WILLIAM GAY
 

the WRECK ON THE HIGHWAY

     Opportunity only knocks once; ruin will kick the door down and barge on in. Some enormous concussion had gone off in the world, a horrendous cataclysm of rending metal and breaking glass he’d heard or dreamed, the waves of destruction rolling outward, dark waters lapping about his ankles. Then he saw that the heavy book had fallen from his chest when he sat up from the couch he’d fallen asleep on.  Everything was happening at once. The phone was ringing and strobe lights raked the windows like cold blue claws and something was pounding at the door, a truncheon, a mailed fist.
                 He sat for a moment disoriented and then he looked at his watch. It was two o’clock in the morning. The pounding went on. Distant thunder rumbled. He picked up the book and laid it on the table and arose and crossed to the door and opened it. A cop stood there, nightstick poised to strike the door.
     Is your name Vestal?
     Khaki and leather and holstered blue steel.  Behind him, looking anomolaic and sinister in Vestal’s front yard, a police cruiser idling, crouched like some beast on its forepaws poised to spring.  Revolving blue light washed the porch.  Vestal could smell mimosa, rain; he could already hear it in the treetops and singing on the tin roof.
     I’m Vestal. What’s the matter?
     You have a minor son named – he tilted an opened notepad toward the porch light – Butler?
     Yes, Vestal said.  But he’s not here.  You want to tell me what’s the matter?
     Mr. Vestal, I’m Deputy Sheriff Rossen.  There’s been an accident, and your son is involved in it.  I need you to come with me.
     What sort of accident?  Is my son all right?
     We think he’s just shook up.  But he’s a minor and he’s asking for you.  Everything’s still under investigation, I don’t have any answers for you yet.  Come on and we’ll find out.  You might want to get a shirt on; he’s being transported to the emergency room at Centre.
     Vestal looked down at himself.  He went back inside and the deputy followed into the living room.  While Vestal pulled on a tee shirt, Rossen stood studying the four walls as if evidence of a crime might be framed there, as if he’d catalogue the room’s contents should he be called upon to testify before an oaken bench.
     Let’s roll, Vestal said.
     You got everything you need?  You’ll probably have to accompany him to Centre. You might want to turn everything off
     I’m packed, Vestal said, impatient to see his son, but the deputy’s eyes swept the room one last time to see was there anything forgotten. He had careful cop’s eyes.  Vestal guessed he always made sure the lights were out before he left a room, the campfire pissed on, his prayers said before his head touched the pillow.
     They went down the stone steps into a world coming alive with storm. The wind was up and running the pale leaves like quicksilver and he could hear it making a harp of the winds and lightning was pacing frantically beyond the restive trees and the heavens were a dome of absolute blackness.
     We better move before the bottom falls out, Rossen said. Going to be like a cow pissing on a flat rock here in a minute. No, don’t bother with your vehicle, you’ll ride with me.
      In his youthful longhaired days as a protestor of wars Vestal had ridden in the backseat of cruisers, caged left and right by handleless doors and forward by a steel mesh screen, but here he was ushered like a guest of honor to the shotgun front seat and the car was backing up as soon as he’d closed the door.
     Buckle up there, Rossen said.
     Easing down the hill Vestal could hear the lick the cam was hitting and the supercharged engine sounded impatient with such constraint. Rossen opened it up on the main road jerking Vestal back against the leather and the headlights cut away the night with the countryside coming at him in windblown tatters like a jigsaw landscape the wind had dissembled. Garbled dispatches from the front lines of chaos crackled over the scanner, cut away Vestal’s enforced calm like broken glass.
     The country was flat here and to the right and in the distance Vestal could see a battery of flashing lights, blue and red, bleeding into the sky like a caustic violet stain.
    He didn’t know why the deputy wouldn’t tell him anything. He didn’t know what he’d find here, what had found him. Inside he felt cold and enormous, he contained worlds beyond number barren and ice locked the wind whistled across.
     Rossen turned right at the crossroad. The first thing Vestal saw was an ambulance, its rear doors cocked open, light pulsing in waves across the field. Two EMTs were sliding a hardboard gurney into the rear. He tried to take all this in. There were two other police cruisers. His son’s red Nissan was on its right side in the ditch, its lights still on. In its headlights a woven wire fence strung away into the darkness.
     The night had taken on a sort of hyper reality, Vestal was drawn into a world where everything was deeply symbolic and every motion and word had a secret meaning. Everything was outlined in bold strokes, the brightness down, the contrast cranked all the way clockwise. Vestal knew that his life had changed in some irrevocable way and that for now all he could do was just lean into the changes and go where they took him.
     He was out of the car without being told and running toward the medics but the high sheriff stepped around the ambulance and held up a restraining hand, stop.
     This is just a precaution, Mr. Vestal. We’re having him transported to the emergency room at
Centre to be checked out. He appears to be just shaken up, this is just standard procedure.
     He’d had a quick glimpse of Butler’s face as the gurney was tipped into the ambulance and slid forward. He heard the gurney lock into place. He was looking for blood and he hadn’t seen any. He hadn’t seen much but he’d seen Butler’s eyes seeking him out and they hadn’t looked like Butler’s eyes. They’d looked like the startled eyes you’ve seen trapped in your headlights.
     Your son was in an accident, the High Sheriff said. There was no emotion in his voice; here these curious malfunctions of time and space seemed his daily fare.
     Not here. Well, here and somewhere else. Two accidents then. He was involved in a collision with another vehicle, he hit it or it hit him, we’re still sorting it out. Anyway he fled the scene.
Apparently he was trying to get to you.                                             
Vestal shook his head. He looked at the Nissan. Part of the roof was peeled back and the driver’s side looked as if it had been raked with enormous claws, by the bucket of a steam shovel. The car was on its side in tall grass and the random orbs of fireflies moved through the rain swept weeds like St. Elmo’s fire on the roiled surface of some wine dark sea.
     These boys need to roll, the High Sheriff said. There’s a hell of a storm east of here and they need to beat it to Centre. If it touches down they’ll be all over the place the rest of the night.
     Vestal climbed into the rear of the ambulance. An attendant closed the door behind him and it latched with the decisive finality of a casket lid slamming shut. They were rolling almost immediately, rain streaking the windshield and the siren wailing down the night like a banshee, lights painting the fleeing roadside trees with a fierce electric lacquer.        
     What happened? Vestal was crouching on a metal bench by the gurney. He was trying to smell alcohol but he hadn’t yet.
     Butler’s eyes were moving jerkily beneath their near translucent lids. The long lashed lids raised and the dark eyes skittered jerkily searching for something and then they fixed on Vestal’s face. The eyes looked frightened, tormented. The face beseeched him. Fix this. Make it go away. Make it not be.
     But the voice was Butler’s confident own. I had a wreck, he said. I couldn’t see shit. Wind and rain. I pulled out from a crossroads and this motorcycle just came out of nowhere and slammed me in the side.
     His eyes looked focused on some point Vestal’s own eyes couldn’t get to. He passed a hand before his eyes as if he’d erase these visions. He shook his head.  Out of nowhere, he said again.
     Why didn’t you stay there? Call the law.
     Butler’s face looked confused. Uncertain. Soft dark shadow of attempted mustache. The face said everything was a mystery, even its own motivations.
     I don’t think anybody was bad hurt. This guy was up walking around yelling at me. I had Tina and a friend of hers, this other girl, and they were all screaming at me. Take me home, take me home. God. They were all yelling at me, all at once. I freaked out. The guy in the grass was screaming at me. I let them out at Tina’s and then I was trying to get to you. I figured you’d call the law.  
      Anyway we’ve got plenty of that, Vestal said.
      What’ll they do to me?
     Vestal was staring out the glass. The night was coming at them with dizzying speed as if the entire landscape, house and tree and stony field, had been flattened into a two-dimensional strip of fabric that fed beneath their wheels at an ever-increasing clip and he imagined it being wound onto an enormous reel turning somewhere in the night behind them. He pretended he hadn’t heard.
     They went through Ackerman’s Field, night lights on, doors locked, guard dogs dozing at their watch. Vestal envied these folk in their tousled beds, covers drawn to their chins, limbs unscathed and their dreams untroubled. At the railroad tracks by the tie yard the ambulance rocked on its heavy-duty springs and leapt into the darkness at town’s edge, speedometer in a dizzy climb, windshield wipers ratcheting away the rain.
     The night was throwing everything it had at them. Storm to the east, the High Sheriff had said. Rain was coming horizontally and the driver had to fight the steering wheel against the buffeting winds that came broadside and tried to jerk the ambulance off the road, the wind carried tree branches, plastic garbage cans, the air was full of leaves the wind had stripped. Vestal kept expecting to see windblown old ladies in rocking chairs, restraining hands raised to their hair, folk clutching the handles of umbrellas, families aligned to the last dog and cat on the ridgepoles of uprooted houses. Beyond the glass the wind was howling down the hillsides and trees were leaned westward into the calm the night wind was blowing away.
     Nearing Centre they met another ambulance, its siren wailing and red lights bleeding into the rain and Vestal wondered if the storm had touched down and in his disassociate frame of mind it seemed to him that they’d met themselves in some dark fairytale mirror or yet descended to a world of dimensional displacement, ambulance and anti-ambulance passing each other in the night and going their separate ways.
***
     He’d seen his son two nights ago. He’d just set down at the bar of a place called The Highlander and drank half a beer and when he’d looked up he could see reflected in the bar mirror the green baize of the pool table and beyond it Butler watching him. His still eyes, his close-cropped black hair. The other player was leaned to shoot and on the far side of the table Butler stood with his cue stick held both handed before his chest like a weapon at parade rest.
     Vestal drained the beer and set the bottle down and shoved his change across the bar for a tip and arose. He went past a makeshift plywood stage with a Karaoke machine and a fat man in a porkpie hat singing Sam Cooke with his eyes closed. Bring it to me, bring your sweet loving, bring it on home to me. He went through batwing doors and out into the failing heat and crossed the street to the parking lot.
     It was at just the end of twilight and beyond the parking lot the western sky was a burnished red that cooled to smoke gray even as he watched it and feeding nighthawks came to dart and check above the streetlamps random as spores moving on a glass slide.
     Hey.
     He turned. His son had come out of the bar and was crossing the pavement toward him.
     No need to run off.
     I wasn’t running off.
     I could have sworn you were running off. Saw me there in the mirror and split.
     Vestal slid his hands in his jean pockets and didn’t say anything.
     Hell, I know you started drinking again. We could have had a beer or two. Shot a game. Talked about olden times. I guess they’re all olden now.
     I had a hard day, Butler. I worked my butt off. I left because every time we talk it works around into a situation where you’re chewing my ass and I just can’t handle it today.
     What are you doing?
     Roofing a house. Putting on shingles. It was hot up there today, too.
     Yeah. I heard they fired your ass up at the college. I expect its harder toting shingles up a thirty foot ladder than it was looking up co-ed’s dresses there in that air conditioning. Though I guess that got to be hot work too.
     The look on Butler’s face was a complicated one but Vestal knew this calm confident face so well he could have deciphered it but he didn’t want to go there. He went anyway. The face looked confused and disappointed in him and it showed pain and the shame he felt saying these things or even being in this conversation and beneath it all anger burned like a banked fire.
     The face looked like old photographs of Vestal’s father. They were both constructed on the same paradigm. Compact bodies and high cheekbones and go to hell grins and sleepy movie star eyes. The three of them, grandfather and father and son, looked as alike as if they’d all been stamped with the same faulted die and Vestal wondered how many of them had been shipped into an unsuspecting world Butler always looked like a coiled spring, like a volatile liquid kept under pressure.
     Any truth in that about you getting fired?
     We came to a mutual understanding.
     Yeah. We mutually understand they fired your ass. I heard about that student. How old was she? Mama heard twenty-two at the factory. How about fixing me up sometime?
     Vestal ran a hand through his hair and turned toward his truck.
     Hey.
     What?
     You got any money.
     Vestal felt in his front pocket. A bill there.  Who knew what denomination? He withdrew it, glanced at it by the streetlamp. It was a fifty dollar bill. He reached it to Butler.
     You got a date?
     Yeah. I’m taking Tina out to eat.
     Don’t drink, okay?
     That’s funny advice, coming from you.
     Take it anyway. Why don’t you drop by the house? Bring Tina by.
     Well. Maybe later. When all this dies down. This goddamned divorce.
     A year ago Butler wouldn’t have said goddamned divorce but a year ago was back in what Butler himself had called the olden times. The olden times were lost and gone and they weren’t coming back. The olden times were beyond the pale.
 ***
     Now here is the emergency room in Centre Tennessee at three o’clock of a Saturday morning. Bedlam reduced to its purest essence, a bus stop on the way to dementia praecox. No-nonsense attendants sped the gurney down a tiled hall, automatic doors opened with their arrival, closed at their passage. Butler’s eyes darted about, taking in all these wonders. They paused in the receiving room. The receiving room was the foyer to hell, a Felliniesque motley of overdosed teenagers and miscarried mothers and the remnants of children set upon by pit bulls or their mother’s boyfriends and a clean-shaven middle-aged man who kept asking, did they ever get the bleeding to stop?
     Forms were filled out, insurance questions must be answered. Vestal, a voice called. They rolled the gurney through stainless steel doors into the bowels of the hospital. Where harpies wait with their poised knives.
     When he’d finished the forms Vestal went and found a seat in this disparate madness. He could hear wind and rain at the glass and he could hear the constant coming and going of ambulances and police cars and after a time the   tattered orphans of the storm began to be carried in or to arrive under their own power. Half-clad or wrapped in blankets and all wearing the selfsame look that Butler had worn. As if they’d been sucker punched by life. They looked like the sorriest of refugees, the wet and bedraggled remainders of some distant shipwreck who’d stumbled ashore and found themselves in this waiting room. One man with a high top boot on one foot and a bedroom slipper on the other and some unshod altogether. Beyond these walls a rising tide of human voices taking on. Calling on God and determined that He pick up the phone.
Elizabeth? Elizabeth? Come on baby say something. Oh Lord. Oh Lord.
     He tried not to see, he tried not to hear. He laid the back of his head against the vinyl and closed his eyes.
     He thought about his father. Or rather an eight by ten photograph of his father that had set for long years on his mother’s bureau. Dust gathered there like the dust on the family Bible his father sang about. His father and three other men. His father who wanted to be Hank Williams and three other men who wanted to be his Drifting Cowboys. A fiddler with his instrument tucked beneath his chin, a player riding a standup bass for comic relief, a seated man with a lap steel guitar. His father with his Gibson hung like a trophy about his neck. Those high Cherokee cheekbones, that shit eating country grin. Howdy friends and neighbors. So glad you all could set a spell and listen to us pick. Cool a while, ain’t it been hot in the field? They all wore white Stetsons, they all wore white Palm Beach suits like Hank. Sharp toed city slicker shoes. He’d wanted to be famous, he’d dreamed about it at night, could taste it at the back of his tongue or at the bottom of a whiskey bottle, cashed checks on a future that had been delayed indefinitely. Killed time waiting for opportunity’s knock at a tiny dirt road radio station. Vestal could hear the voice coming out of the fabric of the radio speaker. Hello out there in radio land. Now let’s get serious for a few minutes, folks. Here’s a gospel number I know will be a blessing to all you shut-ins. The Wreck on the Highway.
     His mother’s voice. I can smell that whore on you from across the room, that cheap perfume is stronger than the whiskey on your breath. Goddamn you. You’ve got lipstick all over the side of your mouth.
     Coming back from gig in a honky tonk two counties over the Cadillac he was driving (again in emulation of his hero) had occupied for a microsecond of time the same space as a bridge abutment God had thrown at him and this drifting cowboy had drifted across the lone prairie to the last roundup. His Gibson Dove guitar looked like something a stick of dynamite had dismantled, like shredded wood you’d use to kindle a fire on a cold winter’s night.
     Mr. Vestal?
     He opened his eyes. A harried looking nurse was standing before him.
     Your son asked me to tell you he wants you with him. Just through those doors and the third door down the hall on the right.
     So directed he went through the doors. The noise diminished and here there seemed a semblance, the cooling hand of competence laid on fevered chaos. He went into the third room. His son was alone. He was still on the board but unstrapped now. He was covered to the shoulders with a sheet and his arms and shoulders were bare and Vestal guessed they’d disrobed him for examination.
     They tell you anything?
     No. I’m all right though. Starting to stiffen up and get sore. I ache all over and my knees feel
banged up.
     The room was divided by a heavy curtain suspended from the ceiling to give the illusion of privacy. There was someone on the other side of the curtain: Vestal could hear stertorous breathing, an occasional moan.
     A doctor came into the room. His white tunic was spotted with blood as a butcher’s might be. Your son’ll be fine, he said. He has no broken bones, no spinal injuries, nothing like that. He’s been X-rayed and we ran a CAT scan. From what I understand about his accident he’s a very lucky young man. He’s a little bruised and shaken up but he’ll be fine.
     Then we can go?
     He won’t be released for a few minutes. I believe they want a specimen for a blood-alcohol
test.
     When the doctor had gone Butler started to speak but Vestal leaned and placed a palm over his son’s mouth. Butler’s eyes cut around to Vestal’s face. Vestal shook his head. Some sort of defensive mode seemed to have kicked in. He hadn’t known he had it; it had just lain dormant until needed. He needed it now. He could feel paranoia staining the edges of his mind like ink on litmus paper. He looked about the room. He suspected recording devices, video cameras, depositions taken unbeknownst. He raised his hand and Butler said, I’m about ready to get the hell out of Dodge.
     Rubber soled footsteps next door. Someone spoke in a druggy spaced-out voice. Where’s my father? The voice asked. Dad?
     Mr. Mayberry?
     Yeah.    
     I know you’re in a lot of pain, Mr. Mayberry. We’re going to do all we can to ease you and then we’re going to have to transport you.
     Transport me? Transport me where?
     I’m sending you to Vanderbilt; they can do more for you there than I can. You’re going to need surgery at once and they’re very good there, the best. There’s a chopper, there’s a helicopter on its way here now.
     A helicopter, the voice said.
     Were you in an automobile accident?
     A car, a car at a crossroads. It pulled out in front of us. We were on a motorcycle. The voice changed, as if had just remembered something. Where’s my father? I want my father in here.
     I have to give you something for pain now, the voice said. Where’s my father, the drugged voice kept asking, and the placating voice kept responding, It’s all right, it’s all right, while whatever ministrations were going on kept going on and Mayberry’s voice grew drowsy and drowsier still and little by little slurred into silence and Vestal realized he’d been brought to this
self same room from the selfsame accident. Small world, he thought dementedly, we’ve got to stop meeting like this. Someone will talk. It grew quiet. He could hear oiled rollers moving away across the tile floor. A door closed.
     A highway patrolman and a nurse came into the room. The officer wore the flat brimmed smoky the bear hat of the Tennessee Highway Patrol, he carried a clipboard. He didn’t speak; he didn’t even glance at Vestal. The nurse leaned and swabbed the inside of Butler’s left elbow and inserted a hypodermic needle. Butler looked away. She pulled back on the syringe and blood with pink froth boiled into the tube. Vestal watching, what have here, does alcohol discolor the blood, what color is doom?
     He stared at the wall. There was a framed print of Van Gogh’s cypresses reared against a hot electric sky. Vestal imagined himself lost in them, the warm citrus smell of cypress, thick needled earth beneath his feet. He’d slip into them like stepping through a curtain and this world would be no more.
     She withdrew the needle and swabbed the spot with alcohol again. She turned to Vestal. We’re through here, she said. You can go wait on him out front. His clothes are here and he can dress and meet you in the waiting room.
     I’ll be outside, Vestal told him.
     The din outside had subsided now, disaster’s rush hour over, a time for taking stock. Vestal stood before the admittance desk until a nurse acknowledged him.
     Sir?
     Hard night for you.
     She looked exhausted, out on her feet, as if she’d been out in the storm, leaning too long into a high keening wind. That tornado touched down, she said.
     I wanted some information about Mr. Mayberry.
     All I can tell you is that Mr. Mayberry is being transported to Vanderbilt for surgery. That’s all I know.
     No, the other Mr. Mayberry. The father.
     Her eyes changed. Are you a relative?
     First cousin, Vestal said.
     Then I’m sorry to tell you this. Mr. Nayberry wasn’t brought here, she said. He didn’t survive. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
     He turned away. The distance across the geometric tile to the door was enormous. He wondered could he make it. Left foot, right foot. Sometimes you can just see too far down the road. To know all things is to suffer all consequence. He wished for ignorance. His head felt full of light and winds, his body a drifting string. The door opened without his touching it and he went through it into the pale dawn.
     The rain had stopped and the storm had passed. Above the streetlamps the sky was a deep purple and high winds that never touched the earth shuttled lavender clouds across as if they had appointments to keep elsewhere. They passed and a capsized crescent moon stood above the trees like an omen.
     He was smoking a cigarette when Butler came out. Butler was fumbling in his pockets, he’d lost his own cigarettes somewhere along the troubled path this night had taken. He reached for one of Vestal’s. I’m ready to get the hell out of here.
     We’ll have to call somebody. Or call a cab.
     Call who?
     Your mother I guess. I don’t know. We’ll call a cab.
     Then let’s call it. I’ve about had it.
     You saw that man up walking around?
     Yeah. He seemed okay. He was okay enough to chew my ass and yell at me.
     Vestal wondered if your mind would tell you lies. If there was some part of your brain that spoon-fed you the news it thought you couldn’t handle. That held the poison in abeyance and fed it drop by drop like fluid in an IV.
     He wondered if Butler had stopped the car. He figured he had. That he’d leapt out into growing storm to the carnage in the weeds with behind him the rising voices of horror and exhortation, take me home, let this not be, sprung door ajar and light spilling out like something toxic from a broken container.
     Here his vision failed him. There was no way to know what Butler had seen but there were scorched images in his seared looking eyes. Vestal wished he could shoulder this burden and just walk off with it. Spare Butler. All he could do was hang onto it a few minutes longer. His life felt like a flung stone.
     Vestal believed you had to take responsibility for everything you did, all the commissions and omissions, the deeds and undeeds. Everything was accounting, everything went into columns marked profit or loss, there was no column marked good intentions, none for holding your own.
The wrong moves you made were noted and it might be years down the line when they handed you the check but they always hand it to you. Too much stuff in the air and you drop the plate and it shatters and your son leans to the blood spattered weeds and closes a dead man’s eyes with a gentle thumb, one, the other.
     He felt slow and swollen, a slow-moving copperhead laden with summer poison, pregnant with the direst of news.
     Yet blood was blood and it was the strongest thing there was. It had always been so. It reeled backward into time when the first families huddled about their guttering fire and it reeled forward into a wavering and provisional future. It transcended the dread familiars that will come in nightmare and the ministrations of lawyers and the exhortations of judges leaned from oaken benches which will surely come too and it transcended the dead long in the cold cold ground bowered beneath rotted silk, sewn mouths gone slack and features crept with indigo mold
     Day was coming now and the world forming itself anew. A band of the palest pink lay above the eastern buildings and one by one the stars had gone.
     He touched Butler’s shoulder, a touch so brief and light it might have been a bird alighting
momentarily then taking to the air again. I’m about ready to get the hell out Dodge myself, he said. I’ll go look for a phone.
     He was counting the moments now before he had to say what he was going to have to say but there was peace in this interim before the firestorm hit and he figured he might as well give him that.
 

 
William Gay is the author of the novels The Long Home, Provinces of Night, and the short story collection, I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down. His short stories have appeared in Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, GQ, and New Stories from the South 1999 and 2000. The winner of the 1999 William Peden Award, and the 1999 James A. Michener Memorial Prize, he lives in Hohenwald, Tennessee.