" 'What song's that?' he asked. He was frowning.
"I laughed. 'At the concert, dummy. The song she finished the concert with. That song. You told me the title.'
"Then he laughed. 'Who's a dummy? "A Maiden's Grave"? What're you talking about? It was "Amazing Grace." The old gospel. That's what I told you.'
" 'No!' I was sure I heard him say 'A Maiden's Grave.' I was positive! And just then I realized that I'd been leaning forward to hear him and that when either of us turned away I couldn't really hear what he was saying at all. And that when I was looking at him I was looking only at his lips, never his eyes or the rest of his face. The same way I'd been looking at everyone else I'd talked to for the last six or eight months.
"I ran straight to the record store downtown – two miles away. I was so desperate, I had to know. I was sure my brother was teasing me and I hated him for it. I swore I'd get even with him. I raced up to the folk section and flipped through the Judy Collins albums. It was true… 'Amazing Grace.' Two months later I was diagnosed with a fifty-decibel loss in one ear, seventy in the other. It's about ninety now in both."
"I'm so sorry," De l'Epée says. "What happened to your hearing?"
"An infection. It destroyed the hairs in my ear."
"And there's nothing you can do about it?"
She doesn't answer him. After a moment she says, "I think that you're Deaf."
"Deaf? Me?" He grins awkwardly. "But I can hear."
"Oh, you can be Deaf but hearing."
He looks confused.
"Deaf but hearing," she continues. "See, we call people who can hear the Others. But some of the Others are more like us."
"What sort of people are those?" he asks. Is he proud to be included? She thinks he is.
"People who live according to their own hearts," Melanie answers, "not someone else's."
For a moment she's ashamed, for she's not sure that she always listens to her own.
A Mozart piece begins to play. Or Bach. She isn't sure which. (Why couldn't the infection have come a year later? Think of all the music I could have listened to in twelve months. For God's sake, her father pumped easy-listening KSFT through the farm's loudspeakers. In my bio, they'll find I was reared on "Pearly Shells," Tom Jones, and Barry Manilow.)
"There's more I have to tell you. Something else I've never told anyone."
"I'd like to hear it," he says, agreeable. But then, in an instant, he disappears.
Melanie gasps.
The music room vanishes and she's back in the slaughterhouse.
Her eyes are wide, she looks around, expecting to see Brutus approaching. Or Bear shouting, storming toward her.
But, no, Brutus is gone. And Bear sits by himself outside the killing room, eating, an incongruous smile on his face.
What had dragged her from the music room?
A vibration from a sound? The light?
No, it was a smell. A scent had wakened her out of her daydream. But of what?
Something she detected amid the smell of greasy food, bodies, and oil and gasoline and rusting metal and old blood and rancid lard and a thousand other scents.
Ah, she recognized it clearly. A rich, pungent smell.
"Girls, girls," she signed emphatically to the students. "I want to say something."
Bear's head turned toward them. He noticed the signing. His smile vanished immediately and he climbed to his feet. He seemed to be shouting, "Stop that! Stop!"
"He doesn't like us to sign," Melanie signed quickly. "Pretend we're playing hand-shape game."
One thing Melanie liked about Deaf culture – the love of words. ASL was a language like any other. In fact it was the fifth most widely used language in America. ASL words and phrases could be broken down into smaller structural units (hand shape, motion, and relation of the hand to the body), just like spoken words could be broken down into syllables and phonemes. Those gestures lent themselves to word games, which nearly all Deaf people grew up playing.
Bear stormed up to her. "What the fuck… with…"
Melanie's hands began to shake violently. She managed to write in the dust on the floor, Game. We're playing game. See? We make shapes with our hands. Shapes of things.
"What things?"
This is animal game.
She signed the word "Stupid." With her index and middle fingers extended in a V, the shape vaguely resembled a rabbit.
"What's that… be?"
A rabbit, she wrote.
The twins ducked their heads, giggling.
"Rabbit… Doesn't… fucking rabbit to me," he said.
Please let us play. Can't hurt.
He glanced at Kielle, who signed, "You turd." Smiling, she wrote in the dust, That was hippo.
"… out of your fucking minds." Bear turned back to his fries and soda.
The girls waited until he was out of sight then looked expectantly at Melanie. Kielle, no longer smiling, asked brusquely, "What do you have to say?"
"I'm going to get us out of here," Melanie signed. "That's what."
Arthur Potter and Angie Scapello were preparing to debrief Jocylyn Weiderman, who was being examined by medics at that moment, when they heard the first shot.
It was a faint crack and far less alarming than Dean Stillwell's urgent voice breaking over the speaker above their heads. "Arthur, we've got a situation here! Handy's shooting."
Hell.
"There's somebody in the field."
Before he even looked outside Potter pressed the button on the mike and ordered, "Tell everybody, no return fire."
"Yessir."
Potter joined Angie and Charlie Budd in the ocher window of the van.
"That son of a bitch," Budd whispered.
Another shot rang out from the slaughterhouse and the bullet kicked up a cloud of splinters from the rotting stockade post next to the dark-suited man about sixty yards from the command van. A voluminous handkerchief, undoubtedly expensive, billowed around the raised right hand of the intruder.
"Oh, no," Angie whispered in dismay.
Potter's heart sank. "Henry, your profile of the assistant attorney general neglected to mention he's out of his damn mind."
Handy fired again, hitting a rock just behind Roland Marks. The assistant AG stopped, cringing. He waved the handkerchief again. He continued slowly toward the slaughterhouse.
Potter pressed speed dial. As the phone rang and rang he muttered, "Come on, Lou."
No answer.
Dean Stillwell's voice came over the speaker. "Arthur, I don't know what to make of it. Somebody here thinks it's -"
"It's Roland Marks, Dean. Is he saying anything to Handy?"
"Looks like he's shouting. We can't hear."
"Tobe, you have those Big Ears in place still?"
The young agent spoke into his stalk mike and punched buttons. In a few seconds, the mournful yet urgent sound of the wind filled the van. Then Marks's voice.
"Lou Handy! I'm Roland Marks, assistant attorney general of the state of Kansas."
A huge crack of a gunshot, overly amplified, burst into the van. Everyone cringed.
Tobe whispered, "The other Big Ear's trained on the slaughterhouse but we're not getting anything."
Sure. Because Handy's not saying anything. Why talk when you can make your point with bullets?
"This is bad," Angie muttered.
The AG's voice again: "Lou Handy, this isn't a trick. I want you to give up the girls and take me in their place."
"Jesus," Budd whispered. "He's doing that?" He sounded half-impressed and Potter had to restrain himself from scowling at the state police captain.
Another shot, closer. Marks danced sideways.
"For the love of God, Handy," came the desperate voice. "Let those girls go!"