Mr. Bailey said, “It was clearly a piece of reckless driving on the other man’s part.
Biff crept out of the side street—and was smashed into!”
Jimmie nodded. In his mind’s eye he could see his brother, at the end of a day of helpless rage at having to be in the army, driving along the dusky side street, slowing at some distance from the stop-line, and hearing the high whine of an approaching car. A car coming illegally fast. Jimmie could imagine his brother’s face. It would go slack and sullen—and then convulse with purpose. His brother’s car would not turn, cautiously, in the path of the oncoming car. It would shoot out, in high, the motor racing, and scarcely turn at all—making an unavoidable obstacle on the road. The other car-brakes grinding, wheels sliding—would strike at an angle. It wasn’t an attempt at suicide, exactly. It wasn’t, even, a conscious effort at self-mutilation. But some such thing, in a more shadowy form, had motivated Biff. He had entertained for one paroxysmal instant the thought, I’ll get hurt—and then they can’t take me! In the next instant he had been getting hurt.
Jimmie knew that such “accidents” were shockingly common. But deliberateness could not be proven. No jury would recognize escapism as a punishable motive.
Sometimes the author of such an accident would confess the impulse—long afterward.
Sometimes a psychiatrist would uncover such an impulse in a patient. Mostly, however, smashups like Biff’s were attributed to related factors, such as high speed, or to “pure accident”—a phrase which, excepting for coincidences in time, is a pure lie.
Such things had been in Jimmie’s mind as he had walked to the hospital. To review them, to confirm them by Biff’s appearance and behavior, took seconds only.
Jimmie let himself smile as if with a sudden thought.
“Anyway, Biff, you’re out of the army!”
The younger man’s eyes moved slowly toward Jimmie and held with faint surprise. “So I am. Funny. I hadn’t thought of that.”