Ed Gorman: Blindside

The traffic was dense here, too. Two signs indicated that the interstate could be picked up just one block from here. It wasn’t quite nine o’clock yet. The cars drove fast as if they wanted badly to be out of this neighborhood.

By the time I managed to reach the other side of the street he’d been inside ‘Pizza’ for three or four minutes. If he was still inside.

The smell of pizza was the only appealing thing about the long, narrow, and swollen-walled place. Tiny tables with red-and-white-checkered tablecloths made not of cloth but oilcloth lined both walls. The pizza ovens were in back, fronted by a counter where two men in white T-shirts stood talking in an agitated way next to the cash register. When they saw me their eyes narrowed with suspicion. He must have warned them I’d be coming.

None of the customers showed more than momentary interest in me as I hurried to the counter. Even before I quite reached it the bald one said, ‘We don’t have anything to do with it. You want him — he went out the back door.’

‘You’re not a cop, are you?’ the other one said.

I didn’t answer. I was too busy rushing to the Exit sign. Outside again. A long alley. And there, in the distance, he ran. As I started after him I wondered how long we could keep going. We were obviously both in decent shape but we weren’t exactly athletes. Was one of us just going to flame out, fall face first on to whatever texture of ground we were running on, and lie unmoving until the cold night air began to plug our sinuses and rasp our throats?

He turned left at the head of the alley. I was grinding through space, blind animal pursuing blind animal. In my imagination at least he had begun to slow some. Or I was finding a remarkable second wind?

This time he resorted to what he must have thought was a very tricky trick. As I reached the street he went left again. He had assumed I wouldn’t get to the street in time to see where he was going. He had also assumed that I would assume he’d turned right into a street filled with condemned houses ripe with winos, rats, and hiding places.

What he’d done was lead us right back to the dreary street of the taverns and ‘Pizza.’ Except this time he was running in the opposite direction. When I hit the street I saw that I hadn’t imagined his lagging strength. He was no more than half a block away. If this had been even ten minutes ago he would have been at least a block or more from me. He had one advantage, though. He knew where he was going.

And soon enough I knew where he was going, too: the interstate. When he reached the end of the street he took a sharp right and started climbing a small hill that led to the entrance. As he scrambled up toward the green-and-white sign he glanced back at me. He seemed to give a small jerk as he realized how close I was. Then he was up and over and I couldn’t see him for the moment.

The hill was more imposing than it appeared. Twice I had to dig my fingers into the dirt to keep my footing. And once I stumbled and gashed my knee on an unseen rock. Or maybe it was a piece of glass.

The interstate. Rush and roar. Music flung from cars. Tiny cars living at the mercy of the behemoth eighteen-wheelers. Video games with American and Japanese and Korean vehicles. Gleaming colors against the rolling Midwestern darkness.

I got to the top in time to see it. His idea was to find an opening in the rush of traffic and make his way across the two lanes here, stop and wait for a break in the lanes on the other side and then leave my sorry ass far, far behind.

He came breathtakingly close to losing his life trying to cross the southbound lanes. He miscalculated the speed of two oncoming cars. One of them had to swerve to avoid him. If car horns could curse, that horn spat out every dirty word ever concocted.

The choice was to let him go or try my own suicide run. Vehicles blasted past me fast enough to make me lean away from their force. Several good citizens, seeing me standing on the edge of the concrete lanes, flipped me off. One teenager was creative enough to flip me off with both middle fingers. A Rhodes scholar in the making. I of course had never done anything that asinine in my own perfect teen years.

The dumb bastard was going to try it. Nolan teetered on the edge of the grass between south and north lanes ready to jump as soon as he saw what he took to be a reasonable chance of making it.

I’d come too far to let him disappear again. Now I started looking for my own reasonable chance. If I got very lucky I could catch him on the grass before he had the opportunity to race across the lanes closest to the woods on the other side.

I had two false starts, both attributable to this vision I had of becoming instant roadkill. When I finally got to it I put my head down and plunged on to the huge roadway. Horns were already blasting me when I was only halfway across.

Because I had my head down and was concentrating exclusively on surviving, I didn’t see the accident. More horns, these from the far lanes. And a scream that must have made the stars tremble. And then a sound of collision. Car and body.

By the time I stood where Nolan had just been I saw the nearest of the two lanes clogged with stopped cars. A man was running from his car, his arms flailing in the air. I could see what he was about to find. Later the driver told the press that Nolan had been knocked maybe seven or eight feet in the air before smashing to the roadway. Right now the man knelt over the bloody rags that had been Nolan’s clothes and shouted at him as if trying to resurrect the dead.

I walked over to him, joining a dozen or so other drivers and passengers who’d come to see what had happened. Through his torn trousers a white bone poked; his right ear had been half ripped away. His chest heaved and blood bubbled in the corners of his mouth. I thought he was trying to say something.

I didn’t bother to introduce myself; I just knelt down next to him, dislodging the man who’d struck him.

‘Nolan.’

The eyelids fluttered but never lifted.

‘Nolan.’

‘You know him?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Did you see it, the accident, I mean?’

‘Yeah. You couldn’t help it. I’ll testify to that.’ Well, I didn’t actually see it but I still knew this man wasn’t at fault.

‘My wife’s already called 911.’

‘Good. Now leave me alone here, will you?’

‘Sure.’

He got up, middle-aged knees cracking, and was immediately surrounded by the others.

‘Nolan.’

Again the eyelids fluttered; again they refused to open.

Before he left he spoke only one word I could understand: ‘Ward.’

I saw a woman on TV once who claimed that she could see the souls of the newly dead leaving their bodies and seeking the light only they could see. She said she saw this most often when she visited hospitals, something she didn’t do unless a loved one was sick, because watching the souls flee the dead frightened her. This came to mind as I stepped off the elevator on the third floor of St Francis Hospital, where surgery was being performed on David Nolan.

Mrs Nolan was in the waiting room. She glared at me as I started to enter. I did us both a favor and joined Kathy and Lucy in a small grotto-like cove down the hall. This was an older section of the hospital. I wondered how many hundreds of people had waited here for the appearance of a doctor to bring them his or her verdict. I could almost tap into all the relieved smiles as well as the shock and disbelief and horror of those who wouldn’t be smiling for a long time.

There is no silence like hospital silence. It is easy to imagine the classic Grim Reaper in his hooded attire slipping into rooms at random and smiting sleeping patients with his scythe and dispatching their souls to the next realm. The three of us sat on a small tufted gray couch between framed paintings of a maternal Virgin and a weary Jesus. I sat between the women. Kathy touched my hand and said, ‘It should have been Jeff, not David.’