Empty Mile

CHAPTER 11

The day they buried Patricia Prentice my father was almost killed. And because I’d accepted his offer to drive into town with him and have breakfast before he started work, I was almost killed too.

Earlier, I’d tried to talk to him about Patricia Prentice but when I raised the subject his conversation became monosyllabic and guarded and he avoided saying anything except that he was okay and I shouldn’t worry about him. I didn’t press the point, I knew from experience that any coming to terms he had to do he’d do deep down inside, in that hidden part of himself where his emotions were sealed.

The end of our street joined a long road that ran downhill. As my father turned the car into it I saw him frown a little.

“Brakes are a bit soft.”

He shrugged and wound down his window. We gathered speed and he took an exaggerated breath of the air coming in.

“I like this time of morning. Before everything starts.”

He frowned again.

“These brakes really don’t feel right.”

There was very little traffic about at this time and going downhill we’d reached a speed of about fifty miles an hour. A hundred yards ahead of us the road curved sharply to the left where it crossed a culvert before flattening out against the floor of the basin. We needed to slow quickly to make the turn but the car continued to pick up speed. I looked across at my father. He was staring through the windshield, gripping the wheel so hard his knuckles showed white beneath the tan of his hands. His right foot pumped rapidly on the brake pedal. He shouted, “The brakes have gone. Hold on!”

He yanked the emergency brake and the scream of the locking rear tires added to the cacophony of sound that had suddenly engulfed us-the engine of the car, the rush of our passage through air and over tarmac, the thudding of our hearts and the roar of our blood, our shouts in the last sickening second as we entered the turn, my father wrenching the wheel around, fighting the weight of the car.

“Cover your face, John!”

And then the howl of the wheels losing their grip and the sideways drift of the car, beyond any hope of control now, out across the angle of the curve as though it floated on oil, the white beams of the guardrail across the edge of the culvert suddenly at my window. And then our impact, a single explosive bang and a hail of shattered glass, the final slewing through a quarter turn, the lurching drop as the back of the car went through the guardrail and over the concrete edge of the culvert, the shriek of metal being scraped from the bottom of the car. And then silence.

For a moment, after it all stopped, neither of us moved or spoke, sure that we must be hideously injured and that movement of any kind would reveal to us the terrible nature of our wounds. But the seconds passed and we did not find ourselves dying or drenched with blood and we peeled ourselves away from the positions into which we’d been thrown.

“Are you all right, John? Are you hurt?”

I flexed my legs and arms. I’d hit the side of my head on the doorframe and I had small cuts on the backs of my hands, but I was uninjured.

“No, I’m okay. I’m not hurt. Are you?”

My father moved a little in his seat and then smiled like he didn’t believe it. “You know, I think I’m all right.”

“You’re bleeding a little.”

He had a small cut on his cheekbone and a drop of blood had run halfway down the side of his face. I pointed to it and he took a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed it away. He held the handkerchief in front of him and looked at the small red mark his blood had made. He turned it so I could see it. And we both began to laugh at the insanity of surviving such violence and noise and danger with nothing more than a few drops of blood to show for it. For a long time we couldn’t stop, but eventually the tension left us and we climbed out of the car.

The impact with the guardrail had buckled the panels along the entire right-hand side of the car. Although the back wheels had gone over the edge the car was stable on its belly and didn’t shift as we both got out through the driver’s door. Six feet below us a small creek entered the mouth of a tunnel which allowed it to pass beneath the road. On either side of the culvert there was a margin of woodland and then houses. In the garden of one of these a middle-aged couple stood watching us anxiously. They were holding hands and they waved at us.

The police turned up ten minutes later and my father answered questions for their report. They figured the only thing that had saved us was hitting the guardrail side-on. If we’d ploughed straight through it, they said, we would have gone nose-first into the culvert and the impact would have killed us for sure. A couple of people who’d come out to look at the damage nodded and made agreeing noises and said how amazing it was we weren’t dead. The police radioed a garage to come out and tow the car, then they gave us a lift into town.

By the time we got there it was late in the morning and my father couldn’t do breakfast anymore. I arranged to come in and pick him up after work, then I wandered around town by myself for half an hour and bought an espresso. I was about to get a cab from the small taxi stand in Old Town when two dark vehicles caught my attention. A hearse and a town car, both bearing the name of a funeral home in gold lettering on their sides. The hearse carried a pale brown coffin and the town car had only one passenger, a man in a dark suit with a rosebud pinned to his lapel. He sat in the back of the car looking straight ahead. I had not expected that Bill Prentice would be solitary for this occasion. He was well known and gregarious and he’d been that way for a long time. When I thought of the kind of funeral procession that might attend his wife I thought of a long train of cars, elaborate wreaths, parties of people for whom he had done favors or been in business with. I thought of an event.

But there was nothing of this about the two lonely cars that passed me. They seemed closed and inward-facing, as though the thing they carried was not to be shared and they wished to pass from view as quickly as possible. I watched them as they moved along the road, their brake lights occasionally flicking red as they slowed for traffic or waited at signals. And then they turned a corner and were gone.

I hadn’t been at home long when Rachel, the manager of the garden center, dropped Stan off in front of the house. He came down the hall and into the kitchen all breathless and full of news.

“Bill closed the garden center.”

“Yeah, I think it was Pat’s funeral today.”

“No, I mean forever. When I got in Rachel was giving everyone their last paychecks and telling us not to come back. Bill’s so sad he’s not going to open it again. He’s not even going to live at his house anymore. He’s gone up to his cabin in the mountains. Rachel said he sold all his furniture.”

“Ah, man, your job…”

“No, Johnny, it’s good. Now we can go full power on Plantasaurus. And guess what? Rachel told me that Bill said I could take all the big plants to help me start, and all the sacks of potting mix too. It’s a reward for the bear.”

Stan went to the refrigerator and got a can of Coke.

“You should cut down on that stuff. It isn’t good for you.”

“What are you talking about, Johnny? It powers you up.”

“It’s full of sugar.”

“Of course it is.” He took a big swallow of the drink and made a growling noise. “Powerin’ up for Plantasaurus!”

Drinking so fast made his eyes water. He blinked rapidly and burped.

I told him about the crash that morning. He went wide-eyed at the story of our narrow escape and then seemed to withdraw into himself. Later, he went upstairs to his room and put on his Batman costume and sat down at his desk with his comic books and his drawing things.

Stan and I met my father at the garage in town. Oakridge had three of these places but, by chance, the Ford had been taken to the one that used to belong to Gareth’s father. The place had been bought and expanded by a nationwide chain and was now run as a franchise by staff who all wore matching uniforms. A short, fat mechanic carrying a clipboard joined us in the workshop. He moved slowly, as though the weight of the fat dragging at his body exhausted him.

“She’s up there.”

He jerked his head at a hydraulic hoist, then took a flashlight out of his pocket and shone it on the underside of my father’s car. The damage was extensive. The exhaust system had been torn away and the drive shaft was no longer connected to the differential. The base of the car itself was scraped and gouged and marked in places with powdered concrete.

“Brake failure.”

Using the flashlight beam he traced a thin metal pipe that came out from somewhere in the engine and ran along its base before splitting out to feed the brakes on each side of the car. Where the pipe bent to curve around the engine it looked discolored and corroded.

“Someone hold the flashlight.”

I took it from him and held it trained on the spot while he went to work with a pair of wire cutters. When he was done he stepped out from under the car and held his hand out to us. A six-inch section of the pipe rested on his palm. The metal on one side of it had rotted away leaving a hole in the pipe wall about two inches long. My father took it and examined it closely. His face was tight with anger and he shook his head slowly.

“Unbelievable.”

The mechanic snorted derisively. “Yeah, it’s pretty poor. Looks like some sort of metal fatigue.”

“But these things aren’t supposed to corrode.”

“What can I say? You got a defective part. This is a reasonably old car.”

“It’s only a ’93.”

“Yeah.”

My father passed the pipe to me. I passed it on to Stan who muttered under his breath, “Unbelievable.”

The mechanic picked up his clipboard and ran his finger down a list of handwritten entries on the top sheet of a pad of printed yellow forms.

“Your car’s written off. Rear axle, diff, drive shaft, all, er, shafted. Chassis out of true. Panel damage down the entire right-hand side. Not worth repairing in a car this age.”

“It’s sixteen years old.”

“Yeah.”

The mechanic signed his name carefully at the bottom of the form then tore off the sheet and handed it to my father.

“You’ll need that for your insurance company.”

On the way home my father was pensive and didn’t speak much. I tried to make conversation once or twice but each time, when he responded, it was as though I had dragged him into the present from someplace far away. In the end I left him alone and listened to the radio instead.

That night at dinner, when my father wasn’t looking, Stan kicked me under the table and silently mouthed, Plantasaurus. The warehouse was costing us money each day and good business sense dictated that we begin our operation as soon as possible, so I really couldn’t put off telling my father about the scheme much longer. But right then, with the crash and Pat’s death still so close about him, didn’t seem the best time to tell him something I was certain he was going to object to. So I shook my head at Stan and he and I ate silently and watched my father pick distractedly at the food on his plate.