of himself, as the exhilaration got the better of him?
An old lady and a little kid—girl or boy, you could not tell which, because the kid had short hair and baggy overalls—were crossing the dirt road. No one would ever know if they saw the truck or not; they did not hesitate at all, or even glance in the direction of the Ford. They just marched right out into that road, the old lady holding the kid’s hand and looking straight ahead, the kid looking up at the old lady and talking up a storm. In her other hand, the old lady held a large black purse. Harm remembered thinking—the thought came to him in the final second of what he would come to regard as his old life, his life before the accident—that it was the same kind of purse his Grandma Strayer carried. She kept tissues in there, and coupons, and peppermints. She always gave him a peppermint from that purse when she saw him, without him even having to ask for it.
The sound was bad, brutal and bad—a deep, resonant thunk-thunk—but the feeling was even worse. The vibration traveled from the front of the truck right on through to the steering wheel, a violent shudder.
Harm knew what the wheel felt like because, at the very last moment, he tried to grab it and turn it abruptly, so that they would not hit the old lady and the kid. But Vic had seen the people, too, the pair of them walking so confidently and so obliviously across that road, and he was a good driver, with that sure touch on the wheel, and he had a great deal of strength in his wrists. Had he been left alone, he might very well have been able to execute the swerve, just missing them. The old lady and the kid would have felt the heavy swish of air as the pickup skidded and fishtailed in a vicious half-circle turn around them, and they probably would have blinked and squinted from the dust flying up in their faces. The old lady, maybe, would have frowned and made a fist and hollered something at Vic. About watching where he was going. About letting people cross the road in peace, for heaven’s sake.
But Harm was pulling at the wheel, too, pulling it in the other direction, fighting Vic. And Alvie, at the last second, was pushing at Harm, trying to get him to grab the wheel tighter, turn it more sharply. Harm jerked the wheel out of Vic’s hands and thus he ended up sending the front of the Ford smashing full-force into the little kid and the old lady, knocking them like bowling pins, bam bam.
The kid flew up in the air. If it had been a dog or a possum or a fence post, it might have been amusing: a small object looping up over the hood of the pickup like a ball tossed in the air, then landing in the dirt, now a funny crumpled new shape. The old lady did not fly anywhere; she was slammed into a ditch at the side of the road. Her dress, Harm could not help but notice, was up around her neck. Her knickers—frilly, edged with lace, but slightly yellowed, because nothing could stay true white when it was washed by hand and hung out on a clothesline to dry—were there for all the world to see. She was not wearing a brassiere; Harm noticed that, too. Her flesh was flabby, the fat around her waist puffed out like biscuit dough. Her breasts hung down on her torso.
All was still, except for the roaring in Harm’s head.
The dust on the road was yellow-brown.
The liquid mingling with that dust, a liquid that ran out of the old lady’s ears and the kid’s mouth, was a dull dark red.
The Barr County deputy sheriff who came along about ten minutes later—the boys never knew how he had learned about the accident, and thought maybe it was a coincidence, maybe this was his regular daily route—was named Pete Diehl. Deputy Diehl. He asked the boys to step out of the Ford.
Until the moment when the deputy arrived, they had stayed in the pickup. With the engine still running. They had not moved. They had struck the kid and the old lady and then they just sat there in stunned, flummoxed silence. All three of them. Maybe if they just sat there, it would be as if it