Fires. Essays, Poems, Stories

out, the headlamp was gone. There was also a small dent in the left front fender. In the dent, a smear of blood coated the metal and several dun-colored feathers were pressed into the blood. It was a hen pheasant, he'd seen that the moment before the impact.
    Shirley leaned over to his side of the car and pressed the button for the window. She was still half-asleep. "Gerry?' she called to him.
    "Just a minute. Just stay in the car," he said.
    "I wasn't about to get out," she said. "Just hurry, I mean."
    He walked back along the shoulder. A truck went by throwing up a mist of spray, and the driver looked out of the cab at him as he roared past. Gerry hunched his shoulders against the cold and kept walking until he came to the sprinkling of broken glass in the
    road. He walked further, looking closely into the wet grass beside the road, until he found the bird. He couldn't bring himself to touch it, but he looked at it for a minute; crumpled, its eyes open, a bright spot of blood on its beak.
    When he was back in the car, Shirley said, "I didn't know what had happened. Did it do much damage?"
    "It knocked out a headlight and made a little dent in the fender," he said. He looked back the way they'd come, and then pulled out onto the road.
    "Did it kill it?" she said. "I mean, it must have, of course. I suppose it didn't have a chance."
    He looked at her and then back at the road. "We were going seventy miles an hour."
    "How long have I been asleep?"
    When he didn't answer, she said, "I have a headache. I have a bad headache. How far are we from Carmel?"
    "A couple of hours," he said.
    "I'd like something to eat and some coffee. Maybe that'll make my head feel better," she said.
    "We'll stop in the next town," he said.
    She turned the rearview mirror and studied her face. She touched here and there under her eyes with her finger. Then she yawned and turned on the radio. She began to spin the knob.
    He thought about the pheasant. It had happened very fast, but it was clear to him he'd hit the bird deliberately. "How well do you really know me?" he said.
    "What do you mean?" she said. She let the radio alone for a minute and leaned back against the seat.
    '1 just said, How well do you know me?"
    "I don't have any idea what you mean."
    He said, "Just how well do you know me? That's all I'm asking."
    "Why do you ask me that at this time of the morning?"
    "We're just talking. I just asked you how well you knew me. Would I"—how should he put it?—"am I trustworthy, for instance? Do you trust me?" It wasn't clear to him what he was asking, but he felt on the edge of something.
    "Is it important?" she said. She looked at him steadily.
    He shrugged. "If you don't think it is, then I guess it isn't." He
    gave his attention back to the road. At least in the beginning, he thought, there'd been some affection. They began living together because she had suggested it for one thing, and because at the time he'd met her, at the party of a friend in a Pacific Palisades apartment, he'd wanted the kind of life he imagined she could give him. She had money and she had connections. Connections were more important than money. But money and connections both—that was unbeatable. As for him, he was just out of graduate studies at UCLA, a drama major—wasn't the city filled with them though— and, except for university theater productions, an actor without a salaried role to his credit. He was also broke. She was older by twelve years, had been married and divorced twice, but she had some money and she took him to parties where he met people. As a result, he'd landed a few minor roles. He could call himself an actor at long last, even if he didn't have more than a month or two month's work each year. The rest of the time, these last three years, he'd spent lying in the sun near her pool, or at parties, or else running here and there with Shirley.
    "Let me ask you this then," he went on. "Do you think I'd act, that I'd ever do something against my own best interests?"
    She looked at him and tapped a tooth with her thumbnail.
    "Well?" he said. It still wasn't clear to him where this might lead. But he intended to keep on with it.
    "Well, what?" she said.
    "You heard me."
    "I think you would, Gerald. I think you would if you thought it was important enough at the time. Now don't ask me any more questions, okay?"
    The sun was out now. The clouds had broken up. He began to see signs announcing various services in the next town. There was more