«Don’t let out all the air conditioning,» one of the army kids cracked, and there were a few chuckles. I wasn’t chuckling. I had seen the mist coming across the lake.
«Billy, why don’t you go have a look?» Norton said.
«No,» I said at once, for no concrete reason.
The line moved forward again. People craned their necks, looking for the fog the kid had mentioned, but there was nothing on view except bright-blue sky. I heard someone say that the kid must have been joking. Someone else responded that he had seen a funny line of mist on Long Lake not an hour ago. The first whistle whooped and screamed. I didn’t like it. It sounded like big-league doom blowing that way.
More people went out. A few even left their places in line, which speeded up the proceedings a bit. Then grizzled old John Lee Frovin, who works as a mechanic at the Texaco station, came ducking in and yelled: «Hey! Anybody got a camera?» He looked around, then ducked back out again.
That caused something of a rush. If it was worth taking a picture of, it was worth seeing.
Suddenly Mrs. Carmody cried in her rusty but powerful old voice, «Don’t go out there!»
People turned around to look at her. The orderly shape of the lines had grown fuzzy as people left to get a look at the mist, or as they drew away from Mrs. Carmody, or as I they milled around, seeking out their friends. A pretty young woman in a cranberry-colored sweatshirt and dark-green slacks was looking at Mrs. Carmody in a thoughtful, evaluating way. A few opportunists were taking advantage of whatever the situation was to move up a couple of places. The checker beside Bud Brown looked over her shoulder again, and Brown tapped her shoulder with a long finger. «Keep your mind on what you’re doing, Sally.»
«Don’t go out there!» Mrs. Carmody yelled. «It’s death! I feel that it’s death out there!»
Bud and Ollie Weeks, who both knew her, just looked impatient and irritated, but any summer people around her stepped smartly away, never minding their places in line. The bag-ladies in big cities seem to have the same effect on people, as if they were carriers of some contagious disease. Who knows? Maybe they are.
Things began to happen at an accelerating, confusing pace then. A man staggered into the market, shoving the IN door open. His nose was bleeding. «Something in the fog!» he screamed, and Billy shrank against me-whether because of the man’s bloody nose or what he was saying, I don’t know. «Something in the fog! Something in the fog took John Lee! Something- He staggered back against a display of lawn food stacked by the window and sat down there. «Something in the fog took John Lee and I heard him screaming! «
The situation changed. Made nervous by the storm, by the police siren and the fire whistle, by the subtle dislocation any power outage causes in the American psyche, and by the steadily mounting atmosphere of unease as things somehow … somehow changed (I don’t know how to put it any better than that), people began to move in a body.
They didn’t bolt. If I told you that, I would be giving you entirely the wrong impression. It wasn’t exactly a panic. They didn’t run-or at least, most of them didn’t. But they went. Some of them just went to the big show window on the far side of the checkout lanes to look out. Others went out the IN door, some still carrying their intended purchases. Bud Brown, harried and officious, began yelling: «Hey! You haven’t paid for that! Hey, you! Come back here with those hotdog rolls!»
Someone laughed at him, a crazy, yodeling sound that made other people smile. Even as they smiled they looked bewildered, confused, and nervous. Then someone else laughed and Brown flushed. He grabbed a box of mushrooms away from a lady who was crowding past him to look out the window-the segments of glass were lined with people now, they were like the folks you see looking through loopholes into a building site-and the lady screamed, «Give me back my mushies!» This bizarre term of affection caused two men standing nearby to break into crazy laughter-and there was something of the old English Bedlam about all of it, now. Mrs. Carmody trumpeted again not to go out there. The fire whistle whooped breathlessly, a strong old woman who had scared up a prowler in the house. And Billy burst into tears.