The Reconstructionist Read online

  He followed the same protocol that he and Boggs had developed over the years. He checked and noted vehicle make, model, year, ID number, wheel and tyre sizes, transmission type, brake type, overall width, overall height, overall length, axle positions, tyre conditions, brake-pad wear. At every six inches across the front end he measured depth of crush relative to the rear axle position, first at bumper level, and then again at hood line. The air was ripe with humidity, and as he made notes sweat fell on the page and glistened there in wet blisters. His father stood watching, then went to the toilet and sat facing the open fields, elbows hitched up a little as if he might giddy-up the commode into the distance.

  Ellis stood fussing with one of the cameras until he realised that he was hesitating, unsure he wanted photos of this car. He circled, taking photos from each side and each corner, from low and high, then moved in and snapped close-ups of the wheels, licence plates, vehicle ID number, the place where the airlane nameplate should have been, broken headlamps and windows, then focused on the damaged area at the front and took photo after photo at every angle, nearer and further, with and without measuring tape for scale. A gust of wind ruffled his notes and made the trees along the road silvery and flickering. The clouds on the western horizon were closing in, black, rigged with claws of vapour. He tried the driver’s door but it would not budge, so he opened the passenger door and slid over to the driver’s side – he had to cram himself, thighs nudging the steering wheel, knees into the dash. He sat gripping the steering wheel. Then he took up his pad and noted the mileage, the fuel level and that the gear shift was in neutral. The dash appeared largely undamaged, though now riven with age cracks. He twisted himself down under the steering wheel to look at the foot pedals – wear of use looked normal. Remembering the headlamp bulbs, and wondering if they were on at the time of the collision, he climbed out but couldn’t find either of them. They might have been lost in the collision, or put into police storage somewhere, or possibly Boggs had taken them. He drew out the driver’s seat belt and examined its length and found a transfer marking where the belt had locked and pulled a little plastic off the D-ring during the impact. He took a photo of it, leaned across the front seat and pulled out the passenger belt, and it also bore a transfer mark.

  A transfer mark on the passenger-side belt.

  Ellis stared at it for a long while, then let the belt run back on its retractor and stood out of the car. His hands had picked up a layer of grime from the car, and he saw it in great detail – the grey thickest on the pads of his fingers, thinner down through the joints and onto the palm.

  A transfer mark on the passenger-side belt.

  He crawled in again, pulled out the passenger belt and examined the mark and then looked away and then re-examined the mark: a small black line across the width of the webbing, almost as if drawn there with a crayon. But it matched the colour of the D-ring, and when he pulled the belt away from the D-ring the impress of the belt into the plastic could be seen there. He photographed both – transfer mark, D-ring.

  ‘Got to put the car back before the rain,’ his father said behind him.

  ‘A minute.’

  Sometimes load markings could also be found on the belt latch plate, but here he could not see one on the driver’s side, and on the passenger side he could only see a very faint marking that might have been a manufacturing effect. Inconclusive. He crawled into the back seat, which had only lap belts – no D-rings, and therefore no possibility of transfer marks. He checked the latch plates, but there were no indications of loading. He returned to the front passenger-side belt and looked at the transfer mark there one more time, felt its texture, turned it in the light. He let the retractor take the belt back. He stood out of the car. ‘Dad,’ he said.

  Side by side they put hands on the damaged sheet metal and leaning and straining they rolled the car back. His father slid the shed door shut and set the lock, then started toward the toilet. He said, without looking around, ‘I’m sorry that your friend is dead. I liked him.’

  ‘I’m going to get going.’

  ‘Find what you wanted?’

  Ellis didn’t answer. His father turned to look. ‘I need to think,’ Ellis said.

  ‘You always did.’

  They watched the weed-infested fields and the sky, which darkened further, the reaching, dark cloud masses now advancing with visible speed. A wind pressed, died, then renewed violently. Ellis put his notes in a back pocket and stood hesitating. Odours rose of dust, manure, mud. His father sat unperturbed on his toilet. A piece of paperboard went by bouncing and spinning, and the wind took dust off the fields and streamed it through the air, making Ellis squint and blink. He wasn’t sure of what he was seeing until it had come halfway across the fields: the leading edge of the rain, perfectly defined, a curtain in the air, and below it the field turned black. The sight of this vast motion held Ellis until, although it seemed to be very slowly crawling over the open fields, the rain suddenly hit him with heavy cold droplets. A gust soaked the length of him. He squinted at his father – at times in the past he’d been convinced that the root problem of his life was that his father loved Christopher more than himself. But perhaps his father in his self-pity was right, and everything could be explained by errors of incompetence.

  Then his father looked at him through the rain and howled, cheerfully, like an ape.

  Startled, Ellis ran.

  In the minivan, his father was visible through the windshield, radically distorted by the water moving on the glass, glowing in his white shirt. He remained atop the toilet and his white arm waved high in the air, like a captain committed to going down with the ship. Ellis waved, but his father almost certainly could not see the gesture. He backed the minivan to the road. The wipers flopped water aside but could barely keep up. The muddy gravel road spattered into the wheel wells. He drove slowly and watched the road and wanted to watch the gravel stones in the road, to watch each drop of water on the windshield – he did not want to think about the transfer mark on the passenger belt of his brother’s car and its meaning.

  Abruptly he cleared the rain. Traffic moved densely on the interstate. Now the afternoon sun, which had stood over his right shoulder in the morning, stood again over his right shoulder. He powered the windows down and air entered clamorously.

  Boggs would have seen the same thing. It meant that a second person had been in the car. Who?

  He didn’t know that it had been Heather.

  He followed the paired doors of a semi-trailer for miles and miles. At a certain distance from the rear of the trailer, he could glimpse the heavy-lidded eyes of the driver in the jittering side-view mirror.

  The police report didn’t say anything about a second person in the car. Why would the second person have been covered up?

  He discovered that he had passed his exit. To keep driving – to drive and drive and drive – seemed simple and enticing. World passing without consequence. But he took an exit ramp and turned back.

  On the night of the accident he had assumed that Heather had been a passenger in Christopher’s car, until her father told him that she had been at the gas station.

  If she had been driving –

  The front seat of the airlane had been close against the steering wheel.

  He manoeuvred through roads and turns, returning. He carried his notes and cameras into the house and went to the computer to pull up a reference website – the designed distance between the wheels of the 1970 Fairlane was within a half-inch of the distance that he had measured on the driver’s side of his brother’s car. That distance had not been altered by the collision: the dash had not been pushed back toward the seat. Rather, the seat had been slid forward, for a driver shorter than he was, or Christopher had been.

  He looked through the police report again, for any suggestion of a second occupant. There was none. An officer that Ellis did not recognise had signed the report. It did note that Heather’s father had been first on the scene. Certainly he had be
en there, because Ellis had seen him. Perhaps he had not been able to author the report because his daughter was involved. But surely he had had input.

  Ellis called the police station at Coil. A woman’s voice told him that the officer who had signed and filed the report had died several years ago, of a heart attack, only months after his retirement. The woman’s voice caught, and Ellis murmured condolences.

  He took the police report and his notes and cameras to the minivan and put them into the glove compartment and locked it. Why did he feel so ungainly as he moved? As if the earth were teetering under him. He returned to the living room. He sat.

  If other explanations existed for the evidence on the seat belts, those explanations did not rise to mind. Typically in such cases he would have talked to Boggs for a fresh perspective. Boggs had known all of this. He had seen the same evidence. What had led him to it? Something Heather said, perhaps. It would have been like him to decide to investigate some small contradiction in whatever she had told him about the accident. Or, just curiosity.

  If she had been driving the car, why hadn’t she told him? The question was critical, and Ellis tried to focus on it. Of course she had held some of herself from sight; in the nature of their affair a lot had been obscured. Yet he thought he had understood her, essentially, if not entirely. Perhaps he had been wrong. What had he known of her relationship with Boggs? She’d said little about it. But he had not asked. She had said that her marriage was a mistake that she blamed on herself. And what had she meant by that? He had no idea. How, after all, had she come together with him? He had been someone other than Boggs, and he had desired her, and she had felt herself linked to him by – what?

  Rain again, darkening the windows, thrumming on the roof, sloshing in the gutters. He watched a droplet work slowly down a windowpane, the shift of the light it held. He tried to think what he should do, of confronting Heather – an idea like a balloon at the end of a string, he pulled it toward himself, then it rose a short distance away again.

  He sat in the living room until late, waiting, listening to the air conditioning turn itself off and on. The rain had stopped. The hour when Heather usually returned went by and in agitation he checked the windows whenever a car passed. Finally he went to the toilet, then lay down and curled on the hard tile of the bathroom floor.

  Eventually he stood again and went upstairs to the bedroom. Startled, he stopped – a shape lay in the bed.

  At the sound of his step she shifted a little. ‘Love,’ he said. ‘You’ve been here all this time?’ he asked. She was silent. ‘Where is your car?’

  ‘It broke down,’ she said. ‘The engine just stopped.’ Her hand, lying atop the bed sheets, opened and closed. ‘I got it towed, and then I was late and stressed. I couldn’t face school, not another day of it, so I took a taxi home. I thought you’d be here.’

  He understood that she was frightened of him, and that she had been for some time now.

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘I’ve been in Coil,’ he said.

  That night he lay gathering a hatred of Boggs. He could not believe that Boggs had not envisioned this course of events.

  He lay beside her until morning, then he said, ‘I have to show you something.’

  Her station wagon was already repaired – an ignition coil replaced. They retrieved it, and then she drove. He was struck by the fact that she almost always preferred to drive. The route to the interstate through familiar end-to-end suburbs spanned past. Tuxedo shop. Liquor store. Laundromat. Starbucks. Church. Chiropractor. A build-your-own-teddy-bear shop. Jiffy Lube. Walgreens. Babies R Us. Bed Bath & Beyond. He had not ridden in the passenger seat of a car in a long time, and it felt unnatural and dangerous, travelling down the roadway without steering wheel or pedals, without control. Strip mall abutted strip mall to create a continuous path of commerce over the land. Heather wound up the engine and pushed into the interstate lanes. Ellis asked, ‘Do you still think about Christopher?’

  ‘Are we going to talk now?’ she asked. ‘Have a conversation?’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Do you think often of the accident?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘I hate to think of it.’

  ‘So you just stopped?’

  ‘I’d say it’s something that I’ve learned.’

  ‘What do you remember?’

  ‘I don’t like to remember.’

  ‘Why have we never talked about this?’

  ‘There are a lot things that we haven’t talked about. Maybe you’ve noticed.’ She looked at him, her expression closed and ungiving.

  ‘Heather,’ he said, and hesitated, and the two syllables stood open, an empty vessel. They were the last spoken for several miles.

  But then he asked, ‘Will you tell me what you remember about Christopher’s accident?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Heather – please.’

  ‘I walked from school to the gas station to buy a 7-Up and to call my dad for a ride. And I was standing in the parking lot when I heard the brakes and turned and saw one car slam into another.’ She spoke flatly. ‘There was an enormous explosion and a fire-ball. When it had settled down and my eyes readjusted, I saw that the car was Christopher’s. I ran to it. By the time I got there, he was already out, and he went to the other car.’ She stared ahead. ‘There were screams and it was hot and Christopher went into the car and came out with someone, and the fire was spreading and he went in, and the fire and smoke were everywhere, and he was trying to go in even further. He kept trying, and I was screaming at him to come out. Then he just stopped. I tried to pull him out. Someone dragged me away.’

  ‘Did you call your dad from the gas station?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said that was the reason you were at the gas station.’

  ‘I was waiting. I knew he wouldn’t be home yet.’

  ‘Did you buy the 7-Up?’

  ‘I guess so, yes. I remember the cold of it in my hand when the heat of the explosion pushed out over me.’

  ‘How long did it take you to recognise the airlane?’

  ‘I don’t know. Why?’

  ‘Where was Christopher when you first saw him?’

  ‘This is a strange conversation,’ she said.

  ‘Did anyone else get out of the airlane?’

  ‘Oh God. Ellis –’

  ‘Were there two people in the airlane?’

  ‘Did John tell you to ask these questions?’

  ‘Well, there were two people in the car at the time of the collision.’

  ‘Did John tell you that?’

  ‘I looked at the car.’

  ‘You think I was in there? That’s what John thought.’

  Ellis said nothing.

  ‘I wasn’t,’ she said.

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘Christopher was alone.’

  ‘These things are never knowable to one hundred per cent certainty,’ Ellis said, ‘but the evidence is pretty clear. Someone sat in the driver’s seat and someone else sat in the passenger seat. Both wore seat belts. I think you were in the car. In fact, you were driving. And your dad manipulated the accident report.’

  She pulled to the side of the road and stopped, tyres scraping on the gravel, and she bent forward and gasped.

  ‘Isn’t that right?’ he asked.

  ‘I watched from the gas station with a can of 7-Up in my hand. You have no idea how much you sound like John.’

  It is over, he thought, this is the end. He breathed shallowly and she stared at the steering wheel and time passed.

  ‘Do you want me to drive?’ he asked.

  She opened her door, stood out of the car. He thought she might walk away, but she circled the car, and he stood out and circled the car, and he began to drive.

  A boy and an older man – presumably the boy’s father – huddled together over something in the lawn, a white-and-red cylinder with
tailfins.

  ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘Water rocket.’

  The father began to work a small hand pump.

  ‘No concrete,’ she observed.

  ‘You remember.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Do you know the difference between a cheeseburger and a blow job?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then let’s go get lunch.’

  She glanced at him, but her expression didn’t change. She said softly, ‘You were afraid of me.’

  ‘When’s the last time you were here?’ Ellis asked.

  ‘Before the accident.’

  ‘When?’

  She sat looking at the house. ‘I met him here earlier that day, I think.’

  ‘You left with him in the airlane?’

  In the lawn, the boy and his father stepped back, and in a shrill voice the boy shouted, ‘Ten! Nine! Eight!’ At zero, the rocket shot into the sky.

  ‘I don’t remember.’ She sighed. ‘That ox yoke is ridiculous.’

  ‘But you think you got out of his car at some point and went to the school and then went to the gas station and waited there for your dad to pick you up.’

  Something crashed just above their heads, and Ellis threw his hands up. Heather screamed.

  ‘The rocket,’ Ellis said.

  ‘I think my heart really stopped.’

  The boy and father came running, and the father took the rocket off the roof of the car, grinning and mouthing, ‘Sorry.’

  ‘But why would you go back to the school?’

  ‘I had friends in choir. Maybe I met one of them. I don’t know.’ The father and son crouched to prepare a second launch. They stepped back and counted down, but this time the rocket only lifted a foot or so before it flopped over, geysering.