Eddie Wilson didn’t know what it was hit him. He still couldn’t think. He was overseas again and the earth was alive with powder going off and he was scared to die. Then he thought it was a plain fall. Pain was a small hot stab behind him, but he knew it was worse because he couldn’t move. Couldn’t even move a finger. He tried to cry out. Couldn’t make a sound. Did the others know what had happened to him? Where was his buddy Tommy? Didn’t they care? He felt as though he had shrunk, now sat bunched inside his skull. He wanted his wife Betty. He opened his eyes. His lamp arrowed a cloudy ray out into the darkness—the lights were out!
Bonali had told them to stay put when he went for the phone, but with the power gone and the vent system off, air scorching with suspended dust that could flame up any second, the need for action grabbed at them. Duncan, left in charge, couldn’t hold it back, and they started to break away. Brevnik, choking with terror and screaming “It’s coming!” was the first to go, and Georgie Lucci followed on his heels. Pooch Minicucci couldn’t find his buddy Cravens and raced after Brevnik and Lucci, thinking he was getting left behind. “Lee! Lee!” he cried, and ran head on into a timber. He scrambled, screaming, to his feet, not knowing who or what was trying to kill him, sending Brevnik and Lucci off on a dead panicked run, and Lee Cravens, thinking Minicucci was hurt, went chasing after. By the time he had caught up with him, Lucci and Brevnik were gone. Back in fourteenth west, Duncan shouted but no one listened. He wanted to run too, but he stood in a swirl of beaconed dust as though rooted and shouted until his lungs ached.
All Strelchuk could see was smoke. “Bruno!” he cried, “we gotta make a run for it, man!” But he heard some voice back of him and he hollered out, “Who is it?” There was topcoal and rock down everywhere, timbers smashed like matchsticks and rails twisted up, power gone, a roiling scummy dark — and then he saw old Joe Castiglione with a piece of timber stove clean through him and Tuck Filbert smack up against the roof, his head upsidedown staring down at him, his eyes open, and blood dribbling out his big square jaw. “My God! who is it?” Strelchuk screamed, the goddamn smoke clawing his lungs to shreds.
“Here,” a wretched thin whisper said. “Collins.”
And there he was, the poor goddamn bastard, his right leg pinned between the floor and a dislodged timber. “Preach! Jesus, man, you — but don’t worry none! We’ll get you out okay!” he cried. “It’s me, Strelchuk, buddy! We’ll make it!” But God Almighty, he didn’t know what he was going to do. Collins’ whole leg must have been no more than a quarter-inch thick from the knee down. Terror gripped Strelchuk and made him shake.
Thrust up by a whistle burst, lifted by the taut jack of forced silence, the ball leans over its zenith, sinks briefly, then springs from a finger’s jar toward the Tucker City basket, into the hands of a black-jerseyed West Condoner. A roar. A bounce. A pass. Gyrating patterns as fingers trace spiraling fences around the black-trunked bodies. Drive. Retreat. Pass. Jump. Shot.
Parked in an unlit corner of the lot outside the West Condon High School auditorium, the two received the Word:
She is spreadin’ her wings for a journey,
And is goin’ to journey by and by,
And when the trumpet sounds in the mornin’,
She will meet her dear Lord in the sky!
They had switched the radio on to keep up with the ball game, underway not a hundred yards distant, but, waiting for the old coils to warm, had become distracted and failed to tune it in. Instead, American evangelist messages of love, death, and chiliasm, transmitted through the nose all the way over from Randolph Junction, leaked into the old Dodge and dribbled recklessly over their young Italian-Catholic lust. It reached their indrawn senses, now rendered in five ways tactile, as curtains of alien irrelevance, permissive because it constrained in the wrong inflections; the glow of the radio was a distant worm that warmed them….
When He comes descendin’ from Heaven
On the clouds that He writes in His Word,
I’ll be joyful, preparin’ to meet Him
On the wings of that Great Speckled Bird!
Their bodies formed a convoluted “X,” the figure of a Greek psi, he seated, boy’s unchastised legs pushed forward under the dash, she curled across his lap and facing him. By thrust and retreat, they advanced their investigations: the circuit established by their mouths, his hand prowled into the rustle of her skirt and petticoat, while her hand rubbed and clawed his neck, proxy for the stalk wedged against her underhip; parting to breathe, they fell motionless, only their eyes pursuing the game, keeping it alive. Yet, though their hands and mouths pressed forward, toppling old resistances, dispersing ancestral phantoms, they had no clear idea of what the next inch would bring. If Angela Bonali’s defloration was to be the consummation, neither of them guessed it.
For a long time, the smoke was so thick Eddie Wilson saw nothing else in the beam of his headlamp. He prayed into the radiant cloud for deliverance from despair. He tried to think of Brother Ely assuring him of his soul’s state of grace. He should have told Ferd Clemens he could use the dog. He didn’t mean to hunt this weekend. He prayed that he be saved from greed and covetousness. Then, slowly, grotesquely, a crushed human shape emerged on the floor at the ray’s end: Tommy Catter, his buddy, staring at him from under an overturned pit car. Tommy’s lamp was shattered. Eddie prayed that Tommy’s sins be forgiven and prayed for his own salvation, and, hoping only to see his wife Betty once more, closed his eyes.
Strelchuk had thrust all his weight onto the timber that pinned Ely Collins’ leg, but there was no budging it. That idiot Bruno was in a state of shock and no good to him at all, and Strelchuk cursed him. Then somebody coughed, deep thick old man’s cough, not like Bruno, and Strelchuk spun: saw two headlamps wavering through the smoke! “Hey! Who is it? Strelchuk here! Who’s there?” Jesus, he was damn near screaming!
“Juliano,” said one of the lamps, and the other, still gagging, said, “Jinx, Mike! What the goddamn is happened?”
“This wasn’t no plain fall!” Mario Juliano said.
“No, there was a shock before. Something went off.”
And Jinx Pontormo cried, “Hey! We got to get the hell out of here!”
“Wait!” Strelchuk shouted. Choking so he could hardly breathe. “What do we do with Collins? He’s pinned here by a timber!”
“Listen, if we don’ get out of this merda,” shouted Jinx, “it ain’t going to matter none who is pinned and who ain’t!” He flashed his headlamp all around and said: “It seem to me like it thins out toward the west! Maybe we can get out by old Main!”
“But we can’t leave Preach here!” Strelchuk yelled. He was miffed that Pontormo was making to leave him. “Come on, you two bastards give me a hand!”
“All right, goddamn it!” snapped Mario Juliano. “Where the hell is he?” They went back and turned their lamps down on him. “Jesus Christ, he’s in a bad way!”
Mario helped and they tried again to work the timber off Collins’ leg, but it couldn’t be done. It had all five hundred feet of mother earth piling down on it. Pontormo came and tried to help too, didn’t relish heading off by himself, the old man was scared, they were all scared.