It rolled impartially across the two-lane blacktop and erased it from view. The McKeons' nice restored Dutch Colonial was swallowed whole. For a moment the second floor of the ramshackle apartment building next door jutted out of the whiteness, and then it went too. The KEEP RIGHT sign at the entrance and exit points to the Federal's parking lot disappeared, the black letters on the sign seeming to float for e moment in limbo after the sign's dirty-white background was gone. The cars in the parking lot began to disappear next.
“What the Christ is this?” Norton asked again, and there was a catch in his voice.
It came on, eating up the blue sky and the fresh black hottop with equal ease. Even twenty feet away the line of demarcation was perfectly clear. I had the nutty feeling that I was watching some extra-good piece of visual effects, something dreamed up by Willys O'Brian or Douglas Trumbull. It 'happened so quickly. The blue sky disappeared to a wide swipe, then to a stripe, then to a pencil line. Then it was gone. Blank white pressed against the glass of the wide show window. I could see as far as the litter barrel that stood; maybe four feet away, but not much farther. I could see the front bumper of my Scout, but that was all.
A woman screamed, very loud and long. Billy pressed himself more tightly against me. His body was trembling like a loose bundle of wires with high voltage running through them.
A man yelled and bolted through one of the deserted lanes toward the door. I think that was what finally started the stampede. People rushed pell-mell into the fog.
“Hey!” Brown roared. I don't know if he was angry, scared, or both. His face was nearly purple. Veins stood out on his neck, looking almost as thick as battery cables. “Hey you people, you can't take that stuff. Get back here with that stuff, you're shoplifting!”
They kept going, but some of them tossed their stuff aside. Some were laughing and excited, but they were a minority. They poured out into the fog, and none of us who stayed ever saw them again. There was a faint, acrid smell drifting in through the open door. People began to jam up there. Some pushing and shoving started. I was getting an ache in my shoulders from holding Billy. He was good-sized; Steff sometimes called him her young heifer.
Norton started to wander off, his face preoccupied and rather bemused. He was heading for the door.
I switched Billy to the other arm so I could grab Norton's arm before he drifted out of reach. “No, man, I wouldn't,” I said.
He turned back. “What?”
“Better wait and see.”
“See what?”
“I don't know,” I said.
“You don't think—” he began, and a shriek came out of the fog. Norton shut up. The tight jam at the OUT door loosened and then reversed itself. The babble of excited conversation, shouts and calls, subsided. The faces of the people by the door suddenly looked flat and pale and two-dimensional.
The shriek wanton and on, competing with the fire whistle. It seemed impossible that any human pair of lungs could have enough air in them to sustain such a shriek. Norton muttered, “Oh my God,” and ran his hands through his hair.
The shriek ended abruptly. It did not dwindle; it was cut off. One more man went outside, a beefy guy in chino workpants. I think he was set on rescuing the shrieker. For a moment he was out there, visible through the glass and the mist, like a figure seen through a milkscum on a tumbler. Then (and as far as know, I was the only one to see this) something beyond him appeared to move, a gray shadow in all that white. And it seemed to me that instead of running into the fog, the man in the chino pants was jerked into it, his hands flailing upward as if in surprise.
For a moment there was total silence in the market.
A constellation of moons suddenly glowed into being outside. The parking-lot sodium lights, undoubtedly supplied by underground electrical cables, had just gone on.
“Don't go out there,” Mrs. Carmody said in her best gore-crow voice. “It's death to go out there.”
All at once, no one seemed disposed to argue or laugh.
Another scream came from outside, this one muffled and rather distant-sounding. Billy tensed against me again.
“David, what's going on?” Ollie Weeks asked. He had left his position. There were big beads of sweat on his round, smooth face. “What is this?”
“I'll be goddamned if I have any idea,” I said. Ollie looked badly scared. He was a bachelor who lived in a nice little house up by Highland Lake and who liked to drink in the bar at Pleasant Mountain. On the pudgy little finger of his left hand was a star-sapphire ring. The February before, he won some money in the state lottery. He bought the ring out of his winnings. I always had the idea that Ollie was a little afraid of girls.
“I don't dig this,” he said.
“No. Billy, I have to put you down. I'll hold your hand, but you're breaking my arms, okay?”
“Mommy,” he whispered.
“She's okay, I told him. It was something to say.
The old geezer who runs the secondhand shop near Jon's Restaurant walked past us, bundled into the old collegiate ~ letter-sweater he wears year-round. He said loudly: “It's one of those pollution clouds. The mills at Rumford and South Paris. Chemicals.” With that, he made off up the Aisle 4, past the patent medicines and toilet paper.
“Let's get out of here, David,” Norton said with no conviction at all. “What do you say we—”
There was a thud. An odd, twisting thud that I felt mostly in my feet, as if the entire building had suddenly dropped =three feet. Several people cried out in fear and surprise. There was a musical jingle of bottles leaning off their shelves and destroying themselves upon the tile floor. A chunk of glass shaped like a pie wedge fell out of one of the segments of the wide front window, and -I saw that the wooden frames banding the heavy sections of glass had buckled and splintered in some places.
The fire whistle stopped in mid-whoop.
The quiet that followed was the bated silence of people waiting for something else, something more. I was shocked and numb, and my mind made a strange crosspatch connection with the past. Back when Bridgeton was little more than a crossroads, my dad would take me in with him and stand talking at the counter while I looked through the glass at the penny candy and two-cent chews. It was January thaw. No sound but the drip of meltwater falling from the galvanized tin gutters to the rain barrels on either side of the stare. Me looking at the jawbreakers and buttons and pinwheels. The mystic yellow globes of light overhead showing up the monstrous, projected shadows of last summer's battalion of dead flies. A little boy named David Drayton with his father, the famous artist Andrew Drayton, whose painting Christine Standing Alone hung in the White House. A little boy named David Drayton looking at the candy and the Davy Crockett bubblegum cards and vaguely needing to go pee. And outside, the v pressing, billowing yellow fog of January thaw. The memory passed, but very slowly. “You people!” Norton bellowed. “All you people, listen to me!”
They looked around. Norton was holding up both hands, the fingers splayed like a political candidate accepting accolades, “It may be dangerous to go outside!” Norton yelled. “Why?” a woman screamed back. “My kids're at home! I got to get back to my kids!” “It's death to go out there!” Mrs. Carmody came back smartly. She was standing by the twenty-five-pound sacks of fertilizer stacked below the window, and her face seemed to bulge somehow, as if she were swelling. A teenager gave her a sudden hard push and she sat down an the bags with a surprised grunt. “Stop saying that, you old bag! Stop rappin' that crazy bullshit!” “Please!” Norton yelled. “If we just wait a few moments until it blows over and we can see—” A babble of conflicting shouts greeted this.