uninhabited house and garage exhibiting such atypical life, doors open and lamps beaming into the night, lottery balls coming up all the right numbers. There was dew on the grass. It might have been any other night. I entered the bright coffin of the garage. On the empty side (it had been designed for a two-car family) sat the usual detritus: a file cabinet; a charcoal grill; a hand-push Honda mower; a floor lamp that had short-circuited months ago; a ten-year-old set of golf clubs; wax-encrusted, rock-scarred skis; a makeshift worktable (a plank on two sawhorses) with vise and lamp, tools spread on and beneath it; snow tires; a deflated football; two Louisville Sluggers, one big and one small, and three grass-stained baseballs; my old outfielder’s glove from law school, and a newer, stiffer, smaller glove for Sam.
I didn’t look at the headlight, the fragment of cloth. I didn’t have to. I got in the car, behind the wheel. It smelled different, hard to describe, some scent sharp and metallic, ozone after lightning. I started up the engine. The sound filled that boxy, nearly enclosed space with its reverberations, product of the five-year-old Ford exhaust system, the eighteen-month-old Midas muffler. Time to change? Trade in? Too late. Live with it. The half-drunk beer was still in my hand. I’d brought it, so I drained it. Thinking, for the first time, about my case. I was a lawyer, after all. There was the illegal broken headlight, and my failure to stop at the scene. There was my record and my life. There was the dead boy on the side of the road. In the eyes of the law, there was no such thing as an accident.
The engine was running. If I pushed the white button clipped to the visor above my head, the garage door would slide down. The opener was also a closer. All that CO would enter me like a long, last dream at night and send me to permanent sleep. So I wouldn’t have to see anything more, how it would all play out. The dumb pain of living. It could end like that, if I willed it to.
There are so many kinds of failure in a man’s life; an Olympiad of humiliation. Maybe this was just another variation: I put the car in reverse and backed out of the garage. I turned it around and switched the engine off and got out. I left my car sitting in the driveway, its busted nose pointing at the road, bright as a neon sign, saying Punish Me.
Ethan
I was driven home by Sergeant Burke and his partner, whose name was Tomlinson. It must have been around eleven o’clock. The roads were empty and quiet. I sat in the back of the police car, listening to the intermittent silence and crackle of the CB radio; for twenty minutes no actual human being spoke a word. It was dark in the backseat, not even the glow from the dashboard. I sat with my knees aligned, my hands tightly clasped—as if, with this hand and that hand, I might somehow hold myself together. I heard Tomlinson, behind the wheel, sniff the air twice—there was dried vomit still on my shirt, and its stink had infected the car. He rolled down his window. Burke glanced over at him, murmured something that I didn’t catch, and then Tomlinson rolled up his window a couple of inches and left it like that.
We turned onto Pine Creek Road. In a little while lights appeared up ahead, on the left, a yellowish wash like a faint stain reaching out through several windows of a handsome old Colonial house, white with painted shutters, onto a broad rectangle of yard, a split-rail fence: the house I lived in. As we pulled to a stop by the mailbox, the precise delineation of the fenestrated light came clear: the upstairs landing illumined; the kitchen downstairs; and from Grace’s studio, at the lower back corner of the house, there emerged just the faintest suggestion of a glow, like a candle flame in a church. From here the house appeared empty, a nest of vacancies.
And to this quiet, anesthetized scene add now the headlights and brakelights of one police cruiser, and the
I didn’t look at the headlight, the fragment of cloth. I didn’t have to. I got in the car, behind the wheel. It smelled different, hard to describe, some scent sharp and metallic, ozone after lightning. I started up the engine. The sound filled that boxy, nearly enclosed space with its reverberations, product of the five-year-old Ford exhaust system, the eighteen-month-old Midas muffler. Time to change? Trade in? Too late. Live with it. The half-drunk beer was still in my hand. I’d brought it, so I drained it. Thinking, for the first time, about my case. I was a lawyer, after all. There was the illegal broken headlight, and my failure to stop at the scene. There was my record and my life. There was the dead boy on the side of the road. In the eyes of the law, there was no such thing as an accident.
The engine was running. If I pushed the white button clipped to the visor above my head, the garage door would slide down. The opener was also a closer. All that CO would enter me like a long, last dream at night and send me to permanent sleep. So I wouldn’t have to see anything more, how it would all play out. The dumb pain of living. It could end like that, if I willed it to.
There are so many kinds of failure in a man’s life; an Olympiad of humiliation. Maybe this was just another variation: I put the car in reverse and backed out of the garage. I turned it around and switched the engine off and got out. I left my car sitting in the driveway, its busted nose pointing at the road, bright as a neon sign, saying Punish Me.
Ethan
I was driven home by Sergeant Burke and his partner, whose name was Tomlinson. It must have been around eleven o’clock. The roads were empty and quiet. I sat in the back of the police car, listening to the intermittent silence and crackle of the CB radio; for twenty minutes no actual human being spoke a word. It was dark in the backseat, not even the glow from the dashboard. I sat with my knees aligned, my hands tightly clasped—as if, with this hand and that hand, I might somehow hold myself together. I heard Tomlinson, behind the wheel, sniff the air twice—there was dried vomit still on my shirt, and its stink had infected the car. He rolled down his window. Burke glanced over at him, murmured something that I didn’t catch, and then Tomlinson rolled up his window a couple of inches and left it like that.
We turned onto Pine Creek Road. In a little while lights appeared up ahead, on the left, a yellowish wash like a faint stain reaching out through several windows of a handsome old Colonial house, white with painted shutters, onto a broad rectangle of yard, a split-rail fence: the house I lived in. As we pulled to a stop by the mailbox, the precise delineation of the fenestrated light came clear: the upstairs landing illumined; the kitchen downstairs; and from Grace’s studio, at the lower back corner of the house, there emerged just the faintest suggestion of a glow, like a candle flame in a church. From here the house appeared empty, a nest of vacancies.
And to this quiet, anesthetized scene add now the headlights and brakelights of one police cruiser, and the
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