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—
“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.”
