'My father's!' Annabelle says, sitting up with a rustle. 'I remember. With Jamie. He bought an orange Corolla, eventually.'
'It was my mother's, more,' Nelson says. 'It's sad to see. The company that bought it from her is still in bankruptcy proceedings, ten years later. They've probably forgotten that they own it. I heard a Barnes and Noble was interested, to make a superstore.'
The spotlights are a little farther down Route 111, in front of what was once a Planter's Peanuts store and became, added on to, a disco in the Seventies. The tall thin silhouette of Mr. Peanut outside, a twelve-foot billboard, became a nearly nude dancing girl with her naughty parts covered by bubbles, but that was too sexist to last. Now the humanoid shape holds a cowgirl in short white skirt and high white boots advertising PURE COUNTRY MUSIC. Country music keeps coming back. Or is it just slow to go away? The parking lot looks only half full. People with sense are staying home tonight, exhausted by the hype, petrified of fanatic Arabs sneaking in from Canada.
'Hey, Nellie,' Billy pipes up. 'It's getting close to midnight, and we're nowhere.'
'I know, I'm going as fast as I can. If you hadn't got me lost-'
'Did Nelson ever tell you the story,' Pru asks Annabelle, 'how he lost the agency up his nose?'
'No, not really.' Her voice sounds dried out, for now.
'Say, thanks a lot,' Nelson complains to his wife.
'Siblings should have no secrets,' Pru says, and makes, he knows without looking, that prudish little mouth of hers, as if sucking on something tart. 'Nelson wasn't always such a saint.'
'He was a pill of a sissy, in fact,' Billy contributes, making the fun rougher. 'A real little mamma's boy, terrified of his father, who was a pretty nice guy, actually.'
'Unlike yours,' Nelson tells him. 'What a sleazebag.'
'Very musical, though,' Billy tells Annabelle. 'He could play anything, any instrument, by ear.'
'Oh, I've always wanted to be able to do that!' she responds, snuggling from the way her voice squeezes down. Does Nelson imagine it, or is there the purr of a zipper being unzipped, that long diagonal zipper on the front of her dress? His sister giggles, and a hand is lightly slapped.
Nelson drives the Corolla through West Brewer. Those new-style icicle lights hang like bright napkins from the little porches of the row houses that slant down to the river and the Weiser Street Bridge. The Bridge has old- fashioned lamp standards, yellow glass balls and iron curlicues going green with age, but the light falls cold and contemporary from tall violet tubes on aluminum stems. At the far end of the bridge sits an upscale coffee bar that used to be a black hangout, Jimbo's Friendly Lounge, before the blacks were chased out of South Brewer by gentrification. Then there unrolls beneath the wheels of the Corolla Brewer's main drag in all its Yuletide glory: the trees rimming Weiser Square are looped with necklaces of white lights, scribbles in three dimensions. The square, an open farmer's market originally, was decades ago blocked to form an ill-advised pedestrian park to revive the downtown, but it turned into a dangerous forest, and by a newer plan has been reopened to automobile traffic. They pass Fourth Street, and the bronze statue of Conrad Weiser in Mohawk headdress in the center of the traffic circle at Fifth Street. Trolley cars used to go east, west, north, and south from this point, to amusement parks and picnic groves. The human traffic thickens; the city fathers have laid on a Millennium Ball in the atrium of the glass- enclosed mall between Fifth and Sixth on the left side of the street, as well as the Christian-rock concert a block up on the right, in the great hole. A dim din penetrates the car windows.
'Hey Nelson,' Billy says. 'The Sunflower Beer clock says it's midnight! Here it's the millennium and we're all stuck in this little Jap jalopy! Nothing's moving!'
'Don't panic,' Nelson tells him. 'That clock never told the right time. The Laid-Back is only up at Ninth, we'll be there in a minute.'
Then Nelson sees the dire occur: at the intersection of Sixth and Weiser, where Kroll's Department Store used to be, two cars ahead of them, the traffic light goes out. Hanging high above the asphalt, the light was green, and now is dead. Not red, dead. The sticky traffic halts completely. Revellers, mostly Hispanic kids in jeans and windbreakers, dart among the cars. A shout is going up, but here and there, as if nobody knows exactly what is happening. The cars behind them honk, in celebration or exasperation. The streetlights flicker.
'Oh my God,' Annabelle says, 'terrorists just like they said,' and begins to cry again.
'It's a little glitch,' Billy says, feigning calm, though this must feel like a tunnel to him. 'These lights are all on computers.'
'Son of a bitch!' Nelson says. Decades of wrongs, hurts, unjust deaths press behind his eyes. He pushes down on the window locks. Hooded kids with sparkle dust on their faces are crowding around the Corolla, and looking up the street toward Mt. Judge. The city's fire alarms begin to wail; church bells are dully ringing. At the top of Mt. Judge, fireworks ignite, one slow bloom after another, mingled with staccato gashes, potassium white and barium green, sodium yellow and chlorine blue, dying, blossoming, dying in drifts of dismissed sparks as the dull concussions thud through the windshield. 'We're missing it!' he cries.
The Corolla was the third car from the intersection when the traffic light went out. The first car glided through, unaware of the breakdown, and the next waited for the car on the right to come out and cut across. Sixth is one- way here, so there is no traffic from the left. The cars behind are in the dark, but up this close to the intersection the problem and its solution are plain: take your turn, in democratic American style. The car ahead of Nelson, a little cherry-red specimen of the remodelled VW Beetle, cute as a bug, with oval slant taillights like Disney animal eyes, creeps out and through, and the car on the right, a serious, four-ring, square-cut tan Audi, takes its turn like a good citizen. Then it is Nelson's turn, his dirty white Toyota's turn, to pass through the doused light and continue on, up Weiser toward the mountain and its fireworks, past where Kroll's used to be and where Mom and Dad got together (if they hadn't, he would not exist, think of that) and on across Seventh, where mile-long trains of coal would drag through from Pottsville to Philly and once upon a time there was a Chinese restaurant, and on up to look for a parking space in the blocks beyond the Laid-Back, around where Dad used to set type for the Verity Press. It will be jolly, to walk, the four of them, out in the air. He has an image of a frozen Daiquiri, or should it be a Margarita, with salt all around the rim?
'Hey!' he exclaims. Tailgating the Audi, a black-and-silver Ford Expedition, a huge SUV with truck wheels and a side mirror the size of a human head, keeps coming, trying to barrel through out of turn, against all decency and order. Some brat of the local rich, beered-up and baseball-hatted, with his smirking airhead buddies, gives Nelson a glazed so-what stare. Nelson sees red. 'That fucker,' he says.
High in the tinted windshield, so it looks greenish, a ball of twinkling fire expands. The Christian-rock music thumps away in the vast illumined excavation on their right. Nelson shivers, as if a contentious spirit is leaving him. And now Pru is attacking him, trying to hug him, her nose poking into his cheek, her breath fluttering warm on his neck. 'Oh honey, that was
'Me, too, almost,' says Annabelle.
'It's funny about death,' Billy contributes from the back seat. 'When you actually face it, it's kind of a rush.'
To Nelson Pru says, so softly the others could hear only if they were to ignore each other and listen hard, 'Let's not hang around too long at the Laid-Back. I thought I'd stay at your place tonight.'
Chapter 5
From: Roy Angstrom, Esq. [[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, January 8, 2000, 8:29 AM To: [email protected]. Subject: Thanking you
