heard the violent pop of the windshield, chased by the patter of glass on his hands and chest. A shard bounced off the closed lid of one eye. An impact sounded on the roof.
He looked. He could see ahead only through a vertical area of unbroken glass on the left and a small, sagging, jagged hole where the pedestrian’s head had struck, and there the pedestrian pin-wheeled through the space lit by the headlamps, hair on end, pant legs and jacket aflutter, flinging dark blood from a wound in the knee. The legs came down against the road one after the other and crumpled, and then he was out of sight. Cool air streamed through the gap in the windshield, and Ellis felt a painful straining of his leg against the brake pedal and the shape of the pedal underfoot while it jerked with animal movements, then chattered a last time, and the car lurched and halted. Ellis sat gasping, hands still on the steering wheel, foot still hard on the brake pedal. Through the hole in the windshield he saw that he had stopped at an angle, with his right front wheel against the kerb. When he closed his mouth, he gagged. He coughed, worked a chip of glass forward, and spit it. ‘Boggs?’ he said.
He reached into his mouth to drag out another fragment and looked at the shape of it – a tiny shining cube on the end of his finger – with a sense of incomplete comprehension. He thought: Boggs Boggs Boggs.
A horn droned. He unbuckled his seat belt and stood out of the car. An SUV had struck the rear of the muddy pickup, and presumably the interminable horn was the SUV’s. The SUV had begun to turn in an attempt to avoid the pickup, and it sat at perhaps a thirty-five-degree angle to the lane lines. That collision didn’t look very severe. Vehicles were stopping behind the SUV, while in the opposite lanes cars moved by slowly. Ellis saw all of this in a glance, as well as the many stark lights along the roadway, the shining jewels of tempered glass at his feet, and on the sidewalk an elderly man who gazed at him with an expression of curiosity. A stranger, who had just witnessed an accident. Ellis watched the man watch him, until he recalled again what had happened – the figure in the street, the sound of traffic behind Boggs’s voice on the phone. He moved forward. At first he saw nothing, only open lane, and he had a surge of hope, that perhaps he had somehow imagined matters to be much worse than they actually were.
But then he looked further ahead. He hadn’t understood how far the pedestrian had been propelled by the collision. The man lay beside the kerb, on his side, in a shadowy interval between the overhead lights, alone, his legs inhumanly twisted. Centrifugal effects had thrown his shoes from him and pulled his socks halfway off. Ellis approached at a staggering run. Looking now at the man and his clothes, he began for the first time to understand that this might not be Boggs. The dark made it difficult to be certain, but the man’s hair appeared lighter than Boggs’s, he looked thinner through the trunk of the body, and Ellis hoped, Let it not be Boggs. This was the only thing he wanted. The man’s face pressed the street. Ellis fell to his knees. The man had a beard, but more trim and again of lighter colour than Boggs’s. Greyed. This man was probably twenty or thirty years older than Boggs, and Ellis nearly laughed.
A woman crouched beside him. She had round spectacles and small fat hands. Ellis said to her, ‘I think he’s dead.’
‘I’m a nurse,’ she said and edged him aside.
He sat on the grass between the kerb and the sidewalk with his knees to his chest. He rocked forward and back, his sense of relief already gone. A broken body lay on the ground, and it seemed clear to him that in his impatience he had killed a man. He tried to recall the decision to pass the pickup on the right – it had hardly been a decision. He had seen the situation and responded. Watching the nurse as she touched and manipulated the man, he felt a great deal collapse on him until it seemed he should be blinded or deafened, or perhaps the world should cease altogether.
‘He has a heartbeat.’ The nurse glanced over. ‘Can you find a blanket? Something to cover him?’
Ellis stood and took a step backward. He turned to the sidewalk, where a number of people had gathered. One moved toward him, and Ellis looked at the approaching figure with a curious fractional delay between perception and understanding: Boggs, wearing a dark blue jacket and a white shirt open at the collar, reaching toward Ellis. ‘I thought it was you,’ Ellis said. ‘I thought I hit you.’
‘I’m fine.’ Boggs touched him on the shoulder. ‘Although I might be sick. That poor guy’s legs. Are you OK?’
‘I went to pass on the right, and when I got on the brakes it was too late. I hit him pretty hard. Probably thirty-five, forty miles an hour.’
Boggs nodded. ‘I saw your car.’
‘There’s a nurse. She wants something to put over him.’
Boggs pulled off his jacket. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Take it. Excuse me. I’m really sorry, but I’m going to be sick.’
Ellis took the jacket and moved toward the fallen man, but several people now huddled and crouched there. ‘Give us room,’ the nurse said.
Ellis tapped a young man on the shoulder, and the jacket was handed down. Ellis stood peering, but because of the others he could see little. ‘How is he?’ he called. No one replied. He tried to press in, but an elbow nudged him away, and he lost resolve. Traffic moved in the opposite lanes, people walked by on the sidewalks. The continued progression of time was surreal. Where had Boggs gone to be sick? He looked down at himself, at the clean, unmarked length of his clothes. The muscles of his right leg ached from pressing the brake pedal.
He returned to his car and stood next to it – a hole smashed into the windshield, a shallow dent in the hood. The windshield’s shatterproof glass shaped itself around the hole like a stiff, glittering fabric. It seemed as if a kind of error had been made in putting him into the centre of this accident, if only he could work out the origin of the error and remedy it, he would now be in the theatre, a little anxious, a little bored.