From this height Roy can also see the road ahead. A car’s taillights glow less than a half mile away. Has Edie slowed to let him catch up?
“No, Edie,” Roy says in the barely audible voice of a man accustomed to talking to himself, a man who has spent too many hours alone in a car. “Go,” he says. “Go. Go.”
Edie Pritchard learned to drive in her uncle’s 1939 Packard Super Eight, though it wasn’t Uncle Earl who gave Edie her first lesson but his wife, Nora. They drove out to a dirt road along the Elk River,
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and Nora put Edie behind the wheel and instructed her in the H pattern of the gears, the synchronization of the clutch and the gas, and the correct foot to use on the brake pedal. “Now go,” Aunt Nora said.
Edie stalled the car the first few times she tried to get it going, but she caught on quickly—and before long she had that big black automobile flying down the road, a dust cloud rising behind her and the treetops rushing by overhead.
Once Edie had demonstrated her proficiency behind the wheel, Aunt Nora said, “All right. I’ve got one more lesson for you. Don’t ever get into this car or any other with your uncle Earl. Not alone.
You hear me? Not ever.”
Edie didn’t say, “Uncle Earl? Your husband? Mom’s brother?” And she didn’t tell her aunt that she, Edie, had already had to slap the hands and wrestle out of the grasp of boys her own age and older, boys bigger and stronger than Uncle Earl.
She has found few pleasures as pure as driving fast, even in the car she and Dean own, an underpowered Volkswagen with a slipping clutch.
But in this Impala? My God! She has the windows open, the volume on the radio turned up high, and the speedometer holding steady at eighty. After dark the signal from Moosejaw’s CHAK comes in stronger than ever, and Edie sings along with nearly every song:
“Come on baby, light my fire.” “My baby, just-a wrote me a letter.” “I know that my baby loves me.” . . . The wind flows through her short hair with no more resistance than over a grassy field.
Roy is looking for that collapsed, abandoned barn not far off the highway. “Like a shipwreck,” Edie had said when they drove by it earlier.
A dirt road turns off the highway near the barn, a road Roy could turn onto, and in the process lead that Ford off Edie’s trail.
There it is, the barn’s hulking shape looming not far ahead.
And is that the road? It might be. He shifts down, the gears grind-ing, and turns the wheel hard, aiming for what might be a road and might be nothing more than a dirt trail that runs into a ditch. For
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an instant it feels as though the truck is tilted on two wheels and in danger of rolling over. But it rights itself, and Roy is able to keep the truck moving ahead, bumping and scraping across the prairie, the headlights illuminating nothing in their bouncing, wavering beams but brush, weeds, dirt, and stones. Within fifty yards he’s able to shift back into third and pick up a little speed across the flat land.
He hazards a glance in the rearview mirror. The Ford seems to be following him off the road but with far more caution than Roy exer-cises. “Go, Edie, go,” he says under his breath.
A creature—a jackrabbit most likely—bounds across the truck’s path, leaping from darkness to light and back to darkness.
He realizes, too late, that this was no road, though maybe it was a trail the cows used to come home. Roy is climbing now, steering the truck up a hill steep enough that he has to shift down again. Once he reaches the top, he can look back and determine whether the Bauers gave up the chase or are still coming on.
But the crest of the hill does not lead to a gentle slope down the other side. Instead the hill falls off sharply, as if a giant knife has sliced off its other half, the earth dropping away and exposing its rocky underside. The truck’s headlights suddenly illuminate nothing but night air, the beams traveling out over space like starlight.
Roy brakes and turns, and in so doing he avoids going over the steepest edge. But he’s still headed downhill and sideways, the truck sliding, skidding, and banging against the boulders that jut out of this ravine. Hang on, he tells himself, hang on, because the truck suddenly seems to have become a living creature with the intent to go its own way and to get rid of him in the process. The truck leans hard into its descent, tilts, then tips, and when its great weight begins to tumble and roll, Roy spreads out his feet and hands as if it’s his balance that can be regained. But he’s a passenger now, riding inside these tons of steel along the earth’s slope with no more power or control than an infant caught in a strong man’s arms. One headlight blinks into darkness while the other flashes, like miniature lightning bolts, first across the horizon, then into the earth, then across the horizon again, and then into the earth once more.
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Time itself becomes a casualty of this accident, and events seem to happen out of sequence, as if everything is ordained only in the instant before it occurs. The sound of shattering glass seems to precede the windshield breaking under the weight of the roof caving in.
The truck’s frame groans before it bends in its roll down the ravine.
Roy already seems to be tumbling out of the truck before the door pops open. The taste of brass is in his mouth before he bites through his lip. The warm gush of blood precedes the pain of the gash across his forehead. The soggy crack of his femur arrives at his ears before the pain rises up to and registers in his brain.
The truck finally comes to rest. Laws, properties, and sequences are restored to their natural order. Roy Linderman’s first utterance,
“Shit,” comes out of his mouth as it must—as close to ship as shit—
spoken through the space where his front teeth were only seconds ago. He rolls onto his back and takes a cautious breath, deep, deeper, right up to the pain and then past it. He exhales slowly, and the air whistles and seems to scrape bone on the way out. He struggles to sit up. He raises both arms over his head as if he’s signaling the gravedigger: “Hold your shovel, I’m alive, I’m alive! ”
He must have skidded face-first out of the truck because when he spits, he tastes not only blood but also dirt. He clears his vision by delicately wiping away the veil of blood that has slipped down his forehead. He won’t touch his broken leg; the bone might be poking through the skin. The leg’s rapid swelling feels as if it’s tightening its own tourniquet.
Roy can’t rise from that sitting position. He can’t walk, and he can’t crawl, but if he stays where he is, he’ll surely die—and so he pulls his way up the hill, his hands and elbows digging into the earth below, and his leg dragging uselessly behind. He moves along the route lit by the one headlight, though its beam, never strong, will soon leave him.
What is time out here, far from all the clocks and measures of human purpose? If only that storm would come closer, its flash and thunder a means to calculate both minutes and miles, but it won’t move from the distance it has settled into. Nevertheless Roy begins to count, “One, two, three, four, five.” And rest. “One, two, three,
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four, five.” And rest. Each five count moves him perhaps three feet.