Nocturne by Saul Tanpepper Page B

His fingers fumbled. Ah, there! Finally his hand found it, slipped in and there was the familiar hard rectangle of the phone. He pulled it out, flipped it open, held the screen before him. The sun behind him was too bright; the screen was washed out, unreadable. He lowered the phone to finish punching in the numbers.
    It was only a fraction of a second, maybe two, that his eyes were off the road, but it was just long enough and just at the wrong moment that he missed seeing the red pickup cut in front of him and slam on its brakes. A fraction of a second. A premonitory image passed through his mind, and he rammed his foot on his own brake, but even without seeing he knew he was too late. The gray Nissan slammed into the back of the truck, the front end diving underneath, the back end lifting up. The car catapulted through the air, up and over the pickup, shearing the truck’s cab off as it went.
    This is what the man saw and thought and felt, almost as if he was watching from somewhere outside of himself:
    The car twisted. It began to flip, rolling side to side: passenger, roof, driver, wheels, over and over again. And finally the car came to a rest on four flat tires, the hood popped open and steam gushing from a ruptured hose. The smell of gasoline filled the air. He could see himself, his face bloody, his glasses lost in the wreckage. Other than a bunch of cuts and bruises, he seemed to be all right. He somehow managed to release the seatbelt, kicked open the door—thank God for manual locks—and stumbled out into the flow of traffic.
    He tried to yell at himself, to tell him to get back in the car. Traffic sped past him, blurs of color, horns blaring and tires screeching. He wanted to tell the man that was himself that it was unsafe to stand on the road like that. And then he was suddenly inside of himself again, realizing the foolishness of his mistake. As he looked up, a semi loaded down with logs barreled toward him.
    They had had a son. He remembered this as the shiny silver grill of the truck grew large in his vision, blinding him in a white flash. They had had a son.
    He began to weep.
    “Honey?”
    The sound of his wife’s voice in his ear startled him from the images passing through his mind. He blinked, saw that he was still on the highway. His exit was approaching. He was almost at work.
    “Honey, is something wrong?”
    He cleared his throat. “No…dear.” He decided that there wasn’t a holiday after all. “I just wanted to… I wanted to say I’ll see you tonight.”
    He could almost see the look on her face, the confusion. He never called while on the road.
    The line was silent for a moment, then: “Pick up a steak, would you, on your way home? I’ll barbecue it for dinner.”
    The cancer warning on the side of the bottle of lighter fluid flashed through his mind. “’Kay, hon,” he said.
    They had had a son and had given him a good, strong name.
    He lifted his hand to wipe his face, but he knew his cheeks would be dry. He signaled for his exit instead, looking for a red pickup in his mirror. There wasn’t one.
    †   †   †
    On a normal day, the Man would process over a hundred claims. But it wasn’t a normal day. He spent the majority of the morning away from his desk, away from his computer. There were meetings of all sorts, tiring, redundant, useless meetings, during which his boss recited figures of little significance to him and which ultimately held no meaning anyway. Why was he here? His mind drifted.
    It took him back to his office, which was on the thirty-fifth floor, just four stories from the top of the building. The window afforded a decent view of the city below, but there was nothing decent to see there. The iron tangle of the train yards far below him, the tracks knotted into an incoherent pattern of ins and outs, comings and goings. The thick muddy ribbon of river. And, in the distance, a wood which seemed to him overly dark and oppressive. The whole town, in fact,