“I know you want to hear it,” Ted said. “You told me that you asked Marion to tell it to you, but Marion can’t handle this story. It turns her to stone, just thinking about it. You remember when you turned her to stone by just asking her about it—don’t you, Eddie?”
“Yes, I remember,” Eddie said. So it was that story. Ted wanted to tell him about the accident.
Eddie had wanted Marion to tell him the story. But what should the sixteen-year-old have said? Eddie certainly needed to hear the story, even if he didn’t want to hear it from Ted.
“Go on, tell it,” the boy said as casually as possible. Eddie couldn’t see where in the room Ted was, or if he was standing or sitting—not that it mattered, because Ted’s narrative voice, in any of his stories, was greatly enhanced by an overall atmosphere of darkness.
Stylistically, the story of Thomas and Timothy’s accident had much in common with Ted Cole’s The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls and The Door in the Floor —not to mention the many drafts that Eddie had faithfully transcribed of A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound . In other words, it was a Ted Cole kind of story; when it came to this kind of story, Marion’s version could never have been a match for Ted’s.
For one thing—and this was immediately clear to Eddie—Ted had worked on the story. It would have killed Marion to have paid as close attention to the details of her boys’ deaths as Ted had. And for another thing, Marion would have told the story without devices; she could have told it only as plainly as possible. In contrast, the principal device in Ted’s telling of the tale was extremely self-conscious, even artificial; yet without it, Ted might not have been able to tell the story at all.
As in most Ted Cole stories, the principal device was also clever. In the story of Thomas and Timothy’s accident, Ted talked about himself in the third person; thus he stood at a considerable distance from himself and from the story. He was never “I” or “me” or “myself ”; he was always only “Ted”—or “he” or “him” or “himself.” He was merely a supporting character in a story about other, more important people.
If Marion had ever told the story, she would have stood so close to it that, in the telling of it, she would have descended into a final madness—a madness much greater than whatever madness had caused Marion to abandon her only living child.
“Well, here’s the deal,” Ted began. “Thomas had his driver’s license, but Timothy did not. Tommy was seventeen—he’d been driving for a year. And Timmy was fifteen; he’d only started to take driving lessons, from his father. Ted had earlier taught Thomas how to drive; it was Ted’s opinion that Timothy, who was only learning, was already a more attentive student than Thomas had ever been. Not that Thomas was a bad driver. He was alert, and confident—he had excellent reflexes. And Thomas was cynical enough to anticipate what bad drivers were going to do, even before the drivers themselves knew what they were going to do. That was the key, Ted had told him, and Thomas believed it: always assume that every other driver is a bad driver.
“There was one particularly important area of driving where Ted thought that his younger son, Timothy, was a better driver—or a potentially better driver—than Thomas was. Timothy had always been more patient than Thomas. Timmy, for example, had the patience to faithfully check the rearview mirror, whereas Tommy neglected to look in the rearview mirror as routinely as Ted thought a driver should look there. And it is often in the area of left turns that a driver’s patience is tested in a most subtle but most specific way—namely, when you are stopped and waiting to turn left across a lane of oncoming traffic, you must never, ever turn your wheels to the left in anticipation of the turn you are waiting to make. Never—not ever !
“Anyway,” Ted continued, “Thomas was one of those impatient young men who would often turn his wheels to the left while anticipating a left-hand turn, although his father and his mother—and even his younger brother—had repeatedly told Tommy not to turn his wheels until he was actually making the turn. Do you know why, Eddie?” Ted asked.
“So that, if you are rear-ended by a vehicle coming up behind you, you will not be pushed into the lane of oncoming traffic,” Eddie answered. “You would simply be pushed straight ahead, staying in your own lane.”
“Who taught you to drive, Eddie?” Ted asked.
“My dad,” Eddie said.
“Good for him! Tell him for me that he did a good job,” Ted said.
“Okay,” Eddie answered in the dark. “Go on . . .”
“Well. Where were we? We were out West, actually. It was one of those ski vacations that people from the East take in the spring, when what amounts to so-called spring skiing can’t be trusted in the East. If you want to be sure there’s snow in March or April, you better go west. And so . . . here were the displaced easterners, who were not at home out West. And it wasn’t just that it was Exeter’s spring vacation; it was doubtless spring break for countless schools and universities, and so there were many out-of-towners who were not only unfamiliar with the mountains but unfamiliar with the roads. And many of these skiers were driving unfamiliar cars—rental cars, for example. The Cole family had rented a car.”
“I get the picture,” Eddie said, sure that Ted was deliberately taking his time to get to what happened—probably because Ted wanted Eddie to anticipate the accident almost as much as Ted wanted Eddie to see it.
“Well. It was after a long day of skiing, and it had snowed all day. A wet, heavy snow. A degree or two warmer,” Ted said, “and this snow would have been rain. And Ted and Marion were not quite the diehard, nonstop skiers that their two sons were. At seventeen and fifteen, respectively, Thomas and Timothy could ski the pants off their parents, who at the time were forty and thirty-four, respectively, and who often finished a day on the slopes a trifle earlier than their boys. That day, in fact, Ted and Marion had retired to the bar at the ski resort, where they were waiting (what seemed to them) a rather long time for Thomas and Timothy to finish their last run—and then the last run after that. You know how boys are—the kids can’t get enough of the skiing, and so the mom and the dad do the waiting. . . .”
“I get the picture—you were drunk,” Eddie said.
“That was one aspect of what would become trivial—in the area of the ongoing argument between Ted and Marion, I mean,” Ted told Eddie. “Marion said that Ted was drunk, although in Ted’s view he wasn’t. And Marion, while not drunk, had had more to drink at that late-afternoon time than was customary for her. When Thomas and Timothy found their parents in the bar, it was evident to both boys that neither their father nor their mother was in ideal shape to drive the rental car. Besides, Thomas had his driver’s license, and Thomas hadn’t been drinking. There was no question as to who among them should be the driver.”
“So Thomas was driving,” Eddie interrupted.
“And, brothers being brothers, Timothy sat beside him—in the passenger seat. As for the parents,” Ted told Eddie, “they sat where, one day, most parents will end up: in the backseat. And, in Ted and Marion’s case, they continued to do what many parents do without cease: they kept arguing, although the nature of their arguments remained trivial, enduringly trivial. Ted, for example, had cleared the windshield of snow, but not the rear window. Marion argued that Ted should have cleared the rear window, too. Ted countered that as soon as the car was warm and moving, the snow would slide off. And although this proved to be the case—the snow slid off the rear window as soon as they were traveling at less-than-highway speed—Marion and Ted continued to argue. Only the topic changed; the triviality endured.
“It was one of those ski towns where the town itself isn’t much to speak of. The main street is actually a three-lane highway, where the middle lane is designated for left turns, although not a few morons confuse what is a turning lane with a passing lane, if you know what I mean. I hate three-lane highways, Eddie—don’t you?”
Eddie refused to answer him. It was a
Ted Cole story: you always see what you’re supposed to be afraid of; you see it coming, and coming. The problem is, you never see everything that’s coming.
“Anyway,” Ted continued, “Thomas was doing a good job of driving, considering the adverse conditions. The snow was still falling. And now it was dark, too—truly everything was unfamiliar. Ted and Marion began to quarrel about the best route to the hotel where they were staying. This was foolish, because the entire town was on one or the other side of this three-lane highway, and since this highway was in actuality a strip of hotels and motels and gas stations and restaurants and bars, which lined both sides of the road, it was necessary to know only which side of the highway you were going to. And Thomas knew. It would be a left turn, no matter how he did it. It hardly helped him, as a driver, that his mother and father were determined to choose precisely where he should turn left. He could, for example, turn left at the hotel itself—Ted approved of this direct approach—or he could drive past the hotel to the next set of traffic lights. There, when the light was green, he could execute a left U-turn; then he would be approaching the hotel on his right. Marion thought the U-turn at the traffic lights was safer than the left turn from the turning lane, where there were no lights.”
“Okay! Okay!” Eddie screamed in the dark. “I see it! I see it!”
“No, you don’t!” Ted shouted at him. “You can’t possibly see it until it’s over ! Or do you want me to stop?”
“No—please go on,” Eddie answered.