Karl Wagner - Why Not You and I?

“OK! Hold it!” someone yelled.

The maroon sedan halted, drowned and streaming, on the brush-covered shore. Workers grouped around it. Two attendants unlimbered a stretcher from the ambulance. Russ wanted to vomit.

“Not inside!” a patrolman called up to them.

The diver pushed back his facemask. “Didn’t see him in there before we started hauling either.”

“Take another look around where he went in,” Saunders advised. “Someone call in and have the Rescue Squad ready to start dragging at daylight.”

“He never would wear his seatbelt,” Russ muttered.

Saunders’ beefy frame shrugged heavily “Don’t guess it would have helped this time. Lake’s deep here along the bluff. May have to wait till the body floats up somewhere.” He set his jaw so tight his teeth grated. “Goddamn it to hell.”

“We don’t know he’s dead for sure.” Russ’s voice held faint hope.

Sloshing and clanking, the Buick floundered up the lakeshore and onto the narrow blacktop. The door was sprung open, evidently by the impact. The front end was badly mauled— grill smashed and hood buckled — from collision with the guard rail and underbrush. Several branches were jammed into the mangled wreckage. A spiderweb spread in ominous pattern across the windshield on the driver’s side.

Russ glowered at the sodden wreck, silently damning it for murdering its driver. Curtiss had always sworn by Buicks — had driven them all his life. Trusted the car. And the wallowing juggernaut had plunged into Fort Loundon Lake like a chrome-trimmed coffin.

Saunders tried the door on the driver’s side. It was jammed. Deep gouges scored the sheet metal on that side.

“What’s the white paint?” Mandarin pointed to the crumpled side panels.

“From the guard rail. He glanced along that post there as he tore through. Goddamn it! Why can’t they put up modern guard rails along these back roads! This didn’t have to happen!”

Death is like that, Russ thought. It never had to happen the way it did. You could always go back over the chain of circumstances leading up to an accident, find so many places where things could have turned out OK. Seemed like the odds were tremendous against everything falling in place for the worst.

“Maybe he got out,” he whispered.

Saunders started to reply, looked at his face, kept silent.

It missed the morning papers, but the afternoon News-Sentinel carried Stryker’s book-jacket portrait and a few paragraphs on page one, a photograph of the wreck and a short continuation of the story on the back page of the first section. And there was a long notice on the obituary page.

Russ grinned crookedly and swallowed the rest of his drink. Mechanically he groped for the Jack Daniel’s bottle and poured another over the remains of his ice cubes. God. Half a dozen errors in the obituary. A man gives his whole life to writing, and the day of his death they can’t even get their information straight on his major books.

The phone was ringing again. Expressionlessly Mandarin caught up the receiver. The first score or so times he’d still hoped he’d hear Curtiss’s voice — probably growling something like: “The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” Eventually he’d quit hoping.

“Yes. Dr Mandarin speaking.”

(Curtiss had always ribbed him. “Hell, don’t tell them who you are until they tell you who’s calling.”)

“No. They haven’t found him yet.”

(“Hot as it is, he’ll bob up before long,” one of the workers had commented. Saunders had had to keep Russ off the bastard.)

“Yeah. It’s a damn dirty shame. I know how you feel, Mrs Hollister.”

(You always called him a hack behind his back, you bloated bitch.)

“No I can’t say what funeral arrangements will be made.”

(Got to have a body for a funeral, you stupid bitch.)

“I’m sure someone will decide something.”

(Don’t want to be left out of the social event of the season, do you?)

“Well, we all have to bear up somehow, I’m sure.”

(Try cutting your wrists.)

“Uh-huh. Goodbye, Mrs Hollister.”

Jesus! Mandarin pushed the phone aside and downed his drink with a shudder. No more of this!

He groped his way out of his office. That morning he’d cancelled all his appointments; his section of the makeshift clinic was deserted. Faces from the downstairs rooms glanced at him uneasily as he swept down the stairs. Yes, he must look pretty bad.

Summer twilight was cooling the grey pavement furnace of the University section. Russ tugged off his wrinkled necktie, stuffed it into his hip pocket. With the determined stride of someone in a hurry to get someplace, he plodded down the cracked sidewalk. Sweat quickly sheened his blue-black stubbled jaw, beaded his forehead and eyebrows. Damp hair clung to his neck and ears. Dimly he regretted that the crewcut of his college days was no longer fashionable.

Despite his unswerving stride, he had no destination in mind. The ramshackle front of the Yardarm suddenly loomed before him, made him aware of his surroundings. Mandarin paused a moment by the doorway. Subconsciously he’d been thinking how good a cold beer would taste, and his feet had carried him over the familiar route. With a grimace, he turned away. Too many memories haunted the Yardarm.

He walked on. He was on the strip now. Student bars, bookshops, drugstores, clothing shops and other student-oriented businesses. Garish head shops and boutiques poured out echoes of incense and rock music. Gayle Corrington owned a boutique along here, he recalled — he dully wondered which one.

Summer students and others of the University crowd passed along the sidewalks, lounged in doorways. Occasionally someone recognized him and called a greeting. Russ returned a dumb nod, not wavering in his mechanical stride. He didn’t see their faces.

Then someone had hold of his arm.

“Russ! Russ, for God’s sake! Hold up!”

Scowling, he spun around. The smooth-skinned hand anchored to his elbow belonged to Royce Blaine. Mandarin made his face polite as he recognized him. Dr Blaine had been on the medicine house staff during Mandarin’s psychiatric residency Their acquaintance had not died out completely since those days.

“Hello, Royce.”

The internist’s solemn eyes searched his face. “Sorry to bother you at a time like now, Russ,” he apologized. “Just wanted to tell you we were sad to hear about your friend Stryker, Know how good a friend of yours he was.”

Mandarin mumbled something appropriate.

“Funeral arrangements made yet, or are they still looking?”

“Haven’t found him yet.”

His face must have slipped its polite mask. Blame winced. “Yeah? Well, just wanted to let you know we were all sorry. He was working on a new one, wasn’t he?”

“Right. Another book on the occult.”

“Always thought it was tragic when an author left his last book unfinished. Was it as good as his others?”

“I hadn’t seen any of it. I believe all he had were notes and a few chapter roughs.”

“Really a damn shame. Say, Russ — Tina says for me to ask you how about dropping out our way for dinner some night. We don’t see much of you these days — not since you and Alicia used to come out for fish fries.”

“I’ll take you up on that some night,” Russ temporized.

“This week maybe?” Blaine persisted. “How about Friday?”

“Sure. That’d be fine.”

“Friday, then. 6:30, say. Time for a happy hour.”

Mandarin nodded and smiled thinly. Blaine squeezed his shoulder, gave him a sympathetic face, and scurried off down the sidewalk. Mandarin resumed his walk.

The hot afternoon sun was in decline, throwing long shadows past the mismatched storefronts and deteriorating houses. Russ was dimly aware that his feet were carrying him along the familiar path to Stryker’s office. Did he want to walk past there? Probably not — but he felt too apathetic to redirect his course.