Stephen Dixon - Fall and Rise

“For the last time — step back?” a policeman says. The three of us step back. “All the way to the sidewalk again?” Sidewalk. Phone on the corner rings. He’s standing beside the booth and answers it. “Wohlen…Hey, hi, how’s it going, last person I expected was…Sure, what?…Ha, no, I…I gave the number for here…Now that’s a good question. After talking to you for ten seconds when it seems like ten years since we — okay, okay. Let’s see. You could hear it’s a street, but exactly where? Fourteenth and Sixth, northwest corner, last — now this is going to be harder. Minus thirty-four from one — six, twenty — we’ll forget the seconds. Seven times sixty plus that twenty-six. Three hundred — No. The last almost seven and a half hours of my midnight to eight shift. That’s putting it exactly enough. My two-way’s not operating, which I’m now glad of because you called…How? Tell me.”

I move up to the car. Two men I stepped back with before, one who’s very tall with a gray ponytail, moved up before me, so if the policeman says anything again it’ll be directed to us all. But stop. Really, what are you looking for? Just like that, why else? Not your everyday happening — not enough? Got this curiosity for the morbid, and not sudden but always. I’m a born snoop and repressed meddler, that’s all. Fires, brawls, car crashes, nonstop sirens and alarms, I usually stop or go out to look, even put on my shoes and turn off what’s cooking if I have to, but rarely this close. Want to see what might’ve happened to the passengers, but why? Blood, flesh, hair, torn cloth. For a moment I want to see what it’s like inside one of these so soon after the crash and before it’s towed off. So this is how it is, in other words. Shit? If so, then even that. I don’t know and maybe I’ve gone overboard. Urine, shit, vomit, guts, I want one to all of those? If that’s what’s there, and it’s not what I want per se, then I suppose so. To show I’m not too squeamish to look right at it for once and take a whiff, which maybe will change me somehow. The attitude: what’s to be afraid if it’s life. So that, I suppose — no, horsecrap. Know my own mind? — you bet. Oh, I don’t know if it’s all horsecrap, but I am curious to see what happened here and I might find. For instance didn’t I one night — when my dad was very sick — incontinent too — could hold in his urine but not his shit — and I was taking care of him with my mom — stick my finger in what I just wiped from him and put it to my nose and take that whiff— there , that wasn’t so bad, maybe it’ll make it easier cleaning him the next times, and it did. “Quite the crackup,” ponytailed man says, three of us inches away from the car and looking inside.

“Sure is,” I say.

“If the driver and his front-seat companion, if there was one, got out alive, I’d be surprised.”

“Maybe. Because I’ve witnessed something like this and the driver, though very banged up at the time, survived and probably at the most ended up with a scar or limp, but not bad.”

“Of course anything can happen to man, anything,” shorter man says. “You can get hit with a feather and die. Or else, as in the last war — number Two — a bullet shot into my helmet and all around the back inside and came out the hole it entered but without leaving anything but a ringing sound.”

“To you?” ponytailed man says.

“Pardon. Did I say to me? To one of my buddies. After the war — in factual accounts — I read of just as strange things that happened: bullets in your canteens or boots but all around and out. Bullets stopped by your dogtag and dropping down your shirt and burning off your chest hairs. Bullets up your gun barrel where nobody got hurt, but also where plenty got hurt with bullets up the barrel and lost a hand or eye or died. I didn’t mean me before with that helmet. Just that as an outfit like ours was you think it’s you because you’re so much one knit bunch. I remember the soldier’s name, even. Politskiun — Don. Every five years on the dot I get a chain letter from him saying break it and not only won’t I win fifty-thousand dollars this Monday but I’ll probably die.”

“Please, fellas,” the policeman says from the booth. “Hold it, hon. Please, fellas. The sergeant’s car comes along, I’m in big trouble. So now I’m telling — okay?”

“Sure,” “Yes,” “Fine,” we say.

“You want to see, do it from the sidewalk.” We step back to it. “On it this time.” On it. “Good.” On the phone: “So as I said…Accident, cat with a bus. No one killed but two nearly. And from the accordion of a car now when it’s making no more music, they were very lucky. One infant not as bad — her mouth…I do not…That’s not true…I said — now hold it a second…I’m sure to the hospital, but that was before my shift.”

Car door’s off so even from the sidewalk we can see inside. Steering wheel jammed into the dash. Underneath it an oil and gas spill. Just what he said: accordion. Its sound run out after the last squeeze. Concertina or accordion, hanging half-opened on the wall in the shape of a U. If I have a wedding — at my wedding I’ll say — I want an accordion or concertina, maybe a balalaika too. How do you spell balalaika, and with two l’s or three? Playing together — Russian or Polish music — and where I, champagne-sated, champagne Churchill preferred, if I can afford it and depending on how many guests, but question of affording it won’t enter it and no more than twenty to thirty guests, happiest I’ll ever be in my life, or close to it, which will be in the delivery room moments after my wife gives birth to our first child, would dance crazily with my bride, whirling to no special steps, instruments un-amplified electrically and players not in native dress. But “Never invite strangers to your wedding,” Hasenai says in “My One and Only Nuptial Song,” “especially musicians and actors. They’ll drink all your sake, eat all your sushi, try to make love to your bride at the party, maybe beat up the groom (substitute appropriate food and wine for your own country and scotch for mine, unless you’re a stranger whose wedding takes place in Japan).”

“Longer I look at this,” I say, “more I find it incredible how anyone got out alive.”

“Maybe they didn’t,” ponytailed man says.

“But according to—”

“What does he know? He’s only interested in making hay on the phone, can’t you hear? ‘Oh love, mushy, pussy, beat my meat, heartpiss.’ A faker.”

“That’s it precisely,” shorter man says, “only we need them.”

“We’ll be fortunate — I’ve seen it happen so I back up with experience what I say — if she doesn’t shoot down here and they don’t do it on the floor of this car, rubble and all.”

“Like I stated,” shorter man says, “everything happens to man — the works. In our platoon an officer stepped on a land mine — this, minutes after he lectured us on how to recognize them — went thirty feet into the air, was unconscious all the while he was up there, came down on his feet without knowing it and which now had no boots on and were scorched, and suddenly was awake and walked straight into a puddle to take away the heat from the burns. Later maybe because burns get infected so easily, they got infected. And because our medic was dead and we were way off no place smoking-out Italians — people tend to forget they were also our enemies then — he almost lost both legs. Lieutenant Malcolm G. Gabert his name was. I don’t hear from him ever. And I certainly, I want you to know, by my aside before, have nothing against Italians.”

“Excuse me, but that lieutenant incident sounds impossible.”

“I knew he’d say that,” ponytailed man says.