Slam the Big Door

Eleven

The back roads of Florida are narrow, straight and rough. The big produce trucks roar through the night. Back there in the black night are the lonely gas stations, the infrequent shabby motels, the nighttime beer joints with their quorum of dusty local cars and pickups. The rare towns are small islands, darkened houses and a brave spattering of neon. The cross-state traveler makes good time at night on the back roads, but there is a sameness to all of it, like crossing a dark sea. The headlights are hypnotic. A racoon makes a very small thump against a front tire, and an opossum even less. So the cars whine down the roads, falling through the night, the lights picking up the wink of animal eyes and dead beer cans.

And sometimes in the lonely cottages set back in the piney woods, the sleeping people will be awakened by a sound like that of an enormous door being slammed. The first time it is heard it cannot be readily identified. But those who hear it the second time know at once what it means.

This one was only eight miles from the Tamiami Trail, on a big curve on State Road 565 that runs east-west and comes out about four miles below the Ravenna city limits. So there were people to hear it. A few. Not many. Sometimes the sound goes unheard, except by those for whom it is their final sensory experience. This is the up-to-date version of the ancient, illogical wheeze about that tree falling in the middle of the desert.

Anything that kills over thirty thousand people a year, and has killed a million since it first became possible to kill a person in this way unique to our culture, is going to be studied intensively. Of course, on a passenger-mile basis, our highways get safer every year, a fact distasteful to the National Safety Council which sees its function as a continuing effort to keep the daylights scared out of everybody. Give them this. It seems to be working.

At any rate, at such institutions as Cornell University, there are continuing studies of what happens to people who are going from here to there, for no particular reason, too carelessly.

Newton’s laws of motion are eminently applicable. And it is interesting to contemplate the idea that were a modern automobile to be reduced to an overall length of three inches, with all parts in perfect scale, the steel foil of the body would be so delicate that it would be impossible to pick it up between thumb and forefinger without denting the sides in, deeply. And were a baby to hammer one with his fist it would flatten like a cream puff, tail fins and all, except for the stubborn hazelnut of the engine. We go fleetly in frail chariots.

The unimaginable energy of a ton and more of one of the delicately realized myths of Detroit traveling at ninety miles an hour must be dispersed in some fashion. Usually it is accomplished by wind friction, road friction, friction of moving parts, savage pressure on brake drums and a long spoor of black rubber, screamed onto pavement. But should something upset the equilibrium, this momentum can also be dispersed by a long end-over-end and sideways roll through tree trunks, power poles, rock gardens, storefronts, schoolchildren — whatever objects are immediately available. The effect of this on the passengers who happen to remain with the vehicle is somewhat similar to the effects that might be obtained if you popped them, along with two bushels of scrap iron, into a blown-up model of a piece of laundry equipment and set the dial for Spin-Dry.

But by far the quickest, most startling and most efficient way of dispersing all of this energy is through a truly classic head-on. A perfect head-on is a rare thing. The energy of the two vehicles — which is the product of mass and momentum — must be almost identical. And they must meet perfectly centered, both traveling in a reasonably straight line, with no attempt on the part of either driver to diminish speed before the moment of impact. When this feat is accomplished, and in all cases where the combined speed of the two vehicles had been in excess of a hundred miles an hour, no one has ever survived. The momentum of each vehicle is totally dispersed by the act of absorbing the energy of the other vehicle. It has been computed that when each vehicle is traveling at ninety miles an hour the impact is just a little bit less than were a single vehicle, in free fall, to strike an utterly unyielding surface. The state of free fall is achieved when any object has attained its maximum rate of fall. To state it another way, if an automobile were strapped to the belly of a big jet and released at forty thousand feet and fell, nose-first, onto an enormous block of tool steel, the inhabitants of that vehicle would provide the medical people with much the same set of interesting distortions and jellied phenomena as can be observed after a classic head-on at a combined speed of one-eighty plus.

At twelve minutes after eight on that Wednesday evening in spring, a five-year-old Mercury and a nine-year-old DeSoto slammed that enormous door on a long and very mild curve on State Road 565 about twelve miles southeast by east of the city of Ravenna, Florida.

And in that instant of finality, in the construction of that sound audible in the still night over two miles away, seven brains, hearts, livers, spleens, burst like rotten fruit which had clung too long to the branch of a high tree.

The experts of the State Highway Patrol did their best to reconstruct it. There were no skid marks to measure, so speed could be but roughly estimated. The green Mercury had been heading west at an estimated ninety plus. For the driver, the long curve was to his right, so he should have remained in the lane on the inside of the curve. But the high speed even on such a gentle curve had induced a factor of centrifugal force which had carried him out so that he was straddling the double yellow line at the point of impact. On the other hand the DeSoto had probably been traveling at such a high rate of speed that the driver could not keep it in the lane on the outside of the curve without losing control. So he had drifted in, cutting the curve, and had been straddling the centerline at the point of impact.

The two vehicles struck with such force that they both rebounded from the impact and came to rest, smoking, still aimed at each other, the DeSoto with its rear wheels in a shallow ditch on the south side of the road, the Mercury on the shoulder on the north side. By then, of course, the trade names of the vehicles were academic, the use of them a matter of convenience. As in all classic head-ons, most of the passengers remained with the vehicles. Directness of impact made the windshield the only exit route, a quick journey available only to the passenger beside the driver. The driver, with the steering column through his chest, and the motor in his lap, tends to remain in place. Also, in the classic head-on, there is a grotesque lack of damage to the rear half of each vehicle. From the midpoint forward, they were compacted, unrecognizable junk. From the midpoint to the taillights, they were quite obviously automobiles, but even in the undamaged rear it was possible to detect startling evidence as to the force of impact. Taillight lenses were collapsed in upon themselves. Gas tanks mashed forward. Rear bumper braces compressed. Rear window glass hurled forward into the car. Dense objects in trunk compartments were hurled forward through the trunk compartment wall into the car’s interior. When the vehicles stopped with that ultimate abruptness, every loose or weakly braced object, every bit of bone, blood and tissue, strove mightily to continue forward at the unabated pace of approximately one hundred and thirty-five feet per second. This is approximately the initial velocity of a three-hundred-yard drive by Snead, and the initial impact flattens the dense ball to almost one half its normal diameter.

A man was hurled through the windshield of the DeSoto, a woman through the windshield of the Mercury. In delicate irony, after each vehicle had come to rest, the ripped and broken bodies of those ejected two each lay closer to the car in which they had not been riding. This momentarily confused the investigation until one trooper noted in the floodlight glare that a body can make skid marks, in blood.

Moments after the impact the DeSoto caught fire, and it burned briskly for over ten minutes before foam smothered the flames. By then there were four state patrol cars, two county cars, three ambulances, two wreckers and a fire engine at the scene, as well as approximately fifty spectators who had parked their cars along the shoulders. The red dome lights winked. The bright floods cast heavy shifting shadows. Men took flash photos. Other men stretched tape measures along the pavement and made computations. Another man was on the radio, relaying the Oklahoma and New York plate numbers to the message center to speed identification of the bodies. Newspaper reporters and photographers had arrived. The coroner arrived, stared, shrugged and went home. Troopers were sending the curious on their way — in lesser quantity than they were arriving — as the bodies were being loaded to be taken to the Police Morgue in Ravenna in the basement of the lab wing of the hospital. The first probable identification was made at the scene. A trooper, holding his breath, gingerly worked a wallet out of a hip pocket in the Mercury. The hip pocket was not where one would expect to find it. In fact, the hip was not where it should have been.

He held the identification cards to the light, then called his superior over. “Local guy, it looks like. Address on Riley Key.”

“Troy Jamison. Troy Jamison. I heard that name before. A builder. Or maybe he peddles real estate.”

“Line up forty guys around here and twenty of them peddle real estate.”

“Don’t get wise with me, Russ. Tell Harry to call this name and address and phone in and tell them to start checking. They all loaded? Okay, you wrecker guys! Hook up and roll ’em.”

Ten minutes later the long curve was once again empty and dark and silent. The infrequent car went by, taking the long curve unaware of the insignificant stains of blood, the discarded film wrappers.

The process of identification continued. It was a full twenty hours before the four occupants of the DeSoto were identified. Had one of them not been thrown clear it could have taken longer. They were all male, all in their middle twenties, all Puerto Rican, all migratory workers. The Mercury was not as difficult. After a Mr. Rodenska at the Jamison home came on the phone and was given a description of the car he suggested the other two occupants might be a man and woman living at Shelder’s Cottages on Ravenna Key. He gave the woman’s name as Miss Jerranna Rowley, and he knew the man only as Birdy. His physical descriptions and estimates of age matched the bodies well enough to warrant sending a team out to number Five. The number of the Oklahoma plates matched the nickel-notebook records maintained by Mrs. Shelder. The team reported back in, when they brought back all personal possessions from the cottage for official storage, that they had been unable to find any papers indicating blood relatives who could be contacted. As it so happened, Mr. Rodenska was then at the morgue, having brought Mrs. Jamison in to make the necessary official identification of her husband.

Fortunately for Mrs. Jamison, of the seven victims only Mr. Jamison had escaped extensive facial abrasions and lacerations. His face was distorted however, as though it were being viewed through a flawed pane of glass. A sheet covered the more serious damage. From the position of the body in the wreck it seemed possible that Jamison had been asleep in the rear seat at the moment of impact.

Rodenska brought the woman in and held her by the arm. She looked at the dead face. The lieutenant thought her face looked just as dead as his.

“Is there any special way I say this?” she asked calmly. “Any sort of legal formula?”

“No. Is that your husband?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Jamison. That’s all we need. You can have your funeral director pick up the remains at any time.”

She turned away and Rodenska took her out. He took her to the car. She got in. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“They want me to go back in there.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I won’t let them keep me long.”

He went back in. The lieutenant said, “I can only ask you to do this and you can say no. But can you try to give me a tentative on the other two? I’ll tell you they aren’t pretty.”

“I’ll give it a try.”

“Thanks. They’re back in here.”

The bodies lay stripped on the zinc slabs, side by side. He looked at a faded rose on a slack and ruptured biceps. And at the woman’s pale brown hair, long neck, meatiness of thigh.

“I’m positive,” he said. “Birdy and the Rowley woman.”

“Thanks,” the lieutenant said. As he walked back out with Mike he sighed and said, “We’ll check through the plates back with the Oklahoma people, and we’ll check the prints through the F.B.I. files, but on that pair I got a hunch it’ll end up no known relatives. There’s money enough on them to bury them and some left over, and so that’ll be stuck in escrow and their junk warehoused, and seven thousand years from now it’ll be turned over to the state.”

They had reached the outside door. Mike could see Mary sitting in the station wagon under the streetlight.

“They were all afternoon in a crummy joint ten miles east of where it happened, getting boiled. How come a guy like Jamison was running around with a pair like that?”

“I don’t know.”

“I knew you didn’t know. I’ll bet his wife couldn’t figure it. I bet even he didn’t know. You run into that every once in a while. A prominent man, he has to go off and get his kicks running around with trash. Funny thing when a man has everything.”

“Correction. He had almost everything. And with some people that’s exactly the same as having nothing.”

“What?”

“I better get her home, Lieutenant.”

“Sure. Thanks for helping out.”

He drove her back to the Key. She stood under the kitchen lights. “I think my personal timing is going to be just about right, Mike.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m going to cry my eyes out. It’s just so far away from me, hanging over me like a — glacier. It’s getting closer and there’s going to be just enough time to get to bed before it falls on me. I’m going to let it rip. I’m going to bellow like a herd of sheep. That doesn’t sound right. A flock of sheep. And I guess they bleat, don’t they? But that’s a word with no dignity.” She took a step closer and kissed him lightly and quickly on the mouth and stepped back. “I’ve got to stop thanking you and thanking you. It’s getting to be a dull routine. Good night, Mike.”

In the morning, when phone calls and callers threatened to drive them out of their mind, Mike, with sudden inspiration, got hold of Shirley McGuire who said she would be happy to run interference. The morning paper gave the accident page one treatment, with a grimly specific shot of the accident scene. Mike read the coverage and decided it was both pedestrian and unnecessarily windy. For the first time in a long, long time he had the quick strong wish that he had directed the coverage: pics, captions, makeup and copy.

At a little after eleven there was a lull, and the three of them, Shirley, Mike and Mary, had coffee on the screened terrace. Mary had been very subdued and quiet, without acting dangerously depressed.

“You’ve been a help, both of you,” Mary said to Mike and Shirley McGuire, “and I’m grateful. But all of this isn’t your problem. Mike, why don’t you have Durelda fix a lunch, and you two take Debbie Ann’s little car, and go a long way away and try to forget all this for a little while. You could drive to Marco. There’s a wonderful beach there...”

Mike glanced at Shirley and saw the quick flicker of interest and anticipation in her dark eyes.

He turned toward Mary and said, “Thanks. But there’s too much to do. Red tape. Legal stuff. Checking account. Lockbox. Wills. I can help with that stuff, Mary.”

“I did it before. I know the routines. I can do it again.”

Mary stood up as the phone started to ring. Mike said, “No reason to do it alone when I’m here to help. And... you’ve got to tell Debbie Ann what’s happened, Mary. I think I should be with you.”

“I can tell her, Mike,” Mary said, and turned to go to the phone, but just as she turned away he saw a look of dread, and he knew he could not leave her.

“They say it’s a lovely, lovely beach at Marco,” Shirley McGuire said.

“And we’ll have a fine picnic, girl. Some other time. Okay?”

Finally, remembering that look of dread, Mike got Mary alone and told her he was perfectly willing to go and tell Debbie Ann by himself, that perhaps it would be better that way. Mary argued, but there was little force in her argument.

So it was agreed that he would go and tell Debbie Ann, provided Sam Scherman said it was all right to tell her, and provided some fool nurse hadn’t given her the morning paper — if she was well enough to read it.

Mike located Sam making his morning rounds. He said Debbie Ann was well enough to be told, that in fact he had debated telling her himself and had decided it would be easier for her coming from her mother. No, Debbie Ann did not know. The special had used her head and commandeered the free paper for the hospitalized before Debbie Ann had seen it.

So Rodenska squared his shoulders, pulled his stomach in and marched to Debbie Ann’s bedside. Her color was much better. The left side of her face was heavily bandaged. Her hair was combed. She had been cranked up into a half-sitting position. The special went out and closed the door behind her.

“What are you doing here?” The locked jaw put a hiss in her speech, an odd tonal quality. “Where’s Mommy? Why isn’t she here?”

“She sent me to visit the sick.”

“This goddamn neck brace is driving me out of my mind. They fixed it so I can’t breathe through the left side of my nose. And they took out a perfectly good tooth, a perfect tooth right in front, goddamn them, so I can suck the foul goop they give me through a straw. So the last thing I want to look at this morning out of this one eye is you, you dirty snitch bastard! Go away, for God’s sake!”

“Anybody could tell you’re vastly improved.”

“How the hell did you all of a sudden make her start hating me? You’re pretty damn smart, Rodenska. You sold her the whole story. Thanks so much. You destroyed her love for me. God, I hate you!”

“Not her love, kiddo. Just her liking for you, and respect for you, and pride in you. Love goes on. You don’t turn that kind off.”

“How comforting can you get?”

“I didn’t tell her anything until I had to. Then I had to do it the hard way, to keep her from charging Troy with rape.”

“Is that so bad?”

“It wouldn’t have stood up. There wouldn’t have been a conviction.”

“I don’t care about that. I wanted them to pick him up and take him to a little room and beat the living hell out of him. That’s what they do to rapists.”

“Only on television. Except when they’re the wrong color.”

“Oh. Anyway, somehow he’s going to pay. Even if I have to hire people to do it. I want his face smashed the way he smashed mine. And crack his neck and break a finger, just like what happened to me. He didn’t have to hit me!”

“What did you say to him?”

“He wouldn’t answer me. He just kept walking. It made me mad. So I stopped and got out. He told me to get out of his way. I asked him where he was going and he said just as far from me as he could get. So I just said he didn’t have to worry about it ever happening again. He didn’t have to run from temptation, I told him. Because just once was plenty for me. I said it was pretty dull merchandise, probably because he was so damn old. Then he hit me. When you see him, you tell him I’ll get even sooner or later. That’s all you’re good for — telling people every damn thing you know. It makes you feel important. You stick your nose in other people’s lives because it makes you feel like a big shot. Get the hell out of here! I get sick looking at you and they keep warning me I shouldn’t throw up.”

“I can’t tell him, princess. I can’t tell him a thing.”

“Why? Did he really go away? I thought it was just an act.”

“He did just what he said he was going to do. He got just as far away from you as he could get. And you’ll never get even.”

“You think.”

“I know. I can’t give you this between the eyes, because there is only one eye. And I’m just bastard enough to be able to get a little bit of enjoyment out of this. He’s stone cold dead, baby. It happened last night. Automobile accident. Head-on. He’s one of seven deceased. He didn’t precisely kill himself, and you didn’t precisely murder him. Let’s just say that if you had had the decency or the desire to keep your legs crossed, he’d be alive. And you wouldn’t be in here.”

The eye snapped shut. He saw her sudden pallor, the clenching of her good fist, the spasm of her throat — and he went running for the nurse. She came on the double, snatched up the wire cutters and hovered over Debbie Ann.

“Are you going to be sick, dear?”

“I... don’t know.”

“If you get absolutely sure you’re going to be, nod your head yes and then spread your lips back out of the way.”

They waited in tension and silence for thirty seconds. Just as Mike realized her color was coming back, Debbie Ann said, “I’m not going to be sick.”

“Good for you, dear. I think you better go, sir.”

“Stay here, Mike!”

“She’s upset, sir.”

“Upset, hell!” Debbie Ann snarled. “I’ll be more upset if I don’t hear more about this. Now get out of here, please, Parkins, and let us talk.”

The nurse hesitated. “I’ll be right outside the door. Don’t be too long, sir.”

When the door shut Debbie Ann said, “Mommy wasn’t involved in it, of course?”

“No.”

“Was he with that woman?”

“Yes.”

“And she was killed too?”

“Nobody could have gotten out of that one.”

“How is Mommy taking it?”

“Pretty well. She identified him. She’s pretty... subdued today, but she’s making the funeral arrangements herself.”

“Does... does she blame me, Mike?”

“She hasn’t said.”

“Do you think she will?”

“She knows the situation was bad. And she can’t help knowing you made a bad situation a hell of a lot worse. You slept with her man when he was sick, mixed-up and vulnerable. You gave him a guilt he couldn’t live with. I don’t see how she can ever think of you again as her sweet little lovable baby. You asked me. I told you. But you didn’t have to ask. You know all that.”

“Oh, God!”

“There’s an old-timey idea still in force. Whatever you take, they get stubborn and make you pay for it.”

“I should have been with him last night, Mike. That would have made it a hell of a lot neater. I wish I’d been with him.”

“Don’t tell me! Am I hearing right? Debbie Ann expressing remorse? Regret? Guilt, even?”

“Don’t pound on me, please.”

“Or maybe it’s just an act. You want to soften me up for some reason. So you make with the tragedy jazz. Remember? You’re the golden girl. You can do anything in the wide world you want to do and it’s right because it’s you that does it. Everybody in the world is a slob except the infinitely desirable Debbie Ann.”

“What are you trying to do to me? My God, I hate myself enough without you—”

“Not enough. Not yet. But you’re moving in the right direction. Remember I told you about looking in the mirror. You haven’t yet. But maybe it’s possible.”

“Who were... the other people killed?”

“Stop changing the subject. Ask the nurse for the morning paper after I leave, which is going to be just about now. You got a lot of time alone. Play this game. Be somebody else, looking at Debbie Ann, getting to know her. What would this somebody else think?”

“I don’t want to know.”

“Yes, you do.”

“I don’t!”

“Do me this,” he ordered. “Give it a try. You got all day.” He held his left hand out. The single eye had a baleful stare.

“Bastard!” she said.

“Coward!” he said, and did not take his hand away.

Finally she reached across her body with her uninjured left hand and took his. “Okay. But I have a feeling I’m not going to enjoy it.”

“Who said it would be a pleasure?” he said, and walked out.

He went back to the house. When he had a chance to speak to Mary alone he said, “She could grow up, that girl. A little delayed, but not impossible.”

“How did she take it?”

“It jolted her. It knocked her off balance. While she was on a tilt, I jolted her another couple of times. The modern style of handling Sleeping Beauty. No kiss. A boot in the tail. Maybe she sits up and looks around. Maybe she goes back to sleep. It’s anybody’s guess.”

“Maybe I kept her asleep so long, treating her like a little child.”

“Don’t treat her that way any more.”

“How could I?”

“Treat her with love. Love isn’t for reward and punishment. Respect is what you give and take away, not love.”

“Mike, Mike,” she said, the tears starting to come.

“If you can cry again, good. Go do so.”

She tried to smile, and fled. He roamed the house restlessly for a little while, and then went over and basked on the beach. He swam a little — with great fury and determination. He walked and found a shark’s tooth, black as the eyes of McGuire. He summoned up specific memories of Buttons, and braced himself for the big wave. It came, and it blinded him, but did not nudge him off his feet.

Mike Rodenska. A chunky brown man on a lot of beach, balding, thoughtful, and alone — relighting the hoarded half of a cigar.

He sat down. A pale gray crab came out of his sand-hole home and squatted, motionless, staring at Rodenska.

“What do you need?” Mike asked him. “You got a hole there. You got a hard shell, and all the beach you can use. You know your trouble, my friend? You’re over-privileged. You got it too good. Go back in the hole and count your money.”

He flapped his hand. The crab darted back into his hole. Mike lay back and went to sleep.