find.”
“What do you mean?” Nick wrote.
“None of the phones in Shoyo work,” Soames said. Nick had no idea if this was in answer to his question (Soames seemed to have given Nick’s last note only the most cursory of glances), or if the doctor had gone off on some new tack—the fever could be making Soames’s mind jump around, he supposed.
The doctor observed Nick’s puzzled face, and seemed to think the deaf-mute might not believe him. “Quite true,” he said. “If you try to dial any number not on this town’s circuit, you get a recorded announcement. Furthermore, the two Shoyo exits and entrances from the turnpike are closed off with barriers which say ROAD CONSTRUCTION. But there is no construction. Only the barriers. I was out there. I believe it would be possible to move the barriers aside, but the traffic on the turnpike seems very light this morning. And most of it seems to consist of army vehicles. Trucks and jeeps.”
“What about the other roads?” Nick wrote.
“Route 63 has been torn up at the east end of town to replace a culvert,” Soames said. “At the west end of town there appears to have been a rather nasty car accident. Two cars across the road, blocking it entirely. There are smudge pots out, but no sign of state troopers or wreckers.”
He paused, removed his handkerchief, and blew his nose.
“The men working on the culvert are going very slowly, according to Joe Rackman, who lives out that way. I was at the Rackmans’ about two hours ago, looking at their little boy, who is very ill indeed. Joe said that he thinks that the men at the culvert are in fact soldiers, though they’re dressed in state road crew coveralls and driving a state truck.”
Nick wrote: “How does he know?”
Standing up, Soames said: “Workmen rarely salute each other.”
Nick got up, too.
“Back roads?” he jotted.
“Possibly.” Soames nodded. “But I am a doctor, not a hero. Joe said he saw guns in the cab of that truck. Army-issue carbines. If one tried to leave Shoyo by the back roads and if they were watched, who knows? And what might one find beyond Shoyo? I repeat: someone made a mistake. And now they’re trying to cover it up. Madness. Madness. Of course the news of something like this will get out, and it won’t take long. And in the meantime, how many will die?”
Nick, frightened, only looked at Dr. Soames as he went back to his car and climbed slowly in.
“And you, Nick,” Soames said, looking out the window at him. “How do you feel? A cold? Sneezing? Coughing?”
Nick shook his head to each one.
“Will you try to leave town? I think you could, if you went by the fields.”
Nick shook his head and wrote, “Those men are locked up. I can’t just leave them. Vincent Hogan is sick but the other two seem okay. I’ll get them their breakfast and then go see Mrs. Baker.”
“You’re a thoughtful boy,” Soames said. “That’s rare. A boy in this degraded age who has a sense of responsibility is even rarer. She’d appreciate that, Nick, I know. Mr. Braceman, the Methodist minister, also said he would stop by. I’m afraid he’ll have a lot of calls to make before the day is over. You’ll be careful of those three you have locked up, won’t you?”
Nick nodded soberly.
“Good. I’ll try to drop by and check on you this afternoon.” He dropped the car into gear and drove away, looking weary and red-eyed and shriveled. Nick stared after him, his face troubled, and then began to walk down to the truck-stop again. It was open, but one of the two cooks was not in and three of the four waitresses hadn’t shown up for the seven-to-three shift. Nick had to wait a long time to get his order. When he got back to the jail, both Billy and Mike looked badly frightened. Vince Hogan was delirious, and by six o’clock that evening he was dead.
Chapter 19
It had been so long since Larry had been in Times Square that he expected it to look different somehow, magical. Things would look smaller and yet better there, and he would not feel intimidated by the rank, smelly, and sometimes dangerous vitality of the place the way he had as a child, when he and Buddy Marx or just he alone would scuttle down here to see the 99-cent double features or to stare at the glittering junk in the windows of the shops and arcades and poolhalls.
But it all looked just the same—more than it should have because some things really had changed. When you came up the stairs from the subway, the newsstand that had been on the corner as you came out was gone. Half a block down, where there had been a penny arcade full of flashing lights and bells and dangerous-looking young men with cigarettes dangling from the corners of their mouths as they played the Gottlieb Desert Isle or Space Race, where that had been there was now an Orange Julius with a flock of young blacks standing in front of it, their lower bodies moving gently as if somewhere jive played on and on, jive that only black ears could hear. There were more massage parlors and X-rated movies.
Still, it was much the same, and this made him sad. In a way the only real difference made things seem worse: he felt like a tourist here now. But maybe even native New Yorkers felt like tourists in the Square, dwarfed, wanting to look up and read the electronic headlines as they marched around and around up there. He couldn’t tell; he had forgotten what it was like to be a part of New York. He had no particular urge to relearn.
His mother hadn’t gone to work that morning. She’d been fighting a cold for the last couple of days and had gotten up early this morning with a fever. He had heard her from the narrow, safe bed in his old room, banging around out in the kitchen, sneezing and saying “Shit!” under her breath, getting ready for breakfast. The sound of the TV being turned on, then the news on the “Today” program. An attempted coup in India. A power station blown up in Wyoming. The Supreme Court was expected to hand down a landmark decision having to do with gay rights.
By the time Larry came out into the kitchen, buttoning his shirt, the news was over and Gene Shalitt was interviewing a man with a bald head. The man with the bald head was showing a number of small animals he had hand-blown. Glassblowing, he said, had been his hobby for forty years, and his book would be published by Random House. Then he sneezed. “Excuse you,” Gene Shalitt said, and chuckled.
“You want em fried or scrambled?” Alice Underwood asked. She was in her bathrobe.
“Scrambled,” Larry said, knowing it would do no good to protest the eggs. In Alice’s view, it wasn’t breakfast without eggs (which she called “crackleberries” when she was in a good humor). They had protein and nutrition. Her idea of nutrition was vague but all-encompassing. She kept a list of nutritious items in her head, Larry knew, as well as their opposite numbers—Jujubes, pickles, Slim Jims, the slice of pink bubble gum that came with baseball cards, and oh dear God, so many others.
He sat down and watched her make the eggs, pouring them into the same old black skillet, stirring them with the same wife whisk that she had used to stir his eggs when he had been going to the first grade at PS 162.
She pulled her hankie out of her bathrobe pocket, coughed into it, sneezed into it, and muttered “Shit!” indistinctly into it before putting it back.
“Day off, Mom?”
“I called in sick. This cold wants to break me. I hate to call in sick on Fridays, so many do, but I’ve got to get off my feet. I’m running a fever. Swollen glands, too.”
“Did you call the doctor?”
“When I was a charming maid, doctors made housecalls,” she said. “Now if you’re sick, you have to go to the hospital emergency room. That, or spend the day waiting for some quack to see you in one of those places where they’re supposed to have—ha-ha—walk-in medical care. Walk in and get ready to collect your Medicare, that’s what I think. Those places are worse than the Green Stamp Redemption Center a week before Christmas. I’ll stay home and take aspirin, and by tomorrow this time I’ll be on the downhill side of it.”
He stayed most of the morning, trying to help out. He lugged the TV in by her bed, the cords standing out heroically on his arms (“You’re going to give yourself a hernia so I can watch ‘Let’s Make a Deal,’” she sniffed), brought her juice and an old bottle of NyQuil for her stuffiness, and ran down to the market to get her a couple of paperbacks.
After that there wasn’t much for them to do except get on each other’s nerves. She marveled how much poorer the TV reception was in the bedroom and he had to bite back an acid comment to the effect that poor
