‘Yes.’ He started toward the trailer, holding his leg and lurching along. With each lurch he gave a high yip of pain, but somehow he kept going. I could smell burning tufts of grass. I could smell electric rain on a rising wind. And under my hands I could feel the light spin of the dreidel slowing down as she went.
I turned her over, held her in my arms, and rocked her back and forth. At Grace Baptist the minister was now reading Psalm 139 for Royce: If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me, even the night shall be light. The minister was reading and the Martians were listening. I rocked her back and forth in my arms under the black thunderheads. I was supposed to come to her that night, use the key under the pot and come to her. She had danced with the toes of her white sneakers on the red Frisbee, had danced like a wave on the ocean, and now she was dying in my arms while the grass burned in little clumps and the man who had fancied her as much as I had lay unconscious beside her, his right arm painted red from the short sleeve of his WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS tee-shirt all the way down to his bony, freckled wrist.
‘Mattie,’ I said. ‘Mattie, Mattie, Mattie.’ I rocked her and smoothed my hand across her forehead, which on the right side was miraculously unsplattered by the blood that had drenched her. Her hair fell over the ruined left side of her face. ‘Mattie,’ I said. ‘Mattie, Mattie, oh Mattie.’
Lightning flashed — the first stroke I had seen. It lit the western sky in a bright blue arc. Mattie trembled strongly in my arms — all the way from neck to toes she trembled. Her lips pressed together. Her brow furrowed, as if in concentration. Her hand came up and seemed to grab for the back of my neck, as a person falling from a cliff may grasp blindly at anything to hold on just a little longer. Then it fell away and lay limply on the grass, palm up. She trembled once more — the whole delicate weight of her trembled in my arms — and then she was still.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
After that I was mostly in the zone. I came out a few times — when that scratched-out scrap of genealogy fell from inside one of my old steno books, for instance — but those interludes were brief. In a way it was like my dream of Mattie, Jo, and Sara; in a way it was like the terrible fever I’d had as a child, when I’d almost died of the measles; mostly it was like nothing but itself. It was just the zone. I was feeling it. I wish to God I hadn’t been.
George came over, herding the man in the blue mask ahead of him. George was limping now, and badly. I could smell hot oil and gasoline and burning tires. ‘Is she dead?’ George asked.
‘Mattie?’
‘Yes.’
‘John?’
‘Don’t know,’ I said, and then John twitched and groaned. He was alive, but there was a lot of blood.
‘Mike, listen,’ George began, but before he could say more, a terrible liquid screaming began from the burning car in the ditch. It was the driver. He was cooking in there. The shooter started to turn that way, and George raised his gun. ‘Move and I’ll kill you.’
‘You can’t let him die like that,’ the shooter said from behind his mask. ‘You couldn’t let a dog die like that.’
‘He’s dead already,’ George said. ‘You couldn’t get within ten feet of that car unless you were in an asbestos suit.’ He reeled on his feet. His face was as white as the spot of whipped cream I’d wiped off the end of Ki’s nose. The shooter made as if to go for him and George brought the gun up higher. ‘The next time you move, don’t stop,’ George said, ‘because I won’t. Guaranteed. Now take that mask off.’
‘No.’
‘I’m done fucking with you, Jesse. Say hello to God.’ George pulled back the hammer of his revolver.
The shooter said, ‘Jesus Christ,’ and yanked off his mask. It was George Footman. Not much surprise there. From behind him, the driver gave one more shriek from within the Ford fireball and then was silent. Smoke rose in black billows. More thunder roared.
‘Mike, go inside and find something to tie him with,’ George Kennedy said. ‘I can hold him another minute — two, if I have to — but I’m bleeding like a stuck pig. Look for strapping tape.
That shit would hold Houdini.’
Footman stood where he was, looking from Kennedy to me and back to Kennedy again. Then he peered down at Highway 68, which was eerily deserted. Or perhaps it wasn’t so eerie, at that — the coming storms had been well forecast. The tourists and summer folk would be under cover. As for the locals . . .
The locals were . . . sort of listening. That was at least close. The minister was speaking about Royce Merrill, a life which had been long and fruitful, a man who had served his country in peace and in war, but the old-timers weren’t listening to him. They were listening to us, the way they had once gathered around the pickle barrel at the Lakeview General and listened to prizefights on the radio.
Bill Dean was holding Yvette’s wrist so tightly his fingernails were white. He was hurting her . . .
but she wasn’t complaining. She wanted him to hold onto her. Why?
‘Mike!’ George’s voice was perceptibly weaker. ‘Please, man, help me. This guy is dangerous.’
‘Let me go,’ Footman said. ‘You’d better, don’t you think?’
‘In your wettest dreams, motherfuck,’ George said.
I got up, went past the pot with the key underneath, went up the cement-block steps. Lightning exploded across the sky, followed by a bellow of thunder.
Inside, Rommie was sitting in a chair at the kitchen table. His face was even whiter than George’s. ‘Kid’s okay,’ he said, forcing the words. ‘But she looks like waking up . . . I can’t walk anymore. My ankle’s totally fucked.’
I moved for the telephone.
‘Don’t bother,’ Rommie said. His voice was harsh and trembling. ‘Tried it. Dead. Storm must already have hit some of the other towns. Killed some of the equipment. Christ, I never had anything hurt like this in my life.’
I went to the drawers in the kitchen and began yanking them open one by one, looking for strapping tape, looking for clothesline, looking for any damned thing. If Kennedy passed out from blood-loss while I was in here, the other George would take his gun, kill him, and then kill John as he lay unconscious on the smoldering grass. With them taken care of, he’d come in here and shoot Rommie and me. He’d finish with Kyra.
‘No he won’t,’ I said. ‘He’ll leave her alive.’
And that might be even worse.
Silverware in the first drawer. Sandwich bags, garbage bags, and neatly banded stacks of grocery-store coupons in the second. Oven mitts and potholders in the third —
‘Mike, where’s my Mattie?’
I turned, as guilty as a man who has been caught mixing illegal drugs. Kyra stood at the living-room end of the hall with her hair falling around her sleep-flushed cheeks and her scrunchy hung over one wrist like a bracelet. Her eyes were wide and panicky. It wasn’t the shots that had awakened her, probably not even her mother’s scream. I had wakened her. My thoughts had wakened her.
In the instant I realized it I tried to shield them somehow, but I was too late. She had read me about Devore well enough to tell me not to think about sad stuff, and now she read what had happened to her mother before I could keep her out of my mind.
Her mouth dropped open. Her eyes widened. She shrieked as if her hand had been caught in a vise and ran for the door.
‘No, Kyra, no!’ I sprinted across the kitchen, almost tripping over Rommie (he looked at me with the dim incomprehension of someone who is no longer completely conscious), and grabbed her just in time. As I did, I saw Buddy Jellison leaving Grace Baptist by a side door. Two of the men he had been smoking with went with him. Now I understood why Bill was holding so tightly to Yvette, and loved him for it — loved both of them. Something wanted him to go with Buddy and the others
. . . but Bill wasn’t going.
Kyra struggled in my arms, making big convulsive thrusts at the door, gasping in breath and then screaming it out again. ‘Let me go, want to see Mommy, let me go, want to see Mommy, let me go —