Congs! Get them Gooks! Pongee sticks! Tiger cages!” and Tommy collapsed his guard, laughing.
“Don’t let it bother you,” Frieda said, tilting her letter-opener nose and strolling over. “If they kill each other, I’ll dance with you.”
“They look too stupid to kill,” Carrie ventured. “Like dinosaurs.”
And when Frieda grinned, she felt something very old and rusty loosen inside her. A warmth came with it.. Relief. Ease.
“Where’d you buy your dress?” Frieda asked. “I love it.”
“I made it.”
“Made it?” Frieda’s eyes opened in unaffected surprise. “No shit!”
Carrie felt herself blushing furiously. “Yes I did. I . . . I like to sew.
I got the material at John’s in Westover. The pattern is really quite easy.
“Come on,” George said to all of them in general. “Band’s gonna start.” He rolled his eyes and went through a limber, satiric buck-and-wing. “Vibes, vibes, vibes. Us Gooks love them big Fender viyyybrations.”
When they went in, George was doing impressions of Flash Bobby Pickett and mugging, Carrie was telling Frieda about her dress, and Tommy was grinning, hands stuffed in his pockets. Spoiled the lines of his dinner jacket Sue would be telling him, but fuck it, it seem to be working. So far it was working fine.
He and George and Frieda had less than two hours to live.
From The Shadow Exploded (p.132):
The White Commission’s stand on the trigger of the whole affair-two buckets of pig blood on a beam over the stage seems to be overly weak and vacillating, even in light of the scant concrete proof. If one chooses to believe the hearsay evidence of Nolan’s immediate circle of friends (and to be brutally frank, they do not seem intelligent enough to lie convincingly), then Nolan took this part of the conspiracy entirely out of Christine Hargensen’s hands and acted on his own initiative …
He didn’t talk when he drove; he liked to drive. The operation gave him a feeling of power that nothing could rival, not even fucking.
The road unrolled before them in photographic blacks and whites, and the speedometer trembled just past seventy. He came from a broken home; his father had taken off after the failure of a badly managed gas-station venture when Billy was twelve, and his mother had four boy friends at last count. Brucie was in greatest favor right now. He was a Seagram’s 7 man. She was turning into one ugly bag, too.
But the car: the car fed him power and glory from its own mystic lines of force. It made him someone to be reckoned with, someone with mana. It was not by accident that he had done most of his balling in the back seat. The car was his slave and his god. It gave, and it could take away. Billy had used it to take away many times. On long, sleepless nights when his mother and Brucie were fighting, Billy made popcorn and went out cruising for stray dogs. Some mornings he let the car roll, engine dead, into the garage he had constructed behind the house with its front bumper dripping.
She knew his habits well enough by now and did not bother making conversation that would simply be ignored anyway. She sat beside him with one leg curled under her, gnawing a knuckle. The lights of the cars streaking past them on 302 gleamed softly in her hair, streaking it silver.
He wondered how long she would last. Maybe not long after tonight. Somehow it had all led to this, even the early part, and when it was done the glue that had held them together would be thin and might dissolve, leaving them to wonder how it could have been in the first place. He thought she would start to look less like a goddess and more like the typical society bitch again, and that would make him want to belt her around a little. Or maybe a lot. Rub her nose in it.
They breasted the Brickyard Hill and there was the high school below them, the parking lot filled with plump, glistening daddies’ cars.
He felt the familiar gorge of disgust and hate rise in his throat. We’ll give them something
(a night to remember) all right. We can do that.
The classroom wings were dark and silent and deserted; the lobby was lit with a standard yellow glow, and the bank of glass that was the
gymnasium’s east side glowed with a soft, orangey light that was ethereal, almost ghostly. Again the bitter taste, and the urge to throw rocks.
“I see the lights, I see the party lights,” he murmured.
“Huh?” She turned to him, startled out of her own thoughts.
“Nothing.” He touched the nape of her neck. “I think I’m gonna let you pull the string.”
Billy did it by himself, because he knew perfectly well that he could trust nobody else. That had been a hard lesson, much harder than the ones they taught you in school, but he had
learned it well. The boys who had gone with him to Henty’s place the night before had not even known what he wanted the blood for. They probably suspected Chris was involved, but they could not even be sure of that.
He drove to the school minutes after Thursday night had become Friday morning and cruised by twice to make sure it was deserted and neither of Chamberlain’s two police cars was in the area.
He drove into the parking lot with his lights off and swung around in back of the building. Further back, the football field glimmered beneath a thin membrane of ground fog.
He opened the trunk and unlocked the ice chest. The blood had frozen solid, but that was all right. It would have the next twenty-two hours to thaw.
He put the buckets on the ground, then got a number of tools from his kit. He stuck them in his back pocket and grabbed a brown bag from the seat. Screws clinked inside.
He worked without hurry, with the easeful concentration of one who is unable to conceive of interruption. The gym where the dance was to be held was also the school auditorium, and the small row of windows looking toward where he had parked opened on the backstage storage area.
He selected a flat tool with a spatulate end and slid it through the small jointure between the upper and lower panes of one window. It was a good tool. He had made it himself in the Chamberlain metal
shop. He wiggled it until the window’s slip lock came free. He pushed the window up and slid in.
It was very dark. The predominant odor was of old paint from the Dramatics Club canvas flats. The gaunt shadows of Band Society music stands and instrument cases stood around like sentinels. Mr. Downer’s piano stood in one corner.
Billy took a small flashlight out of the bag and made his way to the stage and stepped through the red velvet curtains. The gym floor, with its painted basketball lines and highly varnished surface, glimmered at him like an amber lagoon. He shone his light on the apron in front of the curtain. There, in ghostly chalk lines, someone had drawn the floor silhouette of the King and Queen thrones which would be placed the following day. Then the entire apron would be strewn with paper flowers … why, Christ only knew.
He craned his neck and shone the beam of his light up into the shadows. Overhead, girders crisscrossed in shadowy lines. The girders over the dance floor had been sheathed in crepe paper, but the area directly over the apron hadn’t been decorated. A short draw curtain obscured the girders up there, and they were invisible from the gym floor. The draw curtain also hid a bank of lights that would highlight the gondola mural.
Billy turned off the flashlight, walked to the left-hand edge of the apron, and mounted a steel-runged ladder bolted to the wall. The contents of his brown bag, which he had tucked into his shirt for safety, jingled with a strange, hollow jolliness in the deserted gymnasium.
At the top of the ladder was a small platform. Now, as he faced outward toward the apron, the stage flies were to his right, the gym itself on his left. In the flies the Dramatics Club props were stored, some of them dating back to the 1920s. A bust of Pallas, used in some ancient dramatic version of Poe’s “The Raven,” stared at Billy with blind, floating eyes from atop a rusting bedspring. Straight ahead, a steel girder ran out over the apron. Lights to be used against the mural were bolted to the bottom of it.
He stepped out onto it and walked effortlessly, without fear, out over the drop. He was humming a popular tune under his breath. The beam was inch-thick with dust, and he left long, shuffling tracks.