Good Neighbors Read Free

its marquee; passing a bookstore with a bunch of forty-cent Gold Medal paperbacks piled in its window; passing a stack of dewy morning-edition newspapers tied together with twine and dropped in front of a newsstand which is padlocked shut for the night.
    In another forty-five minutes, a fat man with twenty-year-old pimple scars and the matching twenty-year-old anger of someone who got wedgies when he was in grade school will show up, unlock the newsstand, and cut the twine off the stack of newspapers.
    The papers claim it’s March 13th, but looking at the dark horizon while she drives, Kat knows it won’t be March 13th for another three hours or more as far as most people are concerned, no matter what the newspapers say.
    She thinks it would be neat if she could stop her car and read one of the newspapers and find out what will happen tomorrow while she’s sleeping the day away, but, of course, even papers with today’s date only contain old news, news about things that’ve already happened, things you can never change. Even at four o’clock in the morning.
     
     
    As Kat drives along a lonely stretch of road, another car, a light blue 1963 Fiat 600, which has been gaining on her for the last half minute or so – she’s seen the small round headlights growing with each passing second – zips by with a whistle of wind and the high-pitched squeal of its straining engine and the whine of its exhausted whitewall tires.
    A moment after it passes her, Kat turns her car left, onto a night-quiet street, and continues her drive home, southwest toward Queens Boulevard.
    Had she continued straight, she might have seen the Fiat moving toward the next intersection. She might have seen the intersection’s green light turn yellow. She might have heard the RPMs kick up a notch as the driver of the Fiat strained the small car’s small engine further, pressing the gas pedal to the floorboard. She might have seen the yellow light turn red. She might have seen the Fiat fly into the intersection despite the red light. She might have seen a green pickup truck entering the intersection at the same time from the right. She might have seen it slam into the Fiat, right into the passenger’s side door, and heard a crash like thunder; seen the Fiat spin; seen it flip as the driver turned the steering wheel the wrong way at the wrong time; seen it roll three times before coming to a stop upsidedown on the side of the road, leaving a trail of glass and metal in its wake. She might have seen it sitting there, upside down, in the hollow night air, its sad little tires spinning furiously but gripping nothing, looking like an upended beetle beneath the lunatic moon’s yellow light. She might have seen the pickup truck that slammed into it, now with only one headlight, back up, straighten out on the street, and drive away from there. She might have seen the pale face of the driver in the truck turn to the carnage briefly before driving away. But she never would have known why the driver fled the scene when it was the Fiat that ran the red light. No one will ever know that. No one but the driver of the truck himself.
    And, anyway, Kat didn’t go straight.
    She turned her car left, and continued her drive, which is where she is now – moving along steadily toward home with reflections of herself in the windows of the buildings on both sides of the street to keep her company. Three Kats driving along in the same direction. No way she could see the accident. And when the thunderclap of a crash comes, she doesn’t know where it comes from.
    She hears it, turns down Buddy Holly briefly and glances in the rearview mirror, and when she sees nothing back there but the darkness, not even a pair of headlights in the distant past looking like wolf eyes, she turns the radio back up, maybe even a little louder than it was before the unnerving sound of the crash, and she continues on.
    Maybe what she heard was just thunder. Didn’t the man on the radio say