Hold on, Starx said and went off somewhere. Olpert didn’t know where to look — not at the boy, that waxy cycloptic stare, not at the fog, who knew what horrors might appear within it. So he looked up through the hazy ceiling at the darkening sky, the moon nudging into view.
Starx returned pushing a wheelbarrow lined with a tarp and bags of salt. He set the wheelbarrow down, tore the bags open, dumped the salt into the barrow. Then he brought Olpert around to the trunk, reached in, and took a sneakered foot in each hand.
Get his top half, he instructed. We’ll wrap him up, the salt will weigh the body down.
The boy was heavier than he looked, his head lolled against Olpert’s chest, the jaw clacked open, Olpert staggered and dropped his end. The kid’s skull knocked off the pavement with a dull, nutty sound.
What the fug, Bailie, hissed Starx, and all the way across town sitting on the motionless train at Blackacres Station, with Rupe sleeping in her lap, Cora looked up sharply. Something hitched in her throat. What was happening out there in the dusk?
Starx scooped up the body, folded him into the wheelbarrow, arms and legs sagging over the sides, and bound him in the tarp. As he was manoeuvred toward the pond one of the boy’s shoes jostled loose, which Olpert fetched and, cradling like a magic lamp, brought to Starx at the end of the launch.
The boy’s unshod foot dangled, a hole in his sock revealed a rosy coin of heel, and all the way across town the stabbing in Cora’s throat went twisting down into her chest. She gazed out over the roofs of Blackacres to the wall of skyscrapers downtown. Into the twilight appeared the night’s first few stars, and in the moon’s pale light down in the empty pit of People Park Starx said, Help me here, and Olpert tucked the shoe under his arm and took Calum’s feet, the spot of exposed skin clammy to the touch.
Got him? said Starx.
It’s because he doesn’t wear shoelaces, said Olpert.
What?
That’s why his shoe fell off. Olpert nodded toward it, wedged in his armpit. See?
Out in the Zone the moon painted everything silver. Rupe moaned in his sleep, and in his face Cora saw his brother’s face, and her heart felt ravaged by little scrabbling fishhooks. The downtown office towers struck her as dominoes, she imagined them toppling, one felling the next until they were rubble.
Starx said, On three. Olpert nodded. One, said Starx, and as two butchers with a side of meat they rocked the boy, salt sprinkling from the tarp. Cora shivered. Two, said Starx, the body swung pendulously out over Crocker Pond, and back. Rupe woke and said, Ma, are you crying? And Starx yelled, Three.
The body flew. The tarp unfurled. Salt scattered, arms and legs flailed, and everything disappeared into the mist.
There was no splash.
What the fug? said Starx. He toed the water: frozen solid.
Olpert still held the boy’s shoe. He looked from it to Starx.
He’s on top of the ice out there somewhere, said Starx, squinting.
The fog was without depth, a wall of white.
Starx took the shoe from Olpert, knelt, and slid it along the surface. For a second or two it swished over the ice — then vanished, went quiet.
Cora said, No, I’m okay. She petted Rupe’s hair, eased his head down to her lap. Go back to sleep, we’ll find your brother tomorrow.
The mist domed Crocker Pond. Everything was silent.
Fug it, Starx said. Ice has got to melt sometime. There’s salt out there too, right.
Olpert peered into the fog. Shouldn’t we go out there?
But Starx was on the horn with Griggs: Good lookin out, it’s done. What now?
And now? said Griggs. And now, Starx, B-Squad must disappear.
WITH THE WAXY white stick Sam marked two bright flecks on the door of the microwave. (Its clock too was locked at 9:00.) He pressed his forehead against the plastic, lined up his eyes: a match. Next were the holes. With his ducktaped hand Sam guided the drillbit into the door — a grinding sound, a smell of burning plastic, crumbly twists twirled onto the floor. Sam blew out the dust: two eyes stared back.
Next, putty. Sam pinched a grey gob out of the container and sculpted a half-inch volcano shape over the left hole, leaving the top open, and then the right, smoothing the ridges. He put his face up to them, the putty nestled perfectly into his eyesockets, he stared into the oven’s shadowy inside and moulded the two little mounds tighter, it was vital that no light or heat escape, or any air get in, and he smeared the putty onto his cheeks and up to his eyebrows, along the bridge of his nose on both sides.
He felt for the power dial. Found it. Paused. Okay, he said.
Sam breathed in with a great chest-filling gulp, and out, and thought of Adine’s face after the explosion: that raw pulpy mess, that death mask, that mask of blood.
The work was about returning to nothing. And as Sam stood there ready to rewind everything, staring into darkness, he wondered when it was over what he would see. Even darkness was itself something — nothing would be like space, in space it was always night. But no, night was something. Nothing was what you couldn’t see. Nothing was the space behind your head — if there was no space, if you had no head.
OLPERT FOLLOWED his partner into the boathouse, the wood splintered where the big man had shouldered the deadbolt through the doorframe. Starx groped in the dark for a lightswitch, flicked it on: the room was a jumble of nautical equipment, life preservers and flutterboards and oars and paddles and various small watercraft — rowboats, canoes, kayaks, pedalboats in stacks. It smelled of sawdust and mould.
Starx came at him with a pair of denim jumpsuits. Griggs said to get disguises, he said, handing one to Olpert. Starx’s uniform fell to the floor in a heap of khaki. He had nothing on underneath. Olpert was transfixed: so much man stood before him, everything so broad and fleshy and thick. Wrestling that massive body into the jumpsuit seemed equivalent to squeezing a ham inside a sandwich bag. In the end the pants clingwrapped his calves and the top flopped at his waist.
You too, candynuts, Starx grunted, we can’t be in uniform for when they ship us out tomorrow. Don’t look so forlorn, pal! Just a little break, a little holiday, till this all blows over. I need a different shirt though, maybe there’s a lost and found here or something. .
Starx wandered off and reappeared in a maroon Lady Y’s Back-2-Back Champs T-shirt, which fit him as a tubetop. Not ideal, he said, but better than —
Olpert was gone.
Bailie?
Starx stuck his head out the door, looked left, right, up the hilclass="underline" mist, mist, more mist.
Bailie? Starx’s voice rang out over the common.
And then, to the north, he saw movement — a figure flitting down the path from Street’s Milk & Things. Starx nearly called out, but it wasn’t Olpert.
This person was small, a child, a tubby little guy in a red cap who descended with purpose at a light gallop. He reached the bottom of the hill, paused, transfixed by the cloudy bubble over Crocker Pond — waiting, maybe, for a sign.
GRIGGS.
Walters? said Griggs, chair-wheeling beside Noodles before the Orchard Parkway monitor.
And Reed, he’s down in the truck. Cathedral Circus is cleared. Only business with anyone in it was Loopy’s — she was in there, crying, but we sent her to the pub. Reed gave her a fivespot, told her to get a cider on us. Everything’s ready.