Damp air nudged back at him. Then Mikesh’s nose told what his eyes couldn’t. He smelled antifreeze from a damaged radiator. He started down the slope, shoes sliding beneath him.
Even before he was upright, Mikesh’s flashlight caught the hazy profile.
Right-side-up a car is designed to be sleek and pretty. Bottom-side-up, a car looks dirty and camouflaged, more like the machine it really is. This one, its wheels pointing up into the fog, had twisted and half buried itself with the impact, like a hulking piece of rusting ordnance that failed to explode. Flashlight trained on the wreck, Mikesh was slow to register what he saw, but then a voice teetered from the smashed car like the echo of Arnie Mikesh’s childhood sick-dreams. He felt gripped by a desire to turn around, stroll to the warm cab of the truck, turn the Allmans back on, and drive away. Instead he punched 9–1–1 into his phone and headed toward the broken-out windows of the wreck.
He had training in what to do in an accident scene, but the crack-ups Mikesh investigated in his job at the community college were hardly ever serious enough to trigger the inflation of an airbag. This wreck looked bad. He heard the 9–1–1 operator, a woman’s voice. “I’m calling to report an accident, a car headed north,” he told her, walking forward. “It left W14 between St. Lucas and Fort Atkinson at 262nd Avenue, and there’s a victim.”
“A wreck . . . a victim . . . W14” he got in confirmation, and then the phone cut out. He tried redialing, but coverage had gone. When he punched in the numbers again, nothing.
Mikesh circled the upside-down car and noted Bremer County plates. He got down into the snow and shone his light through the exploded windows. That’s when he saw my brother. That is, he saw a foot, a leg, the bottom half of my brother’s body. My brother’s voice was still in the air: reedy enough for Mikesh not to know whether it was a man’s or a woman’s. When Mikesh shimmied forward and shone the light, the beam caught my brother’s head turned toward him underneath the hood. Mikesh, angling to get a better view, saw Josh’s badly hurt features, mumbling out a song in something like sleep. Josh quit singing, and slowly uncracked his right eye. The left was swollen shut and matted with blood. The right pupil, dilated, stared out at Mikesh. My brother’s breathing wasn’t good. The facial skin that Mikesh could see was blue. At impact, Josh had been hurled through the windshield like a stone. The weight of the chassis and engine, pressing down into the roof, caught Josh around the waist. He was curled under the center of the car, with his head and shoulders in a red tent of space: burgundy hood above him and blood-stained earth below. From the hips down he was pinched in what remained of the car’s passenger area.
Mikesh felt my brother’s neck for a pulse. The skin was cold. Mikesh shucked off his cotton jacket and shoved it towards Josh’s body. He needed to keep him warm until he got some help. The dispatcher would be in Decorah, at least forty minutes away in this fog, maybe more. If only she had caught the location. He remembered her repeating the highway number to him. That meant the ambulance would come. Mikesh felt more blood. The rearview mirror had caught the edge of my brother’s ribcage as the car collapsed, digging its way into his side. As Mikesh stretched to press the soft, insulated fabric where he could, my brother’s eye fixed on him.
“The light.”
It came as the softest whisper.
“Can you hear me?” Mikesh said.
Josh’s eye glinted like a shard of glass in a gravel drive. The stare wasn’t fully tracking. Mikesh wished there was more he could do. “I called for help. I can reach you, but I can’t get back to you. I can’t move you. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
Silence.
“I called for help. You need an ambulance. Are you by yourself?”
There was a pause, the same immobile face.
“Are you by yourself?”
“You. You’re here.”
Mikesh was puzzled by my brother’s answer.
“That’s right, I’m here. Is anyone else with you?”
“You.” My brother’s eye focused on him. “I’m thirsty.”
Sympathy welled up in Mikesh. No heat coming off the engine, and no ticking, cooling-engine sounds. Mikesh guessed Josh had been there two, maybe three hours. The residual engine heat had probably been keeping him warm, but now the cold alone was enough to kill him. Mikesh, without his jacket, and his face and shoulder up against the snowy ground, was feeling icy himself.
“I’m going to look around the car for a minute. That means I’m going to take the light away and see if there’s anyone else I need to help.”
“Stay with me. Enter . . . infinity.”
Josh’s command spooked Mikesh. He stood, and walked around the car once more, swinging the light beam into the fog and giving the scene a careful look. Arcing through the air the car, a Buick, had landed hood-first, slamming onto its top, and ploughed backwards and upside down, to a stop. There was glass and chrome, and a big smear of earth and winter-killed grass, but no other bodies. No one in the passenger seat. Still no phone coverage. Mikesh ran back up to the top of the road bank and tried calling again from that higher elevation. Nothing: rural Iowa invisible even to satellites and towers. He snapped the phone shut. The cold made him shiver. His heart went out to my brother, who now had Mikesh’s jacket, who’d been lying there for hours: heat and blood soaking out of him. Mikesh ran to his truck. Pulling open the door he felt the residual warmth spill from the interior along with the yellow glow of the dome light. He cursed not keeping a blanket in the cab. No way he could carry so much as a handful of the precious heat back to my brother. About an inch of coffee remained in the bottom of Mikesh’s travel mug. How many days it had been there? It didn’t matter; my brother needed liquid. But how would he drink it? He was pinned upside down. Mikesh grabbed the rag he kept on the dash to wipe steam and frost from the Chevy’s windshield.
He trotted back to my brother and dipped the cloth into the icy dregs of the coffee. He dropped to his knees, then got down on his belly in the snow.
My brother wasn’t making any sound, but the clear eye was not so fixed. The warmth of the coat may have helped him revive. He blinked. Mikesh reached, and pressed the dripping rag against his lips.
“Put this in your mouth.”
Like a child, my brother did what he was told, but the taste made him recoil. His good eye widened.
“It’s all I have,” Mikesh apologized. He pulled back the jacket and traced Josh’s arm down to where it was pinned between the roof and his body. He could not reach the wrist or hand. Replacing the jacket, he put his own hand on my brother’s neck, index finger searching for a pulse. He pulled away the rag from my brother’s mouth and let it drop.
“Can you feel my hand?”
No answer, but the gaze held.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
There was no smell of alcohol in the faint breath. The curve was a bad one, but not the first the car would have encountered heading north from Bremer County in this fog.
“What happened?”
Josh was looking at Mikesh, his eye bright and glinting. “I didn’t ask for this,” my brother whispered, a terror seeming to grip him. “I’ve been alone.” And then, “Who are you?” The bits of what he said were not connecting, but the question seemed real.
“Arnie. I’m Arnie Mikesh.”
“Mikesh,” my brother’s eye was fixed, his face collected. A long pause, and then a whisper. “Comfort my mother.”
Confusion swept over Mikesh. “Is she here?”
My brother, whose jaw and neck remained cool under Mikesh’s touch, shook his head. Mikesh could tell he was growing weaker, his breath labored and shallow as he sighed, “It’s done.”
Josh’s lips formed a word that began with a shooshing