And then the guard seemed not to know what came next. He only stood there. Dwight was looking over his own right shoulder, in an attempt to keep secure the area behind the tellers’ windows. And Burris could feel them hitting the buttons in there, could feel the silent hammering tremor of alarms moving under the world and up his legs.
The guard posed in his bewilderment like wax.
Burris was out of his seat and unaware of it, standing next to the car’s open door, an unarmed bandit wearing a false beard on the sidewalk before a bank. “Somebody kill that motherfucker,” he screamed.
“Kill that son of a bitch,” Burris screamed.
His brother was down. He cried from the pit of righteousness, “Kill that man!”
And Bill Houston did.
Now that the shooting was started, Bill Houston wanted it to go on forever. Holding his gun out toward the guard and firing was something like spraying paint — trying to get every spot covered. He wanted to make sure that no life was showing through. He didn’t want the guard to have any life left with which he might rise up and kill Bill Houston in return. When the guard was still, lying there at the open mouth of his C-shaped desk with his jaw hanging off to one side and the blood running down his neck and also back into his hair and his ear, Bill shot him twice more in his chest, and would have emptied the shotgun into the guard but caught himself up short, feeling he didn’t want to spend his shells, because shells were more precious than all the money that surrounded them now. The smoke of gunfire lay in sheets along the air around his head, where light played off the fountain’s pond and gave it brilliance. In the center of his heart, the tension of a lifetime dissolved into honey. He heard nothing above the ringing in his ears.
As Jamie steered James’s pickup — borrowed a little bit ago, she couldn’t have said exactly when — the experience was like that of piloting a boat. The back wheels seemed unconnected to the front. The heat of late morning strewed the asphalt with imaginary liquids, and the world seemed out of synch with itself. She had the black transistor radio going on the dashboard, its muttering and snickering generally submerged in the noises of traffic. Everything was turning to rubber in her hands.
Standing on the seat, hanging onto the windowsill with one hand and the dashboard with the other, Miranda looked to Jamie just like a little baby doll from Paradise in a new dress from Marshall’s, a discount establishment. Miranda was singing a little song: “I gotta go, I gotta go, I gotta go,” and after a while, as if by singing these words she had made them come true, an urgency crept into her voice and then she was no longer singing but had set up a chant—“Mom I gotta go-do-tha bath-roomom I gotta go-do-tha bath-roomom I gotta—”
“Hush, fer Godsakes,” Jamie said, and just then very clearly the transistor on the dash said, “Only twenty more days.” An electric shock of fear ran down her legs. “I gotta go too,” she said.
They were right downtown, on what she believed was a one-way street. At the outermost periphery of her vision, she glimpsed some flowers drifting down like rain when she turned her head to find a parking space. “I hafta go now, right away, because I can’t wait,” Miranda informed her desperately. As if it had just come to life, Jamie felt the deep throbbing of the truck’s engine all around them, and beyond that, the pounding of summer heat so deep their human ears were helpless to place it, the pulse of thought, of reality itself — and she braked swiftly, overcome by a sense that the next moment of time meant everything. Softly the radio spoke to her: “Call 248-SAVE.” “Oh my God,” Jamie said, and tears sprang up in her eyes. “Stay here,” she told Miranda, and got out of the car.
“Mama!” Miranda said, frightened, hopping up and down on the seat.
“Stay here!” Jamie told her through the window. She left the car in the street. Just inside a restaurant there was a payphone. In her jeans were three dimes, and she put all three in the phone and pushed the buttons: 248-SAVE. “Phoenix Pool-it,” they said when they answered.
“This is Jamie,” she said. Her mouth was sticky with dread.
“Jamie?” they said. Then, “Well — hi, Jamie. What can we do for you?”
Sweat made the receiver crackle against her ear. Her breath came in gasps. “Got a message for me?” she said finally.
“Uh — message?” the voice asked. There was a neutral dial-tone helpfulness to it, the unresisting dead tenor of machine. “I’m not sure I understand, Jamie.”
She hung up, her head stinging with embarrassment. She noticed that the graffiti on the walls around her was written in another language, in strange letters resembling pyramids and swastikas — she couldn’t: make any of it out, but one or two things seemed to say “Oh my God!” and “Oh my God!”
“I’m almost going in my pants!” Tears stained Miranda’s new dress when Jamie got back into the truck and pulled away swiftly, refusing to glance back even once. Only a half block up was a blank space of curb that might have accommodated several vehicles. Jamie leaned across Miranda and opened her door for her before getting out herself. “Hey,” she said to a man in a green janitor’s outfit, “tell me where there’s a bathroom, will you?”
The man, an Indian with bloodshot eyes, the whites of them almost as dark as his flesh, gestured behind him with his cigaret at the building they fronted. “Maybe right inside here, huh?” he said. Jamie hauled her daughter by the hand up the concrete steps and inside.
It was the police station. Jamie’s thoughts were like this: wo-wo-wo. They were all around her, and everything was brand new. Her blouse was sticking to her back. A few people and policemen were here and there, but the place seemed empty. The spacious room expanded and shrank imperceptibly. She kept pushing it all away from her face by a conscious effort of her mind.
In an area behind the front counter, a uniformed man examined white and yellow papers. He acknowledged Jamie with a nod and looked at her. “What’s up?” She became aware of radar on her skin. His face was a shimmering computerized wall of beef.
In a sudden act of surrender, wanting only to divest herself of shame, she said. “I don’t know.” She felt she was confessing everything.
Miranda said, “I wanna go to the bathroom.” The cop stood up, and he was a small man. He peered over the counter at Miranda and laughed. “One more second!” he said, pointing the way. “Twenty more feet!”
Jamie followed her daughter into the ladies’ room and entered the stall right next to hers. She dropped her shorts and panties and sat down feeling safe, safe, safe — locked in the john, in the bowels of the police — and she realized all at once what a strain her bladder had been experiencing. It seemed she would never be done. She noticed she was jiggling both her feet, clenching and unclenching her jaw until her head ached. Boy, if this ain’t the very edge of it all, I just don’t know, she thought. The noise of her stream beneath her drifted near and away. For a couple of seconds it was as if she were only remembering it, as a person might who’d recently died — she decided to forget about shopping and concentrate on getting home now, on getting past the police — and she could hear some words in the sound of water, faint voices prowling the limit of her ability to keep a grip.
On his way into the darkness of the movies, Burris bought a plastic cup filled with popcorn. There was no possibility he would eat any of it, but he wanted to appear to know what he was doing. It was midafternoon, and he was terrified.