Salvation City (32 page)

Often as not he’d have to give up, frustrated. But there were times when he wanted to shout hurray.

Human Race, Get Out of My Face
.

Of course! How could he have forgotten!

His mother would have liked Clem, he decided. Except for his religion, she probably would have liked him a lot.

“Clem,” he said, laying the last spoon away in the drawer. “Are you saying it’s not evil for Mason to run off and leave his mother all alone like that? I mean, she’s so sick she can hardly get out of bed.”

Clem raised his voice above the sizzling frying pan. “He probably told himself she’d be okay. He probably figured he could count on us. Nobody’s ever on their own in Salvation City. Like, you weren’t here, so you wouldn’t know, but during the flu it wasn’t like other places. There wasn’t any fighting over food or medicine, or stealing from sick or dead people—none of that stuff. And Mason knows—Hey, sounds like we woke someone up.”

Either it was all the noise they’d carelessly started making or the smell of the French toast, which Clem was now transferring from frying pan to platter. Someone could be heard on the stairs. Someone was descending with thumping, exaggerated slowness, like an actor playing a zombie. Cole remembered that Tracy had sprained her ankle yesterday. They waited, watching the doorway, and when she finally appeared each of them involuntarily took a step back.

Maybe she was sleepwalking. She certainly didn’t look fully awake. Clearly, she had just rolled out of bed. Her face was puffy and creased. Her wavy brown hair stuck out all over her head like a fright wig. Yesterday, PW had cleaned the cut on her eyebrow and put a Band-Aid on it. The Band-Aid was now stained with blood, and there were smears of dried blood on her forehead and cheek. The skin around the cut had turned purplish, and her mouth—hanging open in a dumb-struck expression—looked bruised and puffy, too.

She paused in the doorway, holding on to the wall, her weight on one bare foot. The other foot she held poised, toe daintily pointed, an Ace bandage binding the swollen ankle.

She was wearing her short hot-pink bathrobe with the white pom-poms at the belt ends. At the moment the pom-poms grazed the floor: she had slipped the robe on but had neglected to belt it. The robe hung open, the weight of the pom-poms pulling it open, dragging it half off her shoulders.

Maybe it was from hitting her head when she fell down yesterday. Maybe it was all the pills PW had made her swallow. Until she smiled at him Cole wasn’t sure she even knew who he was. The sight of Clem clearly perplexed her. She stared at him as if she had never seen him before. And maybe this was not so strange, because in that moment Clem was utterly transformed. Cole himself might not have known him. A person thrown from a high window or a cliff might have looked as Clem looked now, his mouth an O, his black-button eyes ready to burst right off.

And the next instant he was gone.

Cole barely had time to take this in. It was as if a tornado had blown through the kitchen and whisked Clem out the back door—before the spatula he’d dropped to the floor had ceased clattering.

The commotion upset Tracy. She swayed precariously in the doorway, still balancing on one foot but looking as if she would not be able to hold herself upright much longer. The robe had slipped a little farther down her shoulders. Another move and it would be on the floor, and then she’d be totally naked.

He simply could not look away. And strangely, he did not feel guilty or ashamed—or rather, these feelings were there, but he had other feelings as well. More clamorous ones—ones he would have found hard to put into words—drowning out guilt and shame.

He said, “Tracy?” And again, “Tracy? You okay? Can you walk?”

She smiled at him without answering. She’s going to fall, he thought, and as he stepped gingerly toward her, he flashed on PW’s story about his father stealing so close to a fox he was tracking that he could touch it.

Cole noticed the scar. It must have been from the cancer surgery, he thought. He would have expected to find the scar ugly but he didn’t, though somehow it made her seem even more naked and vulnerable. Her battered face, her limp, her lost and frightened air, made him think of a fallen angel.

She swayed, and when she swayed her breasts swayed. How was it he had thought big breasts were gross? They—
she
was apocalyptic.

He wanted to say something nice and reassuring to her, but when he tried to speak he could not. In the smell rising from her flesh he thought he caught whiffs of bourbon and vanilla. When he took hold of the robe to pull it back onto her shoulders, a thrill passed through him, making his hands shake. She looked at him and smiled again, but with the absent expression of someone not exactly sure why she was smiling. Her eyes were like PW’s when he was at his drunkest. Would she be like him and remember nothing about any of this later? God, Cole hoped so.

When he picked up the ends of the belt, she let go of the wall and rested her palms on his shoulders. He had stopped breathing and his heart was wild. Gently he tightened the belt around her waist. There: she was decent.

She leaned her weight against him as he helped her hobble to a chair. Without her asking, he knew she must want water. He brought her a glass, which she gulped down noisily, water dribbling down her chin. He brought her another glass, which she also gulped down, and a third, which she drank more slowly.

The water seemed to clear her head. She sat up straight, belching softly. She glanced around the kitchen, her eyes lighting up at the sight of the French toast sitting on the platter on the counter. Cole remembered that in all the hysteria of the day before she hadn’t eaten anything except breakfast.

He wet a dish towel at the sink, and as he wiped it over her face she closed her eyes and made a pleased, grateful-sounding gurgle deep in her throat, which made him turn red. When he stopped she kept her eyes closed for a moment and then blinked rapidly several times before popping them open. Wide-eyed, she looked like a girl. A pretty young girl. She looked like her niece, Starlyn.

“Good morning!” she said. Her gaze swept the room again and came once more to rest on the counter. “Do I see French toast?” She pointed excitedly. “Did you make that? Oh, what a peach!”

He had just set her breakfast in front of her when they heard a noise overhead.

“DaDa’s up,” Tracy said cheerfully. But Cole, familiar with PW’s condition the morning after he’d drunk too much, felt a tremor of anxiety. He thought of the people waiting at the church.

He was glad he wasn’t being forced to make conversation. With a hunger to match her thirst, Tracy was attacking her plate. (Though even in her befuddled state, she had not forgotten to give thanks.)

PW, on the other hand, would surely not want to eat first thing this morning. What he’d want was a whole lot of coffee.

As he was making the coffee, Cole started composing in his head another message to his aunt.

And later that morning, when he was alone—when Tracy was upstairs taking a bath and PW had dragged himself and his hammering head off to the church—Cole sat down to write Addy.

Now that the sun was high the room was becoming stifling. The air reeked of maple syrup and bacon. Cole took a sip of coffee. He had decided to start drinking coffee just that morning. Before, he’d never liked the taste. Honestly, he still didn’t like the taste, but everyone knew coffee was supposed to help you think. And he had so much thinking to do.

Yet one more decision he was going to have to explain to PW.

When he had sent his message to Addy, he went out and got on his bicycle. He was headed for the church, but once he started riding he decided to take the long way around, past the old railroad station, making a loop through downtown. It was hot but he wanted to be out for a while, and bike riding always soothed him.

After a mile the sweat poured down his face and gnats swarmed him. There was no coolness in the shade of the large trees under which he passed, just a damper kind of heat. Only the faintest blue showed in the hazy sky. A dog on someone’s porch began barking when it saw him, the noise like firecrackers going off in the calm street.

Downtown was mostly dead. He passed Hix’s Hardware (“Not today, brother, I got work to do”). He passed the drugstore, the used furniture store, the barber shop, the yarn store, the pizzeria, and the gun shop. He made a right at the post office and rode past the bank and the thrift shop, in front of which a woman had just placed a sign: “Brand New Used Maternity Clothes.” Beyond the thrift shop was a diner that had closed sometime before Cole moved to town. It had closed suddenly, and if you looked in the window you could see the tables still set for lunch, the dishes slowly filling up with dust. The car dealership at the end of the street had also gone out of business. A parallel Cole wheeled along in the glass.

The church was a plain beige building with brown roof and trim, the kind of place you’d expect to go for some mundane but useful thing, like lumber or tools or house paint. Cole knew it had once been an American Legion Post, and long before that, about a hundred years before, a meeting-house had stood on this site, a white clapboard building that had been burned to the ground by the Ku Klux Klan after a Quaker pastor gave shelter to a black man—a hobo from Kentucky—accused of pocketing a nickel a white farmer had dropped on his way to town.

When he rode up to the church, Cole saw that no one was there. The parking lot was empty except for a few starlings pecking at the tufts of grass sprouting through cracks in the asphalt. Cole figured PW must have sent everyone straight home and then gone home himself (and most likely right back to bed). He must have just missed them. He figured Clem was probably right about people starting to calm down, and a feather of satisfaction tickled him when he thought how they must be starting to feel pretty foolish, too.

There was a cross mounted on the wall to the right of the church’s main entrance. To the left, rising from a grassy circle on the pavement, was a pole bearing the American flag. There was not the slightest breeze to stir the flag, which was flying at half-staff. Cole had almost forgotten about Jeptha Ludwig. He’d never met Jeptha, but he knew his parents from church, not nearly as well, though, as he knew Jeptha’s grandfather. He tried to think what he would say to Boots the next time he saw him.

“Whatever you say, don’t say ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’” That was his mother speaking. Those words had driven her mad after her parents had died. An expression people got from TV, she said. From cop shows. It had been said to Cole himself many times, and though it had never consoled him, it had always brought back his mother’s disgust.

If he kept going on this road he would eventually reach the old schoolhouse where the Harleys lived. Cole thought of Clem. Poor Clem. He understood why Clem had run away like that this morning. He might be grown-up in a lot of ways, Cole thought, but he was still only thirteen. A year ago, maybe even less, Cole might have followed on his heels.

In his big hurry to leave, Clem had forgotten a notebook he had brought with him. Cole had found it where he’d left it, lying next to the computer. Inside were notes Clem had made for the sermon he was working on. “2 B Xtn = 2 4gv.” The text was from Ephesians. “Be kind and tenderhearted toward one another, and forgive one another as God through Jesus Christ has forgiven you.”

Yes, yes, he thought. He would forgive them.

He would forgive them all.

Now that he was standing still, Cole felt the heat like a hand pressing down on him. Even his elbows were perspiring. He wavered, wondering if he should continue on to Clem’s and see how he was doing. But he wasn’t really worried about Clem. He couldn’t worry about Clem—not when there were so many other people to worry about.

Starlyn!

But he mustn’t let himself think about Starlyn now, either. It would be too much for him. It would leave no room for all the other thinking that needed to be done. And when he thought about all the people he knew who were in some kind of trouble, he sighed and slumped over his handlebars. Who could say when PW and Tracy would be all right again?

As he turned his bike toward home (yes,
home
, he thought: they were not his parents but it was his home; he didn’t have any other), he felt the tension inside him ease. He was not unhappy. In fact, he could not recall another time when the future had looked so bright and full to him. He had made up his mind, and he had no doubt that he would go to Berlin. He did not know exactly when, but he was determined to get there. He had no doubt, either, that he was going back to school, and that one day he would go to college. What else was he to make of that perfectly clear image of himself up ahead, wearing jeans and a leather jacket and the glasses he’d probably need by then (from all that studying), shaking up a lecture hall with his comments? (Girls would dawdle after class to ask would he mind clarifying some point he had made and he’d pretend not to know it was just an excuse to flirt with him.)

He did not believe the world was about to end, and he saw himself living a long time and going many places and doing many different things. “Your whole life ahead of you”—never more than just an expression before—now came to him with the ring of a blessing.

But it was not just to new places Cole wanted to travel. He felt a great longing to retrace his steps, to return to places he had already been, where so much had happened but which remained so dreamlike and murky in his head that he could not lay hold of them. Even if all he could do was stand in the street and look at it, he wanted to go back to the house in Little Leap, as he wanted to go back to Here Be Hope—just to see what it felt like to be there. He wanted to go to Chicago and find out for himself how much had changed since he had lived there and what had happened to everyone, even if what he found out was bad.