Intensity Read Free

were both drinking, him and my mother. They had a cooler full of ice. Bottles of grapefruit juice and vodka. The old lady in the Mercedes was driving really slow, and that incensed Woltz. He wasn’t rational. What did it matter to him? He could’ve pulled around her. But the sight of her driving so slow on the wide-open highway infuriated him. Drugs and booze, that’s all. So irrational. When he was angry…red-faced, arteries throbbing in his neck, jaw muscles bulging. No one could get angry quite as
totally
as Jim Woltz. His rage excited my mother. Always excited her. So she teased him, encouraged him. I was in the backseat, hanging on tight, pleading with her to stop, but she kept at him.”
    For a while, Woltz had hung close behind the other car, blowing his horn at the elderly couple, trying to force them to go faster. A few times he had nudged the rear bumper of the Mercedes with the front bumper of the Cadillac, metal kissing metal with a squeal. Eventually the old woman got rattled and began to swerve erratically, afraid to go faster with Woltz so close behind her but too frightened of him to pull off the road and let him pass by.
    “Of course,” Chyna said, “he wouldn’t have gone past and left her alone. By then he was too psychotic. He would have stopped when she stopped. It still would have ended badly.”
    Woltz had pulled alongside the Mercedes a few times, driving in the wrong lane, shouting and shaking his fist at the white-haired couple, who first tried to ignore him and then stared back wide-eyed and fearful. Each time, rather than drive by and leave them in his dust, he had dropped behind again to play tag with their rear bumper. To Woltz, in his drug fever and alcoholic haze, this harassment was deadly serious business, with an importance and a meaning that could never be understood by anyone who was clean and sober. To Chyna’s mother, Anne, it was all a game, an adventure, and it was she, in her ceaseless search for excitement, who said,
Why don’t we give her a driving test? Woltz said, Test? I don’t need to give the old bitch a test to see she can’t drive for shit.
This time, as Woltz pulled beside the Mercedes, matching speeds with it, Anne said,
I mean, see if she can keep it on the road. Make it a challenge for her.
    To Laura, Chyna recalled, “There was a canal parallel to the road, one of those drainage channels you see along some Florida highways. Not deep but deep enough. Woltz used the Cadillac to crowd the Mercedes onto the shoulder of the road. The woman should have crowded him back, forced him the other way. She should have tramped the pedal to the floor and pegged the speedometer and gotten the hell out of there. The Mercedes would’ve outrun the Cadillac, no problem. But she was old and scared, and she’d never encountered anyone like this. I think she was just disbelieving, so unable to understand the kind of people she was up against, unable to grasp how far they’d go
even though she and her husband had done nothing to them
. Woltz forced her off the road. The Mercedes rolled into the canal.”
    Woltz had stopped, shifted the Cadillac into reverse, and backed up to where the Mercedes was swiftly sinking. He and Anne had gotten out of the car to watch. Chyna’s mother had insisted that she watch too:
Come on, you little chicken. You don’t want to miss this, baby. This is one to remember.
The passenger’s side of the Mercedes was flat against the muddy bottom of the canal, and the driver’s side was revealed to them as they stood on the embankment in the humid evening air. They were being bitten by hordes of mosquitoes but were hardly aware of them, mesmerized by the sight below them, gazing through the driver-side windows of the submerged vehicle.
    “It was twilight,” Chyna told Laura, putting into words the images behind her closed eyes, “so the headlights were on, still on even after the Mercedes sank, and there were lights inside the car. They had