Now there were older houses with field equipment and big tractors in sheds out beside them. In one field hay sat rolled and ready to be picked up, but nobody much seemed to be moving this morning. He wasn’t meeting much traffic, only a solitary vehicle once in a while whose driver would lift a languid hand, as did he.
The road curved often and it was shaded on both sides by tall trees where grapevines hung with clusters of green fruit. Muscadines and possum grapes. Dogwoods and thickets of pines. Oaks and hickories and sweet gum and sycamore. Now there were hollows of hardwood timber and in between them lay fields of cotton and soybeans. More pastures, most of them holding large numbers of cows, black, white, spotted. Old farmhouses that sat back from the road with their neat vegetable gardens out beside them, the pole beans staked, the tomato vines tied up with strips of cloth. He saw a big doe standing at the edge of a patch of underbrush, and a small flash of brown hair that might have been her fawn, but he didn’t see any spots. He unwrapped a piece of the gum and started chewing it. It still looked rainy over in the south, right where he was headed.
He came into a bottom with three bridges where he’d worked a bad wreck one time, five or six years back, a murderous affair at noon one August day where people were trapped and screaming and others in smashed steel dead mute and bloody. You couldn’t tell now by looking at that place that it had ever happened. Time washed things away but he knew it wasn’t going to wash Amy or Alesandra or Fay or Karen.
After he drove a few more miles he began to see the big fields of corn and milo with their tasseled heads standing still under the weight of the morning dew, the broad green leaves at rest. Three deer grazed midway down a row, their bodies stark brown against the surrounding plants. He began to see more gardens and more farm equipment, more barns and pastures and cows. He saw one store coming up but he slowed down and as he watched it he saw that it was closed, looked like it had been for years. The glass in the pumps was broken out and two junked cars sat to one side. A small brown dog stood in front of the island and watched him pass, sniffed the air as if it would catch his scent.
It didn’t seem any fun going to work now. There was nothing to come home to anymore and the house stayed so quiet that he usually kept the radio or the television on just to have what seemed like some company. He hadn’t even been out in his boat lately and his fishing rods stood unused in the corner of the deck where he and Fay had always put them when they got through. What was she doing for money and was she getting anything to eat? No telling who might have picked her up or where she could be by now. The longer he drove the more he convinced himself that it was useless looking for her out here. But he wasn’t far from Yocona by now and he decided that he would go on and look around some anyway, just to be able to say to himself that he had. In the back of his mind the small thought of driving to the coast today had been hiding and trying to come out. But he should have headed that way already if he was going to do that, it was a long drive. And he knew better than to think that even if he drove all the way down there and she was there, he’d be lucky enough to see her standing on a street corner or walking on the beach.
He turned off to the right on a secondary road just past the Baptist church and went across an old bridge high above the river, looking down into the gutted banks as he drove by. On the other side somebody was plowing a field with a wide disk and a big green John Deere tractor with a cab. Then he was climbing hills again and going past thick stands of hardwood timber that stood on the steep sides of hills and the greenery was so thick that he couldn’t see very far down in there. A box turtle was trying to cross the road and he straddled it with the tires and spared it.
On a high and windswept hill where a walking girl had been picked up one night by some boys with a load of catfish, he looked off to the left and saw the open and majestic expanse of the Yocona River bottom, the emerald trees growing, a pasture of jade hills dotted with the white forms of Charolais cows grazing. Far down below there lay big fields of cotton and beyond that more timber and beyond that the pale gray sky and the clouds that melded in it and one tiny speck of silver that was a water tank at Toccopola. And that was as close as he could get that day to where she once had been.
THE WEEKEND PASSED and he went back to work on Monday. He was still on nights and going in at four and getting off at twelve-thirty or one depending on what happened and how busy the nights were. He wasn’t eating enough and was drinking too much when he came in and he knew it but didn’t really give a shit either. He knew he’d have to go look again soon. She was somewhere. But he knew where. Probably the coast. And if he didn’t find her there he didn’t know where to start looking for her next. The world was so big and there were too many places to go. Or hide.
Monday evening they did a roadblock down near Marks looking for some prisoners that had gotten away from a satellite camp over by the Sunflower River and it was the kind of thing he didn’t like, the kind of thing where you had to consciously stop yourself from going for your gun when you saw a carload of rough-looking old boys sitting back there in the line. But nothing happened, they didn’t find them, only spent two hours and forty minutes getting licenses from old ladies and checking their tags and handing the licenses back and everybody asked the same questions, farmers and boys alike, sweet young things with carloads of screaming younguns or fishermen with their boats trailered behind them trying to keep from reeking their beer breath into his face:
“Y’all after them scaped convicks?”
“Yessir, sure are, that’s what’s going on, you ain’t been drinking, have you?”
“No sir, not me, cept I had a couple beers a while ago.”
“How long ago?”
“Bout three hours. You know which way they headed?”
“Not right now, sure don’t, now get home, you hear?”
“Yes sir, sure will, we headed that way right now.”
“Y’all catch anything?”
“We got a pretty nice mess.”
He rode back up into his district just when the sun was starting down and went to a barbecue shack on the other side of Sardis and got a sandwich and a big bag of fries. He ate in the cruiser with the radar going but he’d parked intentionally in a place where the drivers could see him in plenty of time to slow down, so he didn’t catch anybody, but it gave him time to eat supper in peace. Once dark came he pulled on his lights and rode through Highway 4 over to 7 and went through the kingdom of kudzu again where he had first taken Fay that afternoon and marveled that it had only been a few months since that time. He met some speeders but only flashed his blue lights at them and could see the red brake lights in his rearview rocketing them down to a safer speed.
After he’d cruised for a while he decided to pull off the road just north of the Tallahatchie River bridge into a stand of pines that shielded him from southbound traffic very well. It was at the end of a long straight stretch where the trucks sometimes came roaring up with a full head of steam to tackle the hills that lay outside Oxford and sitting in that spot and hidden he could get them pretty easily sometimes. It was just more money for the state. And the state would be a ruthless motherfucker if they got after him.
He slowed and turned off the road and then backed up the short lane of dirt into the looming pines with dust rising from his taillights, doused his headlights and spoke to Loretta at Batesville, checking in with his position and what he was doing. She was more than casually interested, he thought, but he wasn’t. Even now she put a teasing lilt into her voice answering him. And she did have a fine ass. He finished saying what he had to say and hung up the mike. The engine hummed and the dash lights glowed with a pale blue luminescence. He wanted a beer and he wished he was home.
All the cars heading north slowed down when they saw him, even some of the ones going the speed limit. One time he almost started after a smoking junktrap with one headlight and a muffler throwing sparks up from the highway but let it go on for a reason he could not explain to himself, something to
do with the old man and the girl in the Ford Pinto. Something like letting the ones with the hardest luck have one more break. If he could.
He turned the FM radio on and punched it to the country station in Tupelo and listened to it low enough to keep his ear on the radio chatter from Batesville and the patrol cars out on the roads. Squawks and sputters, voices sometimes speaking in static. Men alone out on the road like him. For some reason the truckers weren’t speeding tonight. But he knew well enough too that when the first one had passed him he had picked up the mike of his CB radio and called back on a channel to others behind him. He could imagine the conversation:
“Hey Lone Ranger, we got a bear in the bushes up here bout a mile past the bridge, ten four?”
And then somebody would come back:
“That’s a big ten four Rocky Raccoon, thanks for the info, catch you on the flip side, over and out.”
Those truckers got bored, nothing but endless miles of road with white lines down the center. No wonder they wanted to get to where they were going as soon as they could and get on home to their families. Sit out in the swing under the shade tree and drink a cold beer. Take the kids fishing. At one time it had almost been like that for him. But he and Amy had had such different ideas about how to raise Karen. All that time and what was it worth now?
He rolled the window down and lit a cigarette. He’d been trying to cut down and had been doing pretty good, but whenever he got to drinking beer it seemed like he smoked twice as much so he guessed it didn’t matter.
Fay could be in a truck. Fay might have already been in a truck.
He was shocked to find that he’d gone to sleep when he realized the radio was speaking to him. He sat up and picked up the mike and turned his lights on. The news was bad from the sweet voice on the radio: a gasoline tanker had crashed five miles south of Holly Springs. He reached his hand out for the switch that operated the blue lights and pulled it down into gear even while she was still talking.
He got it headed that way and turned on the siren for good measure and pushed his foot down hard and he could see the cars pulling off the sides of the road already. By the time he had it up to eighty he was hoping some brokedick wouldn’t decide to try and pass on the Tallahatchie River bridge. What was that boy’s name that jumped off?
He went through the cars screaming where they sat pulled off or over and once he got around the curve at the Marshall County line where the first beer store stood, the one that sold the good ribs, he pushed it down even harder and hoped for no stray dogs blissfully trotting.
It never failed to amaze him how fast you could eat up some road going this speed. Trees and houses just shot by, blurred bullets of image that were gone. Cresting hills he let off but as soon as he saw clear road ahead he nailed it again. It was almost as if they all knew he was coming through. And when the traffic meeting him began to bunch up again he knew he was getting close. He eased off the gas pedal and shut the siren down and the main question on his mind was whether or not it was leaking.
Then all of a sudden he didn’t meet any more cars and the road was eerily empty. Up ahead, just beyond the last rise, the pulse of blue lights faded and glowed in the night air. He went over the hill and there was the first car, a highway patrol unit in front of a stopped line of cars that looked two miles long.
“God almighty,” he said, and picked up the mike and told the dispatcher that he was 10-6.
He was down to fifty by now and he swung to the left and went around the cars, trying to see where the patrolman was standing. It was dark down ahead. He could just see the shiny bulk of the tanker in the middle of the road like a beached whale. He could feel the hair prickle on the back of his neck and he wondered where all the fire trucks were. The radio was filled with chatter, other channels, all excited voices trying to speak over screaming sirens, other emergency vehicles that were still en route. If the road was totally blocked then all the fire trucks from Holly Springs were on the other side of the truck. He wondered if anybody had put in a call for some units from Oxford but he guessed he’d find that out soon enough.
Some people were out of their cars, looking. Some of them even on the left-hand side of the road watching down toward there. Don’t step out in front of me. A few were near the edge of the road and he slammed on his brakes and rolled down his window to yell at a young boy and two girls standing there smoking cigarettes: “Get back over there in your car and sit down! And put those cigarettes out!”
They did it, quick.
The officer was standing near the open door of his cruiser, watching him. He pulled up and the officer trotted around. It was Joe Price, he of the hair trigger, Deadeye Dick they’d been calling him around the station lately. His hat was off and he leaned in toward the car.
“It’s bad, Sam,” he said. “The driver’s pinned. You smell it?”
It was all around, a withering odor of petroleum fumes that sickened him.
“Yeah, I smell it.”
“You can go on down or you can stay up here with me. It’s up to you.”
“What’s our plan?”
“Hell if I know. I’ve got em stopped up here and they’ve got everything backed up about three miles on the other side. They can’t bring a fire truck in too close, muffler might set it off or something.”
“What’re they doing about the driver?”
Joe coughed and momentarily balled his fist at his mouth. Sam knew he didn’t shake easily but he looked shook.
“They’s some boys down there from Holly Springs Fire Department trying to get him out with hand tools but I don’t know how much luck they’re having.”
He stood up to look down that way and Sam looked with him. He could see lights flickering around the cab, small yellow spots of light that moved jerkily over the crushed steel.
“There’s a car under it and somebody’s in it but there ain’t nothing left of him. Or her. Don’t know who it is yet.”
“Was he loaded?”
“Not all the way. He just had dumped a load in Byhalia and was headed back to Oxford to get some more. We think there’s about a thousand gallons left but it ain’t all run out in the ditch yet. But they’s gas all over everything down there. It ruptured when it rolled.”
“I guess I’ll go down there,” Sam said.
Joe stood watching him. The people in the cars watched them both to see what these men would do.
“All right,” Joe said finally. “They told me to stay up here or I’d go with you.”
“I know you would.”
The odor of gasoline got stronger and stronger. What it looked like was that the truck had rolled and come to rest on the tires but the trailer was on its side. He turned on his flashlight and shined it ahead of him and now he could hear voices talking in desperation, the boys from the fire department who were working feverishly to free the driver.
Joe hadn’t been lying about the car. It was not even recognizable as a car unless you counted the tiny Plymouth emblem that was nestled up next to one of the blown tractor tires, that and some shattered plastic that was lying in the road, a few bits of glass that sparkled when he ran the beam of his light over the debris. The rest of it was simply a mass of crushed metal no higher than his knee. He thought the car might once have been burgundy. He didn’t look to see if he could view the person inside it.
There were only three firefighters, wearing turnout pants and black T-shirts with HSFD printed on the back of them. One was inside the cab, on the other side of the driver, prying with something. The second one was standing on the fuel tank beside the open door. The other one was holding the light for them. Sam could hear them, panting, their voices strained, edged high with adrenaline:
Son of a bitch!
It won’t move.
Try to …
I’m tryin damn it!
This piece of steel here …
I’m pushin hard as I can.
Shit, it ain’t gonna work.
He could hear the driver moani
ng, too, and could see him, his face covered with blood and the white broken bone stuck out like a jagged stick from the swelling flesh of his ankle, his head back in the seat with his Adam’s apple protruding and the one arm he could see hanging down from his side. His left arm. A wedding ring on his finger. The nails and the hand drenched in blood.
The driver turned his face and looked at Sam. He had a deep cut on his forehead that was leaking blood down into his pale blue eyes. The ear on the left side of his head was almost torn off, hung there by one little piece of meat where blood welled and seeped.
“Please, mister,” he said very clearly. “Just tell these boys to cut my foot off. I know they got an ax. I can live with one foot.”
“We’re going to get you out,” Sam said, but when he leaned over the driver’s lap and looked down into the mass of torn steel where the other firefighter knelt, the foot was swallowed up in what looked to be the rear of the bell housing and some other pieces of metal that were twisted and bent.
“I been trying to get these boys to do it and they won’t do it,” the driver said. All of this said and done in a reek of gasoline so heavy it made Sam dizzy and sick to his stomach at the same time. He saw that what the man was talking about made perfect sense: lose the foot as long as he could live the rest of his life before the gas flowed on down the ditch and found an ignition source. It made sense, but he couldn’t do it. It wasn’t worth thinking about. It was probably the thing to do but he couldn’t do it. He said so.
Sam walked down the side of the tanker to the rear. The hole in the tank was up on the side and the gas had almost stopped flowing but it had dripped all over the road and Sam was standing in it. He stepped over to the ditch and went around the back side and back there it was much worse. The grass in the ditch was wet with gasoline and the smell of it almost put him on his knees. That was when he saw the smudge pots.
They were down the road, hard to see, set just below the level of the road where a blinking barricade stood, some kind of road construction he guessed. He turned to run and realized he couldn’t run and that when it lit up it would light up there at the same moment it lit up here. He started running for them, as hard as he could go, not knowing how long it would take for the fumes to seep down there where the baby flames stood smoking in their pots, leftover things from older days, antiques, and he thought he might have a chance to smother them out if he could just reach them in time, but then the world went orange and black like Halloween and the road he was on lit up bright as daylight for one moment and the force of it blew him across the road into the opposite ditch where he could feel his hair scorching and the shirt melting on his back.