“But you said it won’t take much to scare those people off.”
“It won’t, Jimmy! It won’t! But we’ve got to have that little bit.”
Jimmy Wing wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “If you want something to start with, I can give you something on Morton Derm...”
“Dial Sinnat first, Jimmy boy! Before he can fatten the kitty for them. Hell, I got to get on home before Dellie skins me. Get those lights over there, will you? I’ll see that everything’s locked.”
Wing followed Elmo’s pickup as far as Bayou, then turned off toward the newspaper building. Seconds after he arrived, a state highway patrol tip came in on a bad one ten miles south of town on Bay Highway, just north of the town limits of Everset. Borklund shooed him onto it, along with Stu Kennicott for pictures. They hurried down to Jimmy’s car. Four blocks after they had turned onto Bay Highway an ambulance screeched by them. Jimmy tucked the old blue wagon in behind it, maintaining a minimum safe interval, and clicked on his illegal red flasher.
They had to yell at each other to be heard over the constant sustained scream of the siren and the hard roar of the old Plymouth engine.
“All you know is it’s a bad one?” Stu yelled. He was an aggressive little man with thick glasses.
“That’s all he said.”
“Goddam death trap from Palm City to Everset. Same as Venice to Sarasota. I won’t let Myrt drive it. You following too close?”
“I can see past him, Stu. If anything looks hairy ahead, I’ll fade back.”
“You do that. You know what I like?”
“What do you like?”
“I’m a beauty contest man. And animals. Long legs and cute kittens. I take a hell of a picture, man. These tore-up folks, they put my stomach off. Aren’t you too goddam close!”
“Flash Kennicott, the fearless photographer. I have to move up so I can pass when he does, or I get nipped off.”
“They’ll still be there and they’ll still be dead.”
“Cheer up, Stu. If it’s a bad enough schmear, maybe you’ll get a wire-service pickup.”
Stu kept both feet on imaginary brakes. Soon Wing saw the flashing lights ahead and he stayed close behind the ambulance as it slowed. Troopers with flashlights were moving the traffic through. He saw a state patrol car parked in a field, heading out, so he bounced through a shallow ditch and parked beside it. They got out and walked over to the mess. The sedan was on the near side of the road, upright, the front end accordioned. The old panel delivery was on the far side, on its side, damaged in the same way. Tow trucks were waiting to hook on, as soon as the state police gave the word. In the floodlights a heavy woman in orange slacks lay bonelessly spilling out of the open door on the passenger side of the sedan, facedown, legs tucked under the dash.
Kennicott’s power-pack bulb began to flash. Tires yelped far to the north and south as cars braked for the slow passage by the accident. They gawped as they went by, and pulled off when they were beyond the officers and came walking back through the confusion of lights and through the tall grass to stand and stare some more.
Jimmy Wing saw Cal Chadwicks, a patrolman he knew well, talking to another officer and a truck driver. He went over to them and said, “Evening, Cal.”
Chadwicks turned, smiled, grimaced. “Hey, Jimmy.”
“Head on, it looks like. We going to know how they did it?”
Cal gestured toward the truck driver. “This-here boy saw good. He lost forty dollars of burned-off rubber staying to hell out of it.”
“Heading north,” the driver said with that wooden tone indicative of shock. “The car there, the Nebraska car, passed me and come in between me and the truck ahead. Then he swang out to take a look, but the panel truck was too close, coming fast, so he cut back too far, tripped hisself on where the shoulder drops off and got flang back out right bang into that panel truck and got knocked right back again right across the front end of me to where it’s sitting now. It was a hell of a noise. Seemed like it went on a hell of a long time.”
When another officer came to speak to Chadwicks, Jimmy got the truck driver’s name, and other pertinent information.
Kennicott came over to him and said, “I’ll get back with this right now, Jimmy, they can get it in. You going to phone it in?”
“Yes.”
“Then how about the lend of your car? Can you get a ride?”
Jimmy gave him the keys. “Leave it in the lot there. Put the keys under the mat on the driver side. Get anything?”
“What there is, I got. Who needs it?”
Kennicott left. Wing located Chadwicks again, over by the panel truck. It had Palm County plates. It was being rocked up onto its wheels. One ambulance was gone. “Who was in this one?” Wing asked.
“Claude Barnsong, from Everset.”
“Which Barnsong is that, Cal?”
“The one runs a charter boat out of Everset Marina. His license here says he was... thirty-four. He was alone and he was in a hurry. Got a half ton of marine engine in that thing and it came frontwards when he hit.” Wing borrowed the license and wrote down the RFD address. Chadwicks was able to lend him the identification on the other two deceased, a Mr. and Mrs. George Kylor, aged fifty-eight and fifty-six, with a street address in Grand Island, Nebraska, driving a 1960 Buick. They had lost control of it. There was ample evidence of the point of impact being in the southbound lane, all the fine scale and dust which is hammered loose from the underparts of cars in a head-on smash, the white powder of glass, burst of oil and spray of water, all captured on highway patrol cameras before traffic was permitted to roll over the place of impact. The police report would fix the blame on the Kylor car — and the insurance people would eventually settle. But who was responsible for a road too narrow for the traffic, or for shoulders scoured down by summer rains?
The other ambulance was gone. The panel truck had been hauled away. The burst and scattered luggage had been collected and shoved back into the Kylor vehicle. Patrolmen halted traffic while the wrecker turned out onto the highway with it. As Wing walked over toward the patrol cars to beg a ride back to the city, he kicked something in the grass and it rolled into the light. It was a carved coconut, with a bright clown face and a mailing tag. He squatted and used his lighter and saw the tag was blank. He straightened up and kicked it into the shallow ditch where some child might find it the next day.
A county deputy gave him a ride back into town. He turned his copy in, for the page-one space which had been cleared for it. After he had retrieved the hidden keys and gotten behind the wheel of the station wagon, he sat there in the dark parking lot for a little while without turning on the lights or the motor. There was always a carnival flavor about roadside death in the hot months. Flashing lights, the distant melodies of car radios, the abrupt nervous laughter at macabre jokes, the hot gaseous stink of engines mingling with the trampled fragrance of the grass, recognitions, greetings and farewells in the night, sirens coming and going, the holiday awareness of knowing strangers were dead, not you.
It had drained him, yet made him wonder that it could not touch him more deeply. The coconut mask was a sickly bathos. The fat orange slacks were clownish. He could believe that in these past few years of his life a crust had formed across some middle portion of his mind. He could perceive the relationships of his existence, yet he seemed to be required to explain them to himself in a search for reaction which was so studied that the whole procedure became meaningless. Sometimes he felt as if he had forgotten the first language he had learned to speak, and his acquired tongue had no meaningful words in it. It was not a cynicism. It seemed more of a process of a progressive deadening, depriving him of the internal dialogue he had previously enjoyed, that interplay of query and response which made awareness more acute. He had lost some textural, essential appreciation of reality, and felt himself to be in a dream of boredom, unresponsive to all cheap solutions, jeering at himself in a halfhearted way. And ready for Elmo’s offer, ready for almost any change, just to see what it would do — thinking of himself as a small creature in a maze which it has learned too well, and now needs the stimuli of experimental complications.