Lovedeath Read online

  Clem used a double half-hitch to lash the rope to the rear bumper of their 1975 GM pickup parked between the rear porch and the chicken coop. Then Clem went back to his chores.

  Mrs. McDonald emerged approximately nineteen minutes later, got in the truck, and proceeded to drive to town to get groceries.

  She didn’t get all the way to town. According to the local sheriff’s report: “…At this point in time, Mr. McDonald’s spouse was waved to a stop by Mr. Floyd J. Howell, an employee of the U.S. Postal Service, approximately 2.3 miles from the McDonald domicile on County Road 483, who at that point in time drove alongside Mrs. McDonald and succeeded in conveying, through an assortment of verbal and nonverbal communications, the fact that Mrs. McDonald was dragging something behind her vehicle and should pull over at her earliest convenience.”

  Prairie Midland, my company, ended up paying. The judge’s final ruling had to take into account the indisputable fact that Mr. McDonald was attached to a vehicle under full coverage by us at the time of the accident. If I remember correctly, the settlement included replacing the cupola Farmer McDonald took out on his way over the top. We also had to pay for the completion of the roofing job.

  In the morning it was cool but the storm had blown over, so Caroline and I had breakfast at Wendy’s and drove up to the base of Peak 8 where the Alpine Slide was.

  “Oh, Daddy, it looks like fun.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Don’t you wish Mommy was here?”

  “Mmmm,” I said. In the months since the separation I hadn’t gotten over wishing Kay was there for every new experience, but I’d gotten use to it the way one gets used to a missing tooth. I wished Kay were there now so she could help me think of a graceful way of keeping Caroline off the damned Alpine Slide.

  “Can we go on it?”

  “It looks a little scary,” I said.

  Caroline nodded and regarded the mountainside for a minute. “Yeah, a little,” she said, “but I don’t think Scout would be afraid of it.”

  “No,” I agreed. My son would have loved it all right. Of course Scout would have thought it was a great ride if someone had taped him in a cardboard box halfway up a mountainside and thrown him over the edge. “What do you say we walk around a minute and check things out?”

  The area had been open for less than half an hour but already the parking lot was two-thirds full and a steady stream of children and adults were lined up at the ticket booth and the lift lines. There were two lifts—something called the Colorado Super Lift, triple-wide chairs which ran far up the mountain to the Vista Haus restaurant at 11,600 feet, and the smaller, two-person Alpine Slide lift which ran less than a mile up a steeper slope. Already we could hear the scrape of brakes and screams as riders came down the last curves of the winding concrete trough of the Slide. I couldn’t see the top of the Slide through the trees. The bigger scenic lift was almost empty as it traveled sedately above a slope which looked like a fairway tilted almost vertical in the rich morning light.

  “Why don’t we go on the big one?” I suggested. “We could get a great view.”

  “Aw, no,” said Caroline, “I’d rather go on the Slide.” My daughter whined the least of any six-year-old I’d ever met, but this was perilously close.

  “Let’s see how much.”

  We joined a line moving toward the ticket window. Despite the intense high-altitude sunlight, the air was chill and the breeze made it even colder. Caroline and I were wearing jeans and sweatshirts, but most of the families in sight were shivering and grinning in shorts and T-shirts, as if proclaiming, By God, it’s August, it’s still summer, and we’re on vacation. Clouds were beginning to come into sight above the summit of Peak 8. The tickets were $4.00 for an adult, $2.50 for Caroline. She would have ridden free six months earlier when she was five.

  I looked again at the Alpine Slide. Two sinuous concrete runs had been lain in parallel down the ski slope. A flimsy, split-rail fence bordered it on either side, zig-zagging down the steep hillside like brown lightning strokes. I couldn’t see the beginning of the slide but sledders were visible and audible as they hurtled into the lower third of the run, their colorful sleds riding high on the banked curves. Most of the sledders were screaming.

  “Please, Dad?”

  “I’m thinking,” I said, conscious that I was holding up the line.

  The woman behind the glass looked at my ten-dollar bill and said, “If you’re gonna want to ride more than once, it’s cheaper to buy one of the five-ride specials.”

  “Probably just once apiece,” I said.

  “The two-rides for six dollars for you and two for four dollars for the little girl would be cheaper.”

  “Just one ride apiece,” I said, more sharply than I’d intended.

  “You wear these around your neck,” said Caroline, slipping the elastic cord of the ticket over her head as we walked toward the base of the lift.

  Mine was too tight. It cut into the flesh of my throat like a garroter’s wire. The line to the lift was shorter than I’d thought.

  Prairie Midland was a high-risk company. Our insureds paid more because of poor driving records, histories of defaulting, felony records, past DUI’s, or a hundred other reasons. Anybody in this country can get insured if he or she has the money. The day after that drunk wiped out a school bus and killed twenty-seven people, he could have gotten coverage from Prairie Midland or twenty other companies and pool-coverage fronts like us. This country depends upon the automobile. We can’t leave consumers sitting at home.

  Sometimes after I’d just changed from State Farm to Prairie Midland, I’d be driving somewhere with Kay and see a wino politely vomiting into a gutter or a bag lady conversing with the sky, and I’d say proudly, “One of our insureds there. Probably on the way to a Mensa meeting.”

  I hadn’t intended on going into the insurance business. In high school I wanted to be a comedian—some sort of stand-up comic. My favorite albums were the early Bill Cosby and Jonathan Winters. Cosby was funny then. He hadn’t traded his childlike humor for all the childish smirking and mugging and self-congratulation I see him doing now every time I turn on the TV.

  Jonathan Winters was even better—a truly insane genius. I would do entire monologues from his early albums. Sometimes my brother Rick wouldn’t want to do some stupid stunt I’d dreamed up—jumping our bikes off a fifteen-foot ramp, say, or waiting on Hendlemann’s Trestle for the 4:10 southbound to blow its whistle on the curve above—and I’d say in perfect Jonathan Winterese: “Okay then, Senator, chicken out then, go back to your car. I’ll talk Ace down by myself.”

  In college I no longer wanted to be a comedian, but I didn’t want to be anything else, either. I took liberal arts courses, protested the war, and spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get laid. In Vietnam I sometimes thought about what job I was going to find when I returned to the World, but I don’t think I ever considered insurance adjusting. I spent a lot of time over there thinking about getting laid, too.

  I once figured out that during the six months and twelve days that I was “in-country” during my abbreviated tour in the late, unlamented Republic of South Viet Nam, I never got farther than seven miles from where I’d first landed at the Tan Son Nhut Airport outside of Saigon. I was, in the parlance of my comrades-in-arms who actually hiked out into the boonies and got shot at, a REMF—a Rear-Echelon Motherfucker. That was all right with me at the time. I suppose it still is, although sometimes I think about it.

  Anyway, it’s sort of funny that I never thought about getting into automotive insurance since Dad did it for so many years. One of my earliest memories of going anywhere with him alone was when I rode with him on an adjustor’s errand—I suspect it was somewhere barely out beyond Chicago’s ring of forest preserves in the suburbs but to me it seemed like wilderness—and I played in one of the wrecks while he was estimating the other one.

  I remember sitting in the passenger seat and looking through a Little Golden Book that had
been on the floorboards. It was Bambi. I remember the page where Bambi met Flower was warped and still moist with a dark stain. In the windshield directly in front of me there was an oval hole which the top of my four- or five-year-old skull would have fit perfectly.

  No one thought about seat belts for cars in those days. As late as the early sixties I remember flying somewhere with my dad and people not knowing how to buckle the lap belts in the plane. Dad had to buy the belts for our Chrysler from a USAC racing supply store and everyone thought we were nuts for wearing them.

  I remember the car with the Bambi book was a Renault. Imported cars were relatively rare in the early fifties. This one seemed like a fragile toy. The turn indicator broke off in my hand when I played with it. I didn’t tell Dad.

  Most of the Orange File cases were mine, but some of them were sent to me by other agents and field people who learned that I was keeping the File.

  One of my favorites about the time Scout was born was the Safeway Parking Lot Claim. Kay and I’d just moved from Indianapolis to Denver to be near her family. I wasn’t Claims Manager yet and had to do the interviewing myself.

  I’ll call them Casper and Mrs. Casper. The wife was built like an oversized howitzer shell which had been wrapped in a print dress. Casper was tall and skinny with thick glasses, bow tie, suspenders a decade before the movie Wall Street brought them into style, a nervous mouth, long, twitchy fingers, and Ichabod Crane-ish feet in polished Florsheims.

  The couple had just come out of a Safeway in the Denver suburb of Littleton and had gone around to the driver’s side to set the groceries in the backseat of their Prairie Midland—insured 1978 four-door Plymouth. Casper was carrying the two bags of groceries. Mrs. Casper unlocked the driver’s door, reached in to unlatch the rear door, and opened it for him, talking at him all the while. The parking lot was crowded. Casper stepped out a bit, his back to his own car, as she opened the door.

  As the Fates always seem to have it in our business, the Ford Bronco parked next to them was also covered by our agency, even though Prairie Midland is small enough that it insures only one out of every thousand cars on the road. Our insured, a temporarily out-of-work construction worker, wasn’t in the Bronco. Nor was the only other driver in the household (his common-law wife) covered under our policy. The Bronco had been driven there—allegedly unknown to our insured—by his fourteen-year-old son Bubba, who unerringly chose that instant to slam the Bronco into reverse and to roar out of the parking space, rolling over both of Casper’s feet with the right rear and front wheels of the Bronco as he did so.

  Casper screamed and threw $86.46 worth of groceries into the air. The Bronco drove away. In some agony, Casper collapsed against his own car, holding himself up only by the strength of his hands.

  “What I did next, I swear, I did because I was flustered,” his wife later said in her statement to me. What she did next was slam the rear door shut. On Casper’s fingers.

  Pain isn’t funny, but taking Casper’s statement in that little house in Littleton was one of the most painful things I’d ever done. Both of his feet were heavily swathed and elevated on a Naugahyde ottoman. Eight of his fingers were in splints. He didn’t seem to care about the driver of the Bronco—who still, six days after the accident, hadn’t gone home—but he couldn’t stop talking about his wife. “If that bitch comes back,” he said, waving his splints in the air, “I’ll strangle her!”

  I took as much of the statement as I could and got out of there, pausing on the street corner to hang onto a mailbox until the worst of the laughter had passed. The image of Casper strangling anyone with those stiff, splayed finger splints was more than I could handle.

  Caroline had never been on a chair lift before and we had an awkward moment boarding. I had to pull her upright on the seat before she slid off. The gum-chewing teenager at the boarding area was no help, saying something in an unintelligible monologue as she threw two of the plastic sleds on hooks at the back of the chair.

  We rode up the hillside twenty or thirty feet above rocks and brown stubble. I’d ridden lifts in the winter when the slopes were white and gave an illusion of snow-covered softness below; now it was more like riding a rocking porch swing suspended thirty feet above rocks and tree stumps.

  Caroline was delighted. “It’s so quiet. Look, Daddy, a chipmunk.”

  “Ground squirrel,” I corrected, keeping my right arm around her as we ascended. The Alpine Slide was longer than I’d thought. We caught a glimpse beneath us of adults and youngsters careening down the troughs, their sleds rasping against the concrete sides. Their hands gripped some sort of control stick, their eyes were wide, their hair and shirttails flapped in the breeze of their passage, but no one looked especially alarmed. As we watched, a heavyset man with red hair came barreling down the slide, his body hunched forward, eyes intense, both hands on the stick like a fighter pilot trying to pull out of a dive. His sled slashed high into a curve and made an ominous racket on the very lip of high-banked concrete, as if considering flying out of control into the ravine beyond. The wedge of blue plastic and steel wavered, shook, and dropped back into the groove, rocketing out of sight behind and beneath us.

  It was odd that Kay, who grew up in Colorado, had never skied. She used to joke that there were a dozen non-skiing natives who met in weekly support groups during the winter. Gwen, my ex-secretary, had grown up in the flattest section of Indiana, but had loved to ski. Once when she was leaving early on a Friday, Gwen told me how her father had died. “We were in New Hampshire for a long weekend and Daddy’d just done a real hard double-black diamond run and was standing there near the pool area on his skis, proud as a peacock, when he gets a sort of surprised look on his face and pushes up his goggles and then his face turns as gray as a mouse’s belly and he sort of leaned forward on his poles, like he was a ski jumper, sort of, until his nose was almost touching the snow between his tips. Then he went plop. Tony, he was my boyfriend who was with me that weekend, he and I sort of laughed. But Daddy just laid there. When we turned him over, his face was almost black, his tongue was all swole up, and he was stone cold dead. But like I told Momsy on the phone that night, well, he went when he was happy.”

  I’d gone skiing with Gwen. Not that weekend, but later. Telling Kay I had a conference in Louisville and flying out to Vermont or Utah. Gwen was a nice person in a myriad of small ways—she wept when the goldfish in the outer office died—but she probably never would be accused of needing one of the TAG programs for gifted people which Kay had described to me.

  “Hang on, kiddo,” I told Caroline, taking her hand as we approached the end of the chair-lift ride. The lift didn’t slow appreciably as we came onto the ramp, and the gum-chewing teenager on this end was more intent on unloading the sleds from the hook than helping the passengers, so Caroline and I jumped, half-stumbled, and scurried out of harm’s way by ourselves.

  There were other sleds leaning against a wall with names such as SKYWALKER, X-15, and BLUE LIGHTNING inked on their undersides. I chose one named OLD POKEY and joined the shorter of the two lines at the top of the Slide.

  “Am I going down by myself, Daddy?”

  “Not this time,” I said. I squeezed her hand. It was colder this high up. Clouds were building up above the shoulder of the mountain. “Let’s try it together.”

  Caroline nodded, returning the pressure of my hand. The line grew shorter ahead of us.

  From the time he was old enough to stand, Scout would throw himself headfirst into space toward Kay or me, trusting that we would catch him. Caroline has never done that. Even with piggyback rides she is cautious, warning her “horse” not to fall backward or trip. Scout used to love being thrown high in the air and being caught—even as a baby—and when I saw the opening title shots of The World According to Garp a few years ago, I had to laugh. Caroline wanted to be cuddled, cradled, enfolded…protected.

  Kay and I hated to think it was just the difference between male and female children. We said it wa
s just personalities, different and distinct little people, but I wonder. The last couple of years have been worse.

  Believe what you want, I know precisely what Death looks like. It’s a Pepsi truck with black sidewalls.

  The summer I got back from Vietnam I was living in Indianapolis, taking insulin for the diabetes that hadn’t been discovered or diagnosed until I went into the infirmary at Tan Son Nhut and which got me discharged five months early. I was living with three other guys, two of them ex-medics from Vietnam who’d gone into medical school, and our townhouse looked like a set out of M*A*S*H…the movie, not the TV show. We all wore fatigues most of the time and olive-drab underwear all of the time and two of us slept on army-surplus cots. We were all Donald Sutherland–cool and Elliott Gould–smartass and the pot and booze were taken for granted. All four of us drove motorcycles.

  The first road accident I ever saw—I was four and we were on Route 66 coming out of Chicago—was a motorcycle fatality. I remember the unique and heavy sound of the man and bike hitting the left rear quarterpanel of the Studebaker as they both came through the intersection at the same time. Since then I’ve been on the scene of at least thirty motorcycle deaths, read the details of several hundred more, and had half a dozen spills of my own. The first time I ever rode a cycle I put it up the side of a Conoco station. I’d been doing fine until I pulled into the station lot to turn around—still moving fast in third gear—and simply forgot where the brakes were. I was thirteen. Three old farts had come out of the station after I’d slid into the wall, climbed the bay doors, and dumped it. They stood over me while I lay under the gas tank and twisted handlebars of Rick’s new 250cc machine. Finally one of them spat and said, “Whatsamatter, boy,” his mouth still full of tobacco and Illinois drawl, “don’t ya know how to ride that thing?”