Ronnie has stopped screaming but she’s quaking in Flynn’s arms.
Hannah looks at the two of them, compressed into a vibrating pile. She swallows and says, “You take her down to your car and you drive out of here.”
Flynn doesn’t move or speak, just stares at her and shakes his head, first yes then no.
In the same even, horribly restrained tone, Hannah says, “Just get out. We have a mutual friend who would want it this way.”
She watches as her words sink in. Then Flynn is pulling up to his feet, hauling Ronnie with him, steering to the doorway.
* * *
Hannah waits until they’re out of sight.
Then she begins to do everything wrong. She wants to believe she’s acting on instinct, but what’s compelling her is a force with an unknown name, a motivation so new or so buried that it has no common label, no definition in the average heart.
She holsters her gun, then takes Speer by his long arms and drags him into the center of the gasoline puddle. She deposits him there, his belly wading in an inch of liquid, then she manipulates his wrists and awkwardly rolls him from stomach to back to stomach. She lets the arms drop to the ground, takes a breath, and looks out over the city, a hilly skyline of highway, a few modest high-rises, and dozens of pockets of manmade light.
Then she squats back down, reaches into Speer’s back pants pocket, and extracts a starched white handkerchief, perfectly folded and creased. She shakes it loose, soaks it in gasoline, brings it up to the head, and wipes furiously, a new mother dedicated to cleansing every inch of soiled skin on her overgrown, mutant child.
She wishes the gurgling noise would stop or the eyes would close. She turns the head to the side slightly, opens the mouth with her fingers, and jams the sopping rag inside until only a few stray corners protrude, little flags of futile surrender.
Hannah stands up and walks a circle around Speer. His eyes look up at her, blink once. She feels dizzy with the smell of the gasoline. She reaches into her jacket and pulls out a book of matches. She looks at them for a second, a cheap green-covered pack with a line drawing of a lunch car on the front flap and the words Uncle Elmore’s Rib Room beneath it.
She pulls free a stubby match with a small, crusty white head. She closes the book, tucks the front flap, turns the book over. She strikes the match and nothing happens. She strikes again. A small flame lights and grows and flickers. She cups it from the wind, squats again, drops it on the head, and steps back.
There’s an elongated second of pure waiting. Then the catching, the spurt of flame, the furious run of heat and light.
She stands and stares as the fire continues to grow and feed on the chemical-soaked bundle. It’s a funeral pyre. Like something out of history. Like something imported from an ancient, foreign culture. From a community with a love of cleansing and ritual and finality. From a clan with no confusion or doubt in the persistence of mortality and decay.
From some distant people who always know when the end has arrived.
44
Hazel sits in the very last seat of the bus, her army duffel bag filled to bursting with every secondhand possession she’s ever owned. She’s got the bag propped up against the window and is using it as both a pillow and insulation from the wind that’s blowing through a crack in the pane. She’s trying too hard to sleep and not succeeding. She’s trying not to think about the slight motion sickness that keeps loitering around the edges of her stomach.
She’s an hour outside of Quinsigamond and headed west, she thinks, in the general direction of Chicago. Three hours ago, she was sitting in her usual booth in the Rib Room, drinking the last coffee she’ll ever share with Elmore Orsi. Neither one of them spoke, but when Hazel drained her mug, Elmore handed her a white envelope that contained three thousand dollars and an all-route, coast-to-coast bus pass that doesn’t expire for a year.
She tried to push it back at him, but Elmore shook his head and gave a smile and said simply, “It’s not from me. I found it in one of the back booths after I locked up.”
There was no postmark on the envelope, just Hazel’s name typed in capital letters. She’s surprised how little she cares about knowing who sent the money and the pass. She could name some likely candidates, but she chooses not to. She had planned on leaving at dawn anyway and the envelope simply steered her toward the Greyhound station.
She pulls her feet up onto her seat, pulls her knees up into her chest, and wraps her arms around herself. With one hand, she reaches up to her ear and secures the small pink earphone that’s plugged into the old transistor radio in her jacket pocket. Of course it’s tuned to WQSG. But it’s only a matter of time and distance until she loses the signal and has to pull in something new.
From the sound of things, the Rib Room is buzzing, filled with people and noise and equipment. Ray Todd is broadcasting a special edition of City Soapbox on location from the diner. “Behind the lines, in the heart of enemy territory,” as he calls it. Ray is in rare form, as if the tension of being surrounded by all this mutual hatred and suspicion has elevated his talents to new heights, given him abilities he’d never known before. Even his voice has mutated a bit, taken on this Cronkite-style low rumble which infuses his subject matter with more importance than it deserves. After all, Hazel thinks, this wasn’t a moon walk or a presidential assassination. It was simply a lesson in stupidity and vanity. In the cost of having a family.
She closes her eyes, lets her body rock with the motion of the bus, and, in spite of herself, begins to listen and picture the scene.
If you’ve just joined us, we’re broadcasting live from the Canal Zone in a special report concerning the events of the last twenty-four hours. As most of you know, an anonymous telephone call early yesterday morning led a team of explosives specialists to the WQSG transmitting antenna and support tower. The tower, located on Devlin Hill at the northern border of the city, was apparently wired with what at first appeared to be plastique explosive. An unnamed officer on the scene later acknowledged, however, that the substance and device found on the radio tower “couldn’t have blown a gym locker. Either,” he said, “it was a bad prank or these people are genuine idiots.” Sources within the police department confirmed an anonymous telephone call from an individual who said that “a blow is about to be struck by the forces of anarchy. We’re through joking.” Police refused to disclose whether the caller was male or female …
Hazel can picture Ray, his studio set up in the extra-large “family” booth at the front of the lunch car and a host of slightly confused but intrigued Zone regulars crowding around the table, jockeying for position with Ray’s fans and assorted QSG staff. In the middle of it all, Elmore Orsi is bringing mugs of coffee and platters of Danish, whistling and bantering as he runs a gauntlet of bodies and power cables.
Apparently, Ray has a three-way phone hookup going. He’s interviewing both Chief Bendix and City Manager Kenner, prodding them both, trying to invoke a little name-calling and character-bashing.
CHIEF BENDIX: I want to be clear that we’re treating this as a genuine bombing attempt, an act of wanton terrorism, if you will. Due to the grace of God and the talent of our Commonwealth’s elite bomb squad, we were able to avert hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of destruction. It wouldn’t be prudent to disclose anything more at this point, until we’ve had a chance to assimilate all the information ourselves—