The resurrected girl had taken Barbara’s youngest boy in a deep embrace. A standing embrace, both on their own feet, though the gypsy had wrapped herself around Paul from neck to ankle. Their hug might’ve been the riot in microcosm, a starved and ferocious response to a child who had no idea what he’d meant when he first held out his offering. Paul’s own arms hung at his sides. He searched beyond the head that lay on his shoulder till his eyes fell on his mother’s, at his feet. He went on mouthing his bewildered denials: Just a touch, th-that’s all.
Well, what was she doing down there? Her legs were fine, her elbows sharp, and in another moment Barb was back on her feet and between the boy and girl. She was bracing herself for a tussle. But the gypsy let go at once, moving out of reach with a toss of her lank hair, a spatter of miracle-sweat. The mother had figured the girl wrong, the girl too. The gypsy’s look might’ve been flinty, almost an accusation. But that was the way a lot of young people appeared to Barbara. Her son was the one she had to worry about, and now she wrapped her arms around his undersized chest and began to haul him backwards. Behind the tumbled coffee-table she shuffled, and her heel caught briefly on the altarcloth, sticky with lamp-oil. The flame had been snuffed, at least, in the fall, and the mother had gotten some breathing room for herself and the boy just by pulling him away from the girl. That dark and attractive stranger was, for a moment, the one drawing a crowd, the reporters in particular. The camerawoman Maddalena already had attached herself to the gypsy. Barbara meantime discovered a protected space, a corner of the tent, loosely walled off by the doctor, the chaplain, and the liaison. All three of the men had regrouped behind the fallen wheelchair and the cross.
It was Interstate who’d taken up the cross, brandishing it like a quarterstaff. With this barricade before him, he began shouting again, throwing some French into the mix. The meaning was as clear as DiPio’s hand signals, palms out, arms out. Calm down, calmavi, calmez vous. A step apart from those two Kahlberg stood relatively unruffled. Relatively — the mother didn’t like the way he fingered his jacket.
Nonetheless in back of these three, in back of the wheelchair and chapel’s storage trunk, Barbara found a moment’s safety for herself and her boy. She shuttled Paul around behind her, one last barricade, and in the process she bumped a hip against the tent’s corner pole. The upright wobbled, the nylon rattled around her ears. With one backwards-reaching hand she discovered a seam was torn.
A torn seam, the least she could expect, in a place like this. Then it occurred to Barbara that she could tell the boy to run. He could duck out through the seam.
Mr. Paul could do it, looked like. Whatever this child’s prodigies took out of him, they left him nowhere near so rattled as Barb. Her own clothes were soaked through, jammed up, and yet while the mother had been pressed against her boy, one hand at his neck and the other across his lightly-downed chest, she’d found Paul’s pulse only a few ticks fast and his muscles just lightly trembling. He still had that carpenter smell, but his skin was dry.
She thought of heatstroke, of shock. One push would put him out in the fresh air. What would other people do?
But both of Paul’s cures had been miracles in an inferno. Today, even if the boy escaped this particular volcanic circle, this bruising ritual of the hunt, he’d still be in the Underworld. He’d have to move through poison clouds. The family portraits overhead were supposed to guide him, but their deformed and colorized smiles had been fake to begin with. The whole camp would be on the child before he’d cleared the central amphitheater, and then there were the infantrymen from NATO. God knows what they might do. So Barb kept her boy with her, crooking one arm around him, and as she eyed the oncoming crowd she set herself the way Jay used to at the scrimmage line.
Hadn’t there been a lot of brave talk about the end of everything? Well what would she call this, out beyond a crucifix turned sideways? The crowd had kicked aside the fallen coffee-table, and behind the people who’d come for the service, others were rushing into the tent. Others wanted to see what the fuss was about, they’d heard something and they’d wanted to see, and more of the chairs went over. There was bawling across the steam and the language of metal. Barb had to worry again about her girls and their guards, about Jay and the boys and the agitators in the camp, the ones in league with the hunger strikers. Not all the refugees would get excited over this, a scrap from the table of the white man’s God.
But then too, Maddalena and the born-again gypsy had found a quiet spot at the other end of the tent. Among toppled chairs and fallen drapes, they were doing an interview. The older woman gestured conversationally, with her free hand. Her subject had struck a pose, hand on hip, camera-friendly.
They were doing an interview. Still the mother was clenching her jaw, bent and sweating. Hardly five feet from her face a gang of refugees clamored against the chaplain’s jerryrigged barricade. They waved and bellowed as if they didn’t have any words, let alone whole questions. Nor did they look anything like a movement with a plan, a political organization or some sharp cosa nostra. Rather the mother faced an addled and hollering urge to grab, the fireworks of their shirts and caps not nearly enough madness for them. Now the obese Venus in the Parthenope shirt had grabbed one of the smallest new arrivals, a boy with half a face. The rest of the kid’s face was a crumpled gray-green smear, maybe a birthmark but more likely a scar. The color didn’t match his own pink palms, nor his mother’s either.
She was his mother, surely, this screaming mound of flesh. “Ancora!” Again. “Ancora, questo!” Again, this one.
Did this woman honestly expect another healing? On demand, just like that?
“Ancora!” the mother screamed. “Per l’amore di Dio!”
By now Interstate and the doctor had backed almost off the riser. Silky Kahlberg had eased sideways, but he was at Barbara’s shoulder, and the trunk that had held the Bibles nudged her toes. Meanwhile the scarred mother and her scarred child slammed against the chaplain’s crossbar, the woman’s pleading gone raw. What did she expect, once she got their hands on Paul? But what had Barbara expected, what simple international exit symbol, when she’d come to the Center?
Then Kahlberg pulled a pistol from under his jacket and fired into the air.
One shot: consummate PR. One shot and the tent went silent, other than the clatter of the falling cross. The thing must’ve hit someone in the facing crowd, it must’ve bounced and caught someone’s shin or toes, but nobody made a peep. Parthenope the Earth Mother whipped around, putting her bulk between Silky and her damaged boy. A few of the refugees threw up their arms or ducked their heads. But by and large the crowd went catatonic and baby-faced. The chill even dropped over the plank walkway outside. From beyond the purple nylon came a creak of wood under pressure, someone shifting their weight. Barbara herself had to remember to breathe. She recalled the wide leeway given her bodyguards as the family had descended into the camp. “These people” had long since learned what to do when The Man pulls a gun.