The Waiting Room (30 page)

Then, incredibly, over the space of only a few seconds, as if safety lay somewhere
within
it, the crowd formed itself into a huge seething mass. For a moment, there was stillness, quiet. Then that mass, that huge knot of people, moved like a tide in our direction.

Again Whelan said, "What the
hell
is going on?" There was fear in his voice now.

Some of the people at the leading edges of the crowd were facing toward its center and were backing toward us, arms wide, as if trying to contain it. Others were facing us—I remember a young man in a pink long-sleeved shirt who carried a mantel clock under one arm, reached wide-eyed for us with the other, and looked as if he were trying mightily to break into a run at the same time. But the crowd behind him, the crowd that was literally at his heels, made him stumble once, then again, and again, until, at last, he went down, that clock still under his arm, and the crowd pushed inexorably over him, into the front of the Chevette. Into the door behind which Whelan was standing. He started to move out of the way, but he was too slow—the crowd pinned him between the door and the frame. He tried to straight-arm the door; his face got beet red. Then the inevitable happened. He began to wheeze. His arms buckled, and the top of the door pinned him to the top of the frame, just below his neck.

Then the Chevette itself moved a good three or four inches in response to the crowd pushing against it. It was enough. It freed Whelan momentarily, and, using all the strength I could muster, I shoved at him; he burped loudly—for some insane reason, it made me smile—and he fell into the driver's seat. Half a second later, the Chevette's door slammed shut under the incredible weight of the crowd.

I bolted around to the rear of the car, climbed up onto the top of the car, and lay there with my hands gripping both sides of the roof as the car pitched and yawed and swayed in response to the tide of people pushing at it.

I saw the LTD. It was moving at a good ten miles per hour forward into the crowd. It was running people down by ones and twos and threes while the crowd itself tried—in vain because of its very mass—to get out of the way. And in a narrow path behind it, people lay writhing in their brightly colored spring finery, their flea market acquisitions--clocks, paintings, dolls, toasters, table lamps, puzzles—still tucked under their arms, or clutched tightly in dead hands, or smashed beside them on the street.

I yelled to the crowd surging around the Chevette, "Push it over, push it over!"—meaning the LTD—because I knew the crowd could easily do that if everyone joined in the effort. But it was, of course, a crowd of the panic-stricken and the fearful and the confused. It was not a collective intelligence, it was anti-intelligence, anti-rational, so it was doing exactly the opposite of what it should have been doing. And people were dying because of it.

"Push it over!"
I
screamed. "Push the damned thing over!" And the part of the crowd near the Chevette heard me above their own screams and shouts and curses. They heard me, and they put their bodies flat against the Chevette and began pushing against it.

"No!" I screeched, "goddammit, no!" But there were people on both sides and to the front of the Chevette—people who were now up on the sidewalk and falling through the big window at the front of the post office and jamming up against the mailboxes, people lying one on top of the other so they formed a human wall. The Chevette did not go over.

The LTD stopped.

The crowd continued to surge around me.
I
screamed, "It's stopped! It's stopped!"

Just as the first raindrops fell, the crowd began to disperse.

~ * ~

The LTD was thirty or forty feet away, at the center of Brookfield's main street, and because there was no glaze of sunlight on it,
I
could see through its windshield. I saw Art DeGraff first. He was where he had been the night before—in the middle of the back seat, his huge dark eyes in that hideous white oval face peering ratlike out at me. His anger was still etched hard into his skin, but he was wearing a grisly smile now. A smile of murderous satisfaction. "Damn you!" I shouted over the squeals and screams of the dispersing crowd. "Damn you, Art! May you burn in hell!"

And very clearly, his lips formed these words in response: "I have!"

I saw, then, people sitting so close to him that they looked as if they were propping him up. They were the Haislip brothers, Ryan and Trippe, from the res-taurant in South Canaan. And like Art, they had wide, murderous grins on their mouths. And beside one of them, next to the right-hand passenger door, was the waitress, Florence, who was clapping her hands gleefully and looked as delighted as a five-year-old going to kindergarten for the first time. I remembered what Madeline had said: "It takes all kinds, Sam, to make a world." And, "People don't die, their
bodies
do." And, "You can know no one too well."

I was beginning to understand her.

Murder survived, it was true. Murderers filled up that LTD.

But love survived, as well. Because it was the survival of love that had brought me to this village. Love. And friendship. Abner's love for Phyllis. And the friendship Abner and I shared.

All of it survived.

All of it lingered.

Like leaves lingering through the fall and into winter.

And now the storm was coming, the monstrous hausfrau was coming to sweep away all that had to be swept away, all the lingerers and malingerers and murderers and lovers. She was coming to push them all on because, like petulant children, they had refused to go when it was time.

But there, in Brookfield, as I clung to the top of Kennedy Whelan's Chevette Scooter and the crowd dispersed, leaving behind the dead and dying in their bright spring finery, their bright
Let's go to a country flea market
hats and sweaters and scarves and skirts, I was certain that what was about to happen was only a spring storm.

How was I to know that it was going to be the same kind of storm that Abner had been sure was building in the air around the beach house? "You've got to go, Sam," he'd pleaded then. "You've got to go now!"

But he'd been wrong.

He had thought that his Phyllis was going to be swept away from him.

But he'd been wrong.

~ * ~

I took the first cold drops of rain square on my back, through my shirt.

And they
were
cold. They were very cold. Colder even, I thought, than an April rain should be.

It made me shiver, in fact. I climbed down from the roof of the Chevette and peered into the driver's seat, where Whelan moaned and wheezed rhythmically. I patted his suit pocket, got his inhaler, stuck it in his mouth, and squeezed. He swiped weakly at the air. "Sorry," I said. His eyes fluttered open, then closed, and he muttered something unintelligible. "It's raining," I said.

I straightened. I looked through the rain at the rustic, pleasant, comfortable façade of a New England hamlet—the general store, the restaurant, the grange hall with its arc lamp. I could see faces in all the windows—the faces of the witnesses to tragedy. And I could see that each face was wearing the stiff mask of awe and disbelief and fear.

And I could see, beyond the grange hall, against a backdrop of black sky, a row of red and blue and gold and white plastic banners flapping crazily in the wind. And dimly, because it was nearly at right angles to me, I could see a big white sign which read "BROOKFIELD
FLEA .”

And because, I guessed, the LTD still sat big and dark and wet in the middle of the street, no one had moved to help the injured and the dying.

Whelan moaned a curse. I leaned
over,
glanced at him through the driver's window. Again his eyes fluttered open, then closed. "You okay?" I said, and though he didn't answer, his breathing was more regular, and I told myself that he was indeed okay. "Roll your window up," I said. He struggled feebly for a moment trying to roll it up, then wheezed, "A little rain never hurt anyone."

This is what I heard standing on the street outside the Chevette:

I heard the raindrops pelting against the roof of the car. Below it, Whelan's heavy breathing. And around me, on the street, the pleas and moans of the injured and the dying.

I could see into the LTD. I could see the people in it—the driver, the old man in the gray suit, the Haislip brothers, Florence, Art.

This is what I thought of as I watched them: I thought of Fizzies. Because that's what was happening to them. They were fizzing up, like Fizzies do in a glass of water. They were inside that big dark LTD and the cold rain was pounding on it, and they were fizzing up. All except Art.

Whelan moaned again; again he cursed; and then he said, "What's that noise?" I glanced at him. His eyes were open and he was trying to sit up, but he was having a bad time of it. I grabbed his hand and tugged. He sat up.

"Jesus," he said, "I'm all wet."

"It's raining," I said. "Are you going to be all right?"

"Sure," he said, sounding stronger now. Then, for the first time apparently, he saw the carnage on the street. "My God!" he whispered.

"I've got to help these people," I said.

In a wide circle around the LTD, some lay quietly in their spring finery, others writhed; others twitched as if in response to errant bursts of electricity. Some moaned, some begged "Please" over and over again. Someone, a young man, was saying, "Mama!" And a few—a man in a red spring jacket, a woman in gray overalls and a cream-colored shirt, a little girl in a frilly white dress, several others—were doing what everyone in the LTD, except Art DeGraff, was doing. They were bubbling and boiling under that cold rain. They had their mouths wide open in a big "0" as if to scream, but no screams came out.

I looked at the LTD. It was empty. Except for a long, pasty white face and huge dark eyes peering fearfully out from the middle of the back seat. "Damn you!" I whispered at him. But he wasn't looking at me. His gaze was fixed, and unmoving, as if he were blind—it was the gaze, I knew, of a man who wants desperately to be dead.

~ * ~

Where do you start? I'd been in similar situations in Nam. Not often. Twice. After quick firefights, when I had to run from the injured to the dying to the dead, yelling "Corpsman, corpsman!" again and again.

But as I stood trying to assess this situation, as the rain lightened to a soft drizzle and the wind to a warm southerly breeze, I heard the wail of sirens at a distance.

I went over to a woman of twenty or so; she was closest to the Chevette. She was dressed in a pink halter top, a green, chic spring jacket, and black loose-fitting pants. She was lying on her back, with her arms thrown wide and her legs together, as if she were on a cross, and she clutched a white-faced porcelain doll in her right hand. She had her eyes open and she blinked every few seconds. I could see no blood.

I asked gently, "Where do you hurt?"

She took a quick breath. "I ..." She stopped. "Is it your back?"

She nodded a little.

The wail of sirens grew louder; I judged that there were three or four, and I was thankful for that.

I said to the woman, "Can you move your arms or legs?"

"No," she whispered. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. I looked. Whelan was doing what I was doing, he was talking to one of the injured.

At Pete's Groceries and Things and at Hattie's Brookfield Restaurant, the doors opened and people moved tentatively onto the street. I called angrily at them, "Move, for Christ's sake!" It did no good. I called, "These people need help!" Still nothing. I couldn't blame them. They were trying to make sense of what they'd seen in the last five minutes, still trying to fit it into their structured view of the world.

But still I had to get them moving. "You assholes!" I yelled, "You dimwits! You knuckleheads!" It was enough. A few of them broke into a run and were soon attending to the injured.

The wail of sirens was very close now, at the edge of the town. I glanced toward the sound, saw the first of what would turn out to be a veritable army of emergency vehicles. "Thank God," I murmured. I looked back at the woman. She was smiling at me, a smile of quiet, painful amusement. "You're funny," she said.

~ * ~

It was very difficult for me to believe that I was actually seeing what I was seeing a half hour later. I was a couple of hundred yards south of the spot where the "Brookfield Flea" had been set up, in front of a bright white two-story house that had gingerbread under the severely peaked roof line and flower boxes sprouting some sort of small pinkish-purple flowers under the lower windows. Behind a white picket fence, in the well-manicured front yard, there were rosebushes trimmed back and even a pink ceramic birdbath.

I was seeing the names
"CRAY/PELLAPRAT"
in bold, black, hand-painted letters on the side of one of those tan rural mailboxes.

I found it very difficult to believe that Abner had actually put those names there, but it wasn't the work of genius to figure out why: He had put them there as his pronouncement of love and life and openness. What did he have to hide? Those names announced that he was living there with the woman he loved. He was tending his rosebushes, his flower boxes, his little lawn, his birdbath, and he and Phyllis were
happy
together.