Budd looked very flustered then stuck out his hand.
Potter shook it warmly though Budd didn't grip it very hard, either out of shame or out of concern about the fluffy pads of bandages on the agent's skin.
They all fell silent as Potter gazed up at the sky. "When's the deadline?"
Budd looked again at his wrist blankly for a moment then he realized that he was holding his watch in his right hand. "Forty minutes. What's the matter?" The captain's eyes lifted to the same jaundiced cloud that Potter was targeting.
"I'm getting a bad feeling about this one. This deadline."
"Why?"
"I just am."
"Intuition," Angie said. "Listen to him, Charlie. He's usually right."
Budd looked down from the sky and found Potter looking at him. "I'm sorry, Arthur. I'm plumb outta ideas."
Potter's eyes zipped back and forth over the grass, blackened by the fire and by the shadow of the van. "A helicopter," he blurted suddenly.
"What?"
Potter felt a keen sense of urgency seize him. "Get me a helicopter."
"But I thought we weren't going to give him one."
"I just need to show him one. A big one. At least a six-seater – eight- or ten- if you can find one."
"If I can find one?" Budd exclaimed. "Where? How?"
A thought slipped into Potter's mind from somewhere.
Airport.
There was an airport nearby. Potter tried to remember. How did he know that? Had somebody told him? He hadn't driven past it. Budd hadn't told him; SAC Henderson hadn't said anything. Where -
It was Lou Handy. The taker had mentioned it as a possible source of a helicopter. He must've driven by it on the way here.
He told this to Budd.
"I know it," the captain said. "They got a couple choppers there but I don't know if there's anybody's there who can even fly one. I mean, if we found one in Wichita they might make it here in time. But hell, it'll take more'n forty minutes to track down a pilot."
"Well, forty minutes is all we have, Charlie. Get a move on."
"The truth…" Melanie is crying.
And de l'Epée is the one person she doesn't want to cry in front of. But cry she does. He rises from his chair and sits on the couch next to her.
"The truth is," she continues, "that I just don't like who I am, what I've become, what I'm a part of."
It's time to confess and nothing can stop her now.
"I told you about how I lived for being Deaf. It became my whole life?"
"Miss Deaf Farmhand of the Year."
"I didn't want any of it. Not. One. Bit." She grows vehement. "I got so damn tired of the self-consciousness of it all. The politics of being part of the Deaf world, the prejudice the Deaf have – oh, it's there. You'd be surprised. Against minorities and other handicapped. I'm tired of it! I'm tired of not having my music. I'm tired of my father…"
"Yes, what?" he asks.
"I'm tired of him using it against me. My deafness."
"How does he do that?"
"Because it makes me more scared than I already am! It keeps me at home. That piano I told you about? The one I wanted to play 'A Maiden's Grave' on? They sold it when I was nine. Even though I could still hear enough to play and could for a couple years more. They said – well, he said, my father said – they didn't want me to learn to love something that would be taken away from me." She adds, "But the real reason was that he wanted to keep me on the farm."
So you'll be home then.
Melanie looks into de l'Epée eyes and says what she's never said to anyone. "I can't hate him for wanting me to stay at home. But selling the piano – that hurt so much. Even if I'd had only one day of playing music it would have been better than nothing. I'll never forgive him for that."
"They had no right to do that," he agrees. "But you managed to break away. You've got a job away from home, you're independent -" His voice fades.
And now for the hard part.
"What is it?" de l'Epée asks softly.
"A year ago," she begins, "I bought some new hearing aids. Generally they don't work at all but these seemed to have some effect with certain pitches of music. There was a recital in Topeka I wanted to go to. Kathleen Battle. I'd read in the paper that she was going to sing some spirituals as part of the program and I thought…"
"That she'd sing 'Amazing Grace'?"
"I wanted to see if I could hear it. I was desperate to go. But I had no way of getting there. I can't drive and the buses would have taken forever. I begged ray brother to take me. He'd been working all day on the farm but he said he'd take me anyway."
"We got there just in time for the concert. Kathleen Battle walked out on stage wearing this beautiful blue dress. She smiled to the audience… And then she began to sing."
"And?"
"It was useless." Melanie breathes deeply, kneads her ringers. "It…"
"Why are you so sad?"
"The hearing aids didn't work at all. Everything was muddled. I could hardly hear anything and the notes I could hear were all off key to me. We left at intermission. Danny was doing his best to cheer me up. He…"
She falls silent.
'There's more, isn't there? There's something else you want to tell me."
It hurts so much! She only thinks these words but according to the fishy rules of her music room de l'Epée can hear them perfectly. He leans forward. "What hurts? Tell me?"
And there's so much to tell him. She could use a million words to describe that night and never convey the horror of living through it.
"Go ahead," De l'Epée says encouragingly. As her brother used to do, as her father never did. "Go ahead."
"We left the concert hall and got into Danny's car. He asked if I wanted some dinner but I couldn't eat a thing. I asked him just to drive home."
De l'Epée scoots forward. Their knees meet. He touches her arm. "What else?"
"We left town, got onto the highway. We were in Danny's little Toyota. He rebuilt it himself. Everything. He's so good with mechanical things. He's amazing, really. We were going pretty fast."
She pauses for a moment to let the tide of sadness subside. It never does but she takes a deep breath – remembering when she had to take a breath before saying something – and finds herself able to continue. "We were talking in the car."
De l'Epée nods.
"But that means we were signing. And that means we had to look at each other. He kept asking me what I was sad about, that the hearing aids didn't work, was I discouraged, had Dad been hassling me about the farm again?… He…"
She must breathe deeply again.
"Danny was looking at me, not at the road. Oh, God… it was just there, in front of us. I never saw where it came from."
"What?"
"A truck. A big one, carrying a load of metal pipes. I think it changed lanes when Danny wasn't looking and… oh, Jesus, there was nothing he could do. All these pipes coming at us at a thousand miles an hour…"
The blood. All the blood.
"I know he braked, I know he tried to turn. But it was too late. No… Oh, Danny."
Spraying, spraying. Like the blood from the throat of a calf.
"He managed to steer mostly out of the way but one pipe smashed through the windshield. It…"
De l'Epée kneads her hand. "Tell me," he whispers.
"It…" The words are almost impossible to say. "It took his arm off."
Like the blood running down the gutters into the horrible well in the center of the killing room.
"Right at the shoulder." She sobs at the memory. Of the blood. Of the stunned look on her brother's face as he turned to her and spoke for a long moment, saying words she couldn't figure out then and never had the heart to ask him to repeat.