She wondered what the girl looked like. She wondered what her voice sounded like when she spoke Doug’s name.
Sitting in the theater with a big tub of buttered popcorn on her lap, Laura had realized there were things she had chosen not to see in the last couple of months. A long golden hair on a suit jacket, lying curled up like a question mark. A scent that was not her own. A flush of makeup smeared on a shirt cuff. Doug drifting into thought when she talked to him about the baby; to whom had he run in his dreams? He was like the invisible man, wrapped up in bandages; if she dared to unwrap him, she might find nothing at home.
Doug was with another woman, and David moved in Laura’s belly.
She sighed, a small sound, and she turned off the bathroom light.
In the darkness, she cried a little. Then she blew her nose and wiped her eyes, and she decided she would not say a word about this night. She would wait, and watch, and let time spin out its wire for fools like her to dance upon.
She took off her clothes and got ready for bed. The rain outside was intermittent, hard and soft, like two instruments playing at odds. In the bed, she stared at the ceiling with a babycare book next to her on the bedside table. She thought of her lunch with Carol today, and her vision of the angry hippie who used to be.
Laura realized, quite suddenly, that she’d forgotten what a peace sign looked like.
Thirty-six, she thought. Thirty-six. She placed her hands on David’s swell. A funny thing, all those people who said not to trust anyone over thirty. Real funny.
They had been right.
Laura turned out the light and searched for sleep.
She found it after twenty minutes or so, and then the dream came. In it, a woman held a shrieking baby by the back of its neck, and she screamed toward the sea of blue lights, “Come on, come on you pigfuckers, come on ain’t gonna kiss your ass no more ain’t gonna kiss nobody’s ass!” She shook the baby like a ragged flag, and the sharpshooter on the roof behind Laura radioed on the walkie-talkie that he couldn’t drop the woman without hitting the baby. “Come on, you bastards!” the woman shouted, her teeth glinting. Blood was splattered over the yellow flowers on her dress, and her hair was the color of iron. “Come on, fuck you! Hear me?” She shook the baby again, and its scream made Laura flinch and step back into the protection of the police cars. Somebody brushed past her and told her to get out of the way. Somebody else spoke over a bullhorn to the woman who stood on the apartment’s balcony, the words like a rumble of dumb thunder across the sweltering projects. The woman on the balcony stepped over the dead man at her feet, his head shot open like a clay pot, and she held the pistol against the infant’s skull. “Come on and take me!” she hollered. “Come on, we’ll go to hell together, okay?” She began to laugh then, a cocaine giggle, and the inhuman tragedy of that hopeless laugh crashed around Laura and made her retreat. She bumped into other reporters, the TV people on the scene. They were grim and efficient, but Laura saw something darkly joyous in their eyes. She couldn’t look in their faces without feeling shamed. “Crazy bitch!” somebody yelled, a man who lived in the projects. “Put down that baby!” Another voice, a woman’s: “Shoot her ’fore she kills that baby! Somebody shoot her!”
But the madwoman on the balcony had found her stage, and she paced it with the pistol’s barrel against the infant’s skull and her audience spread out in the parking lot below. “Ain’t gonna give him up!” she hollered. “Ain’t gonna!” Her shadow was thrown large by the lights, and moths fluttered in the heat. “Ain’t gonna take what’s mine!” she shouted, her voice hoarse and cracking. “Told him! Told him! Ain’t nobody gonna take what’s mine away from me! Swear to Jesus, I told him!” A sob burst out, and Laura saw the woman’s body tremble. “Ain’t gonna! Oh my Jesus, ain’t gonna take what’s mine! Fuck you!” she roared at the lights and the police cars and the TV cameras and the snipers and Laura Beale. “Fuck you!” Someone began playing an electric guitar in one of the other apartments, the volume cranked up to earsplitting, and the noise of the bullhorn and the walkie-talkies, the reporters, the onlookers, and the raging of the madwoman merged into a single terrifying sound that Laura would forever think must be the voice of Evil.
The woman on the balcony lifted her face to the night, her mouth open in an animal scream.
A sniper fired. Pop, like a backfire.
Pop went the pistol in the woman’s hand as the back of her head blew apart.
Laura felt something warm and damp on her face. She gasped, fighting upward through the dream.
Doug’s face was over her. The light was on. He was smiling, his eyes a little puffy. She realized he had just kissed her.
“Hi,” he said. “Sorry I’m so late.”
She couldn’t make her mouth work. In her mind she was still at the projects, on that hot night in July, and moths spun before the lights as the policemen stormed the building. Perpetrator down, perpetrator down, she heard a policeman saying into a walkie-talkie. Three bodies up there, Captain. She took the kid out.
“Got a kiss for me?” Doug asked.
She gave him one, on the cheek, and she smelled the scent that was not her own.
“Rainy out,” Doug said as he unknotted his tie. “Traffic’s pretty bad.”
Laura closed her eyes, listening to Doug move around the bedroom. The closet opened and closed. The toilet flushed. Water ran in the sink. Brushing his teeth. Gargling, good old Scope. When would he realize about the tickets? she wondered. Or maybe he was past caring?
Her hands met over the bulge of her belly. Her fingers laced together and locked.
She slept, this time mercifully without dreams.
In her womb, David was still. Doug placed his hand against Laura’s stomach, feeling the baby’s heat, and then he sat on the side of the bed looking at his hand and remembering where it had been. Bastard, he told himself. Stupid, selfish bastard. He felt swollen with lies, bloated with them, and how he could look into Laura’s face he didn’t know. But he was a survivor and he had a silver tongue, and he would do what he had to do in a world where you took what you could get when you could get it.
He had a bad taste in his mouth. He left the bedroom and walked into the kitchen, where he opened the refrigerator and got out a carton of orange juice. He poured himself a glassful, and he was nearing the bottom of the glass when he saw the two ticket stubs next to the telephone. It hit him like a punch between the eyes: he’d forgotten to throw them away since he’d taken Cheryl to see a Tom Cruise movie across town a few nights ago. He almost choked on the orange juice, almost bit through the glass. The ticket stubs. There they were. Right there. From his pants pocket. The ones he’d taken off. Oh, great! Laura had found them. Damn it to hell, what was she doing going through his pockets? A man had a right to privacy! Hold on, don’t lose it. Just hold on. He picked up the stubs, remembering when he’d pocketed them. Right after that, Cheryl had guided him to the snack bar for kingsize Cokes and Milk Duds. His eyes ticked back and forth from the telephone to the ticket stubs; he didn’t like what he was thinking, but why were the stubs next to the telephone? He felt heat working in his face, and he started to throw the stubs into a trash can but stopped his hand. No, no; leave them where they were. Exactly where they were. Finish your juice. Go to bed. Think about it, and come up with a story. Right, right. A story. Client in town, wanted to see a movie. Uh-huh. Selling limited partnerships in movie companies, and a client wanted to check out a movie. Sure.
Laura wasn’t dumb, that was for certain. He would have to work on the story. If she asked. If she didn’t…he wouldn’t volunteer anything.
Doug returned the ticket stubs to where they’d been. He drank down the rest of his orange juice; it was very bitter toward the end. Then he started back into the bedroom, where his wife lay sleeping and his son was curled up in her belly waiting to be born. Before he got there, he thought of something Freud had said, that nobody ever truly forgets anything. He set the alarm clock for an early hour, lay in t
he dark for a while listening to Laura breathe and wondering how he’d gotten here from the moment they had exchanged vows and rings, and finally sleep took him.
Seven miles could be the distance between worlds. It was that far—that close—to the apartment where Mary Terror slept with her new baby cradled against her. She made a soft, moaning noise, and her hand drifted down and pressed against her scars. The baby stared out at the world through painted eyes, his body giving off no warmth.
Rain fell on the roofs of the just and unjust, the saints and the sinners, those who knew peace and those in torment, and tomorrow began at a dark hour.
II
UNKNOWN SOLDIER
1
Bad Karma
THE SUN WAS SHINING, and mary terror was in the woods.
She ran on cramping legs through the wilderness, the breath pluming from her mouth in the chilly air, her body giving up moisture into the gray sweatsuit she wore. It had been a long time since she had run, and her legs weren’t used to the effort. It angered her that she’d let herself get so out of shape; it was a weakness of the mind, a failure of willpower. As she ran through the sun-dappled Georgia forest about three miles from her apartment, she held the Colt .38 in her right hand, her index finger curled around the trigger guard. Sweat was on her face, her lungs beginning to labor though she’d barely gone a third of a mile at an easy pace. The ravines and hillocks were rough on her knees, but she was in training and she gritted her teeth and took the pain like an old lover.
It was just before two o’clock on Sunday afternoon, four days after she’d found the message in the Rolling Stone. Her pickup truck was parked at the end of an old logging road; she knew these woods, and often came here to practice her shooting. It had come upon her to run, to work up a sweat and make the hinges of her lungs wheeze, because the road to the weeping lady lay ahead. She knew the dangers of that road, knew that she was vulnerable out on the open byways of the Mindfuck State, where pigs of every description cruised for a killing. To reach her destination, she would have to be tough and smart, and she’d lived too long as Ginger Coles in a redneck cocoon for the preparations to be easy. Her body wanted to rest, but she pushed herself onward. As she went up a hill she caught sight of the highway to Atlanta in the distance, the sunlight sparking off the glass and metal of speeding cars; then she was going down again, through a pine tree thicket where shadows carpeted the earth, the breath burning in her lungs and her face full of heat. Faster! she urged herself. Faster! Her legs remembered the thrill of speed at a high school track meet, when she’d strained past the other runners toward the tape. Faster! Faster! She ran along the bottom of a wooded ravine, pushing herself to go all out, and that was when her left foot hit a snag and she went down on her belly in the dead leaves and kudzu. The wind whooshed out of her and her chin scraped along the ground, and she lay there puffing and listening to a squirrel chatter angrily in a nearby tree.
“Shit,” Mary said. She sat up, rubbed her chin, found scraped skin but no blood. When she tried to stand, her legs didn’t want to. She sat there for a moment, breathing hard, dark motes spinning before her eyes in the cold, slanting sunlight. Falls were part of the training, she knew. Falls were cosmic teachers. That’s what Lord Jack used to say. When you knew how to fall, you truly knew how to stand. She lay on the ground, catching her breath and remembering the commando training. The Storm Front’s headquarters had been hidden in woods like these, only you could smell the sea in the eastern winds. Lord Jack had been a hard taskmaster: sometimes he awakened them with whispers at four o’clock in the morning, other times with gunshots at midnight. Then he would run the soldiers through the obstacle course, keeping time with a stopwatch and shouting a melange of encouragement and threats. Mary recalled the wargames, when two teams hunted each other in the woods armed with pistols that fired paint pellets. Sometimes the hunt was one-against-one, and those were the trials she’d enjoyed the most; she had never been tagged in all the dozens of hunts Lord Jack had put her into. She had enjoyed turning back on her adversary, coming around in a silent, stalking circle, and delivering the blow that finished the game. No one had ever beaten her at the hunt. No one.
Mary forced herself up. The pain in her bones reminded her that she was no longer a young firebrand, but low coals burned longer. She began running again, with long, steady strides. Her thighs and calves were aching, but she closed her mind to the pain. Make friends with agony, Lord Jack had said. Embrace it, kiss it, stroke it. Love the pain, and you win the game. She ran with the pistol held at her side, and she saw a squirrel dart from the brush and scramble toward an oak tree to her right. She stopped, skidding in a flurry of leaves, slowing the squirrel down into strobelike motions with the force of her concentration. The squirrel was going up the treetrunk, now leaping for a higher branch.
Mary lifted the pistol in a two-handed grip, took aim, and squeezed the trigger.
The crack of the shot and the explosion of the squirrel’s head were almost simultaneous. The body fell into the leaves, writhed for a few seconds, and lay still.
She ran on, the sweet tang of gunpowder in her nostrils and the pistol warm in her hand.
Her eyes searched the shadowed woods. Pig on the left! she thought, and she checked her progress and whirled in a crouch with her gun ready, aiming at a scraggly pine. She ran again, over a hillock and down. Pig on the right! She threw herself to the ground, raising dust, and as she slid on her stomach she took aim at another tree and fired a shot that clipped a top branch and sent a bluejay shrieking into the sky. Then up again—quick, quick!—and onward, her tennis shoes gouging the ground. Another squirrel, drowsing in the sun, came to life and fled across her path; she tracked it, heading toward a group of pines. It was a fast one, desperate with fear. She fired at it as it clambered up a treetrunk, missed by a few inches to the left, but hit the squirrel in the spine with the second bullet. She heard it squeak as she passed on, a signature of blood across the treebark.
Pig to the right! She crouched again, taking aim at an imaginary enemy. Off in the forest, crows called to each other. She smelled woodsmoke as she ran again, and she figured houses must be near. She entered a tangle of thicket, the sweat trickling down the back of her neck and dead leaves snagged in her hair. As she fought through the growth, battering it aside with her forearms, she thought of Jack urging her on with his stopwatch and whistle. He had written the message from the underground; of that she had no doubt. He was calling the Storm Fronters together again, after all these years. Calling for her, his true love. There had to be a purpose behind his summons. The Mindfuck State was still full of pigs, and all the Revolution had done was make them meaner. If the Storm Front could rise up again, with Lord Jack holding its red banner, she would be the happiest woman on earth. She had been born to fight the pigs, to grind them down under her boots and blow their shitty brains out. That was her life; that was reality. When she got back to Lord Jack and the Storm Front was on the move again, the pigs would tremble at the name of Mary Terror.
She burst through the foliage, her face raked by thorns. Pig to the left! she thought, and she dove for the ground. She hit the clayey dirt on her shoulder, rolled through weeds, and contorted her body to the left, lifting the pistol to take aim at—
A boy.
He was standing maybe fifteen yards away, in a splash of sunlight. He wore bluejeans with patched knees and a camouflage-print windbreaker, and on his head was a dark blue woolen cap. His eyes were large and round, and in his arms he held a small, boy-sized rifle.
Mary Terror lay where she was, the gun aimed in the boy’s direction. Time stretched, breaking only when the boy opened his mouth.
“You okay, lady?”
“I fell,” she said, trying to assemble her wits.
“Yeah, I saw. You okay?”
Mary glanced around. Was the boy alone? No one else in sight. She said, “Who you out here with?”
“Just me. My house is over that way.” He motioned with a turnin
g of his head, but the boy’s home was about a half-mile away, over a hill and out of sight.
Mary stood up. She saw the boy’s eyes fix on the revolver in her hand. He was about nine or ten, she decided; his face was ruddy, the cheeks chill-burned. The rifle he held was a .22, and it had a small telescopic sight. “I’m all right,” she told him. Again her gaze searched the woods. Birds sang, cars droned on the distant highway, and Mary Terror was alone with the boy. “I tripped,” she said. “Stupid, huh?”
“You ’bout scared the life outta me, comin’ through there and all.”