“Don’t try to talk,” I said. “They shot you. Those beasts shot you.”
He was looking right at me, but when I waved my hand, he didn’t seem to see it.
Voice faint, he asked, “Where?”
“What does it matter?” I asked him. “They shot you. They shot you, and you’re going to die right here, in the middle of this stupid street.”
That red mist was coming out of his mouth, and he could barely breathe, but he tried to sit up. I pushed him back. “Lay down,” I said. “You’re dying.”
“My play,” he said. “Find my play.”
“Don’t talk,” I said. “Save your energy.”
I don’t know why I said that. I’d maybe seen it in a movie. Then he started to go. I mean, you could see him go — the color drain, the muscles slacking. I’d never seen that before. But there it was. Still, he wouldn’t shut up. “My play,” he said. “It’s on the shelf, beside my bed.”
He was going to go any second, I could tell. I mean, this guy was dying.
“Shut up,” I said. “Quit talking.”
With like his last breath, he asked me, “Do you know any CPR?”
“No, damn it, no,” I said. “I always meant to learn.”
He took this big, rattling breath, and as he exhaled, he spoke:
“In Act IV,” he said, “erase the cruel words that Lonnie speaks. He doesn’t mean it. I know that now. Don’t let him turn his back on Susan, either. Have them embrace. That’s how the scene must end, with them embracing.”
He said this, then — bang — he was dead! It all happened — the head roll, the eye glaze, that weight coming to his limbs — but those are just the things that catch your eye. They’re nothing compared with that lifting you feel. He just lifted away.
I looked around. I can’t even tell you what I was looking for. Sheriff Dan and those guys were eating hamburgers. The other inmates were raking up dead birds and burning them in neat piles, like last season’s leaves. The light off the Odd Fellows building was coppery, and I knew my father was in there. It’s hard to explain the buzz in me. I mean, things looked the same, but I saw them different. Suddenly it was clear that Sheriff Dan wasn’t really quarantining the town. He wasn’t quarantining anything. This was a last stand. The city workers were circling the wagons to keep the citizens out. People were dying all over town, and these guys had a cooler full of sodas. They were tearing the corners off ketchup packets and squirting it on their hamburgers. Suddenly it was obvious to me that they were all men. Where were the women? Where were the other women who worked in the courthouse, women like Janis? Would they have let Janis through the gates? Or would she be left to her dark fate out in our fair town?
I started going through the professor’s pockets, looking for his identification. I didn’t know what I’d do with it. I just needed to know who he was. I’d tell his story, maybe. It would matter to someone, what became of him. To someone, that story would be everything in the world. I started rifling through his pockets, looking over my shoulder at all those guns and burgers, and then a funny thing happened. I couldn’t find any of those bullet holes. I couldn’t find one place where this kid had been shot. I rolled him over and felt under his jacket. I checked his feet, even, but, no, all those bullets had missed. Sheriff Dan and his boys had missed every time.
I stood. The Odd Fellows building was across the town square from me, about a block-and-a-half sprint through the dormant trees. On the horizon, dark stands of snow clouds were moving in, but for now the sun was direct and bright. Most of the snow and ice had melted, so the ground would be firm. In the cherry picker above the courthouse hung two firemen with binoculars and rifles. To get through the trees, I’d have to move sidelong past twenty or thirty pistol barrels.
To the drama professor, I said, “I’m sorry about what happened to you, but I have to go.”
Then I bolted. I crossed the street in a couple big strides, tried to slalom when I hit the tree trunks, running in and out of them, branches whooshing past my head. For a while, it was easy. I leapt twin park benches, then leaned hard as I rounded the fountain. My arms were pumping, and I kept telling myself that I was strong, that all of Gerry’s push-ups had helped me, that dragging hogs would serve me now. But the truth was, I felt anything but strong. My lungs felt like I’d inhaled a fistful of thumbtacks. With every breath, I kept looking for the spotty blood to start coming out of me.
I cut through the playground equipment at full speed. When I heard a booming voice yell, “Hold your horses, Professor,” I tucked and rolled under the jungle gym. The sand was half frozen, and I paused there, breathing hard. When I got up and started running again, the bullets began.
There was lots of banging going on at the edge of the park, but I didn’t look. Sure, the guns were loud, but they were way over there, and the bullets were right here. I guess I’d had it in my head that the bullets would be invisible things, that, unless one hit me, I wouldn’t know how close they’d all come. But you could hear every one of them. Most of them sounded like a finger snap. Snap-snap, they went. Snap-snap-snap. Some bullets came by like ssst, while others went wooo, just the way kids sounded as their roller coaster plunged at Glacier Days. When slugs went through the holly, sharp leaves flew past my face, and you’ll never forget the smell of a bullet sizzling through a chinaberry bush, Christmassy and fresh.
Passing the carousel at the other end of the park, I entered the open street and poured on everything I had. All the wooden carousel horses got peppered—thuck-thuck, the solid hits sounded like, with a thwack whenever splinters flew. The last stretch was without cover, down an empty street, but here the bullets stopped. I don’t know if the deputies were reloading or if they’d lost interest, but there was only the sound of my shoes as I clapped past the old Bijou Theater and the Red Dakotan, then burst through the brass doors of the Odd Fellows building.
I had to rest, I needed to collapse, but there in the lobby was an old guy on one of those red couches, and he was sprawled out as if watching the television mounted above. The TV was dead, though, and the sound of his green oxygen bottle hissing on without him made me not look too close. I just went for the stairs.
On the top floor, I found my father’s door locked for the first time. I pounded on the big metal door, and when it didn’t open, it took me three tries to wheel out the combo. I heaved the door wide, and there was my father, golf club lifted in self-defense, standing on the far side of the room, framed by those large coppery-tinted windows.
“My God,” Dad said, “you’re alive.”
I couldn’t breathe. I had to bend over. “Yeah,” I told him, “I’m alive.”
I’d never felt so alive.
Dad lowered the golf club. “You’ve got it, don’t you?”
Hands on my knees, wheezing, I nodded. “I’ve got it.”
“Well, what about your asthma?” he asked. “You probably just need your inhaler. You’ve always had problems breathing.”
I looked up at him, shook my head no.
Dad just stood there, as if he couldn’t move. I walked to him, and he started shaking his head. I put my arm around him, and all he could do was shake his head. Through the window was the Missouri River Valley and the main hog fire, still raging, though squat now and more intense.
“I didn’t know if I’d see you again,” he said. His eyes were clear and wide. “I went to the prison. No one’s there. The rooms are empty. There was no one to tell me anything.”
He really was upset. Deep down, I could tell, the man was really hurting. I wanted to tell him to relax, to calm down, that everything would be okay. But I couldn’t say anything like that, because on the outside my father was as calm and collected as could be.