Once, at his request, she had reeled off a whole list of mortal and venial sins.
Although she had learned them in catechism classes twenty, twenty-five, even thirty years before, her list seemed (to him at least) complete and faultless. But there was a matter of interpretation that he couldn’t make clear. Sometimes an act was a mortal sin, sometimes only venial. It seemed to depend on the perpetrator’s frame of mind. The conscious will to do evil. Was that something she had said during those long-ago discussions, or had Freddy whispered it in his ear just now? It puzzled him, worried him.
The conscious will to do evil.
In the end, he thought he had isolated the two biggies, the two hard and fast mortal 230
sins: suicide and murder. But a later conversation-had it been with Ron Stone? yes, he believed it had-had even blurred half of that. Sometimes, according to Ron (they had been drinking in a bar, it seemed, as long as ten years ago). murder itself was only a venial sin. Or maybe not a sin at all. If you cold-bloodedly planned to do away with somebody who had raped your wife, that might just be a venial sin. And if you killed somebody in a just war-those were Ron’s exact words, he could almost hear him speaking them in some mental taproom-then it wasn’t a sin at all. According to Ron, all the American GI’s that had killed Nazis and Japs were going to be okay when the Judgment Trump blew.
That left suicide, that hissing word.
He was coming up to the construction. There were black-and-white barriers with round flashing reflectors on top, and orange signs that glowed briefly and brightly in his headlights. One said:
ROAD ENDS TEMPORARILY
Another said:
DETOUR-FOLLOW SIGNS
Another said:
BLASTING AREA!
TURN OFF 2-WAY RADIOS
He pulled over, put the transmission lever in park, turned on his four-way flashers, and got out of the car. He walked toward the black-and-white barriers. The orange blinkers made the falling snow seem thicker, absurd with color.
He also remembered being confused about absolution. At first he had thought it was fairly simple: If you committed a mortal sin, you were mortally wounded, damned. You could hail Mary until your tongue fell out and you would still go to hell. But Mary said that wasn’t always so. There was confession, and atonement, and reconsecration, and so on. It was very confusing. Christ had said there was no eternal life in a murderer, but he had also said whosoever believeth in me shall not perish. Whosoever. It seemed that there were as many loopholes in biblical doctrine as there were in a shyster lawyer’s purchase agreement. Except for suicide, of course. You couldn’t confess suicide or repent suicide or atone for it because that act cut the silver cord and sent you plunging out into whatever worlds there were. And-And why was he thinking about it, anyway? He didn’t intend to kill anybody and certainly he didn’t intend to commit suicide. He never even thought about suicide. At least, not until just lately.
He stared over the black-and-white barriers, feeling cold inside.
The machines were down there, hooded in snow, dominated by the wrecking crane. In its brooding immobility it had gained a dimension of awfulness. With its skeletal gantry rising into the snowy darkness, it reminded him of a praying mantis that had gone into some unknown period of winter contemplation.
He swung one of the barriers out of the way. It was very light. He went back to the 231
car, got in, and pulled the transmission lever down into low. He let the car creep forward over the edge and down the slope, which had been worn into smooth ridges by the comings and goings of the big machines. With dirt underneath, the tendency of the heavy car to slip around was reduced. When he got to the bottom he shifted back into park and turned off all the car’s lights. He climbed back up the slope, puffing, and put the barrier back in place. He went back down.
He opened the LTD’s tailgate and took out Mary’s bucket. Then he went around to the passenger seat and set the bucket on the floor beneath his carton of firebombs. He took the white lid off the bucket and, humming softly, dipped each wick in gasoline. That done, he carried the bucket of gas over to the crane and climbed up into the unlocked cab, being careful not to slip. He was excited now, his heartbeat hurrying along, his throat tight and close with bitter exultation.
He splashed gas over the seat, over the controls, over the gearbox. He stepped out on the narrow riveted catwalk that skirted the crane’s motor hood and poured the rest of the gas into the cowling. Hydrocarbon perfume filled the air. His gloves had soaked through, wetting his hands and turning them numb almost immediately. He jumped down and stripped the gloves off, putting them into his overcoat pockets. The first packet of matches dropped from his fingers, which felt as distant as wood. He held onto the second pack, but the wind snuffed the first two he had scratched. He turned his back to the wind, hunched over the match folder protectively and got one to stay lighted. He touched it to the rest, and they hissed into flame. He tossed the burning matches into the cab.
At first he thought they must have gone out, because there was nothing. Then there was a soft explosive sound- flump! -and fire boiled out of the cab in a furious gust, driving him back two steps. He shielded his eyes from the bright orange flower opening up there.
An arm of fire ran out of the cab, reached the engine hood, paused for a moment as if in reflection, and then sniffed inside. This time the explosion was not soft. KAPLOOM!
And suddenly the cowling was in the air, rising almost out of sight, fluttering and turning over. Something whizzed past his head.
It’s burning, he thought. It’s really burning!
He began to do a shuffling dance in the fiery darkness, his face contorted in an ecstasy so great that it seemed his features must shatter and fall in a million smiling pieces. His hands curled into waving fists above his head.
“Hooray! ” He screamed into the wind, and the wind screamed back at him. “Hooray goddam it hooray!”
He dashed around the car and slipped in the snow and fell down and that might have saved his life because that was when the gas tank of the crane blew debris in a forty-foot circle. A hot piece of metal winged through the right window of the LTD, punching a stellated hole in the safety glass and sending out a drunken spiderweb of cracks.
He picked himself up, frosted with snow all the way down his front, and scrambled behind the wheel. He put his gloves back on-fingerprints-but after that, any thought of caution was gone. He started the car with fingers that could barely feel the ignition key and then heavy-footed the accelerator, “dragging out” they had called it when they had been kids and the world was young, the rear end of the station wagon whipping left and 232
right. The crane was burning furiously, better than he ever would have imagined, the cab an inferno, the big windshield gone.
“Hot damn!” he screamed. “Oh Freddy, hot damn!”
He skated the LTD in front of the crane, the firelight sketching his face in twotone Halloween colors. He rammed his right index finger at the dashboard, hitting the cigarette lighter on the third try. The construction machines were on his left now, and he rolled down his window. Mary’s floor-bucket rolled back and forth on the floor, and the beer and soda bottles chattered frantically against one another as the wagon jounced across the gouged and frozen earth.
The cigarette lighter popped out and he slammed both feet down on the power brake.
The station wagon looped the loop and came to a stop. He pulled the lighter out of its socket, took a bottle from the carton, and pressed the glowing coil against the wick. It flared alight and he threw it. It shattered against the mud-caked tread of a bulldozer and flame splashed gaudily. He pushed the cigarette lighter back in, drove twenty feet farther, and threw three more at the dark hulk of a payloader. One missed, one struck the side and spilled burning gasoline harmlessly into the snow, and the third arced neatly into the cab.
“Fuckinbullseye!” he screamed.
Another bulldozer. A smaller payloader. Then he came to a house trailer up on jacks.
A sign over the door said:
LANE CONSTRUCTION CO.
On-Site Office
NO HIRING DONE HERE!
Please Wipe Your Feet
He pulled the LTD up at point-blank range and threw four burning bottles at the large window beside the door. They all went through, the first shattering the glass of both window and bottle, dragging a burning drape in after it.