"Don't panic," Nelson tells him. "That clock never told the right time. The Laid-Back is only up at Ninth, we'll be there in a minute."
Then Nelson sees the dire occur: at the intersection of Sixth and Weiser, where Kroll's Department Store used to be, two cars ahead of them, the traffic light goes out. Hanging high above the asphalt, the light was green, and now is dead. Not red, dead. The sticky traffic halts completely. Revellers, mostly Hispanic kids in jeans and windbreakers, dart among the cars. A shout is going up, but here and there, as if nobody knows exactly what is happening. The cars behind them honk, in celebration or exasperation. The streetlights flicker.
"Oh my God," Annabelle says, "terrorists just like they said," and begins to cry again.
"It's a little glitch," Billy says, feigning calm, though this must feel like a tunnel to him. "These lights are all on computers."
"Son of a bitch!" Nelson says. Decades of wrongs, hurts, unjust deaths press behind his eyes. He pushes down on the window locks. Hooded kids with sparkle dust on their faces are crowding around the Corolla, and looking up the street toward Mt. Judge. The city's fire alarms begin to wail; church bells are dully ringing. At the top of Mt. Judge, fireworks ignite, one slow bloom after another, mingled with staccato gashes, potassium white and barium green, sodium yellow and chlorine blue, dying, blossoming, dying in drifts of dismissed sparks as the dull concussions thud through the windshield. "We're missing it!" he cries.
The Corolla was the third car from the intersection when the traffic light went out. The first car glided through, unaware of the breakdown, and the next waited for the car on the right to come out and cut across. Sixth is one-way here, so there is no traffic from the left. The cars behind are in the dark, but up this close to the intersection the problem and its solution are plain: take your turn, in democratic American style. The car ahead of Nelson, a little cherry-red specimen of the remodelled VW Beetle, cute as a bug, with oval slant taillights like Disney animal eyes, creeps out and through, and the car on the right, a serious, four-ring, square-cut tan Audi, takes its turn like a good citizen. Then it is Nelson's turn, his dirty white Toyota's turn, to pass through the doused light and continue on, up Weiser toward the mountain and its fireworks, past where Kroll's used to be and where Mom and Dad got together (if they hadn't, he would not exist, think of that) and on across Seventh, where mile-long trains of coal would drag through from Pottsville to Philly and once upon a time there was a Chinese restaurant, and on up to look for a parking space in the blocks beyond the Laid-Back, around where Dad used to set type for the Verity Press. It will be jolly, to walk, the four of them, out in the air. He has an image of a frozen Daiquiri, or should it be a Margarita, with salt all around the rim?
"Hey!" he exclaims. Tailgating the Audi, a black-and-silver Ford Expedition, a huge SUV with truck wheels and a side mirror the size of a human head, keeps coming, trying to barrel through out of turn, against all decency and order. Some brat of the local rich, beered-up and baseball-hatted, with his smirking airhead buddies, gives Nelson a glazed so-what stare. Nelson sees red. "That fucker," he says. This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. Pru shrieks when she realizes that Nelson's foot is firm on the accelerator and that nothing short of ramming into the Expedition will stop their forward motion. Its fat high bumper-two-tone, the lower half chrome-reflects their right headlight in a flaring smear; she braces for the bump, the crazed windshield, the crumpled metal, the thud of pain. But the cocky brat in the baseball cap sees with widened eyes that Nelson isn't kidding; and brakes hard, so his buddies' empty heads all bounce in unison. The Corolla skims by, still accelerating, missing by an inch. The dig-out smell of hot rubber fills the interior. The couple in the back seat cheer, a bit breathlessly. "I hate SUVs," Nelson explains. "Pretentious gas-guzzlers, they think they own the road."
High in the tinted windshield, so it looks greenish, a ball of twinkling fire expands. The Christian-rock music thumps away in the vast illumined excavation on their right. Nelson shivers, as if a contentious spirit is leaving him. And now Pru is attacking him, trying to hug him, her nose poking into his cheek, her breath fluttering warm on his neck. "Oh honey, that was great, the way you made that asshole chicken out. I think I wet my pants."
"Me, too, almost," says Annabelle.
"It's funny about death," Billy contributes from the back seat. "When you actually face it, it's kind of a rush."
To Nelson Pru says, so softly the others could hear only if they were to ignore each other and listen hard, "Let's not hang around too long at the Laid-Back. I thought I'd stay at your place tonight."
Chapter 5
From: Roy Angstrom, Esq. [royson@buckeyemedia.com] Sent: Saturday, January 8, 2000, 8:29 AM To: ron.harrison@qwikbrew.com. Subject: Thanking you
Hi Grandma and Ron-Its been a week so its "high time" to check in and thank you for the great time we had together New Years Eve. I really enjoyed seeing all those fireworks around the world moving across all the time zones. It made me feel how small the planet EARTH is. Mom said there were even some on Mt Judge we could of seen. The thing I remember best was on David Letterman the three slobby guys where the one hit a golf ball off the fat ones belly button and the third guy caught it in his mouth. He could of broke a tooth doing that.
The reason Mom didn't come back to the house at all was that they nearly had a fatal accident when the traffic lights went out and it left them all exausted. She says Dad will be coming out to live with us here in Ohio and thats great too.
Heres a joke-how do you tell when a Islamic terrorist is scared? Answer-he shiites in his pants. Actually it was nice that in Iran they let them go except for the passenger who had his throat cut for looking funny at the one they called the Doctor. What really took my interest in the news is this Tibetan boy just my age who was the second most important lama in the world and escaped by walking several days through a blizzard in the Himmelayas, hes called the KARMAPA. On the same website I read where the Dolly Lama (the most important lama) said of YK2 "Millennium? The sun and the moon are the same to me." You can look all this up Ron at www.tibet.com. A lot of jokes are at www.ohyesyouare.com. Sample-How do you tell Al Gore from Bill Bradley? Answer one is a bore and one sags badly. ROTFL (rolling on the floor laughing).
Thanx again for a really great time and teaching me 3-handed pinockle. I dont expect to stay up playing pinockle past midnight again until I get to college, maybe to Kent State like Dad. Its the best.
luv u both;-) (wink) ROY
"Hi? Annabelle? It's-"
"Nelson! How is it going?"
"Not bad. Good, actually. Her apartment is pretty roomy, though eventually we might look for a house. Roy would like a house in Stow."
"He must be thrilled."
"Thrills at that age wear off in about half an hour, but, yeah, he seems pleased. And Judy is pleased. She says boyfriends take you much more seriously if you have a father on the premises. She's broken up, thank God, with that creep who kept her in Ohio to go to some very stuffy party, as she described it. She wishes now she'd come to Brewer."
"Is she still going to be a stewardess?"
"Well, that's a little, where you'd expect, up in the air-"
"I knew you were going to say 'up in the air'!"
"But I think so. If one of these jerks doesn't talk her into living with him instead. But girls now-they're not so easy to talk into things. They're, what's the word, empowered. Judy teases me, the way I keep looking at her, but it's amazing to me, how beautiful she's become, even since I saw her last summer. Every tooth, every eyelash, you know, just so exact. She has Dad's and my cowlick in one eyebrow. And there's a new switchy quick way she moves and does things. She's smaller than her mother, though her hair is like Pru's used to be, but she doesn't have that sort of awkward broadbeamy semi-helpless thing Pru does. Judy is knit. She went out for all these sports at high school, and works out at this health club. She lets me feel her biceps."