A small boy darted out of the crowd and fired a rock at the back of a cop’s head.
Blood splattered the road as the cop fell over. A half-dozen more descended on the boy, bearing him off. Incredibly, small and savage fistfights had begun on the sidelines between the well-dressed townfolk and the rattier slum-dwellers. A woman in a ripped and faded housedress suddenly descended on a plump matron and began to pull her hair.
They fell heavily to the road and began to roll on the macadam, kicking and screaming.
“My God,” Amelia said sickly.
“What’s happening?” Richards asked. He dared look no higher than the clock on the dashboard.
“Fights. Police hitting people. Someone broke a newsie’s camera.”
“GIVE UP, RICHARDS. COME OUT.”
“Drive on,” Richards said softly.
The air car jerked forward erratically. “They’ll shoot for the air caps, ” she said. “Then wait until you have to come out. ”
“They won’t,” Richards said.
“Why?”
“They’re too dumb.”
They didn’t.
They proceeded slowly past the ranked police cars and the bug-eyed spectators. They had split themselves into two groups in unconscious segregation. On one side of the road were the middle- and upper-class citizens, the ladies who had their hair done at the beauty parlor, the men who wore Arrow shirts and loafers. Fellows wearing coveralls with company names on the back and their own names stitched in gold thread over the breast pockets. Women like Amelia Williams herself, dressed for the market and the shops.
Their faces were different in all ways but similar in one: They looked oddly incomplete, like pictures with holes for eyes or a jigsaw puzzle with a minor piece missing. It was a lack of desperation. Richards thought. No wolves howled in these bellies. These minds were not filled with rotted, crazed dreams or mad hopes.
These people were on the right side of the road, the side that faced the combination marina and country club they were just passing.
On the other side, the left, were the poor people. Red noses with burst veins.
Flattened, sagging breasts. Stringy hair. White socks. Cold sores. Pimples. The blank and 415
hanging mouths of idiocy.
The police were deployed more heavily here, and more were coming all the time.
Richards was not surprised at the swiftness and the heaviness of their crunch, despite the suddenness of his appearance. Even here, in Boondocks, U.S.A., the club and the gun were kept near to hand. The dogs were kept hungry in the kennel. The poor break into summer cottages closed for autumn and winter. The poor crash supermarts in subteen gangs. The poor have been known to soap badly spelled obscenities on shop windows.
The poor always have itchy assholes and the sight of Naugahyde and chrome and two-hundred-dollar suits and fat bellies have been known to make the mouths of the poor fill with angry spit. And the poor must have their Jack Johnson, their Muhammad Ali, their Clyde Barrow. They stood and watched.
Here on the right, folks, we have the summer people, Richards thought. Fat and sloppy but heavy with armor. On the left, weighing in at only a hundred and thirty-but a scrappy contender with a mean and rolling eyeball-we have the Hungry Honkies. Theirs are the politics of starvation; they’d roll Christ Himself for a pound of salami.
Polarization comes to West Sticksville. Watch out for these two contenders, though. They don’t stay in the ring; they have a tendency to fight in the ten-dollar seats. Can we find a goat to hang up for both of them?
Slowly, rolling at thirty, Ben Richards passed between them.
Minus 038 and COUNTING
An hour passed. It was four o’clock. Shadows crawled across the road.
Richards, slumped down below eye level in his seat, floated in and out of consciousness effortlessly. He had clumsily pulled his shirt out of his pants to look at the new wound. The bullet had dug a deep and ugly canal in his side that had bled a great deal. The blood had clotted, but grudgingly. When he had to move quickly again, the wound would rip open and bleed a great deal more. Didn’t matter. They were going to blow him up. In the face of this massive armory, his plan was a joke. He would go ahead with it, fill in the blanks until there was an “accident” and the air car was blown into bent bolts and shards of metal (” . . . terrible accident . . . the trooper has been suspended pending a full investigation . . . regret the loss of innocent life . . . “-all this buried in the last newsie of the day, between the stock-market report and the Pope’s latest pronouncement), but it was only reflex. He had become increasingly worried about Amelia Williams, whose big mistake had been picking Wednesday morning to do her marketing.
“There are tanks out there,” she said suddenly. Her voice was light, chatty, hysterical.
“Can you imagine it? Can you-” She began to cry.
Richards waited. Finally, he said: “What town are we in?”
“W-W-Winterport, the sign s-said. Oh, I can’t! I can’t wait for them to do it! can’t!”
“Okay,” he said.
She blinked slowly, giving an infinitesimal shake of her head as if to clear it. “What?”
416
“Stop. Get out.”
“But they’ll kill y-”
“Yes. But there won’t be any blood. You won’t see any blood. They’ve got enough firepower out there to vaporize me and the car, too.”
“You’re lying. You’ll kill me.”
The gun had been dangling between his knees. He dropped it on the floor. It clunked harmlessly on the rubber floor-mat.
“I want some pot,” she said mindlessly. “Oh God, I want to be high. Why didn’t you wait for the next car? Jesus! Jesus!”
Richards began to laugh. He laughed in wheezy, shallow-chested heaves that still hurt his side. He closed his eyes and laughed until tears oozed out from under the lids.
“It’s cold in here with that broken windshield,” she said irrelevantly. “Turn on the heater. ”
Her face was a pale blotch in the shadows of late afternoon.
Minus 037 and COUNTING
“We’re in Derry,” she said.
The streets were black with people. They hung over roof ledges and sat on balconies and verandahs from which the summer furniture had been removed. They ate sandwiches and fried chicken from greasy buckets.
“Are there jetport signs?”
“Yes. I’m following them. They’ll just close the gates.”
“I’ll just threaten to kill you again if they do.”
“Are you going to skyjack a plane?”
“I’m going to try.”
“You can’t.”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
They made a right, then a left. Bullhorns exhorted the crowd monotonously to move back, to disperse.
“Is she really your wife? That woman in the pictures?”
“Yes. Her name is Sheila. Our baby, Cathy, is a year and a half old. She had the flu.
Maybe she’s better now. That’s how I got into this.”
A helicopter buzzed them, leaving a huge arachnid shadow on the road ahead. A grossly amplified voice exhorted Richards to let the woman go. When it was gone and they could speak again, she said:
“Your wife looks like a little tramp. She could take better care of herself.”
417
“The picture was doctored,” Richards said tonelessly.
“They would do that?”
“They would do that. ”
“The jetport. We’re coming up to it.”
“Are the gates shut?”
“I can’t see . . . wait . . . open but blocked. A tank. It’s pointing its shooter at us.”
“Drive to within thirty feet of it and stop.”
The car crawled slowly down the four-lane access road between the parked police cars, between the ceaseless scream and babble of the crowd. A sign loomed over them: VOIGT AIRFIELD. The woman could see an electrified cyclone fence which crossed a marshy, worthless sort of field on both sides of the road. Straight ahead was a combination information booth and check-in point on a traffic island. Beyond that was the main gate, blocked by an A-62 tank capable of firing one-quarter-megaton shells from its cannon. Farther on, a confusion of roads and parking lots, all tending toward the complex jet-line terminals that blocked the runways from view. A huge control tower bulked over everything like an H. G. Wells Martian, the westering sun glaring off its polarized bank of windows and turning them to fire. Employees and passengers alike had crowded down to the nearest parking lot where they were being held back by more police. There was a pulsing, heavy whine in their ears, and Amelia saw a steel-gray Lockheed/G-A Superbird rising into a flat, powerful climb from one of the runways behind the main buildings.
“RICHARDS!”
She jumped and looked at him, frightened. He waved his hand at her nonchalantly.
It’s all right, Ma. I’m only dying.
“YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED INSIDE,” the huge amplified voice admonished him.
“LET THE WOMAN GO. STEP OUT.”