I wanted to get back out into the cold air again, away from the hissing radiators and the indolent, flat eyes of the men looking at me.
“Forget it,” I said. “He’s probably on a drunk over in Idaho.”
“Don’t fool with me, son. I ain’t up to it this morning.”
I lit my cigarette and wiped my damp hair back over my head.
“Give me that accident report that come in from French-town,” the sheriff said to the dispatcher. He took his glasses out of his shirt pocket and squinted at the small writing on the paper.
“Was he driving a ’55 Ford pickup?” he said, pulling his glasses off his nose.
“Yes.” I felt something drop inside of me.
“Take a ride with me.”
He started walking down the hallway toward the front door, his waist like an innertube under his shirt. I remained motionless, the cigarette hanging in my mouth, watching his huge silhouette walk toward the square of dawn outside.
“You better go with him, mister,” the dispatcher said.
I caught up with the sheriff outside on the glazed sidewalk. I could feel my shoes slipping on the ice, but his very weight seemed to give him traction on the cement.
“All right, what are we playing?” I said.
“Get in.” But this time his voice was lower and more human.
I got in on the passenger’s side and closed the door. The sawed-off twelve-gauge pump clipped vertically against the dashboard knocked against my knees. He flicked on the bubble-gum light without the siren, and we headed west out of town. He was breathing heavily from the fast walk to the car.
“About an hour ago a ’55 pickup went off the road on 263 and rolled all the way down to the river,” he said.
My head was swimming.
“So what the hell are we doing?” I said. “You’ve got a junked truck in the river. You want me to identify it so you can give Buddy a citation?”
He opened the wind vane and flipped his cigar out. He waited a moment, and I saw his hands tense on the wheel before he turned to me with his pie-plate face.
“The driver’s still in there, Paret. It burned.”
We drove down the highway by the side of the Clark, and the water was blue and running fast in the middle between the sheets of ice that extended from the banks. The sun came up bright in a clear sky over the mountains, and men were fishing with wet flies and maggots for whitefish on the tips of the sandbars. The thick pines on the sides of the mountains were dark green and bent with the weight of the new snow, and the sunlight on the ice-covered boulders refracted with an iridescence that made your eyes water.
The truck was scorched black, and all the windows had exploded from the heat. There was a large melted area around it in the snow, and the tires had burned away to the rims. I could see the huge scars in the rock incline where the truck had rolled end over end and had come to rest against a cottonwood tree, as though its driver had simply wanted to park there with a high-school girl after a dance. The men from the coroner’s office had already wrapped the body in a rubber sheet, covered it with canvas, and strapped it on an alpine stretcher that they worked slowly up the incline. A deputy sheriff walked to the car with the melted barrel and torn magazine of a rifle in his hand. The stock had been burned away, and the ejection lever hung down from the trigger.
“Look at this son of a bitch,” he said. “Every shell in it blew up. He must have had a bunch of them in his clothes, too, because they went off all over him.”
We were outside the car now, standing in the snow, though I didn’t remember how we got there. Across the river the sunlight fell on the white mountain as it would on a mirror.
You don’t know its Buddy, I thought. There are ranchers all over this county that drive pickup trucks, and they all carry a lever-action in the deer rack. Every week a drunk cowboy goes off the road in a pickup. And this one just happened to burn.
“You don’t know who he is,” I said, my voice loud even to myself.
The deputy looked at me curiously.
“Did you find anything that says who he was?” the sheriff said.
“No, sir. The tag was burned up, and so was anything in the glove. But like the coroner said, the damnedest thing is the way that guy went out. He must have caught his head inside the steering wheel when he turned over, and the top half of him was burned into a piece of cork. But there wasn’t a mark on his legs, except for a tattoo inside his thigh.”
I walked away from the car, along the shoulder of the road and the glistening shine of the snow melting on the asphalt and the yellow grass that protruded through the gravel. I could hear the cottonwoods clatter dryly against one another in the wind along the river, and water was ticking somewhere in flat drops off a boulder into a crystalline pool. Then I heard the powerful engine of the sheriff’s car next to me, the idle racing, and his voice straining through the half-open passenger’s window.
I turned and looked at him as I might at someone from the other side of the moon. He was trying to hold the wheel with one hand and roll down the window completely with the other. His pie-plate face was filled with blood and exertion, and his words came out with a labored wheeze in his chest.