Burial (31 page)

I felt myself being dragged along the floor, too. I managed to hook my left foot around the leg of the left-hand bed, and that slowed us down a little. Karen had actually
disappeared
into the hole, right up to her waist, and she was twisting her body from side to side. I didn't know whether this hole bore any resemblance to quicksand — whether you sank more quickly if you struggled — but I shouted, ‘
Keep still! Keep still! Just pull
!'

Right behind me, Amelia came back into the room, and without a word she took hold of my belt in one hand and seized hold of the bed with the other.

For a few seconds, I believed that we were winning. Karen managed to lift one knee onto the brink of the hole, and I reached out with my other hand and caught hold of the shoulder of her blouse.

‘Pull!' I told Amelia ‘One big effort and we should get her out!'

I grunted and strained and we gained an inch; and then another inch.

‘Give me your other hand!' I told Karen. ‘Here — give me your other hand!'

I offered her my right hand. She reached out for it.

‘That's it, you've almost done it!'

But then she looked at me with wild piggy-eyed triumph, and harshly laughed in my face. Her hand was cold and hard as a claw, a man's hand, and she twisted my fingers around until I heard the cartilage crunch.

I roared at her, ‘
Stop, Karen, don't let him do it
!' But she twisted my left hand, too, almost crushing my fingers. The pain was incredible. I had to let her go.

‘
Karen
!' I yelled. But with a sharp
ffwwooossshhh
! she slid across the rug and into the empty hole. Immediately, the rug closed up around her, and the last I saw of her was an upraised hand, clutching, clutching, like the hand of a swimmer going down for the third time.

I hammered on the floor with my fist but it was solid; and I knew that I had lost her.

Amelia touched my shoulder. ‘Harry,' she said. ‘I'm sorry, Harry. I wish I could have helped more. I wish I
hadn't
helped at all.'

I knew what she meant. I slowly stood up and looked around the smoky, blood-spattered room.

‘Misquamacus,' I repeated. ‘I really hoped and prayed that I'd seen the last of him. The great Indian crusader. The great Red hope.'

‘Harry, there's nothing more you can do.'

‘Jesus!' I shouted. I punched the wall in anger and grief and blinding frustration. ‘Doesn't he understand that it's all over? The buffalo-hunts and the war-parties and the goddamned pow-wows? It's all over — gone! — whether we're sorry about it or not!'

Amelia put her arms around me and held me very close.
‘Come on, Harry, let's just get ourselves out of here before somebody calls the police. We've got enough trouble on our plates, without the law.'

I turned back and stared at the place where the hole had been.

‘That Misquamacus is damned to hell,' I said, in a voice like mashed-up glass. ‘That Misquamacus is damned to hell. Even if I have to take him there myself.'

Behind the brightly-lit theatre of the Revlon cosmetics counter at Marshall Field, Nann Bryce waited with tightly stage-managed patience while the woman tried Caribbean Glow for the third time, pressing her lips tightly together, and then pouting at herself in the magnifying mirror. ‘I don't know,' the woman told her. ‘I still think it's
way
too dark for me.'

‘Maybe you'd like to try the Tropical Kiss again,' Nann suggested. It was seven after one, seven minutes into Nann's lunchbreak, and she was anxious to meet Trixie to see if the results of Trixie's test had come through. She was supposed to be meeting her at Orlowski's Coffee Shop at a quarter past, and she didn't want to be late. Trixie was volatile at the best of times. All this trouble with Nat had made her ten times more jumpy and irritable than usual.

The woman turned her face from side to side. ‘I don't know. Do
you
think it's too dark?'

Nann said, ‘It depends on how you want to present yourself. Do you want to have that sultry, exotic look; or do you want to look bright and outgoing?'

‘Well, exotic,' the woman declared. ‘I mean
mysterious
, you know? I want my husband to think, “Here's a woman with something more about her than I ever knew.”'

Nann smiled. ‘In that case, Caribbean Glow's the one for you, no question.' Pause. ‘Is that cash or charge?'

It was almost twenty-five past one by the time Nann dodged through the jammed-up traffic on Washington Street and hurried into Orlowski's. The midday sun was brassy and uncomfortably hot, and the city was unusually airless. This morning's weather forecast had predicted high humidity, smog pollution and electric storms. No wind off the lake.

At least Orlowski's was cool, mirrored and mosaic-floored, with palms nodding in the air-conditioned draft.

Trixie was sitting in the far corner next to the wall-mirror, drinking coffee. She was nineteen years old, skinny and startlingly pretty — her hair back-combed and spritzed up. She wore black pedal-pushers and three layers of T-shirt and black cotton jacket. Nann thought that Janet Jackson had nothing on Trixie; but while Janet Jackson danced and sang and made millions, Trixie courted nothing but trouble. The latest trouble, of course, being Nat.

‘Oh, honey … I'm so sorry I'm late,' Nann told her, parking her bag and sitting down next to her. ‘It was Caribbean Glow or Tropical Kiss and she couldn't make up her mind for hard cash. “I want my husband to think, ‘here's a woman with something more about her than I ever knew.'”'

Trixie gave her a slanted, humourless smile. She looked like her father when she did that. Her father had died four years ago in a stupid car accident on Dundee Avenue, by Santa's Village. A huge delivery truck had charged out of a side-turning like a dinosaur. Oil, snow, and blood on the highway. Nann still missed him sorely; and still cried at Christmas. Some people died and the space they left in the world seemed to close and heal, but the space that Trixie's father had left behind him was still vacant. In Nann's heart, at least, and probably in Trixie's, and Marshall's, too. Marshall was Nann's younger child and only son.

‘Coffee,' Nann told the waitress. And then, to Trixie,
‘You eaten?'

Trixie shook her head. Nann said,'What's the special?'

‘Meatloaf.'

‘Bring me two turkey on rye.'

‘Momma,' protested Trixie, ‘I don't want anything.'

The waitress hesitated. ‘You deaf?' Nann demanded. ‘Two turkey on rye.'

The waitress left. Trixie had tears sparkling in her eyes. ‘Momma,' she said, shaking her head.

‘You're pregnant,' said Nann, taking a clean handkerchief out of her purse and unfolding it. Trixie still wasn't old enough to unfold her own handkerchiefs: at least, not the way that Nann saw it. Trixie dabbed her eyes and looked distraught

Nann said, ‘You're sitting in the corner with nothing but coffee and a face like a funeral, and I can't guess you're pregnant?'

‘It's due February fourteenth. St Valentine's Day.'

Nann sat back in exasperation. ‘How appropriate. The St Valentine's Day Fiasco.'

‘Momma, we were so
careful
!'

‘Oh,
sure
you were careful. Careful to enjoy yourselves. Careful not to think about the consequences. Careful not to consider that poor baby you're carrying, what its future is going to be, with Nat the Hat for a poppa, and Trixie the Airhead for a momma. Are you going to give birth to this child? If so, how are you going to take care of it? And what about your education? What about you? What about everything we planned?'

Trixie banged down her coffee cup. ‘The next thing you're going to tell me is that I've betrayed Poppa's memory, is that it?'

Nann covered her eyes with her hand. ‘I'm sorry. I guess I'm disappointed, that's all. I feel like it's my fault.'

Trixie held her mother's hand. ‘Momma, Nat loves me
and I love him. I know you think that he's no good at all; but then your folks didn't like Poppa, did they? What happened — it's nobody's
fault
. You were younger than me when you had me, weren't you? We made a mistake, for sure. We shouldn't have had a baby so soon. But we'll work it out, one way or another.'

Nann took her handkerchief back and wiped her eyes. ‘How many times do you think mothers have conversations like this, all over the world? Every day, I shouldn't wonder, in every town and every city you can name.'

She looked up. ‘I don't know. I guess times change. What you hoped for yourself, what you wished for your children, that can't always be. Sometimes what happens is what's best'

The waitress brought their turkey sandwiches. They both looked down at them; then up at each other. ‘Go on,' smiled Nann. ‘You have to eat for two.'

Trixie picked her sandwich up and stared at it. Nann took a bite out of hers, and started to chew. But her mouth refused to produce any saliva, and she was just chewing and chewing, a big wad of turkey-breast and dry bread that wouldn't be swallowed, no matter what.

Nann started to sob. Tears ran down her cheeks and down the sides of her mouth and plopped on to her plate. She couldn't help herself. She didn't know whether she was happy or sad or shocked or just plain silly. But in the end she had to take out her mouthful of sandwich in her napkin and put it in the ashtray, and dab her eyes again, because she was only thirty-eight years old, God help her, and she was going to be a grandmother.

Trixie said, ‘Momma — don't cry. There's no use to cry. Everything's going to work out, one way or another. At least this baby's got himself a future.'

Nann was still sobbing and Trixie was still holding her hand when the world became a different place.

They couldn't understand what had happened at first.
They thought that somebody had thrown a brick at Orlowski's window, because it cracked diagonally all the way across, and palms tipped over, their china planters shattering on the mosaic floor. Plaster sifted from the ceiling, chairs tipped.
Earthquake
? they thought. They'd read about earthquakes, seen them on the news. But then all the wall-mirrors warped and exploded, and women were screaming, and glass was sparkling everywhere.
Earthquake
! somebody screamed (or maybe they didn't — maybe they all just thought it, all together — like the crowd that watches an airplane crashing, and thinks
oh, no, dear God, oh, no
! but nobody can actually manage to speak).

Trixie clutched her mother's wrist. Her mother's wrist with its silver charm-bracelet. All the charms that her father had given her — the lucky horseshoe and the wedding-bell, and the strange crooked salamander. But then they didn't have a moment to say anything; or even to look at each other; because out of the window they could see Marshall Field's store collapsing — the whole building
collapsing
, as if it had been dynamited.

The summer fashion displays in the State Street windows vanished completely. Windows burst, mannequins flung up their arms in grotesque gestures of despair. Then they were gone, drowned in concrete. Above them, floor after floor came thundering down — steel, glass, concrete — thousands of tons of building and goods and elevators and staircases, all dropping into the subways beneath, and then deeper, and deeper still, with hundreds of shoppers and sales assistants dropping down with them. It was like the
Titanic
sinking on land — a huge building full of wealthy shoppers disappearing into the bedrock, as if it had struck an iceberg.

Nann stood by the cracked window of Orlowski's with her mouth open and watched Marshall Field's roar thunderously into oblivion. Trixie stood a little way behind her. The cloud of dust and concrete shone like fog; gilded and
choking. Gradually, it sifted to the ground, and the sun began to penetrate, but Orlowski's and all the surrounding area was oddly silent, as if the world had suddenly come to an end. It was only when they heard sirens in the distance that people began to move, and talk, and hurry outside.

Nann stood on the sidewalk and stared at the rubble-strewn site where Marshall Field's had once been. Trixie came up and stood beside her. They could barely see each other through the dust.

‘This is ridiculous,' said Nann. It was all she could think of to say.

Trixie was in shock, the back of her hand pressed to her forehead.

‘
This is ridiculous
? Nann screamed at her. ‘
A whole building doesn't just vanish
!'

‘Earthquake,' said Trixie. She took her hand away from her forehead and covered her mouth, as if she were about to retch. ‘Didn't you hear those people say earthquake?'

Nann stared at her. ‘This isn't any earthquake! This building is
gone
! All of my friends, all of the people I work with! They're
gone
! Look at it, there's nothing left! Only bricks, and bits and pieces! Where's the building gone, child? Where's the people who were in it? Where's it
gone
, Trixie? Where's the whole damned block gone to? This was Marshall Field's! This was
MarshallField's
! Where does Marshall Field's disappear to, all of a sudden?'

‘I don't know,' said Trixie, turning her back, shivering, chilled with fright. ‘I don't
want
to know.'

All around them, almost overwhelming the whooping and honking of firetrucks and ambulances, they heard deeper rumbling noises. Chunks of concrete and masonry began to rain down heavily onto the streets, some of them bouncing and shattering on the sidewalk, some of them noisily crushing taxis and automobiles.

Buildings were falling everywhere; but not just falling,
they were
vanishing
, disappearing into the ground as if they had never been built. The noise was huge: worse than an earthquake. Drumming like mad drummers; thundering like summer thunderstorms. Nann put her arm around Trixie's shoulders and clutched her tight; but for some unaccountable reason Nann
knew
: she knew why this was happening, just like her grandmother had told her, just like her great-grandmother had told her grandmother: she
knew
.