Masque: Exchange of roles as Blacks fade to enact static counterparts to Reds now bearing down in interstitched configurations. Red One crosses meridian, confronts tableau of Blacks, slows, signals placement: Red Two to his left, Red Three to center, Red Four and Five to the corners. Blacks dance lightly, buttocks oriented to netted eye. Red Three slaps thigh, shouts, and Black Three leaps, slashes meaninglessly at empty space. Chants instruct. Red One holds, weighs forward, keeping the pendular (down the corridor he comes) scissoring of Red Three in the corner of his eye, juts young jaw, hoots; cued, Black One strikes, misses, as Red One withdraws. Black One flails, presses: Red One, laughing, delivers out to Red Two. Red Two (and through the double doors into the auditorium like a bird bursting from its cage in alarm) dissembles a return to Red One, but it is Red Three, momentarily stationary on a central black cross intersecting a black circle, who receives (then down the aisle in flying leaps batting wildly against obstacles) off the gleaming floorboards. He shams bounce to Red Four in the right corner, drawing Black Three out of the circle toward the foil, and then, alone and lit on his varnished disc, assumes his role: the Hook. A semi circling sweep, chasse, fade (and white shirt aflutter leaps the rail to alight on the hardwood floor), stretch — but circle breaks as Black Two and Three puncture its rim in assault. Collision (past the players and pallid up to the scorekeeper’s table). Whistle. Roar. Buzzer, unexpectedly prolonged.
The throbbing paeans of the crowd within, seined but not trapped by the auditorium’s drafty walls, washed over the old Dodge in the parking lot like surf, gathering ascendancy over the Randolph Junction radio station which had begun to fade and grow fuzzy. For Angie Bonali, the shouting was both exotic and paternal, a distant tidal bath of freedom, and a proximate refuge if she needed it. …
I been gatherin’ flowers from the hillside,
To wreathe around your (ground?),
But you’ve (fade) (baby, I’m knockin’ on your …)
(The flowers?) have all withered down …
As they, chests heaving, leaned apart, she gazed up past his dark head, burred and ridged like a goat’s, to the tattered roof of the old car. Under the tatters, in daylight, there was rust; now, behind them, there seemed only cosmic space. She closed her eyes. A width, less than three inches, of damp fragile nylon was all that kept his fingers out, and even now threatened to become less her buckler than his gauntlet. “It’s nearly eight,” she guessed, gasped. “Don’t you think we’d better — better go — see the game?’’
He sighed and gazed, pleasantly pained, down at her lips, full and appealing, as she knew, and now slightly bruised. Their psi plunged shut once more, her fist snarling eagerly in his cropped hair, his pawing savagely in her bared thighs, butting her body against the spiny fish that wriggled and plunged in his lap …
(fade in) … were in bloom,
I shot and killt my darlin’
(static) be my doom (all of God’s children
seem to gather there) to wreathe around your …
“Please!” she sobbed.
“Angie!” he pleaded, freed his own hand a moment to tug hers down across his chest. She buried her face in his shirt, her hand at the buckle without strength. “Oh hell!” he snapped, and flicked her skirt down over her thighs.
She whirled away, sat up, stared out the fogged-up windows. “What is it!” Her heart pounded with the discovery of real place around her. The people were streaming out of the auditorium.
“What’s going on?” he asked irritably, hand clinging to her knee in rote strategy.
“Is the game over?” She couldn’t get her breath.
“Can’t be,” he said. “It just started.” He flipped the radio dial, looking for the West Condon station.
The crowd, protoplasmic, flooded through the double doors and inundated the parking lot. Lamps on poles and swerving car lights made the onrushing mass seem translucent, unbodied. As individuals, nearing, emerged from it, Angie rolled down the window and called out, “What is it?”
“Number Nine blew up!”
The radio crashed on, piercing her breast. “We repeat: All persons other than doctors, nurses, and members of mine rescue teams are urged to remain in their homes. Bulletins will be—”
“Hey! You got room?”
“Sure!” shouted the boy with Angie. “Get in!”
Angie slumped forward to let the three squeeze past her into the back seat. Her bruised lips against her knuckles cried sin! as her father’s loved presence invaded the Dodge.
“Hey, Angie! Was your Dad on tonight?”
“Yes,” she whispered, but she was already crying. Oh, Daddy! I’m sorry!
Parked at the outer edge of the lot, the advantage was all theirs, but even then they soon found themselves bumper to bumper on the old road out to the coalmine.
The three men jerryrigged a stretcher with brattice canvas and hustled Ely Collins into it. They’d been too long about it. The gas was so dense now, it felt like their goddamn clothes were floating free from their bodies. Strelchuk remembered Bruno, didn’t see him anywhere. “Hey Bruno!” he shouted, but got no answer.
“Come on, goddamn you, Strelchuk!” Jinx Pontormo cried, so nervous his old Italian voice squeaked like a boy’s. “I have enough of your jackass games!”
“Bruno, we’re going!” Mike called, but they were already on the move as he said it, Pontormo leading, fat round shoulders hulled forward in an anxious charge on the void ahead, Strelchuk and Juliano bearing the old mechanic on the cloth between them. With his buddy Collins nailed to the earth and maybe dying, Bruno had cut out to save his own skin — if he got in a hole, he goddamn well deserved it. “Jerk must have gone on,” Strelchuk muttered, covering his vague sense of guilt.
She felt, as in dreams, to be running without gaining ground, willing acts she could not perform. Iron to its metal stand. Plug out. Around the far thrust of the ironing board. Through the wilderness of looming chairs, stirring pamphlets, whipped laundry. Past the pleading eyes stuck on the walls. Over cracked linoleum to the wooden basement stairs. Down half of them, knees feathery. “Ma!” Basement was lit hollowly by unsmoked bulbs. Her Ma was singing and didn’t hear her. “Ma!” The washer churned like someone choking. “Mal”
Her Ma glanced up from the machine, thrust another armload in, and walked over to the stairs. “Cain’t hear nothing with that machine going,” she explained. Her arms were scabbed with suds.
“It’s the mine, Ma!” Elaine said. She didn’t know how to act. She feared what might happen when her Ma knew. “It’s blowed up, Ma! I jist heard it on the radio!”
But all her Ma said was, “Git your coat, child,” and turned back to unplug the washer. “And don’t fergit your boots!” she called back over her shoulder. But later, as they ran along together toward the Deepwater road, Elaine saw it was her Ma who forgot hers.