It was what Charlotte would have called “a throwaway line”-a reference to any extraneous dialogue in a screenplay-but after the accident that killed Joe and Meg, the distraction word lingered.
Why hadn’t they been wearing their seat belts, for example? Had the girl been giving him a blow job? Probably she had; Joe’s fly was open, and his penis was poking out of his pants when the body was discovered. He’d been thrown from the car and died immediately. Meg wasn’t so lucky. The girl was found alive, but with her head and neck at an unnatural angle; she was wedged between the brake and the accelerator pedal. She’d died in the ambulance, before reaching the hospital.
What had led Joe and Meg to cut two days of classes in Boulder, and make the drive to Winter Park, at first seemed pretty obvious; yet two days of new, nonstop snow wasn’t the prevailing reason. Besides, it had been a typical late-March snow, wet and heavy-the skiing must have been slow, the visibility on the mountain treacherous. And from the look of the ski house in Winter Park -that is, before the cleaning lady rushed in and made some attempt to restore order-Joe and the girl had spent most of their time indoors. It didn’t appear that they’d done much skiing. Perhaps it had no more significance than most youthful experiments, but the young couple seemed to have made a game out of sleeping in every bed in the house.
Naturally, there would remain some unanswerable questions. If they weren’t in Winter Park to ski, why had they waited until the evening of the second day to drive back to Boulder? Joe knew that after midnight and before dawn, the ski patrol was in the habit of closing U.S. 40 over Berthoud Pass, whenever there was any avalanche danger; with such a heavy, wet snow, and because it was the avalanche time of year, possibly Joe hadn’t wanted to risk leaving before light the next morning, when they might still be blasting avalanches above Berthoud Pass. Of course the two lovers could have waited until daylight of the following morning, but maybe Joe and Meg had thought that missing two days of classes was enough.
It was snowing heavily in Winter Park when they left, but there was next to no ski traffic on U.S. 40 in the direction of I-70, and that highway was well traveled. (Well, it was a weekday night; for most schools and colleges that had a March break, the vacation was over.) Joe and Meg must have passed the snowplow at the top of Berthoud Pass; the plowman remembered Joe’s car, though he’d noticed only the driver. Apparently, the plowman hadn’t seen the passenger; perhaps the blow job was already in progress. But Joe had waved to the plowman, and the plowman recalled waving back.
Only seconds later, the plowman spotted the other car-it was coming in the other direction, from I-70, and the plowman presumed it was “a goddamn Denver driver.” This was because the driver was going much too fast for the near-blizzard conditions. In the plowman’s estimation, Joe had been driving safely-or at least slowly enough, given the storm and the slickness of the wet snow on the highway. Whereas the Denver car-if, indeed, the driver was from Denver -was fishtailing out of control as the car came over the pass. The plowman had flashed his lights, but the other car never slowed down.
“It was just a blue blur,” the plowman said in his deposition to the police. (What kind of blue? he was asked.) “With all the snow, I’m not really sure about the color,” the plowman admitted, but Danny would always imagine the other car as an unusual shade of blue-a customized job, as Max had called it.
Anyway, that mystery car just disappeared; the plowman never saw the driver.
The snowplow then made its way downhill, over the pass-in the direction of I-70-and that was when the plowman came upon the wreck on U.S. 40, Joe’s upside-down car. There’d been no other traffic over the pass, or the plowman would have seen it, so the plowman’s interpretation of the skid marks in the snow was probably correct. The other car-its tires spinning, its rear end drifting sideways-had skidded from the uphill lane into the downhill lane, where Joe was driving. From the tracks in the snow, the plowman could see that Joe had been forced to change lanes-to avoid the head-on collision. But the two cars had never made contact; they’d traded lanes without touching.
On a wet, snowy road, the plowman knew, a car coming uphill can recover from a skid-just take your foot off the gas, and the car slows down and stops skidding. In Joe’s case, of course, his car just kept going; he hit the huge snowbank that had buried the guardrail on the steep side of U.S. 40, where the drivers coming up Berthoud Pass don’t like to look down. It’s a long way down at that section of the road, but the soft-looking snowbank was densely packed and frozen hard; the snowbank bounced Joe’s car back into the uphill lane of U.S. 40, where the car tipped over. From those skid marks, the plowman could tell that Joe’s car had slid on its roof down the steepest part of the highway. Both the driver’s-side door and the door on the passenger side had sprung open.
How had one of Danny Angel’s interviewers asked the question? “Wouldn’t you say, Mr. Angel-regarding how slowly your son was driving, and the fact that he didn’t hit the other car-that, in all likelihood, it was an accident your son and the girl would have survived if they’d been wearing their seat belts?”
“In all likelihood,” Danny had repeated.
The police said it was impossible to imagine that the driver of the other car hadn’t been aware of Joe and Meg’s predicament; even with all the fishtailing, the so-called Denver driver must have seen what had happened to Joe’s car. But he didn’t stop, whoever he (or she) was. If anything, according to the plowman, the other car had sped up-as if to get away from the accident.
Danny and his dad rarely talked about the accident itself, but of course the cook knew what his writer son thought. To anyone with an imagination, to lose a child is attended by a special curse. Dominic understood that his beloved Daniel lost his beloved Joe over and over again-maybe in a different way each time. Danny would also wonder if the other car ever had a driver, for surely it was the blue Mustang. That rogue car had been looking for Joe all these years. (At the time of the accident on Berthoud Pass, it had been almost fourteen years since that near accident in the alleyway in back of the Court Street house in Iowa City, when Max-who’d seen the blue Mustang more than once-and the eight-year-old Joe himself had sworn there was no driver.)
It was a driverless blue Mustang, and it had a mission. Just as Danny, in his mind’s eye, had once imagined his slain two-year-old in diapers on Iowa Avenue, so had the plowman from Winter Park found Joe’s actual body-dead in the road.