Perspective (A Driver’S Tale)

By Peter Kerestur

An ordinary man leaves his house for a routine drive to work in order to earn his daily bread. Ten minutes into his drive, he is stopped by the utility workers working on a piece of road damaged by the last nights torrential flood storm, and his trip is inadvertently delayed. Pressed by time to be still on time for work, the legal system shows its true teeth and catches up on him. Wrapping its claws around him, the system arbitrarily turns his normally innocent trip into an unexpected nightmarish show of bureaucratic power on loose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503527065

Peter Kerestur

Author, Peter Kerestur, was born, raised and educated in Europe. He is married and he has two children. He lives in Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

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Copyright © 2015 by Peter Kerestur.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 01/30/2015

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Contents

A driver’s tale

Perspective

To my wife Ruzena, to my daughter Kelly, and to my son Peter

A driver’s tale

You know, the prosecutor said in a probing voice, this ticket carries four points. He let his sentence’s underlying question mark hang in the air just long enough to allow his right hand to reshuffle the summonses on the top of a conference table he was seated at. But, his voice perked up as he continued, I can reduce it to a lesser charge with only two points.

A loud silence made the prosecutor shift in his chair sideways. Angling his head to his right and away from the summonses, he looked up to meet the eyes of the defendant standing by the table and towering over him. Almost instantaneously, the prosecutor diverted his look back onto the ticket pile. Those eyes, they were not, as he was accustomed to, the eyes of a supplicant, much less of a guilty man; they were the eyes of an angry, of a defiant man, although the rest of his demeanor retained an appearance of overall composure. This man was seething inside.

Fidgeting with his papers, the prosecutor stood up. He pushed the chair under the table. He bent over his documents, rearranged them one last time, and stepped back from the table to give him space. Facing the defendant now directly, the prosecutor looked blandly into his face, all the while shunning the eye contact. Do you agree to the reduced charge?

*     *     *

It was a warm early-October Friday. The blue skies were cloudless. The sun’s orb, in its cobalt-white splendor surrounded by dandelion-yellow corona, hung midway over the western horizon, and when unobstructed by trees, dispensed its rays with blinding intensity. Filtered through the tall trees, the rays played checkers with the thinning foliage, and darting fierce yellow spikes of luminescence all around, they made one blink against his own will. Every leaf that fell off the shedding trees, whether tumbling headlong down or floating graciously in the air before the touchdown, seemed to indulge in the general luminosity by boldly displaying all the dying shades and patterns of its species, their color ranging from bright yellow through shiny gold to glistening reddish brown, their patterns from ragged patches through suggestive symmetries to almost-perfect geometric forms, as Earth’s gravity pulled each and every one irrevocably to the solid ground.

It was up in the Northern Appalachian Mountains, on the back roads winding through their sloping sides covered with deciduous forests interspersed with single-family houses, where the future defendant embarked on his routine journey to earn his daily bread. As he guided his compact toward the major roads and highways, the sun’s beams warmed his left temple. Not fond of visors, since distractive, he occasionally lowered and slightly turned his head away from the windshield, to avoid the shifting sun hitting his eyes directly. He peered at the shoulder-less blacktopped road his car gleefully devoured, the road’s grassy lining and beyond, from under his contracted eyebrows, his watchfulness for the deer undiminished. Still, the deer became harder to discern, for their coats had already acquired the winterized color of brown, and with decaying leaves and the underbrush turning brown as well, they blended more readily with their habitat. There. He had just passed one grazing at the sparse vegetation by the opposite edge of the road. With her rump pointed at his car, she was no danger. But the one a good dozen yards farther down and standing sideways along his lane? He slackened his pace. The car drawing nearer, the deer raised her head and wiggled her ears. As he was passing her in a slight arc, she resumed her feeding and wiggled her white tail instead.

Having negotiated the left right-angled turn at a T-junction, the car needed only initial assistance to move on. After a mild hump, the road sloped increasingly downward, and the driver allowed the car to pick up speed on its own. The tree trunks began to compete with electrical poles for their share in the side-view mirrors. A tan ranch-style house set a short distance in the woods swished by on its left. A moderate right-bearing curve. A moderate left-bearing curve. At the bottom of the ensuing straight stretch, the driver could see the familiar metal grate bridge with green guardrails spanned over an invisible brook now bathed in the full sun. Approaching the bridge, he slowed down to half speed. Just as the front wheels were to roll over the rusty grates, he let go of the brake pedal. His shirted back pressed lightly and involuntarily against his cloth seat. The tires rattled momentarily and the car bounced slightly. Halfway between the gas and brake pedals, his foot shot back and hit the brake pedal with a renewed, sudden force. His back peeled violently off his seat and both his hands clutched resolutely the steering wheel. Stiffening his arms, he pushed his back firmly against the seat. By the corner of his eye he had caught a swift motion on the small clearing that opened to his right, its trajectory unmistakably directed to cross his path. The collection of his CDs on the passenger seat slammed helter-skelter to the floor. A brown mass obscured his view for an eternal fraction of a second. The crackle of a breaking lens and a dull thud that precedes the warping of metal he expected to hear did not materialize. A quick glance to his left offered a still of a pair of brown legs high in the air. Their black hooves were at the level of the inner white-lined hindquarters, the hindquarters crowned with a mocking white tail at its full erection. But the stillness was delusory. Next moment the rump was gone and the general calm restored. Only the breeze moved gently the leaves. Embracing the top half of the black steering wheel with his left forearm while collecting his scattered CDs with his outstretched right hand, he couldn’t help thinking that sometimes the deer simply play chicken with the cars. This call, however, was indeed a close, very close call.

In the middle of a steep downgrade, in a shallow ditch along his lane, he passed a deer corpse he remembered from early in the morning on his way up and home. The blackish brown carcass had lain flat on its side and close to a faded white line demarcating the rough edge of the road, the long neck arched toward the back, one of the bifurcated antlers touching the spine, blood still oozing from the partly dropped jaw of the mouth. The neck was now headless, and the esophagus and trachea gaped innocently at passers-by. As in the darkness of the night a lens’s chips in the body’s vicinity glistened star-like in the yellow light of his left high beam, so did they sparkle again, sans the body, in the jolly sun. A few feet from the decapitated cadaver, he noticed a substantial chunk of a white grill and an orange side marker, yet no brake marks whatsoever on the road’s surface itself, only the blood stain. A crow, perched on the deer’s chest, a sizable piece of pinkish meat in its beak, flapped its shiny charcoal black wings in an apparent take-off, but stayed put with the car showing no signs of stopping.

Another T-junction and another left right-angled turn. A couple of ess curves in short succession. An impromptu oversize diamond-shaped sign, its supportive pole anchored in a low, fully spread tetrapod base, popped up on the edge of the road. It leaned toward the natural embankment that rose above the roof of the approaching car, and its orange fabric quivered in the sun. ROAD WORK AHEAD The bold black letters, printed a word a line, intruded on the driver. The bare black rock, only inches away from the road proper and extending about a foot upward from its level, that the embankment was formed of and just four days ago was covered with tenacious vegetation, mirrored the tree trunks standing tall along the other side of the road and down the slope ad infinitum. A sharp right curve traced the rock foundation. The physical road disappeared.

The car crawled round the curve. The scene that opened behind the curve took the driver by surprise. Despite the sign’s warning, it caught him totally unprepared. He did not expect the message to be fulfilled right around the corner. Even the road lost some of its familiarity. Its slight upgrade unchanged alright, but the road seemed to curve less lazily than usual in its wide, semicircular and opposite direction, and to rise more sharply straight up after curving counter again. Yet the delta at the bottom of an unpaved driveway that descended in an angle from the green corrugated garage door of a brown Colonial two-story house up slope and partly obscured by the trees, and that attached itself to the middle of the outer semicircle seemed larger.

In Tuesday’s wee hours, while traveling in the other direction, a wide stream gushed over the curve in high spirits. The water, inconspicuous on the sharply sloping ground of the woods above, turned into a black mercurial mass the moment it hit the road’s blacktop, and wallowed glistening in the car’s headlights. Clear of the road surface, the liquid mass returned to its inconspicuous state, dissipated by the sloping ground below the curve, swallowed by the darkness. The rain that fed the transient river, and which began as drizzle on Sunday afternoon, was coming down hard, and the black wiper blades pushed the sheets of film-like water laboriously from left to right, from right to left, each swing squirting the sheet ends alternately to either flank of the car. Having decided to listen to the nature for a change, the driver had turned off his CD player at the foot of the mountain, and as the car climbed, a mesmerizing, incessant staccato of the rain pellets pummeling the roof of his car filled its cabin, undisturbed. Back since, the staccato drew more packed. The road was giving off a metallic luster, here and there networked with rivulets. Nearing the inundated curve from the moderate incline without engaging the accelerator, the driver applied a slight and steady pressure to the gas pedal when the car began to show the signs of slowing down. The front wheels plowed into the edge of the water mass, and the car felt as though held unwittingly back by a pair of massive hands pressed irresistibly against its front bumper. The driver increased the pressure on the pedal. The car forced itself deeper into the boisterous liquid. The hands pushed harder against its bumper. Accordingly, the driver kept increasing his pressure, maintaining the car’s persistent pace constant despite the insistent hands. The staccato gave way to a sonorous gurgle, generated by the water rushing under the car. Displeased at being hampered in its course by a self-imposed obstacle now in need to deal with, the river frothed angrily around the car’s nose. The foam glittered in the beams of its headlights, threatening all the while to engulf them. For a fleeting moment the car felt heaved. A slight, quickly passing jolt, jerked the car downstream. The driver jerked his steering wheel instinctively to the left. The car steadied itself, gripping the unseen road surface more firmly with every new foot gained. Simultaneously, the frothing grew less agitated and more removed. The staccato returned. Hesitantly, the massive hands let finally go completely, and the driver realized that five minutes later he wouldn’t have made it through, ending up mercilessly washed off the road and hopelessly stuck against the tree trunks in the woods below, a flip-over as a bonus. Served with a bath and a shower in one for a better measure.

Drenched in the full sun on that Friday afternoon, the same curve displayed a different, manmade activity. To the driver, who was forced to sit idly, however, the activity’s hardware constituted a litter and its attendants appeared to move deliberately slow. From across the delta, on the inside of the semicircle, a yellow utility truck loitered, facing him. Its white boom’s halves were collapsed over one another, and the white, solid-walled bucket that was attached to its loose half sat snugly over the truck’s tail. The door of a tool box close to the cab’s boarding step hung down, nearly touching the road’s top, its white inside in sharp contrast with the black interior. On its rear corner, horizontally stacked white-striped red cones asked an obvious question, with the answer soon to come. Some fifteen feet apart, and on the same side of the road, a dump truck was lowering its dark gray ribbed bed. Its tailgate, which fronted the bucket, was swinging, and a bright aperture formed by the side of the bed, the gate, and the floor went from a picture-perfect equilateral to a series of ever more shrinking isosceles triangles. The bed’s canopy parallel with the cab’s black roof, the gate shut the daylight completely off.

Two living cones manned each end of the blocked lane, positioned at its edge. Both were clad in yellow and reflective orange overalls. The cone next to the idling compact had the bib down, revealing the elastic webbings of gray suspenders over a white undershirt, and its straps, thrown over the bends of the naked elbows, dangled at its waist. The baseball-capped, bearded, and potbellied figure was leaning on a staff crowned with a black-rimmed round sign, its one side inscribed with a gigantic STOP in a red, its other with a SLOW in an orange field. The cone on the farther end slumped way up above the dump truck. Its sun-tanned hairless face turned abruptly away from the scene unfolding in the middle of the curve. Its body followed languidly the direction set by the command post. Loose blond hair covered its shoulders and its back down to its waist, shimmering gaily in the sunlight. The distance notwithstanding, the figure looked awfully huge. The SLOW side of its sign made a brief appearance at its right shoulder. A red car was drawing near to the figure until it came to a full stop a few feet from it. The car’s right headlight looked as though painted faint bright yellow. Its left headlight was missing, a gaping hole in its place. A doubled white rope exited the hole, wrapped round the bumper, and vanished underneath. The outer tip of a fog light lens was sticking out of its bumper housing. Yet another casualty of an overconfident deer. A second vehicle appeared on the incline and inched toward the still red car. Its headlights looked as though painted faint bright blue. Evidently, though there was no accompanying sign, at least not on this side, the drivers adhered slavishly to a recent edict proclaiming that, since it was a WORK ZONE (in orange field), it was a new STATE LAW (small capitals) to TURN ON your HEADLIGHTS (overdone capitals). But was a one-eyed car a valid entry? The driver of the compact let the thought fade away, and as the female traffic regulator turned her attention again to the middle-of-the-road scene, so did he.

A three-foot-wide ditch, freshly covered with asphalt slightly bumping above the surrounding road, ran straight across the curve from the far tip of the delta to the space between the rears of the utility and dump trucks, the body of the former hiding its balance from direct view. A man in yellow and reflective orange overalls, its trouser legs rolled up to his knees, stood on the other side of the covered ditch. He wielded a shovel and intermittently touched the bumping surface here and there with its fairly flat steel scoop. He withdrew his shovel. He stepped back. He carefully placed the edge of the scoop, its concave inward, on the blacktop about a foot away from his tan boots. Palm over palm and over the birch handle cross piece, he rested both hands on his tool. His uncovered head turned measuredly from the rear of the utility truck to the tip of the delta and back, his face partly downcast and deadly serious, his eyes fixed critically at the fat line which they followed.

The driver of the compact glanced at a small oblong rectangle on his instrument panel situated parallel to and directly below an inscription in white bearing a multiplication sign followed by the multiplier of one, zero, zero, zero, the whole number immediately accompanied with lower-case characters of r, p, m. The rectangle gave away a cellophane glare, its black background serving as a backdrop for setting off a triplet of amber digits that crowded it, though the scheme fared poorly in the present sheen of the sun. The digits read two, two, one, with the first and the second interposed with a pair of periods stacked above one another. Four minutes had elapsed since his unsolicited invitation to witness a road repairman in action.

His white shirt began to feel wet on his back. His right hand reached under his unbuttoned neckband. His thumb and forefinger got hold of the second button and twitched it free of its stud and hole. His hand moved down the placket, and his fingers grabbed the third button, ready to remove it from its hole. They froze momentarily as if paralyzed at its touch. They let go of the button. No. Not yet. Still, he let the second unbuttoned button unbuttoned, knowing that eventually they would all be unbuttoned. His hand moved to, grasped, and cranked the window’s handle. Light breeze caressed his face and throat. A whiff of fresh bitumen tickled his nostrils. The engine’s subdued hum was interrupted by a short burst of the cooling fan kicking in. The last white digit clicked soundlessly to three.

Done with the thoughtful survey, the man and his shovel resumed their gentle poking, neither ostensibly satisfied with their handiwork. Should he or should he not? One stroke of the shovel; one step of its man. Another stroke. The arms lifted and moved the shovel to their left. Another stroke. Better not. The shovel moved back to the right and hung hesitantly in the air. The white digit read four. Was it three strokes into a minute? What would be the average? Better not. The driver abandoned the counting.

Another car drew cautiously behind the two vehicles stopped on the downhill above the blocked section of the roadway. The female cone turned her face in its direction. A pickup emerged from the curve high above, inching toward the third car. The cone reverted her attention to her prime subject. The male cone continued to support his STOP/SLOW sign, his posture unchanged. The digit changed to five. To six. To seven. About a mile beyond the upper curve, there lay a road to the left, attaching itself in a right angle to the one under repair. Introduced with SHARP CURVES AHEAD, the road wound sharply downhill, his compact majestically clearing each and every successive curve on its way to…. It was a futile mental image. The driver retrieved a silver-faced remote control from a storage box under his right elbow rest and pressed its lowest right-hand black button. White capital a and m letters, and seven, seven, zero digits popped up on a bluish display in the middle of his central console. A cheerful male voice blasted into the car’s interior, gushing out its open window. The male cone’s sign jerked in the air and the man with the shovel paused, raised his eyes, and shook his head. Repeatedly and quickly, the driver pressed and released a few times the top left button with a white minus sign. And we’ll be right back after these commercials, the low voice intoned. Don’t go anywhere. The driver hit the mute button. A round headlight crept into his side-view mirror. The digit read zero. He should have been by a STOP sign at the bottom of the hill.

Two cars added their eminent presence to the growing line in the opposite lane. A bumper peeked out from behind the curve. Suddenly, the man with the shovel strode briskly into the delta. The two cones raised their free hands to their faces, each alternately bringing its palm to its mouth, lips agitated. After the third exchange, the male cone dropped his hand alongside his body and turned his torso toward the driver of the compact. A deep voice emanated from under his moustache, announcing calmly, You can proceed now. The SLOW side was flipping around.

*     *     *

The prosecutor’s question sounded mechanical, prompted simply by inertia. He had already heard the answer before the first word of his question dripped off his lips. Those fierce eyes. And this recalcitrant mind of his. Just refusing to acknowledge the obvious; skirting the truth his own eyes delivered.

The defendant peered into the prosecutor’s round face, made rounder by… No, delete that. …turning oval due to a receding hairline. The light brown hair, smoothed painstakingly backward, carried the wide gaps of a course-tooth comb. A lone blondish hair dangled over his mildly furrowed forehead, its tip touching the skin above his left, almost hairless, eyebrow.

No, sir, the defendant answered.

Fleetingly, the prosecutor’s piggish eyes met the defendant’s. But, the prosecutor said, I can reduce your ticket to a lesser charge. He paused. Returning, his voice betrayed tiredness as he pushed his never-failing trump card obscenely in the full view of the defendant. You know, that will save two points.

An inquisitive clean-shaven face turned up briefly in the top glass panel of the door to the defendant’s left. The prosecutor seemed not to notice. To the defendant, the face brought a fresh urgency to the total lack of any sounds generated on the other side of the door to reach his ears despite the hallway bustling with people. The soundlessness hovered over the room, its resonance enhanced when rudely broken by either of the voices, its emptiness deepened when whole. A sticky coolness permeated the room’s plentiful air.

Sir, the defendant said firmly, I don’t care about the points. A little bit too firmly. Save the firmness for the judge, the defendant reminded himself. Nor about the money, for that matter, he added less contentiously.

The prosecutor’s naturally goose-bumped and reddish neck turned more pronounced both in its roughness and in its color. So you don’t take my deal? He rather summarized than asked.

No, sir. I want to go to a trial.

Becoming acutely aware of the disobedient hair, the prosecutor swept his left short-fingered hand over his left eyebrow and the forehead area above backward to midway of his crown. Done, his fingers smoothed the smooth hair behind his left ear. The hand beside his body, the lone hair fell to the floor. His body reverted toward the table and his right leg stepped forward. Both his hands grasped the respective rails of the back of the chair and dragged it scraping from under the table. His upper body leaned over the summonses. His hands shifted the pile a few inches to the left. His right hand reached for the Windsor knot of his dark-gray tie and jerked it in both directions along the neckband of his crisp white dress shirt, making its apron flutter over the table top. The hand traced smoothingly the necktie’s front apron in its entire length and tucked its tip behind the wide waistband of his belted black trousers.

Go sit and wait in the courtroom, the prosecutor said under his breath, directing his words at the shiny table top. His well-meaning rebuffed, the injury resounded throughout his curtness. The hands brought the summonses back to their original spot and began to dig through their uncouth stack.

*     *     *

The sun was leaning heavily against the chest and stomach of the driver. Its intense bright rays were filtered through a stylized rectangle, its shape reminiscent of the classic sun visor with tapering top ends to hug the pivot. It had the dimensions of a common visor, but unlike its inherent adjustability, this one was permanently slammed flat, decal imprinted, on the windshield. It covered a specious space produced by the rear-view mirror’s black case hung low and held distant from the windshield via a supportive black bracket, its black mounting button glued right in the pseudo visor’s center, and the gap between the mirror and the roof perceived only by a person ensconced in either front seat. The pseudo visor’s texture resembled that of a door screen, except for the light-unobstructing tiny rectangles being considerably smaller than the junctions of the black lines, the fat ones running diagonally to each other, with hair-thin lines running vertically and complementary to through them, which by crossing themselves formed the intricate mesh itself and thereby defined their own relative disproportionate relationship. A hemline traced the shape of the visor. Fancifulness quit, plain black dots took over its design, the ratio of black and daylight inverted, the dots drastically smaller and more widespread as the lines were getting more remote from the main body. After phasing out the visor, the trimmed-down line continued to follow the windshield seal all around.

The driver of the compact could see the fiery ball of the sun struggling to pierce the shaded area, which rendered it gray. Robbed of their blinding force, its rays were quietly sizzling, and they turned the front of his shirt into a heating pad, a blanket of luscious warmth strategically placed where truly enjoyable. However, the other side, the hidden side, drew a different, and antagonistic, picture. Despite having the driver door window rolled all the way down and the passenger halfway to create a constant draft, the bucket seat began to feel too confining and its cloth course to the point of being loaded with minuscule needles that penetrated the fabric of his shirt. Of course, there was an air-conditioning option. But what if this was the last relatively hot day before the winter embarked on making its inroads? Besides, he had never developed any strong affection for, or is it addiction to?, having cold air blasted into his face and on his throat.

Situated at the junction of the seat and backrest on the console side, a buckle in gray molded plastic projected outward, its loose end at the level of the driver’s right ilium. Its ruby red rectangular release button, embossed with PRESS in worn black capitals, its inner wall a part of the slot a metal catch to be inserted in that gaped empty black, flashed momentarily in a stray ray. A dark silhouette craftily constructed by the power of the sun to cast shadows when obstructed, moved graciously on and across the light gray surface of the shiny roadway, entering it on the left. Meticulously and exquisitely contoured, unmistakably majestic. It was headed by a snub-nosed projection attached to a pear-like form, suggestive of a sphere at the joint, which mildly tapered toward the silhouette’s rear, yet cut off before becoming too narrow. Each half-circle’s curvilinear line exploded outward on its respective side into a massive and elongated Marconi-sail shaped extension. One third into the sail’s leech, a seam pulled too hard at the luff, bending the rest of the leech so as to make the luff equidistant from the point of breaking its straight line in either direction. Should one have wished to fold the silhouette over its horizontal axis, the halves would have matched point to point, indentation to indentation, curve to curve. The shadow, which contained no fault lines, would have delighted Konrad Lorenz, who would have undoubtedly looked for some herring gull chicks to crouch at its sight, thus confirming one of the first ethological hypotheses.

The peregrine falcon’s shadow snaked over a silver, rust-stained guardrail, navigating toward the nearby river. A faded green chain-link fence, a part of continuum, ran parallel to the railing, demarcating an exclusive piece of land. Within its confines, two white-framed goals with slack nets and a brownish grass field in between, a set of glistening monkey bars, slides with closed yellow plastic chutes, a monkey cage; a sprawling light brown brick building, its texture preserved, with an invisible flat roof, only two vent structures sticking up in the air like a pair of sore thumbs, and portholes for windows, white doors; a dark brown brick building, its texture similarly preserved, its lateral annex, the white unadorned gable facing the road, loaded with huge multi-pane white windows, and topped with a black shingled pitched roof, the ridge of the main building crowned with three white, four-sided, windows equipped, and evenly spaced lanterns; and assortment of stationary passenger cars, their grills staring at the façade of the main building, its doors and windows, and a pack of yellow buses beginning to line up between the two entities, their elongated noses in the direction of the travel of the compact; the Old Glory and the State flag on a white staff, drooping, the halyard, dangling along its length, the truck and finial, overreaching the roof of the main building just about midway; shedding oaks and green pines, seemingly randomly allowed to grow.

A two-face traffic signal, hung over an intersection from an arm attached to a silver post, popped into the driver’s forward view. He had counted on the top lens to be lit, its just being switched to or already being on almost a steel rule, so as to enable him to employ his hands other than for driving, but he was in for a surprise of mixed value. It was the bottom lens that out of its shading tunnel visor beamed rich green instead. And no cars at all to slow down for, either, as they would resume their interrupted journeys. Should all the traffic lights, or majority of them, which he had yet to deal with and which numbered a baker’s dozen, not interfere with his continuous motion, and every interval normally wasted on each and surmised to average one minute, an extremely conservative estimate nonetheless, to be therefore gained, he would definitely make up for the temporal loss at the road repair site, and hence it would be still feasible for him to be on time, although he had already resigned himself to be late. That was on one hand, and it was uncertain. On the other hand—. Well, the shirt could not wait any longer. The itching on the back grew intolerable. The first perspiratory globule collected at his suprasternal notch and began to roll down his chest, channeled by the slight