Rumors of Peace (22 page)

N
IGHTY-NIGHT
,” Mrs. Stappnagel called across the roof.

“Nighty-night,” Valerie called back.

Of methodical habits, Valerie's parents went to bed precisely at ten-fifteen, leaving the night bigger and better. Not that I didn't like them, they were very nice, but the darkness took on greater depth and mystery when the house was silent.

The night air was warm, motionless, heavy with the smell of the potted lemon trees. There was no moon, not even a thin crescent. The sky was so black that you could scarcely make out the big oaks or the nearby mass of hills behind which Mendoza lay.

“No bomber's moon tonight,” I observed.

“Of course not. It's a new moon. That's when it's hit so obliquely by the sun that you can't see it.” Little Valerie lay straight and narrow in her sleeping bag, like a mummy. “Astronomy is interesting.”

“Do you believe in fate?”

“No. That's astrology.”

I lay propped on an elbow, listening to the crickets, to the frogs croaking from the pond, breathing the lemon smell.

“Why do you say nighty-night? Why don't you say good night?”

“I have no idea.” She gave an irritated squirm in her bag. “This roof is so darn hard.”

“It's not hard.”

“It's as hard as—”

A mammoth blush instantaneously filled the sky behind the hills. A towering, fan-shaped glow of dull red, veined all over with long descending silver streamers. Large dim shapes bloomed high in the rosy light, turning over and over with immense languor. I watched as if mesmerized, frozen on my elbow, feeling somewhere inside me a remote groping toward astonishment. Then a gigantic blast struck the house broadside, slamming my head back with shattering impact.

I was running inside a nightmare, on a treadmill where blows kept knocking me back, until I realized I was in a dark room and the blows were the hard edges of furniture I was colliding with, reeling back from, tangling up with Valerie, whose face suddenly lit up harsh white. I was pulled into someone's arms, a blinding flashlight in my eyes.

“Everybody be still,” whispered Mr. Stappnagel, beaming the flashlight before him and making his way carefully through the room. My eyes followed him from his wife's arm, which was so tight that it bunched up the skin on one side of my face. My bangs fluttered with the drilling breaths from her nostrils. Her husband pushed wide the half open door to the roof.

“My God,” he whispered.

The huge glow was still there, paler now. I felt the glow reach my eyes, but it went no deeper, as if my skull, instead of having been shattered, had been cemented solid.

Mr. Stappnagel closed the door and stood leaning against it. He seemed not to know what to do. He beamed the flashlight on his wristwatch. “Ten-twenty-two.”

“Is it an air raid?” his wife whispered.

“I don't think so. I don't hear the warning.” He listened.

She listened too. She kept plucking and smoothing Valerie's hair, strands of which were caught in my mouth.

Suddenly Mr. Stappnagel went over to the light switch on the wall. Brilliance filled the room, showing his face chalk white. The floor was littered with glass, the windows framed by a few remaining pieces. Pictures had fallen from the walls and lay among overturned lamps and broken vases. There was an unearthly sense of stillness, except for a
small sound of creaking from above. It was the chandelier, swaying gently to and fro. Mr. Stappnagel reached up and stopped it, slowly lowering his arms. Again he seemed not to know what to do. Then he stepped hurriedly to the radio. But with his hand on the knob he paused, turned around.

“Maybe you should put them to bed,” he said, his eyes flicking down from his wife's face to mine and back. A tiny movement, sending a hairline crack through the cement of my head. It was as if he wanted me out of the room. As if the radio would say something I shouldn't hear. As with the blow of an ax, the cement split.

“Shell!”

“Now wait—”

My legs were already running, my hands clawing the arm that held me back. I tried to bite it, then tried to bite the fingers that Mr. Stappnagel was clamping around my wrist. His voice rang in my ear. “It could be miles from Mendoza! There's no telling from here!” I kept biting and kicking, rocked inside by shock waves of grief until they turned into a surging nausea and I came to a standstill.

“I think you should go with Mother now,” Mr. Stappnagel said quietly. “As soon as I hear anything I'll tell you. I promise. Go with Mother now.”

I allowed myself to be led away with Valerie. After a few steps I leaned over and vomited on the floor, Mrs. Stappnagel holding my head. I didn't want her to do that. I didn't want to be touched. She led us on, holding me to her side, and at the end of the hall she opened Valerie's door. She reached inside to the light switch.

“I want to go home,” I said.

“It's all right,” she whispered, taking us inside. There was no broken glass here; she led us quickly to the bed.

“I want to go home.”

“It's all right now. It's all right, it's all right.” She kept whispering this, smiling at me as she drew the bed covers back. “Up you go. Both of you.”

I climbed in with my terrifying grief, and she patted the covers around us. “It's a miracle you didn't cut your feet in there,” she said, straightening up, and she stood for a moment with her hand pressed hard against
her temple. In the distance, very faintly, came the wail of a siren. She smoothed her hair back. “Try not to worry now. Father and I will tell you if we hear anything. It'll be all right, just try not to worry.” She went over and pulled the blackout shades down, then unplugged the radio and put it under her arm. She smiled as she turned off the light and went out, quietly closing the door behind her.

“I hope it's not Shell,” Valerie whispered in the darkness.

I lay with my hands pressed against my face. I lay that way for a long time, as more sirens in the distance filled the air. Then I pulled the blankets away and crawled over Valerie.

“Where are you going? Mother said we should—”

After feeling my way to the door, I let myself out and closed it behind me. I walked down the unlit hallway to its end where it gave onto the living room. They had turned off the overhead light, a dim lamp glow bathed the entranceway. I leaned against the wall a few feet back. I couldn't see them or the radio, but I could hear the dial turning through static and music and stopping.

“—an unconfirmed report that the city of Mendoza has been leveled by an explosion—there is no communication with the city at this time—the tremendous blast was felt fifty miles away, switchboards throughout the area are in a state of chaos—you are asked not to use your telephones except for reasons of extreme emergency—you are asked to stay off all roads—we repeat—”

A sharp, bitter-tasting drool poured into my mouth. I was aware only of that, of how it slipped through my lips and slid down, hanging from my chin in a long, fine string that glistened in the lamp glow, trembling and swaying and catching on my pajama front. Then with a numbness, supporting myself along the wall, I moved slowly back to Valerie's room. I fumbled the door shut behind me and felt my way back to the bed, lying down across the end. The sirens were shooting along the road leading past the house to Mendoza, the piercing screams filling the room. A massive soundlessness was tearing through my throat. I wanted to go home and be dead with them in their arms.

The door opened, and Mrs. Stappnagel spoke into the darkness. “It's all right, they're fire trucks, don't be frightened. They'll be gone soon
. . . try to sleep. Suse, we haven't heard anything yet . . . we'll tell you as soon as we do.”

The door closed. I pulled myself to a sitting position, then suddenly jumped up and barged through the dark to the table where I fumbled wildly with the lamp, finally getting it turned on. My shorts were on the floor. With shaking hands I changed into them while looking frantically around for my shirt, not seeing it, leaving my pajama top on and seizing my tennis shoes. I staggered around, pulling them on. I felt I had no balance, no center of gravity. I fell against the bed.

Valerie had sat bolt upright. “What are you doing?”

“Going home.”

“But you can't! You mean alone?”

“Don't tell them!”

“But they said—but you shouldn't—” She began pushing the covers back.

“I'll kill you!” I clasped my hands around her neck, squeezing the thumbs in. “I'll kill you.”

She sat perfectly still, her small eyes wide. I took my hands away and went to the window.

In a chain of flashing red lights, fire engines and ambulances and police cars screamed by my side, their headlights illuminating the dirt and weeds I raced along, and illuminating my back, too, so that I feared a police car would swerve over and arrest me, or the Stappnagel car would come after me—Valerie had told them, or they had seen me run down the driveway, and they would say everything's all right and drag me back, and I would never reach Dad and Mama dead in the rubble, the three of us dead together, all that I wanted now, and as I ran, I was crying in loud, open sobs, deafened by the sirens; but for all that, I ran with wild speed, on the toes, hands knifelike to cut the air.

A wheel swerved off the tar, spitting gravel and dirt against my legs. Someone shouted from the back of a fire truck. I moved farther in, pounding flat on my feet now, a stabbing pain in my side. At last the stabs grew so sharp that I plodded to a standstill in the rushing lights
and bent over, gasping. When my breathing came even again, I ran on with a fresh burst of speed.

After a while I began to feel a cycle. A terrific speed, then a heavy, plodding run, then the hunched-over standstill. As the cycle repeated itself I began to feel the distance bitten into, solid miles eaten up.

The traffic went in cycles too. The chain of lights would suddenly vanish down the road, leaving the night black, filled with the peaceful sound of crickets and the steady thud of my feet, the road stretching before me like a gray ribbon. Then a single vehicle would shoot by, and another, and then again came the long screaming chain of lights.

Sometimes I started crying again while I ran. Sometimes I noticed the stale vomit taste in my mouth. But at some point I only knew that noise and lights alternated with silence and darkness and that my pounding legs had no feeling.

The sirens sank in low, separate whines. Lifting my head from my jogging, I recognized the stretch of road I was on as lying just outside town. From within the slowing vehicles, the drivers' faces were turning and squinting at me as I ran by. I swung into the pear orchard at my side, stumbling over dirt clods, hearing shouts from down the road like barked commands. When I came alongside the shouts, I stopped and held onto a tree trunk, catching my breath and leaning around, looking.

Two convoy trucks were parked on the side of the road. Helmeted soldiers stood with rifles; others were swinging flashlights, waving ahead ambulances and fire trucks while ordering back private cars. A woman was arguing in a hysterical voice from her rolled-down window. A soldier kept waving her back, shouting, “Emergency vehicles only! Get off the road!” She kept arguing in her high, crazy voice. Another soldier stepped forward and raised his rifle. She pulled over to the side, opposite the trucks, where two or three other private cars had been forced, their drivers talking huddled together outside them.

They should go by foot, it was the only way. Maybe others were, and the orchard was filled with people like me running through the darkness, for I had struck off again, diagonally, to come out on the Alhambra Avenue side. I could hear vehicles passing the checkpoint, their sirens starting up again, screaming down the road and swerving
onto Alhambra Avenue; all I could see through the last rows of trees was the swift glare of headlights and flashing red. As I stumbled across the clods to the orchard's edge, I held my hand pressed above my eyes, ready to block out what lay ahead. At the edge my courage failed me, and I stopped dead. Then I forced myself to step out.

The headlights illumined house after house, tree after tree, exactly the same as when I had left that morning. My hand trembled down my face; than a rocket of ecstasy burst inside me, and I shot through the traffic, barely clearing an onrushing ambulance, and raced down Alhambra Avenue, loving everything unbearably, my hair whipping back from my ears, this pile of dog crap I leaped over, all the sirens screaming past, and this warm black night and all nights to come, and all days, and everything that would ever happen. Each fresh block revealed itself intact, perfect. People stood on their front steps, some on corners, but not many, and they seemed already used to the wild noise, more interested in my flight. It must be late, past midnight, maybe one o'clock, a dreamlike hour to be running down the street.

Coming toward me was a stream of ambulances and private cars, all turning onto the street that led to the Community Hospital. Turning my head as I ran past, I glimpsed the hospital nestled against the hill where Helen Maria had invoked the gods so long ago, glimpsed a mass of activity before the entrance, people rushing around in a blazing network of headlights. Then I turned off on Arreba Street and covered the last three blocks with a final burst of speed, throwing myself against the pepper tree in the front yard, breathing deep and ragged into its bark. I drank in the house. Dark, peaceful, a miracle of all that was beautiful and familiar. Dad and Mama lay safely asleep, or they were sitting safe in the living room, behind the blackout shades, discussing the night. And now I would climb the stairs and feel my arms around them.

But when I had regained my breath and started toward the stairs, the enormity of my misbehavior had already begun sinking in. I had disobeyed army orders, radio orders, Stappnagel orders, and had gone running through the dangerous night, in my pajama top. Even in the joy of seeing me, Dad and Mama would be upset; they would worry from this minute on that I was demented, that I would spend the rest
of my life committing hazardous, lawbreaking acts and bring unhappiness down on myself. They were not dead. It was enough. I gave the house a last happy look and started back.