He was an amazingly competent artist already, only four years old or not (“My little genius,” Sonia sometimes called him), and his picture was much better than the color-it-in poster on the other side of the sheet. What he had managed before the lights went out was work a gifted first-year art student might have been proud of. In the middle of the poster-sheet, a tower of dark, soot-colored stone rose into a blue sky dotted with fat white clouds. Surrounding it was a field of roses so red they almost seemed to clamor aloud. Standing off to one side was a man dressed in faded bluejeans. A pair of gunbelts crossed his flat middle; a holster hung below each hip. At the very top of the tower, a man in a red robe was looking down at the gunfighter with an expression of mingled hate and fear. His hands, which were curled over the parapet, also appeared to be red.
Sonia had been mesmerized by the presence of Susan Day, who was sitting behind the lectern and listening to her introduction, but she had happened to glance down at her son’s picture just before the introduction ended. She had known for two years that Patrick was what the child psychologists called a prodigy, and she sometimes told herself she had gotten used to his sophisticated drawings and the Play-Doli sculptures he called the Clay Family. Perhaps she even had, to some degree, but this particular picture gave her a strange, deep chill that she could not entirely dismiss as emotional fallout from her long and stressful day.
“Who’s that?” she asked, tapping the tiny figure peering jealously down from the top of the dark tower.
“Him’s the Red King,” Patrick said.
“Oh, the Red King, I see. And who’s this man with the guns?”
As he opened his mouth to answer, Roberta Harper, the woman at the podium, lifted her left arm (there was a black mourning band on it) toward the woman sitting behind her. “My friends, His. Susan Day.i” she cried, and Patrick Danville’s answer to his mother’s second question was lost in the rising storm of applause: Him’s name is Roland, Mama. I dream about him, sometimes.
He’s a King, too.
Now the two of them sat in the dark with their ears ringing, and two thoughts ran through Sonia’s mind like rats chasing each other on a treadmilclass="underline" Won’t this day ever end, I knew I shouldn’t have brought him, won’t this day ever end, I knew I shouldn’t have brought him, won’t this day"Mommy, you’re scrunching my picture!” Patrick said. He sounded a little out of breath, and Sonia realized she must be scrunching him, too. She eased up a little. A tattered skein of screams, shouts, and babbled questions came from the dark pit below them, where the people rich enough to pony up fifteen-dollar “donations” had been seated in folding chairs. A rough howl of pain cut through this babble, making Sonia jump in her seat.
The thudding crump which had followed the initial explosion had pressed in painfully on their ears and shaken the building. The blasts which were still going on-cars exploding like firecrackers in the parking lot-sounded small and inconsequential in comparison, but Sonia felt Patrick flinch against her with each one.
“Stay calm, Pat,” she told him. “Something bad’s happened, but I think it happened outside.” Because her eyes had been drawn to the bright glare in the windows, Sonia had mercifully missed seeing her heroine’s head leaving her shoulders, but she knew that somehow lightning had struck in the same place.
(shouldn’t have brought him, shouldn’t have brought him) and that at least some of the people below them were panicking.
If she panicked, she and Young Rembrandt were going to be in serious trouble.
But I’m not going to. I didn’t get out of that deathbox this morning just to panic now. I’ll be goddamned if I will.
She reached down and took one of Patrick’s hands-the one that wasn’t clutching his picture. It was very cold.
“Do you think the angels will come to save us again, Mama?” he asked in a voice that quivered slightly.
“Nah,” she said. “I think this time we better do it ourselves.
But we can do that. I mean, we’re all right now, aren’t we?”
“Yes,” he said, but then slumped against her. She had a terrible moment when she was sure he had fainted and she’d have to carry him from the Civic Center in her arms, but then he straightened up again.
“My books was on the floor,” he said. “I didn’t want to leave without my books, especially the one about the boy who can’t take off his hat.
Are we leaving, Mama?”
“Yes. As soon as people stop running around. There’ll be lights in the halls, ones that run on batteries, even though the ones in here are out. When I say, we’re going to get up and walk-walk-up the steps to the door. I’m not going to carry you, but I’m going to walk right behind you with both my hands on your shoulders. Do you understand, Pat?”
“Yes, Mama.” No questions. No blubbering. just his books, thrust into her hands for safekeeping. He held onto the picture himself.
She gave him a quick hug and kissed his cheek.
They waited in their seats five minutes by her slow count to three hundred. She sensed that most of their immediate neighbors were gone before she got to a hundred and fifty, but she made herself wait. She could now see a little, enough for her to believe that something was burning fiercely outside, but on the far side of the building. That was very lucky. She could hear the warble-wail of approaching police cars, ambulances, and fire-trucks.
Sonia got to her feet. “Come on. Keep right in front of me.”
Pat Danville stepped into the aisle with his mother’s hands pressed firmly down on his shoulders. He led her up the steps toward the dim yellow lights which marked the north balcony corridor, stopping only once as the dark shape of a running man hurtled toward them.
His mother’s hands tightened on his shoulders as she yanked him aside.
“Goddam right-to-lifers!” the running man cried, “Fucking selfrighteous turds I’d like to kill them all!”
Then he was gone and Pat began walking up the stairs again. She felt a calmness in him now, a centered lack of fear, that touched her heart with love, and with some queer darkness, as well. He was so different, her son, so special… but the world did not love people like that, The world tried to root them out, like tares from a garden.
They emerged at last into the corridor. A few deeply shocked people wandered back and forth, eyes dazed and mouths agape, like zombies in a horror movie. Sonia hardly glanced at them, just got Pat moving toward the stairs. Three minutes later they exited into the fireshot night perfectly unscathed, and upon all the levels of the universe, matters both Random and Purposeful resumed their ordained courses. Worlds which had trembled for a moment in their orbits now steadied, and in one of those worlds, in a desert that was the apotheosis of all deserts, a man named Roland turned over in his bedroll and slept easily once again beneath the alien constellations.
Across town, in Strawford Park, the door of the Portosan marked MEN blew open. Lois Chasse and Ralph Roberts came flying out backward in a haze of smoke, clutching each other. From within came the sound of the Cherokee hitting and then the plastique exploding. There was a flash of white light and the toilet’s blue walls bulged outward, as if some giant had hammered them with his fists.
A second later they heard the explosion all over again; this time it came rolling across the open air. The second version was fainter, but somehow more real.
Lois’s feet stuttered and she thumped to the grass of the lower hillside with a cry which was partly relief. Ralph landed beside her, then pushed himself up to a sitting position. He stared unbelievingly at the Civic Center, where a fist of fire was now clenched on the horizon. A purple lump the size of a doorknob was rising on his forehead, where Ed had hit him. His left side still throbbed, but he thought maybe the ribs in there were only sprung, not broken.