at least. There were others staggering around like me and half the time stepping on them. There was blood all over—some alongside people where it ought to be, and some out on the grass as if it had dropped from the sky, which maybe it had. I tripped over something and looked down, and it was a shoe, a man’s brown shoe; it had laces and they were still tied, but there was no foot in it.
There were people giving first aid, and a lot more who were trying to but had forgotten anything they ever knew about it. I saw one man working over another man who looked better than he did. There were maybe a couple dozen people who were hysterical—most of them were women, but some were kids and some were men. There were dazed people wandering around for reasons they didn’t understand, looking for something that made no sense; and after a while I realized I was one of them.
Then the sirens started. I don’t know who got to the high school first, but the first thing I saw was the hook- and-ladder. There are some little trees about as tall as a good basketball player out front, and I remember having some crazy idea that the firemen would use the ladders to climb them and get bodies down. I don’t know what crazy idea the firemen themselves had; maybe they just brought along their hook-and-ladder thinking it might be useful, the way you drop a pair of scissors into the basket when you’re packing for a picnic.
So all of a sudden there were guys in white coats running around carrying stretchers, and firemen with stretchers and aid kits, too, only the firemen had on slickers, and those terrific hats they always have. Lots of people were finding each other:
Just about then I caught sight of Aladdin Blue. Something had happened to his shirt, and he was knotting a rag around some other guy’s hand. I ran to him and grabbed him and hollered, “I thought you were dead!”
He said, “You’re hurt,” and bum leg and all hauled me over to an ambulance. A couple of guys there cut open my jeans and bandaged my leg, working so fast I hardly knew what they’d done. Next minute we were swaying along, going like hell and hitting every chuckhole on Main Street. Somebody’d shot me up, and I was dizzy from it. A woman on one of the other stretchers said, “Where’re they taking us?” and I said, to the hospital, meaning Barton Community Hospital.
Only we never got there. We just went on and on,
I’ll spare you the rest of the bloody details. There were lots of people hurt worse than I was. It turned out that B.C.H. had been full, or maybe they were saving it for the people who might really die or something, and they’d taken us to Palestine, which isn’t where you think but a suburb closer to Chicago than Barton is. The emergency ward there patched me up some more—stitches and about two pints of blood this time instead of just gauze and pads—and told me I’d been cut by flying glass (which I’d already figured out for myself) and not zapped by shrapnel. That was the first time I heard of shrapnel. Then they tucked me away in one of those nice cozy hospital beds that are about five feet off the floor and eighteen inches wide, and gave me a pill, and after a while I went right to sleep.
When I woke up it was morning; and believe it or not for ten minutes or so I wasn’t sure what had happened or where I was. I felt like I’d had terrible dreams all night, but whenever I tried to put a finger on them, they turned out to be something that had really happened, like my throwing my arms around Aladdin Blue and getting my blood on him. I felt, too, that somehow something had changed—that my old world had stopped while I was sitting behind the card table, and a new one had started when I came to under one of the lab tables; and I would never in my whole life ever be able to get back to my old world again. I kept telling myself it was crazy, and it’s only about now that I’ve come to realize that it was absolutely true.
I was in a private room with nobody around to talk to me or answer questions. Instead of medicine, all I could smell was flowers; there was a big bouquet on the table beside my bed. My head hurt and my leg hurt, but I couldn’t do anything about them and I wanted something that would take my mind off them. There was a TV up almost at the ceiling, looking down as you might say at me in my bed; but I didn’t know how to switch it on. I kept thinking how lucky it was I’d ridden into town in the Caddy with Elaine, because if I hadn’t I’d have been worried to death about Sidi, and the way it was I knew Bill would take care of him till I got back. Then I started thinking about everybody I thought might’ve been at the Fair and wondering if they were all right. Aladdin Blue was okay or pretty close to it, because I’d seen him. But what about Elaine? Uncle Dee? Les? Megan? Larry?
Then it hit me. What had blown up must have been Pandora’s Box; and if that was right, Larry’d been right on top of it.
After about half an hour a nurse came in. She sure wasn’t like the beautiful nurses you see on the tube, but she wasn’t a battle-ax either, and she gave me a little smile. “We’re awake! Could we see someone now? We have a visitor.”
I thought it was going to be Aladdin Blue, so I said yes, but the truth was I’d have seen anybody. I also asked if there was any chance of getting some breakfast.
The nurse said she was sure there was, and a minute later a young cop I’d seen around Barton once or twice came in. Uniform, gun, the whole nine, except instead of wearing his hat he had it with his clipboard. He smiled and told me he was Officer Ritter. Blue eyes and crew-cut blond hair made him look like a handsome storm trooper. I told him I was Patient Hollander.
He sat down and laid his hat on my table and fixed up his clipboard on his knee. “I’ve got your name already, and your age. Where were you when it happened?”
“Why is it
“We already have,” he said, “but that’s just for technical advice on the bomb.”
“Who’s we?”
I expected him to tighten up, but he didn’t. “The Barton Police and the Pool County Sheriff’s Department.”
“Aren’t you going to call in the FBI or something?” He shook his head. “Only if we uncover evidence indicating that a federal law’s been violated.”
“Maybe I could pray in school.”
“I wish you would,” he said straight-faced. “I’d appreciate it. Where were you when it happened?”
So I told him just like I’ve told you, but in a whole lot more detail because he kept going over it and over it and asking screwy questions like how far was my table from the window, and had Blue flinched before the bomb went off. I said how could he have flinched when he didn’t know there was a bomb, and he read me back all that stuff
