John MacDonald - Slam the Big Door

Hessler was depressed. But he cheered up remarkably when he found that Troy was out, and that things might well improve. They talked a long time. Hessler’s ideas seemed valid to Mike. He knew he would have to check them out with expert, disinterested parties before going ahead.

As they were about to leave, Marvin said, “Say, yesterday that old Purdy Elmarr was here, poking all over the place. He didn’t want any help at all. Said he was just looking. That’s what they all seem to say. But he sure looked a long time.”

“Thanks, Marvin,” Mike said.

After they were in the car, Mary said, “Trouble?”

“I don’t know. Maybe that old man snowed me good. I had the feeling he quit too easy. He’s — hard to figure. He’s playing poker every minute. Now I got the feeling I showed him my hole card and while I was doing it, he was palming an ace.”

“If he’s going to squeeze us, Mike, I won’t let you come in with me. I won’t permit that.”

“He’s got you scared?”

“I’m not scared of Purdy or anybody else and you know it. But trying to buck him would be like — trying to stop a train by falling in front of it.”

“I’ll have to see him again.”

“We’ll have to see him. Both of us. And tell him Troy is out.”

“I’ll bet eleven dollars he knew all about that by noon last Monday.”

Mary fixed dinner for them Wednesday night. They played cribbage after dinner. She was a resolute competitor, with all the proper desire to win.

The phone rang during the middle of the third game. “Don’t stack the cards,” she said as she got up.

“Yes?” he heard her say. “Yes, this is she. What? What is that? Oh! Oh, my God!”

He had gotten up quickly at the sound of her voice. He went to her. Her face was so bloodless her deep tan had turned a dirty yellow. She swayed. He pushed her into a chair. “Debbie Ann?” he asked her.

“No. Troy,” she said.

He picked up the dangling receiver.

The back roads of Florida are narrow, straight and rough. The big produce trucks roar through the night. Back there in the black night are the lonely gas stations, the infrequent shabby motels, the nighttime beer joints with their quorum of dusty local cars and pickups. The rare towns are small islands, darkened houses and a brave spattering of neon. The cross-state traveler makes good time at night on the back roads, but there is a sameness to all of it, like crossing a dark sea. The headlights are hypnotic. A racoon makes a very small thump against a front tire, and an opossum even less. So the cars whine down the roads, falling through the night, the lights picking up the wink of animal eyes and dead beer cans.

And sometimes in the lonely cottages set back in the piney woods, the sleeping people will be awakened by a sound like that of an enormous door being slammed. The first time it is heard it cannot be readily identified. But those who hear it the second time know at once what it means.

This one was only eight miles from the Tamiami Trail, on a big curve on State Road 565 that runs east-west and comes out about four miles below the Ravenna city limits. So there were people to hear it. A few. Not many. Sometimes the sound goes unheard, except by those for whom it is their final sensory experience. This is the up-to-date version of the ancient, illogical wheeze about that tree falling in the middle of the desert.

Anything that kills over thirty thousand people a year, and has killed a million since it first became possible to kill a person in this way unique to our culture, is going to be studied intensively. Of course, on a passenger-mile basis, our highways get safer every year, a fact distasteful to the National Safety Council which sees its function as a continuing effort to keep the daylights scared out of everybody. Give them this. It seems to be working.

At any rate, at such institutions as Cornell University, there are continuing studies of what happens to people who are going from here to there, for no particular reason, too carelessly.

Newton’s laws of motion are eminently applicable. And it is interesting to contemplate the idea that were a modern automobile to be reduced to an overall length of three inches, with all parts in perfect scale, the steel foil of the body would be so delicate that it would be impossible to pick it up between thumb and forefinger without denting the sides in, deeply. And were a baby to hammer one with his fist it would flatten like a cream puff, tail fins and all, except for the stubborn hazelnut of the engine. We go fleetly in frail chariots.

The unimaginable energy of a ton and more of one of the delicately realized myths of Detroit traveling at ninety miles an hour must be dispersed in some fashion. Usually it is accomplished by wind friction, road friction, friction of moving parts, savage pressure on brake drums and a long spoor of black rubber, screamed onto pavement. But should something upset the equilibrium, this momentum can also be dispersed by a long end-over-end and sideways roll through tree trunks, power poles, rock gardens, storefronts, schoolchildren — whatever objects are immediately available. The effect of this on the passengers who happen to remain with the vehicle is somewhat similar to the effects that might be obtained if you popped them, along with two bushels of scrap iron, into a blown-up model of a piece of laundry equipment and set the dial for Spin-Dry.

But by far the quickest, most startling and most efficient way of dispersing all of this energy is through a truly classic head-on. A perfect head-on is a rare thing. The energy of the two vehicles — which is the product of mass and momentum — must be almost identical. And they must meet perfectly centered, both traveling in a reasonably straight line, with no attempt on the part of either driver to diminish speed before the moment of impact. When this feat is accomplished, and in all cases where the combined speed of the two vehicles had been in excess of a hundred miles an hour, no one has ever survived. The momentum of each vehicle is totally dispersed by the act of absorbing the energy of the other vehicle. It has been computed that when each vehicle is traveling at ninety miles an hour the impact is just a little bit less than were a single vehicle, in free fall, to strike an utterly unyielding surface. The state of free fall is achieved when any object has attained its maximum rate of fall. To state it another way, if an automobile were strapped to the belly of a big jet and released at forty thousand feet and fell, nose-first, onto an enormous block of tool steel, the inhabitants of that vehicle would provide the medical people with much the same set of interesting distortions and jellied phenomena as can be observed after a classic head-on at a combined speed of one-eighty plus.

At twelve minutes after eight on that Wednesday evening in spring, a five-year-old Mercury and a nine-year-old DeSoto slammed that enormous door on a long and very mild curve on State Road 565 about twelve miles southeast by east of the city of Ravenna, Florida.

And in that instant of finality, in the construction of that sound audible in the still night over two miles away, seven brains, hearts, livers, spleens, burst like rotten fruit which had clung too long to the branch of a high tree.

The experts of the State Highway Patrol did their best to reconstruct it. There were no skid marks to measure, so speed could be but roughly estimated. The green Mercury had been heading west at an estimated ninety plus. For the driver, the long curve was to his right, so he should have remained in the lane on the inside of the curve. But the high speed even on such a gentle curve had induced a factor of centrifugal force which had carried him out so that he was straddling the double yellow line at the point of impact. On the other hand the DeSoto had probably been traveling at such a high rate of speed that the driver could not keep it in the lane on the outside of the curve without losing control. So he had drifted in, cutting the curve, and had been straddling the centerline at the point of impact.