Chapter 18
   
Nick opened the door between Sheriff Baker’s office and the jail cells and they started razzing him right off. Vincent Hogan and Billy Warner were in the two Saltine-box cells on Nick’s left. Mike Childress was in one of the two on the right. The other was empty and it was empty because Ray Booth, he of the purple LSU fraternity ring, had flown the coop.
   “Hey, dummy!” Childress called. “Hey, you fuckin dummy! What’s gonna happen to you when we get outta here? Huh? What the fuck’s gonna happen to you?”
   “I’m personally gonna rip your balls off and stuff em down your throat until you strangle on em,” Billy Warner told him. “You understand me?”
   Only Vince Hogan didn’t participate in the razzing. Mike and Billy didn’t have too much use for him on this day, June 23, when they were to be taken up to the Calhoun County seat and jugged pending trial. Sheriff Baker had leaned on Vince and Vince had spilled his yellow guts. Baker had told Nick he could get an indictment against these ole boys, but when it got to a jury trial, it was going to be Nick’s word against these three—four, if they picked up Ray Booth.
   Nick had gained a healthy respect for Sheriff John Baker these last couple of days. He was a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound ex-farmer who was predictably called Big Bad John by his constituents. The respect Nick felt for him was not because Baker had given him this job swamping out the holding area to make up for his lost week’s pay, but because he had gone after the men who had beaten and robbed Nick. He had done it as if Nick were a member of one of the oldest and most respected families in town instead of just a deaf-mute drifter. There were plenty of sheriffs here in the border South, Nick knew, who would have seen him on a work farm or roadgang for six months instead.
   They had driven out to the sawmill where Vince Hogan worked, taking Baker’s private car, a Power Wagon, instead of the county prowler car. There was a shotgun under the dash (“Always locked up and always loaded,” Baker said) and a bubble light Baker put on the dash when he was on police business. He put it up there when they swung into the lumberyard parking area, two days ago now. Baker had hawked, spat out the window, blew his nose, and dabbed at his red eyes with a handkerchief. His voice had acquired a nasal foghorn quality. Nick couldn’t hear it, of course, but he didn’t need to. It was clear enough that the man had a nasty cold.
   “Now, when we see him, I’ll grab him by the arm,” Baker said. “I’ll ask you, ‘Is this one of em?’ You give me a big nod yes. I don’t care if it was or not. You just nod. Get it?”
   Nick nodded. He got it.
   Vince was working the board planer, feeding rough planks into the machine, standing in sawdust almost to the top of his workboots. He gave John Baker a nervous smile, and his eyes flicked uneasily to Nick standing beside the sheriff. Nick’s face was thin and battered and still too pale.
   “Hi, Big John, what you doin out with the workin folk?”
   The other men in the crew were watching all this, their eyes shifting gravely from Nick to Vince to Baker and then back the other way like men watching some complicated new version of tennis. One of them spat a stream of Honey Cut into the fresh sawdust and wiped off his chin with the heel of his hand.
   Baker grabbed Vince Hogan by one flabby, sunburned arm and pulled him forward.
   “Hey! What’s the idea, Big John?”
   Baker turned his head so Nick could see his lips. “Is this one of em?”
   Nick nodded firmly, and pointed at Vince for good measure.
   “What is this?” Vince protested again. “I don’t know this dummy from Adam.”
   “Then how come you know he’s a dummy? Come on, Vince, you’re going to the cooler. Toot-sweet. You can send one of these boys to get your toothbrush.”
   Protesting, Vince was led to the Power Wagon and deposited inside. Protesting, he was taken back to town. Protesting, he was locked up and left to stew for a couple of hours. Baker didn’t bother with reading him his rights. “Damn fool’d just get confused,” he told Nick. When Baker went back around noon, Vince was too hungry and too scared to do any more protesting. He just spilled everything.
   Mike Childress was in the jug by one o’clock, and Baker got Billy Warner at his house just as Billy was packing up his old Chrysler to go someplace—along piece from the look of all the packed liquor-store boxes and strapped-together luggage. But somebody had talked to Ray Booth, and Ray had been just smart enough to move a little quicker.
   Baker took Nick home to meet his wife and have some supper. In the car Nick wrote on the memo pad: “I am sure sorry it’s her brother. How is she taking it?”
   “She’s bearing up,” Baker said, both his voice and the set of his body almost formal. “I guess she’s done some crying over him, but she knew what he was. And she knows you can’t pick your relatives like you do your friends.”
   Jane Baker was a small, pretty woman who had indeed been crying. Looking at her deeply socketed eyes made Nick uncomfortable. But she shook his hand warmly and said; “I’m pleased to know you, Nick. And I apologize deeply for your trouble. I feel responsible, with one of mine being a part of it and all.”
   Nick shook his head and shuffled his feet awkwardly.
   “I offered him a job around the place,” Baker said. “Station’s gone right to hell since Bradley moved up to Little Rock. Painting and picking up, mostly. He’s gonna have to stick around for a while anyway—for the… you know.”
   “The trial, yes,” she said.
   There was a moment then in which the silence was so heavy even Nick found it painful.
   Then, with forced gaiety, she said, “I hope you eat redeye ham, Nick. That’s what there is, along with some corn and a big bowl of slaw. My slaw’s never been up to what his mother used to make. That’s what he says, anyway.”
   Nick rubbed his stomach and smiled.
   Over dessert (a strawberry shortcake—Nick, who had been on short rations during the last couple of weeks, had two helpings), Jane Baker said to her husband: “Your cold sounds worse. You’ve been taking too much on, John Baker. And you didn’t eat enough to keep a fly alive.”
   Baker looked guiltily at his plate for a moment, then shrugged. “I can afford to miss a meal now and then,” he said, and palpated his double chin.
   Nick, watching them, wondered how two people of such radically different size got along in bed. I guess they manage, he thought with an interior grin. They sure look comfortable enough with each other. And not that it’s any of my business anyway.
   “You’re flushed, too. You carrying a fever?”
   Baker shrugged. “Nope… well. Maybe a touch.”
   “Well, you’re not going out again tonight. That’s final.”
   “My dear, I have prisoners. If they don’t specially need to be watched, they do need to be fed and watered.”
   “Nick can do it,” she said with finality. “You’re going to bed. And don’t go on about your insomnia; it won’t do you any good.”
   “I cant send Nick,” he said weakly. “He’s a deaf-mute. Besides, he ain’t a deputy.”
   “Well then, you just up and deputize him.”
   “He ain’t a resident!”
   “I won’t tell if you won’t,” Jane Baker said inexorably. She stood up and began clearing the table. “Now you just go on and do it, John.”
   And that was how Nick Andros went from Shoyo prisoner to Shoyo deputy in less than twenty-four hours. As he was preparing to go up to the sheriff’s office, Baker came into the downstairs hall, looking large and ghostly in a frayed bathrobe. He seemed embarrassed to be on view in such attire
   “I never should have let her talk me into this,” he said. “Wouldn’t have done, either, if I didn’t feel so punk. My chest’s all clogged up and I’m as hot as a fire sale two days before Christmas. Weak, too.”
   Nick nodded sympathetically.
   “I’m stuck between deputies. Bradley Caide and his wife went up to Little Rock after their baby passed away. One of those crib deaths. Awful thing. I don’t blame them for going.”
   Nick pointed at his own chest and made a circle with his thumb and forefinger.
   “Sure, you’ll be okay. You just take normal care, you hear? There’s a .45 in the third drawer of my desk, but don’t you be takin it back there. Nor the keys either. Understand?”
   Nick nodded.
   “If you go back there, stay out of their reach. If any of em tries playin sick, don’t you fall for it. It’s the oldest dodge in the world. If one of em should get sick, Doc Soames can see them just as easy in the morning. I’ll be in then.”
   Nick took his pad from his pocket and wrote: “I appreciate you trusting me. Thanks for locking them up & thanks for the job.”
   Baker read this carefully. “You’re a puredee caution, boy. Where you from? How come you’re out on your own like this?”
   “That’s a long story,” Nick jotted. “I’ll write some of it down for you tonight, if you want.”
   “You do that,” Baker said. “I guess you know I put your name on the wire.”
   Nick nodded. It was SOP. But he was clean.
   “I’ll get Jane to call Ma’s Truck Stop out by the highway. Those boys’ll be hollering police brutality if they don’t get their supper.”
   Nick wrote: “Have her tell whoever brings it to come right in. I can’t hear him if he knocks.”
   “Okay.” Baker hesitated a moment longer. “You got your cot in the corner. It’s hard, but it’s clean. You just remember to be careful, Nick. You can’t call for help if there’s trouble.”
   Nick nodded and wrote, “I can take care of myself.”
   “Yeah, I believe you can. Still, I’d get someone from town if I thought any of them would—” He broke off as Jane came in.
   “You still jawing this poor boy? You let him go on, now, before my stupid brother comes along and breaks them all out.”
   Baker laughed sourly. “He’ll be in Tennessee by now, I guess.” He whistled out a long sigh that broke up into a series of phlegmy, booming coughs. “I b’lieve I’ll go upstairs and lie down, Janey.”
   “I’ll bring you some aspirin to cut that fever,” she said.
   She looked back over her shoulder at Nick as she went to the stairs with her husband. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Nick. Whatever the circumstances. You be just as careful as he says.”
   Nick bowed to her, and she dropped half a curtsy in return. He thought he saw a gleam of tears in her eyes.
   A pimply, curious boy in a dirty busboy’s jacket brought three dinner trays about half an hour after Nick had gotten down to the jail. Nick motioned for the busboy to put the trays on the cot, and while he did, Nick scribbled: “Is this paid for?”
   The busboy read this with all the concentration of a college freshman tackling Moby Dick. “Sure,” he said. “Sheriff’s office runs a tab. Say, can’t you talk?”
   Nick shook his head.
   “That’s a bitch,” the busboy said, and left in a hurry, as if the condition might be catching.
   Nick took the trays in one at a time and pushed each one through the slot in the bottom of the cell door with a broomhandle.
   He looked up in time to catch “—chickshit bastard, ain’t he?” from Mike Childress. Smiling, Nick showed him his middle finger.
   “I’ll give you the finger, you dummy,” Childress said, grinning unpleasantly. “When I get out of here I’ll—” Nick turned away, missing the rest.
   Back in the office, sitting in Baker’s chair, he drew the memo pad into the center of the blotter, sat thinking for a moment, and then jotted at the top:
   Life History
   By Nick Andros
   He stopped, smiling a little. He had been in some funny places, but never in his wildest dreams had he expected to be sitting in a sheriff’s office, deputized, in charge of three men who had beaten him up, and writing his life story. After a moment he began to write again:
   I was born in Caslin, Nebraska, on November 14, 1968. My daddy was an independent farmer. He and my mom were always on the edge of getting squeezed out. They owed three different banks. My mother was six months pregnant with me and my dad was taking her to see the doctor in town when a tie rod on his truck let go and they went into the ditch. My daddy had a heart attack and died.
   Anyway, three months after, my mom had me and I was born the way I am. Sure was a tough break on top of losing her husband that way.
   She carried on with the farm until 1973 and then lost it to the “big operators,” as she always called them. She had no family but wrote to some friends in Big Springs, Iowa, and one of them got her a job in a bakery. We lived here until 1977 when she was killed in an accident. A motorcycle hit her while she was crossing the street on her way home from work. It wasn’t even his fault but only bad luck as his brakes failed. He wasn’t even speeding or anything. The Baptist Church gave my mamma a charity funeral. This same church, the Grace Baptist, sent me to the Children of Jesus Christ orphanage in Des Moines. This is a place that all sorts of churches chip together to support. That was where I learned to read and write…
   He stopped there. His hand was aching from writing so much, but that wasn’t why. He felt uneasy, hot and uncomfortable at having to relive all that again. He went back to the jail quarters and looked in. Childress and Warner were asleep. Vince Hogan was standing by the bars, smoking a cigarette and looking across the corridor at the empty cell where Ray Booth would have been tonight if he hadn’t run so quick. Hogan looked as if he might have been crying, and that led him back in time to that small mute scrap of humanity, Nick Andros. There was a word he had learned at the movies as a kid. That word was INCOMMUNICADO. It was a word that had always had fantastic, Lovecraftian overtones to Nick, a fearful word that echoed and clanged in the brain, a word that inscribed all the nuances of fear that live only outside the sane universe and inside the human soul. He had been INCOMMUNICADO all his life.
   He sat down and re-read the last line he’d written. That was where I learned to read and write. But it hadn’t been as simple as that. He lived in a silent world. Writing was code. Speech was the moving of lips, the rise and fall of teeth, the dance of a tongue. His mother had taught him to read lips, and had taught him how to write his name in struggling, sprawling letters. That’s your name, she had said. That’s you, Nicky. But of course she had said it silently, meaninglessly. The prime connection had come when she tapped the paper, then tapped his chest. The worst part about being deaf-mute was not living in the silent movie world; the worst part was not knowing the names of things. He had not really begun to understand the concept of naming until he was four. He had not known that you called the tall green things trees until he was six: He had wanted to know, but no one had thought to tell him and he had no way to ask: he was INCOMMUNICADO.
   When she died he had retreated almost all the way. The orphanage was a place of roaring silence where grim-faced thin boys made fun of his silence; two boys would run up to him, one boy with his hands plastered over his mouth, one boy with his hands plastered over his ears. If none of the staff happened to be near, they would punch him out. Why? No reason. Except that maybe in the vast white class of victims there is a subclass: the victims of victims.
   He stopped wanting to communicate, and when that happened the thinking process itself began to rust and disintegrate. He began to wander from place to place vacantly, looking at the nameless things that filled the world. He watched groups of children in the play yard move their lips, raise and lower their teeth like white drawbridges, dance their tongues in the ritual mating of speech. He sometimes found himself looking at a single cloud for as long as an hour at a time.
   Then Rudy had come. A big man with scars on his face and a bald head. Six feet, five inches tall, might as well have been twenty to runty Nick Andros. They met for the first time in a basement room where there was a table, six or seven chairs, and a TV that only worked when it felt like it. Rudy squatted, putting his eyes on approximately the same level as Nick’s. Then he took his huge, scarred hands and put them over his mouth, his ears.
   I am a deaf-mute.
   Nick turned his face sullenly away: Who gives a fuck?
   Rudy slapped him.
   Nick fell down. His mouth opened and silent tears began to leak from his eyes. He didn’t want to be here with this scarred troll, this bald boogey. He was no deaf-mute, it was a cruel joke.
   Rudy pulled him gently to his feet and led him to the table. A blank sheet of paper was there. Rudy pointed at it, then at Nick. Nick stared sullenly at the paper and then at the bald man. He shook his head. Rudy nodded and pointed at the empty paper again. He produced a pencil and handed it to Nick. Nick put it down as if it were hot. He shook his head. Rudy pointed at the pencil, then at Nick, then at the paper. Nick shook his head. Rudy slapped him again.
   More silent tears. The scarred face looking at him with nothing but deadly patience. Rudy pointed at the paper again. At the pencil. At Nick.
   Nick grasped the pencil in his fist. He wrote the four words that he knew, calling them forth from the cobwebby, rusting mechanism that was in his thinking brain. He wrote:
   NICHOLAS ANDROS
   FUCK YOU
   Then he broke the pencil in half and looked sullenly and defiantly at Rudy. But Rudy was smiling. Suddenly he reached across the table and held Nick’s head steady between his hard, callused palms. His hands were warm, gentle. Nick could not remember the last time he had been touched with such love. His mother had touched him like that.
   Rudy removed his hands from Nick’s face. He picked up the half of the pencil with the point on it. He turned the paper over to the blank side. He tapped the empty white space with the tip of the pencil, and then tapped Nick. He did it again. And again. And again. And finally Nick understood.
   You are this blank page.
   Nick began to cry.
   Rudy came for the next six years.
   … where I learned to read and write. A man named Rudy Sparkman came to help me. I was very lucky to have him. In 1984 the orphanage went broke. They placed as many kids that they could, but I was not one of them. They said I would get in with a family after a while and the state would pay them for keeping me. I wanted to go with Rudy but Rudy was in Africa working for the Peace Corps.
   So I ran away. Being sixteen, I don’t think they looked for me too hard. I figured if I could stay out of trouble I would be all right, and so far so good. I have been taking the high school correspondence courses one at a time, because Rudy always said education is the most important. When I settle down for a while I’m going to take that high-school equivalency test. I will be able to pass it soon. I like school. Maybe I will go to college someday. I know that sounds crazy, a deaf-mute bum like me, but I don’t think it’s impossible. Anyway, that’s my story.
   Yesterday morning Baker had come in around seven-thirty while Nick was emptying wastebaskets. The sheriff looked better.
   “How you feeling?” Nick wrote.
   “Pretty good. I was burnin up until midnight. Worst fever I’ve had since I was a kid. Aspirin didn’t seem to help it. Janey wanted to call the doc, but around twelve-thirty the fever just broke. I slep like a log after that. How are you doing?”
   Nick made a thumb-and-forefinger circle.
   “How’s our guests?”
   Nick opened and closed his mouth several times in a mime jabbering. Looked furious. Made banging gestures on invisible bars.
   Baker threw back his head and laughed, then sneezed several times.
   “You ought to be on TV,” he said. “Did you write your life story down like you said you was gonna try to do?”
   Nick nodded and handed the two sheets of longhand over. The sheriff sat down and read them carefully. When he was done he looked at Nick so long and so piercingly that Nick stared down at his feet for a moment, embarrassed and confused.
   When he looked up again Baker said: “You’ve been on your own since you were sixteen? For six years?”
   Nick nodded.
   “And you’ve really taken all these high school courses?”
   Nick wrote for some time on one of the memo sheets. “I was way behind because I started to read & write so late. When the orphanage closed I was just starting to catch up. I got six h.s. credits from there and another six since then from La Salle in Chicago. I learned about them from a matchbook cover. I need four more credits.”
   “What courses do you still need?” Baker asked, then turned his head and shouted: “Shut up in there! You’ll get your hotcakes and coffee when I’m damned good and ready and not before!”
   Nick wrote: “Geometry. Advanced math. Two years of a language. Those are the college requirements.”
   “A language. You mean like French? German? Spanish?”
   Nick nodded.
   Baker laughed and shook his head. “Don’t that beat all. A deaf-mute learning to talk a foreign language. Nothing against you, boy. You understand that.”
   Nick smiled and nodded.
   “So why you been driftin around so much?”
   “While I was still a minor I didn’t dare stay in one place for too long,” Nick wrote. “Afraid they’d try to stick me in another orphanage or something. When I got old enough to look for a steady job, times got worse. They said the stock-market crashed, or something, but since I’m deaf I didn’t hear it (ha-ha).”
   “Most places would have just let you ramble on,” Baker said. “In hard times the milk of human kindness don’t flow so free, Nick. As for a steady job, I might be able to put you onto something around here, unless those boys soured you on Shoyo and Arkansas for good. But… we ain’t all like that.”
   Nick nodded to show he understood.
   “How’s your teeth? That was quite a shot in the mouth you took.”
   Nick shrugged.
   “Take any of those pain pills?”
   Nick held up two fingers.
   “Well, look, I got some paperwork to do on those boys. You go on with what you were doing. We’ll talk more later.”
   Dr. Soames, the man who had almost hit Nick with his car, came by around 9:30 A.M. the same morning. He was a man of about sixty with shaggy white hair, a scrawny chicken neck, and very sharp blue eyes.
   “Big John tells me you read lips,” he said. “He also says he wants to see you gainfully employed, so I guess I better make sure you’re not going to die on his hands. Take off your shirt.”
   Nick unbuttoned his blue workshirt and took it off.
   “Holy Jesus, lookitim,” Baker said.
   “They did a job of work, all right.” Soames looked at Nick and said dryly, “Boy, you almost lost your left tit.” He pointed to a crescent-shaped scab just above the nipple. Nick’s belly and ribcage looked like a Canadian sunrise. Soames poked and prodded him and looked carefully into the pupils of his eyes. At last he examined the shattered remains of Nick’s front teeth, the only part of him that really hurt now, in spite of the spectacular bruises.
   “That must hurt like a sonofabitch,” he said, and Nick nodded ruefully. “You’re gonna lose them,” Soames went on. “You—” He sneezed three times in quick succession. “Excuse me.”
   He began to put his tools back into his black bag. “The prognosis is favorable, young man, barring strokes of lightning or further trips to Zack’s ginmill. Is your speaking problem physical, or does it come from being deaf?”
   Nick wrote: “Physical. Birth defect.”
   Soames nodded. “Damn shame. Got to think positive, though, and thank God that He didn’t decide to give your brains a stir while He was at it. Put your shirt on.”
   Nick did. He liked Soames; in his way, he was very much like Rudy Sparkman, who had told him once that God had given all deaf-mute males an extra two inches below the waist to make up for the little bit He had subtracted from above the collarbones.
   Soames said, “I’ll tell em to give you a refill on that pain medication down at the drugstore. Tell moneybags here to pay for it.”
   “Ho-ho,” John Baker said.
   “He’s got more dough stashed away in fruit jars than a hog has warts,” Soames went on. He sneezed again, wiped his nose, rummaged around in his bag, and brought out a stethoscope.
   “You want to look out, Gramps, I’ll lock you up for drunk and disorderly,” Baker said with a smile.
   “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Soames said. “You’ll open your mouth too wide one day and fall right in. Take off y’shirt, John, and let’s see if your boobs are as big as they used to be.”
   “Take off my shirt? Why?”
   “Because your wife wants me to look at you, that’s why. She thinks you’re a sick man and she doesn’t want you to get any sicker, God knows why. Ain’t I told her enough times that she and I wouldn’t have to sneak around anymore if you were underground? Come on, Johnny. Show us some skin.”
   “It was just a cold,” Baker said, reluctantly unbuttoning his shirt. “I feel fine this morning. Honest to God, Ambrose, you sound worse’n I do.”
   “You don’t tell the doctor, the doctor tells you.” As Baker pulled his shirt off, Soames turned to Nick and said, “But you know it’s funny how a cold will just start making the rounds. Mrs. Lathrop is down sick, and the whole Richie family, and most of those no-accounts out on the Barker Road are coughing their brains out. Even Billy Warner in there’s hacking away.”
   Baker had wormed out of his undershirt.
   “There, what’d I tell you?” Soames asked. “Ain’t he got a set of knockers on him? Even an old shit like me could get horny looking at that.”
   Baker gasped as the stethoscope touched his chest. “Jesus, that’s cold! What do you do, keep it in a deep freeze?”
   “Breathe in,” Soames said, frowning. “Now let it out.”
   Baker’s exhale turned into a weak cough.
   Soames kept at the sheriff for a long time. Front and back both. At last he put away his stethoscope and used a tongue depressor to look down Baker’s throat. Finished, he broke it in two and tossed it into the wastebasket.
   “Well?” Baker said.
   Soames pressed the fingers of his right hand into the flesh of Baker’s neck under the jaw. Baker winced away from it.
   “I don’t have to ask if that hurt,” Soames said. “John, you go home and go to bed and that isn’t advice, that’s an order.”
   The sheriff blinked. “Ambrose,” he said quietly, “come on. You know I can’t do that. I’ve got three prisoners who have to go up to Camden this afternoon. I left this kid with them last night, but I had no business doing it, and I won’t do it again. He’s mute. I wouldn’t have agreed to it last night if I had been thinking right.”
   “You never mind them, John. You got problems of your own. It’s some kind of respiratory infection, a damn good one by the sound, and a fever to go with it. Your pipes are sick, Johnny, and to be perfectly frank, that’s no joke for a man who’s carrying around the extra meat you are. Go to bed. If you still feel okay tomorrow morning, get rid of them then. Better still, call the State Patrol to come down and get them.”
   Baker looked apologetically at Nick. “You know,” he said, “I do feel kind of dragged out. Maybe some rest—”
   “Go home and lie down,” Nick wrote. “I’ll be careful. Besides, I have to earn enough to pay for those pills.”
   “Nobody works so hard for you as a junkie,” Soames said, and cackled.
   Baker picked up the two sheets of paper with Nick’s background on them. “Could I take these home for Janey to read? She took a real shine to you, Nick.”
   Nick scrawled on the pad, “Sure can. She’s very nice.”
   “One of a kind,” Baker said, and sighed as he buttoned his shirt back up.
   “This fever’s comin on strong again. Thought I had it licked.”
   “Take aspirin,” Soames said, latching his bag. “It’s that glandular infection I don’t like.”
   “There’s a cigar box in the bottom desk drawer,” Baker said. “Petty cash fund. You can go out for lunch and get your medication on the way. Those boys are more dildoes than desperadoes. They’ll be okay. Just leave a voucher for how much money you take. I’ll get in touch with the State Police and you’ll be shut of them by late this afternoon.”
   Nick made a thumb-and-forefinger circle.
   “I’ve been trusting you a lot on short notice,” Baker said soberly, “but Janey says it’s all right. You have a care.”
   Nick nodded.
   Jane Baker had come in around six yesterday evening with a covered dish supper and a carton of milk.
   Nick wrote, “Thanks very much. How’s your husband?”
   She laughed, a small woman with chestnut brown hair, dressed prettily in a checked shirt and faded jeans. “He wanted to come down himself, but I talked him out of it. His fever was up so high this afternoon that it scared me, but it’s almost normal tonight. I think it’s because of the State Patrol. Johnny’s never really happy unless he can be mad at the State Patrol.”
   Nick looked at her quizzically.
   “They told him they couldn’t send anybody down for his prisoners until nine tomorrow morning. They’ve had a bad sick-day, twenty or more troopers out. And a lot of the people who are on have been fetching people to the hospital up at Camden or even Pine Bluff. There’s a lot of this sickness around. I think Am Soames is a lot more worried than he’s letting on.”
   She looked worried herself. Then she took the two folded sheets of memo paper from her breast pocket.
   “This is quite a story,” she said quietly, handing the papers back to him. “You’ve had just about the worst luck of anyone I ever heard of. I think the way you’ve risen above your handicaps is admirable. And I have to apologize again for my brother.”
   Nick, embarrassed, could only shrug.
   “I hope you’ll stay on in Shoyo,” she said, standing. “My husband likes you, and I do, too. Be careful of those men in there.”
   “I will,” Nick wrote. “Tell the sheriff I hope he feels better.”
   “I’ll take him your good wishes.”
   She left then, and Nick passed a night of broken rest, getting up occasionally to check on his three wards. Desperadoes they were not; by ten o’clock they were all sleeping. Two town fellows came in to check and make sure Nick was all right, and Nick noticed that both of them seemed to have colds.
   He dreamed oddly, and all he could remember upon waking was that he seemed to have been walking through endless rows of green corn, looking for something and terribly afraid of something else that seemed to be behind him.
   This morning he was up early, carefully sweeping out the back of the jail and ignoring Billy Warner and Mike Childress. As he went out, Billy called after him: “Ray’s gonna be back, you know. And when he catches you, you’re gonna wish you were blind as well as deaf and dumb!”
   Nick, his back turned, missed most of this.
   Back in the office, he picked up an old copy of Time magazine and began to read. He considered putting his feet up on the desk and decided that would be a very good way to get in trouble if the sheriff came by.
   By eight o’clock he was wondering uneasily if Sheriff Baker might have had a relapse in the night. Nick had expected him by now, ready to turn the three prisoners in his jail over to the county when the State Patrol came for them. Also, Nick’s stomach was rumbling uncomfortably. No one had showed up from the truck-stop down the road, and he looked at the telephone, more with disgust than with longing. He was quite fond of science fiction, picking up falling-apart paperbacks from time to time on the dusty back shelves of antique barns for a nickel or a dime, and he found himself thinking, not for the first time, that it was going to be a great day for the deaf-mutes of the world when the telephone viewscreens the science fiction novels were always predicting finally came into general use.
   By quarter of nine he was acutely uneasy. He went to the door which gave on the cells and looked in.
   Billy and Mike were both standing at their cell doors. Both of them had been banging on the bars with their shoes… which just went to show you that people who can’t talk only made up a small percentage of the world’s dummies. Vince Hogan was lying down. He only turned his head and stared at Nick when he came to the door. Hogan’s face was pallid except for a hectic flush on his cheeks, and there were dark patches under his eyes. Beads of sweat were standing out on his forehead. Nick met his apathetic, fevered gaze and realized that the man was sick. His uneasiness deepened.
   “Hey, dummy, how about some brefus?” Mike called down to him. “An ole Vince there seems like he could use a doctor. Tattle-talein don’t agree with him, does it, Bill?”
   Bill didn’t want to banter. “I’m sorry I yelled at you before, man. Vince, he’s sick, all right. He needs the doctor.”
   Nick nodded and went out, trying to figure out what he should do next. He bent over the desk and wrote on the memo pad: “Sheriff Baker, or Whoever: I’ve gone to get the prisoners some breakfast and to see if I can hunt Dr. Soames up for Vincent Hogan. He appears to be really sick, not just playing possum. Nick Andros.”
   He tore the sheet off the pad and left it in the middle of the desk. Then, tucking the pad into his pocket, he went out into the street.
   The first thing that struck him was the still heat of the day and the smell of greenery. By afternoon it was going to be a scorcher. It was the sort of day when people like to get their chores and errands done early so they can spend the afternoon as quietly as possible, but to Nick, Shoyo’s main street looked strangely indolent this forenoon, more like a Sunday than a workday.
   Most of the diagonal parking spaces in front of the stores were empty. A few cars and farm trucks were going up and down the street, but not many. The hardware store looked open, but the shades of the Mercantile Bank were still drawn, although it was past nine now.
   Nick turned right, toward the truck-stop, which was five blocks down. He was on the corner of the third block when he saw Dr. Soames’s car moving slowly up the street toward him, weaving a little from side to side, as if with exhaustion. Nick waved vigorously, not sure if Soames would stop, but Soames pulled in at the curb, indifferently taking up four of the slanted parking spaces. He didn’t get out but merely sat behind the wheel. The look of the man shocked Nick. Soames had aged twenty years since he had last seen him bantering casually with the sheriff. It was partly exhaustion, but exhaustion couldn’t be the whole explanation—even Nick could see that. As if to confirm his thought, the doctor produced a wrinkled handkerchief from his breast pocket like an old magician doing a creaky trick that does not interest him much anymore, and sneezed into it repeatedly. When he was done he leaned his head back against the car’s seat, mouth half-open to draw breath. His skin looked so shiny and yellow that he reminded Nick of a dead person.
   Then Soames opened his eyes and said, “Sheriff Baker’s dead. If that’s what you flagged me down for, you can forget it. He died a little after two o’clock this morning. Now Janey’s sick with it.”
   Nick’s eyes widened. Sheriff Baker dead? But his wife had been in just last night and said he was feeling better. And she… she had been fine. No, it just wasn’t possible.
   “Dead, all right,” Soames said, as though Nick had spoken his thought aloud. “And he’s not the only one. I’ve signed twelve death certificates in the last twelve hours. And I know of another twenty that are going to be dead by noon unless God shows mercy. But I doubt if this is God’s doing. I suspect He’ll keep right out of it as a consequence.”
   Nick pulled the pad from his pocket and wrote: “What’s the matter with them?”
   “I don’t know,” Soames said, crumpling the sheet slowly and tossing the ball into the gutter. “But everyone in town seems to be coming down with it, and I’m more frightened than I ever have been in my life. I have it myself, although what I’m suffering most from right now is exhaustion. I’m not a young man anymore. I can’t go these long hours without paying the price, you know.” A tired, frightened petulance had entered his voice, which Nick fortunately couldn’t hear. “And feeling sorry for myself won’t help.”
   Nick, who hadn’t been aware Soames was feeling sorry for himself, could only look at him, puzzled.
   Soames got out of his car, holding on to Nick’s arm for a minute to help himself. He had an old man’s grip, weak and a little frenzied. “Come on over to that bench, Nick. You’re good to talk to. I suppose you’ve been told that before.”
   Nick pointed back toward the jail.
   “They’re not going anywhere,” Soames said, “and if they’re down with it, right now they’re on the bottom of my list.”
   They sat on the bench, which was painted bright green and bore an advertisement on the backrest for a local insurance company. Soames turned his face gratefully up to the warmth of the sun.
   “Chills and fever,” he said. “Ever since about ten o’clock last night. Just lately it’s been the chills. Thank God there hasn’t been any diarrhea.”
   “You ought to go home to bed,” Nick wrote.
   “So I ought. And will. I just want to rest for a few minutes first…” His eyes slipped shut and Nick thought he had gone to sleep. He wondered if he should go on down to the truck-stop and get Billy and Mike some breakfast.
   Then Dr. Soames spoke again, without opening his eyes. Nick watched his lips. “The symptoms are all very common,” he said, and began to enumerate them on his fingers until all ten were spread out in front of him like a fan. “Chills. Fever. Headache. Weakness and general debilitation. Loss of appetite. Painful urination. Swelling of the glands, progressing from minor to acute. Swelling in the armpits and in the groin. Respiratory weakness and failure.”
   He looked at Nick.
   “They are the symptoms of the common cold, of influenza, of pneumonia. We can cure all of those things, Nick. Unless the patient is very young or very old, or perhaps already weakened by a previous illness, antibiotics will knock them out. But not this. It comes on the patient quickly or slowly. It doesn’t seem to matter. Nothing helps. The thing escalates, backs up, escalates again; debilitation increases; the swelling gets worse; finally, death.
   “Somebody made a mistake.
   “And they’re trying to cover it up.”
   Nick looked at him doubtfully, wondering if he had picked the words rightly from the doctor’s lips, wondering if Soames might be raving.
   “It sounds slightly paranoid, doesn’t it?” Soames asked, looking at him with weary humor. “I used to be frightened of the younger generation’s paranoia, do you know that? Always afraid someone was tapping their phones… following them… running computer checks on them… and now I find out they were right and I was wrong. Life is a fine thing, Nick, but old age takes an unpleasantly high toll on one’s dearly held prejudices, I find.”
   “What do you mean?” Nick wrote.
   “None of the phones in Shoyo work,” Soames said. Nick had no idea if this was in answer to his question (Soames seemed to have given Nick’s last note only the most cursory of glances), or if the doctor had gone off on some new tack—the fever could be making Soames’s mind jump around, he supposed.
   The doctor observed Nick’s puzzled face, and seemed to think the deaf-mute might not believe him. “Quite true,” he said. “If you try to dial any number not on this town’s circuit, you get a recorded announcement. Furthermore, the two Shoyo exits and entrances from the turnpike are closed off with barriers which say ROAD CONSTRUCTION. But there is no construction. Only the barriers. I was out there. I believe it would be possible to move the barriers aside, but the traffic on the turnpike seems very light this morning. And most of it seems to consist of army vehicles. Trucks and jeeps.”
   “What about the other roads?” Nick wrote.
   “Route 63 has been torn up at the east end of town to replace a culvert,” Soames said. “At the west end of town there appears to have been a rather nasty car accident. Two cars across the road, blocking it entirely. There are smudge pots out, but no sign of state troopers or wreckers.”
   He paused, removed his handkerchief, and blew his nose.
   “The men working on the culvert are going very slowly, according to Joe Rackman, who lives out that way. I was at the Rackmans’ about two hours ago, looking at their little boy, who is very ill indeed. Joe said that he thinks that the men at the culvert are in fact soldiers, though they’re dressed in state road crew coveralls and driving a state truck.”
   Nick wrote: “How does he know?”
   Standing up, Soames said: “Workmen rarely salute each other.”
   Nick got up, too.
   “Back roads?” he jotted.
   “Possibly.” Soames nodded. “But I am a doctor, not a hero. Joe said he saw guns in the cab of that truck. Army-issue carbines. If one tried to leave Shoyo by the back roads and if they were watched, who knows? And what might one find beyond Shoyo? I repeat: someone made a mistake. And now they’re trying to cover it up. Madness. Madness. Of course the news of something like this will get out, and it won’t take long. And in the meantime, how many will die?”
   Nick, frightened, only looked at Dr. Soames as he went back to his car and climbed slowly in.
   “And you, Nick,” Soames said, looking out the window at him. “How do you feel? A cold? Sneezing? Coughing?”
   Nick shook his head to each one.
   “Will you try to leave town? I think you could, if you went by the fields.”
   Nick shook his head and wrote, “Those men are locked up. I can’t just leave them. Vincent Hogan is sick but the other two seem okay. I’ll get them their breakfast and then go see Mrs. Baker.”
   “You’re a thoughtful boy,” Soames said. “That’s rare. A boy in this degraded age who has a sense of responsibility is even rarer. She’d appreciate that, Nick, I know. Mr. Braceman, the Methodist minister, also said he would stop by. I’m afraid he’ll have a lot of calls to make before the day is over. You’ll be careful of those three you have locked up, won’t you?”
   Nick nodded soberly.
   “Good. I’ll try to drop by and check on you this afternoon.” He dropped the car into gear and drove away, looking weary and red-eyed and shriveled. Nick stared after him, his face troubled, and then began to walk down to the truck-stop again. It was open, but one of the two cooks was not in and three of the four waitresses hadn’t shown up for the seven-to-three shift. Nick had to wait a long time to get his order. When he got back to the jail, both Billy and Mike looked badly frightened. Vince Hogan was delirious, and by six o’clock that evening he was dead.

Chapter 19
   
It had been so long since Larry had been in Times Square that he expected it to look different somehow, magical. Things would look smaller and yet better there, and he would not feel intimidated by the rank, smelly, and sometimes dangerous vitality of the place the way he had as a child, when he and Buddy Marx or just he alone would scuttle down here to see the 99-cent double features or to stare at the glittering junk in the windows of the shops and arcades and poolhalls.
   But it all looked just the same—more than it should have because some things really had changed. When you came up the stairs from the subway, the newsstand that had been on the corner as you came out was gone. Half a block down, where there had been a penny arcade full of flashing lights and bells and dangerous-looking young men with cigarettes dangling from the corners of their mouths as they played the Gottlieb Desert Isle or Space Race, where that had been there was now an Orange Julius with a flock of young blacks standing in front of it, their lower bodies moving gently as if somewhere jive played on and on, jive that only black ears could hear. There were more massage parlors and X-rated movies.
   Still, it was much the same, and this made him sad. In a way the only real difference made things seem worse: he felt like a tourist here now. But maybe even native New Yorkers felt like tourists in the Square, dwarfed, wanting to look up and read the electronic headlines as they marched around and around up there. He couldn’t tell; he had forgotten what it was like to be a part of New York. He had no particular urge to relearn.
   His mother hadn’t gone to work that morning. She’d been fighting a cold for the last couple of days and had gotten up early this morning with a fever. He had heard her from the narrow, safe bed in his old room, banging around out in the kitchen, sneezing and saying “Shit!” under her breath, getting ready for breakfast. The sound of the TV being turned on, then the news on the “Today” program. An attempted coup in India. A power station blown up in Wyoming. The Supreme Court was expected to hand down a landmark decision having to do with gay rights.
   By the time Larry came out into the kitchen, buttoning his shirt, the news was over and Gene Shalitt was interviewing a man with a bald head. The man with the bald head was showing a number of small animals he had hand-blown. Glassblowing, he said, had been his hobby for forty years, and his book would be published by Random House. Then he sneezed. “Excuse you,” Gene Shalitt said, and chuckled.
   “You want em fried or scrambled?” Alice Underwood asked. She was in her bathrobe.
   “Scrambled,” Larry said, knowing it would do no good to protest the eggs. In Alice’s view, it wasn’t breakfast without eggs (which she called “crackleberries” when she was in a good humor). They had protein and nutrition. Her idea of nutrition was vague but all-encompassing. She kept a list of nutritious items in her head, Larry knew, as well as their opposite numbers—Jujubes, pickles, Slim Jims, the slice of pink bubble gum that came with baseball cards, and oh dear God, so many others.
   He sat down and watched her make the eggs, pouring them into the same old black skillet, stirring them with the same wife whisk that she had used to stir his eggs when he had been going to the first grade at PS 162.
   She pulled her hankie out of her bathrobe pocket, coughed into it, sneezed into it, and muttered “Shit!” indistinctly into it before putting it back.
   “Day off, Mom?”
   “I called in sick. This cold wants to break me. I hate to call in sick on Fridays, so many do, but I’ve got to get off my feet. I’m running a fever. Swollen glands, too.”
   “Did you call the doctor?”
   “When I was a charming maid, doctors made housecalls,” she said. “Now if you’re sick, you have to go to the hospital emergency room. That, or spend the day waiting for some quack to see you in one of those places where they’re supposed to have—ha-ha—walk-in medical care. Walk in and get ready to collect your Medicare, that’s what I think. Those places are worse than the Green Stamp Redemption Center a week before Christmas. I’ll stay home and take aspirin, and by tomorrow this time I’ll be on the downhill side of it.”
   He stayed most of the morning, trying to help out. He lugged the TV in by her bed, the cords standing out heroically on his arms (“You’re going to give yourself a hernia so I can watch ‘Let’s Make a Deal,’” she sniffed), brought her juice and an old bottle of NyQuil for her stuffiness, and ran down to the market to get her a couple of paperbacks.
   After that there wasn’t much for them to do except get on each other’s nerves. She marveled how much poorer the TV reception was in the bedroom and he had to bite back an acid comment to the effect that poor reception was better than no reception at all. Finally he said he might go out and see some of the city.
   “That’s a good idea,” she said with obvious relief. “I’m going to take a nap. You’re a good boy, Larry.”
   So he had gone down the narrow stairs (the elevator was still broken) and onto the street, feeling guilty relief. The day was his, and he still had some cash in his pocket.
   But now, in Times Square, he didn’t feel so cheerful. He wandered along, his wallet long since transferred to a front pocket. He paused in front of a discount record store, transfixed by the sound of his own voice coming from the battered overhead speakers. The bridge verse.
   I didn’t come to ask you to stay all night
   Or to find out if you’ve seen the light
   I didn’t come to make a fuss or pick a fight
   I just want you to tell me if you think you can
   Baby, can you dig your man?
   Dig him, baby—
   Baby, can you dig your man?
   That’s me, he thought, looking vacantly in at the albums, but today the sound depressed him. Worse, it made him homesick. He didn’t want to be here under this gray washtub sky, smelling New York exhaust, one hand constantly playing pocket pool with his wallet to make sure it was still there. New York, thy name is paranoia. Suddenly where he wanted to be was in a West Coast recording studio, making a new album.
   Larry quickened his step and turned in at an arcade. Bells and buzzers jangled in his ears; there was the amplified, ripping growl of a Deathrace 2000 game, complete with the unearthly, electronic screams of the dying pedestrians. Neat game, Larry thought, soon to be followed by Dachau 2000. They’ll love that one. He went to the change booth and got ten dollars in quarters. There was a working phone kiosk next to the Beef’n Brew across the street and he direct-dialed Jane’s Place from memory. Jane’s was a poker parlor where Wayne Stukey sometimes hung out.
   Larry plugged quarters into the slot until his hand ached, and the phone began to ring three thousand miles away.
   A female voice said, “Jane’s. We’re open.”
   “To anything?” he asked, low and sexy.
   “Listen, wise guy, this isn’t… hey, is this Larry?”
   “Yeah, it’s me. Hi, Arlene.”
   “Where are you? Nobody’s seen you, Larry.”
   “Well, I’m on the East Coast,” he said cautiously. “Somebody told me there were bloodsuckers on me and I ought to get out of the pool until they dropped off.”
   “Something about a big party?”
   “Yeah.”
   “I heard about that,” she said. “Big spender.”
   “Is Wayne around, Arlene?”
   “You mean Wayne Stukey?”
   “I don’t mean John Wayne—he’s dead.”
   “You mean you haven’t heard?”
   “What would I hear? I’m on the other coast. Hey, he’s okay, isn’t he?”
   “He’s in the hospital with this flu bug. Captain Trips, they’re calling it out here. Not that it’s any laughing matter. A lot of people have died with it, they say. People are scared, staying in. We’ve got six empty tables, and you know Jane’s never has empty tables.”
   “How is he?”
   “Who knows? They’ve got wards and wards of people and none of them can have visitors. It’s spooky, Larry. And there are lot of soldiers around.”
   “On leave?”
   “Soldiers on leave don’t carry guns or ride around in convoy trucks. A lot of people are really scared. You’re well off out where you are.”
   “Hasn’t been anything on the news.”
   “Out here there’s been a few things in the papers about getting flu boosters, that’s all. But some people are saying the army got careless with one of those little plague jars. Isn’t that creepy?”
   “It’s just scare talk.”
   “There’s nothing like it where you are?”
   “No,” he said, and then thought of his mother’s cold. And hadn’t there been a lot of sneezing and hacking going on in the subway? He remembered thinking it sounded like a TB ward. But there were plenty of sneezes and runny noses to go around in any city. Cold germs are gregarious, he thought. They like to share the wealth.
   “Janey herself isn’t in,” Arlene was saying. “She’s got a fever and swollen glands, she said. I thought that old whore was too tough to get sick.”
   “Three minutes are up, signal when through,” the operator broke in.
   Larry said: “Well, I’ll be coming back in a week or so, Arlene. We’ll get together.”
   “Fine by me. I always wanted to go out with a famous recording star.”
   “Arlene? You don’t by any chance know a guy named Dewey the Deck, do you?”
   “Oh!” she said in a very startled way. “Oh wow! Larry!”
   “What?”
   “Thank God you didn’t hang up! I did see Wayne, just about two days before he went into the hospital. I forgot all about it! Oh, gee!”
   “Well, what is it?”
   “It’s an envelope. He said it was for you, but he asked me to keep it in my cash drawer for a week or so, or give it to you if I saw you. He said something like ‘He’s goddam lucky Dewey the Deck isn’t collecting it instead of him.’”
   “What’s in it?” He switched the phone from one hand to the other.
   “Just a minute. I’ll see.” There was a moment of silence, then ripping paper. Arlene said, “It’s a savings account book. First Commercial Bank of California. There’s a balance of… wow! Just over thirteen thousand dollars. If you ask me to go somewhere dutch, I’ll brain you.”
   “You won’t have to,” he said, grinning. “Thanks, Arlene. Hang on to that for me, now.”
   “No, I’ll throw it down a storm-drain. Asshole.”
   “It’s so good to be loved.”
   She sighed. “You’re too much, Larry. I’ll put it in an envelope with both our names on it. Then you can’t duck me when you come in.”
   “I wouldn’t do that, sugar.”
   They hung up and then the operator was there, demanding three more dollars for Ma Bell. Larry, still feeling the wide and foolish grin on his face, plugged it willingly into the slot.
   He looked at the change still scattered on the phone booth’s shelf, picked out a quarter, and dropped it into the slot. A moment later his mother’s phone was ringing. Your first impulse is to share good news, your second is to club someone with it. He thought—no, he believed—that this was entirely the former. He wanted to relieve both of them with the news that he was solvent again.
   The smile faded off his lips little by little. The phone was only ringing. Maybe she had decided to go in to work after all. He thought of her flushed, feverish face, and of her coughing and sneezing and saying “Shit!” impatiently into her handkerchief. He didn’t think she would have gone in. The truth was, he didn’t think she was strong enough to go in.
   He hung up and absently removed his quarter from the slot when it clicked back. He went out, jingling the change in his hand. When he saw a cab he hailed it, and as the cab pulled back into the flow of traffic it began to spatter rain.
   The door was locked and after knocking two or three times he was sure the apartment was empty. He had rapped loud enough to make someone on the floor above rap back, like an exasperated ghost. But he would have to go in and make sure, and he didn’t have a key. He turned to go down the stairs to Mr. Freeman’s apartment, and that was when he heard the low groan from behind the door.
   There were three different locks on his mother’s door, but she was indifferent about using them all in spite of her obsession with the Puerto Ricans. Larry hit the door with his shoulder and it rattled loudly in its frame. He hit it again and the lock gave. The door swung back and banged off the wall.
   “Mom?”
   That groan again.
   The apartment was dim; the day had grown dark very suddenly, and now there was thick thunder and the sound of rain had swelled. The living room window was half open, the white curtains bellying out over the table, then being sucked back through the opening and into the airshaft beyond. There was a glistening wet patch on the floor where the rain had come in.
   “Mom, where are you?”
   A louder groan. He went through into the kitchen, and thunder rumbled again. He almost tripped over her. She was lying on the floor, half in and half out of her bedroom.
   “Mom! Jesus, Mom!”
   She tried to roll over at the sound of his voice, but only her head would move, pivoting on the chin, coming to rest on the left cheek. Her breathing was stertorous and clogged with phlegm. But the worst thing, the thing he never forgot, was the way her visible eye rolled up to look at him, like the eye of a hog in a slaughtering pen. Her face was bright with fever.
   “Larry?”
   “Going to put you on your bed, Mom.”
   He bent, locking his knees fiercely against the trembling that wanted to start up in them, and got her in his arms. Her housecoat fell open, revealing a wash-faded nightgown and fishbelly-white legs sewn with puffy varicose veins. Her heat was immense. That terrified him. No one could remain so hot and live. Her brains must be frying in her head.
   As if to prove this, she said querulously: “Larry, go get your father. He’s in the bar.”
   “Be quiet,” he said, distraught. “Just be quiet and go to sleep, Mom.”
   “He’s in the bar with that photographer!” she said shrilly into the palpable afternoon darkness, and thunder cracked viciously outside. Larry’s body felt as if it was coated with slowly running slime. A cool breeze was moving through the apartment, coming from the half-open window in the living room. As if in response to it, Alice began to shiver and the flesh of her arms humped up in gooseflesh. Her teeth clicked. Her face was a full moon in the bedroom’s semidarkness. Larry scrambled the covers down, put her legs in, and pulled the blankets up to her chin. Still she shivered helplessly, making the top blanket quiver and quake. Her face was dry and sweatless.
   “You go tell him I said come outta there! ” she cried, and then was silent, except for the heavy bronchial sound of her breathing.
He went back into the living room, approached the telephone, then detoured around it. He shut the window with a bang and then went back to the phone.
   The books were on a shelf underneath the little table it sat on. He looked up the number of Mercy Hospital and dialed it while more thunder cracked outside. A stroke of lightning turned the window he’d just closed into a blue and white X-ray plate. In the bedroom his mother screamed breathlessly, chilling his blood.
   The phone rang once, there was a buzzing sound, then a click. A mechanically bright voice said: “This is a recording made at Mercy General Hospital. Right now all of our circuits are busy. If you will hold, your call will be taken as soon as possible. Thank you. This is a recording made at Mercy General Hospital. At the time of your call—”
   “We put the mopheads downstairs! ” his mother cried out. Thunder rolled. “Those Puerto Rickies don’t know nothing! ”
   “—call will be taken as soon as—”
   He thumped the phone down and stood over it, sweating. What kind of goddam hospital was that, where you got a fucking recorded announcement when your mother was dying? What was going on there?
   Larry decided to go down and see if Mr. Freeman could watch her while he got over to the hospital. Or should he call a private ambulance? Christ, how come nobody knew about these things when they needed to know about them? Why didn’t they teach it in school?
   In the bedroom his mother’s laborious breathing went on and on.
   “I’ll be back,” he muttered, and went to the door. He was scared, terrified for her, but underneath another voice was saying things like: These things always happen to me. And: Why did it have to happen after I got the good news? And most despicable of all: How bad is this going to screw up my plans? How many things am I going to have to change around?
   He hated that voice, wished it would die a quick, nasty death, but it just went on and on.
   He ran down the stairs to Mr. Freeman’s apartment and thunder boomed through the dark clouds. As he reached the first-floor landing the door blew open and a curtain of rain swept in.

Chapter 20
   
The Harborside was the oldest hotel in Ogunquit. The view was not so good since they had built the new yacht club over on the other side, but on an afternoon like this, when the sky had been poxed with intermittent thunderstorms, the view was good enough.
   Frannie had been sitting by the window for almost three hours, trying to write a letter to Grace Duggan, a high school chum who was now going to Smith. It wasn’t a confessional letter dealing with her pregnancy or the scene with her mother—writing about those things would do nothing but depress her, and she supposed Grace would hear soon enough from her own sources in town. She had only been trying to write a friendly letter. The bicycle trip Jesse and I took to Rangely in May with Sam Lothrop and Sally Wenscelas. The biology final I lucked out on. Peggy Tate’s (another high school friend and mutual acquaintance) new job as a Senate page. The impending marriage of Amy Lauder.
   The letter just wouldn’t allow itself to be written. The interesting pyrotechnics of the day had played a part—how could you write while pocket thunderstorms kept coming and going over the water? More to the point, none of the news in the letter seemed precisely honest. It had twisted slightly, like a knife in the hand that gives you a superficial cut instead of peeling the potato as you had expected it to do. The bicycle trip had been jolly, but she and Jess were no longer on such jolly terms. She had indeed lucked out on her BY-7 final, but had not been lucky at all on the biology final that really counted. Neither she nor Grace had ever cared all that much for Peggy Tate, and Amy’s forthcoming nuptials, in Fran’s present state, seemed more like one of those ghastly sick jokes than an occasion of joy. Amy’s getting married but I’m having the baby, hah-hah-hah.
   Feeling that the letter had to be finished if only so she wouldn’t have to wrestle with it anymore, she wrote:
   I’ve got problems of my own, boy do I have problems, but I just don’t have the heart to write them all down. Bad enough just having to think about them! But I expect to see you by the Fourth, unless your plans have changed since your last letter. (One letter in six weeks? I was beginning to think someone had chopped your typing fingers off, kid!) When I see you I’ll tell you all. I could sure use your advice.
   Believe in me and I’ll believe in you,
   Fran
   She signed her name with her customary flamboyant/comic scrawl, so it took up half of the remaining white space on the notesheet. Just doing that made her feel more like an imposter than ever. She folded it into the envelope and addressed it and put it against the mirror standing up. Finished business.
   There. Now what?
   The day was darkening again. She got up and walked restlessly around the room, thinking she ought to go out before it started to rain again, but where was there to go? A movie? She’d seen the only one in town. With Jesse. To Portland to look at clothes? No fun. The only clothes she could look at realistically these days were the ones with the elastic waistbands. Room for two.
   She’d had three calls today, the first one good news, the second indifferent, the third bad. She wished they’d come in reverse order. Outside the rain had begun to fall, darkening the marina’s pier again. She decided she’d go out and walk and to hell with the impending rain. The fresh air, the summer damp, might make her feel better. She might even stop somewhere and have a glass of beer. Happiness in a bottle. Equilibrium, anyway.
   The first call had been from Debbie Smith, in Somersworth. Fran was more than welcome, Debbie said warmly. In fact, she was needed. One of the three girls who had been sharing the apartment had moved out in May, had gotten a job in a warehousing firm as a secretary. She and Rhoda couldn’t swing the rent much longer without a third. “And we both come from big families,” Debbie said. “Crying babies don’t bother us.”
   Fran said she’d be ready to move in by the first of July, and when she hung up she found warm tears coursing down her cheeks. Relief tears. If she could get away from this town where she had grown up, she thought she would be all right. Away from her mother, away from her father, even. The fact of the baby and her singleness would then assume some sort of sane proportion in her life. A large factor, surely, but not the only one. There was some sort of animal, a bug or a frog, she thought, that swelled up to twice its normal size when it felt threatened. The predator, in theory at least, saw this, got scared, and slunk off. She felt a little like that bug, and it was this whole town, the total environment (gestalt was maybe an even better word), that made her feel that way. She knew that nobody was going to make her wear a scarlet letter, but she also knew that for her mind to finish convincing her nerves of that fact, a break with Ogunquit was necessary. When she went out on the street she could feel people, not looking at her, but getting ready to look at her. The year-round residents, of course, not the summer people. The year-round residents always had to have someone to look at—a tosspot, a welfare slacker, The Kid from a Good Family who had been picked up shoplifting in Portland or Old Orchard Beach… or the girl with the levitating belly.
   The second call, the so-so one, had been from Jess Rider. He had called from Portland and he had tried the house first. Luckily, he had gotten Peter, who gave him Fran’s telephone number at the Harborside with no editorial comment.
   Still, almost the first thing he’d said was: “You got a lot of static at home, huh?”
   “Well, I got some,” she said cautiously, not wanting to go into it. That would make them conspirators of a kind.
   “Your mother?”
   “Why do you say that?”
   “She looks like the type that might freak out. It’s something in the eyes, Frannie. It says if you shoot my sacred cows, I’ll shoot yours.”
   She was silent.
   “I’m sorry. I don’t want to offend you.”
   “You didn’t,” she said. His description was actually quite apt—surface-apt anyway—but she was still trying to get over the surprise of that verb, offend. It was a strange word to hear from him. Maybe there’s a postulate here, she thought. When your lover begins to talk about “offending” you, he’s not your lover anymore.
   “Frannie, the offer still stands. If you say yes, I can get a couple of rings and be there this afternoon.”
   On your bike, she thought, and almost giggled. A giggle would be a horrible, unnecessary thing to do to him, and she covered the phone for a second just to be sure it wasn’t going to escape. She had done more weeping and giggling in the last six days than she had done since she was fifteen and starting to date.
   “No, Jess,” she said, and her voice was quite calm.
   “I mean it!” he said with startling vehemence, as if he had seen her struggling with laughter.
   “I know you do,” she said. “But I’m not ready to get married. I know that about me, Jess. It has nothing to do with you.”
   “What about the baby?”
   “I’m going to have it.”
   “And give it up?”
   “I haven’t decided.”
   For a moment he was silent and she could hear other voices in other rooms. They had their own problems, she supposed. Baby, the world is a daytime drama. We love our lives, and so we look for the guiding light as we search for tomorrow.
   “I wonder about that baby,” Jesse said finally. She really doubted if he did, but it was maybe the only thing he could have said that would cut her. It did.
   “Jess—”
   “So where are you going?” he asked briskly. “You can’t stay at the Harborside all summer. If you need a place, I can look around in Portland.”
   “I’ve got a place.”
   “Where, or am I not supposed to ask?”
   “You’re not supposed to,” she said, and bit her tongue for not finding a more diplomatic way of saying it.
   “Oh,” he said. His voice was queerly flat. Finally he said cautiously, “Can I ask you something and not piss you off, Frannie? Because I really want to know. It’s not a rhetorical question or anything.”
   “You can ask,” she agreed warily. Mentally she did gird herself not to be pissed off, because when Jess prefaced something like that, it was usually just before he came out with some hideous and totally unaware piece of chauvinism.
   “Don’t I have any rights in this at all?” Jess asked. “Can’t I share the responsibility and the decision?”
   For a moment she was pissed off, and then the feeling was gone. Jess was just being Jess, trying to protect his image of himself to himself, the way all thinking people do so they can get to sleep at night. She had always liked him for his intelligence, but in a situation like this, intelligence could be a bore. People like Jess—and herself, too—had been taught all their lives that the good thing to do was commit and be active. Sometimes you had to hurt yourself—and badly—to find out it could be better to lie back in the tall weeds and procrastinate. His toils were kind, but they were still toils. He didn’t want to let her get away.
   “Jesse,” she said, “neither of us wanted this baby. We agreed on the pill so the baby, wouldn’t happen. You don’t have any responsibility.”
   “But—”
   “No, Jess,” she said, quite firmly.
   He sighed.
   “Will you get in touch when you get settled?”
   “I think so.”
   “Are you still planning to go back to school?”
   “Eventually. I’m going to take the fall semester off. Maybe with something CED.”
   “If you need me, Frannie, you know where I’ll be. I’m not running out.”
   “I know that, Jesse.”
   “If you need dough—”
   “Yes.”
   “Get in touch. I won’t press you, but… I’ll want to see you.”
   “All right, Jess.”
   “Goodbye, Fran.”
   “Goodbye.”
   When she hung up the goodbyes had seemed too final, the conversation unfinished. It struck her why. They had not added “I love you,” and that was a first. It made her sad and she told herself not to be, but the telling didn’t help.
   The last call had come around noon, and it was from her father. They had had lunch the day before yesterday, and he told her he was worried about the effect this was having on Carla. She hadn’t come to bed last night; she had spent it in the parlor, poring over the old genealogical records. He had gone in around eleven-thirty to ask her when she was coming up. Her hair had been down, flowing over her shoulders and the bodice of her nightgown, and Peter said she looked wild and not strictly in touch with things. That heavy book was on her lap and she hadn’t even looked up at him, only continued to turn the pages. She said she wasn’t sleepy. She would be up in a while. She had a cold, Peter told her as they sat in a booth at the Corner Lunch, more looking at hamburgers than eating them. The sniffles. When Peter asked her if she would like a glass of hot milk, she didn’t answer at all. He had found her yesterday morning asleep in the chair, the book on her lap.
   When she finally woke up she had seemed better, more herself, but her cold was worse. She dismissed the idea of having Dr. Edmonton in, saying it was just a chest cold. She had put Vicks on her chest, and a flannel square of cloth, and she thought her sinuses were clearing already. But Peter hadn’t cared for the way she looked, he told Frannie. Although she refused to let him take her temperature, he thought she was running a couple of degrees of fever.
   He had called Fran today just after the first thunderstorm had begun. The clouds, purple and black, had piled up silently over the harbor, and the rain began, at first gentle and then torrential. As they talked she could look out her window and see the lightning stab down at the water beyond the breakwater, and each time it happened there would be a little scratching noise on the wire, like a phonograph needle digging a record.
   “She’s in bed today,” Peter said. “She finally agreed to let Tom Edmonton take a look at her.”
   “Has he been yet?”
   “He just left. He thinks she’s got the flu.”
   “Oh, Lord,” Frannie said, closing her eyes. “That’s no joke for a woman her age.”
   “No, it isn’t.” He paused. “I told him everything, Frannie. About the baby, about the fight you and Carla had. Tom’s taken care of you since you were a baby yourself, and he keeps his lip buttoned. I wanted to know if that could have caused this. He said no. Flu is flu.”
   “Flu made who,” Fran said bleakly.
   “Pardon?”
   “Never mind,” Fran said. Her father was amazingly broadminded, but an AC/DC fan he was not. “Go on.”
   “Well, there’s not much further to go, hon. He said there’s a lot of it around. A particularly nasty breed. It seems to have migrated out of the south, and New York is swamped with it.”
   “But sleeping in the parlor all night—” she began doubtfully.
   “Actually, he said being in an upright position was probably better for her lungs and her bronchial tubes. He didn’t say anything else, but Alberta Edmonton belongs to all the organizations Carla belongs to, so he didn’t have to. Both of us knew she’s been inviting something like this, Fran. She’s president of the Town Historical Committee, she’s spending twenty hours a week in the library, she’s secretary of the Women’s Club and the Lovers of Literature Club, she’s been running the March of Dimes here in town since before Fred died, and last winter she took on the Heart Fund, for good measure. On top of all that she’s been trying to drum up interest in a Southern Maine Genealogical Society. She’s run down, worn out. And that’s part of the reason she blew up at you. All Edmonton said was that she had the welcome mat out for the first evil germ that passed her way. That’s all he had to say. Frannie, she’s getting old and she doesn’t want to. She’s been working harder than I have.”
   “How sick is she, Daddy?”
   “She’s in bed, drinking juice and taking the pills that Tom prescribed. I took the day off, and Mrs. Halliday is going to come in and sit with her tomorrow. She wants Mrs. Halliday so they can work out an agenda for the July meeting of the Historical Society.” He sighed windily and lightning scratched the wire again. “I sometimes think she wants to die in harness.”
   Timidly, Fran said: “Do you think she’d mind if I—”
   “Right now she would. But give her time, Fran. She’ll come around.”
   Now, four hours later, tying her rain scarf over her hair, she wondered if her mother would come around. Maybe if she gave up the baby, no one in town would ever get wind of it. That was unlikely, though. In small towns people scent the wind with noses of uncommon keenness. And of course if she kept the baby… but she wasn’t really thinking of that, was she? Was she?
   She could feel guilt working in her as she pulled on her light coat. Her mother was run down, of course she was. Fran had seen that when she came home from college and the two of them exchanged kisses on the cheek. Carla had bags under her eyes, her skin looked too yellow, and the gray in her hair, which was always beauty-shop-neat, had progressed visibly in spite of the thirty-dollar rinses. But still…
   She had been hysterical, absolutely hysterical. And Frannie was left asking herself exactly how she was going to assess responsibility if her mother’s flu developed into pneumonia, or if she had some kind of breakdown. Or even died. God, what an awful thought. That couldn’t happen, please God no, of course not. The drugs she was taking would knock it out, and once Frannie was out of her line of visibility and incubating her little stranger quietly in Somersworth, her mother would recover from the knock she had been forced to take. She would—
   The phone began to ring.
   She looked at it blankly for a moment, and outside more lightning flickered, followed by a clap of thunder so close and vicious that she jumped, wincing.
   Jangle, jangle, jangle.
   But she had had her three calls, who else could it be? Debbie wouldn’t need to call her back, and she didn’t think Jess would, either. Maybe it was “Dialing for Dollars.” Or a Saladmaster salesman. Maybe it was Jess after all, giving it the old college try.
   As she went to pick it up, she felt sure it was her father and that the news would be worse. It’s a pie, she told herself. Responsibility is a pie. Some of the responsibility goes with all the charity work she does, but you’re only kidding if you think you’re not going to have to cut a big, juicy, bitter piece for yourself. And eat every bite.
   “Hello?”
   There was nothing but silence for a moment and she frowned, puzzled, and said hello again.
   Then her father said, “Fran?” and made a strange, gulping sound. “Frannie?” That gulping sound again and Fran realized with dawning horror that her father was fighting back tears. One of her hands crept to her throat and clutched at the knot where the rain scarf was tied.
   “Daddy? What is it? Is it Mom?”
   “Frannie, I’ll have to pick you up. I’ll… just swing by and pick you up. That’s what I’ll do.”
   “Is Mom all right?” she screamed into the phone. Thunder whacked over the Harborside again and frightened her and she began to cry. “Tell me, Daddy!”
   “She got worse, that’s all I know,” Peter said. “About an hour after I talked to you she got worse. Her fever went up. She started to rave. I tried to get Tom… and Rachel said he was out, that a lot of people were really sick… so I called the Sanford Hospital and they said their ambulances were out on calls, both of them, but they’d add Carla to the list. The list, Frannie, what the hell is this list, all of a sudden? I know Jim Warrington, he drives one of the Sanford ambulances, and unless there’s a car wreck on 95 he sits around and plays gin rummy all day. What’s this list?” He was nearly screaming.
   “Calm down, Daddy. Calm down. Calm down.” She burst into tears again and her hand left the knot in her scarf and went to her eyes. “If she’s still there, you better take her yourself.”
   “No… no, they came about fifteen minutes ago. And Christ, Frannie, there were six people in the back of that ambulance. One of them was Will Ronson, the man who runs the drugstore. And Carla… your mother… she came out of it a little as they put her in and she just kept saying, ‘I can’t catch my breath, Peter, I can’t catch my breath, why can’t I breathe?’ Oh, Christ,” he finished in a breaking, childish voice that frightened her.
   “Can you drive, Daddy? Can you drive over here?”
   “Yes,” he said. “Yes, sure.” He seemed to be pulling himself together.
   “I’ll be on the front porch.”
   She hung up and went down the stairs quickly, her knees trembling. On the porch she saw that, although it was still raining, the clouds of this latest thundershower were already breaking up and late afternoon sun was beaming through. She looked automatically for the rainbow and saw it, far out over the water, a misty and mystic crescent. Guilt gnawed and worried at her, furry bodies inside her belly, in where that other thing was, and she began to cry again.
   Eat your pie, she told herself as she waited for her father to come. It tastes terrible, so eat your pie. You can have seconds, even thirds. Eat your pie, Frannie, eat every bite.

Chapter 21
 
Stu Redman was frightened. He looked out the barred window of his new room in Stovington, Vermont, and what he saw was a small town far below, miniature gas station signs, some sort of mill, a main street, a river, the turnpike, and beyond the turnpike the granite backbone of far western New England—the Green Mountains.
   He was frightened because this was more like a jail cell than a hospital room. He was frightened because Denninger was gone. He hadn’t seen Denninger since the whole crazy three-ring circus moved from Atlanta to here. Deitz was gone, too. Stu thought that maybe Denninger and Deitz were sick, perhaps dead already.
   Somebody had slipped. Either that, or the disease that Charles D. Campion had brought to Arnette was a lot more communicable than anyone had guessed. Either way, the integrity of the Atlanta Plague Center had been breached, and Stu thought that everyone who had been there was now getting a chance to do a little firsthand research on the virus they called A-Prime or the superflu.
   They still did tests on him here, but they seemed desultory. The schedule had become slipshod. Results were scrawled down and he had a suspicion that someone looked at them cursorily, shook his head, and dumped them in the nearest shredder.
   That wasn’t the worst, though. The worst was the guns. The nurses who came in to take blood or spit or urine were now always accompanied by a soldier in a white-suit, and the soldier had a gun in a plastic Baggie. The Baggie was fastened over the wrist of the soldier’s right gauntlet. The gun was an army-issue .45, and Stu had no doubt that, if he tried any of the games he had tried with Deitz, the .45 would tear the end of the Baggie into smoking, burning shreds and Stu Redman would become a Golden Oldie.
   If they were just going through the motions now, then he had become expendable. Being under detention was bad. Being under detention and being expendable… that was very bad.
   He watched the six o’clock news very carefully every night now. The men who had attempted the coup in India had been branded “outside agitators” and shot. The police were still looking for the person or persons who had blown a power station in Laramie, Wyoming, yesterday. The Supreme Court had decided 6–3 that known homosexuals could not be fired from civil service jobs. And for the first time, there had been a whisper of other things.
   AEC officials in Miller County, Arkansas, had denied there was any chance of a reactor meltdown. The atomic power plant in the small town of Fouke, about thirty miles from the Texas border, had been plagued with minor circuitry problems in the equipment that controlled the pile’s cooling cycle, but there was no cause for alarm. The army units in that area were merely a precautionary measure. Stu wondered what precautions the army could take if the Fouke reactor did indeed go China Syndrome. He thought the army might be in southwestern Arkansas for other reasons altogether. Fouke wasn’t all that far from Arnette.
   Another item reported that an East Coast flu epidemic seemed to be in the early stages—the Russian strain, nothing to really worry about except for the very old and the very young. A tired New York City doctor was interviewed in a hallway of Brooklyn’s Mercy Hospital. He said the flu was exceptionally tenacious for Russian-A, and he urged viewers to get flu boosters. Then he suddenly started to say something else, but the sound cut off and you could only see his lips moving. The picture cut back to the newscaster in the studio, who said: “There have been some reported deaths in New York as a result of this latest flu outbreak, but contributing causes such as urban pollution and perhaps even the AIDS virus have been present in many of those fatal cases. Government health officials emphasize that this is Russian-A flu, not the more dangerous Swine flu. In the meantime, old advice is good advice, the doctors say: stay in bed, get lots of rest, drink fluids, and take aspirin for the fever.”
   The newscaster smiled reassuringly… and off-camera, someone sneezed.
   The sun was touching the horizon now, tinting it a gold that would turn to red and fading orange soon. The nights were the worst. They had flown him to a part of the country that was alien to him, and it was somehow more alien at night. In this early summer season the amount of green he could see from his window seemed abnormal, excessive, a little scary. He had no friends; as far as he knew all the people who had been on the plane with him when it flew from Braintree to Atlanta were now dead. He was surrounded by automatons who took his blood at gunpoint. He was afraid for his life, although he still felt fine and had begun to believe he wasn’t going to catch It, whatever It was.
   Thoughtfully, Stu wondered if it would be possible to escape from here.

Chapter 22
   
When Creighton came in on June 24, he found Starkey looking at the monitors, his hands behind his back. He could see the old man’s West Point ring glittering on his right hand, and he felt a wave of pity for him. Starkey had been cruising on pills for ten days, and he was close to the inevitable crash. But, Creighton thought, if his suspicion about the phone call was correct, the real crash had already occurred.
   “Len,” Starkey said, as if surprised. “Good of you to come in.”
   “De nada,” Creighton said with a slight smile.
   “You know who that was on the phone.”
   “It was really him, then?”
   “The President, yes. I’ve been relieved. The dirty alderman relieved me, Len. Of course I knew it was coming. But it still hurts. Hurts like hell. It hurts coming from that grinning, gladhanding sack of shit.”
   Len Creighton nodded.
   “Well,” Starkey said, passing a hand over his face. “It’s done. Can’t be undone. You’re in charge now. He wants you in Washington as soon as you can get there. He’ll have you on the carpet and he’ll chew your ass to a bloody rag, but you just stand there and yessir him and take it. We’ve salvaged what we can. It’s enough. I’m convinced it’s enough.”
   “If so, this country ought to get down on its knees to you.”
   “The throttle burned my hand, but I… I held it as long as I could, Len. I held it.” He spoke with quiet vehemence, but his eyes wandered back to the monitor, and for a moment his mouth quivered infirmly. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”
   “Well… we go back a country mile or three, Billy, don’t we?”
   “You can say that again, soldier. Now—listen. One thing is top priority. You’ve got to see Jack Cleveland, first chance you get. He knows who we’ve got behind both curtains, iron and bamboo. He knows how to get in touch with them, and he won’t stick at what has to be done. He’ll know it’ll have to be quick.”
   “I don’t understand, Billy.”
   “We have to assume the worst,” Starkey said, and a queer grin came over his face. It lifted his upper lip and made it wrinkle like the snout of a dog protecting a farmyard. He pointed a finger at the sheets of yellow flimsy on the table. “It’s out of control now. It’s popped up in Oregon, Nebraska, Louisiana, Florida. Tentative cases in Mexico and Chile. When we lost Atlanta, we lost the three men best equipped to deal with the problem. We’re getting exactly nowhere with Mr. Stuart ‘Prince’ Redman. Did you know they actually injected him with the Blue virus? He thought it was a sedative. He killed it, and no one has the slightest idea how. If we had six weeks, we might be able to turn the trick. But, we don’t. The flu story is the best one, but it is imperative—imperative —that the other side never sees this as an artificial situation created in America. It might give them ideas.
   “Cleveland has between eight and twenty men and women in the U.S.S.R. and between five and ten in each of the European satellite countries. Not even I know how many he has in Red China.” Starkey’s mouth was trembling again. “When you see Cleveland this afternoon, all you need tell him is Rome falls. You won’t forget?”
   “No,” Len said. His—lips felt curiously cold. “But do you really expect that they’ll do it? Those men and women?”
   “Our people got those vials one week ago. They believe they contain radioactive particles to be charted by our Sky-Cruise satellites. That’s all they need to know, isn’t it, Len?”
   “Yes, Billy.”
   “And if things do go from bad to… to worse, no one will ever know. Project Blue was uninfiltrated to the very end, we’re sure of that. A new virus, a mutation… our opposite numbers may suspect, but there won’t be time enough. Share and share alike, Len.”
   “Yes.”
   Starkey was looking at the monitors again. “My daughter gave me a book of poems some years ago. By a man named Yeets. She said every military man should read Yeets. I think it was her idea of a joke. You ever heard of Yeets, Len?”
   “I think so,” Creighton said, considering and rejecting the idea of telling Starkey the man’s name was pronounced Yates.
   “I read every line,” Starkey said, as he peered into the eternal silence of the cafeteria. “Mostly because she thought I wouldn’t. It’s a mistake to become too predictable. I didn’t understand much of it—I believe the man must have been crazy—but I read it. Funny poetry. Didn’t always rhyme. But there was one poem in that book that I’ve never been able to get out of my mind. It seemed as if that man was describing everything I dedicated my life to, its hopelessness, its damned nobility. He said that things fall apart. He said the center doesn’t hold. I believe he meant that things get flaky, Len. That’s what I believe he meant. Yeets knew that sooner or later things get goddam flaky around the edges even if he didn’t know anything else.”
   “Yes, sir,” Creighton said quietly.
   “The end of it gave me goosebumps the first time I read it, and it still does. I’ve got that part by heart. ‘What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’”
   Creighton stood silent. He had nothing to say.
   “The beast is on its way,” Starkey said, turning around. He was weeping and grinning. “It’s on its way, and it’s a good deal rougher than that fellow Yeets ever could have imagined. Things are falling apart. The job is to hold as much as we can for as long as we can.”
   “Yes, sir,” Creighton said, and for the first time he felt the sting of tears in his own eyes. “Yes, Billy.”
   Starkey put out his hand and Creighton took it in both of his own. Starkey’s hand was old and cold, like the shed skin of a snake in which some small prairie animal has died, leaving its own fragile skeleton within the husk of the reptile. Tears overspilled the lower arcs of Starkey’s eyes and ran down his meticulously shaved cheeks.
   “I have business to attend to,” Starkey said.
   “Yes, sir.”
   Starkey slipped his West Point ring off his right hand and his wedding band off his left. “For Cindy,” he said. “For my daughter. See that she gets them, Len.”
   “I will.”
   Starkey went to the door.
   “Billy?” Len Creighton called after him.
   Starkey turned.
   Creighton stood ramrod straight, the tears still running down his own cheeks. He saluted.
   Starkey returned it and then stepped out the door.
   The elevator hummed efficiently, marking off the floors. An alarm began to hoot—mournfully, as if it somehow knew it was warning of a situation which had already become a lost cause—when he used his special key to open it at the top, so he could enter the motor-pool area. Starkey imagined Len Creighton watching him on a succession of monitors as he first picked out a jeep and then drove it across the desert floor of the sprawling test site and through a gate marked HIGH SECURITY ZONE NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT SPECIAL CLEARANCE. The checkpoints looked like turnpike tollbooths. They were still manned, but the soldiers behind the yellowish glass were dead and rapidly mummifying in the dry desert heat. The booths were bulletproof, but they hadn’t been germproof. Their glazed and sunken eyes stared vacantly at Starkey as he motored past, the only moving thing along the tangle of dirt roads among the Quonset huts and low cinderblock buildings.
   He stopped outside a squat blockhouse with a sign reading ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT A-1-A CLEARANCE on the door. He used one key to get in, and another to summon the elevator. A guard, dead as a doornail and stiff as a poker, stared at him from the glass-encased security station to the left of the elevator doors. When the elevator arrived and the doors opened, Starkey stepped in quickly. He seemed to feel the gaze of the dead guard on him, a small weight of eyes like two dusty stones.
   The elevator sank so rapidly his stomach turned over. A bell dinged softly when it came to a halt. The doors slid open, and the sweet odor of decay hit him like a soft slap. It wasn’t too strong because the air purifiers were still working, but not even the purifiers could dispose of that smell completely. When a man has died, he wants you to know about it, Starkey thought.
   There were almost a dozen bodies sprawled in front of the elevator. Starkey minced among them, not wanting to tread on a decaying, waxy hand or trip over an outstretched leg. That might make him scream, and he most definitely didn’t want to do that. You didn’t want to scream in a tomb because the sound of it might drive you mad, and that’s exactly where he was: in a tomb. It looked like a well-financed scientific research project, but what it really was now was a tomb.
   The elevator doors slid shut behind him; there was a hum as it began to go up automatically. It wouldn’t come down again unless somebody else keyed it, Starkey knew; as soon as the installation’s integrity had been breached, the computers had switched all the elevators to the general containment program. Why were these poor men and women lying here? Obviously they had been hoping the computers would fuck up the switch-over to the emergency procedures. Why not? It even had a certain logic. Everything else had fucked up.
   Starkey walked down the corridor which led to the cafeteria, his heels clicking hollowly. Above, the fluorescents embedded in their long fixtures like inverted ice-cube trays threw a hard, shadowless light. There were more bodies. A man and a woman with their clothes off and holes in their heads. They screwed, Starkey thought, and then he shot her, and then he shot himself. Love among the viruses. The pistol, an army-issue .45, was still clutched in his hand. The tile floor was spotted with blood and gray stuff that looked like oatmeal. He felt a terrible and thankfully transient urge to bend down and touch the dead woman’s breasts, to see if they were hard or flaccid.
   Farther down the hall a man sat with his back propped against a closed door, a sign tied around his neck with a shoelace. His chin had fallen forward, obscuring what was written there. Starkey put his fingers under the man’s chin and pushed his head back. As he did so, the man’s eyeballs fell back into his head with a meaty little thud. The words on the sign had been written in red Magic Marker. NOW YOU KNOW IT WORKS, the sign said. ANY QUESTIONS?
   Starkey let go of the man’s chin. The head remained cocked at its stiff angle, the dark eye sockets staring raptly upward. Starkey stepped back. He was crying again. He suspected he was crying because he didn’t have any questions.
   The cafeteria doors were propped open. Outside them was a large cork bulletin board. There was to have been a league bowl-off on June 20, Starkey saw. The Grim Gutterballers vs. The First Strikers for the Project championship. Also, Anna Floss wanted a ride to Denver or Boulder on July 9. She would share driving and expenses. Also, Richard Betts wanted to give away some friendly pups, half collie and half St. Bernard. Also, there were weekly nondenominational religious services in the caf.
   Starkey read every announcement on the bulletin board, and then he went inside.
   The smell in here was worse—rancid food as well as dead bodies. Starkey looked around with dull horror.
   Some of them seemed to be looking at him.
   “Men—” Starkey said, and then choked. He had no idea what he had been about to say.
   He walked slowly over to where Frank D. Bruce lay with his face in his soup. He looked down at Frank D. Bruce for several moments. Then he pulled Frank D. Bruce’s head up by the hair. The soup bowl came with him, still stuck on his face by soup which had long since congealed, and Starkey struck at it in horror, finally knocking it off. The bowl clunked to the floor, upside down. Most of the soup still clung to Frank D. Bruce’s face like moldy jelly. Starkey produced his handkerchief and wiped off as much of it as he could. Frank D. Bruce’s eyes appeared to be gummed shut by soup, but Starkey forbore to wipe the lids. He was afraid Frank D. Bruce’s eyes would fall back into his skull, like the eyes of the man with the sign. He was even more afraid that the lids, freed of the glue which held them, might roll up like windowshades. He was mostly afraid of what the expression in Frank D. Bruce’s eyes might be.
   “Private Bruce,” Starkey said softly, “at ease.”
   He put the handkerchief carefully over the face of Frank D. Bruce. It stuck there. Starkey turned and walked out of the cafeteria in long, even strides, as if on a parade ground.
   Halfway back to the elevator he came to the man with the sign around his neck. Starkey sat down beside him, loosened the strap over the butt of his pistol, and put the barrel of the gun into his mouth.
   When, the shot came, it was muffled and undramatic. None of the corpses took the slightest notice. The air purifiers took care of the puff of smoke. In the bowels of Project Blue, there was silence. In the cafeteria, Starkey’s handkerchief came unstuck from Private Frank D. Bruce’s face and wafted to the floor. Frank D. Bruce did not seem to mind, but Len Creighton found himself looking into the monitor which showed Bruce more and more often, and wondering why in hell Billy couldn’t have gotten the soup out of the man’s eyebrows while he was at it. He was going to have to face the President of the United States soon, very soon, but the soup congealing in Frank D. Bruce’s eyebrows worried him more. Much more.

Chapter 23
   
Randall Flagg, the dark man, strode south on US 51, listening to the nightsounds that pressed close on both sides of this narrow road that would take him sooner or later out of Idaho and into Nevada. From Nevada he might go anywhere. From New Orleans to Nogales, from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine, it was his country, and none knew or loved it better. He knew where the roads went, and he walked them at night. Now, an hour before dawn, he was somewhere between Grasmere and Riddle, west of Twin Falls, still north of the Duck Valley Reservation that spreads across two states. And wasn’t it fine?
   He walked rapidly, rundown bootheels clocking against the paved surface of the road, and if car lights showed on the horizon he faded back and back, down over the soft shoulder to the high grass where the night bugs made their homes… and the car would pass him, the driver perhaps feeling a slight chill as if he had driven through an air pocket, his sleeping wife and children stirring uneasily, as if all had been touched with a bad dream at the same instant.
   He walked south, south on US 51, the worn heels of his sharp-toed cowboy boots clocking on the pavement; a tall man of no age in faded, pegged jeans and a denim jacket. His pockets were stuffed with fifty different kinds of conflicting literature—pamphlets for all seasons, rhetoric for all reasons. When this man handed you a tract you took it no matter what the subject: the dangers of atomic power plants, the role played by the International Jewish Cartel in the overthrow of friendly governments, the CIA-Contra-cocaine connection, the farm workers’ unions, the Jehovah’s Witnesses (If You Can Answer These Ten Questions “Yes,” You Have Been SAVED!), the Blacks for Militant Equality, the Kode of the Klan. He had them all, and more, too. There was a button on each breast of his denim jacket. On the right, a yellow smile-face. On the left, a pig wearing a policeman’s cap. The legend was written beneath in red letters which dripped to simulate blood: HOW’S YOUR PORK?
   He moved on, not pausing, not slowing, but alive to the night. His eyes seemed almost frantic with the night’s possibilities. There was a Boy Scout knapsack on his back, old and battered. There was a dark hilarity in his face, and perhaps in his heart, too, you would think—and you would be right. It was the face of a hatefully happy man, a face that radiated a horrible handsome warmth, a face to make waterglasses shatter in the hands of tired truck-stop waitresses, to make small children crash their trikes into board fences and then run wailing to their mommies with stake-shaped splinters sticking out of their knees. It was a face guaranteed to make barroom arguments over batting averages turn bloody.
   He moved on south, somewhere on US 51 between Grasmere and Riddle, now closer to Nevada. Soon he would camp and sleep the day away, waking up as evening drew on. He would read as his supper cooked over a small, smokeless campfire, it didn’t matter what: words from some battered and coverless paperback porno novel, or maybe Mein Kampf, or an R. Crumb comic book, or one of the baying reactionary position papers from the America Firsters or the Sons of the Patriots. When it came to the printed word, Flagg was an equal opportunity reader.
   After supper he would commence walking again, walking south on this excellent two-lane highway cutting through this godforsaken wilderness, watching and smelling and listening as the climate grew more arid, strangling everything down to sagebrush and tumbleweed, watching as the mountains began to poke out of the earth like dinosaur spines. By dawn tomorrow or the day after that he would pass into Nevada, striking Owyhee first and then Mountain City, and in Mountain City there was a man named Christopher Bradenton who would see that he had a clean car and some clean papers and then the country would come alive in all its glorious possibilities, a body politic with its network of roads embedded in its skin like marvelous capillaries, ready to take him, the dark speck of foreign matter, anywhere or everywhere—heart, liver, lights, brain. He was a clot looking for a place to happen, a splinter of bone hunting a soft organ to puncture, a lonely lunatic cell looking for a mate—they would set up housekeeping and raise themselves a cozy little malignant tumor.
   He hammered along, arms swinging by his sides. He was known, well known, along the highways in hiding that are traveled by the poor and the mad, by the professional revolutionaries and by those who have been taught to hate so well that their hate shows on their faces like harelips and they are unwanted except by others like them, who welcome them to cheap rooms with slogans and posters on the walls, to basements where lengths of sawed-off pipe are held in padded vises while they are stuffed with high explosives, to back rooms where lunatic plans are laid: to kill a Cabinet member, to kidnap the child of a visiting dignitary, or to break into a boardroom meeting of Standard Oil with grenades and machine guns and murder in the name of the people. He was known there, and even the maddest of them could only gaze upon his dark and grinning face at an oblique angle. The women he took to bed with him, even if they reduced intercourse to something as casual as getting a snack from the refrigerator, accepted him with a stiffening of the body, a turning away of countenance. They took him the way they might take a ram with golden eyes or a black dog—and when it was done they were cold, so cold, it seemed impossible they could ever be warm again. When he walked into a meeting the hysterical babble ceased—the backbiting, recriminations, accusations, the ideological rhetoric. For a moment there would be dead silence and they would start to turn to him and then turn away, as if he had come to them with some old and terrible engine of destruction cradled in his arms, something a thousand times worse than the plastic explosive made in the basement labs of renegade chemistry students or the black market arms obtained from some greedy army post supply sergeant. It seemed that he had come to them with a device gone rusty with blood and packed for centuries in the Cosmoline of screams but now ready again, carried to their meeting like some infernal gift, a birthday cake with nitroglycerine candles. And when the talk began again it would be rational and disciplined—as rational and disciplined as madmen can make it—and things would be agreed upon.
   He rocked along, his feet easy in the boots, which were comfortably sprung in all the right places. His feet and these boots were old lovers. Christopher Bradenton in Mountain City knew him as Richard Fry. Bradenton was a conductor on one of the underground railway systems by which fugitives moved. Half a dozen different organizations, from the Weathermen to the Guevara Brigade, saw that Bradenton had money. He was a poet who sometimes taught Free University classes or traveled in the western states of Utah, Nevada, and Arizona, speaking to high school English classes, stunning middle-class boys and girls (he hoped) with the news that poetry was alive—narcoleptic, to be sure, but still possessed of a certain hideous vitality. He was in his late fifties now, but Bradenton had been dismissed from one California college twenty-some years ago for getting too chummy with the SDS. He had been busted in The Great Chicago Pig Convention of 1968, formed his ties to one radical group after another, first embracing the craziness of these groups, then being swallowed whole.
   The dark man walked and smiled. Bradenton represented just one end of one conduit, and there were thousands of them—the pipes the crazies moved through, carrying their books and bombs. The pipes were interconnected, the signposts disguised but readable to the initiate. In New York he was known as Robert Franq, and his claim that he was a black man had never been disputed, although his skin was very light. He and a black veteran of Nam—the black had more than enough hate to make up for his missing left leg—had offed six cops in New York and New Jersey. In Georgia he was Ramsey Forrest, a distant descendant of Nathan Bedford Forrest, and in his white sheet he had participated in two rapes, a castration, and the burning of a nigger shanty town. But that had been long ago, in the early sixties, during the first civil rights surge. He sometimes thought that he might have been born in that strife. He certainly could not remember much that had happened to him before that, except that he came originally from Nebraska and that he had once attended high school classes with a red-haired, bandy-legged boy named Charles Starkweather. He remembered the civil rights marches of 1960 and 1961 better—the beatings, the night rides, the churches that had exploded as if some miracle inside them had grown too large to be contained. He remembered drifting down to New Orleans in 1962, and meeting a demented young man who was handing out tracts urging America to leave Cuba alone. That man had been a certain Mr. Oswald, and he had taken some of Oswald’s tracts and he still had a couple, very old and crumpled, in one of his many pockets. He had sat on a hundred different Committees of Responsibility. He had walked in demonstrations against the same dozen companies on a hundred different college campuses. He wrote the questions that most discomfited those in power when they came to lecture, but he never asked the questions himself; those power merchants might have seen his grinning, burning face as some cause for alarm and fled from the podium. Likewise he never spoke at rallies because the microphones would scream with hysterical feedback and circuits would blow. But he had written speeches for those who did speak, and on several occasions those speeches had ended in riots, overturned cars, student strike votes, and violent demonstrations. For a while in the early seventies he had been acquainted with a man named Donald DeFreeze, and had suggested that DeFreeze take the name Cinque. He had helped lay plans that resulted in the kidnapping of an heiress, and it had been he who suggested that the heiress be made crazy instead of simply ransomed. He had left the small Los Angeles house where DeFreeze and the others had fried not twenty minutes before the police moved in; he slunk away up the street, his bulging and dusty boots clocking on the pavement, a fiery grin on his face that made mothers grab up their children and pull them into the house, a grin that made pregnant women feel premature labor pains. And later, when a few tattered remnants of the group were swept up, all they knew was there had been someone else associated with the group, maybe someone important, maybe a hanger-on, a man of no age, a man called the Walkin Dude, or sometimes the Boogeyman.
   He strode on at a steady, ground-eating pace. Two days ago he had been in Laramie, Wyoming, part of an ecotage group that had blown a power station. Today he was on US 51, between Grasmere and Riddle, on his way to Mountain City. Tomorrow he would be somewhere else. And he was happier than he had ever been, because—
   He stopped.
   Because something was coming. He could feel it, almost taste it on the night air. He could taste it, a sooty hot taste that came from everywhere, as if God was planning a cookout and all of civilization was going to be the barbecue. Already the charcoal was hot, white and flaky outside, as red as demons’ eyes inside. A huge thing, a great thing.
   His time of transfiguration was at hand. He was going to be born for the second time, he was going to be squeezed out of the laboring cunt of some great sand-colored beast that even now lay in the throes of its contractions, its legs moving slowly as the birthblood gushed, its sun-hot eyes glaring into the emptiness.
   He had been born when times changed, and the times were going to change again. It was in the wind, in the wind of this soft Idaho evening.
   It was almost time to be reborn. He knew. Why else could he suddenly do magic?
   He closed his eyes, his hot face turning up slightly to the dark sky, which was prepared to receive the dawn. He concentrated. Smiled. The dusty, rundown heels of, his boots began to rise off the road. An inch. Two. Three inches. The smile broadened into a grin. Now he was a foot up And two feet off the ground, he hung steady over the road with a little dust blowing beneath him.
   Then he felt the first inches of dawn stain the sky, and he lowered himself down again. The time was not yet.
   But the time was soon.
   He began to walk again, grinning, now looking for a place to lay up for the day. The time was soon, and that was enough to know for now.

Chapter 24
 
 Lloyd Henreid, who had been tagged “the baby-faced, unrepentant killer” by the Phoenix papers, was led down the hallway of the Phoenix municipal jail’s maximum security wing by two guards. One of them had a runny nose, and they both looked sour. The wing’s other occupants were giving Lloyd their version of a tickertape parade. In Max, he was a celebrity.
   “Heyyy, Henreid!”
   “Go to, boy!”
   “Tell the DA if he lets me walk I won’t letya hurt im!”
   “Rock steady, Henreid!”
   “Right on, brother! Rightonrightonrighton! ”
   “Cheap mouthy bastards,” the guard with the runny nose muttered, and then sneezed.
   Lloyd grinned happily. He was dazzled by his new fame. It sure wasn’t much like Brownsville had been. Even the food was better. When you got to be a heavy hitter, you got some respect. He imagined that Tom Cruise must feel something like this at a world premiere.
   At the end of the hall they went through a doorway and a double-barred electric gate. He was frisked again, the guard with the cold breathing heavily through his mouth as if he had just run up a flight of stairs. Then they walked him through a metal detector for good measure, probably to make sure he didn’t have something crammed up his ass like that guy Papillon in the movies.
   “Okay,” the one with the runny nose said, and another guard, this one in a booth made of bulletproof glass, waved them on. They walked down another hall, this one painted industrial green. It was very quiet in here; the only sounds were the guards’ clicking footfalls (Lloyd himself was wearing paper slippers) and the asthmatic wheeze from Lloyd’s right. At the far end of the hall, another guard was waiting in front of a closed door. The door had one small window, hardly more than a loophole, with wire embedded in the glass.
   “Why do jails always smell so pissy?” Lloyd asked, just to make conversation. “I mean, even the places where no guys are locked up, it smells pissy. Do you guys maybe do your wee-wees in the corners?” He snickered at the thought, which was really pretty comical.
   “Shut up, killer,” the guard with the cold said.
   “You don’t look so good,” Lloyd said. “You ought to be home in bed.”
   “Shut up,” the other said.
   Lloyd shut up. That’s what happened when you tried to talk to these guys. It was his experience that the class of prison corrections officers had no class.
   “Hi, scumbag,” the door-guard said.
   “How ya doin, fuckface?” Lloyd responded smartly. There was nothing like a little friendly repartee to freshen you up. Two days in the joint and he could feel that old stir-stupor coming on him already.
   “You’re gonna lose a tooth for that,” the door-guard said. “Exactly one, count it, one tooth.”
   “Hey, now, listen, you can’t—”
   “Yes I can. There are guys on the yard who would kill their dear old mothers for two cartons of Chesterfields, scumbucket. Would you care to try for two teeth?”
   Lloyd was silent.
   “That’s okay, then,” the door-guard said. “Just one tooth. You fellas can take him in.”
   Smiling a little, the guard with the cold opened the door and the other led Lloyd inside, where his court-appointed lawyer was sitting at a metal table, looking at papers from his briefcase.
   “Here’s your man, counselor.”
   The lawyer looked up. He was hardly old enough to be shaving yet, Lloyd judged, but what the hell? Beggars couldn’t be choosers. They had him cold-cocked anyway, and Lloyd figured to get twenty years or so: When they had you nailed, you just had to close your eyes and grit your teeth.
   “Thank you very—”
   “That guy,” Lloyd said, pointing to the door-guard. “He called me a scumbag. And when I said something back to him, he said he was gonna have some guy knock out one of my teeth! How’s that for police brutality?”
   The lawyer passed a hand over his face. “Any truth to that?” he asked the door-guard.
   The door-guard rolled his eyes in a burlesque My God, can you believe it? gesture. “These guys, counselor,” he said, “they should write for TV. I said hi, he said hi, that was it.”
   “That’s a fuckin lie!” Lloyd said dramatically.
   “I keep my opinions to myself,” the guard said, and gave Lloyd a stony stare.
   “I’m sure you do,” the lawyer said, “but I believe I’ll count Mr. Henreid’s teeth before I leave.”
   A slight, angry discomfiture passed over the guard’s face, and he exchanged a glance with the two that had brought Lloyd in. Lloyd smiled. Maybe the kid was okay at that. The last two CAs he’d had were old hacks; one of them had come into court lugging a colostomy bag, could you believe that, a fucking colostomy bag? The old hacks didn’t give a shit for you. Plead and leave, that was their motto, let’s get rid of him so we can get back to swapping dirty stories with the judge. But maybe this guy could get him a straight ten, armed robbery. Maybe even time served. After all, the only one he’d actually pokerized was the wife of the guy in the white Connie, and maybe he could just roll that off on ole Poke. Poke wouldn’t mind. Poke was just as dead as old Dad’s hatband. Lloyd’s smile broadened a little. You had to look on the sunny side. That was the ticket. Life was too short to do anything else.
   He became aware that the guard had left them alone and that his lawyer—his name was Andy Devins, Lloyd remembered—was looking at him in a strange way. It was the way you might look at a rattlesnake whose back has been broken but whose deadly bite is probably still unimpaired.
   “You’re in deep shit, Sylvester!” Devins exclaimed suddenly.
   Lloyd jumped. “What? What the hell do you mean, I’m in deep shit? By the way, I thought you handled ole fatty there real good. He looked mad enough to chew nails and spit out—”
   “Listen to me, Sylvester, and listen very carefully.”
   “My name’s not—”
   “You don’t have the slightest idea how big a jam you’re in, Sylvester.” Devins’s gaze never faltered. His voice was soft and intense. His hair was blond and crewcut, hardly more than a fuzz. His scalp shone through pinkly. There was a plain gold wedding band on the third finger of his left hand and a fancy fraternity ring on the third finger of his right. He knocked them together and they made a funny little click that set Lloyd’s teeth on edge. “You’re going to trial in just nine days, Sylvester, because of a decision the Supreme Court handed down four years ago.”
   “What was that?” Lloyd was more uneasy than ever.
   “It was the case of Markham vs. South Carolina,” Devins said, “and it had to do with the conditions under which individual states may best administer swift justice in cases where the death penalty is requested.”
   “Death penalty!” Lloyd cried, horror-struck. “You mean the lectric chair? Hey, man, I never killed anybody! Swear to God!”
   “In the eyes of the law, that doesn’t matter,” Devins said. “If you were there, you did it.”
   “What do you mean, it don’t matter?” Lloyd nearly screamed. “It does so matter! It better fuckin matter! I didn’t waste those people, Poke did! He was crazy! He was—”
   “Will you shut up, Sylvester?” Devins inquired in that soft, intense voice, and Lloyd shut. In his sudden fear he had forgotten the cheers for him in Maximum, and even the unsettling possibility that he might lose a tooth. He suddenly had a vision of Tweety Bird running a number on Sylvester the Cat. Only in his mind, Tweety wasn’t bopping that dumb ole puddy-tat over the head with a mallet or sticking a mousetrap in front of his questing paw; what Lloyd saw was Sylvester strapped into Old Sparky while the parakeet perched on a stool by a big switch. He could even see the guard’s cap on Tweety’s little yellow head.
   This was not a particularly amusing picture.
   Perhaps Devins saw some of this in his face, because he looked moderately pleased for the first time. He folded his hands on the pile of papers he had taken from his briefcase. “There is no such thing as an accessory when it comes to first-degree murder committed during a felony crime,” he said. “The state has three witnesses who will testify that you and Andrew Freeman were together. That pretty well fries your skinny butt. Do you understand?”
   “I—”
   “Good. Now to get back to Markham vs. South Carolina. I am going to tell you, in words of one syllable, how the ruling in that case bears on your situation. But first, I ought to remind you of a fact you doubtless learned during one of your trips through the ninth grade: the Constitution of the United States specifically forbids cruel and unusual punishment.”
   “Like the fucking lectric chair, damn right,” Lloyd said righteously.
   Devins was shaking his head. “That’s where the law was unclear,” he said, “and up until four years ago, the courts had gone round and round and up and down, trying to make sense of it. Does ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ mean things like the electric chair and the gas chamber? Or does it mean the wait between sentencing and execution? The appeals, the delays, the stays, the months and years that certain prisoners—Edgar Smith, Caryl Chessman, and Ted Bundy are probably the most famous—were forced to spend on various Death Rows? The Supreme Court allowed executions to recommence in the late seventies, but Death Rows were still clogged, and that nagging question of cruel and unusual punishment remained. Okay—in Markham vs. South Carolina, you had a man sentenced to the electric chair for the rape-murder of three college co-eds. Premeditation was proved by a diary this fellow, Jon Markham, had kept. The jury sentenced him to death.”
   “Bad shit,” Lloyd whispered.
   Devins nodded, and gave Lloyd a slightly sour smile. “The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which reconfirmed that capital punishment was not cruel and unusual under certain circumstances. The court suggested that sooner was better… from a legal standpoint. Are you beginning to get it, Sylvester? Are you beginning to see?”
   Lloyd didn’t.
   “Do you know why you’re being tried in Arizona rather than New Mexico or Nevada?”
   Lloyd shook his head.
   “Because Arizona is one of four states that has a Capital Crimes Circuit Court which sits only in cases where the death penalty has been asked for and obtained.”
   “I don’t follow you.”
   “You’re going to trial in four days,” Devins said. “The state has such a strong case that they can afford to empanel the first twelve men and women that get called to the box. I’ll drag it out as long as I can, but we’ll have a jury on the first day. The state will present its case on the second day. I’ll try to take up three days, and I’ll filibuster on my opening and closing statements until the judge cuts me off, but three days is really tops. We’ll be lucky to get that. The jury will retire and find you guilty in about three minutes unless a goddamned miracle happens. Nine days from today you’ll be sentenced to death, and a week later, you’ll be dead as dogmeat. The people of Arizona will love it, and so will the Supreme Court. Because quicker makes everybody happier. I can stretch the week—maybe—but only a little.”
   “Jesus Christ, but that’s not fair!” Lloyd cried.
   “It’s a tough old world, Lloyd,” Devins said. “Especially for ‘mad dog killers,’ which is what the newspapers and TV commentators are calling you. You’re a real big man in the world of crime. You’ve got real drag. You even put the flu epidemic back East on page two.”
   “I never pokerized nobody,” Lloyd said sulkily. “Poke, he did it all. He even made up that word.”
   “It doesn’t matter,” Devins said. “That’s what I’m trying to pound through your thick skull, Sylvester. The judge is going to leave the Governor room for one stay, and only one. I’ll appeal, and under the new guidelines, my appeal has to be in the hands of the Capital Crimes Circuit Court within seven days or you exit stage left immediately. If they decide not to hear the appeal, I have another seven days to petition the Supreme Court of the United States. In your case, I’ll file my appeal brief as late as possible. The Capital Crimes Circuit Court will probably agree to hear us—the system’s still new, and they want as little criticism as possible. They’d probably hear Jack the Ripper’s appeal.”
   “How long before they get to me?” Lloyd muttered.
   “Oh, they’ll handle it in jig time,” Devins answered, and his smile became slightly wolfish. “You see, the Circuit Court is made up of five retired Arizona judges. They’ve got nothing to do but go fishing, play poker, drink bonded bourbon, and wait for some sad sack of shit like you to show up in their courtroom, which is really a bunch of computer modems hooked up to the State House, the Governor’s office, and each other. They’ve got telephones equipped with modems in their cars, cabins, even their boats, as well as in their houses. Their average age is seventy-two—”
   Lloyd winced.
   “—which means some of them are old enough to have actually ridden the Circuit Line out there in the willywags, if not as judges then as lawyers or law students. They all believe in the Code of the West—a quick trial and then up the rope. It was the way out here until 1950 or so. When it came to multiple murderers, it was the only way.”
   “Jesus Christ Almighty, do you have to go on about it like that?”
   “You need to know what we’re up against,” Devin said. “They just want to make sure you don’t suffer cruel and unusual punishment, Lloyd. You ought to thank them.”
   “Thank them? I’d like to—”
   “Pokerize them?” Devins asked quietly.
   “No, course not,” Lloyd said unconvincingly.
   “Our petition for a new trial will be turned down and all my exceptions will be quickly heaved out. If we’re lucky, the court will invite me to present witnesses. If they give me the opportunity, I’ll recall everybody that testified at the original trial, plus anyone else I can think of. At that point I’d call your junior high school chums as character witnesses, if I could find them.”
   “I quit school in the sixth grade,” Lloyd said bleakly.
   “After the Circuit Court turns us down, I’ll petition to be heard by the Supreme Court. I expect to be turned down on the same day.”
   Devins stopped and lit a cigarette.
   “Then what?” Lloyd asked.
   “Then?” Devins asked, looking mildly surprised and exasperated at Lloyd’s continuing stupidity. “Why, then you go on to Death Row at state prison and just enjoy all that good food until it’s time to ride the lightning. It won’t be long.”
   “They wouldn’t really do it,” Lloyd said. “You’re just trying to scare me.”
   “Lloyd, the four states that have the Capital Crimes Circuit Court do it all the time. So far, forty men and women have been executed under the Markham guidelines. It costs the taxpayers a little extra for the added court, but not all that much, since they only work on a tiny percentage of first-degree murder cases. Also, the taxpayers really don’t mind opening their pocketbooks for capital punishment. They like it.”
   Lloyd looked ready to throw up.
   “Anyway,” Devins said, “a DA will only try a defendant under Markham guidelines if he looks completely guilty. It isn’t enough for the dog to have chicken feathers on his muzzle; you’ve got to catch him in the henhouse. Which is where they caught you.”
   Lloyd, who had been basking in the cheers from the boys in Maximum Security not fifteen minutes ago, now found himself staring down a paltry two or three weeks and into a black hole.
   “You scared, Sylvester?” Devins asked in an almost kindly way.
   Lloyd had to lick his lips before he could answer. “Christ yes, I’m scared. From what you say, I’m a dead man.”
   “I don’t want you dead,” Devins said, “just scared. If you go into that courtroom smirking and swaggering, they’ll strap you in the chair and throw the switch. You’ll be number forty-one under Markham. But if you listen to me, we might be able to squeak through. I don’t say we will; I say we might.”
   “Go ahead.”
   “The thing we have to count on is the jury,” Devins said. “Twelve ordinary shleps off the street. I’d like a jury filled with forty-two-year-old ladies who can still recite Winnie the Pooh by heart and have funerals for their pet birds in the back yard, that’s what I’d like. Every jury is made very aware of Markham ’s consequences when they’re empaneled. They’re not bringing in a verdict of death that may or may not be implemented in six months or six years, long after they’ve forgotten it; the guy they’re condemning in June is going to be pushing up daisies before the All-Star break.”
   “You’ve got a hell of a way of putting things.”
   Ignoring him, Devins went on: “In some cases, just that knowledge has caused juries to bring in verdicts of not guilty. It’s one adverse result of Markham. In some cases, juries have let blatant murderers go just because they didn’t want blood that fresh on their hands.” He picked up a sheet of paper. “Although forty people have been executed under Markham, the death penalty has been asked for under Markham a total of seventy times. Of the thirty not executed, twenty-six were found ‘not guilty’ by the empaneled juries. Only four convictions were overturned by the Capital Crimes Circuit Courts, one in South Carolina, two in Florida, and one in Alabama.”
   “Never in Arizona?”
   “Never. I told you. The Code of the West. Those five old men want your ass nailed to a board. If we don’t get you off in front of a jury, you’re through. I can offer you ninety-to-one on it.”
   “How many people have been found not guilty by regular court juries under that law in Arizona?”
   “Two out of fourteen.”
   “Those are pretty crappy odds, too.”
   Devins smiled his wolfish smile. “I should point out,” he said, “that one of those two was defended by yours truly. He was guilty as sin, Lloyd, just like you are. Judge Pechert raved at those ten women and two men for twenty minutes. I thought he was going to have apoplexy.”
   “If I was found not guilty, they couldn’t try me again, could they?”
   “Absolutely not.”
   “So it’s one roll, double or nothing.”
   “Yes.”
   “Boy,” Lloyd said, and wiped his forehead.
   “As long as you understand the situation,” Devins said, “and where we have to make our stand, we can get down to brass tacks.”
   “I understand it. I don’t like it, though.”
   “You’d be nuts if you did.” Devins folded his hands and leaned over them. “Now. You’ve told me and you’ve told the police that you, uh…” He took a stapled sheaf of papers out of the stack by his briefcase and riffled through them. “Ah. Here we are. ‘I never killed nobody. Poke did all the killing. Killing was his idea, not mine. Poke was crazy as a bedbug and I guess it is a blessing to the world that he has passed on.’”
   “Yeah, that’s right, so what?” Lloyd said defensively.
   “Just this,” Devins said cozily. “That implies you were scared of Poke Freeman. Were you scared of him?”
   “Well, I wasn’t exactly—”
   “You were afraid for your life, in fact.”
   “I don’t think it was—”
   “Terrified. Believe it, Sylvester. You were shitting nickels.”
   Lloyd frowned at his lawyer. It was the frown of a lad who wants to be a good student but is having a serious problem grasping the lesson.
   “Don’t let me lead you, Lloyd,” Devins said. “I don’t want to do that. You might think I was suggesting that Poke was stoned almost all the time—”
   “He was! We both was!”
   “No. You weren’t, but he was. And he got crazy when he got stoned—”
   “Boy, you’re not shitting.” In the halls of Lloyd’s memory, the ghost of Poke Freeman cried Whoop! Whoop! merrily and shot the woman in the Burrack general store.
   “And he held a gun on you at several points in time—”
   “No, he never—”
   “Yes he did. You just forgot for a while. In fact, he once threatened to kill you if you didn’t back his play.”
   “Well, I had a gun—”
   “I believe,” Devins said, eyeing him closely, “that if you search your memory, you’ll remember Poke telling you that your gun was loaded with blanks. Do you remember that?”
   “Now that you mention it—”
   “And nobody was more surprised than you when it actually started firing real bullets, right?”
   “Sure,” Lloyd said. He nodded vigorously. “I bout damn near had a hemorrhage.”
   “And you were about to turn that gun on Poke Freeman when he was cut down, saving you the trouble.”
   Lloyd regarded his lawyer with dawning hope in his eyes.
   “Mr. Devins,” he said with great sincerity, “that’s just the way the shit went down.”
   He was in the exercise yard later that morning, watching a softball game and mulling over everything Devins had told him, when a large inmate named Mathers came over and yanked him up by the collar. Mathers’s head was shaved bald, à la Telly Savalas, and it gleamed benignly in the hot desert air.
   “Now wait a minute,” Lloyd said. “My lawyer counted every one of my teeth. Seventeen. So if you—”
   “Yeah, that’s what Shockley said,” Mathers said. “So, he told me to—”
   Mathers’s knee came up squarely in Lloyd’s crotch, and blinding pain exploded there, so excruciating that he could not even scream. He collapsed in a hunching, writhing pile, clutching his testicles, which felt crushed. The world was a reddish fog of agony.
   After a while, who knew how long, he was able to look up. Mathers was still looking at him, and his bald head was still gleaming. The guards were pointedly looking elsewhere. Lloyd moaned and writhed, tears squirting out of his eyes, a red-hot ball of lead in his belly.
   “Nothing personal,” Mathers said sincerely. “Just business, you understand. Myself, I hope you make out. That Markham law’s a bitch.”
   He strode away and Lloyd saw the door-guard standing atop the ramp in the truck-loading bay on the other side of the exercise yard. His thumbs were hooked in his Sam Browne belt and he was grinning at Lloyd. When he saw he had Lloyd’s complete, undivided attention, the door-guard shot him the bird with the middle fingers of both hands. Mathers strolled over to the wall, and the door-guard threw him a pack of Tareytons. Mathers put them in his breast pocket, sketched a salute, and walked away. Lloyd lay on the ground, his knees drawn up to his chest, hands clutching his cramping belly, and Devins’s words echoed in his brain: It’s a tough old world, Lloyd, it’s a tough old world.
   Right.

Chapter 25
 
 Nick Andros pushed aside one of the curtains and looked out into the street. From here, on the second story of the late John Baker’s house, you could see all of downtown Shoyo by looking left, and by looking right you could see Route 63 going out of town. Main Street was utterly deserted. The shades of the business establishments were drawn. A sick-looking dog sat in the middle of the road, head down, sides bellowsing, white foam dripping from its muzzle to the heat-shimmering pavement. In the gutter half a block down, another dog lay dead.
   The woman behind him moaned in a low, guttural way, but Nick did not hear her. He dosed the curtain, rubbed his eyes for a moment, and then went to the woman, who had awakened. Jane Baker was bundled up with blankets because she had been cold a couple of hours ago. Now sweat was streaming from her face and she had kicked off the blankets—he saw with embarrassment that she had sweated her thin nightgown into transparency in some places. But she was not seeing him, and at this point he doubted her semi-nakedness mattered. She was dying.
   “Johnny, bring the basin. I think I’m going to throw up!” she cried.
   He brought the basin out from under the bed and put it beside her, but she thrashed and knocked it onto the floor with a hollow bonging sound which he also couldn’t hear. He picked it up and just held it, watching her.
   “Johnny!” she screamed. “I can’t find my sewing box! It isn’t in the closet!”
   He poured her a glass of water from the pitcher on the nightstand and held it to her lips but she thrashed again and almost knocked it from his grasp. He set it back down where it would be in reach if she quieted.
   He had never been so bitterly aware of his muteness as the last two days had made him. The Methodist minister, Braceman, had been with her on the twenty-third when Nick came over. He was Bible-reading with her in the living room, but he looked nervous and anxious to get away. Nick could guess why. Her fever had given her a rosy, girlish glow that went jarringly with her bereavement. Perhaps the minister had been afraid she was going to make a pass at him. More likely, though, he had been anxious to gather up his family and melt away over the fields. News travels fast in a small town, and others had already decided to get out of Shoyo.
   Since the time Braceman had left the Baker living room some forty-eight hours ago, everything had turned into a waking nightmare. Mrs. Baker had gotten worse, so much worse that Nick had feared she would die before the sun went down.
   Worse, he couldn’t sit with her constantly. He had gone down to the truck-stop to get his three prisoners lunch, but Vince Hogan hadn’t been able to eat. He was delirious. Mike Childress and Billy Warner wanted out, but Nick couldn’t bring himself to do it. It wasn’t fear; he didn’t believe they would waste any time working him over to settle their grievance; they would want to make fast tracks away from Shoyo, like the others. But he had a responsibility. He had made a promise to a man who was now dead. Surely, sooner or later the State Patrol would get things in hand and come to take them away.
   He found a .45 rolled up in its holster in the bottom drawer of Baker’s desk, and after a few moments of debate he put it on. Looking down and seeing the woodgrip butt of the gun lying against his skinny hip had made him feel ridiculous—but its weight was comforting.
   He had opened Vince’s cell on the afternoon of the twenty-third and had put makeshift icepacks on the man’s forehead, chest, and neck. Vince had opened his eyes and looked at Nick with such silent, miserable appeal that Nick wished he could say anything—as he wished it now, two days later, with Mrs. Baker—anything that would give the man a moment’s comfort. Just You’ll be okay or I think the fever’s breaking would be enough.
   All the time he was tending to Vince, Billy and Mike were yelling at him. While he was bent over the sick man they didn’t matter, but he saw their scared faces every time he looked up, their lips forming words that all came down to the same thing: Please let us out. Nick was careful to keep away from them. He wasn’t grown, but he, was old enough to know that panic makes men dangerous.
   That afternoon he had shuttled back and forth on nearly empty streets, always expecting to find Vince Hogan dead on one end or Jane Baker dead on the other. He looked for Dr. Soames’s car but didn’t see it. That afternoon a few of the shops had still been open, and the Texaco, but he became more and more convinced that the town was emptying out. People were taking paths through the woods, logging roads, maybe even wading up Shoyo Stream, which passed through Smackover and eventually came out in the town of Mount Holly. More would leave after dark, Nick thought.
   The sun had just gone down when he arrived at the Baker house to find Jane moving shakily around the kitchen in her bathrobe, brewing tea. She looked at Nick gratefully when he came in, and he saw her fever was gone.
   “I want to thank you for watching after me,” she said calmly. “I feel ever so much better. Would you like a cup of tea?” And then she burst into tears.
   He went to her, afraid she might faint and fall against the hot stove.
   She held his arm to steady herself and laid her head against him, her hair a dark flood against the light blue robe.
   “Johnny,” she said in the darkening kitchen. “Oh, my poor Johnny.”
   If he could speak, Nick thought unhappily. But he could only hold her, and guide her across the kitchen to a chair by the table.
   “The tea—”
   He pointed to himself and then made her sit down.
   “All right,” she said. “I do feel better. Remarkably so. It’s just that… just…” She put her hands over her face.
   Nick made them hot tea and brought it to the table. They drank for a while without speaking. She held her cup in both hands, like a child. At last she put her cup down and said: “How many in town have this, Nick?”
   “I don’t know anymore,” Nick wrote. “It’s pretty bad.”
   “Have you seen the doctor?”
   “Not since this morning.”
   “Am will wear himself out if he’s not careful,” she said. “He’ll be careful, won’t he, Nick? Not to wear himself out?”
   Nick nodded and tried a smile.
   “What about John’s prisoners? Has the patrol come for them?”
   “No,” Nick wrote. “Hogan is very sick. I’m doing what I can. The others want me to let them out before Hogan can make them sick.”
   “Don’t you let them out!” she said with some spirit. “I hope you’re not thinking of it.”
   “No,” Nick wrote, and after a moment he added: “You ought to go back to bed. You need rest.”
   She smiled at him, and when she moved her head Nick could see the dark smudges under the angles of her jaw—and he wondered uneasily if she was out of the woods yet.
   “Yes. I’m going to sleep the clock right around. It seems wrong, somehow, to sleep with John dead… I can hardly believe he is, you know. I keep stumbling over the idea like something I forgot to put away.” He took her hand and squeezed it. She smiled wanly. “There may be something else to live for, in time. Have you gotten your prisoners their supper, Nick?”
   Nick shook his head.
   “You ought to. Why don’t you take John’s car?”
   “I can’t drive,” Nick wrote, “but thank you. I’ll just walk down to the truck-stop. It isn’t far. & check on you—in the morning, if that’s all right.”
   “Yes,” she said. “Fine.”
   He got up and pointed sternly at the teacup.
   “Every drop,” she promised.
   He was going out the screen door when he felt her hesitant touch on his arm.
   “John—” she said, stopped, and then forced herself to go on. “I hope they… took him to the Curtis Mortuary. That’s where John’s folks and mine have always buried out of. Do you think they took him there all right?”
   Nick nodded. The tears brimmed over her cheeks and she began to sob again.
   When he left her that night he had gone directly to the truck-stop. A CLOSED sign hung crookedly in the window. He had gone around to the house trailer in back, but it was locked and dark. No one answered his knock. Under the circumstances he felt he was justified in a little breaking and entering; there would be enough in Sheriff Baker’s petty cash box to pay any damages.
   He hammered in the glass by the restaurant’s lock and let himself in. The place was spooky even with all the lights on, the jukebox dark and dead, no one at the bumper-pool table or the video games, the booths empty, the stools unoccupied. The hood was over the grille.
   Nick went out back and fried some hamburgers on the gas stove and put them in a sack. He added a bottle of milk and half an apple pie that stood under a plastic dome on the counter. Then he went back to the jail, after leaving a note on the counter explaining who had broken in and why.
   Vince Hogan was dead. He lay on the floor of his cell amid a clutter of melting ice and wet towels. He had clawed at his neck at the end, as if he had been resisting an invisible strangler. The tips of his fingers were bloody. Flies were lighting on him and buzzing off. His neck was as black and swollen as an inner-tube some heedless child has pumped up to the point of bursting.
   “Now will you let us out?” Mike Childress asked. “He’s dead, ya fuckin mutie, are you satisfied? You feel revenged yet? Now he’s got it, too.” He pointed to Billy Warner.
   Billy looked terrified. There were hectic red splotches on his neck and cheeks; the arm of his workshirt, with which he had repeatedly swiped at his nose, was stiff with snot. “That’s a lie!” he chanted hysterically. “A lie, a lie, a fuckin lie! that’s a l—” He began to sneeze suddenly, doubling over with the force of them, expelling a heavy spray of saliva and mucus.
   “See?” Mike demanded. “Huh? Y’happy, ya fuckin mutie dimwit? Let me out! You can keep him if you want to, but not me. It’s murder, that’s all it is, cold-blooded murder!”
   Nick shook his head, and Mike had a tantrum. He began to throw himself against the bars of his cell, bruising his face, bloodying the knuckles of both hands. He stared at Nick with bulging eyes while he banged his forehead repeatedly.
   Nick waited until he got tired and then pushed the food through the slots in the bottoms of the cells with the broomhandle. Billy Warner looked at him dully for a moment, then began to eat.
   Mike threw his glass of milk against the bars. It shattered and milk sprayed everywhere. He slammed his two burgers against the graffiti-covered rear wall of his cell. One of them stuck in a splat of mustard, ketchup, and relish that was grotesquely cheery, like a Jackson Pollock painting. He jumped up and down on his slice of apple pie, boogying on it. Apple chunks flew every which way. The white plastic plate splintered.
   “I’m on a hunger strike!” he yelled. “Fuckin hunger strike! I won’t eat nothing! You’ll eat my dingle before I eat anything you bring me, you fuckin deaf-mute retard asshole! You’ll—”
   Nick turned away and silence immediately descended. He went back out into the office, not knowing what to do, scared. If he could drive, he would take them up to Camden himself. But he couldn’t drive. And there was Vince to think about. He couldn’t just let him lie there, drawing flies.
   There were two doors opening off the office. One was a coat closet. The other led down a flight of stairs. Nick went down and saw it was a combination cellar and storage room. It was cool down there. It would do, at least for a while.
   He went back upstairs. Mike was sitting on the floor, morosely picking up squashed apple slices, brushing them off and eating them. He didn’t look up at Nick.
   Nick gathered the body up in his arms and tried to lift it. The sick smell coming off the corpse was making his stomach do cartwheels and handstands. Vince was too heavy for him. He looked at the body helplessly for a moment, and became aware that both of the others were now standing at their cell doors, watching with a dreadful fascination. Nick could guess what they were thinking. Vince had been one of them, a whiny gasbag, maybe, but someone they hung with, just the same. He had died like a rat in a trap with some horrible swelling sickness they didn’t understand. Nick wondered, not for the first time that day, when he would start to sneeze and run a fever and develop those peculiar swellings on his neck.
   He laid hold of Vince Hogan’s meaty forearms and dragged him out of the cell. Vince’s head leaned toward him because of the weight on his shoulders, and he seemed to be looking at Nick, wordlessly telling him to be careful, not to joggle him too much.
   It took ten minutes to get the big man’s remains down the steep stairs. Panting, Nick laid him on the concrete under the fluorescents, and then covered him quickly with a frayed army blanket from the cot in his cell.
   He tried to sleep then, but sleep only came in the early hours of the morning after June twenty-third had become the twenty-fourth, yesterday. His dreams had always been very vivid, and sometimes he was afraid of them. He rarely had out-and-out nightmares, but more and more often lately they were ominous, giving him the feeling that no one in them was exactly as they seemed, and that the normal world had skewed into a place where babies were sacrificed behind closed blinds and stupendous black machines roared on and on in locked basements.
   And, of course, there was the very personal terror—that he would wake up with it himself.
   He did sleep a little, and the dream that came was one he had had before recently: the cornfield, the smell of warm growing things, the feel that something—or someone—very good and safe was close. A sense of home. And that began to fade into cold terror as he became aware that something was in the corn, watching him. He thought: Ma, weasel’s got in the henhouse! and awoke to early morning light, sweat standing out on his body.
   He put coffee on and went in to check on his two prisoners.
   Mike Childress was in tears. Behind him, the hamburger was still stuck on the wall in its drying glue of condiments.
   “You satisfied now? I got it too. Ain’t that what you wanted? Ain’t that your revenge? Listen to me, I sound like a fuckin freight train goin up a hill!”
   But Nick’s first concern had been for Billy Warner, who lay comatose on his bunk. His neck was swelled and black, his chest rising in fits and starts.
   He hurried back to the office, looked at the telephone, and in a fit of rage and guilt he knocked it off the desk and onto the floor, where it lay meaninglessly at the end of its cord. He turned the hotplate off and ran down the street to the Baker house. He pushed the bell for what seemed an hour before Jane came down, wrapped in her robe. The fever-sweat was back on her face. She was not delirious, but her words were slow and slurry and her lips were blistered.
   “Nick. Come in. What is it?”
   “V. Hogan died last night. Warner’s dying, I think. He’s awful sick. Have you seen Dr. Soames?”
   She shook her head, shivered in the light draft, sneezed, and then swayed on her feet. Nick put an arm around her shoulders and led her to a chair. He wrote: “Can you call his office for me?”
   “Yes, of course. Bring me the phone, Nick. I seem… to have had a setback in the night.”
   He brought the phone over and she dialed Soames’s number. After she had held the receiver to her ear for more than half a minute, he knew there was going to be no answer.
   She tried his home, then the home of his nurse. No answer.
   “I’ll try the State Patrol,” she said, but put the phone back in the cradle after dialing a single number. “The long-distance is still out of service, I guess. After I dial 1, it just goes wah-wah-wah in my ear.” She gave him a pallid smile and then the tears began to flow helplessly. “Poor Nick,” she said. “Poor me. Poor everybody. Could you help me upstairs? I feel so weak, and I can’t catch my breath. I think I’ll be with John soon.” He looked at her, wishing he could speak. “I think I’ll lie down, if you can help me.”
   He helped her upstairs, then wrote: “I’ll be back.”
   “Thank you, Nick. You’re a good boy…” She was already drifting off to sleep.
   Nick left the house and stood on the sidewalk, wondering what to do next. If he could drive, he might be able to do something. But…
   He saw a child’s bicycle lying on the lawn of a house across the street. He went to it, looked at the house it belonged to with its drawn shades (so much like the houses in his confused dreams), then went and knocked on the door. There was no answer, although he knocked several times.
   He went back to the bike. It was small, but not too small for him to ride, if he didn’t mind his knees whamming the handlebars. He would look ludicrous, of course, but he was not at all sure there was anyone left in Shoyo to see… and if there was, he didn’t think many of them would be in a laughing frame of mind.
   He got on the bike and pedaled clumsily up Main Street, past the jail, then east on Route 63, toward where Joe Rackman had seen the soldiers masquerading as a road crew. If they were still there, and if they really were soldiers, Nick would get them to take care of Billy Warner and Mike Childress. If Billy was still alive, that was. If those men had quarantined Shoyo, then surely the sick of Shoyo were their responsibility.
   It took him an hour to pedal out to the roadwork, the bike weaving crazily back and forth across the center line, his knees thumping the handlebars with monotonous regularity. But when he got there the soldiers, or road crew, or whatever they had been, were gone. There were a few smudgepots, one of them still flickering. There were two orange sawhorses. And the road had been torn up, although Nick judged it would still be passable, if you weren’t too choosy about the springs of your car.
   Black flickering movement caught the tail of his eye, and at the same instant the wind stirred around a little, just a soft summer breath, but enough to bring a ripe and sickening odor of corruption to his nostrils. The black movement was a cloud of flies, constantly forming and re-forming itself. He walked the bike over to the ditch at the far side of the road. In it, next to a shiny new corrugated culvert pipe, were the bodies of four men. Their necks and swollen faces were black. Nick didn’t know if they were soldiers or not, and he didn’t go any closer. He told himself he would walk back to the bike, there was nothing here to be scared about, they were dead, and dead people couldn’t hurt you. He was running by the time he was twenty feet from the ditch, anyway, and he was in a panic as he rode back toward Shoyo. On the outskirts of town he hit a rock and crashed the bike. He went over the handlebars, bumped his head, and scraped his hands. He only hunkered there for a moment in the middle of the road, shivering all over.
   For the next hour and a half of that morning, yesterday morning, Nick knocked on doors and rang bells. There would be someone well, he told himself. He himself felt all right, and surely he could not be the only one. There would be someone, a man, a woman, maybe a teenager with a learner’s permit, and he or she would say: Oh, hey, yes. Let’s get them to Camden. We’ll take the station wagon. Or words to that effect.
   But his knocking and ringing were answered less than a dozen times. The door would open to the length of a latch-chain, a sick but hopeful face would look out, see Nick, and hope would die. The face would move back and forth in negation, and then the door would shut. If Nick could talk, he would have argued if they could still walk, they could drive. That if they took his prisoners to Camden, they could go themselves, and there would be a hospital. They would be made well. But he couldn’t speak.
   Some asked if he had seen Dr. Soames. One man, in a delirious rage, threw the door of his small ranch-house wide open, staggered out on the porch dressed only in Isis underpants, and tried to grab Nick. He said he was going to do “what I should have done to you back in Houston.” He seemed to think Nick was someone named Jenner. He lurched back and forth along the porch after Nick like a zombie in a third-rate horror picture. His crotch had swelled terribly; his underpants looked as if someone had stuffed a honeydew melon into them. At last he crashed to the porch and Nick watched him from the lawn below, his heart thumping rapidly. The man shook his fist weakly, then crawled back inside, not bothering to shut the door.
   But most of the houses were only silent and cryptic, and at last he could do no more. That dream-sense of ominousness was creeping up on him and it became impossible to dismiss the idea that he was knocking on the doors of tombs, knocking to wake the dead, and that sooner or later the corpses might begin to answer. It didn’t help much to tell himself that most of the houses were empty, their occupants already fled to Camden or El Dorado or Texarkana.
   He went back to the Baker house. Jane Baker was sleeping deeply, her forehead cool. But this time he wasn’t as hopeful.
   It was noon. Nick went back to the truck-stop, feeling his night’s broken rest now. His body seemed to throb all over from his spill off the bike. Baker’s .45 banged his hip. At the truck-stop he heated two cans of soup and put them in thermos jugs. The milk in the fridge still seemed fine, so he took a bottle of that, too.
   Billy Warner was dead, and when Mike saw Nick, he began to giggle hysterically and point his finger. “Two down and one to go! Two down and one to go! You’re gettin your revenge! Right? Right?”
   Nick carefully pushed the thermos of soup through the slot with the broomhandle, and then a big glass of milk. Mike began to drink soup directly from the thermos in small sips. Nick took his own thermos and sat down in the hallway. He would take Billy downstairs, but first he would have lunch. He was hungry. As he drank his soup he looked at Mike thoughtfully.
   “You wondering how I am?” Mike asked.
   Nick nodded.
   “Just the same as when you left this morning. I must have hawked out a pound of snot.” He looked at Nick hopefully. “My mom always said that when you hawked snot like that, you was gettin better. Maybe I just got a mild case, huh? You think that might be?”
   Nick shrugged. Anything was possible.
   “I got the constitution of a brass eagle,” Mike said. “I think it’s nothing. I think I’ll throw it off. Listen, man, let me out. Please. I’m fuckin beggin you now.”
   Nick thought about it.
   “Hell, you got the gun. I don’t want you for nothing, anyway. I just want to get out of this town. I want to check on my wife first—”
   Nick pointed to Mike’s left hand, which was bare of rings.
   “Yeah, we’re divorced, but she’s still here in town, out on the Ridge Road. I’d like to look in on her. What do you say, man?” Mike was crying. “Give me a chance. Don’t keep me locked up in this rat-trap.”
   Nick stood up slowly, went out into the office, and opened the desk drawer. The keys were there. The man’s logic was inexorable; there was no sense in believing that someone was going to come and bail them out of this terrible mess. He got the keys and went back. He held up the one Big John Baker had shown him, with the tag of white tape on it, and tossed them through the bars to Mike Childress.
   “Thanks,” Mike babbled. “Oh, thanks. I’m sorry we beat up on you, I swear to God, it was Ray’s idea, me and Vince tried to stop him but he gets drinkin and he gets crazy—” He rattled the key in the lock. Nick stood back, his hand on the gunbutt.
   The cell door opened and Mike stepped out. “I meant it,” he said. “All I want to do is get out of this town.” He sidled past Nick, a grin twitching at his lips. Then he bolted through the door between the small cellblock and the office. Nick followed just in time to see the office door closing behind him.
   Nick went outside. Mike was standing on the curb, his hand on a parking meter, looking at the empty street.
   “My God,” he whispered, and turned his stunned face to look at Nick. “All this? All this?”
   Nick nodded, his hand still on the gunbutt.
   Mike started to say something, and it turned into a coughing spasm. He covered his mouth, then wiped his lips.
   “I’m getting to Christ out of here,” he said. “You’re wise, you’ll do the same thing, mutie. This is like the black death, or somethin.”
   Nick shrugged, and Mike started down the sidewalk. He moved faster and faster until he was nearly running. Nick watched him until he was out of sight, and then went back inside. He never saw Mike again. His heart felt lighter, and he was suddenly sure that he had done the right thing. He lay down on the cot and went to sleep almost at once.
   He slept all afternoon on the blanketless couch and awoke sweaty but feeling a little better. Thunderstorms were beating the hills—he couldn’t hear the thunder, but he could see the blue-white forks of light stabbing the hills—but none had come to Shoyo that night.
   At dusk he walked down Main Street to Paulie’s Radio & TV and committed another of his apologetic break-ins. He left a note by the cash register and lugged a Sony portable back to the jail. He turned it on and flipped through the channels. The CBS affiliate was broadcasting a sign which read MICROWAVE RELAY DIFFICULTY PLEASE STAY TUNED. The ABC station was showing “I Love Lucy,” and the NBC feed was a rerun episode in a current series about a perky young girl trying to be a mechanic on the stock-car circuit. The Texarkana station, an independent specializing mostly in old movies, game shows, and religious zanies of the Jack Van Impe stripe, was off the air.
   Nick snapped the TV off, went down to the truck-stop, and fixed enough soup and sandwiches for two. He thought there was something eerie about the way all the streetlights still came on, stretching out both ways along Main Street in spotlit pools of white light. He put the food in a hamper, and on the way to Jane Baker’s house three or four dogs, obviously unfed and ravenous, advanced on him in a pack, drawn by the smell from the hamper. Nick drew the .45 but couldn’t summon up the heart to use it until one of the dogs was getting ready to bite him. Then he pulled the trigger and the bullet whined off the cement five feet in front of him, leaving a silvery streak of lead. The sound of the report did not come to him, but he felt the dull thud of vibration. The dogs broke and ran.
   Jane was asleep, her forehead and cheeks hot, her breathing slow and labored. She looked dreadfully wasted to Nick. He got a cold washcloth and wiped her face. He left her share of food on the night table, and then went down into the living room and turned on the Bakers’ TV, a big console color job.
   CBS didn’t come on all night. NBC kept to a regular broadcast schedule, but the picture on the ABC affiliate kept going hazy, sometimes fading out to snow and then snapping back suddenly. The ABC channel showed only old syndication programs, as if its line to the network had been severed. It didn’t matter. What Nick was waiting for was the news.
   When it came on, he was dumbfounded. The “superflu epidemic,” as it was now being called, was the lead story, but the newscasters on both stations said it was being brought under control. A flu vaccine had been developed at the Atlanta Centers for Disease Control, and you could get a shot from your, doctor by early the following week. Outbreaks were reportedly serious in New York, San Francisco, L.A., and London, but all were being contained. In some areas, the newscaster went on, public gatherings had been canceled temporarily.
   In Shoyo, Nick thought, the entire town had been canceled. Who was kidding who?
   The newscaster concluded by saying that travel to most of the large city areas was still restricted, but the restrictions would be lifted as soon as the vaccine was in general release. He then went on to a plane crash in Michigan and some congressional reactions to the latest Supreme Court gay-rights decision.
   Nick turned off the TV and went out onto the Bakers’ porch. There was a glider and he sat down in it. The back-and-forth motion was soothing, and he couldn’t hear the rusty squeak that John Baker had kept forgetting to oil. He watched fireflies as they hemmed irregular seams in the dark. Lightning flashed dully inside the clouds on the horizon, making them look as if they held fireflies of their own, monster fireflies the size of dinosaurs. The night was sticky and close.
   Because television was a completely visual medium for Nick, he had noticed something about the news broadcast that others might have missed. There had been no film-clips, none at all. There had been no baseball scores, maybe because no ball games had been played. A vague weather report and no weather map showing the highs and lows—it was as if the U.S. Bureau of Meteorology had closed up shop. For all Nick knew to the contrary, they had.
   Both newscasters had seemed nervous and upset. One of them had a cold; he had coughed once on mike and had excused himself. Both newscasters had kept cutting their eyes to the left and right of the camera they were facing… as if someone was in the studio with them, someone who was there to make sure they got it right.
   That was the night of June 24, and he slept raggedly on the Bakers’ front porch, and his dreams were very bad. And now, on the afternoon of the following day, he was officiating at the death of Jane Baker, this fine woman… and he couldn’t say a word to comfort her.
   She was tugging at his hand. Nick looked down at her pale, drawn face. Her skin was dry now, the sweat evaporated. He took no hope or comfort in that, however. She was going. He had come to know the look.
   “Nick,” she said, and smiled. She clasped one of his hands in both of hers. “I wanted to thank you again. No one wants to die all alone, do they?”
   He shook his head violently, and she understood this was not in agreement with her statement but rather in vehement contradiction of its premise.
   “Yes I am,” she contradicted. “But never mind. There’s a dress in that closet, Nick. A white ode. You’ll know it because of…” A fit of coughing interrupted her. When she had it under control, she finished, “… because of the lace. It’s the one I wore on the train when we left for our honeymoon. It still fits… or did. I suppose it will be a little big on me now—I’ve lost some weight—but it doesn’t really matter. I’ve always loved that dress. John and I went to Lake Pontchartrain. It was the happiest two weeks of my life. John always made me happy. Will you remember the dress, Nick? It’s the one I want to be buried in. You wouldn’t be too embarrassed to… to dress me, would you?”
   He swallowed hard and shook his head, looking at the coverlet. She must have sensed his mixture of sadness and discomfort, because she didn’t mention the dress again. She talked of other things instead—lightly, almost coquettishly. How she had won an elocution contest in high school, had gone on to the Arkansas state finals, and how her half-slip had fallen down and puddled around her shoes just as she reached the ringing climax of Shirley Jackson’s “The Daemon Lover.” About her sister, who had gone to Viet Nam as part of a Baptist mission group, and had come back with not one or two but three adopted children. About a camping trip she and John had taken three years ago, and how an ill-tempered moose in rut had forced them up a tree and kept them there all day.
   “So we sat up there and spooned,” she said sleepily, “like a couple of high school kids in a balcony. My goodness, he was in a state when we got down. He was… we were… in love… very much in love… love is what moves the world, I’ve always thought… it is the only thing which allows men and women to stand in a world where gravity always seems to want to pull them down… bring them low… and make them crawl… we were… so much in love…”
   She drowsed off and slept until he wakened her into fresh delirium by moving a curtain or perhaps just by treading on a squeaky board.
   “John! ” she screamed now, her voice choked with phlegm. “Oh, John, I’ll never get the hang of this dad-ratted stick shift! John, you got to help me! You got to help me —”
   Her words trailed off in a long, rattling exhalation he could not hear but sensed all the same. A thin trickle of dark blood issued from one nostril. She fell back on the pillow, and her head snapped back and forth once, twice, three times, as if she had made some kind of vital decision and the answer was negative.
   Then she was still.
   Nick put his hand timidly against the side of her neck, then her inner wrist, then between her breasts. There was nothing. She was dead. The clock on her bedtable ticked importantly, unheard by either of them. He put his head against his knees for a minute, crying a little in the silent way he had. All you can do is have sort of a slow leak, Rudy had told him once, but in a soap opera world, that can come in handy.
   He knew what came next and didn’t want to do it. It wasn’t fair, part of him cried out. It wasn’t his responsibility. But since there was no one else here—maybe no one else well for miles around—he would have to shoulder it. Either that or leave her here to rot, and he couldn’t do that. She had been kind to him, and there had been too many people along the way who hadn’t been able to spare that, sick or well. He supposed he would have to get going. The longer he sat here and did nothing, the more he would dread the task. He knew where the Curtis Funeral Home was—three blocks down and one block west. It would be hot out there, too.
   He forced himself to get up and go to the closet, half hoping that the white dress, the honeymoon dress, would turn out to have been just another part of her delirium. But it was there. A little yellowed with the years now, but he knew it, all the same. Because of the lace. He took it down and laid it across the bench at the foot of the bed. He looked at the dress, looked at the woman, and thought, It’s going to be more than just a little big on her now. The disease, whatever it is, was crueler to her than she knew… and I guess that’s just as well.
   Unwillingly, he went around to her and began to remove the nightgown. But when it was off and she lay naked before him, the dread departed and he felt only pity—a pity lodged so deep in him that it made him ache and he began to cry again as he washed her body and then dressed it as it had been dressed when she wore it on the way to Lake Pontchartrain. And when she was dressed as she had been on that day, he took her in his arms and carried her down to the funeral home in her lace, oh, in her lace: he carried her like a bridegroom crossing an endless threshold with his beloved in his arms.

Chapter 26
   
Some campus group, probably either Students for a Democratic Society or the Young Maoists, had been busy with a ditto machine during the night of June 25-26. In the morning, these posters were plastered all over the University of Kentucky at Louisville campus:
   ATTENTION! ATTENTION! ATTENTION! ATTENTION!
   YOU ARE BEING LIED TO! THE GOVERNMENT IS LYING TO YOU! THE PRESS, WHICH HAS BEEN CO-OPTED BY THE FORCES OF THE PIG PARAMILITARY, IS LYING TO YOU! THE ADMINISTRATION OF THIS UNIVERSITY IS LYING TO YOU, AS ARE THE INFIRMARY DOCTORS UNDER THE ADMINISTRATION’S ORDERS!
   1. THERE IS NO SUPERFLU VACCINE.
   2. SUPERFLU IS NOT A SERIOUS DISEASE, IT IS A DEADLY DISEASE.
   3. SUSCEPTIBILITY MAY RUN AS HIGH AS 75%.
   4. SUPERFLU WAS DEVELOPED BY THE FORCES OF THE U.S. PIG PARAMILITARY AND DISBURSED BY ACCIDENT.
   5. THE U.S. PIG PARAMILITARY NOW MEANS TO COVER UP THEIR MURDEROUS BLUNDER EVEN IF IT MEANS 75% OF THE POPULATION WILL DIE!
   ALL REVOLUTIONARY PEOPLE, GREETINGS! THE TIME OF OUR STRUGGLE IS NOW! UNITE, STRIVE, CONQUER!
   MEETING IN GYM AT 7:00 PM!
   STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE!
   What happened at WBZ-TV in Boston had been planned the night before by three newscasters and six technicians, all operating in Studio 6. Five of these men played poker regularly, and six of the nine were already ill. They felt they had nothing to lose. They collected nearly a dozen handguns. Bob Palmer, who anchored the morning news, brought them upstairs inside a flight bag where he usually carried his notes, pencils, and several legal-sized notepads.
   The entire broadcast facility was cordoned off by what they had been told were National Guardsmen, but as Palmer had told George Dickerson the night before, they were the only over-fifty Guardsmen he had ever seen.
   At 9:01 A.M., just after Palmer had begun to read the soothing copy he had been handed ten minutes before by an army noncom, a coup took place. The nine of them effectively captured the television station. The soldiers, who hadn’t expected any real trouble from a soft bunch of civilians accustomed to reporting tragedy at long distance, were taken completely by surprise and disarmed. Other station personnel joined the small rebellion, and cleared the sixth floor quickly and locked all the doors. The elevators were brought to six before the soldiers on the lobby level quite knew what was happening. Three soldiers tried to come up the east fire stairs, and a janitor named Charles Yorkin, armed with an army-issue carbine, fired a shot over their heads. It was the only shot fired.
   Viewers in the WBZ-TV broadcast area saw Bob Palmer stop his newscast in the middle of a sentence, and heard him say, “Okay, right now!” There were scuffling sounds off-camera. When it was over, thousands of bemused viewers saw that Bob Palmer was now holding a snub-nosed pistol in his hand.
   A hoarse, off-mike voice yelled jubilantly: “We got em, Bob! We got the bastards! We got em all!”
   “Okay, that’s good work,” Palmer said. He then faced into the camera again. “Fellow citizens of Boston, and Americans in our broadcast area. Something both grave and terribly important has just happened in this studio, and I am very glad it has happened here first, in Boston, the cradle of American independence. For the last seven days, this broadcast facility has been under guard by men purporting to be National Guardsmen. Men in army khaki, armed with guns, have been standing beside our cameramen, in our control rooms, beside our teletypes. Has the news been managed? I am sorry to say that this is the case. I have been given copy and forced to read it, almost literally with gun to my head. The copy I have been reading has to do with the so-called ‘superflu epidemic,’ and all of it is patently false.”
   Lights began to flicker on the switchboard. Within fifteen seconds every light was on.
   “Our cameramen have taken film that has either been confiscated or deliberately exposed. Our reporters’ stories have disappeared. Yet we do have film, ladies and gentlemen, and we have correspondents right here in the studio-professional reporters, but eyewitnesses to what may be the greatest disaster this country has ever faced… and I do not use those words lightly. We are going to run some of this film for you now. All of it was taken clandestinely, and some of it is of poor quality. Yet we here, who have just liberated our own television station, think you may see enough. More, indeed, than you might have wished.”
   He looked up, took a handkerchief from his sport-coat pocket, and blew his nose. Those with good color TVs could see that he looked flushed and feverish.
   “If it’s ready, George, go ahead and run it.”
   Palmer’s face was replaced with shots of Boston General Hospital. Wards were crammed. Patients lay on the floors. The halls were full; nurses, many of them obviously sick themselves, wove in and out, some of them weeping hysterically. Others looked shocked to the point of coma.
   Shots of guards standing on street corners with cradled rifles. Shots of buildings that had been broken into.
   Bob Palmer appeared again. “If you have children, ladies and gentlemen,” he said quietly, “we would advise that you ask them to leave the room.”
   A grainy shot of a truck backing down a pier jutting out over Boston Harbor, a big olive-colored army truck. Below it, riding uncertainly, was a barge covered with canvas tarps. Two soldiers, rugose and alien in gas masks, jumped down from the truck’s cab. The picture jiggled and joggled, then became steady again as they pulled back the canvas sheet covering the open rear end of the truck. Then they jumped up inside, and bodies began to cascade out onto the barge: women, old men, children, police, nurses; they came in a cartwheeling flood that seemed never to end. At some point during the film-clip it became clear that the soldiers were using pitchforks to get them out.
   Palmer went on broadcasting for two hours, his steadily hoarsening voice reading clippings and bulletins, interviewing other members of the crew. It went on until somebody on the ground floor realized that they didn’t have to re-take the sixth floor to stop it. At 11:16, the WBZ transmitter was shut down permanently with twenty pounds of plastique.
   Palmer and the others on the sixth floor were summarily executed on charges of treason to their government, the United States of America.
   It was a small-town, once-weekly West Virginia newspaper called the Durbin Call-Clarion, put out by a retired lawyer named James D. Hogliss, and its circulation figures had always been good because Hogliss had been a fiery defender of the miners’ right to organize in the late 1940s and in the 1950s, and because his anti-establishment editorials were always filled with hellfire and brimstone missiles aimed at the government hacks at every level, from town to federal.
   Hogliss had a regular bunch of paperboys, but on this clear summer morning he took the papers around himself in his 1948 Cadillac, the big whitewall tires whispering up and down the streets of Durbin… and the streets were painfully empty. The papers were piled on the Cadillac’s seats and in its trunk. It was the wrong day for the Call-Clarion to come out, but the paper was only one page of large type set inside a black border. The word at the top proclaimed EXTRA, the first extra edition Hogliss had put out since 1980, when the Ladybird mine had exploded, entombing forty miners for all time.
   The headline read: GOV’T FORCES TRY TO CONCEAL PLAGUE OUTBREAK!
   Beneath: “Special to the Call-Clarion by James D. Hogliss.”
   Below that: It has been revealed to this reporter by a reliable source that the flu epidemic (sometimes called Choking Sickness or Tube Neck here in West Virginia) is in reality a deadly mutation of the ordinary flu virus created by this government, for purposes of war—and in direct disregard of the revised Geneva accords concerning germ and chemical warfare, accords which representatives of the United States signed seven years ago. The source, who is an army official now stationed in Wheeling, also said that promises of a soon-forthcoming vaccine are ‘a baldfaced lie.’ No vaccine, according to this source, has yet been developed.
   “Citizens, this is more than a disaster or a tragedy; it is the end of all hope in our government. If we have indeed done such a thing to ourselves, then…”
   Hogliss was sick, and very weak. He seemed to have used the last of his strength composing the editorial. It had gone from him into the words and had not been replaced. His chest was full of phlegm, and even normal breathing was like running uphill. Yet he went methodically from house to house, leaving his broadsides, not even knowing if the houses were still occupied, or if they were, if anyone inside had enough strength left to go out and pick up what he had left.
   Finally he was on the west end of town, Poverty Row, with its shacks and trailers and its rank septic-tank smell. Only the papers in the trunk remained and he left it open, its lid flopping slowly up and down as he went over the washboards in the road. He was trying to cope with a fearsome headache, and his vision kept doubling on him.
   When the last house, a tumbledown shack near the Rack’s Crossing town line, was taken care of, he still had a bundle of perhaps twenty-five papers. He slit the string which bound them with his old pocketknife and then let the wind take them where the wind would, thinking of his source, a major with dark, haunted eyes who had been transferred from something top secret in California called Project Blue only three months before. The major had been charged with outside security there, and he kept fingering the pistol on his hip as he told Hogliss everything he knew. Hogliss thought it would not be long before the major used the gun, if he hadn’t used it already.
   He climbed back behind the wheel of the Cadillac, the only car he had owned since his twenty-seventh birthday, and discovered he was too tired to drive back to town. So he leaned back sleepily, listened to the drowning sounds coming from his chest, and watched the wind blow his extra editions lazily up the road toward Rack’s Crossing. Some of them had caught in the overhanging trees, where they hung like strange fruit. Nearby, he could hear the bubbling, racing sound of Durbin Stream, where he had fished as a boy. There were no fish in it now, of course—the coal companies had seen to that—but the sound was still soothing. He closed his eyes, slept, and died an hour and a half later.
   The Los Angeles Times ran only 26,000 copies of their one-page extra before the officers in charge discovered that they were not printing an advertising circular, as they had been told. The reprisal was swift and bloody. The official FBI story was that “radical revolutionaries,” that old bugaboo, had dynamited the L.A. Times ’ presses, causing the death of twenty-eight workers. The FBI didn’t have to explain how the explosion had put bullets in each of the twenty-eight heads, because the bodies were mingled with those of thousands of others, epidemic victims who were being buried at sea.
   Yet 10,000 copies got out, and that was enough. The headline, in 36-point-type, screamed:
   WEST COAST IN GRIP OF PLAGUE EPIDEMIC
   Thousands Flee Deadly Superflu
   Government Coverup Certain
   LOS ANGELES—Some of the soldiers purporting to be National Guardsmen helping out during the current ongoing tragedy are career soldiers with as many as four ten-year pips on their sleeves. Part of their job is to assure terrified Los Angeles residents that the superflu, known as Captain Trips by the young in most areas, is “only slightly more virulent” than the London or Hong Kong strains… but these assurances are made through portable respirators. The President is scheduled to speak tonight at 6:00 PST and his press secretary, Hubert Ross, has branded reports that the President will speak from a set mocked up to look like the Oval Office but actually deep in the White House bunker “hysterical, vicious, and totally unfounded.” Advance copies of the President’s speech indicate that he will “spank” the American people for overreacting, and compare the current panic to that which followed Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast in the early 30s.
   The Times has five questions it wishes the President would answer in his speech.
   1. Why has the Times been enjoined from printing the news by thugs in army uniforms, in direct violation of its Constitutional right to do so?
   2. Why have the following highways—US 5, US 10, and US 15—been blocked off by armored cars and troop carriers?
   3. If this is a “minor outbreak of flu,” why has martial law been declared for Los Angeles and surrounding areas?
   4. If this is a “minor outbreak of flu,” then why are barge-trains being towed out into the Pacific and dumped? And do these barges contain what we are afraid they contain and what informed sources have assured us they do contain—the dead bodies of plague victims?
   5. Finally, if a vaccine really is to be distributed to doctors and area hospitals early next week, why has not one of the forty-six physicians that this newspaper contacted for further details heard of any delivery plans? Why has not one clinic been set up to administer flu shots? Why has not one of the ten pharmaceutical houses we called gotten freight invoices or government fliers on this vaccine?
   We call upon the President to answer these questions in his speech, and above all we call upon him to end these police-state tactics and this insane effort to cover up the truth…
   In Duluth a man in khaki shorts and sandals walked up and down Piedmont Avenue with a large smear of ash on his forehead and a hand-lettered sandwich board hanging over his scrawny shoulders.
   The front read:
   THE TIME OF THE DISAPPEARANCE IS HERE
   CHRIST THE LORD RETURNETH SOON
   PREPARE TO MEET YOUR GOD!
   The back read:
   BEHOLD THE HEARTS OF THE SINNERS WERE BROKEN
   THE GREAT SHALL BE ABASED AND THE ABASED MADE GREAT
   THE EVIL DAYS ARE AT HAND
   WOE TO THEE O ZION
   Four young men in motorcycle jackets, all of them with bad coughs and runny noses, set upon the man in the khaki shorts and beat him unconscious with his own sandwich board. Then they fled, one of them calling back hysterically over his shoulder: “Teach you to scare people! Teach you to scare people, you half-baked freak!”
   The highest-rated morning program in Springfield, Missouri, was KLFT’s morning phone-in show, “Speak Your Piece,” with Ray Flowers. He had six phone lines into his studio booth, and on the morning of June 26, he was the only KLFT employee to show up for work. He was aware of what was going on in the outside world and it scared him. In the last week or so, it seemed to Ray that everyone he knew had come down sick. There were no troops in Springfield, but he had heard that the National Guard had been called into K.C. and St. Louis to “stop the spread of panic” and “prevent looting.” Ray Flowers himself felt fine. He looked thoughtfully at his equipment—phones, time-delay device to edit those callers who lapsed into profanity from time to time, racks of commercials on cassettes (“If your toilet overflows/And you don’t know just what goes/Call for the man with the big steel hose/Call your Kleen-Owt Man! ”), and of course, the mike.
   He lit a cigarette, went to the studio door, and locked it. Went into his booth and locked that. He turned off the canned music that had been playing from a tape reel, turned on his own theme music, and then settled in at the microphone.
   “Hi, y’all,” he said, “this is Ray Flowers on ‘Speak Your Piece,’ and this morning I guess there’s only one thing to call about, isn’t there? You can call it Tube Neck or superflu—or Captain Trips, but it all means the same thing. I’ve heard some horror stories about the army clamping down on everything, and if you want to talk about that, I’m ready to listen. It’s still a free country, right? And since I’m here by myself this morning, we’re going to do things just a little bit differently. I’ve got the time-delay turned off, and I think we can dispense with the commercials. If the Springfield you’re seeing is anything like the one I’m seeing from the KLFT windows, no one feels much like shopping, anyway.
   “Okay—if you’re spo’s to be up and around, as my mother used to say, let’s get going. Our toll-free numbers are 555-8600 and 555-8601. If you get a busy, just be patient. Remember, I’m doing it all myself.”
   There was an army unit in Carthage, fifty miles from Springfield, and a twenty-man patrol was dispatched to take care of Ray Flowers. Two men refused the order. They were shot on the spot.
   In the hour it took them to get to Springfield, Ray Flowers took calls from: a doctor who said people were dying like flies and who thought the government was lying through its teeth about a vaccine; a hospital nurse who confirmed that bodies were being removed from Kansas City hospitals by the truckload; a delirious woman who claimed it was flying saucers from outer space; a farmer who said that an army squad with two payloaders had just finished digging a hell of a long ditch in a field near Route 71 south of Kansas City; half a dozen others with their own stories to tell.
   Then there was a crashing sound on the outer studio door. “Open up!” a muffled voice cried. “Open up in the name of the United States!”
   Ray looked at his watch. Quarter of twelve.
   “Well,” he said, “it looks like the Marines have landed. But we’ll just keep taking calls, shall w—”
   There was a rattle of automatic rifle fire, and the knob of the studio door thumped onto the rug. Blue smoke drifted out of the ragged hole. The door was shouldered inward and half a dozen soldiers, wearing respirators and full battledress, burst in.
   “Several soldiers have just broken into the outer office,” Ray said. “They’re fully armed… they look like they’re ready to start a mop-up operation in France fifty years ago. Except for the respirators on their faces…”
   “Shut it down!” a heavyset man with sergeant’s stripes on his sleeves yelled. He loomed outside the broadcast booth’s glass walls and gestured with his rifle.
   “I think not!” Ray called back. He felt very cold, and when he fumbled his cigarette out of his ashtray, he saw that his fingers were trembling. “This station is licensed by the FCC and I’m—”
   “I’m revokin ya fuckin license! Now shut down!”
   “I think not,” Ray said again, and turned back to his microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, I have been ordered to shut down the KLFT transmitter and I have refused the order, quite properly, I think. These men are acting like Nazis, not American soldiers. I am not—”
   “Last chance!” The sergeant brought his gun up.
   “Sergeant,” one of the soldiers by the door said, “I don’t think you can just—”
   “If that man says anything else, waste him,” the sergeant said.
   “I think they’re going to shoot me,” Ray Flowers said, and the next moment the glass of his broadcast booth blew inward and he fell over his control panel. From somewhere there came a terrific feedback whine that spiraled up and up. The sergeant fired his entire clip into the control panel and the feedback cut off. The lights on the switchboard continued to blink.
   “Okay,” the sergeant said, turning around. “I want to get back to Carthage by one o’clock and I don’t—”
   Three of his men opened up on him simultaneously, one of them with a recoilless rifle that fired seventy gas-tipped slugs per second. The sergeant did a jigging, shuffling death-dance and then fell backward through the shattered remains of the broadcast booth’s glass wall. One leg spasmed and his combat boot kicked shards of glass from the frame.
   A PFC, pimples standing out in stark relief on his whey-colored face, burst into tears. The others only stood in stunned disbelief. The smell of cordite was heavy and sickening in the air.
   “We scragged him!” the PFC cried hysterically. “Holy God, we done scragged Sergeant Peters!”
   No one replied. Their faces were still dazed and uncomprehending, although later they would only wish they had done it sooner. All of this was some deadly game, but it wasn’t their game.
   The phone, which Ray Flowers had put in the amplifier cradle just before he died, gave out a series of squawks.
   “Ray? You there, Ray?” The voice was tired, nasal. “I listen to your program all the time, me and my husband both, and we just wanted to say keep up the good work and don’t let them bully you. Okay, Ray? Ray?… Ray?…”
   COMMUNIQUE 234 ZONE 2 SECRET SCRAMBLE
   FROM: LANDON ZONE 2 NEW YORK
   TO: CREIGHTON COMMANDING
   RE: OPERATION CARNIVAL
   FOLLOWS: NEW YORK CORDON STILL OPERATIVE DISPOSAL OF BODIES PROCEEDING CITY RELATIVELY QUIET X COVER STORY UNRAVELING FASTER THAN EXPECTED BUT SO FAR NOTHING WE CAN’T HANDLE FROM CITY POPULATION SUPERFLU IS KEEPING MOST OF THEM INSIDE XX NOW ESTIMATE THAT 50% OF TROOPS MANNING BARRICADES AT POINTS OF EGRESS/INGRESS note 1 NOW ILL W/SUPERFLU MOST TROOPS STILL CAPABLE OF ACTIVE DUTY AND PERFORMING WELL XXX THREE FIRES OUT OF CONTROL IN CITY HARLEM 7TH AVENUE SHEA STADIUM XXXX DESERTION FROM RANKS BECOMING A GREATER PROBLEM DESERTERS NOW BEING SUMMARILY SHOT XXXXX PERSONAL SUMMARY IS THAT SITUATION IS STILL VIABLE BUT DETERIORATING SLOWLY XXXXXX COMMUNICATION ENDS
   LANDON ZONE 2 NEW YORK
   In Boulder, Colorado, a rumor that the U.S. Meteorological Air Testing Center was really a biological warfare installation began to spread. The rumor was repeated on the air by a semidelirious Denver FM disc jockey. By 11 P.M. on the night of June 26, a vast, lemminglike exodus from Boulder had begun. A company of soldiers was sent out from Denver-Arvada to stop them, but it was like sending a man with a whisk-broom to clean out the Augean stables. Better than eleven thousand civilians—sick, scared, and with no other thought but to put as many miles between themselves and the Air Testing Center as possible—rolled over them. Thousands of other Boulderites fled to other points of the compass.
   At quarter past eleven a shattering explosion lit the night at the Air Testing Center’s location on Broadway. A young radical named Desmond Ramage had planted better than sixteen pounds of plastique, originally earmarked for various Midwestern courthouses and state legislatures, in the ATC lobby. The explosive was great; the timer was cruddy. Ramage was vaporized along with all sorts of harmless weather equipment and particle-for-particle pollution-measuring gadgets.
   Meanwhile, the exodus from Boulder went on.
   COMMUNIQUE 771 ZONE 6 SECRET SCRAMBLE
   FROM: GARETH ZONE 6 LITTLE ROCK
   TO: CREIGHTON COMMANDING
   RE: OPERATION CARNIVAL
   FOLLOWS: BRODSKY NEUTRALIZED REPEAT BRODSKY NEUTRALIZED HE WAS FOUND WORKING IN A STOREFRONT CLINIC HERE TRIED AND SUMMARILY EXECUTED FOR TREASON AGAINST THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA SOME OF THOSE BEING TREATED ATTEMPTED TO INTERFERE 14 CIVILIANS SHOT, 6 KILLED 3 OF MY MEN WOUNDED, NONE SERIOUSLY X ZONE 6 FORCES THIS AREA WORKING AT ONLY 40% CAPACITY ESTIMATE 25% OF THOSE STILL ON ACTIVE DUTY NOW ILL W/SUPERFLU 15% AWOL XX MOST SERIOUS INCIDENT IN REGARD TO CONTINGENCY PLAN F FOR FRANK XXX SERGEANT T.L. PETERS STATIONED CARTHAGE MO. ON EMERGENCY DUTY SPRINGFIELD MO. APPARENTLY ASSASSINATED BY OWN MEN XXXX OTHER INCIDENTS OF SIMILAR NATURE POSSIBLE BUT UNCONFIRMED SITUATION DETERIORATING RAPIDLY XXXXX COMMUNICATION ENDS
   GARFIELD ZONE 6 LITTLE ROCK
   When the evening was spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table, two thousand students attending Kent State University in Ohio went on the warpath—big time. The two thousand rioters consisted of first mini-semester summer students, members of a symposium on the future of college journalism, one hundred and twenty attendees of a drama workshop, and two hundred members of the Future Farmers of America, Ohio branch, whose convention happened to coincide with the grassfire spread of the superflu. All of them had been cooped up on the campus since June 22, four days ago. What follows is a transcription of police-band communications in the area, spanning the time period 7:16–7:22 P.M.
   “Unit 16, unit 16, do you copy? Over.”
   “Ah, copy, unit 20. Over.”
   “Ah, we got a group of kids coming down the mall here, 16. About seventy warm bodies, I’d say, and… ah, check that, unit 16, we got another group coming the other way… Jesus, two hundred or more in that one, looks like. Over.”
   “Unit 20, this is base. Do you copy? Over.”
   “Read you five-by, base. Over.”
   “I’m sending Chumm and Halliday over. Block the road with your car. Take no other action. If they go over you, spread your legs and enjoy it. No resistance, do you copy? Over.”
   “I copy no resistance, base. What are those soldiers doing over on the eastern side of the mall, base? Over.”
   “What soldiers? Over.”
   “That’s what I asked you, base. They’re—”
   “Base, this is Dudley Chumm. Oh shit, this is unit 12. Sorry, base. There’s a bunch of kids coming down Burrows Drive. About a hundred and fifty. Headed for the mall. Singing or chanting or some damn thing. But Cap, Jesus Christ, we see soldiers, too. They’re wearing gas masks, I think. Ah, they look to be in a skirmish line. That’s what it looks like, anyway. Over.”
   “Base to unit 12. Join unit 20 at the foot of the mall. Same instructions. No resistance. Over.”
   “Roger, base. I am rolling. Over.”
   “Base, this is unit 17. This is Halliday, base. Do you copy? Over.”
   “I copy, 17. Over.”
   “I’m behind Chumm. There’s another two hundred kids coming west to east toward the mall. They’ve got signs, just like in the sixties. One says SOLDIERS THROW DOWN YOUR GUNS. I see another one that says THE TRUTH THE WHOLE TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH. They—”
   “I don’t give a shit what the signs say, unit 17. Get down there with Chumm and Peters and block them off. It sounds like they’re headed into a tornado. Over.”
   “Roger. Over and out.”
   “This is Campus Security Chief Richard Burleigh now speaking to the head of the military forces encamped on the south side of this campus. Repeat: this is Campus Security Chief Burleigh. I know you’ve been monitoring our communications, so please spare me the ducking and fucking and acknowledge. Over.”
   “This is Colonel Albert Philips, U.S. Army. We are listening, Chief Burleigh. Over.”
   “Base, this is unit 16. The kids are coming together at the war memorial. They appear to be turning toward the soldiers. This looks nasty. Over.”
   “This is Burleigh, Colonel Philips. Please state your intentions. Over.”
   “My orders are to contain those present on campus to the campus. My only intention is to follow my orders. If those people are just demonstrating, they are fine. If they intend to try breaking out of quarantine, they are not. Over.”
   “You surely don’t mean—”
   “I mean what I said, Chief Burleigh. Over and out.”
   “Philips! Philips! Answer me, goddam you! Those aren’t commie guerrillas out there! They’re kids! American kids! They aren’t armed! They—”
   “Unit 13 to base. Ah, those kids are walking right toward the soldiers, Cap. They’re waving their signs. Singing that song. The one the Baez crotch used to sing. Oh. Shit, I think some of them are throwing rocks. They… Jesus! Oh Jesus Christ! They can’t do that!”
   “Base to unit 13! What’s going on out there? What’s happening?”
   “This is Chumm, Dick. I’ll tell you what’s happening out here. It’s a slaughter. I wish I was blind. Oh, the fuckers! They… ah, they’re mowing those kids down. With machine guns, it looks like. As far as I can tell, there wasn’t even any warning. The kids that are still on their feet… ah, they are breaking up… running to all points of the compass. Oh Christ! I just saw a girl cut in half by gunfire! Blood… there must be seventy, eighty kids lying out there on the grass. They—”
   “Chumm! Come in! Come in, unit 12!”
   “Base, this is unit 17. Do you copy? Over.”
   “I copy you, goddammit, but where’s fucking Chumm? Fucking over!”
   “Chumm and… Halliday, I think… got out of their cars for a better look. We’re coming back, Dick. Now it looks like the soldiers are shooting each other. I don’t know who’s winning, and I don’t care. Whoever it is will probably start on us next. When those of us who can get back do get back, I suggest that we all go down in the basement and wait for them to use up their ammo. Over.”
   “Goddammit—”
   “The turkey shoot’s still going on, Dick. I’m not kidding. Over. Out.”
   Through most of the running exchange transcribed above, the listener can hear faint popping sounds in the background, not unlike horse chestnuts in a hot fire. One may also hear thin screams… and, in the last forty seconds or so, the heavy, coughing thump of mortar rounds exploding.
   Following is a transcription taken from a special high-frequency radio band in Southern California. The transcription was made from 7:17 to 7:20 P.M., PST.
   “Massingill, Zone 10. Are you there, Blue Base? This message is coded Annie Oakley, Urgent-plus-10. Come in, if you’re there. Over.”
   “This is Len, David. We can skip the jargon, I think. Nobody’s listening.”
   “It’s out of control, Len. Everything. L.A. is going up in flames. Whole fucking city and everything around it. All my men are sick or rioting or AWOL or looting right along with the civilian population. I’m in the Skylight Room of the Bank of America, main branch. There’s over six hundred people trying to get in and get at me. Most of them are regular army.”
   “Things fall apart. The center does not hold.”
   “Say again. I didn’t copy.”
   “Never mind. Can you get out?”
   “Hell no. But I’ll give the first of the scum something to think about. I’ve got a recoilless rifle here. Scum. Fucking scum!”
   “Luck, David.”
   “You too. Hold it together as long as you can.”
   “Will do.”
   “I’m not sure—”
   Verbal communication ends at this point. There is a splintering, crashing sound, the screech of giving metal, the tinkle of breaking glass. A great many yelling voices. Small-arms fire, and then, very close to the radio transmitter, close enough to distort, the heavy, thudding explosions of what might very well be a recoilless rifle. The yelling, roaring voices draw closer. There is the whining sound of a ricochet, a scream very close to the transmitter, a thud, and silence.
   Following is a transcription taken from the regular army band in San Francisco. The transcription was made from 7:28 to 7:30 P.M., PST.
   “Soldiers and brothers! We have taken the radio station, and the command HQ! Your oppressors are dead! I, Brother Zeno, until moments ago Sergeant First Class Roland Gibbs, proclaim myself first President of the Republic of Northern California! We are in control! We are in control! If your officers in the field try to countermand my orders, shoot them like dogs in the street! Like dogs! Like bitches with shit drying on their rumps! Take down name, rank, and serial numbers of deserters! List those that speak sedition or treason against the Republic of Northern California! A new day is dawning! The day of the oppressor is ended! We are—”
   A rattle of machine-gun fire. Screams. Thumps and thuds. Pistol shots, more screams, a sustained burst of machine-gun fire. A long, dying moan. Three seconds of dead air.
   “This is Major Alfred Nunn, United States Army. I am taking provisional and temporary control of United States forces in the San Francisco area. The handful of traitors present in this HQ have been dealt with. I am in command, repeat, in command. The holding operation will go on. Deserters and defectors will be dealt with as before: extreme prejudice, repeat, extreme prejudice. I am now—”
   More gunfire. A scream.
   Background: “—them all! Get them all! Death to the war-pigs —”
   Heavy gunfire. Then silence on the band.
   At 9:16 P.M., EST, those still well enough to watch television in the Portland, Maine, area tuned in WCSH-TV and watched with numbed horror as a huge black man, naked except for a pink leather loincloth and a Marine officer’s cap, obviously ill, performed a series of sixty-two public executions.
   His colleagues, also black, also nearly naked, all wore loincloths and some badge of rank to show they had once belonged in the military. They were armed with automatic and semi-automatic weapons. In the area where a studio audience had once watched local political debates and “Dialing for Dollars,” more members of this black “junta” covered perhaps two hundred khaki-clad soldiers with rifles and handguns.
   The huge black man, who grinned a lot, showing amazingly even and white teeth in his coal-black face, was holding a .45 automatic pistol and standing beside a large glass drum. In a time that already seemed long ago, that drum had held scraps of cut-up telephone books for the “Dialing for Dollars” program.
   Now he spun it, pulled out a driver’s license, and called, “PFC Franklin Stern, front and center, puh-leeze.”
   The armed men flanking the audience on all sides bent to look at name tags while a cameraman obviously new to the trade panned the audience in jerky sweeps.
   At last a young man with light blond hair, no more than nineteen, was jerked to his feet, screaming and protesting, and led up to the set area. Two of the blacks forced him to his knees.
   The black man grinned, sneezed, spat phlegm, and put the .45 automatic to PFC Stern’s temple.
   “No!” Stern cried hysterically. “I’ll come in with you, honest to God I will! I’ll—”
   “Inthenameofthefathersonandholyghost,” the big black man intoned, grinning, and pulled the trigger. There was a large smear of blood and brains behind the spot where PFC Stern was being forced to kneel; and now he added his own contribution.
   Splat.
   The black man sneezed again and almost fell over. Another black man, this one in the control room (he was wearing a green long-billed fatigue cap and pristine white jockey shorts), pushed the APPLAUSE button, and in front of the studio audience, the sign flashed on. The blacks guarding the audience/prisoners raised their weapons threateningly, and the captive white soldiers, their faces glistening with perspiration and terror, applauded wildly.
   “Next!” the black man in the loincloth proclaimed hoarsely, and delved into the drum again. He looked at the slip and announced: “Master Tech Sergeant Roger Petersen, front n center, puh-leeze! ”
   A man in the audience began to howl and made an abortive dive for the back doors. Seconds later he was up on stage. In the confusion, one of the men in the third row tried to remove the name tag pinned to his blouse. One shot banged out and he slumped down in his seat, his eyes glazed as if such a tawdry show had bored him into a deathlike semi-doze.
   This spectacle went on until almost quarter of eleven, when four squads of regular army, wearing respirators and carrying submachine guns, crashed into the studio. The two dying groups of soldiers immediately went to war.
   The black man in the loincloth went down almost immediately, cursing, sweating, riddled with bullets, and firing his automatic-pistol crazily into the floor. The renegade who had been operating the #2 camera was shot in the belly, and as he leaned forward to catch his spilling guts, his camera pivoted slowly around, giving the audience a leisurely pan shot of hell. The semi-naked guards were returning fire, and the soldiers in the respirators were spraying the entire audience area. The unarmed soldiers in the middle, instead of being rescued, found that their executions had only been speeded up.
   A young man with carroty hair and a wild expression of panic on his face climbed over the backs of six rows of seats like a circus performer on stilts before his legs were chewed away by a stream of .45-caliber bullets. Others crawled up the carpeted aisles between rows, their noses to the floor, the way they had been taught to crawl under live machine-gun fire in basic training. An aging sergeant with gray hair stood up, arms spread wide like a TV host, and screamed, “STAWWWWP! ” at the top of his lungs. Heavy fire from both sides homed in on him and he began to jig-a-jig like a disintegrating puppet. The roar of the guns and the screams of the dying and wounded made the audio needles in the control room jump over to + 50 dB.
   The camera operator fell forward over the handle that controlled his camera, and those watching were now given only a merciful view of the studio ceiling for the rest of the exchange. The gunfire diminished over a period of five minutes to isolated explosions, then to nothing. Only the screams went on.
   At five minutes past eleven, the studio ceiling was replaced on home screens by a picture of a cartoon man who was staring glumly at a cartoon TV. On the cartoon TV was a sign that said: SORRY, WE’RE HAVING PROBLEMS!
   As the evening wound toward its close, that was true of almost everyone.
   In Des Moines, at 11:30 P.M., CST, an old Buick covered with religious stickers—HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS, among others—cruised the deserted downtown streets relentlessly. There had been a fire in Des Moines earlier in the day that had burned most of the south side of Hull Avenue and Grandview Junior College; later there had been a riot that gutted most of the downtown area.
   When the sun went down, these streets had been filled with restlessly circling crowds of people, most of them under twenty-five, many riding choppers. They had broken windows, stolen TV sets, filled their gas tanks at service stations while watching for anyone who might have a gun. Now the streets were empty. Some of them—the bikers, mainly—were kicking out their remaining jams on Interstate 80. But most of them had crept into houses and locked the doors, already suffering with superflu or only terror of it as daylight left this flat green land. Now Des Moines looked like the aftermath of some monster New Year’s Eve party after sodden sleep, had claimed the last of the revelers. The Buick’s tires whispered and crunched over the broken glass in the street and turned west from Fourteenth onto Euclid Avenue, passing two cars that had crashed head-on and now lay on their sides with their bumpers interlaced like lovers after a successful double homicide. There was a loudspeaker on top of the Buick’s roof, and now it began to give off amplified boops and beeps, followed by the scratchy sounds of an old record’s opening grooves, and then, blaring up and down the spectral, deserted streets of Des Moines came the sweetly droning voice of Mother Maybelle Carter, singing “Keep on the Sunny Side.”
   Keep on the sunny side,
   Always on the sunny side,
   Keep on the sunny side of life,
   Though your problems may be many
   It will seem you don’t have any
   If you keep on the sunny side of life…
   The old Buick cruised on and on, making figure-eights, loops, sometimes circling the same block three or four times. When it hit a bump (or rolled over a body), the record would skip.
   At twenty minutes to midnight, the Buick pulled over to the curb and idled. Then it began to roll again. The loudspeaker blared Elvis Presley singing “The Old Rugged Cross,” and a night wind soughed through the trees and stirred a final whiff of smoke from the smoldering ruins of the junior college.
   From the President’s speech, delivered at 9 P.M., EST, not seen in many areas.
   “… a great nation such as this must do. We cannot afford to jump at shadows like small children in a dark room; but neither can we afford to take this serious outbreak of influenza lightly. My fellow Americans, I urge you to stay at home. If you feel ill, stay in bed, take aspirin, and drink plenty of clear liquids. Be confident that you will feel better in a week at most. Let me repeat what I said at the beginning of my talk to you this evening: There is no truth—no truth —to the rumor that this strain of flu is fatal. In the greatest majority of cases, the person afflicted can expect to be up and around and feeling fine within a week. Further—”
   note 2
   “Further, there has been a vicious rumor promulgated by certain radical anti-establishment groups that this strain of influenza has been somehow bred by this government for some possible military use. Fellow Americans, this is a flat-out falsehood, and I want to brand it as such right here and now. This country signed the revised Geneva Accords on poison gas, nerve gas, and germ warfare in good conscience and in good faith. We have not now nor have we ever—”
   note 3
   “—have we ever been a party to the clandestine manufacture of substances outlawed by the Geneva Convention. This is a moderately serious outbreak of influenza, no more and no less. We have reports tonight of outbreaks in a score of other countries, including Russia and Red China. Therefore we—”
   note 4
   “—we ask you to remain calm and secure in the knowledge that late this week or early next, a flu vaccine will be available for those not already on the mend. National Guardsmen have been called out in some areas to protect the populace against hooligans, vandals, and scare-mongers, but there is absolutely no truth to the rumors that some cities have been ‘occupied’ by regular army forces or that the news has been managed. My fellow Americans, this is a flat-out falsehood, and I want to brand it as such right here and…”
   Graffito written on the front of the First Baptist Church of Atlanta in red spray paint:
   “Dear Jesus. I will see you soon. Your friend, America. PS. I hope you will still have some vacancies by the end of the week.”

Chapter 27
 
 Larry Underwood sat on a bench in Central Park on the morning of June 27, looking into the menagerie. Behind him, Fifth Avenue was crazily jammed with cars, all of them silent now, their owners dead or fled. Farther down Fifth, many of the posh shops were smoking rubble.
   From where Larry sat he could see a lion, an antelope, a zebra, and some sort of monkey. All but the monkey were dead. They had not died of the flu, Larry judged; they had gotten no food or water for God knew how long, and that had killed them. All but the monkey, and in the three hours that Larry had been sitting here, the monkey had moved only four or five times. The monkey had been smart enough to outwit starvation or death by thirst—so far—but it surely had a good case of superflu. That was one monkey who was hurtin for certain. It was a hard old world.
   To his right, the clock with all the animals chimed the hour of eleven. The clockwork figures which had once delighted all children now played to an empty house. The bear tooted his horn, a clockwork monkey who would never get sick (but who might eventually run down) played a tambourine, the elephant beat his drum with his trunk. Heavy tunes, baby, heavy fucking tunes. End of the World Suite Arranged for Clockwork Figures.
   After a bit the clock fell silent and he could hear the hoarse shouting again, now mercifully faint with distance. The monster-shouter was somewhere off to Larry’s left this fine forenoon, perhaps in the Heckscher Playground. Maybe he would fall into the wading pool there and drown.
   “Monsters coming!” the faint, hoarse voice cried. The overcast had broken this morning, and the day was bright and hot. A bee cruised past Larry’s nose, circled one of the nearby flowerbeds, and made a three-point landing on a peony. From the menagerie came the soothing, soporific drone of the flies as they landed on the dead animals.
   “Monsters coming now!” The monster-shouter was a tall man who looked to be in his middle sixties. Larry had first heard him the night before, which he had spent in the Sherry-Netherland. With night lying over the unnaturally quiet city, the faint, howling voice had seemed sonorous and dark, the voice of a lunatic Jeremiah floating through the streets of Manhattan, echoing, rebounding, distorting. Larry, lying sleepless in a queen-sized double with every light in the suite blazing, had become irrationally convinced that the monster-shouter was coming for him, seeking him out, the way the creatures of his frequent bad dreams sometimes did. For a long time it had seemed that the voice was drawing ever closer—Monsters coming! Monsters on the way! They’re in the suburbs! —and Larry became convinced that the suite’s door, which he had triple-locked, would burst inward and that the monster-shouter would be there… not a human being at all but a gigantic troll-thing with the head of a dog and saucer-sized fly eyes and champing teeth.
   But earlier this morning Larry had seen him in the park and he was only a crazy old man wearing corduroy pants and zoris and horn-rimmed glasses with one bow taped. Larry had tried to speak to him and the monster-shouter had run in terror, crying back over his shoulder that the monsters would be in the streets at any moment. He had tripped over an ankle-high wire fence and went sprawling on one of the bikepaths with a loud comic thwap! sound, his glasses flying off but not shattering. Larry had gone to him, but before he could get there, the monster-shouter had scooped up his glasses and was gone toward the mall, crying his endless warning. So Larry’s opinion of him had swung from extreme terror to utter boredom and mild annoyance in the space of twelve hours.
   There were other people in the park; Larry had spoken to a few of them. They were all pretty much the same, and Larry supposed that he himself wasn’t much different. They were dazed, their speech disjointed, and they seemed helpless to stop reaching for your sleeve with their hands as they talked. They had stories to tell. All the stories were the same. Their friends and relatives were dead or dying. There had been shooting in the streets, there had been an inferno on Fifth Avenue, was it true that Tiffany’s was gone, could that be true? Who was going to clean up? Who was going to collect the garbage? Should they get out of New York? They had heard that troops were guarding all the places where one could hope to do this. One woman was terrified that the rats were going to rise up out of the subways and inherit the earth, reminding Larry uneasily of his own thoughts on the day he had first returned to New York. A young man munching Fritos from a gigantic bag told Larry conversationally that he was going to fulfill a lifetime ambition. He was going to Yankee Stadium, run around the outfield naked, and then masturbate on home plate. “Chance of a lifetime, man,” he told Larry, winked with both eyes, and then wandered off, eating Fritos.
   Many of the people in the park were sick, but not many had died there. Perhaps they had uneasy thoughts of being munched for dinner by the animals, and they had crawled indoors when they felt the end was near. Larry had had only one confrontation with death this morning, and one was all he wanted. He had walked up Transverse Number One to the comfort station there. He had opened the door and a grinning dead man with maggots crawling briskly hither and yon on his face had been seated inside, his hands settled on his bare thighs, his sunken eyes staring into Larry’s own. A sickening sweet smell bloated out at Larry as if the man sitting there was a rancid bonbon, a sweet treat which, in all the confusion, had been left for the flies. Larry slammed the door shut, but belatedly: he lost the cornflakes he had eaten for breakfast and then dry-heaved until he was afraid he might rupture some of his inner workings. God; if You’re there, he had prayed as he stumbled back toward the menagerie, if You’re taking requests today, Big Fella, mine is not to have to look at anything else like that today. The kooks are bad enough, something like that is more than I can take. Thank You so much.
Now, sitting on this bench (the monster-shouter had moved out of earshot, at least temporarily), Larry found himself thinking about the World Series five years ago. It was good to remember that because, it now seemed to him, that was the last time he had been completely happy, his physical condition tiptop, his mind resting easily and not working against itself.
   That had been just after he and Rudy split up. That had been a damn piss-poor thing, that split-up, and if he ever saw Rudy again (never happen, his mind told him with a sigh), Larry was going to apologize. He would get down and kiss Rudy’s shoetops, if that was what Rudy needed to make it okay again.
   They had started off across the country in a wheezy old 1968 Mercury that had shat its transmission in Omaha. From there on they would work for a couple of weeks, hitchhike west for a while, work another couple of weeks, then hitchhike some more. For a while they worked on a farm in western Nebraska, just below the panhandle, and one night Larry had lost sixty dollars in a poker game. The next day he’d had to ask Rudy for a loan to tide him over. They had arrived in L.A. a month later, and Larry had been the first to land a job—if you wanted to call washing dishes for the minimum wage working. One night about three weeks later, Rudy had broached the subject of the loan. He said he’d met a guy who’d recommended a really good employment agency, never miss, but the fee was twenty-five bucks. Which happened to be the amount of the loan he had made to Larry after the poker game. Ordinarily, Rudy said, he never would have asked, but—
   Larry had protested that he’d paid the loan back. They were square. If Rudy wanted the twenty-five, okay, but he just hoped Rudy wasn’t trying to get him to pay off the same loan twice.
   Rudy said he didn’t want a gift; he wanted the money he was owed, and he wasn’t interested in a lot of Larry Underwood bullshit, either. Jesus Christ, Larry said, trying a good-humored laugh. I never thought I’d need a receipt from you, Rudy. Guess I was wrong.
   It had escalated into a full-scale argument, almost to the point of blows. At the end Rudy’s face had been flushed. That’s you, Larry, he’d shouted. That’s you all over. That’s how you are. I used to think I’d never learn my lesson, but I think I finally did. Fuck off, Larry.
   Rudy left, and Larry followed him to the stairs of the cheap rooming house, digging his wallet out of his back pocket. There were three tens neatly folded into the secret compartment behind the photos and he had heaved them after Rudy. Go on, you cheap little lying fuck! Take it! Take the goddam money!
   Rudy had slammed the outer door open with a bang and had gone out into the night, toward whatever tin destiny the Rudys of this world can expect. He didn’t look back. Larry had stood at the top of the stairs, breathing hard, and after a minute or so he had looked around for his three ten-dollar bills, gathered them up, and put them away again.
   Thinking of the incident now and then over the years, he had become more and more sure that Rudy had been right. Actually, he was positive. Even if he had paid Rudy back, the two of them had been friends since grade school, and it seemed (looking back) that Larry had always been a dime short for the Saturday matinee because he’d bought some licorice whips or a couple of candy bars on the way over to Rudy’s, or borrowing a nickel to round out his school lunch money or getting seven cents to make up carfare. Over the years he must have bummed fifty dollars in change from Rudy, maybe a hundred. When Rudy had braced him for that twenty-five, Larry could remember the way he had tightened up. His brain had subtracted twenty-five dollars from the three tens, and had said to him: That only leaves five bucks. Therefore, you already paid him back. I’m not sure just when, but you did. Let’s have no more discussion of the matter. And no more there had been.
   But after that he had been alone in the city. He had no friends, hadn’t even attempted to make any at the café on Encino where he worked. The fact was, he’d believed everyone who worked there, from the evil-tempered head cook to the ass-wiggling, gum-chewing waitresses, had been a dipstick. Yes, he had really believed everyone at Tony’s Feed Bag was a dipstick but him, the sainted, soon-to-succeed (and you better believe it) Larry Underwood. Alone in a world of dipsticks, he felt as achy as a whipped dog and as homesick as a man marooned on a desert island. He began to think more and more of buying a Greyhound AmeriPass and dragging himself back to New York.
   In another month, maybe even another two weeks, he would have done it, too… except for Yvonne.
   He met Yvonne Wetterlen at a movie theater two blocks from the club where she worked as a topless dancer. When the second show let out, she had been weeping and searching around her seat on the aisle for her purse. It had her driver’s license in it, also her checkbook, her union card, her one credit card, a photostat of her birth certificate, and her Social Security card. Although he was positive it had been stolen, Larry did not say so and helped her look for it. And sometimes it seemed they really must live in a world of wonders, because he had found it three rows down just as they were about to give up. He guessed it had probably migrated down there as a result of people shuffling their feet as they watched the picture, which had really been pretty boring. She had hugged him and wept as she thanked him. Larry, feeling like Captain America, told her he wished he could take her out for burgers or something to celebrate, only he was really strapped for cash. Yvonne said she’d treat. Larry, that great prince, had been pretty sure she would.
   They started to see each other; in less than two weeks they had a regular thing going. Larry found a better job, clerking in a bookstore, and had gotten a gig singing with a group called The Hotshot Rhythm Rangers & All-Time Boogie Band. The name was the best thing about the group, actually, but the rhythm guitarist had been Johnny McCall, who later went on to form the Tattered Remnants, and that was actually a pretty good band.
   Larry and Yvonne moved in together, and for Larry everything changed. Part of it was just having a place, his own place, that he was paying half the rent for. Yvonne put up some curtains, they got some cheap thrift-shop furniture and refinished it together, other members of the band and some of Yvonne’s friends started to drop around. The place was bright in the daytime, and at night a fragrant California breeze, which seemed redolent with oranges even when the only thing it was really redolent with was smog, would drift in through the windows. Sometimes no one would come and he and Yvonne would just watch television, and sometimes she would bring him a can of beer and sit on the arm of his chair and rub his neck. It was his own place, a home, goddammit, and sometimes he’d lie awake in bed at night with Yvonne sleeping beside him, and marvel at how good he felt. Then he would slip smoothly into sleep, and it was the sleep of the just, and he never did think of Rudy Marks at all. At least, not much.
   They lived together for fourteen months, all of it fine until the last six weeks or so, when Yvonne got to be kind of a bitch, and the part of it that summed it all up for Larry was that World Series. He would put in his day at the bookstore, then go over to Johnny McCall’s house and the two of them—the whole group only practiced on weekends, because the other two guys had night jobs—would work on some new stuff or maybe just hack away at the great oldies, the ones Johnny called “real bar-rippers,” tunes like “Nobody but Me” and “Double Shot of My Baby’s Love.”
   Then he’d go home, to his home, and Yvonne would have dinner all ready. Not just TV dinners, shit like that, either. Real home cooking. Girl was well trained. And afterward they would go into the living room and turn on the tube and watch the Series. Later, love. It had seemed all right, it had all seemed his. There hadn’t been one single thing hassling his mind. Nothing had been so good since then. Nothing.
   He realized he was crying a little bit, and he felt a momentary disgust that he should be sitting here on a bench in Central Park, crying in the sun like some wretched old man on a pension. Then it occurred to him that he had a right to cry for the things he had lost, that he had a right to be in shock if that was what this was.
   His mother had died three days ago. She had been lying on a cot in the hallway of Mercy Hospital when she died, crammed in with thousands of others who were also busy dying. Larry had been kneeling beside her when she went, and he had thought he might go mad, watching his mother die while all around him rose the stench of urine and feces, the hell’s babble of the delirious, the choking, the insane, the screams of the bereaved. She hadn’t known him at the end; there had been no final moment of recognition. Her chest had finally just stopped in mid-heave and had settled very slowly, like the weight of an automobile settling down on a flat tire. He had crouched beside her for ten minutes or so, not knowing what to do, thinking in a confused way that he ought to wait until a death certificate was signed or someone asked him what had happened. But it was obvious what had happened, it was happening everywhere. It was just as obvious that the place was a madhouse. No sober young doctor was going to come along, express sympathy, and then start the machinery of death. Sooner or later his mother would just be carried away like a sack of oats, and he didn’t want to watch that. Her purse was under the cut. He found a pen and a bobby pin and her checkbook. He tore a deposit slip from the back of her book and wrote on it her name, her address, and after a moment’s calculation, her age. He clipped it to her blouse pocket with the bobby pin and began to cry. He kissed her cheek and fled, crying. He felt like a deserter. Being on the street had been a little better, although at that time the streets had been full of crazy people, sick people, and circling army patrols. And now he could sit on this bench and grieve for more general things: his mother’s loss of her retirement, the loss of his own career, for that time in L.A. when he had sat watching the World Series with Yvonne, knowing there would be bed and love later, and for Rudy. Most of all he grieved for Rudy and wished he had paid Rudy his twenty-five dollars with a grin and a shrug, saving the six years that had been lost.
   The monkey died at quarter of twelve.
   It was on its perch, just sitting there apathetically with its hands drawn up under its chin, and then its eyelids fluttered and it fell forward and hit the cement with a final horrid smack.
   Larry didn’t want to sit there anymore. He got up and began to walk aimlessly down toward the mall with its large bandshell. He had heard the monster-shouter some fifteen minutes ago, very far away, but now the only sound in the park seemed to be his own heels clicking on the cement and the twitter of the birds. Birds apparently didn’t catch the flu. Good for them.
   When he neared the bandshell, he saw that a woman was sitting on one of the benches in front of it. She was maybe fifty, but had taken great pains to look younger. She was dressed in expensive-looking gray-green slacks and a silk off-the-shoulder peasant blouse… except, Larry thought, as far as he knew, peasants can’t afford silk. She looked around at the sound of. Larry’s footsteps. She had a pill in one hand and tossed it casually into her mouth like a peanut.
   “Hi,” Larry said. Her face was calm, her eyes blue. Sharp intelligence gleamed in them. She was wearing gold-rimmed glasses, and her pocketbook was trimmed with something that certainly looked like mink. There were four rings on her fingers: a wedding band, two diamonds, and a cat’s-eye emerald.
   “Uh, I’m not dangerous,” he said. It was a ridiculous thing to say, he supposed, but she looked like she might be wearing about $20,000 on her fingers. Of course, they might be fakes, but she didn’t look like a woman who would have much use for paste and zircons.
   “No,” she said, “you don’t look dangerous. You’re not sick, either.” Her voice rose a little on the last word, making her statement into a polite half-question. She wasn’t as calm as she looked at first glance; there was a little tic working on the side of her neck, and behind the lively intelligence in the blue eyes was the same dull shock that Larry had seen in his own eyes this morning as he shaved.
   “No, I don’t think I am. Are you?”
   “Not at all. Did you know you have an ice cream wrapper on your shoe?”
   He looked down and saw that he did. It made him blush because he suspected that she would have informed him that his fly was open in that same tone. He stood on one leg and tried to pull it off.
   “You look like a stork,” she said. “Sit down and try it. My name is Rita Blakemoor.”
   “Pleased to know you. I’m Larry Underwood.”
   He sat down. She offered her hand and he shook it lightly, his fingers pressing against her rings. Then he gingerly removed the ice cream wrapper from his shoe and dropped it primly into a can beside the bench that said IT’S YOUR PARK SO KEEP IT CLEAN! It struck him funny, the whole operation. He threw his head back and laughed. It was the first real laugh since the day he had come home to find his mother lying on the floor of her apartment, and he was enormously relieved to find that the good feel of laughing hadn’t changed. It rose from your belly and escaped from between your teeth in the same jolly go-to-hell way.
   Rita Blakemoor was smiling both at him and with him, and he was struck again by her casual yet elegant handsomeness. She looked like a woman from an Irwin Shaw novel. Nightwork, maybe, or the one they had made for TV when he was just a kid.
   “When I heard you coming, I almost hid,” she said. “I thought you were probably the man with the broken glasses and the queer philosophy.”
   “The monster-shouter?”
   “Is that what you call him or what he calls himself?”
   “What I call him.”
   “Very apt,” she said, opening her mink-trimmed (maybe) bag and taking out a package of menthol cigarettes. “He reminds me of an insane Diogenes.”
   “Yeah, just lookin for an honest monster,” Larry said, and laughed again.
   She lit her cigarette and chuffed out smoke.
   “He’s not sick, either,” Larry said. “But most of the others are.”
   “The doorman at my building seems very well,” Rita said. “He’s still on duty. I tipped him five dollars when I came out this morning. I don’t know if I tipped him for being very well or for being on duty. What do you think?”
   “I really don’t know you well enough to say.”
   “No, of course you don’t.” She put her cigarettes back in her bag and he saw that there was a revolver in there. She followed his gaze. “It was my husband’s. He was a career executive with a major New York bank. That’s just how he put it when anyone asked what he did to keep himself in cocktail onions. I-am-a-career-executive-with-a-major-New-York-bank. He died two years ago. He was at a luncheon with one of those Arabs who always look as if they have rubbed all the visible areas of their skin with Brylcreem. He had a massive stroke. He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation’s equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on? Harry Blakemoor died with his tie on. I like it, Larry.”
   A finch landed in front of them and pecked the ground.
   “He was insanely afraid of burglars, so he had this gun. Do guns really kick and make a loud noise when they go off, Larry?”
   Larry, who had never fired a gun in his life, said, “I don’t think one that size would kick much. Is it a .38?”
   “I believe it’s a .32.” She took it out of her bag and he saw there were also a good many small pill-bottles in there. This time she didn’t follow his gaze; she was looking at a small chinaberry tree about fifteen paces away. “I believe I’ll try it. Do you think I can hit that tree?”
   “I don’t know,” he said apprehensively. “I don’t really think—”
   She pulled the trigger and the gun went off with a fairly impressive bang. A small hole appeared in the chinaberry tree. “Bull’s-eye,” she said, and blew smoke from the pistol barrel like a gunfighter.
   “Real good,” Larry said, and when she put the gun back in her purse, his heart resumed something like its normal rhythm.
   “I couldn’t shoot a person with it. I’m quite sure of that. And soon there won’t be anyone to shoot, will there?”
   “Oh, I don’t know about that.”
   “You were looking at my rings. Would you like one?”
   “Huh? No!” He began to blush again.
   “As a banker, my husband believed in diamonds. He believed in them the way the Baptists believe in Revelations. I have a great many diamonds, and they are all insured. We not only owned a piece of the rock, my Harry and I, I sometimes believed we held a lien on the whole goddam thing. But if someone should want my diamonds, I would hand them over. After all, they’re only rocks again, aren’t they?”
   “I guess that’s right.”
   “Of course,” she said, and the tic on the side of her neck jumped again. “And if a stick-up man wanted them, I’d not only hand them over, I would give him the address of Cartier’s. Their selection of rocks is much better than my own.”
   “What are you going to do now?” Larry asked her.
   “What would you suggest?”
   “I just don’t know,” Larry said, and sighed.
   “My answer exactly.”
   “You know something? I saw a guy this morning who said he was going out to Yankee Stadium and je… and masturbate on home plate.” He could feel himself blushing again.
   “What an awful walk for him,” she said. “Why didn’t you suggest something closer?” She sighed, and the sigh turned into a shudder. She opened her purse, took out a bottle of pills, and popped a gel capsule into her mouth.
   “What’s that?” Larry asked.
   “Vitamin E,” she said with a glittering, false smile. The tic in her neck jumped once or twice and then stopped. She became serene again.
   “There’s nobody in the bars,” Larry said suddenly. “I went into Pat’s on Forty-third and it was totally empty. They have that great big mahogany bar and I went behind it and poured myself a water glass full of Johnnie Walker. Then I didn’t even want to be there. So I left it sitting on the bar and got out.”
   They sighed together, like a chorus.
   “You’re very pleasant to be with,” she said. “I like you very much. And it’s wonderful that you’re not crazy.”
   “Thank you, Mrs. Blakemoor.” He was surprised and pleased.
   “Rita. I’m Rita.”
   “Okay.”
   “Are you hungry, Larry?”
   “As a matter of fact, I am.”
   “Perhaps you’d take the lady to lunch.”
   “That would be a pleasure.”
   She stood up and offered him her arm with a slightly deprecatory smile. As he linked his through it, he caught a whiff of her sachet, a smell that was at once comforting and disquietingly adult in its associations for him, almost old. His mother had worn sachet on their many trips to the movies together.
   Then he forgot about it as they walked out of the park and up Fifth Avenue, away from the dead monkey, the monster-shouter, and the dark sweet treat sitting endlessly inside the comfort station on Transverse Number One. She chattered incessantly, and later he could remember no one thing she had chattered about (yes, just one: she had always dreamed, she said, of strolling up Fifth Avenue on the arm of a handsome young man, a man who was young enough to have been her own son but who wasn’t), but he recalled the walk often just the same, especially after she began to jitter apart like some indifferently made toy. Her beautiful smile, her light, cynical, casual chatter, the whisper of her slacks.
   They went into a steak house and Larry cooked, a trifle clumsily, but she applauded each course: the steak, the french fries, the instant coffee, the strawberry-rhubarb pie.