Beyond the shelter of the park, away from the breezes that wafted off the river, the temperature rose above one hundred and stayed there. The blue dome of the cloudless sky turned hazy with reflected light, and the heat seemed to press down upon the homes and businesses of Hopewell with the intention of flattening them. Downtown, the digital signboard on the exterior brick wall of the First National Bank read 103°, and the concrete of the streets and sidewalks baked and steamed in the white glare. Within their airconditioned offices, men and women began planning their Friday-afternoon escapes, trying to think of ways they could cool down the blast-furnace interiors of their automobiles long enough to survive the drive home.
On the picket lines at the entrances to MidCon Steel’s five shuttered plants, the union workers hunkered down in lawn chairs under makeshift canopies and drank iced tea and beer from large Styrofoam coolers, hot and weary and discouraged, angry at the intransigence of their collective fate, thinking dark thoughts and feeling the threads of their lives slip slowly away.
In the cool, dark confines of Scrubby’s Bar, at the west edge of town j ust off Lincoln Highway, Deny Howe sat alone at one end of the serving counter, nursing a beer and mumbling unintelligibly of his plans for MidCon to a creature that no one else could see.
It was nearing five o’clock, the sun sinking west and the dinner hour approaching, when Nest and her friends gathered up their fishing gear and the last few cans of pop and made their way back through the park. They climbed from the old boat launch (abandoned now since Riverside had bought the land and closed the road leading in), gained the heights of the cemetery, and followed the fence line back along the bluff face to where the cliffs dropped away and the park began. They wormed their way through a gap in the chain-link, Jared and Robert spreading the jagged edges wide for the girls, followed the turnaround past the Indian mounds, and angled through the trees and the playgrounds toward the ball diamonds. The heat lingered even with the sun’s slow westward descent, a sullen, brooding presence at the edges of the shade. In the darker stretches of the spruce and pine, where the boughs grew thick and the shadows never faded, amber eyes as flat and hard as stone peered out in cold appraisal. Nest, who alone could see them, was reminded of the increasing boldness of the feeders and was troubled anew by what it meant.
Robert Heppler took a deep drink from his can of Coke, then belched loudly at Brianna Brown and said with supreme insincerity, “Sorry.”
Brianna pulled a face. She was small and pretty with delicate features and thick, wavy dark hair. “You’re disgusting, Robert!”
“Hey, it’s a natural function of the body.” Robert tried his best to look put-upon. Short and wiry, with a mischievous face, a shock of unruly white-blond hair, Robert eventually aggravated everyone he came in contact with-particularly Brianna Brown.
“There is nothing natural about anything you do!” Brianna snapped irritably, although there wasn’t quite enough force behind the retort to cause any of the others to be concerned. The feud between Robert and Brianna was long-standing. It had become a condition of their lives. No one thought much about it anymore, except where the occasional flare-up exacerbated feelings so thoroughly that no one could get any peace. That had happened only once of late, early in the summer, when Robert had managed to hide a red fizzie in the lining of Brianna’s swimsuit just before she went into the pool at Lawrence Park. Mortified beyond any expression of outrage at the resulting red stain, Brianna would have killed Robert if she could have gotten her hands on him. As it was, she hadn’t said a word to him for almost two weeks afterward, not until he apologized in front of everyone and admitted he had behaved in a stupid and childish manner-and even that seemed to please Robert in some bizarre way that probably not even he could fathom.
“No, listen, I read this in a report.” Robert looked around to be sure they were all listening. “Belching and farting are necessary bodily functions. They release gases that would otherwise poison the body. You know about the exploding cows?”