The doors hadn’t sprung and the windows were intact, the motor was running, and the wheels turned like a gut-shot horse. The lights of the metallic-colored sedan pointed off toward the hills of Lodge Grass as the motor sputtered and started to fail. The steam was still rising from the surface of the road so it must have just happened. I slid into the trunk lid. The glazed surface of the road made it difficult to navigate, but I traversed my way around to the back glass; the condensation had fogged the surface from the inside so that I couldn’t see. As I scrambled, I heard a groan, and I suddenly had a little trouble breathing. I threw myself around the rear bumper and was relieved as the motor finally died, taking with it the hazard of internal combustion and two wheels driving.
Somewhere along the way I must have put my gloves on, which was good because the bottom of the car was still hot. I climbed up, and the sizzle of the wet leather on the exhaust smelled like a burning steak. I reached and grabbed the bump strip at the middle of the passenger-side door. I pulled at the handle and the damn thing actually gave with a quick bump but then settled back and fastened. I yanked it hard enough to get my fingers under the lip of the door and leveraged it open again. It wasn’t going to stay, so I lodged my feet against the opening and hit it with all the weight that had inconvenienced me up to now. The door bent completely back on its hinges and ripped loose, flipping past the hood, and sliding away on the frozen sheen of ice. Piss on Ralph Nader, they never made ’em like they used to.
Isaac wasn’t moving. His eyes were closed, and there was blood on the side of his head. An arm was lying across the trunk of his body. It’s always the same, if there’s even the remotest possibility of neck or back injury, you might do more bad than good. If I went in, I was going to crash down on top of him, so I put a leg over the side to give me a little advantage. He was warm, and there was a familiar rhythm at the inside of his wrist. It was then that one of those little miracles happened. He stirred once, adjusting his weight as if trying to find a more comfortable position. It wasn’t much, but it told me that his spine and nervous system were intact. He could be moved. I strained to reach the seatbelt that had saved his life and thanked God that seat-belts were designed to fasten on the inside. As I pulled him from a sitting position, his legs caught below the steering wheel, and I had to hoist him a little to the right to get him free. As I negotiated the controls of the vehicle, I got my other hand on the front of the doctor’s coat and lifted him up.
That was when I felt the lights. Nothing I had called would have flashing yellow lights, and nothing I called would be that big. The state of Wyoming uses large five-ton plows equipped with shale spreaders that could disseminate five yards of granulated scoriae; this meant ten tons of bad news arriving in a little more than a minute.
Suddenly rediscovering my strength and glad that Isaac hadn’t gained that much weight since prison camp, I pulled him free from the steering wheel and almost had him when his foot caught on the seatbelt. Forcing myself to be calm, I turned him to the side, but the seatbelt clung there. I took a breath and twisted him in the other direction as the belt slipped free and slithered back into the darkness. I raised him up the rest of the way and turned.
It was way too late. The driver must have seen my emergency lights and he had started braking, but it didn’t look like he was going to make it. I looked down at the icy reflection of the black road. There was nowhere we could go. Anywhere we went from here would be just as bad as where we were and probably worse, so I did nothing. I watched as ten tons of WYDOT equipment hit the first ice slick and started its sickening slide sideways.
As we sat there on the side of the car like some bizarre modern pieta, I couldn’t help but think that this is what I got for thinking I could have a night off to take a beautiful woman to a magical place to meet wonderful people. Retribution was at hand in the form of cold rolling steel and red shale.
The guardrail of the underpass looked like a galvanized funnel, and I glanced at the ice plastered on the northwest surface of the metal. Arching showers of melted snow flew from the tires of the truck. The plow seemed as big as the ones I had seen on the front of Burlington Northern locomotives.
I looked down at Isaac and smiled; this shit didn’t happen to Tom Mix when he was saving some nubile young thing who had been tied to the tracks. What happened to me didn’t seem to matter, but Isaac was different; how could a life so full of meaning end so meaninglessly? I smoothed the old man’s hair on one side; there was blood, but I didn’t think he was hurt badly. As the light of the oncoming truck lit the red liquid streaks, I heard a noise in the distance. It might have been the rhythm of the big studded and chained Bandag tires clawing the aggregate surface of the highway or the thump of the Bullet’s diesel, but it sounded like drums.
When I looked up again, the back of the truck was sliding toward us, and the taillights were two angry eyes. The spin continued, but the showers of slush didn’t seem to be arching quite so high. I watched as the headlights turned back toward us again along with the vaulted metal of the plow. The truck slid to a stop about nine feet from where we sat. It looked like an irate buffalo, blowing steam from its stacked nostrils and dripping sweat from its forehead. The drums had stopped.
Static. “Unit Six, 10–55, over.”
I knew Wes Rogers because he was old like me. He was the first highway patrolman on the scene, and I was helping him with his report. The other HPs oozed in under throbbing blue light in their mercury black cruisers, and the EMTs loaded Isaac Bloomfield into the back of the ambulance.
“So you just sat there?” He was smiling as he wrote on the metal clipboard, his Smoky the Bear hat pushed back in a pretty good likeness of Will Rogers, no relation. It was strange being on the passenger side of the cruiser. He shook his head and chuckled. “You got an extra pair of shorts?”
“I don’t wear shorts; that’s why women are drawn to me.”
He stopped writing. “Well, I don’t mind telling you, I’da had to go home and change mine.” He handed me the clipboard to sign the forms. “How far you away from retiring?”
When I pushed on the pen it lit up the writing surface. “Chronologically or financially?” I handed him back the clipboard and stuck the nifty pen in my pocket. “Why do you ask?”
He tucked the forms back into the center console. “I’m gone next month. Scottsdale, Arizona.”
I was surprised; I figured Wes was going to be around forever. “What’re you gonna do in Scottsdale?”
He looked out at the frozen landscape, and we might as well have been on the dark side of the moon. “Watch my grandson grow up, and keep the Mexicans outta the golf course ponds at night.”
I thought for a moment and came up with Wes’s wife’s name. “What’s Ruth got to say about all this?”
I followed his eyes, and we watched as Pete’s Towing pulled the lowered and narrowed Mercedes over and onto its wheels. “I figure she’ll take it all right, seein’ as how she’s been waiting for it for the last twenty-six years.”
I stuck my hand out, and he shook it back. He told me I could keep the pen as a token of his affection and a fond farewell.
I trudged through the crusty snow of the roadside toward the Bullet and pulled up short as a chain line dragged Isaac Bloomfield’s sole transport up onto the levered platform of the wrecker; a coveralled driver cinched the vehicle down with log dogs. The elderly physician’s baby was headed for Sonny George’s junkyard, just outside of Durant. They would hold the car there until Isaac could decide what to do with it. It was a shame, really. The doc had owned the car for as long as I’d known him, and he kept it in tip-top condition. Fred Ray, the mechanic at the local Sinclair station, had once told me the car was in immaculate shape due to Isaac’s preventive maintenance. I suppose even German engineering failed sometimes; that, or the eighty-five-year-old driver had.