— What dust?
— About three or four klicks up the road.
Danny could see Kelly crouching now, lowering himself on strong arms. And Le Roy, who only that morning had laughed for the first time since anyone could remember, was flattened in a patch of striped light from the barred window, muttering, “Fuck this shit,” over and over to himself. He looked from the shiny barrels of the guns to the FBI logos to the laced and polished boots and tried to decide if he was experiencing a flashback or a dream or just a particularly vivid scene for the epic. It seemed very real, but all of the scenes had seemed real before he turned them into words and wrote them down.
By the waters of Babylon…
— Get going. You should have left when it was dark.
— Just let Pig Eye stay. He was supposed to go home last week.
— We were all supposed to go home.
— But Pig Eye.
He got slowly out of his chair, adjusting the blue mechanical pencil so it was horizontal now rather than vertical, the plastic barrel of the body arranged so that it lay just underneath the last words he had written — words that might make a fitting last line, which would make his epic shorter than he had imagined it, but lots of things were either longer or shorter than he had thought they would be — the war, for instance, and innocence and life. He felt sharp and clearheaded, if somewhat unhinged, and then not unhinged, but brittle and coldly righteous. Strong. A bell was ringing. It was the bell at the railroad crossing. He felt a bullet of comprehension click into its chamber. That’s all it was — the train! But a train didn’t explain the guns and the boots and the voices that were finished shouting at Le Roy and had started shouting at him. One of the agents took a step forward, and through the thick plastic visor, Danny saw Harraday’s eyes staring at him, the hollow eyes of a natural killer.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m writing a rap epic.”
By the waters of Babylon,
A soldier makes a lucky shot…
— Tell them who you are.
— I am an American soldier.
— Tell it to them, and say it like you mean it!
He turned to face the door. The perfect word was out there. It was somewhere between his ear and his eye. He could feel the guns aiming at it, and then it shifted ever so slightly until it was dead center, right in the middle of his forehead. Help, he thought.
Le Roy had his eyes closed. Kelly was moving his mouth, but no sound was coming out. Or, if sound was coming out, he couldn’t hear it. Maybe he was deaf. He didn’t think he was deaf, but he couldn’t absolutely rule it out. Where was the captain? The captain should be there to tell them what to do. Or his recruiting officer or the doctor or the sergeant who had always smoked him in basic training but who had taught him everything he needed to know. He straightened his shoulders.
By the waters of Babylon,
He stood with his head up and his feet squared.
We sat down and wept.
— Tell them who you are!
“I am an American soldier! I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough!”
“On the ground, now!”
The captain had gone back to Iraq — he remembered that now. But Dolly was coming. Last time they had talked, she had said she would. “Not right away,” she had told him. “Ask me in a couple weeks.” He would call her and ask her to marry him again, just to make sure. He’d plan something special for a celebration. No sparklers. No alcohol. No tablecloth with stars and stripes. “I will never accept defeat!” he shouted, this time a little louder, just in case. Then he looked into the middle distance and thought of Pig Eye and also of Joe Kelly the day the two soldiers had stood together like brothers on the Toyota — and then he rammed his right fist into the air.
It was as if he had punched through a sound barrier, for as he did it, Kelly shouted, “Hit the deck, Danny! Hit the deck!” and the bell stopped ringing and the train blasted through right on schedule or even a little early for once, rattling the glass in the barred windows. But then Kelly was drowned out by a deafening crash, as if the train had jumped its tracks. Danny saw stars, and among the stars, a planet — Mars! At first it was the barest pinprick of light, and then it became big, blood-red, and molten before it exploded the way Pig Eye had exploded, into a thousand new pinpricks as everything disintegrated and settled into a kind of shrouded, starstruck peace.
12.9 Maggie
The side street intersected with an alley that ran behind the bus station, and as she tore past it, Maggie could see three squad cars and the sheriff’s big pickup parked there, gleaming in the sun. She gripped the handlebars as tightly as she could. Sweat pooled in her armpits and dripped from her brow. Were the police after her? Had they found the stolen documents? Was she a fugitive from the law?
She sent a prayer into the ether and hoped Lyle would hear it. And then she thought about the army and the war and how she had taken her eye off the ball, but was the ball the depleted uranium munitions, or was it Tommy and George, or was it her poor, neglected family? Please, God, she thought, take care of Will!
She was pedaling as hard as she could, keeping her head down and taking back roads to a track she knew of that followed Ash Creek from the park with the baseball field where the summer league games were played all the way to the Church of the New Incarnation, where the narrow trickle of the creek widened out into a glassy man-made reflecting pool before meandering through the fields and eventually into a concrete culvert that funneled it beneath the highway. When the undulating form of the church came into view, Maggie was already tiring. How would she make it the hundred miles to Oklahoma City? How would she make it to wherever she was going with only a rusty bicycle and scarcely a dollar to her name? Almost of its own accord, the bicycle turned up the long driveway toward the twin domes of the church, the domes that made the church look like a female torso toppled over on its back.
As Maggie entered the vestibule, she could hear music emanating from the nave: the big pipe organ accompanied by what sounded like the full choir. It was Saturday. It must be a special holy day, but she couldn’t think of which one it might be. Just as she was tiptoeing forward to peek through the double doors, the pastor’s wife burst through them and almost knocked into her. “Maggie!” she cried. “Whatever are you doing here?”
Maggie was taken aback by the perfectly waved hair and the made-up face and the tightly wrapped summer dress and the air of voluptuous good will. When Tiffany put out her arms, Maggie allowed herself to fall into the softness and burst into tears. “I’m tired,” she said. “I’m just a little tired is all.”
“Of course you are,” said Tiffany. “Let me get you a glass of water and a bite to eat.”
It turned out that the producers had wanted to film some background segments for the television show, so for the previous week, a camera crew had been shadowing the pastor and his wife. Today was the day to shoot the choir and the interior of the church. “The show’s going national,” said Tiffany. “They even want to do a segment on me.”
She led Maggie to where a tray of fruit and sandwiches had been set out for the camera crew. She poured two glasses of water and took Maggie to an inner room where they wouldn’t be disturbed. “I heard you talking to Houston the day you and your husband came to him for advice,” she said. “I heard you talking about the prisoners, and I haven’t been able to forget what you said. As you know, I lead a group called Mothers of Mercy, and you inspired me to take on something more significant than providing school supplies for the prison and sewing quilts for wounded soldiers.”