He didn't notice the lights had turned green. No cars waited behind him
otherwise he might have been alerted by someone leaning on the horn,
wondering what the fuck was wrong with him holding up traffic. He
rolled down his windows, there was not much air in the afternoon sky,
and he was about to suggest that Judy Wiener do the same on her side.
He heard the car door behind her open as someone jumped in. He saw
a face ̶ youngish, Hispanic, damp with the sweat of desperation. A
narrow, handsome face whose twisted mouth screamed, Drive this
fucking car. Drive. Now. The sound more terrifying than the face.
There was the scent of cologne, as if the man had stepped fresh out
the bathroom into his clothes and onto the streets, then into their car.
He heard Judy Wiener gasp as her heart leapt up to her throat.
His first thought was, How did he get inside? I didn't leave the back
door unlocked. How did he get in?
Then he saw the gun in the man's hand, the first real gun he'd ever
seen in someone's hand.
What happened next happened fast but he remembered it slowly: the
distorted face; the words like detonations in the car; the gun in the
man's hand. And then the blood, lots of blood on the man's shirt, some
sort of beige golf shirt, but drenched in red stuff that had to be the
man's blood.
He heard popping sounds, like pellets hitting his car, only he didn't
think at the time they were bullets. He heard Judy Wiener say, "Oh, my
God".
The man slumped on the back seat. He managed to lift his torso, he
pointed the gun at Radix, shouting again, Drive. This time Radix looked
straight in his eyes. They were pleading for help, the face damp with
perspiration, the shirt messy red. And the hand that held the gun
shaking.
All so fast. The man seemed to sag back in the seat, the arm going limp
for a moment, as if his gesture of intimidation had sucked the last
breath out of him. Only then did Radix, his mouth now dry, a fierce
pain in his stomach, snap into action.
He stepped on the gas pedal, shooting forward; and at this point he
couldn't recall clearly what happened next.
They told him he'd run straight into the path of a van. The van hit him
broadside and sent him in a spin. The car hit a wall that divided traffic
going into and coming out of a tunnel, then it came to a stop.
Radix felt the jarring contact right through to his bones. There was a
howling in his ears as of tortured winds; then stillness, as the silence
closed in. And through that silence he distinctly heard what sounded
like a baby's gurgle, then a long sigh.
He kept returning to that sound long after they'd extricated him from
the vehicle wreck. They told him it could have been the man in the
back seat grasping at life, releasing the last scraps of air in his lungs as
he expired. That must have been what he heard.
(from "Ah Mikhail, O Fidel!", a novel by N.D. Williams, 2001)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 