No one around the accident who crowded behind the police lines with looks of worry, curiosity, thrill, and sympathy etched unmistakably on their faces, even those who tried not to betray their particular reasons for having rushed down to the corner after hearing the screeching and the scream and the unmistakable crunch of metal on metal by the ton, unable to leave the scene until they had seen firsthand the results of the work of the emergency crews with their torches and saws, could stand the waiting. Three large men were gathered together to one side, having found some shade and a long low wooden fence rail that served well as a bench. All had come from their patio table of empty pint glasses and residual greasy red bones that had been hot wings but moments before the commotion on the corner, and talked loudly to each other about what awful shape the survivors, if any, would be in when finally pulled from the heap of gnarled metal that had been cars, until the sharp and disapproving glance of a young mother in blue jeans and pea coat standing nearby had the effect she intended, which was not to change the attitudes of men who regarded such tragedies as if they were merely the highlight clips from some gruesome sport on television so much as to quiet them enough to cease reminding her of the utter lack of what she had always considered to be a fundamental human sense of compassion in the face of suffering, and not incidentally to prevent them from muttering callous commentary and jokes that she was sure to overhear later slipping tonelessly from the mouth of her son to one or another of his playmates, spoken without awareness of the meaning or the connotations of jesting at death but only because he tended to repeat things he heard when followed by laughter.

It had not occurred to the thin bald man on the other side of the street unconsciously rubbing his large bony wrist—who, bent on rediscovering himself in the newfound freedom of retirement, had been out walking all morning, reviewing the streets of his neighborhood and reminiscing about who had lived where, wondering how old their children would be now since last time he’d seen them it must’ve been, God, 1987? No, they moved back to Jersey the summer after Linda died, so it would have been 1985—that his wrist felt so large and naked because he’d decided this morning for the first time in years not to put on the watch, for a retiree, he proclaimed to himself, has earned the right to keep no schedule but what he chooses. More curious about the reactions of the spectators than the accident itself, he scanned the faces in the crowd and lingered, upon catching her eye, at the young mother turning from the group of men with accusation still wrought in her brow, just as her eyes swept smoothly down his face to his chest and then, the tension about her eyes passing away like a disappearing shadow, darted toward something else that must have caught her attention, but he kept watching her for no other reason than that something about her manner seemed agreeable as she, still looking toward whatever had drawn her attention, absent-mindedly and lazily rubbed the top of her son’s head, no higher than her hips, bathed in straight blond hair shorn angularly and shining almost white in the sun. The old man suddenly noticed that his arms were raised awkwardly and that he was rubbing his wrist; realizing that her chestward glance must have been directed toward that curious movement, he immediately and self-consciously dropped his arms to his sides and put his hands in his pockets. Raising his eyes again toward the dark-haired woman in the pea coat, he saw instead a reflection as if from far away, a frightfully malformed image of that unconscious moment: a lanky hunched old man with slightly sunken eyes and liver spots and a frantic paperwhite fringe of hair above his ears, wringing his hands manically while gawking at a motor vehicle accident, but this passed as soon as it had appeared, and he found her still gazing distantly over to his right. He turned to see what so captivated her but saw only a patch of cloudless sky partly framed by the storefronts that lined the street, partly fettered by an abnormally cluttered and unsightly moiré of wires running askew from the top of a wooden telephone pole on the corner where so many men in dark uniforms were still rushing about and yelling to each other.

Regarding those men now, the old man shifted his weight to his other foot and in a familiar motion swept his right hand from the pocket of his tan slacks into his front shirt pocket and adeptly pulled out a cigarette, patted his pockets to locate his lighter, and turned away to look for a place to sit.

mr. faulkner? mr. faulkner?