PART ONE
New Orleans, Louisiana, 1960
The Ford lay flipped on its back, the front tires collapsed and folded in toward its underside. Spits of steam rose from beneath the hood, smelling of metal and gasoline. The left front tire was warped, the hubcap gone, and the ends of the steel bolts spun in a cockeyed silver oval that was reflected in the light of a full moon.
He leaned with one arm on the roof of his own car, closing his eyes to it, praying it was not as he already knew it to be, crossing himself with a trembling hand. A ticking sound came from the Ford’s engine. The frogs in the bayou were silenced, and he became aware of the pitiful crying farther down the road, about a hundred yards, the low strangled child sounds coming from the other car, a two-toned Pontiac Fire Chief.
Moments earlier the Pontiac had sped past him, coming from the opposite direction, too fast for the narrow road. It had sped by him like an angry fit of wind as he rounded the slight curve and then he heard the loud awful crashing sound behind him. The crash had occurred even as his fear chilled him, without time for tires to squeal or horns to blare.
The Pontiac had been spun around by the head-on collision and was pivoted back towards him, upright, its tires flattened, lit up in the moonlight like a cat preparing to pounce.
The child’s voice came and went, protesting and pitiful, and then he heard the man’s curses.
The cop part of John Bonner’s brain began reconstructing the crash. The Ford, which had carried his daughter and son-in-law of only a few hours, had been trailing his own car, its speed between fifty and fifty-five miles per hour. The Pontiac had blown by in a shout, at a speed of seventy or eighty or more, and within three seconds, there had been the sound of the crash. He stared at the exploded windshield of the Ford in the middle of the road, curved and
spidered, resting like a broken shield in the aftermath of battle. He saw no brake marks on the pale gray of the asphalt.
He cursed at the man whose voice he heard. The father in him was in choking, alien land, cruel beyond experience.
Wait here, he said to Pauline. Not knowing if she was awake or not. She had passed out after they drove away from the reception, before they had crossed over Canal Street, nesting in the seat while they sat at the light. She had been blissful, dreamy and happy. He heard no sound from her now and he knew it would be the last peace she would ever have.
He walked ahead, toward the Ford, hesitant, like a man descending a flight of stairs in darkness. He made a halting arc around the car and then he came to a stop. His heart beat fast like the last flickers of a candle flame and he massaged his chest and beat his fist against it.
He straightened and inhaled the dense air that smelled of rotted fish and mud and gasoline, thick and liquid. He heard a lone bullfrog, then another, and a shy splash behind him in the bayou that ran alongside the road. Ripples eased through an egg-shaped reflection of the moon on the black water. He felt the angina pains like the blunt edge of knives pressed into his jaw
and behind his sternum. John Bonner was fifty-four years old and two heart attacks had left him feeling like a cripple. The third attack, he’d been told, would be the one that would most likely kill him, the one there would be no coming back from.
He dug into his suit pockets for the small pill tin that contained the two nitroglycerine tablets. He had put them there in case the ceremony would become too much for him, knowing how he was when having to speak in front of crowds. He was wearing a rented summer tuxedo and had removed the clip-on tie and undone the cummerbund that had been too tight to begin with. He squatted in the road and then got down on both knees, careful not to scrape the pants material against the asphalt. He willed himself still and balanced himself and then he placed the tablet on his tongue. He felt the tablet dissolve and he took deep, slow breaths, each one to the count of six.
He heard the car door open behind him and looked back and saw Pauline, her head extended from the window frame of the open door, limp and cocked sideways.
What is it? she asked him.
He held up his palm as if he were directing traffic and told her to stay where she was.
God in heaven. John? She stilled her head, surveying the wreckage.
Stay there, baby.
It looks terrible.
You don’t need to see it. His words tumbled up into his throat in jagged pieces, tasting of bile.
Less than an hour ago John Bonner had been moving amidst the tables of the Bon Ton Café, careening like a big-bellied plane caught in a strong crosswind, long wings tilting back and forth, in combat with gravity, the proud father of the bride. Close friends and family members were assembled at the long rows of tables that had been pulled together. They ate crayfish étouffée and redfish topped with lump crabmeat and butter and then the bread pudding with the whiskey sauce. He had not had the money for such a reception on a cop’s salary, but his daughter was marrying well.
Afterwards they had all gathered in the parking lot at the corner of Magazine and Poydras where they smoked cigarettes and drank from paper cups into which the half-smiling old waitresses had transferred their drinks. They talked in loud voices and laughed, two families coming together, holding their cups away from their bodies as if they needed to do so for balance. They leaned into one another’s faces and hugged and shook hands and kissed one another on cheeks and lips and said over and over what a beautiful bride, what a perfect couple, the scene portending nothing.
From where he stood now he could make out the lifeless warped body of Tom, his son-in-law of less than four hours. The driver’s side of the car had absorbed most of the impact and he had not been entirely thrown. His head and shoulders lay face-up on the asphalt as if to allow easy transport. His neck was broken, the skin on the side of his face white as raw flour, caught in the moonlight, the light harsh, like in a storefront window. He took a few steps closer to the car and squatted to check Tom’s pulse, feeling around on a blood-covered wrist that hung at a queer angle.
Behind him he heard the door of his own car slam and Pauline call out to him. Her voice desperate now. John. No, John. She walked toward him, in her bare feet. She had removed her shoes and nylons as soon as they had left the restaurant.
Pauline. Go on and get back in the car like I said, baby.
That’s Tom’s car, John.
He stood up and walked toward her and waved his hands at her, telling her to stop, but she continued. Taking unbalanced, winding steps, shaking her head, her mouth covered by her hands. Where’s Rose? John.
She got thrown out of the car and I need to find her, he said. Get back in the car, baby.
Please. Please, no. Don’t let this be happening. No, God.
He turned her around by the shoulders and led her back to the car. He held her gently around her bony shoulders and felt her body falter and give way to him. He helped her into the passenger seat and told her he needed to go see what he could do.
No, God, she said. Tell me she’s all right, John.
She got thrown is all I know, he told her.
She leaned forward in the seat and rocked back and forth. Make her be okay, John. Make her be okay. Her hands were clasped together in prayer.
He straightened and took a deep breath that felt like it reached only as far as the back of his tongue. He felt like he was breathing gasoline, as if his lungs were heavy damp bags, pulling at his throat.
We’ve lost her. John. God, we’ve lost her.
He headed off, favoring his right knee that had been creased by a bullet fifteen years earlier and then he angled around the car and immediately to the place where her body lay, where the cold police part of his brain had already calculated it to be.
She lay face down on the crushed-shell shoulder of the road, the part of it that slanted downward to the water at a steep angle. One arm was submerged in the water that was black as oil and it was this part of her that he touched first, moving it gently toward her torso and checking for a pulse.
In the moonlight the back of her wedding dress shone pearl-white and there was not a drop of blood on it that he could see. Her head was crushed. The white of her skull was exposed, and when he rotated her face toward him, he was unable to recognize it as his daughter’s. The skin was peeled away, her nose gone.
It was then that the unrestrained weight of a father’s grief overtook him. He pulled her tight against his chest and cried and breathed in and out with her hair against his lips. He smelled the gasoline and the mud stench of the water. He heard footsteps on the pavement and voices of men who were running up behind him.
Oh, Jesus God, he heard a man cry out and then another one say, in a voice almost whispered: Oh, Christ. Then they all fell quiet and he knew that in the light of the moon, they had seen her face cradled on his shoulder now, and he could hear them, wordless, circling behind him. All strangers.
There’s some in the other car that’s still alive, he heard one of them say. It don’t look good though, another man said. There’s two kids in there. It don’t look good for either one of them.
All he wanted then was to be able to carry her away from this, but she was no longer his little girl, the one not so many years ago he could toss into the air without effort and catch in his beefy arms. But John Bonner was no longer a young, healthy man. He knew now that his own life was over, and Pauline’s as well.
He took off his white rented jacket and draped it over his daughter’s shoulders and head and wept.
Later, in the car, he and Pauline cried together, Pauline as limp as an injured bird, the side of her face quivering against his open palm.
From there he watched the men, nine of them now, gathered like playground boys around the man who had emerged from the Pontiac. He could hear their chattering high-strung voices, and he watched as they darted in and out of the circle and struck and kicked at the one-armed man. An amputee, he thought. A goddamned amputee, driving a car. Driving that fast. He watched the man bend forward and stagger toward the group. The man wore a short-sleeved white shirt and his left arm extended to just above where his elbow would have been. He was a tough sonofabitch, a fighter dog, and the other men knew it. He was tall and broad-shouldered and towered over all but one of them. He was the type of man one officer alone would not want to have to restrain.
I should shoot him in the head, right now, this very instant.
He heard the cold liquid sound of sirens in the distance and knew they were only a few minutes away. A short fat man in a mechanic’s overalls rushed forward from the circle and struck the one-armed man from the Pontiac in the face with an uppercut. The man staggered but didn’t drop. He crouched and held out his one hand, defiant, as if he were inviting someone else to come at him.
John Bonner held his wife Pauline close to him. He was no longer crying. Emotions beyond grief were settling within him, invading him. A small wind drifted in through the open window and the skin on his cheeks burned. He breathed in the smell of the gasoline from the wreckage and he wished then that death would come gently to both him and Pauline. But even with the pain that rolled up his arm and through his shoulder, a pain that he felt deep in the cartilage and hard bones of his shoulder blades, he knew, too, that death was mocking him. That death was to life like thunder to lightning—its own separate beast, living and incapable of being tamed.
Copyright © 2008 by Denzil Strickland
