Stephen Hunter: Night of Thunder

Bob had received the doctor’s verdict. They were in the wait-and-see stage. All the monitoring systems recorded strong life signs. She was badly bruised and lacerated, but there were no broken bones. Brain activity seemed unaltered; EKG strong, signifying no permanent damage. But she was totally unconscious and had been so now for over twenty-four hours.

“There’s no telling in these cases,” said the young resident. “She took a bad knock on the head and the whiplash was vicious in the few seconds the car bounced. She was rattled around pretty hard. We just don’t know how long she’ll be out. Classically a coma of this nature lasts a few weeks.”

“Or months or years? Or forever?”

“That’s an outside possibility. Yes sir, Mr. Swagger. But it’s rare. Usually a few weeks and they recover, their memory is foggy but in time it returns. The brain has had a shock. It realizes how close it came to death. It wants to rest and relax for a while. It’ll be back when it feels safe. She’s a strong young woman. Anyhow, Dr. Crane can tell you more tomorrow.”

“What do the police say, Mr. Gustofson?” Bob asked.

“I’ve got a copy of the report for you. But Johnson County Sheriff’s Department says their assessment is that she was driving home down the road, and some teenager, possibly high on the very thing she was investigating, methamphetamine, decided to show off. You know these rural kids get NASCAR fever with the big race less than a week away.”

“I noticed the traffic and all the activity driving in,” Bob said.

“Yes sir. Well, one of the things we’ve noted is that traffic aggression goes way up this time of year. So the cops believe some punk kid was trying to be Dale Senior to the decidedly un-hip Volvo, just for the thrill of it, the kick of it, and he got carried away, misjudged his speed and instead of scaring the bejesus out of her and getting a laugh out of his buddies, he smacked her off the road, and down the incline she went. She was lucky in one way.”

“How is that, sir.”

“They say he first hit her about three miles back, much higher up the mountain. If she’d have gone over there, the incline was several hundred feet. Rolling the whole way, then smashing into trees, she’d have been dead for sure. As it was, where she finally went off, the distance was only 150 feet or so, and she didn’t hit any of the trees head-on but rather glanced off them. The big thing is, she didn’t roll. The roll is the killer. Somehow, she outdrove him for three miles, and when he finally hit her solid, she kept the car in traction and out of the air. I’d say she saved her own life.”

Bob saw his daughter in the car, in the dark, some big punk fool in a pickup with a brainful of crystal meth and a gutful of Budweiser slamming her, laughing hard, deciding it was fun, and slamming her again and again. He’d like to have a conversation with the young fellow. He’d leave him a check for the facial reconstruction bill but not a penny for the wheelchair he’d need forever.

“Do they have any leads?”

“They have a detective on the case. I spoke to her. She’s very good, she’s broken some big cases. Thelma Fielding. She’d be the one to see.”

Bob looked at his watch. He’d taken a 1 P.M. from Boise to Knoxville via St. Louis, rented a car, and roared the whole way up I-81 to get here this fast. Now it was nearly ten.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Swagger. She’s an outstanding young woman. We all hope for the best for her. Do you have a place to stay? The town is filling up with racing fans, it might be hard to find a room. We have a spare bedroom. The paper has rallied also and there’s lots of folks willing to accommodate you if need be, no matter how long you stay.”

“I’ll go to her apartment and stay there. The nurse gave me her effects when I checked in and I saw the key. I hope you have the address and can give me some directions. Then tomorrow after I see her and talk to the doctors on the day shift, I’ll want to go out and talk to that detective.”

“Just to warn you, this big race screws everything up. It brings in millions and millions of bucks. You could say the whole region lives off this month the year long. But the downside of course is that everybody’s all involved in it, and the cops especially. It’s a royal pain moving around town or trying to get anything normal done.”

“I’m used to waiting,” said Bob. “You might say, I was once a professional waiter. I can wait a long, long time without moving a twitch, you just watch.”

You always fear entering your own child’s private life. What if you make discoveries, learn things you weren’t meant to know, find out intimacies, privacies, discretion that a child always hides from her parents, just to save them worry or knowledge. You can learn too much.

But that didn’t happen. If she had a private life, or any secrets, it hadn’t gotten interesting yet. Nothing indicated a boyfriend, a scandal, a secret. She was dead set on doing well in this job, moving on to another job on a bigger paper and who knows what. Maybe some fancy rag like the Times or the Post, maybe running a smaller, more focused thing. Copies of those papers lay everywhere, as did magazines like The New Yorker and Time and so forth. Her books were all by journalists and novelists. That was her talent. Bob knew: You had to let them be what they could be, just as in his way, although dying young for it, Bob’s own father Earl had let his son be what he wanted, and had encouraged his talents and not held his flaws against him.

After several misturns and dead ends and an involuntary tour of Bristol, even the line in the city where Tennessee magically turns into Virginia and vice versa depending on the direction, Bob had at last found the side road that ran just next to and so close to a Wal-Mart that you’d have thought it was the parking lot, followed it behind the giant store, down a hill, into a little glade of houses, along a creek, and then up into an apartment complex. Hers was on the third floor. He saw a sheeted Kawasaki 350 in the parking lot and knew it was Nikki’s, and that she loved that bike. He wished she’d taken it to Mountain City, because on the bike no redneck high on shit and beer would have outperformed her. He’d seen her ride the damned thing. She could stay with anyone, she could stay with him-he was good-and she’d have left that cracker crashed and burning in the gully, gone home, taken a shower, had a beer and a good laugh, and then a good night’s sleep. She had Swagger blood, after all.

But the squat, boxy Volvo had saved her life, he bet. It wouldn’t surrender to the forces of gravity or physics as it roared down the incline in a cloud of dust, shedding itself of speed. It was designed to keep people alive by Swedish geniuses, and God bless Lars or Ingmar or whoever, because he’d done his job that day. It never broke, it never collapsed, and though fenders and engine and trunk had cammed inward, the integrity of the passenger box stayed intact. His daughter lived on the slenderest of threads: that she’d been able to forestall her stalker for three miles downhill, that she’d stayed out of the roll, that she’d gone over where the incline was much slighter, that the car held together, that it didn’t hit the trees head-on but rather glancingly, and that she’d been conscious enough to call it in.

Outside, trees whistled in the southern night. Was this Tennessee or Virginia? He couldn’t be sure. You had to live here for years to know automatically. Whatever, it was the South, with its dark history of violence, its strange streaks of courage, its stubbornness, its pride, its love of hunting, fishing, twangy music, and fast cars. He himself had sprung from such a place, a state with a long history of clan feuds and grudges, violence on the street, youth swollen hard on aggression and let to bloom until someone was dead. It sent men in the hundreds up the Pea Ridges of the War of the Rebellion, and most went willingly and died-nobly? Bob had seen enough gut-shot men to know there was no nobility to it. But he also knew the strange pride that compelled the young men of the South onward into the grape and musket, up that bleak Pea Ridge swept by leaden blizzards, the majority to die slowly of massive intestinal wounds, screaming in the night six days after the battle was lost or won. That was something.