The Wreck
by Scott Speck

	Dad revved the engine, then backed our station wagon up the steeply
sloped driveway.  As rain suddenly showered the roof, my brother Bob and I 
glanced at each other in disbelief.  Dad rarely exposed the car to such weather
unless he had the chance to clean the engine and dry the car at our destination.
Mom was too busy cleaning her glasses with a tissue to notice how dreary a 
Saturday we had picked for our daytrip.
	"Look at those clouds," Bob said.  The sky had to be ominous for him to
comment on it this early in the morning.  Misty drizzle gave way to huge drops
that spattered the windshield and hammered the roof.  Dad switched on the wipers
and headlights, then pressed the automatic garage door button.  That button's
delicate plastic click always annoyed me.  Or maybe it was the way Dad sighed 
when he pressed it.  The door bounced off a rise in the driveway, opening again 
until he re-pressed the button.  The door openings and closings continued a few
times, along with Dad's rising tide of cuss words.
	I froze on the soft, tan bench seat, three feet from Bob who was still
watching the clouds.  If this ritual continued much longer, Dad would be in a 
rotten mood for the rest of the day.  The garage door finally stayed shut.  Dad 
stared it down, making sure it wouldn't open a fourth time.  I wondered why
we even had an automatic garage door, with its idiosyncracies and unreliable
motor.  Satisfied that the house was secure, Dad lurched the car forward and
sped down the street.
	"It was supposed to stop by midnight, last night," Mom said.  "I hope it
doesn't rain all day."  She stared blankly through the rain as we rounded
a sharp bend in the road.
	"Mary, what do you want me to do about it?  It's supposed to end by
noon, and if we wait until then to leave, the day'll be over before it started."
	Dad switched on KDKA radio, where a talk-show host was debating the energy
crisis with a caller.  While they spat venom at each other, I stared at the endless
succession of fields, houses, schools, cemeteries, all blurred by rain washing
across my window.
	I had picked my psychedelic sweatshirt for today, to add some color
to this otherwise dark day.  My brother wore a dark green sweatshirt, and he looked
with disdain at me in my bright colors, like he was the grownup and I was still
the little kid.  Heck, we were only a year apart, and my shirt was his hand-me-down
from a month ago.
	We were headed for Ligonier, a picturesque Pennsylvania town, complete 
with quaint shops, restaurants, a bandstand in the town square, and lots of streets
lined with sugar maples.  This late in October, the leaves would glow with brilliant
shades of yellow, orange, and red.  Though the sun was supposed to show its face
later in the day, I was looking forward to the contrast of the bright foliage against
a storm-bruised sky.
	We barely said a word during the hour-long drive.  By the time we reached the
edge of town, the rain had stopped, and the air had that delicious clarity unique 
to October, when brilliantly colored leaves litter the ground, carpeting still-green 
lawns with yellow fire.  We pulled into a small side lot to avoid curbside parking.
Dad hated parking along a street, since his car might get sideswiped by a careless 
driver.  
	A breeze was blowing, so we zipped up our jackets.  Dad, as expected, raised
the beige hood of his Chevrolet, towel in hand, and dried off the top of the engine.
I marveled that the engine block was still bright orange despite being five years
old.  He kept the air filter cover so shiny you could use it as a mirror.  Bob grabbed
a towel and dried the cold, beaded rain from the hood and roof.  I stood there,
purposeless, feeling like the lazy bum of the family.  A few minutes later, with the
car properly purified, we began our stroll down Main Street.
	Due to the stormy weather, the town was practically deserted, and I relished
the quiet.  Gone was the fear of being squeezed between strangers.  Today, we could
walk anywhere we wanted, with no one to slow us down.
	"Nine o'clock," Dad said, inspecting his watch.  Yes, we were the early
bird family.  We always arrived at the mall as the doors opened.  We would hang
out at the Waldenbooks' chain-link portcullis, tapping our feet as the store
manager raised the gate.  By lunchtime, we were usually tired of shopping, so lunch
was the last thing we did before heading home, just when most people were arriving.
	It was no different for trips to places like Ligonier.  We had pulled
into the town square by nine, an hour before anything but the local gas station was
open.  We spent the first hour walking Main Street, climbing the bandstand steps,
sitting briefly on the benches as a kind of unspoken tradition, all the while noting
the gorgeous leaves, the squirrels squabbling and gathering acorns for the winter.
	Despite the chilly weather, when the shops finally opened, we stopped
at the town square ice cream shop, where I bought my obligatory double scoop of
grape ice cream.  By the time I had finished the cone, my lips were stained a deep
shade of purple that would last the day.  Then it was on to some antiques shops,
where Dad gave his usual spiel.
	"Don't touch anything expensive," he said.  That was his mantra, and how it
made me hunger to reach up and touch those lead crystal decanters, with their cobalt
blue glass and glistening stoppers.  I loved to feel the weight of fine crystal
glassware, but my less than perfect track record with handling valuables left me
watching, not touching.  My brother appeared bored at the antique shop door, but
both of us perked up a minute later, when, inside this musty shop with its creaky
wooden floorboards, we had the chance to rummage through boxes full of dead people's
long forgotten junk.
	I saw the budding craftsman in my brother, the way he eyed objects that
had required talent to create.  He picked up old tools, inspected the finishes
of grandfather clocks, their pendulums motionless behind beveled glass windows.  I
was more fascinated by plastic shrunken heads and chunks of brightly colored glass.
And telephones, yes, of all styles and colors.  I was obsessed with answering them,
clicking the receiver, as if to summon some ghost of an operator living inside an
unplugged phone.  I always imagined hearing an old woman's voice, thin and airy,
lost somewhere far and away in space and time.  Then Dad passed by, urging me to be
careful, to not break anything, since all of this junk was so old that it was also
very fragile, and he'd have to buy anything we ruined.
	Soon, it was lunchtime, near the end of our day.  We chose the Lincoln Inn,
a place I had read about in the newspaper's food column.  A reviewer had raved about
their food -- affordable, prepared with surprising flair for the price, and the
reviewer had commented favorably about their spaghetti sauce.
	That's all I had needed to hear.  I was a spaghetti fanatic, and it was
my dish of choice no matter where we ate.  My brother was the hamburger connoisseur,
and the Lincoln Inn had that, too.  Dad's mood had improved throughout the day,
especially when the first rays of sunshine had cut through mist left behind by the
rain.  It was no longer cold outside, just pleasantly cool.
	Inside the restaurant, everyone was cordial, and in five minutes I had
fallen in love with our waitress, at least ten years my senior but smiling at
me in a way that left me blushing.  By the time my spaghetti arrived, I forgot 
her perfect face and focused my attention on the task at hand.  There's nothing
that uplifts one's mood more than a hot plate of good food and some fresh homemade
bread.  Throughout our meal, we talked about things we had seen in shops, though
we hadn't bought anything.  Dad had a way of defusing one's aspirations of buying
junk.  He was a compulsive spender on new merchandise, of course, but the moment 
anything broke, it usually got the heave-ho over the backyard fence, only to become
a fragmenting piece of junk on its downhill roll toward the river.  That's what
happened when anything he owned became imperfect.  After purchasing something,
Dad obsessed over guarding its virginal purity.  The harder he worked to preserve
perfect order, the angrier he became, the more betrayed he felt when the object 
of his obsession eventually malfunctioned.
	I remember one time, when my grandfather pulled up in front of our house,
a tiny, soft dinge in his car's left front fender.  Grandpap had appeared stricken
with grief, since his car was less than a year old.  I remember him standing
beside my dad.  Both of them shook their heads, hands on their hips.
	"This car is ruined, Sonny," Grandpap had said.  "After a wreck, a car
is just no good.  It'll never be the same again."
	Within four months, Grandpap had purchased a new car, relieving his own
nagging anxiety of driving a less-than-perfect car.  He and Dad were so alike
when it came to cars.  
	After lunch, we returned to our car, parked a quarter mile further down
Main Street.  Then began the drive home, with more talk radio in the background,
while my brother and I played "the truck game".  Every time we saw a semi truck,
we had to quickly blurt out the name brand -- International, Autocar, Peterbilt,
Kenworth, Mack.  Every now and then, we spotted a Volvo, one of the exotics.  While
naming the trucks, we kept a running total.  By the time we left the highway, the
count was usually close to a hundred.
	We had just left town and were descending a gentle slope on Route 30, when
we all noticed a car stopped ahead, in our lane, near a break in the central 
highway divide.  Neither its brake lights nor flashers were on, and I wondered if 
it had broken down.  Dad leaned forward, apparently puzzled by what lay in our 
path.  The car was a half mile or so away, and there was a fairly dense flow of 
traffic behind us and to our right.  He maintained speed, and then, with the car 
still dead in the lane, he braked firmly.  We decelerated pretty hard, and he began
a fresh litany of cuss words, under his breath at first, then with increasing
volume as he flashed with anger.  I figured he was pissed at himself for not having
switched lanes and braked sooner, and at that idiot of a driver, visible as a
silhouette up ahead, who hadn't moved aside, away from the approaching traffic.
I knew Dad was angry with the three of us, too, for showing our nerves at the 
events unfolding around us.
	As we braked hard, I turned around and saw a dark green Ford station wagon 
ten feet behind us, its front end nosing down, a young guy at the wheel, his jaws
clenched, both arms stiff, an older woman sitting beside him, her hands braced
on the dashboard, lipsticked mouth craned open.
	The Ford slowed down but maintained its distance, thank God.  As I breathed
a sigh of relief, I heard a loud screech, of rubber on pavement, and the crunch
of metal -- a thud melting away into lingering crinkles of buckled steel.  A
half-second later, another crunch, this one louder, closer, as the car behind us
lurched forward, the occupants' heads snapping back.  The car's headlights vanished
beneath the lower edge of our rear window.  Then the collision, a gentle bump that
barely jerked our heads.  We drifted forward, separating from the station wagon
behind us.  All the while, Dad was shouting, "Mary, we're hit!  Mary, we're hit!
Jesus Chris, we're hit!"
	In another second, we came to a complete stop, about twenty or thirty feet
behind the car stopped dead in front of us.  Then, with a squeal of tires, the car
in front of us that had been playing dead, that rusted brown Ford Torino, peeled 
out, fishtailed through the turnaround area, and accelerated loudly away from us 
in the opposite direction.
	"That son of a bitch!" Dad said.  "That dumb shit waited until everyone
got hit, and then he just left!  I should've hit him, too!"
	All traffic had stopped, including the slow lane, as cars pulled over to
the shoulder to offer help to the injured.  Looking out the back window,  I saw
clouds of steam rising from the shattered radiators of the two cars furthest back.
The station wagon behind us had a slightly crimped front bumper, and my heart
sank as I wondered how much damage we had sustained.
	Dad got out of the car and slammed the door behind himself.  He walked
back to see if anyone was hurt.  The guy behind us climbed out of his Ford wagon, 
massaging his neck, his passenger still seated, wincing as she turned her head 
slowly side to side.  My brother began to open his door.
	"Hey, stay in here," Mom said.
	"Why?  Everyone's stopped," Bob said.
	Mom turned around and surveyed the situation.
	"I wanna see what happened," Bob said.  He climbed out, closed the door
and straightened out his sweatshirt.  Dad was standing at the back of the car,
rubbing the rear bumper, silent cuss words hissing through his lips.  I could tell
they were his choicest, by the predominance of the letter "F" that began most of
them.  I, too, left the car and walked back to where Bob was standing.  The only
damage I could see was a slight dimple, about half the size of a dime, near the
middle of the rubber strip running the width of our rear bumper.
	"Thank God that's all that happened," I said.
	"What the hell are you talking about?" Dad said.  "There could be a lot
more damage we can't see.  The whole goddamn bumper could fall off."
	He bent over and cautiously laid his right palm on the bumper.  He pressed
gently several times, then harder, each time with more force.  With that, he locked
his arm at the elbow and pushed down with all his weight, rocking the car up and
down.  The bumper seemed pretty solid to me.  After all this testing, Dad's face 
softened, and his mood began to calm.  I dared not say anything more, however 
favorable, out of fear of riling him further.  Dad was very unpredictable at times
like these.  If I cracked a joke, he could either laugh or fly into a tantrum that
would leave us riding home in silence.
	We turned around to face several approaching emergency vehicles, sirens
blaring.  Three state police cruisers, as well as a Ligonier ambulance, pulled up to
the rear of the wreck scene.  Police and medics helped people out of their cars,
as drivers and passengers alike were interviewed for the accident investigation.
No one was seriously injured, though two people were given foam neck rings to wear
at the scene.
	A state cop approached my dad and asked for his license and registration.
Dad already had them both in hand, and he handed them over with nervous hesitation.
I knew he was worried that this was somehow all his fault.  Though he had obviously
come to a stop with room to spare, I knew he was worried about the testimony of
other drivers.  Would someone try to pin the blame on him to protect their own
driving records?  The more I thought about it, the more pissed off I became at the
driver who had sped off.  I wondered if he had purposely set the stage, by sitting
motionless in the fast line of a highway.  It certainly wasn't a vote of confidence,
him having sped off the moment the last car's hood had folded up in a puff of
ruptured radiator steam.
	The driver behind us tried to strike up a conversation with Dad.  He was
sixteen years old, and had just gotten his junior license.  This was his second
accident in a month, both of which had involved getting hit from behind.  The police
had already told him that the accident was partly his fault, because he had drifted
forward and struck our car.  I felt sorry for him -- he had done a great job, I
thought, in minimizing the damage to our car.  Heck, the mark on our rear bumper was
barely noticeable.  If I hadn't washed and waxed that bumper a hundred times before,
I wouldn't have even noticed it.
	I walked to the front of our car while they talked, since I could tell
the guy was really nervous, and I really didn't want to hear the platitudes that
Dad might offer up.  They'd be spoken through a veil of politeness, concealing
the contempt Dad felt for anyone who dared damage our car.  Mom had gotten out
to stretch her legs, and she, too, was watching Dad from a distance.
	We stood around for over an hour until it was finally Dad's turn to give
a statement.  I heard the police officer, speaking politely and precisely, jotting
down notes as Dad gave his take on what had happened.  Unfortunately, none of us
had noted the tag number of the car in front of us, so the police would have a
hard time figuring out if someone had tried to cause the wreck in the first place.
The interview ended, and we were once again left standing around.  With the work
involved in towing away two smashed cars and sweeping broken glass from the road,
the police didn't have time to talk further with Dad.  He was growing increasingly
impatient, wondering why he hadn't yet been given the go-ahead.
	"One of those imbeciles is probably trying to pin this on me," he said
at last.  He summoned the courage to ask one of the officers about the delay.
Five minutes later, he came back with his license and registration in hand.
	"Let's go," he said, with the hint of a grin on his face.  We jumped into
the car, eager to leave this scene of moaning motorists, folded car hoods, smashed
fenders, shattered glass, gleaming bits of chrome scattered about the road.
	"I feel sorry for that kid," Dad said, as we drove off.
	"Why?" Bob said.
	"He shouldn't have been following us as close as he was, but he barely
tapped us in the collision."
	I was shocked that Dad felt sympathy for the guy who had hit us.
	"His rear end really had a lot of damage," I said.  "That's his second
accident, and he didn't even cause it."
	"It was the guy farthest back who was most at fault," Bob said, and I
agreed with him.  We were on the open road again, the traffic thin because of the
wreck zone, now several miles behind us.
	"I still wonder what the heck that car was doing in front of us," Mom said.
	"Who knows," Bob said.  "Maybe he stalled and finally got his car started
again."
	"But why did he tear away from the scene after the wreck?" Mom said.
	"I wouldn't stay around," Bob said.  "It wasn't his fault."  
	Bob had been studying his traffic law, having borrowed the older neighbor
kid's driving manual.  Bob was the kind of guy who would be on the road on his
sixteenth birthday, and not a day later.
	"You can't just stop like that on a highway," Mom said.
	"No matter whether someone stops or not," Bob said, "the cars behind
have to allow room to stop.  If you can't slow down in time, it's your fault."
	"He's right," Dad said.  "We're the only ones who managed to stop in time
and not hit anyone."
	I was proud that my Dad was the only one completely in the right, given
the situation leading up to and through the accident.  What an excellent driver!
How many times I had seen him narrowly avoid disaster by swerving out of harm's 
way, or braking hard to avoid hitting the guy in front of us.  Each time we had
a near miss, I saw his eyes, fearfully expectant in the rear view mirror, never
trusting the car behind us.	
	"You're the only person completely in the right, with everything that
happened," Bob said.
	Dad suddenly looked sideways at Mom, his mouth hanging open a little.
He must have seen one of those looks on her face.
	"What?" he said, his voice raised slightly in pitch.  It was a sure sign
of agitation.
	"We waited a long time to brake, though," Mom said.
	What was she talking about, I wondered.  Dad stopped in time.  He braked
far enough back to come to a complete stop, never touching the car in front of us.
But I knew she had struck a nerve.  She had twanged at some underlying bad feeling
or guilt on Dad's part.
	"Well I'll be damned," Dad said, in long, drawn out words.  "Why don't you
just say it?  You think this was all my fault, don't you?"
	"I didn't say that," Mom said, her pitch raised, a half-smile of
indignation on her face.  She was trying to make light of the comment and calm
Dad's nerves before he went ballistic.
	"What the hell are you saying, then?" he said, and now his voice was
resolute, deep.  The veneer we had carefully tacked into place, throughout this
rainy-turned-sunny day, was peeling away.  The tiny metal tacks we had each tapped,
in turn, to secure Dad's good mood, were popping loose.  I could almost hear
them, pinging against the enfolding interior of our car.
	"I can't believe you would think this was my fault.  So I waited a little
while to stop.  I stopped, though, didn't I?  The asshole three cars back
didn't!  The guy behind him didn't either!"
	Mom went silent, her face blank as she stared straight ahead.  She'd
weather the initial storm and then begin the long, arduous process of apology.
Dad would rant the whole way home.  Upon pulling into the garage, he would leave
me and Bob to close the garage door, with all our button pressings, and then
we'd hear that loud, fateful slam of his bedroom door.  We wouldn't see him again
for the rest of the day.  When he finally emerged from his sulking lair, we'd
avoid looking at him while listening carefully to his every footstep until he
returned to his room.  Over time, we'd gauge his anger by the loudness of each
successive door slam.  In a couple of days, we might be back to normal.  
	"I'll let you drive next time," Dad said.
	"Hon, I didn't say it was your fault.  It wasn't.  But--"
	"Then what are you saying?" Dad said.  We had accelerated to seventy
miles per hour, and the highway here was a little bumpy, so I really noticed our
speed.  I looked over at Bob, whose brow was furrowed.  He was undoubtedly figuring
out the rights and wrongs of this traffic accident.  I wanted to ask him his
opinion on all of this, but I was afraid to say a word.  If Dad saw us whispering to
each other in the back seat, he'd get even madder.
	"I was just saying that you could've switched lanes when you first saw him,
or started slowing down sooner."
	As I thought about it, her logic grew on me.  I looked to the white plastic
paperclip fastened to Dad's visor, snug against the roof.  It was from Eismont's
Service Station, where Dad took the car for its annual state inspection.  The words
"Drive Defensively" appeared on the clip, in bold black letters.  For the first
time, the meaning of that phrase dawned on me.
	"I'm sorry I waited too long for you!" Dad said.  "Did you hear our tires
screech?"
	"No," Mom said, shaking her head, still avoiding eye contact with Dad.
	"Did you feel us fishtailing, or swerving, or losing control?"
	"No," Mom said again, that half-grin returning to her face.
	"Then I didn't brake too hard," Dad said.  He watched for any reaction
from her.  He was teetering on the edge of his cliff of anger.  I thought he had
already leapt beyond the point of no return, but now I realized he hadn't yet
crossed the precipice.  He glanced rapidly back and forth, between Mom and the 
road in front of us.  She said nothing, but it was clear, by the thoughtful, 
almost mesmerized look on her face, that she was considering his last words.
	"Well, I'll go to Hell!" Dad said, his head bouncing as he spat his
words on the steering wheel.  "You really do think it was my fault!"
	Mom turned to him, but it was too late.  
	He exploded into a tirade of cursing more colorful than any I could 
remember.  My memory tends to erase the specifics, as to the precise words pouring
from his mouth.  After about ten minutes of it, he fell silent.  We were still a 
half hour from home, so we'd all have to keep quiet, not move a muscle until we 
pulled into the garage.  Dad would seal himself inside his tomb of anger, the 
door slammed shut, brass button-lock pressed and clicked neatly into place.
	As we drove on, and our car swayed and bounced over gentle ripples in the
pavement, I watched Dad's hands on the wheel.  I understood Mom's logic, and,
for the first time in my life, I doubted if Dad really was the perfect driver.
I thought of the thousands of hours we had spent on the road together.  I could
recall many situations in which Dad had done the right thing.
	But we no longer had the infallible hands of a god on our steering wheel.
These were the same hands that left drips of paint on our awnings, down our
walls.  The same hands with fingers that danced like lightning across the
typewriter keyboard but littered the page with garish misspellings.
	We reached home in one piece.  But later, as I stood in my bedroom and
felt the whole house shudder to the slam of Dad's bedroom door, I knew life
was safer with my feet planted firmly on solid ground.