Recessional: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

in a proper bed.
    Always a careful driver, he now tested the road that had been so heavily battered by the blizzard and found that his tandem responded properly when he applied the brakes, slowing to thirty or even twenty without excessive yawing. This is quite doable, he thought. Evansville well before midnight without straining the engine.
    When he reached the sign that said YOU ARE NOW ENTERING INDIANA he saluted and cried: “Chicago, farewell!” Then he made an obscene gesture and added: “Up your bucket.” He was on his way to Florida.
    But he was in Indiana only a few moments when he impulsively pulled off the highway, stopped his rig, and put his face in his hands. All bravado gone, he mumbled: “I lost a paradise in Chicago. A great job—one of the best clinics around. And the wonderful mothers and babies relying on me, trusting me. A growing bank account and a beautiful wife. How did it all vanish so soon?”
    Remaining frozen at the wheel, he pressed his temples and muttered: “A doctor without a kit. A specialist without a practice. No wife, and exactly a hundred and eighty dollars in my pocket. Zorn, you sure screwed up your life.”
    Then he suddenly tensed and his grip on the wheel tightened: Now, dammit, start rebuilding, or your life will begin to go downhill right now. By some miracle I’m getting a second chance. I’m earning good money, and—who knows?—maybe someday I’ll even practice as a doctor again.
    He restarted his motor, edged his rig back onto the highway and swore: “Start of a new year, start of a new life.”
    Fifty miles farther south on Route 41 all ice on the highway had been crushed and removed by heavy trucks, so that he felt safe in driving at sixty miles per hour. Even so, he kept careful watch on the car two ahead to make sure that if anything happened he would be able to slow down instantly. With the extra load in the trailer pushing him from behind, he must avoid sudden stops.
    Daylight was disappearing by the time he reached the cutoff forInterstate 65 that would sweep him around Terre Haute and put him on the road for the finishing kick into Evansville, where he felt confident that a motel bed would be waiting since the storm had kept traffic from the interstates. When it became clear that he would reach his destination well before midnight, he relaxed, leaned back in his seat, listened to the various FM stations as he entered their broadcast range and sang along when they played some song he knew.
    As he had expected, the first Evansville motel he approached had a room, and for thirty dollars he had a hot bath, a good sleep and complimentary coffee, so that when he headed south on New Year’s morning he had abundant energy. Ahead of him was a reasonably clear road and only four hundred miles or so to Atlanta. But as he approached Nashville on his run across Tennessee, he heard on his radio: “Motorists are advised to proceed cautiously on the hilly portions of Route 41 between Nashville and Chattanooga. Icy conditions prevail as a result of last night’s storm. Slow down!” He chuckled at the warning, thinking: Till you’ve been on Boul Mich with the ropes in place to keep you from being blown away, you don’t know what ice is.
    Nevertheless he did slow down, for in recent years he had seen television news showing in sickening detail how, in an ice storm or a heavy fog, even cautious drivers could pile their cars into massive crashes on the freeways. He remembered one in California—sixty cars, smashing into each other.
    But even at his diminished speed, as he came around a bend in the hill country just west of Chattanooga he saw the car two ahead start slipping sideways and then, completely out of control, make a 180-degree turn so that it continued sliding, but backward. And as he watched in terror, the doomed car moved slowly but inexorably into a tangle of three others that had slid the same way, ending up in a huge pileup involving scores of cars. Cars