Here is one of Gordon’s photographs of what Otis saw that night out at the bridge: Viewed in silhouetted profile through a shattered side door window against bright spotlights beamed down from the road above and bouncing off the trickling creek in which the crushed automobile lies, a head, partly submerged, dangles upside down from a broken neck, wearing the shallow creek water across its forehead like a flatcap or a mortar board. Headlamps pierce the night like a blind stare and, in the center of the photo, one high wheel provides a visual echo of the rainbow-arched bridge rising bleakly, upper right, into the dense dark sky above. On the left, a squat figure, also in silhouette and featureless except for thick spectacles ablaze with reflected light, descends the slope from the road above like some sort of otherworldly beast of prey, hunched over and knees bent as if about to pounce, while higher up in the center of the picture, near the foot of the concrete bridge, a scarecrowlike personage, well-lit and seen from the rear, slumps contortively, legs bandied and long arms draped over the shoulders of two white-jacketed helpers, his head fallen forward and out of view, so giving the impression of a headless man with loose airy limbs fluttering in the night breeze. This photograph, now in one of Gordon’s shelved backshop albums, is labeled simply “W-37,” suggesting that what is important is not the identity of the persons in the photograph or their stories or any conceivable meaning that might be attached to the events displayed, but rather simply the composition itself: Time, a fraction of it, frozen into an aesthetically compelling pattern, and all there is to know. This austere view, however, is undermined by the photograph itself, for in it there is another figure, uniformed and proxy for the absent viewer, gazing out upon the scene from a position just below the foot of the bridge with a look of profound perplexity, his billed cap tipped back, seeming almost to turn his head from character to character in his effort to interpret what he sees before him. To locate, or to confirm, its meaning. Even the photographer seems part of the policeman’s intense study, which engages us as it engages him. Something is being revealed. What is it?
“Honey, you can be the first to congratulate me,” Daphne was telling her best friend on the telephone the next morning, that day that Otis made his sacred vow. “I’m engaged again.” Her friend did not seem terribly impressed by this news. Of course, Daphne had been engaged half a dozen times at least over the last ten years, married thrice, it was not the sort of news that made the world shake. Still, Daphne had more to tell, just wait until she heard it all. Her last husband was Nikko, the pro out at the country club. That one didn’t last a year, but it wasn’t her fault, Nikko had vamoosed with that little fifteen-year-old exhibitionist, daughter of the town’s orthodontist, after the little fanny twitcher, already notorious for swimming topless at the country club pool, had scandalized the entire community by turning up at the Pioneers Day parade as an Indian princess dressed in nothing but beads and psychedelic body paint. When Nikko blew town, John brought in young Kevin, the present club pro and barkeep, prodigal son of a business crony, with whom Daphne enjoyed a brief consolatory if hazy fling. Probably John’s wife thought that’s who she was going to marry now. “No, not Kevin, sweetie, that’s been over for ages. Listen, Kevin’s approach shots are clever and he’s fun in the rough, so to speak, but the boy’s drives are short and choppy and he can never keep his eye on the ball, if you follow me. Pulls the flag too soon, too. No, I’ve been seeing — well, now don’t tell anyone, sugar, it wouldn’t look right, not yet, but let me put it this way, your old chum is going to be driving nothing but T-birds and Lincolns from now on. That’s right. Well, he’s old, I know, but that only makes him all the more appreciative, and believe me, appreciation is something I could use more of just now. I’ll be honest, when that shithead Nikko left me for that little high school kid, I realized suddenly that my ass was at least ten years out of date — I mean, god-damn it, honey, I’m not cute anymore. You’ve been lucky, it’s been harder for me. And besides — this is just between us girls, but as someone who’s got pretty high standards you’ll appreciate this — Old Stu’s hung like a horse. I kid you not. It’s a real old country-boy dong, the kind they tell jokes about. Admittedly it doesn’t have a lot of starch in it — mostly it just lies there, curled up like an old hounddog in front of the fire, as Stu says — but I’ve made it get up on its hind legs and do a few tricks, and old Stu’s so grateful he cries, and then I cry, too, and I realize if it’s not love as I’d always imagined it, what the hell, it’s love just the same. So you’re going to have to stand up there with me and the preacher one more time, can you bear it? Honest to God, sugar, I don’t know what we’d do without you around here. And at least that cute fraternity-boy preacher’s new, so we’ll be able to tell this batch of wedding photos from the last ones, right? I think I’ll wear burgundy red this time, it’s the color of the Thunderbird Stu’s giving me. We have to wait for the funeral of course, but — what? Winnie? Winnie got killed last night, hadn’t you heard? Out at the humpback bridge. Sorry, I thought you knew …”
Alf had happened to be on call that night that Winnie died, and the ambulance swung round to pick him up on the way to the wreck. He was not as sober as he should have been, but under the circumstances it hardly mattered. Old Stu had, anyone could see at a glance, joined him in widowerhood, and, unscathed except for a scratch across his nose, was himself able to walk away. Or would have been if he had been sober enough to walk at all. Winnie had probably been killed on impact, though the anger and alarm on her face suggested she had seen it coming. The police officer, examining the road, could find no skid marks: “Must have rammed that fucker at full throttle,” he muttered, looking a bit rattled, seeming not to want to get near the wreck itself. They had hit the side of the bridge on Winnie’s side, but may have already been rolling, ending up wheels high in the creek below, so it wasn’t easy getting them out. There were a few drunks from the tavern down the road, come to lend a hand, but they all seemed a bit disoriented by it all, staggering around bleakly in muddy circles, in and out of the beams of the headlights piercing the damp night eerily, and the photographer, something of a nutcase anyway, was preoccupied with getting it all on record just as it had happened, so it was pretty much left up to Alf and his drivers to pull Stu and Winnie out of there. While they were struggling, knee-deep in weedy water, with the Mercury’s crushed doors, a strange-looking bespectacled woman with an exaggerated limp came down into the ditch and gave them a hand. She had apparently just been driving by. She was strong and efficient and especially useful in helping them work the dead body out through the smashed window so she could be stretchered off, though the man she was with, evidently having no stomach for such labors, remained in their car up at the side of the road, staring straight ahead and clutching the steering wheel with both hands. When Alf accompanied the young woman back to the car, thanking her for helping out, he saw that the man was his nurse’s brother Cornell, Oxford’s youngest boy, and he knew then that this woman was his new bride. Her first night in town probably. One she would no doubt long remember.