The Reconstructionist (18 page)

In front of the upholstery shop he parked the minivan and crossed the access road to gaze down. The embankment’s slope looked steeper from here than it had seemed from below. At his feet grew dandelions and weeds. A Camel pack. A crushed water bottle. In the south-west stood a swathe of near-black clouds while the traffic below ran bellowing. He took a breath and went down clutching the weeds.

The passing vehicles moved in long streams and flows, sucking a wind that fluttered against him. He studied the shape of the embankment, the location of the acceleration and deceleration lanes, the proximity of the overpasses at the exits ahead and behind. Here, on an early morning in winter, after a night-time snowfall, a Dodge Durango had parked on the shoulder, occupied by a family of five Pakistani immigrants who had abandoned a rental apartment two days earlier and begun driving west. Ten minutes before the accident a police officer drove by and did not note any stopped vehicles – implying that the Dodge had not been here long.

The driver of the semi that destroyed the Dodge and killed everyone inside began to lose control after passing the previous exit. Perhaps he encountered a patch of ice. Perhaps his attention
wandered
. A standard black box in the semi recorded speeds of a few miles an hour over the speed limit, and conditions were poor – heavy snow and ice on the roadway, more snow sifting down. For a distance of several hundred feet the semi swerved back and forth – a little, then more and more as the driver struggled to regain control of the trailer swinging out behind him. Ellis had modelled the dynamics. When the driver got on the brakes, it caused the trailer to fully jackknife. The entire semi slid broadside. It was travelling at – Ellis had calculated – 46 mph when the rear corner ripped open the Dodge and hurled it down the shoulder, spinning in a complicated trajectory that Ellis laboriously reconstructed by an analysis of a stack of police photos of tyre marks in the snow.

When the Dodge came to a stop it stood empty, and the five occupants lay in little heaps here and there on the road. Scattered around them were suitcases, duffels, Fritos, a pair of flip-flops and a small charcoal grill.

No one alive knew why the family had left their apartment and started west, and the available evidence also didn’t indicate why they had stopped on the shoulder – the same shoulder Ellis now trudged along. The Dodge still had gas in the tank. Maybe it had some mechanical problem. Maybe the driver wanted to look at a map. Maybe there was an argument. Ellis and Boggs had identified the accident location by walking the shoulder with a book of police photos, watching for the shape of the embankment and a bit of fencing that showed at the top. Or had it been a guard rail? Irritated, Ellis returned to the place where he had come down the embankment and continued on in the other direction. Maybe he had the wrong Outback, the wrong exit, the wrong interstate, the wrong city.

When he noticed a sudden quiet he ran across the lanes, to the centre median.

Cars roared into the lanes behind him. The median, about thirty feet wide, shallowed in a grassy ditch. At the bottom a seagull stabbed at a candy bar wrapper.

After throwing the Dodge aside the semi had continued to
slide
and swing around until its wheels scooped into the earth of the median. Ellis looked for furrows in the grass. He remembered photographing the tracks of still raw earth with Boggs, and it didn’t seem likely that the highway department would have made any attempt to fill them. But he didn’t see them.

He walked with the flow of traffic, then against it. A drop of water struck his face, then another. Soon a drizzle sketched visible lines in the air. The noise of the wheels on the road began to shift tone. He stood watching the moving columns of vehicles while his hair plastered down, his shirt grew soaked, his pants. A plume thrown by a semi landed against his ankles. Eventually the traffic must break. It passed through his mind that if he waited here long enough, inevitably he would see an accident occur.

When next he looked down the median, a figure was coming.

It wobbled a little side to side, stopping now and again to peer at the ground, and eventually emerged from the rain in a baggy yellow-and-black Steelers jacket with the hood up, a girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen. Under one arm she held an object – a headlamp assembly, wires springing from it. She stopped about ten feet away and regarded him with a frown, as if he were a post in the ground in the wrong place. When he said hello, she nodded slightly and asked, ‘What are you doing here?’

He looked at the traffic. His hands trembled in his armpits. The rain ran off the girl’s jacket, the sleeves hung past her hands, the hood shadowed her eyes.

‘I’m trying to get back across,’ Ellis said.

The girl didn’t answer. She turned to face the roadway as if she were at a bus stop and examined the headlamp in her hands. Ellis, confounded, wandered up the median a short distance, then returned and waited. Eventually he bowed his head. Eventually he shut his eyes.

Then the sound of the traffic changed. A course of rear lights brightened, cars slowed. Ellis had lost his expectation that the traffic would ever stop; to see it now seemed a flouting of nature.

They crossed the lanes between stopped cars and climbed the
embankment
and when he reached the minivan the girl was still with him. The rain had become extraordinary, a collapsing wave. ‘Well, get in,’ he yelled.

They watched the water move on the windshield. Except for the rattling on the roof, the minivan seemed a calm and hushed place. He started the engine to run the heater. ‘That came out of a Ford Probe,’ he said, gesturing at her headlamp.

She glanced at him. ‘I know.’

‘I can drive you home,’ he said. ‘But you have to tell me how to get there. I don’t know this place.’

‘You don’t have to do anything for me,’ she said. But she didn’t move either, just sat in his minivan. She had some pimples around her lips and watched the rain with peculiar intensity.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’m hungry. You hungry?’

He eased down the access road to a Wendy’s. Inside he ordered hamburgers, fries, sodas. They sat in a booth with red seats, and she ate with a slow and precise method, one fry at a time until they were gone, the burger in small bites.

He picked the headlamp off the table and put his eye to the glass. ‘You find this along the road somewhere?’

She said nothing.

‘This was in a collision,’ he said. ‘At night.’

He set it aside, and he watched her look at it, then up at him, then at the headlamp again, her jaw flexing. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Bulb filaments are hot and soft when they’re lit. When a crash suddenly accelerates or decelerates the car, if the filament is on, it’s so soft that it gets thrown out of shape. It’s like cracking a whip.’

She lifted the headlamp and peered at the bulb filament. Then she looked at him, with one eye a little squinted.

‘Are you homeless?’ he asked.

‘No.’

His phone rang. He saw that it was the office and let it ring.

‘Do you spend much time down there along the interstate?’ he asked. ‘Did you happen to see an accident that happened there,
a
semi hit a Durango, about a year, year and a half ago, in the winter, in the snow?’

She stared at him.

‘I’m looking for a friend of mine,’ Ellis said. ‘He might have been down there recently, looking around. Did you see him?’

‘Did you know people in that accident?’ she asked.

‘I think the people who knew the people in the accident all live in Pakistan.’

She nodded. ‘I think the unknown dead are important.’

‘What?’

‘The unknown dead.’

He watched her. He didn’t know what to do with her. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to go home?’

She folded a napkin edge against edge. ‘OK.’

Under her guidance they crossed the city by side streets. ‘My mom might know that accident,’ she said. ‘She might know about your friend.’

‘Really?’

‘I think so.’ The rain faded. They entered an industrial district. A cement plant fronted by barrel-backed trucks. A rail yard. Rows of grey warehouses. They drove beside a junkyard where piled broken vehicles rose over a fence of corrugated metal. The girl pointed down a run of gravel and said, ‘Here.’ A double-wide trailer stood surrounded by several vehicles in various levels of dismantlement.

The girl started out of the minivan, stopped, waved. ‘Come on. Mom’s here.’

A fibreglass storm door on a spring clapped loudly behind him. The mother, a lank and weathered woman in a denim shirt, said to the girl, ‘There you are,’ and ignoring Ellis she rattled through a speech of reprimand –
How can you wander off without telling me? Don’t you know I worry?
– in a tone of saying a thing that had been said before and would be said again without expectation of effect. Then she looked at the headlamp assembly. ‘Four bucks. Maybe.’ She turned to Ellis. ‘Thanks for bringing her back. You want coffee?‘

Ellis refused. The accident that he described, between the semi and the Dodge, sounded familiar, she said, but there were a lot of accidents, they ran together. He asked about Boggs, but she only shrugged and smiled, the headlamp still in her hands. ‘I don’t know where she finds these things,’ she said.

She had unnaturally white teeth, hollow cheeks. She smiled and smiled, and when Ellis looked around, the girl had vanished. He thought of Boggs out there alone, and he wrenched around on one heel, toward the door, calling out apologies and goodbye.

No rain. The puddles showed fragments of sky in the gravel. As he crossed to the minivan, the girl wandered out from behind a Subaru Brat rusting along the door sills. A boy who appeared to be a couple of years younger trailed her, wearing a bandanna around his neck like a cowboy.

‘I bet I know how you can find your friend,’ the girl said.

‘Your mom didn’t know anything.’

‘I have a technique,’ she said.

‘Really.’ He looked for her to smirk, but she only nodded. He felt tired and drained of resistance and ideas. He shrugged.

They passed between rough rows of vehicles lying side by side, spaced just far enough apart to allow the doors to swing a few inches, cars and trucks caved, twisted, pierced, burned, or freed of doors, hood, wheels, trunk lid, roof or fenders. Like bodies gathered after battle. Like a sorting of things before the rendering of final judgement. Drops of rainwater clung to the sheet metal, puddled in the dents. The girl and the boy walked ahead, and the boy’s steps clicked oddly – he was wearing tap shoes. And Ellis heard occasional shrill voices calling in other parts of the junkyard, words he could not make out.

A pile of rusting wheels. A pile of drive shafts. Somewhere a train moved, pushing vibrations that caused the entire field of vehicles to shimmer. Ellis lagged behind. It was easy to imagine that in any slightly different life he would never have come here.

The girl slowed and spoke without looking: the back of her head speaking to him. ‘The thing is, dead people don’t just go away. Things don’t just disappear. Things leave an effect. Souls
leave
an effect. And here we have a bunch of things that have the traces of souls. They’re not
obvious
. Maybe they’re only the effects of effects or the traces of traces, you know? But it’s not
that
hard to bring them out.’

Ellis hardly knew where to begin with this.

‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘it can’t hurt.’

Ellis asked, ‘Are you talking about ghosts?’

She glanced back. ‘Boo!’ Then she turned into a cul-de-sac and stopped before a Monte Carlo – crimson paint, gold trim, the interior upholstered in beige. The paint gleamed, the tyres held air. But the passenger door had been forced deep into the vehicle, as if staved in by a battering ram. The girl opened the driver’s door. She looked at Ellis.

‘What?’ Ellis said.

‘You’ll have to sit here.’

Ellis looked at his watch. The day had advanced into mid-afternoon. Overhead, clouds still dominated. ‘Are you sure you haven’t seen a big guy with a beard?’ Ellis asked. ‘Whatever he paid you, I’ll pay double.’

‘Don’t you want to find your friend?’

He peered inside. Colourful paraphernalia covered the dashboard and the pale seat fabric was spattered with stains. He tried to remember – he seemed to have no instinctive sense of himself any more – if in the past this was the sort of situation he would have extracted himself from. The stains appeared to be blood. An enormous blotching covered the passenger seat, which was distorted by the impacted door. He waited for the girl to say something ridiculous that would spur him away. But she said nothing.

The driver’s seat held him as softly as a plush sofa. Gold braid and tassels ran around the windshield glass; cards printed with the images of saints hung from the ceiling; figurines of crudely painted plastic stood on the dash holding swords, sceptres or birds; faux leopard skin wrapped the steering wheel; a bust of a weeping Virgin dangled from the rear-view mirror. The sun had faded the colours of the cards and figurines. The leopard skin was soiled at
three
and nine o’clock. A small stain of, again, blood marked the chin of the Virgin.

‘What now?’ he asked.

She closed the door. ‘Put your hands on the wheel.’ She circled to the front and she looked at him down the length of the hood. ‘Ask your question.’