Toombs lay on the floor, crouched and clutching at a stomach wound with his eight fingers. He looked at them with glazed eyes, and Mary thought she heard him gasp, 'No surrender.'
'Jack! Where's Jack?' she asked Edward, clinging to him.
He shook his head. 'Gotta get out!' He picked up James Xavier Toombs's automatic. 'Back door! You ready?'
She made a noise that meant yes, her mouth full of blood. Upstairs, some of the ammunition in the arsenal was starting to explode, the noise like Independence Day firecrackers. The back door was already hanging open. A dead pig lay on his back at the bottom of the steps. Jack had passed this way, Mary knew. Where was Didi? Still in the house? She had no time to think about anyone else. Smoke was billowing from the burning houses, cutting visibility to within a few yards. Mary could see the white tongues of flashlights licking at the smoke. 'You with me?' Edward asked her, and she nodded.
They started across the back lawn, through the low-lying smoke. Gunshots were still popping, tracers flying through the haze. Edward scrabbled over a fence into the alley, and pulled Mary over. The pain made her think she was about to leave her guts behind, but she had no choice; she kept going, fighting back the darkness that tried to drag her down. Together they staggered along the alley. Blue lights were flashing, sirens awail. They went over another fence and crashed into garbage cans. Then they pressed up against the wall of a house, Mary shivering with pain and about to pass out. 'Don't move. I'll be back,' Edward promised, and he ran ahead to find a way through the pig blockade.
Mary sat with her legs outstretched. She released a moan, but she clenched her teeth against a scream. Where was Jack? Alive or dead? If he was dead, so was she. She leaned over and threw up, getting rid of blood and pizza.
And then she heard a scraping noise, and she looked to her right at a pair of shined black shoes.
'Mary Terrell,' the man said.
She looked up at him. He wore a dark suit and a blue striped tie, his chiseled face all but obscured by the smoke. There was a gleaming silver badge on his lapel. He held a snub-nosed.38 in his right hand, pointed somewhere between them.
'On your feet,' the pig commanded.
'Fuck you,' she said.
He reached for her arm, her hand sunken in the bloody mess of her belly.
She let him grasp her with his slimy pig hand. And as she allowed him to haul her up, incredible pain bringing tears to her eyes, she lifted the revolver that had been hidden beside her and she shot him in the face.
Mary saw his jaw explode. It was a wonderful sight. His gun went off right in her ear, and the bullet whined about three inches from her own face. His arm was out of control, the gun whipping around. More bullets fired, one into the ground and two into the air. Mary shot him again, this time in the throat. She saw the animal fear in his eyes, and she heard him whine. Air and blood bubbled from his wound. He staggered back, desperately trying to aim at her, but his fingers twitched and lost the gun. The pig went down on his knees, and Mary Terror stood over him and jammed the revolver's barrel against his forehead. She pulled the trigger and saw him shudder as if stuck with an electric prod. The gun clicked: no more bullets.
The pig's torn face wore a crooked, bleeding leer, one side of his jaw hanging by tough red strands of muscle. She started to pick up his gun, but the pain stopped her. She was too weak to even smash him in the nose. She gathered bloody saliva in her mouth, and she spewed it across his cheeks.
'Mary? I think I've found a -' Edward stopped. 'Jesus!' he said, looking at the man's ruined face. He lifted his gun and started to squeeze the trigger.
'No,' Mary told him. 'No. Let him suffer.'
Edward paused, then he lowered the gun.
'Suffer,' Mary whispered, and she leaned forward and kissed the pig's sweating forehead. He had thin brown hair, going bald. The pig made a gasping, clucking sound from his gaping throat. 'Let's split!' Edward urged. Mary turned away from the pig, and she and Edward staggered off into the smoke, one of her hands pressed into her stomach as if to keep her insides from sliding out.
'Suffer,' Mary Terror said, sitting in the olive-green van with Drummer. She rolled down her window and smelted the air. The reek of smoke and burning houses was all gone, but she remembered it. She and Edward had crawled past a parked pig car in the dense haze, a couple of pigs standing less than ten feet away and holding pump shotguns as they talked about kicking hippie ass. An abandoned concession stand four blocks north, at the edge of a weeded-up park, had a loose board. Mary and Edward had hidden there for over twenty-six hours, sleeping except when they had to kick the rats away from Mary's blood. Then Edward had gone out and found a pay phone, and he'd called some friends in Manhattan who owned a militant bookstore. Two hours after that, Mary awoke in an apartment listening to voices argue the fact that she was getting blood on everything and she couldn't stay there. Somebody came in with a medical bag, antiseptic, hypodermics, and shiny instruments. 'Fucking mess,' she heard him say as he removed the shrapnel and wood shards with forceps.
'My baby,' Mary had whispered. 'I'm going to have a baby.'
'Yeah. Right. Eddie, give her another swig of the rum.'
She drank the liquid fire. 'Where's Jack? Tell Jack I'm going to have his baby.'
Edward's voice: 'Mary? Mary, listen to me. A friend of mine's going to take you on a trip. Take you to a house where you can rest. Is that all right?'
'Yes. I'm going to have a baby. Oh, I'm hurting. I'm hurting.'
'You won't hurt long. Listen, Mary. You're going to stay at this house until you can get around, but you can't stay there very long. Only a week or so. Okay?'
'Underground railroad,' she'd answered, her eyes closed. 'I can dig it.'
'I have to leave now. Can you hear me?'
'Hear you.'
'I have to leave. My friend is going to take care of you. I've paid him some money. I've got to go right now. Okay?'
' 'Kay,' she'd said. She had drifted to sleep, and that was the last time she'd seen Edward Fordyce.
Near Baltimore there was the gas station bathroom where Mary had delivered the dead infant girl from a belly held together with three hundred and sixty-two ragged stitches. There was a house in Bowens, Maryland, near the edge of Battle Creek Cypress Swamp, where Mary had lived for a week on lentil soup with a man and woman who never talked. At night the shrieks of small animals being devoured in the swamp sounded to her like crying babies.
The couple had let her read a New York Times story about the Shootout. It was a difficult thing to read. Edward, Lord Jack, and Bedelia Morse had escaped. James Xavier Toombs had been captured, alive but badly wounded. He would never tell about the weeping lady, Mary knew. James Xavier Toombs had a hole inside himself, and he could retreat into it, close the lid, and recite haiku in his inner sanctum.
The worst night, though, was when she dreamed about herself giving a baby boy to Lord Jack. It was terrible, because when it was over she was alone again.
'I was born right there. See it?' Mary picked up Drummer's bassinet. But Drummer was asleep, his pink eyelids fluttering and the pacifier gripped in his mouth. She kissed his forehead, a gentler kiss than she'd once given a suffering pig, and she returned Drummer's bassinet to the floorboard.
There were ghosts at 1105 Elderman Street. She could hear them singing songs of love and revolution with voices that would be young forever. James Xavier Toombs had been killed in a riot at Attica; she wondered if his ghost had returned here, and joined those of the other sleeping children. Linden, New Jersey. July 1, 1972. As Cronkite would have said: That was the way it was.
She felt very old. Tomorrow she would feel young again. She drove back the sixteen miles to the McArdle Travel Inn outside Piscataway, and when she cried a little bit no one saw.
4: A Crack in Clay
When the door opened, Laura thrust the half-killed bottle of sangria into Mark Treggs's face. 'Here. I brought you a present.'
