Jack and Al's hit-and-run

On a night less than a month after Jack Torrance had broken his son Danny's arm, he and his closest drinking companion, Al Shockley, were driving back into Barre, Vermont, on U.S. 31. Al was behind the wheel of his Jaguar, shifting fancily on the curves, sometimes crossing the double yellow line. Both men were very drunk; the martians, as Al called them, had landed that night in force. As they came around the last curve before the bridge at seventy miles an hour, a child's bicycle loomed in the headlights. There was the sharp, hurt squealing of rubber shredding from the Jag's tires, and Jack remembered seeing Al's face looming over the steering wheel like a round white moon. The jingling, crashing sound as they hit the bike at forty miles an hour, and it flew up like a bent and twisted bird, the handlebars striking the windshield. A moment later came the final dreadful smash as it landed on the road behind them. Something thumped underneath them as the tires passed over it. The Jag drifted around broadside, Al still jockeying the wheel, and from far away Jack heard himself saying: "Jesus, Al. We ran him down. I felt it."

The Search and the Cover-Up

Al brought the car to a smoking halt not more than three feet from a bridge stanchion. Two of the Jag's tires were flat; they had left zigzagging loops of burned rubber for a hundred and thirty feet. They looked at each other for a moment and then ran back in the cold darkness. The bike was completely ruined—one wheel was gone, and Al saw it lying in the middle of the road, half a dozen spokes sticking up like piano wire. Al said hesitantly: "I think that's what we ran over, Tacky-boy." Jack demanded, "Then where's the kid?" but neither of them had seen one. They moved the bike to one shoulder of the road, Al went back to the Jag and put on its four-way flashers, and for the next two hours they searched the sides of the road using a powerful four-cell flashlight. Nothing. Although it was late, several cars passed the beached Jaguar and the two men with the bobbing flashlight; none of them stopped. Jack later thought that some queer providence, bent on giving them both a last chance, had kept the cops away, had kept any of the passersby from calling them. At quarter past two they returned to the Jag, sober but queasy. Al demanded, "If there was nobody riding it, what was it doing in the middle of the road? It wasn't parked on the side; it was right in the fucking middle!" Jack could only shake his head.

The Cover-Up and Its Aftermath

Al hiked across the bridge to the nearest pay phone, called a bachelor friend, and told him it would be worth fifty dollars if the friend would get the Jag's snow tires out of the garage and bring them down to the Highway 31 bridge outside of Barre. The friend showed up twenty minutes later, wearing a pair of jeans and his pajama top. He surveyed the scene and asked, "Kill anybody?" Al, already jacking up the back of the car, replied, "Providentially, no one." The friend said, "I think I'll just head on back anyway. Pay me in the morning." The two of them got the tires on without incident and drove back to Al's house. In the dark quiet of the garage, Al said: "I'm off drinking, Jacky-boy. It's all over. I've slain my last martian." Jack never doubted Al's ability to carry through. Driving back to his own house in the VW with the radio turned up, he heard some disco group chant over and over again, talismanic in the house before dawn: "Do it anyway… you wanta do it… do it anyway you want…" No matter how loud he heard the squealing tires, the crash. When he blinked his eyes shut, he saw that single crushed wheel with its broken spokes pointing at the sky.

The Turning Point

When Jack got in, Wendy was asleep on the couch. He looked in Danny's room and saw Danny in his crib on his back, sleeping deeply, his arm still buried in the cast. In the softly filtered glow from the streetlight outside he could see the dark lines on its plastered whiteness where all the doctors and nurses in pediatrics had signed it. He pulled the covers up over Danny, went into their bedroom, and took the Spanish Llama .38 down from the top shelf of the closet. It was in a shoe box. He sat on the bed with it for nearly an hour, looking at it, fascinated by its deadly shine. It was dawn when he put it back in the box and put the box back in the closet. That morning he called Bruckner, the department head, and told him to please post his classes; he had the flu. Wendy made him scrambled eggs and coffee. They ate in silence. The only sound came from the back yard, where Danny was gleefully running his trucks across the sand pile with his good hand. She went to do the dishes. Her back to him, she said: "Jack. I've been thinking." She wanted to talk about what was best for her and Danny. He asked her for a favor: "Let's talk about it a week from today. If you still want to." She turned to him, her hands lacy with suds, her pretty face pale and disillusioned, and said, "Jack, promises don't work with you." But she agreed. During that week he saw Al Shockley more than ever, but he came home early and there was no liquor on his breath. He drank coffee black and endless cans of Coca-Cola. One night he drank a whole six-pack of Coke and then ran into the bathroom and vomited it up. The level of the bottles in the liquor cabinet did not go down. After his classes he went over to Al Shockley's—she hated Al Shockley worse than she had ever hated anyone—and when he came home she would swear she smelled scotch or gin on his breath, but he would talk lucidly to her before supper, drink coffee, play with Danny after supper, sharing a Coke with him, read him a bedtime story, then sit and correct themes with cup after cup of black coffee by his hand, and she would have to admit to herself that she had been wrong. Weeks passed and the unspoken word retreated further from the back of her lips. Jack sensed its retirement but knew it would never retire completely. Things began to get a little easier. Then George Hatfield. He had lost his temper again, this time stone sober.

The Lingering Guilt

The hit-and-run became a secret that bound Jack and Al together even as it drove them apart. When Jack called Al from a phone booth in Boulder to thank him for getting the Overlook job, Al asked, "Miss it much?" Jack answered, "Every day." Al laughed and said, "I know that scene. But I don't know how you stayed dry after that Hatfield thing, Jack. That was above and beyond." Jack replied evenly, "I really bitched things up for myself." After he hung up, he closed his eyes in the hot booth and again saw the crashing bike, the bobbing flashlight. There had been a squib in the paper the next day, no more than a space-filler really, but the owner had not been named. Why it had been out there in the night would always be a mystery to them, and perhaps that was as it should be. The accident never left Jack; it was the dark foundation upon which his fragile sobriety was built, a constant reminder of what he had done and what he might become again. When Danny, sensing his father's turmoil, asked if he had had an accident, Jack lied. The lie, and the guilt it concealed, became another layer of the pressure that the Overlook would eventually exploit.