the driver of the Datsun was revving his engine like a kid in a muscle-car waiting for the light to turn green. Clouds of exhaust smoke farted up from the tailpipe. As soon as the gate had retracted enough to allow the Datsun passage, the car leaped forward, squirting through the gap with its engine roaring, and when it did, Ralph got a clear look at the driver. He was close enough now for there to be no doubt: it was Ed, all right.
The Datsun bounced along the short unpaved stretch of lane between the gate and the Harris Street Extension. A horn blared suddenly, and Ralph saw a blue Ford Ranger, heading west on the Extension, swerve to avoid the oncoming Datsun. The driver of the pickup saw the danger too late, and Ed apparently never saw it at all (it was only later that Ralph came to consider Ed might have rammed the Ranger on purpose).
There was a brief scream of tires followed by the hollow bang of the Datsun's fender driving into the Ford's sidewall. The pickup was driven halfway across the yellow line. The Datsun's hood crumpled, came unlatched, and popped up a little; headlight glass tinkled into the street. A moment later both vehicles were dead in the middle of the road, tangled together like some weird sculpture.
Ralph stood where he was for the time being, watching as oil spread beneath the Datsun's front end. He had seen several roadaccidents in his almost-seventy years, most of them minor, one or two serious, and he was always stunned by how quickly they happened and how little drama there was. It wasn't like in the movies, where the camera could slow things down, or on a video tape, where you could watch the car go off the cliff again and again if you so chose; there was usually just a series of converging blurs, followed by that quick and toneless combination of sounds: the cry of the tires, the hollow bang of metal crimping metal, the tinkle (of glass.
There was even a kind of protocol for this sort of thing: How Should Behave When Involved in a Low-Speed Collision. Of course there was, Ralph mused. There were probably a dozen two-bit collisions in Derry every day, and maybe twice that number in the wintertime, when there was snow and the roads got slippery. You got out, you met your opposite number at the point where the two vehicles had come together (and where, quite often, they were still entwined), you looked, you shook your heads. Sometimes-often, actually-this phase of the encounter was marked with angry words: fault was assigned (often rashly), driving skills impugned, legal action threatened. Ralph supposed what the drivers were really trying to say without coming right out and saying it was Listen, fool, you scared the living hell out of me!
The final step in this unhappy little dance was The Exchange of the Sacred Insurance Screeds, and it was at this point that the drivers usually began to get control of their galloping emotions... always assuming that no one had been hurt, as appeared to be the case here.
Sometimes the drivers involved even finished up by shaking hands.
Ralph prepared to watch all this from his vantage point less than a hundred and fifty yards away, but as seen as the driver's door of the Datsun opened he understood that things were going to go differently here-that the accident was maybe not over but still happening. It certainly did not seem that anyone was going to shake at the end of these festivities.
The door did not swing open; it flew open. Ed Deepneau leaped out, then simply stood stock-still beside his car, his slim shoulders squared against a background of deepening clouds, He was wearing faded jeans and a tee-shirt, and Ralph realized that before today he had never seen Ed in a shirt that didn't button up the front. And there was something around his neck: a long white something. A scarf? It looked like a scarf, but why would anyone be wearing a scarf on a day as hot as this one had been?
Ed stood beside his wounded car for a moment, seeming to look in every direction but the right one. The fierce little pokes of his narrow head reminded Ralph of the way roosters studied their barnyard turf, looking for invaders and interlopers. Something about that similarity made Ralph feel uneasy.