Читать книгу Jeopardy Is My Job - Marlowe Stephen - Страница 7

Sterling Moss would have envied me.

They had installed night-lights at the speedway in Indianapolis, and all the lights had coalesced to look like a big fat full moon, and there I was sitting in the bucket-seat of my Lancia so far ahead of the pack that another car wasn’t even in sight. Not only that, but look ma, no hands.

Maybe I wasn’t driving though. It was a two-man racer, and a big figure sat hunched over the wheel to my left. That put me in what they call in the trade the suicide seat. The wind of our slipstream rushed by. We were really zooming along. Suicide seat? Ha-ha, that was a good one. My partner was hunched over the wheel as if his life depended on it, and his hands were glued at ten and four o’clock. He was a driver who knew his business. He wouldn’t wrap us around a tree.

But he might wrap us around a rambling, spreading, thick- and twisted-limbed cactus as big as a house. Now, who had said the prickly-pear was as big as a house? Didn’t remember, didn’t know what that damn thing was doing here, but: “Swing around it, you sap,” I said, and my voice sounded like a laryngitic cat mewling in an echo chamber. “You’ll pile us up.”

The cactus got bigger, as cacti will if you are approaching them at something like forty miles an hour. I nudged my partner with an elbow. His right hand slid off the steering wheel and hung limply between us.

“Hey!” I said, and leaned over to turn the wheel hard left myself. My driver’s other hand left the wheel and he slipped sideways toward me. We missed the cactus and went bucketing along. My head began to ache suddenly as I came out of my racing-car dream of glory. The driver was leaning against me, a dead weight. I tugged at his hair to get a look at his face. His hair was short-cropped and sticky—sticky with blood. His face was Stu Huntington’s except for a large dent high up on the right side where his temple had been. He looked as if he had been kicked in the head by a horse. Like most people who have been kicked in the head by a horse, he was dead.

Then I snapped out of it. I was sitting in a car, Stu Huntington’s Lancia, with a dead man, Stu Huntington, behind the wheel. We were not supposed to get very far. It was a miracle we had got this far. The road was more than a dirt track, but no superhighway. The grade was steep now, ten degrees going down. No shoulder bordered the left side of the unpaved road. It skirted the edge of a cliff and it was a long way down, almost vertical, to the Torremolinos-Fuengirola highway. Beyond that, the sea. Where, after going off the road and smashing flat on the highway, we were supposed to wind up.

I leaned over the dead man and gripped the wheel. My hands were shaking. His head fell in my lap. His leg was in the way. I couldn’t find the brake pedal.

Our headlights swept the cliff edge. I yanked the wheel hard. We swerved and skidded, tires whining, rocks clattering under the fenders. I tromped my foot in the direction of the brake-pedal. Same no luck: his leg was still in the way. I had no room to maneuver. He held down a bucket-seat and I held down a bucket-seat, we were a big corpse and a big man, and that was that. It wouldn’t help to cut the ignition. Rolling free we’d probably pick up speed even faster than in high gear. If I could reach the brake, or even the clutch-pedal to brake us down through the lower gears. . . .

I couldn’t reach that either. Try getting around a dead man in the front seat of a little sports car some time.

The Lancia had a floor shift. It was low and to the right, in fourth gear. I got a grip on it. Then I had to turn the wheel to avoid the cliff edge again, and the dead man leaned against me harder. I caught a glimpse of the speedometer. It was pushing fifty—far too fast for this road, even with a racing driver behind the wheel. We had no kind of a driver at all. I grabbed the stick again and pushed hard toward the dashboard. The stick vibrated in my hand and there was a whining, grinding, scraping sound. It would be hell on the gear box, but I could worry about that later—if there was a later.

As the lower gear took hold, I felt the Lancia lurch. The speedometer needle jiggled down to forty and hovered there. I worked the gearbox down to second the same way. The Lancia bucked as if it had hit a wall, but that cut our speed to thirty and then to twenty-five. Those four-speed racers are geared to lose speed downhill in second. Maybe we’d make it. Far ahead and below us I thought I could see the white ribbon of the highway bathed in moonlight. The dirt road was fairly straight the rest of the way, though steep, but in second gear on the highway with nobody’s foot on the gas we’d quickly come to a stop.

And then we blew a tire.

It was inevitable, the way the rubber had been punished running over sharp rocks in the beds of dried out freshets on the road. I clung to the wheel. It bucked and squirmed under my hands like a living thing, and I had to contend with Stu Huntington’s dead weight sitting where I should have been sitting. The Lancia fishtailed in a wide slewing loop like a skier executing a Christie stop. Headlights to cliff edge again, not a very high cliff now, but more than high enough for the purpose.

The car tilted. I could see nothing. Dust enveloped us blindingly. For an awful moment I wondered if, after all, Huntington was still alive. Because I knew I had to leave the Lancia in a hurry. But no: he had to be dead. The dent in the side of his head was as big as my fist, and deep.

I fumbled with the door handle on my side and yanked it open. The car began to nose down as its front wheels left the road, it was that close. I leaped as far as I could. I didn’t want to get clipped by the rear fender.

Feet-first I hit the ground, staggered two steps on a wildly bouncing treadmill, lost my balance and went down. Then I was out of the cloud of dust and rolling, and then I heard a crashing, splintering sound, and then I saw the moonlit sky and the earth, the sky again and the earth again, and the earth slammed the breath out of my lungs and the sky wouldn’t give it back to me, and I was pulled and pushed and jumped on and pummeled and my mouth filled with dust, sand and pebbles.

I came to rest against a rock. I sat there, trying very hard to breathe and learning how difficult it can be. After a long time I got up. I was quaking like a leaf in a gale, but my legs held me up. I staggered in a little circle, and then a bigger one, until I found the direction I wanted, which was downhill. I made it to the bottom of the road, where it joined the highway. A short way up the pavement toward Torremolinos, a man straddling a motorbike with his feet on the ground was staring down at something. I went over there, not on the double.

The Lancia had left one fender and one wheel on the highway. What was left of Stu Huntington had been thrown clear, and it was what riveted the man on the motorbike’s attention. The rest of the car had plowed through the flimsy guardrail and over some rocks into the sea.

The man on the motorbike stared and stared. When I reached him I swayed and touched him, and still looking at what lay in the road he said, very softly, “Mother of God,” and was quickly and rackingly sick.