For a moment there was total silence in the market.
A constellation of moons suddenly glowed into being outside. The parking-lot sodium lights, undoubtedly supplied by underground electrical cables, had just gone on.
“Don’t go out-there,” Carmody said in her best gore-crow voice. “It’s death to go out there.” All at once, no one seemed disposed to argue or laugh.
Another scream came from outside, this one muffled and rather distant- sounding.
Billy tensed against me again.
“David, what’s going on?” Ollie Weeks asked. He had left his position. There were big beads of sweat on his round, smooth face. “What is this?”
“I’ll be goddammed if I have any idea,” I said. Ollie looked badly scared. He was a bachelor who lived in a nice little house up by Highland Lake and who liked to drink in the bar at Pleasant Mountain. On the pudgy little finger of his left hand was a starsapphire ring. The February before, he won some money in the state lottery. He bought the ring out of his winnings. I always had the idea that Ollie was a little afraid of girls.
“I don’t dig this,” he said.
“No. Billy, I have to put you down. I’ll hold your hand, but you’re breaking my arms, okay?”
“Mommy,” he whispered.
“She’s okay,” I told him. It was something to say.
The old geezer who runs the secondhand shop near Jon’s Restaurant walked past us, bundled into the old collegiate letter-sweater he wears year-round. He said loudly:
“It’s one of those pollution clouds. The mills at Rumford and South Paris. Chemicals.” With that, he made off up the Aisle 4, past the patent medicines and toilet paper.
“Let’s get out of here, David,” Norton said with no conviction at all. “What do you say we—” There was a thud. An odd, twisting thud that I felt mostly in my feet, as if the entire building had suddenly dropped three feet. Several people cried out in fear and surprise. There was a musical jingle of bottles leaning off their shelves and destroying themselves upon the tile floor. A chunk of glass shaped like a pie wedge fell out of one of the segments of the wide front window, and I saw that the wooden frames banding the heavy sections of glass had buckled and splintered in some places.
The fire whistle stopped in mid-whoop.
The quiet that followed was the bated silence of-people waiting for something else, something more. I was shocked and numb, and my mind made a strange cross-patch connection with the past. Back when Bridgton was little more than a crossroads, my dad would take me in with him and stand talking at the counter while I looked through the glass at the penny candy and two-cent chews. It was January thaw. No sound but the drip of meltwater falling from the galvanized tin gutters to the rain barrels on either side of the store. Me looking at the jawbreakers and buttons and pinwheels. The mystic yellow globes of light overhead showing up the monstrous, projected shadows of last summer’s battalion of dead flies. A little boy named David Drayton looking at the candy and the Davy Crockett bubble-gum cards and vaguely needing to go pee. And outside, the pressing, billowing yellow fog of January thaw.
The memory passed, but very slowly.
“You people!” Norton bellowed. “All you people, listen to me!” They looked around. Norton was holding up both hands, the fingers splayed like a political candidate accepting accolades.
“It may be dangerous to go outside!” Norton yelled.
“Why?” a woman screamed back. “My kids’re at home! I got to get back to my kids!”
“It’s death to go out there!” Carmody came back smartly. She was standing by the twenty-five-pound sacks of fertilizer stacked below the window, and her face seemed to bulge somehow, as if she were swelling.
A teenager gave her a sudden hard push and she sat down on the bags with a surprised grunt. “Stop saying that, you old bag! Stop rappin’ that crazy bullshit! ”
“Please!” Norton yelled. “if we just wait a few moments until it blows over and we can see—” A babble of conflicting shouts greeted this.
“He’s right,” I said, shouting to be heard over the noise. “Let’s just try to keep cool.”
“I think that was an earthquake,” a bespectacled man said. His voice was soft. In one hand he held a package of hamburger and a bag of buns. The other hand was holding the hand of a little girl, maybe a year younger than Billy. “I really think that was an earthquake.”
“They had one over in Naples four years ago,” a fat local man said.
“That was in Casco,” his wife contradicted immediately. She spoke in the unmistakable tones of a veteran contradictor.
“Naples,” the fat local man said, but with less assurance. “Casco,” his wife said firmly, and he gave up.
Somewhere a can that had been jostled to the very edge of its shelf by the thump, earthquake, whatever it had been, fell off with a delayed clatter. Billy burst into tears. “I want to go home’! I want my MOTHER!”
“Can’t you shut that kid up?” Bud Brown asked. His eyes were darting rapidly but aimlessly from place to place.
“Would you like, a shot in the teeth, motormouth?” I asked him.
“Come on, Dave, that’s not helping,” Norton said distractedly.
“I’m sorry,” the woman who had screamed earlier said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t stay here. I’ve got to get home and see to my kids.” She looked around at us, a blond woman with a tired, pretty face.
“Wanda’s looking after little Victor, you see. Wanda’s only eight and sometimes she forgets… forgets she’s supposed to be… well, watching him, you know. And little Victor… he likes to turn on the stove burners to see the little red light come on… he likes that light… and sometimes he pulls out the plugs… little Victor does… and Wanda gets…
bored watching him after a while… she’s just eight…” She stopped talking and just looked at us. I imagine that we must have looked like nothing but a bank of merciless eyes to her right then, not human beings at all, just eyes. “Isn’t anyone going to help me?” she screamed. Her lips began to tremble. “Won’t… won’t anybody here see a lady home?” No one replied. People shuffled their feet. She looked from face to face with her own broken face. The fat local man took a hesitant half-step forward and his wife jerked him back with one quick tug, her hand clapped over his wrist like a manacle.
“You?” the blond woman asked Ollie. He shook his head. “You?” she said to Bud.
He put his hand over the Texas Instruments calculator on the counter and made no reply.
“You?” she said to Norton, and Norton began to say something in his big lawyer’s voice, something about how no one should go off half-cocked, and… and she dismissed him and Norton just trailed off.
“You?” she said to me, and I picked Billy up again and held him in my arms like a shield to ward off her terrible broken face.
“I hope you all rot in hell,” she said. She didn’t scream it. Her voice was dead tired. She went to the OUT door and pulled it open, using both hands. I wanted to say something to her, call her back, but my mouth was too dry.
“Aw, lady, listen—” the teenage kid who had shouted at Carmody began. He held her arm. She looked down at his hand and he let her go, shamefaced. She slipped out. into the fog. We watched her go and no one said anything. We watched the fog overlay her and make her insubstantial, not a human being anymore but a pencil- ink sketch of a human being done on the world’s whitest paper, and no one said anything. For a moment it was like the letters of the KEEP RIGHT sign that had seemed to float on nothingness; her arms and legs and pallid blond hair were all gone and only the misty remnants of her red summer dress remained, seeming to dance in white limbo. Then her dress was gone, too, and no one said anything.
IV. The Storage Area.
Problems with the Generators.
What Happened to the Bag-Boy.
Billy began to act hysterical and tantrummy, screaming for his mother in a hoarse, demanding way through his tears, instantly regressing to the age of two. Snot was lathered on his upper lip. I led him away, walking down one of the middle aisles with my arm around his shoulders, trying to soothe him. I took him back by the long white meat cabinet that ran the length of the store at the back. McVey, the butcher, was still there. We nodded at each other, the best we could do under the circumstances.
I sat down on the floor and took Billy on my lap and held his face against my chest and rocked him and talked to him. I told him all the lies parents keep in reserve for bad situations, the ones that sound so damn plausible to a child, and I told them in a tone of perfect conviction.