Walkers (5 page)

Dr. Hovde sat quietly while Joana talked. His eyes never left her face.

"Well ... that's it," she said at last, feeling somehow that she had not done a good job in the telling.

"I see. Well, I wouldn't worry about it too much if I were you," said the doctor. "It's not an uncommon experience."

"It's not?"

"Not at all. In the case of a sudden shock like an accident or a fire or, in your case, a near-drowning, the mind can play some mighty strange tricks."

"I don't think you understand me, Doctor. What I'm saying is that it wasn't a
near
-drowning last night, it was real. I died in that swimming pool. For a period of time, I have no idea how long, since time had no meaning where I was, I was really dead. I crossed over, then somehow made it back."

"Yes, I can see how you might believe that. There have been a number of books recently about the experiences of people brought back from the so-called brink of death. Have you read any of them?"

"No."

"You've heard of the books, perhaps?"

"Maybe I have." Joana began to feel irritated at the doctor's professional detachment. "Anyway, I don't see what those books have to do with me."

"Sometimes an idea or an impression planted in the subconscious can be blown to the surface, so to speak, at a time of great stress."

"I didn't know you were a psychiatrist," Joana said coolly.

Dr. Hovde chuckled. "I'm not, of course, just an old-fashioned G.P. Still, I can pull out a little elementary Freud now and then if the occasion calls for it. If you want my strictly medical opinion of what caused this 'weird experience' of yours, I would call it anoxic hallucination, sensory distortions caused by temporary lack of oxygen delivered to the brain."

"Do you think that's it?"

"What else could it be?"

"I—I don't know. I have a feeling it's not over."

Dr. Hovde moved to a desk and scribbled on a prescription pad. "I can understand how this would cause you some anxiety, so I'll prescribe a tranquilizer for you. If you still feel edgy, take one every four hours for a couple of days. After that you shouldn't need them."

"All right," Joana said. She took the slip of paper, folded it, and tucked it into her bag. The doctor was so logical and reasonable in his explanation, she began to wonder if perhaps he was right. After all, the oxygen had been cut off from her brain for a short period, and that could have triggered the whole outlandish experience.

But she did not think so.

Dr. Hovde walked her back down the hallway to the waiting room. "Just take it easy the rest of the day," he said. "Do something you enjoy. How's that for doctor's orders? I wish I could give them to myself, but this is my afternoon in the emergency ward."

"Is that so?" Joana said politely. Her thoughts were elsewhere.

"Yes, I try to put in one or two half-days a week," the doctor said. "With a practice like mine you can get caught up in treating strep infections and flu, and forget how to deal with some of the more violent

things that can happen to the human body."

"I suppose so," Joana said.

"Take care of yourself now, and if there's any problem, give me a call."

"I will."

Joana left the building and walked up the street to her car. The overcast was rapidly burning away, and it looked like it was going to be a lovely day.

She was not ready to go home, so decided she would stop in Westwood to get her prescription filled and do some window-shopping. The thought cheered her, and she paid no attention when a Chevy station wagon pulled out into the street behind her and followed her in on Santa Monica Boulevard.

The streets of Westwood thronged, as usual, with shoppers, strollers, college students, and tourists. And as usual, there was not a parking place to be seen anywhere. Joana sometimes wondered where all the cars came from that lined both sides of the streets from Wilshire to Le Conte. There never seemed to be anyone parking or leaving, they were always just...there. However, the sun was fully out now and a gentle breeze blew in from the ocean, and Joana did not mind having to walk a few blocks.

For several minutes she drove back and forth on the oddly angled streets, making her way north block by block, it was several blocks up Hilgard, along the eastern edge of the UCLA campus, that she finally found an available parking place. In the heavy traffic Joana paid no attention to the station wagon that stayed doggedly behind her.

She backed the Datsun into the space on Hilgard and dropped a quarter into the parking meter. Several cars behind her, the station wagon double-parked and sat there with the engine idling. Joana glancecl back at the driver, a white-faced woman with a grim mouth and an odd dusty look to her eyes. Feeling uncomfortable, Joana turned away. Something about the woman seemed to trigger a memory, an unpleasant memory. Joana put the thought out of her mind and walked down the street toward Le Conte. Bullock's was there, just across the street from the campus. Joana decided to save the big department store for last, checking out the smaller specialty shops of Westwood first.

On her right the green lawn of the campus sloped up and away. Students lounged about on the grass. Some dozed, some read books, and some were couples with eyes only for each other. Joana, barely four years out of college herself, marveled at how young they looked. How young and unmarked by the world.

Behind her the station wagon eased forward. The woman at the wheel paid no attention to the exasperated drivers behind her and crawled along the line of parked cars, keeping pace with Joana.

At Le Conte Joana turned right, staying alongside the campus, and stopped for the traffic light, waiting to cross at Tiverton. Twenty yards up the street the station wagon stopped too and waited.

The red DON'T WALK light blinked off and the white WALK came on. Joana started across the street.

To her left an automobile engine revved suddenly. Tires shrieked on the asphalt. There were shouts of warning from the other pedestrians. A little girl screamed.

For an instant Joana was frozen in the crosswalk, a third of the way across the street. She saw the station wagon rushing toward her like some maddened beast. Through the windshield she could see the face of the woman at the wheel. It was a mask of mindless fury, the lips skinned back from yellowed teeth in a soundless snarl.

Someone clutched at Joana from behind and she snapped out of her trance. She sprang forward in a headlong leap, striking the pavement with her hands. She rolled over and over toward the far curb. A blast of wind buffeted her as the station wagon roared past her, inches away.

There was a metallic clang as the wagon caromed off a parked car and bounced up over the curb. It crossed the sidewalk and continued up onto the lawn, slowing down but still scattering pedestrians and

students.

Dazed, her ears ringing, Joana sat up on the pavement. She was surrounded by people, many of them college students. They were looking down at her with concern while they watched the station wagon roll slowly up the bank on the other side of the street. Everyone spoke at once.

"Are you hurt?"

"... ran right through the stop light..."

"...didn't even slow down..."

"...must be crazy..."

"...drunk..."

Joana rose shakily to her feet. Her hands were scraped where they had hit the pavement, but as far as she could tell, there were no other injuries. She turned with the others to watch as across the street the station wagon plowed heavily into a thicket of laurel and stalled. The engine died, and for a moment there was an unnatural silence over the scene.

The door of the station wagon swung open. Slowly the woman got out from behind the steering wheel. She was a short, unremarkable-looking woman, a trifle overweight and wearing a cotton print dress. Her gray hair was in disarray, she looked confused. The woman turned her head from side to side, as though searching for something, but her eyes were empty.

The people down in the street who had been watching her suddenly came to life. A crowd surged forward and up the embankment toward the woman. As they converged on her, the woman crumpled to the ground like a marionette with the strings cut.

Down on the street a black-and-white police car pulled into the block and jammed to a stop. Two young officers jumped out. One of them ran up the grassy slope toward the woman who lay beside the station wagon. The other listened briefly to a group of

witnesses, then came over to Joana.

"Are you hurt, miss?"

"No. I scraped my hands a little when I jumped out of the way, that's all."

"Those people say the vehicle appeared to head right for you and accelerate."

"I don't know, everything happened so fast. I didn't see anything until I was out in the crosswalk and all of a sudden the car was coming at me. I just had time to jump out of the way."

"I'll need your name and address for the report."

Joana fumbled out her driver's license and handed it to the young policeman. He made careful entries in a pocket-size notebook.

"Jimmy!"

The officer looked up at his partner called from across the street. He was kneeling there on the grass beside the woman.

"Yo?"

"Come over here."

The policeman called Jimmy returned Joana's license and closed the notebook. He slipped it into his shirt pocket and crossed the street. The people who were standing around moved after him in a group. Joana was carried along with them.

The two policemen stood together and talked in low, urgent voices. The crowd stayed back to give them a semicircle of space. The people gave their attention to the woman who lay face up on the ground. Several of them ventured closer.

"What's the matter with her?" somebody asked.

"She fainted."

"Fainted, hell. She's dead."

"She can't be. Her car didn't hit anything solid, just kind of mushed into the hedge."

"I don't care, man, the woman's dead. Just take a look."

Joana turned away and started to walk back down the embankment toward the street. The policeman who had talked to her followed and caught up with her.

"Excuse me, Miss..." He consulted his notebook. Miss Raitt."

"Yes?"

"Did you get a good look at the woman who was driving the station wagon?"

"Not really, it all happened so quickly."

"Would you mind taking a look at her now?"

"Is it necessary?"

"Some of the witnesses say she seemed to aim her car at you deliberately. We have to know if you

recognize her."

"All right."

Joana let herself be led back to where the woman lay on the grassy slope. The people standing around made way for her. The woman's eyes were closed now, the expression on her face almost serene in contrast to the mask of ferocity Joana had glimpsed as the car bore down on her. Were it not for the dead gray pallor of her face, the woman could have been sleeping.

"Know her?" the policeman asked.

"I've never seen her before."

"Are you sure?"

"Positive. Can I go now?"

The policeman glanced over at his partner, who was taking down the names of witnesses. "Yes, you can go," he said. "If there's an inquest you may be called upon to testify."

Joana nodded and started again for the street. She felt numb, and strangely detached from the recent violent events. When she reached the sidewalk, instead of heading back toward her car, she crossed the street to a drugstore and found a telephone booth. She searched for a moment through her bag, then pulled out the card she was looking for:
Peter Landau, Psychic Counseling
.

A Wednesday afternoon was generally one of the quieter periods in the emergency ward of the West Los Angeles Receiving Hospital. Later on, as the weather grew warmer, they would begin getting more seasonal action from the beach—the people who swallowed too much seawater or absorbed too much sun. But before the hot weather set in, there would be just the normal emergency-ward customers. They would get the usual number of children who had ingested some noxious substance found uncapped and unguarded under the sink. There would be a few dog bites, a housewife who sliced her finger along with the carrots, a broken bone, a sprain, a concussion, a coronary. A varied list, but routine, and spaced out nicely over the day. Fridays and Saturdays, business picked up. That was when they got the sick drunks, the bum-trippers, the torn-up traffic victims, the losers of fights, the mugging victims, and the gunshot wounds. On Friday and Saturday nights there was hardly ever a chance for a doctor on the emergency ward to slip away for a quiet cigarette, which was what Dr. Warren Hovde was doing on the bright June afternoon when Mrs. Yvonne Carlson was brought in.

One look at the woman's body told Dr. Hovde there was nothing he or anyone else could do for her. Nevertheless, he ran through the standard tests before marking her officially D.O.A. and sending the body down to the pathology lab in the basement.

Since he had the time to kill, Dr. Hovde took the police report on Mrs. Carlson, Caucasian, fifty-seven, back to the office cubicle to read while he treated himself to another cigarette. Dr. Hovde was careful never to smoke at his own office where one of his patients might see him. It would undermine the stern antismoking lectures he delivered regularly.

He leaned back in the wooden swivel chair, propped his feet on a pulled-out drawer, and began to read the formal police version of the accident in Westwood a little more than an hour earlier. Suddenly he sat forward when he recognized the name of Joana Raitt in the report. He went back and started the report again, reading the whole thing through carefully.

When he had finished he carried the folder with him out to the ward. There he spoke to the young resident who was treating a roller-skater for a pair of abraded knees.

"Do you think you can manage without me for a few minutes?" Dr. Hovde said.

The resident looked around at the nearly empty ward. "Unless we get an earthquake."

"I'll be in the pathology lab."