I was talking to one of my line cooks outside and we watched the sunset and wound down from the rush and talked about how we could improve our performance next time. We talked for a while and the sun did set and dusk turned to dark and we heard sirens out in front of the building on Circle Drive. Red light bounced off the walls of the building and we poked our heads around the corner to see a fire truck blocking traffic, and a group of firemen huddled around a mass on the ground. I think I saw the thing's feet moving and the firemen were quiet and focused. Moments later there was a police car, and a cop and another fireman were laying out pylons and directing slow moving traffic around the scene and we moved up closer to see more.
"If you get close and you see something horrible, you'll never forget it." I cautioned my young cook, remembering a trip on the bus when I was a kid. An old lady had been killed crossing Broadway and they had a detour set up. As my bus turned I looked out the window and could see a long dark puddle stretching away from a people sized blotch in the center of the road and flowing down in rivulets to the gutter. It was midafternoon in the summer, and the blood glinted black and shiny and smooth in the high sun. It's a sight you don't forget.
My cook looked at me a little spooked and thought about whether he could handle human horror in his head, then moved up anyway.
There was a car stopped in front of the huddled mass, and its hood was smashed and its headlight was smashed and its windshield was smashed and there was this tall lanky teenage kid all pale and shaking standing beside the car hugging himself and biting his lips watching with complete and utter intensity as the firemen worked on the thing on the ground.
It was only another minute or two and there was an ambulance there and the EMS guys got out and started to help, one of them breaking out a stretcher. A TV cameraman showed up and started filming, visibly bothered when a car passed in front of his shot.
Some guy in his 40s came walking by, dressed in business casual, tired, toting a laptop and smoking a cigarette and he stopped to watch with us.
"Pedestrian?" he said.
"Yep" I said, although I didn't really know.
The guy looked at the damage to the car. "Must have been a big pedestrian." he surmised.
"Or a fast car." I noted.
"Maybe both. Dead?" he asked me.
"I don't know, I think I saw his feet moving."
He tilted his head, shrugged, then shook it no. "They're moving pretty slow for a not-dead guy."
And they were. And nothing moved, not feet, not hands, not head, not even my line cook and I. They put the thing on to the stretcher and put the stretcher in the ambulance and the ambulance tore away and we stood there for a couple of minutes watching the clean up.
The firemen passed around a spray bottle and sprayed off their boots and the knees of their overalls and the fronts of their jackets. One of them spread sand across a long glistening patch of dark wetness on the roadway.
I went inside and the party was still going strong, but the bar manager was keyed up anxious and there was a cop asking questions and taking notes and one of the waitresses was in the office crying. The grotesque and curious thing on the road had been a guy in our bar minutes before, a friend of the server and he had dashed across the street to buy cigarettes when the tall lanky kid slammed into him, taking away all his peopleness and life and momentum.
I was shaken. I don't like mortality, and that was a pretty uncomfortable reminder how fast that can happen.
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