3

Jack had the Lincoln Tunnel pretty much to himself. He passed the stripe which marked the border of New York and New Jersey, remembering how his brother and sister and he used to cheer whenever they crossed the line after spending a day in The City with their parents. It had always been a thrill then to be back in good ol’ New Jersey. Those days were gone with the two-way toll collections. Now they charged you a double toll to get to Manhattan and let you leave for nothing. And he didn’t cheer as he crossed the line.

He cruised out of the tunnel mouth, squinting into the sudden glare of the morning sun. The ramp made a nearly circular turn up to and through Union City, then down to the meadowlands and the N.J. Turnpike. Jack collected his ticket from the “Cars Only” machine, set his cruise control for fifty miles per hour and settled into the right-hand lane for the trip. He was running a little late, but the last thing he wanted was to be stopped by a state cop.

The olfactory adventure began as the Turnpike wound its ways through the swampy lowlands, past the Port of Newark and all the surrounding refineries and chemical plants. Smoke poured from stacks and torch-like flames roared from ten-story discharge towers. The odors he encountered on the strip between Exits 16 and 12 were varied and uniformly noxious. Even on a Sunday morning.

But as the road drifted inland, the scenery gradually turned rural and hilly and sweet-smelling. The farther south he drove, the farther his thoughts were pulled into the past. Images streaked by with the mile markers: Mr. Canelli and his lawn… early fix-it jobs around Burlington County during his late teens, usually involving vandals, always contracted sub rosa… starting Rutgers but keeping his repairs business going on the side… the first trips to New York to do fix-it work for relatives of former customers…

Tension began building in him after he passed Exit 7. Jack knew the reason: He was approaching the spot where his mother was killed.

It was also the spot where he had—how had Kolabati put it?—”drawn the line between yourself and the rest of the human race.”

It had happened during his third year at Rutgers. A Sunday night in early January. Jack was on semester break. He and his parents were driving south on the Turnpike after visiting his Aunt Doris in Heightstown; Jack was in the back seat, his parents in the front, his father driving. Jack had offered to take the wheel but his mother said the way he wove in and out of all those trucks made her nervous. As he remembered it, he and his father had been discussing the upcoming Superbowl while his mother watched the speedometer to make sure it didn’t stray too far over sixty. The easy, peaceful feeling that comes with a full stomach after a lazy winter afternoon spent with relatives was shattered as they cruised under an overpass. With a crash like thunder and an impact that shook the car, the right half of the windshield exploded into countless flying, glittering fragments. He heard his father shout with surprise, his mother scream in pain, felt a blast of icy air rip through the car. His mother moaned and vomited.

As his father swerved the car to the side of the road, Jack jumped into the front seat and realized what had happened: A cinderblock had crashed through the windshield and landed against his mother’s lower ribs and upper abdomen. Jack didn’t know what to do. As he watched helplessly, his mother passed out and slumped forward. He shouted to get to the nearest hospital. His father drove like a demon, flooring the pedal, blowing the horn, and blinking the headlights while Jack pushed his mother’s limp body back and pulled the cinderblock off her. Then he removed his coat and wrapped it around her as protection against the cold gale whistling through the hole in the windshield. His mother vomited once more—this time it was all blood and it splattered the dashboard and what was left of the windshield. As he held her, Jack could feel her growing cold, could almost feel the life slipping out of her. He knew she was bleeding internally, but there was nothing he could do about it. He screamed at his father to hurry but he was already driving as fast as he could without risking loss of control of the car.

She was in deep shock by the time they got her to the emergency room. She died in surgery of a lacerated liver and a ruptured spleen. She had exsanguinated into her abdominal cavity.

The incalculable grief. The interminable wake and funeral. And afterwards, questions: Who? Why? The police didn’t know and doubted very much that they would ever find out. It was common for kids to go up on the overpasses at night and drop things through the cyclone fencing onto the cars streaming by below. By the time an incident was reported, the culprits were long gone. The State Police response to any and all appeals from Jack and his father was a helpless shrug.

His father’s response was withdrawal; the senselessness of the tragedy had thrown him into a sort of emotional catatonia in which he appeared to function normally but felt absolutely nothing. Jack’s response was something else: cold, nerveless, consuming rage. He was faced with a new kind of fix-it job. He knew where it had happened. He knew how. All he had to do was find out who.

He would do nothing else, think of nothing else, until that job was done.

And eventually it was done.

It was long over now, a part of the past. Yet as he approached that overpass he felt his throat constrict. He could almost see a cinderblock falling… falling toward the windshield… crashing through in a blizzard of glass fragments… crushing him. Then he was under and in shadow, and for an instant it was nighttime and snowing, and hanging off the other side of the overpass he saw a limp, battered body dangling from a rope tied to its feet, swinging and spinning crazily. Then it was gone and he was back in the August sun again.

He shivered. He hated New Jersey.