Waterston picked up the phone and started dialing.
Joni Cooper stared into the blackness of the living room, letting the phone ring without picking it up. From the bedroom, Stan called out angrily, "Are you going to get that or what?" She did not answer him.
"Fuck it, then!"
The phone rang three more times, then stopped. Joni sat unmoving. The drapes in the room were all closed, and the lights were off. She could see nothing. But she stared into the blackness, listening, thinking.
She could hear Stan thrashing around in the bedroom, taking his aggression out on whatever inanimate object was closest to hand. They had had another fight tonight, or, rather, another battle in their ongoing fight. She knew she should be upset, but for some reason she just didn't seem to care.
She sat, staring, thinking, and after a while Stan shut off the television. Soon she heard his even, regular breathing--the breathing of sleep--loud in the silent empty house.
A year. It had been almost an entire year since she had lost the baby.
Though she knew there was something wrong with her, she had never gotten over the loss of her baby. It was affecting her still. She thought about it constantly, brooded about it, lamented it. She realized that her preoccupation with the incident was taking its toll on her marriage, her job, her friendships, but there didn't seem to be anything she could do about it. She had no control over the situation.
She was losing her grip on everything.
It was stupid, she knew. Women had abortions all the time. It wasn't the end of the world. And she could always have another child. There was nothing physically wrong with either her or Stan. Theoretically, they could have a whole bunch of kids.
But she couldn't let this child go. Stan Jr." she thought. They would have named him Stan Jr.
She even imagined sometimes, in the middle of the night, staring into the darkness, that she could hear the baby crying, crying.
From the bedroom came the sound of something heavy being knocked over.
A lamp. She heard the shattering of glass, followed by a loud hard thump. What was Stan doing in there, tearing the place apart? She knew she should get up to investigate, but she couldn't bring herself to move. Instead, she sat still, staring into nothingness, listening.
There was a muffled yelp.
And a baby's cry.
Joni stood up, her heart racing. The sound came again, and she hurried down the hall toward the bedroom. The lamp had been knocked over. The room was dark. The only light was the diffused glow of the bathroom overhead. She peeked into the room. "Stan?" she called softly.
Something small and soft nuzzled against her leg, and she felt a thrill of excited anticipation rush through her. She bent down on one knee and reached forward with both hands. Her fingers touched skin that was cold and slightly slimy. In the half-light, she saw something pinkish press toward her. Stan Jr.? She reached for it and instinctively pulled it toward her, cuddling it blindly against her breast.
Searing pain lashed through her as tiny teeth bit down and tiny claws dug in. She tried to push the small creature away from her, but it held tightly onto her breast, ripping open the skin. She fell forward, screaming, feeling the blood spurting from the open wound. Another pair of jaws bit into the exposed skin of her calf.
Her last thought, before the pain obliterated everything, was disjointedly coherent: We're too far from town. No one will hear us die.
The truck turned from Main Street to Old Mesa Road, cases of Pepsi sliding slightly across the metal floor in the back and bumping gently against the side as Brad pulled the wheel hard, trying to lessen the impact of the curve. The truck straightened out and they headed past the park toward the markets at the north end of town. Suddenly Brad bent forward and stared through the dirty windshield, squinting against the morning sun. "What in fuck's name is that?"
He pulled the truck to a stop in front of the parking lot next to the Valley National Bank building. A crowd of people had gathered in the parking lot and were standing in a tight group, facing the building, those in back pressing close against those in front and craning their necks as though trying to see something. Gordon looked over at Brad.
"Why'd you stop? You want to get out and see what it is?"
Brad took off his Pepsi hat, threw it down on the seat next to him and ran a hand through his hair in a rough effort to comb it down. "Don't see something like this every day," he said in answer.
"Must be fifty, sixty people out there."
They hopped out of the truck and started walking across the pavement toward the crowd. They could hear the clear tones of a public orator, loud even without amplification. The crowd pressed forward, listening, trying to catch a glimpse of the speaker.
"Satan preys upon the young because they are WEAK! They do not KNOW they are doing his bidding, they simply do notunderSTAND ! They are INNOCENT! And innocence is NEITHER good nor evil! It is the absence of BOTH! THIS is why innocence is so easily corruptible, why the innocent so often become the wicked! We must not be innocent OR ignorant if we expect to do battle with Satan! We must be ARMED! Armed with the ammunition of RIGHT! With the Holy Word of God!"
Brad stopped walking before they were even halfway across the parking lot. He listened for a moment to the voice, then laughed loudly. A few heads on the periphery of the crowd turned to look at him. "I thought this was something important," he said. "It's just some preacher trying to drum up business. He's probably planning to have a tent meeting tonight and tell everyone about the evils of sex and drugs and rock and roll." He spit on the asphalt then nodded back toward the truck. "Come on. Let's get going. I don't want to hear this crap, and we have a lot to do today."
Gordon held up his hand. "Wait," he said. He was already walking forward. "I want to see something first."
Though he had been tempted, Gordon had said nothing to Brad about Marina's experience with Brother Elias the other night. He could hear Brad shuffling uninterestedly behind him, the heels of his cowboy boots scraping against the loose gravel on the asphalt. "You've heard enough," Brad said. "Let's go."
Gordon ignored him and moved forward.
"Chaos is Satan's goal! He will stop at nothing less! He intends to unravel ALL of God's work, ALL of man's accomplishments and bring about his OWN world! A world of evil, of blackness, of perpetual night!"
He knew that voice. He had heard it only once, and it had been much quieter, much more subdued, but it had been filled with the same demonic intensity and had been delivered in the same rhythmic cadences. He pushed his way through the crowd, shouldering past old men and young women, stepping over small children in strollers. Until he stood before Brother Elias.
The preacher, wearing the same gray business suit he had worn that day in the hospital, his short hair neatly combed and glistening with some type of application, stood on the small bench in front of the bank, holding a Bible in his right hand as he spoke. Behind him, Gordon could see the faces of the tellers and other bank workers pressed against the tinted glass doors of the building. Brother Elias was pacing, walking back and forth along the rectangular seat of the wooden bench like an animal in its cage. Periodically, he would stop pacing and point his Bible melodramatically at someone in the crowd, his voice rising with fervor. Sunlight glinted off his gold crucifix tie clip.
Brother Elias suddenly crouched low, pointing at a young mother standing next to her infant daughter. He straightened up as he saw Gordon. He stopped speaking, and his black eyes bored into Gordon's.
The expression on his face was so fanatic, his look so hard and determined, that Gordon felt the anger which had been building inside him drain away and metamorphose into something like fear.