Free Pitch Dark by RENATA ADLER Page B

It’s all right, ma’am, the policeman says, I’ve nearly finished it. I say, But you haven’t seen my car or even the truck. He does not reply. I say, Surely you’re going to come and see the truck. As though this were a new thought to him, he gets up reluctantly from behind the desk. His helmet has been on the whole time. And I am still, or again, deluded, perhaps because they both seem so slow and unintelligent, with a kind of idiot trust. At the door, the driver, perhaps by now embarrassed, says, The damage of course is nothing. I just didn’t want them coming after me about your car. In this matter of the commas. In this matter of the paragraphs. In this matter of the scandal at the tennis courts. Not right here, I think, not now.
    We walk to the truck. When the policeman finally sees, after I’ve pointed it out to him, that the bumper is bent, he starts to press his own foot against it, pauses, steps back, says to the driver, I guess you’ll want to bend that back. The driver, sensing perhaps a loss of allegiance, looks at us both and says, very slowly, I’ll want to get an estimate. The policeman, as though recollecting himself, says, He’ll want to get an estimate. I say, Look, since I’m responsible, why don’t we go together for an estimate, and I’ll just pay. Silence. The driver says, Oh, I can’t go now. I ask when he might be able to go. He looks away and says he can’t say at the moment. Beginning at last to get an intimation, I say, Why don’t you simply tell me your own estimate of the damages, and perhaps I could pay it to you now. He hesitates, seems to calculate, says, No, I’m afraid I couldn’t do that. The policeman has been standing there, looking off into the distance. I ask, either of them really, what I ought to do. I ask whether I oughtn’t to see the truck driver’s license. No reply. I look toward the policeman. He asks me when I’ll be going back to the United States. I say, Friday, or Saturday. He says to the driver, Why don’t you give the lady your phone number, and she can call you Friday afternoon. I say, That’s fine, but you know, I really ought to have his license number. The policeman says, I’ll just write his phone number down for you; asks the driver; writes it down at his dictation. They walk away, as though the matter were at an end. I say, Officer, I think I’ll need that rental agreement, if you’ve finished with it. He says, I returned it to you, I believe. I say, Maybe we left it at the station; and start walking toward the door. I have been standing, as it happens, further from the truck and nearer the station, than either of them. The rental agreement is lying beside the ledger, on the desk. I take it. There is a moment of tension. Then the policeman says, He will have that estimate for you Friday afternoon. The driver smiles. We walk back to the road. As we part, the driver climbs into his cab, smiles again, and says, oddly, You have my word.
    Quanta, Amy said, on the train, in that blizzard, in answer to my question. Hello, this is Medea. Wasn’t always. Well, he asked for me, you inquired after me, at the conference in the Motel on the Mountain. The motel has since become, what does it matter what it has since become. I don’t think they hold conferences there. It is where we began.
    Driving onward, I simply do not understand it. What word. Why no exchange of license numbers. There was an undertone, certainly of complicity, but what could possibly have been the underlying calculation? It did not seem, after all, so very cagey to have given me his phone number; better, in some ways, I would have thought, to ask for mine. It was fobbed off, I suppose, in lieu of the driver’s license, and of the policeman’s actual report. But to what end? I still tend to mistake their apparent lack of intelligence or competence for guilelessness. The policeman never even looked at my car; and if they were planning, for instance, to say that I’d hit and run,