She pilfered through her purse for her keys as Phil timidly lifted inked-on pages of the reporter's notebook Monica handed him. "Keep track of the mileage, willya?" she said.
Phil told her he would. He traded the notebook for her keys, and dodged the frayed residents in their green pajamas and the exponentially more poised nurses in their white knit. One day, medical apparel would become popular in fashion, Phil mused, much as lawyer apparel was now, and used car salesman apparel had been in the 70s. Everyone said the future designs would be unisex, and medical chic certainly qualified.
Phil nodded his half-nod to every physician he encountered. They needed to think of him kindly now should he run over a coil of live wire later tonight. In the parking lot, he was thankful it had stopped raining, but as he adjusted the driver's seat to accommodate his gawky legs, he saw big, but sparse, drops blister the windshield. He backed out, listening to the report from somewhere downtown, maybe ground zero. Still some lines down in the Cutler area, but all utilities in the area except water had been cut off to avert disaster. Whew. Phil could breathe as he drove.
There was no evidence of the slightest wind until Phil got to the intersection of Pine and 12th. There the road surface was flecked with splinters large and small. Some of the splinters looked to be of metal. Phil steered Monica's car as gingerly as he could among the tire hazards. Phil couldn't get over the idea that blood changed colors according to what you were wearing. In the movies, it was always red, because those shot or cut or stabbed always wore white, but tonight one staggered victim after another walked in or were brought in wearing wet, discolored clothes. So very often bleeding only looked like the result of a mishandled cup of coffee.
He got out his wallet when he got to Tenth, where an Armored Personnel Carrier was parked at the Hardee's and several thin men in green waved at him in a way that was not friendly. After an interval of desperate torture--the search for the crank--he rolled down his window as one approached. "I'm press," Phil said, displaying the open face of his wallet.
"That's your JCPenney card, man," the guardsman said.
"Oh. My apologies. I just . . . let me see . . . " Phil found his old press card opposite a photo of his sister who was up in Little Rock typing legal transcripts from eight to five during the week.
"Okay. Want you to stay off of Walnut Street. We don't have that under control. When you're driving, don't stop, except at the signs, just keep going. You'll hold people up who need to get where they need to go. Cute chick, man? Is that your woman?"
Phil shook his head, embarrassed. "No. That's Patti. She's my sister."
"You carry a picture of your sister?"
Phil drove forward, unwilling to explain. Due to his glasses, the odd shape of his head, and certainly his unimpressive job, Phil had never had a girlfriend, and it embarrassed him. His big sister was the only female who ever listened to him. She thought Phil was smart and not a loser. Just . . . maybe . . . undecided about a lot of things.
As Phil drove down the dwindled avenue Pine Street became when it trailed off into the residential area, he saw what he thought was a tree growing out of the side of a house. From behind him, a sudden jarring honk blew out all thought. "Don't stop!" he heard a male voice yell. He lifted his foot from the brake pedal he had no idea he had applied.
Monica's car drifted smoothly down the last of Pine, without Phil's touching the throttle. To the left, Phil could see the house where he knew city board member Dalton Pinfield ran his insurance agency, and also lived with his three blonde daughters whose pictures got into the paper whatever they did. Big, leafy limbs obscured the roof, and from a thick, roiling jungle in the front yard, the bent face of a Jeep Cherokee appealed for rescue. Two jittery, white strands from flashlights flickered across the scene like weakening nerve ends.
Two much stronger beams coming on fast from the left made Phil stomp down on the brake.
"Damn. You even SEE that stop sign?" Phil heard someone male say from nearby. He rolled his window down the rest of the way and smiled meekly.
"I'm sorry, sir. I'm just . . . I'll . . . "
"Turn right," the guardsman said. "I said RIGHT!"
Phil obeyed. As he swung the car onto Sixth Street, he decided Monica's car had a little too much give in the steering. There was the briefest sensation of uncontrol, like training wheels suddenly coming off. But he reined the car in, and achieved a relatively tight turn which would not have endangered oncoming traffic, if there had been any.
Phil passed an apartment complex on his left and on his right a large, red brick two-story used by a law firm. He couldn't see much changed around either structure, but as he drove closer to Caddo Street he saw that one 50-foot Pecan tree behind the law firm had swallowed a billboard that said THE ONLY THING MISSING IN CH_RCH IS "U"! He rolled down the passenger side window to make sure he saw what he saw. Not appropriate for the lead, of course, but it could certainly lend some color to the piece.
When he got to the intersection of Sixth and Caddo, he looked anxiously to his left. The Radio Shack remained pristine. Good. And he'd forgotten to pick up his printer, which he'd brought in three days ago for what would be its third operation. Damn feeder.
To his right was city hall. He turned around in his seat, not believing what he heard. Lawnmowers? And apparently the lights in that building were back on while internal darkness reigned in every other building nearby.
Phil showed his ID to another guardsman, this one of a quieter temperament -- a rare breed apparently, since all the others yelled for him to go, as soon as the slight Caddo Street traffic permitted. Phil drove south past a furniture store on his right and a dry cleaner's on his left. There were cracks in the big front windows of the store that split into a sort of Jackson Pollock pencil drawing as he drove on. He could see a few windows out on the side of the big Horizon Bank farther up. But when he got to the old Phillip's Drug Store, which had recently shut its doors when the owner retired after 40 years (Monica had done a story in which the owner decried the "WalMartization of our country," and Phil threw out that phrase knowing Crider wouldn't stand for it), he didn't see windows, just square holes all the way around where several figures tried to hang big sheets of plastic. He didn't see the door either. All he saw were guardsmen and police shuffling about holding M16s like guitars. One of them caught his eye and angrily waved him forward. Phil took his foot off the brake.
He kept driving down Sixth, thinking of recording all this in a notebook. But that wouldn't have been safe anyway. He looked left and right as he passed the intersection of Main Street. At his left he saw a row of dark, broken hulks only lit by the occasional spotlight and the bright blue intervals when police car beams turned their way. People dressed in unbuttoned jackets stepped carefully along the closed street, where about two dozen logs and telephone poles had fallen, some leaning askew on cars and trucks with no windows. Phil looked to his left and saw the shattered face of Elk Horn Bank's time and temperature display was the only apparent sign of damage on that side.
So the shoe store, the carpet store, the women's surplus clothing store, the pharmacy were all destroyed. The bank had broken windows.
Phil kept driving. To his left he saw that the west wall of the pharmacy appeared to have grown a thin beard. Various sticks, shards of wood, and shingles stuck out of the wall. One man in a cap was showing two friends how hard it was to dig one shingle out. He nearly fell over as the wall released the black rectangle.
Phil had begun to think the storm hadn't been as bad as he thought, that the buildings were intact, although structurally compromised. But through the right-hand side of the windshield he saw the place were there should have been a restaurant. Instead, there were two brick columns, each somewhat incomplete, but where the restaurant had been there were only chewed remnants, what an insolent child left of a full plate of food he'd found unpalatable, but interesting. Inside the pile of splintered walls and scattered bricks, Phil could see the anxious face of some kind of minivan, possibly Japanese.
Phil heard honks behind him again, so he kept on. He nearly didn't see that the red brick funeral home across from what he now remembered had been called Shaver's Tea Garden and Restaurant had lost its roof, its carport, its front canopy and all its windows. All that was left was a dingy husk certain to cave in with a sharp kick or a shout.
Phil looked for the old barber shop in the old trailer he knew his grandfather patronized regularly went to for his "no-sideburns, left side part" four-dollar trim, but he didn't see it. He looked for the auto repair shop in the long tin building, but all he saw was a kind of rough, one-dimensional outline in debris, much like what you put on a piece of paper when you were four and first started trying to draw your own house. You left off everything that could not be rendered with a straight, black line.
When Phil tried to turn up Walnut Street, about four National Guardsmen gathered around the car. One put his arm on the rear-view mirror, as though preparing to hold the car in place with an slight exertion of the forearm. "Sir, turn back around. This is zone four. Access restricted to emergency personnel only!" Phil slowly peeked his head out and looked at the five men in green fatigues, but could not tell which one, using a slicing tenor, had told him to halt. Many of them appeared to be wearing war paint.
"I am a member of the press," Phil said.
"All the more reason not to let you through," laughed the man holding the rear-view mirror.
Phil backed up, and as he backed onto the highway, a big Channel 16 van nearly rear-ended him. The van screeched on its tires, then turned up Walnut, unperturbed. The driver rolled the window down and flipped Phil a quick, casual bird. Phil heard some laughing and saw a man with a television camera hanging his legs out the open side door. In less than a minute, the van had gone past the National Guard checkpoint on its way to film more wreckage. Phil shook his head. It was amazing what a difference a camera made.
Phil was retraced his path along Sixth when he saw what he thought was a fat, brown dog, loping across the road, trotting arhytmically. Apparently, this dog was wanted by the police. When Phil stopped, several officers crossed in front of the car with flashlights and big rifles. One yelled, "Get down!" He stopped and fired. "Damn! I'm sorry," he said. Phil drove forward a little.
"Rabid dog?" Phil yelled to the one who had fired.
"No. That damn bear we caught this morning in Gurdon," the stout policeman explained between gasps for breath. "Tree fell on the door of his cage and sheared it off. He's loose now and he's runnin' up toward town. I'm too old for this."
Phil began to park on the shoulder. The officer, seeing what he intended to do, gestured frantically. "Hey, you better keep going 'fore I shoot you with a tranquilizer dart just like I did Sergeant Ricketts just now!"
So Phil kept driving. Through his passenger side window, he did catch a glimpse of Sergeant Ricketts, a nearly pudgy man in a black uniform who didn't look at all damaged. He held the pink dart in his hand and walked slowly across the street. But come to think of it, he did seem to be shaking his leg, stomping against the pavement in an effort to keep it awake. One other officer held his gun for him and watched Ricketts with amused expectation. The police all disappeared into the dark of Phil's rear-view mirror and he sadly realized he would probably not get to see the end of the story.
Phil took a right turn at Clay, toward the courthouse, the oldest building in the county, and one of the oldest in the state, the subject of a few papers Phil turned in in high school. As the building rose into view from behind the sheriff's office, it became plain to Phil that the trusty three-story had been hurt. The clock faces, replaced only six months before thanks to a check an ex-county judge's widow wrote last summer, were shattered in many places, much like the bank's time and temperature display. A lot of shingles had been torn off and the roof now looked like the side of an incompletely scaled fish. The top of the steel flag pole bent to touch the ground. The Confederate soldier's statue lay on the wet grass. If it had still had its head, it would have been lying face down.
Across from the front of the courthouse were several attorneys' offices. One of them had been an eighty-year-old frame house and now leaned dangerously forward. The offices of a family of bail bondsmen who had done business there since the depression looked hollowed out. The walls were still there, but the contents had been vacuumed up into the sky, had gone the way of the roof. Scattered, walking figures followed erratic paths through the scene, carrying misshapen, unidentifiable objects.
Phil concluded that he had seen all he had need to see. Nearly every commercial and public building within twelve blocks was either gone or gouged out. He drove back through the several checkpoints, cheerfully showing his press card to men who had seen it not twenty minutes before. Back at the ER waiting room, he found Monica sitting between dozens of subdued parents, brothers, sisters and children of the injured, turning the pages of her notebook.
"How many?" Phil asked her.
"Dead? Still four. But they had to fly two more up to Little Rock, they were so bad."
"Hmm," Phil said. "I'm amazed there aren't more. Amazed. The whole downtown looks just terrible. I don't think it would have been good to be there."
"Goodness," Monica said softly. "Well, do you think we should go?"
"Where? Back there? The damage?" Phil felt his blood rise. He heard the sudden crash of a gurney against the double doors. Three policemen were hovering around a fourth, who lay inert but awake. It was Sergeant Ricketts. "We shot him with a tranquilizer dart," Phil overheard one policeman explain to a male nurse who approached. "It's in the thigh. He's groggy. We don't know what this does to people so . . . "
Monica saw and heard too. Her eyebrows went up wearily. "What in the world?" she said.
"Escaped bear. He accidently got shot chasing it," Phil said, but Monica still looked puzzled.
"I meant go back to write our stories," Monica said, getting up, gathering her purse. "I want to get off from this and find out if my house is still there."
"Oh, Mercy," Phil said. "Where did you live?"
"The corner of Caddo and 12th."
"You should be all right," he told her. "It veered off to the east of there."
"Good. Good," Monica said. "I was so worried about my little cat, Spanky. He's such a good boy."
As they walked out the double doors, Monica startled Phil by reaching toward him and holding onto the sleeve of his arm and looking up at him quietly as they walked. "What?" he said in near alarm.