Recessional: A Novel (4 page)

The plan he had worked out hastily when he learned that he would be working in Florida required him to make Evansville, Indiana, this first night. It would be a drive of nearly three hundred miles, but since his days in high school he had been accustomed to covering five or six hundred miles a day and doing it alone if other young men in Denver had not been free to go along and share the driving. In those exciting days when he was fanning out to places like Seattle, Los Angeles and Chicago, if he did have to drive alone he did so until
he felt the first signs of fatigue. He would then pull off to the side of the highway, lock all doors and roll up all the windows except for a little crack up front, and sleep crammed sideways for a couple of hours, awaking with such renewed energy that he tore along the next portion of his trip. He had formed the habit of using a motel only on the third night, when he judged that his body deserved total relaxation in a proper bed.

Always a careful driver, he now tested the road that had been so heavily battered by the blizzard and found that his tandem responded properly when he applied the brakes, slowing to thirty or even twenty without excessive yawing. This is quite doable, he thought. Evansville well before midnight without straining the engine.

When he reached the sign that said
YOU ARE NOW ENTERING INDIANA
he saluted and cried: “Chicago, farewell!” Then he made an obscene gesture and added: “Up your bucket.” He was on his way to Florida.

But he was in Indiana only a few moments when he impulsively pulled off the highway, stopped his rig, and put his face in his hands. All bravado gone, he mumbled: “I lost a paradise in Chicago. A great job—one of the best clinics around. And the wonderful mothers and babies relying on me, trusting me. A growing bank account and a beautiful wife. How did it all vanish so soon?”

Remaining frozen at the wheel, he pressed his temples and muttered: “A doctor without a kit. A specialist without a practice. No wife, and exactly a hundred and eighty dollars in my pocket. Zorn, you sure screwed up your life.”

Then he suddenly tensed and his grip on the wheel tightened: Now, dammit, start rebuilding, or your life will begin to go downhill right now. By some miracle I’m getting a second chance. I’m earning good money, and—who knows?—maybe someday I’ll even practice as a doctor again.

He restarted his motor, edged his rig back onto the highway and swore: “Start of a new year, start of a new life.”

Fifty miles farther south on Route 41 all ice on the highway had been crushed and removed by heavy trucks, so that he felt safe in driving at sixty miles per hour. Even so, he kept careful watch on the car two ahead to make sure that if anything happened he would be able to slow down instantly. With the extra load in the trailer pushing him from behind, he must avoid sudden stops.

Daylight was disappearing by the time he reached the cutoff for
Interstate 65 that would sweep him around Terre Haute and put him on the road for the finishing kick into Evansville, where he felt confident that a motel bed would be waiting since the storm had kept traffic from the interstates. When it became clear that he would reach his destination well before midnight, he relaxed, leaned back in his seat, listened to the various FM stations as he entered their broadcast range and sang along when they played some song he knew.

As he had expected, the first Evansville motel he approached had a room, and for thirty dollars he had a hot bath, a good sleep and complimentary coffee, so that when he headed south on New Year’s morning he had abundant energy. Ahead of him was a reasonably clear road and only four hundred miles or so to Atlanta. But as he approached Nashville on his run across Tennessee, he heard on his radio: “Motorists are advised to proceed cautiously on the hilly portions of Route 41 between Nashville and Chattanooga. Icy conditions prevail as a result of last night’s storm. Slow down!” He chuckled at the warning, thinking: Till you’ve been on Boul Mich with the ropes in place to keep you from being blown away, you don’t know what ice is.

Nevertheless he did slow down, for in recent years he had seen television news showing in sickening detail how, in an ice storm or a heavy fog, even cautious drivers could pile their cars into massive crashes on the freeways. He remembered one in California—sixty cars, smashing into each other.

But even at his diminished speed, as he came around a bend in the hill country just west of Chattanooga he saw the car two ahead start slipping sideways and then, completely out of control, make a 180-degree turn so that it continued sliding, but backward. And as he watched in terror, the doomed car moved slowly but inexorably into a tangle of three others that had slid the same way, ending up in a huge pileup involving scores of cars. Cars heading west along the other side of Highway 41 were also piling up, with some crossing the median and smashing into the fronts of cars in his lane.

In the same moment that Andy realized he was in danger, he also saw a possible escape route: off to the right of his side there was a moderate berm that sloped gently down. Convinced that he would surely, within the next few moments, crash into the pile ahead and at the same time be struck from behind, he wrenched his steering wheel sharply toward the berm, thinking to drift down the slope. His front wheels did not respond, and he continued moving relentlessly toward
the pileup. Reversing direction for just a moment, he quickly swung the wheel back to the right, and this time, dangerously close to striking the car ahead, his sedan and its heavy trailer eased gently over the side of the road and slid slowly off the shoulder and down the bank, escaping disaster.

But from his safety spot off the road he now watched the horror occurring on the highway a few yards above him, much worse now than anything he had ever seen on the news. A monstrous double trailer hauled by a massive six-wheel semi—the entire rig must have been eighty feet long—moved ponderously down the far side of the road, lost control and jackknifed into the eastbound cars, smashing some of them flat. His mouth agape, he mumbled: “Jesus! Just where I’d have been,” but as a doctor he felt urgently that he should not be a mere spectator down below but up there in the midst of the carnage, helping to save lives.

Before he could start crawling up the berm, he was immobilized by what he saw developing to the east where a huge truck hauling two tiers of new cars was approaching at considerable speed. Men who had left their smashed cars ran back along the highway, screaming at the driver: “Slow down! Slow down!” but since he could not see the chaos ahead, he interpreted their frantic signals as those of frightened strangers who did not know how to drive Tennessee highways in bad weather. Instead of slowing down, he accelerated even more in order to maintain control of his gigantic rig. Zorn, seeing him speed up, recalled a term from high school physics: “Christ, the kinetic force of that bastard!” He knew that the total forward thrust of that great monster, its massive gear in back and its full load of new cars, could plow through a stone wall before its force abated, and he screamed “No! No!” as it rammed into the huge trailer whose components now lay on their sides with touring cars crushed beneath them. With a thundering crash the skidding car transport tore through the fallen semi, continued over it and burst into flames, igniting the semi as well. The people trapped in the cars below would be cremated.

Appalled as he watched from a safe distance of ten yards, the helpless doctor remained immobilized. To rush into that inferno hoping to save lives would result only in the loss of his own. As he climbed up the berm to see what he might still be able to accomplish, he saw a sports car driven by a young woman duplicate his performance
by sliding slowly toward the chaos. Unlike him she found no avenue of escape. Crashing with some force into the three late arrivals that had piled up in the wake of the burning truck, she was obviously infuriated by a mishap for which she shared no blame. Climbing out of her damaged sports car, and confused by the mayhem around her, she stumbled forward between her car and the one ahead with which she had collided. Zorn, aware of her perilous position, screamed “No! Don’t stand there!” She heard his anguished cry and turned to see who had shouted, but remained immobile between the two cars. “Oh, Christ!” Zorn screamed as a powerful Lincoln town car came up behind the sports car at almost full speed and slammed into the rear of the girl’s car, shoving it forward so violently that it crushed the girl’s legs between her car and the car in front.

When Zorn reached her she was still pinned between the cars, aware that she had been hurt but not yet of how badly. He knew it was essential that she be dragged from the wreckage so her legs could be attended to immediately, though he almost feared seeing what the damage was, and he shouted to bystanders, “Give a hand!” Two young men, not aware that they would be in the same danger from the crashing of new arrivals, sprang to his aid, and by brute strength they moved her car enough so that she could be extricated. When she saw that her lower legs, severed by her own car’s steel bumper, were no longer part of her, she fainted.

Remembering the medical bag he always carried in his sedan, Zorn threw one of the young men his keys: “I’m a doctor. Get my kit in the trunk.” Even before the man was back, Andy had torn strips from the unconscious girl’s dress and shouted: “Somebody give me a branch. Two branches.” And when these were torn from nearby trees, he twisted them in the fabric, circling her legs above the knee and providing pressure to stanch the flow of blood.

When the young woman, still mercifully unconscious, was left in the care of women from the other wrecks, Zorn went back to the sports car to recover the two legs because he knew that doctors could perform miracles in reattaching limbs. But when he saw that the legs had been mashed flat he knew the veins and arteries and nerve systems had been totally destroyed. There was no possible way of refitting the fragments, so he abandoned them.

It was twenty minutes before the first helicopter arrived. It belonged to a Nashville television studio and could provide no medical
assistance but it signaled for all emergency forces in the area to report. After photographing the wreckage for ten minutes it disappeared, and soon the first medical copter did fly in. Andy was at its door before the rotor had stopped revolving: “Medical doctor. Girl here with both legs amputated. She must go first,” and when the paramedics saw her condition, with the improvised tourniquets, they made space for her and him.

On the brief flight to a waiting Chattanooga hospital the girl revived and looked pathetically at Andy: “My legs? Are they gone?” Andy knew that in her first moments of consciousness what she needed most from him was comfort and reassurance. Taking her hands in his, he said above the loud humming of the copter: “The great news is, you’re going to live. Friends took care of that.” When terrible fear swept her face, he released one of his hands and placed it under her chin: “Sure, there’s trouble. You saw that. But I promise you you’ll have a long and lovely life.” Aware that she was still trembling, he said: “At your wedding, I’ll ask you for a dance. Yes, you will be dancing,” and he gently brushed back the hair from her forehead.

This had the effect he wanted, for in a wavering voice she asked: “Was it totaled?” and he realized that in her confusion she was speaking of her car.

“It was, but you were not. You’ll be driving again.” She tried to acknowledge this vote of confidence but was overwhelmed by a paroxysm of terrible pain and fainted again.

At the hospital a Dr. Zembright, an elderly orthopedist who had been alerted from the helicopter, rushed the girl into an operating room where he praised Zorn for the precise placement of the two tourniquets: “You had first-aid training?”

“Medical doctor. Chicago.”

When the unconscious young woman had been attended to, the stumps of her legs disinfected and antibiotics applied, Dr. Zembright took Zorn to a private office where a conversation occurred that the younger doctor would never forget. “The steps you took at the scene have probably saved her knees.” The older man recognized that the still-shaken Zorn needed reassurance. “She’ll thank you a million times in years to come. Because with knees in place, it’s easier.”

“It was hell out there. I stood eight, ten yards from the highway and watched helplessly as one damned truck after another piled into that mess. Carnage.”

“Would a shot of whiskey help?”

“Seldom touch it, but I’d better have one now. Then I have to look after my car.”

“You left it at the scene?”

“Down a dip to the side. You’d be surprised how helpful everyone was pulling people from the fires. Young fellow who helped me pull the girl free promised he’d watch my car and trailer. He wanted me to stay with her. He has my keys.”

Zembright, knowing from past experiences with shock that Zorn was teetering on the edge, poured him a stiff shot from his private reserve and the two men relaxed while buzzers echoed throughout the hospital, which was becoming packed with the wounded from the pileup. Andy tossed his shot at one swallow, then coughed from doing so.

The older man said: “Doctor, I judge from what you told me that you played the role of a Good Samaritan.”

“I did what you’d have done.”

“Probably more. But as a wiser man, I’d have done something else you didn’t do.”

“What did I miss? Will it damage her?”

Zembright leaned back and smiled. “Her? No. You? Maybe.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m sure I’d also have tried to help if I were driving past, but because I also know what happens later, as soon as I had helped I’d have hightailed out of there.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ve learned through sad experience that some months after you’ve saved a victim’s life through your roadside expertise administered in time, the son of a bitch is going to hire a sleazy lawyer and sue you for not having done something else that he thought might have been better. And instead of being a Good Samaritan as in Luke, you find yourself before a judge being condemned for being a busybody intruder who crippled the very person you were trying to help.”