The Saint Magazine. January 1967. Volume 24, No. 5.

What’s It All About? by Stephen Dentinger

How many times have you wondered what was in the mind of that hit and run driver just before he struck? Just before he ran into that old woman — or that child... What were his thoughts, in his all too brief moment of mastery over life and death, as he saw his victim...

The engine coughed once and then caught, throbbing to life as I eased down on the accelerator. Then I was traveling, heading across town to the expressway where I could really open her up. The dark came late on these summer nights, and even now at past nine-thirty a sort of red-orange glow lingered in the western sky, as if reluctant to vanish completely.

I had all the windows open and the breeze felt good, and I wondered where I was going. Not that it mattered. It never mattered when was behind the wheel, feeling the power of the engine as we tore through the night — just it and me. Maybe that was the only taste of power — real power — I got in an otherwise dull life. Five days a week I could work away like all the other jerks, and walk the streets during the lunch hour with that set expression of pleasant boredom, but when Friday nights came I was master of myself, driving two tons of steel along a gray ribbon of highway.

It was at times like this that I knew what the air aces of the First World War must have felt when they took to the sky in their Spads and Fokkers and Sopwith Camels. This, right here now, speeding along the expressway at seventy miles an hour, was what life is all about. I flipped on the radio but then turned it off again. I didn’t need it. I didn’t need anything but the speed and the power and the certainty that I was going somewhere.

But where tonight? I jacked up the speed to eighty-five, taking a long low hill as if it didn’t exist, roaring down the other side with all the fury of the night around me. I passed a little sports car with a girl at the wheel, turned sharply in front of her and debated having some fun. But no, I had other things on my mind. She might remember me, or the license number, and report it to the cops later. I couldn’t take a chance on anything like that.

Further along, pressing ninety, I caught an Animal in, the road — a rabbit, probably — and pinned him to the pavement before he knew what hit him. All right, all right. No faster, or they might pick me up. I slowed it back gradually, seeing the lights of the city off on my right.

And turned off into downtown. The city reminded me of the resort season in Florida. Flowering sport shirts, girls in shorts, open-topped convertibles prowling the streets. Friday, Friday night, the beat beat beat of the rock place as I passed. “Hey, cat.” Sure. I remembered Florida, and the old man I’d caught on the crosswalk there.

Friday night was alive, with the blood of the city throbbing in its veins, and I was its master, as long as I stayed behind the wheel, as long as I saw it all only through the windshield specked with the guts of a dozen dead bugs.

I cruised some more, thinking about where to go. Maybe down to the Negro section. I could hit a kid in the street and keep on going. They’d see a white man driving away and that would be enough for a nice riot on a hot Friday night. Or maybe down to the beach, where there’d be a crowd even after dark. They were never individual people when I had them in my sights, never men or women or children when I gunned the car forward in that final second. They were only objects like bags of sand.

Some kids in a pickup truck yelled at me as they went by, and I followed them for a while until I got tired of it. Then I swung around to follow the circling red flasher of an ambulance as it roared through the night. I figured it would be an accident and I was right. A couple of hot rodders piled into each other on a turn. The one kid was screaming when they lifted him out, and I watched it for a long time through my windshield.

Pretty soon I was heading back toward the expressway, hungry for another taste of the speed. A few big drops of rain glanced off the glass in front of me, and I rolled up the windows as the full fury of a brief downpour hit the road ahead. It was good, and I liked driving in the rain. I remembered the first car I’d ever owned — a supercharged French job with an eight cylinder engine. My father had bought it for my eighteenth birthday, back when the family had money, and it had rained the first day I drove it. They’d taken St away from me soon after that, because of the accident and my father’s death, but I always had the memory of that first drive in the rain.

Now my tastes ran to American cars, because the foreign ones were too distinctive. Someone might remember, reports might be compared. I was very, very careful — always.

Two girls loomed up in my headlights as the rain abated. They had a flat tire and they huddled under a single black raincoat while they debated what to do. I sped past them, then cut back to the exit lane and left the expressway at the next feeder. It took me only a few minutes to double back and get on again where I had before. This time I turned off my headlights.

The rain had stopped and they were trying to do something with the tire. I could see them clearly in the reflected glow from the distant lights, but they didn’t see me. The car hummed along like a silent bat swooping through the night. I pushed it to the speed limit and held it there — no faster, because they might be able to tell later. No faster... careful...

The girl in the raincoat glanced up at the last instant, her dim face a mixture of surprise and then terror. As I felt the car crunch against them, I slammed on the brakes and switched on my headlights. It would look good, even if they searched for skid marks on the wet pavement. It would look fine.

I got out then and looked at them. It was the first time I’d ever tried two at once.

The police came finally, with their spotlights cutting little arcs in the night. There was no need for the ambulance that came along too. “God, officer, I never saw them. Not till it was too late. That black raincoat, and they didn’t have any lights...”

“It wasn’t your fault, buddy. It was just one of those things.”

I turned away, covering my face, feeling the exhilaration flood through my veins. All right, all right for now. In a few months, in another state, with a different name and a different car, I’d be ready again.

That’s what life is all about...