He looked down at the sleeping bag, in which he had expected to spend the small hours of the night, and thought of Janice Cray saying she wanted to apologize for Columbine, and 9/11, and Barry Bonds. Probably she would cop to global warming as well. Maybe when this was over and they had secured jobs – or not; not was probably just as likely – he would treat her to breakfast. Not a date, nothing like that, just some scrambled eggs and bacon. After that they would never see each other again.
More people came. They reached the end of the posted switchbacks with the self-important DO NOT CROSS tape. Once that was used up, the line began to stretch into the parking lot. What surprised Augie – and made him uneasy – was how silent they were. As if they all knew this mission was a failure, and they were only waiting to get the official word.
The banner gave another lackadaisical flap.
The fog continued to thicken.
Shortly before five A.M., Augie roused from his own half-doze, stamped his feet to wake them up, and realized an unpleasant iron light had crept into the air. It was the furthest thing in the world from the rosy-fingered dawn of poetry and old Technicolor movies; this was an anti-dawn, damp and as pale as the cheek of a day-old corpse.
He could see the City Center auditorium slowly revealing itself in all its nineteen-seventies tacky architectural glory. He could see the two dozen switchbacks of patiently waiting people and then the tailback of the line disappearing into the fog. Now there was a little conversation, and when a janitor clad in gray fatigues passed through the lobby on the other side of the doors, a small satiric cheer went up.
‘Life is discovered on other planets!’ shouted one of the young men who had been staring at Janice Cray – this was Keith Frias, whose left arm would shortly be torn from his body.
There was mild laughter at this sally, and people began to talk. The night was over. The seeping light wasn’t particularly encouraging, but it was marginally better than the long small hours just past.
Augie knelt beside his sleeping bag again and cocked an ear. The small, regular snores he heard made him smile. Maybe his worry about her had been for nothing. He guessed there were people who went through life surviving – perhaps even thriving – on the kindness of strangers. The young woman currently snoozing in his sleeping bag with her baby might be one of them.
It came to him that he and Janice Cray could present themselves at the various application tables as a couple. If they did that, the baby’s presence might not seem an indicator of irresponsibility but rather of joint dedication. He couldn’t say for sure, much of human nature was a mystery to him, but he thought it was possible. He decided he’d try the idea out on Janice when she woke up. See what she thought. They couldn’t claim marriage; she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring and he’d taken his off for good three years before, but they could claim to be … what was it people said now? Partners.
Cars continued to come up the steep incline from Marlborough Street at steady tick-tock intervals. There would soon be pedestrians as well, fresh off the first bus of the morning. Augie was pretty sure they started running at six. Because of the thick fog, the arriving cars were just headlights with vague shadow-shapes lurking behind the windshields. A few of the drivers saw the huge crowd already waiting and turned around, discouraged, but most kept on, heading for the few remaining parking spaces, their taillights dwindling.
Then Augie noticed a car-shape that neither turned around nor continued on toward the far reaches of the parking lot. Its unusually bright headlights were flanked by yellow fog-lamps.
HD headers, Augie thought. That’s a Mercedes-Benz. What’s a Benz doing at a job fair?
He supposed it might be Mayor Kinsler, here to make a speech to the Early Birds Club. To congratulate them on their gumption, their good old American git-up-and-git. If so, Augie thought, arriving in his Mercedes – even if it was an old one – was in bad taste.
An elderly fellow in line ahead of Augie (Wayne Welland, now in the last moments of his earthly existence) said: ‘Is that a Benz? It looks like a Benz.’
Augie started to say of course it was, you couldn’t mistake a Mercedes’s HD headlamps, and then the driver of the car directly behind the vague shape laid on his horn – a long, impatient blast. The HD lights flashed brighter than ever, cutting brilliant white cones through the suspended droplets of the fog, and the car leaped forward as if the impatient horn had goosed it.
‘Hey!’ Wayne Welland said, surprised. It was his final word.
The car accelerated directly at the place where the crowd of job-seekers was most tightly packed, and hemmed in by the DO NOT CROSS tapes. Some of them tried to run, but only the ones at the rear of the crowd were able to break free. Those closer to the doors – the true Early Birds – had no chance. They struck the posts and knocked them over, they got tangled in the tapes, they rebounded off each other. The crowd swayed back and forth in a series of agitated waves. Those who were older and smaller fell down and were trampled underfoot.
Augie was shoved hard to the left, stumbled, recovered, and was pushed forward. A flying elbow struck his cheekbone just below his right eye and that side of his vision filled with bright Fourth of July sparkles. From the other eye he could see the Mercedes not just emerging from the fog but seeming to create itself from it. A big gray sedan, maybe an SL500, the kind with twelve cylinders, and right now all twelve were screaming.
Augie was driven to his knees beside the sleeping bag, and kicked repeatedly as he struggled to get back up: in the arm, in the shoulder, in the neck. People were screaming. He heard a woman cry, ‘Look out, look out, he’s not stopping!’
He saw Janice Cray pop her head out of the sleeping bag, eyes blinking in bewilderment. Once more he was reminded of a shy mole peering from its hole. A lady mole with a bad case of bed head.
He scrambled forward on his hands and knees and lay down on the bag and the woman and baby inside, as if by doing this he could successfully shield them from a two-ton piece of German engineering. He heard people yelling, the sound of them almost lost beneath the approaching roar of the big sedan’s motor. Someone fetched him a terrific wallop on the back of his head, but he barely felt it.
There was time to think: I was going to buy Rose of Sharon breakfast.
There was time to think: Maybe he’ll veer off.
That seemed to be their best chance, probably their only chance. He started to raise his head to see if it was happening, and a huge black tire ate up his vision. He felt the woman’s hand grip his forearm. He had time to hope the baby was still sleeping. Then time ran out.
DET. – RET.
1
Hodges walks out of the kitchen with a can of beer in his hand, sits down in the La-Z-Boy, and puts the can down on the little table to his left, next to the gun. It’s a .38 Smith & Wesson M&P revolver, M&P standing for Military and Police. He pats it absently, the way you’d pat an old dog, then picks up the remote control and turns on Channel Seven. He’s a little late, and the studio audience is already applauding.
He’s thinking of a fad, brief and baleful, that inhabited the city in the late eighties. Or maybe the word he really wants is infected, because it had been like a transient fever. The city’s three papers had written editorials about it all one summer. Now two of those papers are gone and the third is on life support.
The host comes striding onstage in a sharp suit, waving to the audience. Hodges has watched this show almost every weekday since his retirement from the police force, and he thinks this man is too bright to be doing this job, one that’s a little like scuba-diving in a sewer without a wetsuit. He thinks the host is the sort of man who sometimes commits suicide and afterward all his friends and close relatives say they never had a clue anything was wrong; they talk about how cheerful he was the last time they saw him.