Grand Marquis is about a hundred yards from the Interstate. Sergeant's headlights pick out the broken grille off the highway's dark shoulder.A car passes slowly as Sergeant brakes, signals, and pulls off the highway onto gravel, shifting into reverse to get as close to the skewed back end of the Marquis as possible. The 53-year old ex-marine cranks the radio stepping down out of the cab, motown, something he hasn't heard in years and associates still with his wife's sudden acquiescence three decades ago in the back of his dad's Toronado. Her insurgent memory, Sergeant realized long ago, comes unbidden at the scene of any accident where a death has occurred.
Smoking, Sergeant walks slowly alongside the car and lets the flashlight play over the forced angles of the crushed front end.
He peers in under the bent hood; hard to see what's gone through the firewall. Both doors are jammed shut from the impact.
The driver's side window is missing, punched out by the emergency crew to claim the body. Sergeant leans inside, flashlight probing the mats like a familiar third arm. He catches a glimpse of the shrine in the weak moving light and brings the flashlight up against a rosary dangling from the gear selector, close enough that he can read the embossed acronym along its base. Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum, Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews. The dashboard is scattered with rose petals. Hoodoo. Garnishing the macabre bouquet are half a dozen pages torn from a Gideon bible, the shredded jigsaw scraps of a hand-written letter, the cover of a sophomore yearbook and a matchbook with the word "grace" in ball-point on the inside fold. Sergeant pulls his torso out of the car and sweeps the edge of the woods with his flashlight. The bastards are obviously long gone, at peace now with the suddenly dead.
Sergeant chocks both back wheels and lifts the Marquis as high as he dares. He has to kick at the dragging front grille three or four times before it comes off in pieces. He picks the largest chunk off the ground and tosses it inside the car on his way back up into the truck.
It's a bit warmer inside the cab. Sergeant leaves the door open to keep the dome light from blinking out and examines the photograph he's taken from the dashboard of the Grand Marquis. Five kids are standing against the cement wall of a high school gymnasium: one of the boys looks remarkably like a wino Sergeant's seen hanging around by the bus terminal, but it's the prettier of the two girls that catches his attention; she's sixteen or seventeen with short blond hair, and her expression in half-profile reflects a wondrous delight at some situation the photographer's just missed, such childish rapture that Sergeant stares helplessly at the girl for nearly a minute without identifying her as his only wife, and then a shiver of recognition sprinkles his forearms with goosebumps.
Sergeant pulls unsteadily back onto the road with the Grand Marquis in tow. The highway going in is dark right through the outskirts, so dark that Sergeant accidentally nicks a pylon when an abrupt detour appears out of the night, guiding him through the ditch for half a mile before putting him back on the blacktop. The abandoned road equipment forms a series of strange silhouettes going by, dead dinosaurs and hostile frigates.
Sergeants hands have begun to shake at the wheel. "Goddamnit,
goddamnit..." The lights of the arterial come up quickly. He eases up on the gas too late as his exit recedes in the rearview mirror. The right blinker continues to flicker dumbly, waiting for the missed turn-off. Sergeant knows he'll have to cut back on the next exit, but suddenly the right lane opens up beside him and he realizes he's missed that exit too as it slashes by and disappears behind him. The lights of the hospital shine bright going past.The Marquis pulls dangerously into the curve as Sergeant comes off the highway too fast; he can feel the drag on his own back wheels. The two vehicles drift nearly to the concrete barrier before conquering inertia and plunging down into the residential streets of the hospital district. Sergeant brakes hard at the bottom of the hill, almost crawling through the intersection. The undershirt clings heavily to his belly with sweat.
It takes Sergeant twenty minutes of searching and doubling back along the quiet dark streets to find Deborah's old house, auctioned off eleven and a half years ago when her parents finally followed her to the grave. Two of the upstairs windows are lit.The front end of the Grand Marquis touches pavement with a shaky bounce, right front tire resting up on the curb. Sergeant's thick legs begin to go weak as he stumbles around the car, disengaging it from the tow truck. Some instinct tells him he should return the photograph to the dash of the Marquis, but he stands out instead in the cold wind unwilling to let it go.
A dog begins to bark.
At sixty miles over the limit, the highway loses definition to a smooth immutability in Sergeant's high beams. The howling rush of wind blasts Sergeant's face through the open window, snapping viciously at the photograph stuck to the rearview mirror with duct tape.
Police radar clocks Sergeant at 107mph crossing the river. When the tow truck fails to hit a second radar trap further down the road, a police cruiser pulls out and starts backtracking slowly along the highway. A bright searchlight moves along the landscape, carefully checking the ditches.
November 1991, San Francisco