Famous Last Meals (16 page)

“And you really don't know where we're going?”

“Not a clue.”

“When she said, ‘Will you go back to the house, please, Dad, and get him?' I assumed she was talking about Tighe.”

“Maybe she was.”

“Do you know where I was when they called me?”

“Jellystone National Park?”

“Funny. You're a laugh riot, you are. You should work up a little routine, take it on up to the Poconos. No, my young friend, I was on the top floor of a very tall building in Manhattan. As luck would have it, the man I was meeting there keeps a helicopter on the roof. I'm going to have to tell you what they said to me on the phone, aren't I?”

“Not if you don't want to.” A passing sign welcomed us to Burlington.

“You know, I think she really did want me to bring her brother instead.”

“Did something happen to Jane?”

“How did you ever keep up in school, boy? ‘Did something happen to Jane.' Priceless. Do you see that green sign with the big “H” on it up ahead? Well, you keep you eyes peeled for the next one, because there are going to be a series of them, like a trail of breadcrumbs. Did something happen to Jane. Tell me you didn't have anything to do with this stunt.”

“I assure you I have no idea what you're talking about.”

Jane had been moved from Emergency upstairs into a ward. “You,” she said when she saw me. Her father had indeed grabbed the wrong “him.” One of her legs was in an elevated cast. She had a black eye, a swollen upper lip, and an abraded face. I asked her what had happened.

“Tighe sat on me.”

“They're trying to find a cable long enough to haul your car out of that quarry, Jane. So let's forgo the wisecracks, shall we?”

“Don't lecture me, Father.”

“You could've been killed. Let's be somewhat more forthcoming with essential details, please.”

“You're only going to get mad at me.”

“I'm already there. If I get any angrier I'll pass out. Have you any idea what it costs to rent a helicopter and pilot by the hour?”

“About a dollar?”

He turned to me. “You talk to her. Maybe you'll have better luck. I'm ready to leave her here.”

“I wasn't trying to off myself, if that's what you were thinking about. Dad?”

“What?”

“Tell me that's not what you were thinking. At least give me that much credit.”

“The car you were driving is sitting in a hundred and fifty feet of water. The road ends about a quarter mile away from the edge of the quarry. What am I supposed to be thinking? There was no ramp, so you obviously weren't trying to jump to the other side. Were you? I didn't think so. What does that leave, then? You thought it'd be keen-o-cool to plunge in a borrowed car to the bottom of a water-filled rock pit, you know, see what it might feel like. Life is obviously not supplying you with sufficient jolts per second.”

“This is exactly what I mean,” she said, making no attempt to bridge the gap between past arguments and this one. “Everything I do you run down. I could tell you what I was doing, but you'd say something sarcastic the way you always do.”

“I want to know,” I interjected.

“Operative. Stooge.”

“Jane, I'm going down to the cafeteria. If by the time I've returned you have not told your boyfriend what happened to you out there, I promise you I will get back in my Hertz Sunbird and drive away, and you will have to convalesce in this very public ward, and when you are well enough to go home it will be your mother and not I who will come to wheel you out. I have never been more serious.”

Unlike the night before, mention of Jane's mother elicited no discernible reaction in her.

“He is always never more serious.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes, Father Dear.”

I used to believe that coincidence was merely that, the product of random motion. Max chose James Dean for his starring pre-mortem role at dinner. The night she damaged her knee, Jane Burden said she was trying to recreate the car race scene in
Rebel Without a Cause
, the one in which Dean's character jumps out from behind the wheel before the car he is driving beetles over a cliff. Not so lucky his opponent. As far as I knew, Max had never seen Jacoba Wyndham in performance, and even if he had, I was familiar enough with her oeuvre to know that nowhere in it did she make even the most cryptic allusion to the film. If only her attempt at cinematic re-enactment had been as thrilling as what we get to experience in the movie.

After Mr. Burden left the hospital room, Jane made me swear on the lives of my unborn children that the story I would tell him was that his impetuous daughter, in recreating the famous “chicken” car duel scene from the movie, threw herself out of the car before it plunged into the quarry and sank. Hitting the ground at such a great speed, she broke her knee and sustained minor abrasions and lacerations to the face, head and hands. But above all I was to say that she came away from the experience knowing, really knowing, what it felt like to cheat death. “He'll believe it if it comes from you.”

What had really happened, an amateur sleuth could have deduced. A chat with the attending doctor, the one who had put the cast on Jane's leg, would have revealed that the trauma to her knee came not from it striking the ground with great force but from a considerable weight having been applied to it. Given that the dirt road leading to the quarry ended at a locked steel gate four hundred meters away from the quarry, a barrier imposed to prevent the kind of stunt Jane wanted people to believe she had attempted, was it probable that the car was even down there under the water? Deep ditches lined each side of the road. Even if she had been able to circumvent the gate without leaving an important part of the vehicle's undercarriage behind, large rocks strewn about near the old mining pit made speed and a straight-line approach unlikely.

“You mean the car's not down there? Where is it?” I asked.

“Probably in some chop shop in Albany by now.”

“Somebody stole it?”

“Not exactly.”

She insisted that she had indeed set out, early in the morning before Tighe, Francesca and I were awake, to recreate the film scene in question. Her reason for doing so didn't become clear until much later, when I was able to connect her anger from the night before with a much older wound. As described, the gate was impassable. She backed up and when she directed the car at a sharp angle into the left-hand ditch, the front left wheel sank into the loam. She tried to free the car by spinning the wheels forward and back, only to cause it to sink further, up to the axles in the loose sand and gravel. She was ready to leave it there and walk back when a truck drew up behind her.

A man got out and said he had seen the lights of her car from back on the county road. He offered to help pull her car out, and before she could decline he was attaching a chain and hook from the front of his pickup to the back of her car. His breath smelled of liquor. She was afraid of what he was going to want in compensation. His oil-stained coveralls and grimy baseball cap suggested that he worked in a garage or on a farm. If she could get the man's car keys she might be able to outrun him and get away in his vehicle. Not very likely, she conceded. How to incapacitate him? He looked to be a hundred pounds heavier than she was. Short of clubbing him with a rock on the back of the head, she had no means of escape.

Meanwhile he eased his truck slowly backwards until the chain rose from the road. Jane's car began to move, but it was at such a pronounced angle that it was in danger of toppling onto its side. He asked her to get back into the car and put the key in the ignition so that she could shift into neutral gear and also straighten the front wheels. She did so, leaving the driver's door open. The car began to move with her in it, gradually tilting even more.

“Get out!” he shouted, easing forward, letting slack come into the chain, but both wheels on the driver's side were in the ditch now and the car was on its way over. There was no stopping it. She heard him shouting at her. She couldn't stay on the seat. She hadn't fastened the seatbelt. Climbing up toward the passenger-side door was impossible. Slowly, like something being dumped into a trash receptacle, she slid out.

She tried to scramble up the other side of the ditch before the car fell on her. The man was yelling something. Her feet slipped in the sand and she thought she felt a heavy hand holding her down, pinning her like an opposing wrestler waiting for the referee's ruling. At first, because her adrenaline was up and because she was working to extricate herself, her free leg braced against the doorframe and pushing as she lay on her side, she felt no pain. Then, as her pinned leg moved, she felt tearing and searing in her knee. She screamed.

The man came into sight. He said that he had secured the car with another chain so that it would not move any farther, but she could not picture what he was describing. He said, “Hold on, hold on, don't go anywhere,” and she laughed at such a notion. It came out as a groan.

He returned with a car jack, felt around in the muck and began to dig out a depression with his fingers. It took forever. Finally, when she thought she was going to faint from the pain and couldn't be sure she hadn't lost consciousness for a minute or two, he got the jack into place under the car's frame and supported on a flat rock that he had wedged in there.

“I'm sorry this happened to you,” he said as he fit the tire iron into the jack and began to crank. The jack opened, expanding on its internal teeth like a little person coming out of a crouch, and the car lifted enough for her to slip out. She was so pumped full of fright and energy that she tried putting weight on the leg and cried out again. She collapsed, striking the ground hard with her face.

The man picked her up and took her back to his truck. He took out a heavy blanket, folded it in half, put it on the ground and stretched her out on it lying on her back. “You sure are pretty,” he said. “Don't try and get up.”

When she woke she was lying on old pieces of carpeting in the back of the moving truck and was covered by the horse blanket. The sun in her eyes flickered like glinting low fingers slapping along a picket fence of live trees. She couldn't roll over. The knee screamed out at her again. She heard the back window of the cab slide open.

“Where are we going?”

“What?”

She repeated the question three times only to give up, having no louder voice. He was saying something to her. “Where's my car?” She didn't know whether she had thought the words or said them.

As if he had heard her he yelled, “I'm taking you to the ER. Your car is totalled. Sorry. Couldn't get her upright so I had to drag her on her side.”

“You can have it.”

“What's that?”

“I said,” straining for greater volume, “you can have it.”

“I didn't do nothing bad to you. When you were out.”

Out where? she thought before realizing what he had meant. “Do you have any aspirin?”

“Pardon me?”

“Aspirin. Painkillers. Anything.”

He passed a bottle out the window and she reached up to take it. The first mouthful came out too quickly and sloshed over her face. She raised her torso and supported herself on her elbows for the next gulp. It burned all the way down, its warmth spreading. The knee continued to throb, but from a distance now.

They were on a highway that had at least three lanes going in each direction. Cars passed them on the left and the right. She sipped and slept, woke to find that the bottle had fallen over, losing what had been left of the liquor. Take me far, far, far, far, far, she thought. Away, away, away. It was like being carried by a fast-moving current. A hot spot in her stomach churned. Tall buildings flashed by. Signs with exits, names of streets. She heard horns, sirens, car radios, whining transmissions. When she turned her head to the side, all she had drunk poured out her mouth. She smelled her stomach acids and gasoline fumes, and saw small birds strung on an overhead wire. She closed her eyes.

She opened them when the tailgate dropped with a dull clang and hands slid her out in her cocoon onto a firm soft surface. Metal sidebars came up left and right, clicked in place. Someone wiped the vomit from around her mouth with a cloth. She heard the word, “vitals.”

“What's your name, Miss?”

“Jane.”

“Jane What?”

“Burden.”

“Burton?”

“With a ‘d.' D-e-n, as in heavy load.”

“Do you know what happened to you, Jane Heavy Load?”

“More or less.”

“Sir? Sir? Somebody tell him—no, you have to—hey! Hey! Stop him—I can't believe this—don't let him drive away before he talks to us. Do you know that guy?”

“Who?”

“The one who drove you here.”

“No, I don't.”

She thought about what he had said: “You sure are pretty. I'm sorry this happened to you. I didn't touch you. While you were out.” Miss Jane, while you were out a strange man from a trailer park did not violate you in any way. But he did take the car you were driving. It's only fair, you have to agree. As payment. Of a sort. No, not for saving you, since he was as much a contributor to your injury as you were. This must be the cost of remaining...what? I was going to say, “healthy,” but it may not be the best word to describe someone in your condition. Maybe this is the price women have to pay from time to time to ensure that they stay alive. Small price? Certainly, a pittance to pay for one's continued existence. Especially since it wasn't your car to begin with. The person you borrowed it from, understanding bloke, is he? She. Splendid. It did look to be something of a beater. You did her a favour in disposing of it, then. Say it went over the side and down to the bottom. Not even worth retrieving. Let oxidation do its work. Except that the authorities and their representatives tend to be sceptical types. Police officers and insurance investigators and that ilk, they like to see for themselves. Chances are they're going to send a diver or two down with powerful flashlights. Who can say what they'll find? Now, let's go over your story again, shall we.