I was tired-exhausted-but I couldn’t sleep for the longest time. All I could think about was what would happen tomorrow: the secretary of homeland security murdered by terrorists on the Indian Canyon Bridge. And no one knew about it but the killers and me. Me, a seventeen… no, now an eighteen-year-old kid, wanted by the police as a murderous fugitive.
Crazy as she was, Crazy Jane was right: I had to stop it. Somehow I had to warn Yarrow or warn the police or warn somebody. I just had to. But how would I ever get anyone to believe me? I’d already told Detective Rose about it. He thought I was a liar. Everyone else thought I was a murderer. How could I convince them to take me seriously?
Wide-awake, I thought about it a long time. I thought about going back to Centerville to try to warn Yarrow myself. But how would I get there? I didn’t have a car. I didn’t have any money. I considered hitchhiking-but how long could I stand out there on the open highway before a police car went by or some driver recognized me and called 911…?
While I was thinking about all this, one of the cats-it was too dark for me to see which one-climbed on top of my chest. Purring loudly, he kneaded me with his forepaws so that I felt the sharp prick of his claws in my flesh. When he was done with that, he curled up on top of me and lay there, purring. I listened to the sound, comforted by the warmth of his furry body…
Then a hand grabbed my shoulder. I sat up, terrified and confused, blinking, looking around. Had the police found me?
No. It was Crazy Jane.
There was a bit of gray light seeping into the room now. I realized I must’ve fallen asleep. It was almost dawn. In the faint glow of morning, I could see Jane squatting there next to me. Her hand was clutching my shoulder. Her big eyes were gleaming.
“It’s all right,” she said in a low murmur. “It’s too early for them… the impulses don’t start till the sun comes up… We can get the cans before they reach us…”
“The cans?” I asked sleepily.
“Come on.”
My body ached as I worked my way up off the floor. It was going to be a while before the bruises and sores healed. I followed Jane’s shape in the dark room. The sound of her crazy muttering came ceaselessly from her silhouette.
“Jane knows what to do. They can’t stop Jane. They can’t take Jane back to the hospital. I know it’s mind control. I know how they do it. Electricity. That’s the secret.”
It went on like that as she took me out of the apartment, down the stairs again, back out into the street. A damp, bitter morning chill had settled over the city. It ate through the flannel of my work shirt and brought goose bumps out on my arms. Just as she had before, Jane took hold of my elbow and started walking along in that quick, choppy, squirrelly way of hers. Just as before, she kept talking as she walked.
“Jane knows. Jane knows. They can’t fool Jane.”
The city was still quiet. Cars went racing by on the all-but-empty streets. The few pedestrians we passed on the sidewalk were still night people, hunched and solitary. They paid no attention to us.
The sky grew steadily brighter as we went, and the traffic grew heavier. But the sun still hadn’t come up over the horizon when we stopped on the sidewalk in the warehouse district where we’d met the night before.
We were standing in front of a large, empty lot. It was big, nearly a city block wide and long. Maybe it had been a park once, or maybe there were buildings here and they’d been torn down or fallen down. Whatever the reason, there was nothing here now but an unbroken field of garbage and debris: piles of rubble, rebar, discarded appliances everywhere-and papers and coffee cups and fast-food boxes tumbling through it all, blown by the dawn wind.
Jane let go of my arm. She worked her hand into the depths of her voluminous coat. When the hand came out again, she was holding two black plastic trash bags-the same kind as the ones lying around all over her apartment.
“Cans,” she said, stretching out the word in that strange way of hers. “Caaaaans.”
She handed one of the bags to me and walked into the empty lot, carrying the other one.
At first, I couldn’t figure out why we were here or what she was doing. I just stood there, shivering in the cold, and watched as Jane moved into the empty lot, wading through the debris and garbage with her quick steps. Her chin was lowered almost to her chest, her head was down as she began to walk from one end of the lot to the other. Once or twice, I heard her murmur softly: “Caaaaans.”
Then she picked one up. It had gotten brighter now, and I could see what it was from where I was standing: an aluminum soda can. Of course, then I understood. She was collecting cans so she could get the deposits. I used to do the same thing when I was little. When you buy a soda in our state, you pay a ten-cent deposit on the can. Then when you take the can back, they give you back the dime. It’s supposed to stop people from throwing the cans away and making a mess. But of course people are lazy and they throw the cans away anyway. If you go out and look around, you can collect them-a lot of them-enough to make some pretty good money. As always, Crazy Jane was not as crazy as she seemed.
So I joined her. And as the day slowly broke, the two of us moved in concert over the field of garbage. She crossed one way and I crossed the other, searching the ground for cans. In the middle, we would pass each other and I would hear her murmuring, “Jane knows… the impulses can’t fool her… it’s mind control, that’s all… to take me back to the hospital… ” and other nutty stuff like that. Then I’d go past and she’d go past and we’d go on crisscrossing through the garbage, searching for cans.
There were a lot of them. I guess Jane had some experience in this and knew all the best places to look. By the time the sun finally edged up over the railroad tracks across the street, her large black plastic bag was rattling with cans, and so was mine. By then, too, my back hurt something fierce, and I was tired. This was hard work, moving back and forth, bending over, scanning the ground. And the bag kept getting bulkier and bulkier as I added more and more cans, making it harder to work.
We went on for what felt like a long time, at least an hour after the sunrise. After a while, I started thinking about that story in the newspaper. It said that Yarrow was arriving at eleven a.m. and would meet with the governor for an hour before traveling to the president’s house. That didn’t give me a lot of time to get back to Centerville, to find him, to warn him. But I couldn’t get back to Centerville without money. So I went on-back and forth across the field, wrestling cans out from the rebar and rubble and stuffing them in my bag.
Finally, Jane stopped. She straightened. She stretched backward, her grimy, pocked face turned up to the morning sky. Her plastic bag sat on the ground beside her, bulging with cans.
“That’s all,” she said.
I looked around me. We were only about halfway over the field. “That’s all?” I said. “Are you sure?”
She nodded. “Jane knows.”
Once again, we went off together, she and I, walking down the street side by side, each of us now carrying a bag stuffed full of cans. Jane kept her free hand on my elbow as always and, as always, she kept up her murmuring, guiding me along with her quick steps.
It was full morning now. The city was waking up. There were a lot more people around us. There was traffic on the broad avenues-cars, taxis maneuvering for space, and the occasional bus rumbling by. There were men and women hurrying past us on every side, more and more of them coming out of their apartment buildings, coming out of stores, heading for their cars or bus stops, heading for work. With every step we took, I felt more exposed. Here we were: a young guy and a muttering crazy lady carrying two huge plastic bags full of soda cans. We kind of stood out in the crowd, if you see what I mean. Any minute, I thought, someone would take a good look at us and recognize me. Or maybe a policeman would go by and spot me. Any minute, I thought I was going to have to drop my bag and run for it.