South of Otter Creek he came up on the car, came up on it too fast. It was a sedan of a gray color that blended too well with the rain. It did not have lights on.
The big blue and yellow rig was traveling at fifty-five miles an hour when Dix Marshall saw the faint bulk of the slow-moving sedan. Within a fractional part of a second, he had known that he could not hope to slow down in time. He had to make his choice instantaneously: Cut to the right and take his chances on the sloppy shoulder; cut to the left and risk a head-on with something coming the other way, or put on all the brakes he had and hope to hit the sedan lightly enough not to kill whoever was in it.
During the three quarters of a second it took, Marshall to make his decision, the big rig traveled nearly sixty feet. He jammed his foot down on the gas and gave a blast with the big air horns and swung left, risking the head-on. At the speed he was traveling he would not be in the left lane more than two long seconds.
He leaned forward and stared ahead, looking for the twin glow of oncoming dim lights. He plunged past the gray sedan. He saw something ahead of him and he snapped the big rig back into the right lane, cutting dangerously close to the sedan. As he cut back he saw that the object he had seen was the thick concrete railing of a bridge. It was the bridge over the Waccasassa, but he did not know that. He felt the skid of the two sets of duals on the rear of the trailer. He saw the thick rain-wet railing on the right side, saw the rain bouncing from it, haloing it. The trailer kept skidding, and he felt it slam against the concrete. It did not seem to be a hard impact. But in the next moment the cab was angled toward the concrete on the left side and he felt the dizzy sense of the whole rig tipping. As it went over he suddenly seemed to get the words right in his mind, the exact way he could tell Grace and make her understand.
The heavy cab smashed into the thick railing, burst through it, and pieces of reinforced concrete as big as bushel baskets fell into the river. By then cab and trailer lay on their right side, sliding with a raw noise of ripping metal, sliding, wedging the big trailer crosswise across the bridge, jamming it solidly between the two bridge railings. The tractor, having punched its hole through the east railing, was nipped off by the continuing motion of the trailer and fell into the shallow’ river, making one further quarter-turn as it fell, landing with the four heavy wheels in the air, then settling, sighing, suckling against the mud of the bottom, air bubbles bursting against the rain-lashed surface.
A few minutes later a car of the Florida State Highway Patrol, traveling north, braked sharply as the young driver saw the curious obstruction across the road. The driver put on the red flashing dome light and got out and inspected the barrier. It took him a moment to figure out that it was the roof of a big cargo trailer. He climbed onto the bridge railing and eased his way past, and he saw how forcibly the trailer had wedged itself into that position. It would be a long difficult job getting it free and out of the way.
Three cars were piled up on the other side. The elderly and indignant couple in the gray car that was the first in line said it had just happened. The patrolman went down onto the river bank, stripped down to his underwear and went into the river. On the second try he got the door open and brought the driver out of the cab and towed him ashore. The left temple area and the whole left frontal lobe was crushed, and the driver was dead.
He dressed, hurried back to his car and radioed in and told of the situation. After a short delay, he was told that he should check the old detour and see if it was still passable. Truck traffic would be rerouted at Otter Creek on the north and Inglis on the south. Other cars would be dispatched at once and, if he reported the detour passable, passenger cars should be routed over it. Wreckers were being dispatched to the scene.
The patrolman drove over the route and radioed in that it was okay for one way traffic. By then cars were beginning to pile up at both ends. The other trooper arrived. They set up their routing system, sending the cars through from each end in alternate batches, telling them not to straggle, but take it slow on the sand road, and on the wooden bridges.
And so passenger traffic rolled cautiously over the old detour, over the two wooden bridges, by the grim old house between the bridges, back out onto the highway. They felt their way through a half-world of gray driving rain. They inched across the old timbers of the bridges. The big pines swayed. The wind sound increased. The two patrolmen, parked four miles apart, blocked the highway and the red dome lights flashed in the murk. They were glad traffic was thin.
Virginia Sherrel drove north through the Wednesday rain in the blue-and-white Dodge convertible that she and her husband, David, had picked out together for the vacation they were to take — the vacation that David had finally taken alone. She drove north alone, the way David had driven south.
She had not liked the idea of an urn. The very word had the sound of a funeral bell. Bell? Fragment of an old pun: the New Hampshire farmhouse, on honeymoon. They had walked too far, and it had begun to rain, and they had run back. And David had knelt and taken the hem of her tweed skirt and twisted the water out of it and, smiling up at her, said, “Wring out wild belle.”
Not the sound of “urn.” And the urn itself had made a sound when the undertaker, with an almost grotesque callousness, had taken one down from a shelf and opened the screw top with a shrill grating sound and then held it out to her — and she, caught up in the wicked pantomime, had leaned forward a bit and stared inanely down into it and said, “No, I don’t think so.” Not for David.
So it was a box. A flat bronze box, not quite as long or as deep as a cigar box. With a discreet border design, a small catch. The undertaker had snapped the catch three times.
It was in the trunk compartment of the car, and she knew how it was wrapped. Back in the hotel in Sarasota she had closed the room door behind her and made certain it was locked, and then she had untied the cord, unwrapped the cardboard box.
Inside the cardboard box, the bronze box lay wrapped in tissue, resting on a nest of tissue. As she unwrapped it she thought of the presents they had given each other. David had once said, “I think I really like to see you unwrap presents. Such intense absorption! And all the sensuous little delays, such as untieing knots instead of cutting them.”
And this is your final present, David.
She lifted the bronze box and looked wonderingly at the fine grayish ash. She touched it lightly with her finger. It was soft and a few flakes adhered to the moisture of her finger tip, and she brushed them off. Here is all of you, my love. She closed the lid and it snapped as it had in the undertaker’s showroom. She wrapped it in the tissue, closed the cardboard box and wrapped it in the brown paper. She went over and stretched out on the bed. Gift from David. Gift of himself.
Chapter 4
Now, as she drove north through gray rain, the bronze box was in the luggage compartment of the car. His death was something she could not comprehend. She sensed that she would never understand why it happened. But she knew her grief was soiled by the manner of his death. As she drove cautiously, automatically, her mind turned back to that morning twenty days ago, that ten o’clock morning in the small east-side apartment when she learned how it had all ended.
She had gone down after breakfast to get the mail. No letter from David. Then she had gone back up to the apartment and poured her second cup of coffee. She sat and looked at the bills and the circulars and read one letter from an old dear friend who now lived in Burlington and who wrote, “I suppose it is a sort of modern wisdom to take a vacation from each other, but damned if I like the sound of it. To have you and David indulge in such a thing is to me like the teeter and fall of great idols. Forgive me if I am too blunt, Ginny, but I can’t help thinking David needs, more than anything else, a sound spanking.”