11
HE DROVE with the windows down to revive himself, then pulled over a mile from home to see if he could spot any of the constellations he’d invented at the academy. That’s what he’d liked most about New Mexico, a huge night sky that let him picture the whole universe, which his mother had told him was continually expanding, the stars like dots on an inflating balloon. True or not, it reinforced his growing sensation of standing on a shrinking planet beneath an expanding sky.
But tonight he couldn’t even find Taurus or Cassiopeia. He absently listened to his radio and the dispatcher’s monotone about three youths loitering in Peace Arch, a CI’s report of helicopter smuggling in the Cascades and a blue Cutlass on some drive-thru a Canadian phoned in. He took in the silhouettes of silos and barns and the Abbotsford mansions flickering in the low northeastern sky like candles through beveled glass. The night air burped, whined and rang with frogs, mosquitoes and field crickets before yielding to the rising drone of an approaching vehicle. Brandon smelled manure in the fields, which probably meant someone was spraying excessively at night. Or perhaps it was just the forgotten stench of dairy country in the spring, the one season when realtors didn’t coax out-of-town high rollers into their fields of dreams.
Brandon stepped around his hood into the headlights of a sedan that looked black or possibly midnight blue. The driver seemed to accelerate at the sight of him. Brandon hopped back inside, popped it in gear and leaned on the gas. “Do we have plates on the drive-thru?” he asked slowly after the dispatcher responded.
“Negative. No plates.”
Brandon gave his coordinates and noticed he was drunker than he’d realized as he struggled to focus on the fleeing taillights. “I’m code two,” he said, more eagerly than he’d intended and before he remembered what code two meant.
“Two-zero-five, this is Supervisor Wheeler. What vehicle are you driving?”
“Private.”
After another long pause, Wheeler said, “Ten-three the pursuit, two-zero-five.”
“Too late,” Brandon replied.
Dionne had warned him that Patera didn’t want to catch hell for chasing hooligans through family neighborhoods or scaring tipsy locals off the road. Still, if a blue Cutlass hopped the border and blew past him and Dionne was his trainer …
Brandon eased his truck up to sixty yet fell farther behind. Was it even a Cutlass? He could tell trucks from cars and sedans from compacts, but beyond that he was guessing. What he did know was that the Bender Road straightaway curled into a tight S-turn before crossing Pangborn.
“Two-zero-five,” the supervisor repeated after the longest pause yet. “You have been officially ten-three’d.”
“Copy that,” Brandon said, accelerating to avoid falling farther behind. “But it’s too late.”
The sedan’s smoldering taillights blew past the yellow sign warning drivers to slow down.
As Brandon rounded the first curve he noticed the lack of lights ahead. Then he saw why. The sedan’s left rear wheel hung almost comically above the shoulder, its trunk sprung and gaping at the stars. The rest of it was stabbed diagonally, hood-first into the steaming ditch, as if the driver hadn’t even attempted to turn. When he radioed it in, Brandon abandoned his contained mumble for a near-hysterical and repetitive cry for an ambulance.
He slammed his right knee lunging from the truck, then galloped, vision pulsing, to the back of the sedan, trying to take it all in at once. The depth of the ditch, the height of the water, the pitch of the hissing steam, the diagonal posture of the green car, the manufacturer’s name in raised gold letters below the popped trunk: P-o-n-t-i-a-c S-u-n-b-i-r-d.
It wasn’t even the right car! His mind jammed. No pictures, no words, just that hissing sound, yet his body kept moving and he heard himself shouting into the ditch, though the words didn’t sound like his. He used the cross brace on the telephone pole to help him climb down before slipping the final few feet and falling into freezing water up to his hips along the driver’s side of the bowed and steaming hood. Amazingly there didn’t appear to be water inside the car, but he wasn’t sure that mattered. The driver was lying on the steering wheel, his face cocked awkwardly toward the passenger seat. Brandon couldn’t see much beyond a thickly bearded cheek and dark hair buzzed close to the scalp.
The window was half open and Brandon shouted louder than he intended to that help was coming. He reached for the door handle, then realized he couldn’t open it wide enough to pull the little man out without letting water in. He ransacked his memory for guidance in such situations, groped through the window, fumbled for the man’s pulse and, finding none, slid a panicky hand beneath his armpit to palm his chest. After recoiling from the thumping heart, he unleashed a jumble of apologies and promises. His flashlight darted around the interior of a vehicle that looked as clean and impersonal as a rental car. “Gonna be all right,” he told the man and himself, then straightened up in the ditch, the mud suction starting to control his boots. “Gonna be all right.”
Brandon watched himself from above, climbing in slow motion out into his headlights, unsure about what to do next or how much time had passed, feeling severed from the moment, moving through air, his torso floating above numbed legs. Radioing in again, nauseous now, he pleaded for the ambulance that had already been sent, described the driver’s condition and shared the vehicle’s model and plate.
The supervisor’s tone had changed. He slowly and clearly enunciated every word, as if for a jury. Brandon realized he was over-talking and began offering the minimum, chattering before cutting out and limping hesitantly to the ditch, pants heavy and sagging, body shivering, checking to make sure the water hadn’t climbed any higher on the driver’s side. Wanting to call his mother.
It wasn’t until he shuffled around the back of the sedan again that he heard the reassuring wail of a siren. And it wasn’t until the too-bright, too-loud ambulance stormed down Badger Road and turned up Bender that it occurred to him that he still hadn’t looked inside the yawning trunk.
He didn’t know what to make of most of the mess—mason jars full of dry powder and fluids leaking from tubes in a slotted Styrofoam case. But after helping his father blow up a dozen stumps he knew what blasting caps looked like. He held up his icy hands, as if surrendering, to slow the ambulance. A BP rig sped up behind it, doubling the light show. Three medics unloaded and charged toward his shivering figure and the cockeyed Sunbird, which was also when Brandon saw, behind and above the men, the faint, sprawling, nine-star, barn-shaped constellation he’d invented in New Mexico but never named.