real and make-believe. Besides, I was kind of interesting: Hey, Charlie Decker went apeshit today, didja hear? No! Did he? Yeah. Yeah. I was there. It was just like
I know they thought they’d be all right. That’s part of it. What I wonder about is this: Were they hoping I’d get somebody else?
Another shrieking sound had joined the fire siren, this one getting closer real fast. Not the cops. It was that hysterical yodeling note that is all the latest rage in ambulances and paramedic vehicles these days. I’ve always thought the day will come when all the disaster vehicles will get smart and stop scaring the almighty shit out of everyone they’re coming to save. When there’s a fire or an accident or a natural disaster like me, the red vehicles will rush to the scene accompanied by the amplified sound of the Darktown Strutters playing “Banjo Rag.” Someday. Oh, boy.
CHAPTER 13
Seeing as how it was the school, the town fire department went whole hog. The fire chief came first, gunning into the big semicircular school driveway in his blue bubble-topped Ford Pinto. Behind him was a hook-and-ladder trailing firemen like battle banners. There were two pumpers behind that.
“You going to let them in?” Jack Goldman asked.
“The fire’s out there,” I said. “Not in here.”
“Did you shut ya locka door?” Sylvia Ragan asked. She was a big blond girl with great soft cardiganed breasts and gently rotting teeth.
“Yes.”
“Prolly out already, then.”
Mike Gavin looked at the scurrying firemen and snickered. “Two of ’em just ran into each other,” he said. “Holy moly.”
The two downed firemen untangled themselves, and the whole group was preparing to charge into the inferno when two suit-coated figures ran over to them. One was Mr. Johnson, the Human Submarine, and the other was Mr. Grace. They were talking hard and fast to the fire chief.
Great rolls of hose with shiny nozzles were being unreeled from the pumpers and dragged toward the front doors. The fire chief turned around and yelled, “Hold it!” They stood irresolutely on the lawn, their nozzles gripped and held out before them like comic brass phalluses.
The fire chief was still in conference with Mr. Johnson and Mr. Grace. Mr. Johnson pointed at Room 16. Thomas Denver, the Principal with the Amazing Overshaved Neck, ran over and joined the discussion. It was starting to look like a pitcher’s mound conference in the last half of the ninth.
“I want to go home!” Irma Bates said wildly.
“Blow it out,” I said.
The fire chief had started to gesture toward his knights again, and Mr. Grace shook his head angrily and put a hand on his shoulder. He turned to Denver and said something to him. Denver nodded and ran toward the main doors.
The chief was nodding reluctantly. He went back to his car, rummaged in the back seat, and came up with a really nice Radio Shack battery-powered bullhorn. I bet they had some real tussles back at the fire station about who got to use that. Today the chief was obviously pulling rank. He pointed it at the milling students.
“Please move away from the building. I repeat. Will you please move away from the building. Move up to the shoulder of the highway. Move up to the shoulder of the highway. We will have buses here to pick you up shortly. School is canceled for-”
Short, bewildered whoop.
“… for the remainder of the day. Now, please move away from the building.”
A bunch of teachers-both men and women this time-started herding them up toward the road. They were craning and babbling. I looked for Joe McKennedy but didn’t see him anywhere.
“Is it all right to do homework?” Melvin Thomas asked tremblingly. There was a general laugh. They seemed surprised to hear it.
“Go ahead.” I thought for a moment and added: “If you want to smoke, go ahead and do it.”
A couple of them grabbed for their pockets. Sylvia Ragan, doing her lady-of-the-manor bit, fished a battered pack of Camels delicately out of her purse and lit up with leisurely elegance. She blew out a plume of smoke and dropped her match on the floor. She stretched out her legs, not bothering overmuch with the nuisance of her skirt. She looked comfy.
There had to be more, though. I was getting along pretty well, but there had to be a thousand things I wasn’t thinking of. Not that it mattered.
“If you’ve got a friend you want to sit next to, go ahead and change around. But don’t try to rush at me or run out the door, please.”
A couple of kids changed next to their buddies, walking quickly and softly, but most of them just sat quiet. Melvin Thomas had opened his algebra book but couldn’t seem to concentrate on it. He was staring at me glassily.
There was a faint metallic
“Hello,” Denver said. “Hello, Room 16.”
“Hello,” I said.
“Who’s that?”
“Charlie Decker.”
Long pause. Finally: “What’s going on down there, Decker?”
I thought it over. “I guess I’m going berserk,” I said.
An even longer pause. Then, almost rhetorically: “What have you done?”
I motioned at Ted Jones. He nodded back at me politely. “Mr. Denver?”
“Who’s that?”
“Ted Jones, Mr. Denver. Charlie has a gun. He’s holding us hostage. He’s killed Mrs. Underwood. And I think he killed Mr. Vance, too.”
“I’m pretty sure I did,” I said.
“Oh,” Mr. Denver said.
Sarah Pasterne giggled again.
“Ted Jones?”
“I’m here,” Ted told him. He sounded very competent, Ted did, but at the same time distant. Like a first lieutenant who has been to college. You had to admire him.
“Who is in the classroom besides you and Decker?”
“Just a sec,” I said. “I’ll call the roll. Hold on.”
I got Mrs. Underwood’s green attendance book and opened it up. “Period two, right?”
“Yeah,” Corky said.
“Okay. Here we go. Irma Bates?”
“I want to go
“She’s here,” I said. “Susan Brooks?”
“Here.”
“Nancy Caskin?”
“Here.”
I went through the rest of the roll. There were twenty-five names, and the only absentee was Peter Franklin.
“Has Peter Franklin been shot?” Mr. Denver asked quietly.
“He’s got the measles,” Don Lordi said. This brought on another attack of the giggles. Ted Jones frowned deeply.
“Decker?”
“Yes.”
“Will you let them go?”
“Not right now,” I said.
“Why?” There was dreadful concern, a dreadful heaviness in his voice, and for a second I almost caught myself feeling sorry for him. I crushed that quickly. It’s like being in a big poker game. Here is this guy who has been winning big all night, he’s got a pile of chips that’s a mile-high, and all at once he starts to lose. Not a little bit, but a lot, and you want to feel bad for him and his falling empire. But you cram that back and bust him, or you take it in the eye.
So I said, “We haven’t finished getting it on down here yet.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means stick it,” I said. Carol Granger’s eyes got round.
“Decker-”
“Call me Charlie. All my friends call me Charlie.”
“Decker-”
I held my hand up in front of the class and crossed the fingers in pairs. “If you don’t call me Charlie, I’m going to shoot somebody.”
Pause.
“Charlie?”
“That’s better.” In the back row, Mike Gavin and Dick Keene were covering grins. Some of the others weren’t bothering to cover them. “You call me Charlie, and I’ll call you Tom. That okay, Tom?”
Long, long pause.
“When will you let them go, Charlie? They haven’t hurt you.”
Outside, one of the town’s three black-and-whites and a blue state-police cruiser had arrived. They parked across the road from the high school, and Jerry Kesserling, the chief since Warren Talbot had retired into the local Methodist cemetery in 1975, began directing traffic onto the Oak Hill Pond road.
“Did you hear me, Charlie?”
