Free An American Dream by Norman Mailer Page B

lining the East River Drive, but it had no barbed wire on top, I was able to climb up and get over without ripping my pants, and come down the other side. There was now a jump of eight feet further down to a strip of curb, but I dropped—I hated jumping—but I dropped, jarred my ankle, hurt something minor in my groin, some little muscle, and made my way along the southbound traffic whose drivers were crawling by at five miles an hour in the unobstructed lane. Deborah was a hundred feet down the road. I had a glimpse of four or five cars collided into one another, and a gathering of forty or fifty people. A magnesium flare had been lit and it gave off the white intent glare which surrounds workingmen doing serious work at night. Two police cars flanked the scene, their red lights revolving like beacons. In the distance, I could hear the siren of an ambulance, and in the center was that numb mute circle of silence which surrounds a coffin in the center of a room. I could hear a woman weeping hysterically in one of the automobiles which had collided. There were the short, rapt, irritable tones of three big men talking to one another, a professional conversation, two police and a detective, I realized, and farther on an elderly man with dirty gray hair, a large nose, an unhealthy skin, and a pairof pink-tinted glasses was sitting in his car, the door open, holding his temple, and groaning in a whining gurgling sound which betrayed the shoddy state of his internal plumbing.
    But I had broken through the crowd and was about to kneel at Deborah’s body. An arm in a blue serge sleeve held me back.
    “Officer, that’s my wife.”
    The arm went down suddenly. “You better not look, mister.”
    There was nothing agreeable to see. She must first have struck the pavement, and the nearest car had been almost at a halt before it hit her. Perhaps it pushed the body a few feet. Now her limbs had the used-up look of rope washed limp in the sea, and her head was wedged beneath a tire. There was a man taking photographs, his strobe light going off each time with a mean crackling hiss, and as I knelt, he stepped back and turned to someone else, a doctor with a satchel in his hand, and said, “She’s yours.”
    “All right, move the car back,” the doctor said. Two policemen near me pushed on the automobile and retired the front wheels a foot before the car bumped gently into the car behind it. I knelt ahead of the medical examiner and looked at her face. It was filthy with the scrape of asphalt and tire marks. Just half of her was recognizable, for the side of her face which caught the tire was swollen. She looked like a fat young girl. But the back of her head, like a fruit gone rotten and lying in its juices, was the center of a pond of coagulated blood near to a foot in diameter. I stayed between the police photographer who was getting ready to take more pictures and the medical examiner who was opening his satchel, and still on my knees, touched my face to hers, being careful to catch some of the blood on my hands, and even (as I nuzzled her hair with my nose) a streak or two more on my cheeks. “Oh, baby,” I said aloud. It might have been good to weep, but nothing of that sort was even near. No, shock and stupor would be the best I could muster. “Deborah,” I said, and like an echo from the worst of one’s past came a clear sense of doing this before, of making love to somewoman who was not attractive to me, of something unpleasant in her scent or dead in her skin, and me saying “Oh, darling, oh, baby,” in that rape of one’s private existence which manners demand. So, now, the “Oh, darling” came out full of timbre, full of loss. “Oh, Christ, Christ,” I repeated dully.
    “Are you the husband?” a voice asked in my ear. Without turning around, I had an idea of the man who spoke. He was a detective, and he must be at least six feet tall, big through the shoulder and with the beginning of a gut. It was an Irish