'Ready for a walk, Little Walter?'
Little Walter only snuggled his cheek into the hollow of her shoulder. Sometimes his paucity of speech bothered her - she had friends whose babies had been babbling whole sentences by sixteen months, and Little Walter only had nine or ten words - but not this morning. This morning she had other things to worry about.
The day felt dismayingly warm for the last full week of October; the sky overhead was its very palest shade of blue and the light was somehow blurry. She felt sweat spring out on her face and neck almost at once, and her crotch was throbbing badly - worse with every step, it seemed, and she had taken only a few. She thought of going back for aspirin, but wasn't it supposed to make bleeding worse? Besides, she wasn't sure she had any.
There was something else, as well, something she hardly dared admit to herself: if she went back into the house, she wasn't sure she'd have the heart to come back out again.
There was a white scrap of paper under the Toyota's left windshield wiper. It had Just a Note from SAMMY printed across the top and surrounded by daisies. Torn from her own kitchen pad. The idea caused a certain tired outrage. Scrawled under the daisies was this: Tell anyone and more than your tires will be flat. And below, in another hand: Next time maybe we'll turn you over and play the other side.
'In your dreams, motherfucker,' she said in a wan, tired voice.
She crumpled the note up, dropped it by one flat tire - poor old Corolla looked almost as tired and sad as she felt - and made her way out to the end of the driveway, pausing to lean against the mailbox for a few seconds.The metal was warm on her skin, the sun hot on her neck. And hardly a breath of breeze. October was supposed to be cool and invigorating. Maybe it's that global warming stuff, she thought. She was first to have this idea, but not the last, and the word which eventually stuck was not global but local.
Motton Road lay before her, deserted and charmless. Starting a mile or so to her left were the nice new homes of Eastchester, to which The Mill's higher-class workadaddies and workamommies came at the end of their days in the shops and offices and banks of Lewiston-Auburn. To her right lay downtown Chester's Mill. And the Health Center.
'Ready, Little Walter?'
Little Walter didn't say if he was or wasn't. He was snoring in the hollow of her shoulder and drooling on her Donna the Buffalo tee-shirt. Sammy took a deep breath, tried to ignore the throb coming from The Land Down Under, hitched up the Papoose, and started toward town.
When the whistle started up on top of the Town Hall, blowing the short blasts that indicated a fire, she first thought it was in her own head, which was feeling decidedly weird. Then she saw the smoke, but it was far to the west. Nothing to concern her and Little Walter... unless someone came along who wanted a closer look at the fire, that was. If that happened, they would surely be neighborly enough to drop her off at the Health Center on their way to the excitement.
She began to sing the James McMurtry song that had been popular last summer, got as far 'We roll up the sidewalks at quarter of eight, it's a small town, can't sell you no beer,' then quit. Her mouth was too dry to sing. She blinked and saw she was on the edge of falling into the ditch, and not even the one she'd been walking next to when she started out. She'd woven all the way across the road, an excellent way to get hit instead of picked up.
She looked over her shoulder, hoping for traffic.There was none. The road to Eastchester was empty, the tar not quite hot enough to shimmer.
She went back to what she thought of as her side, swaying on her feet now, feeling all jelly-legged. Drunken sailor, she thought. What do you do with a drunken sailor, ear-lye in the morning? But it wasn't morning, it was afternoon, she had slept the clock around, and when she looked down she saw that the crotch of her sweats had turned purple, just like the underpants she'd been wearing earlier. That won't come out, and I only have two other pairs of sweats that fit me. Then she remembered one of those had a big old hole in the seat, and began to cry. The tears felt cool on her hot cheeks.
'It's all right, Little Walter,' she said. 'Dr Haskell's going to fix us up. Just fine. Fine as paint. Good as n - '
Then a black rose began to bloom in front of her eyes and the last of her strength left her legs. Sammy felt it go, running out of her muscles like water. She went down, holding onto one final thought: On your side, on your side, don't squash the baby!
That much she managed. She lay sprawled on the shoulder of Motton Road, unmoving in the hazyjuly-ish sun. Little Walter awoke and began to cry. He tried to struggle out of the Papoose and couldn't; Sammy had snapped him in carefully, and he was pinned. Little Walter began to cry harder. A fly settled on his forehead, sampled the blood oozing through the cartoon images of SpongeBob and Patrick, then flew off. Possibly to report this taste-treat at Fly HQ and summon reinforcements.
Grasshoppers reeee'd in the grass.
The town whistle honked.
Little Walter, trapped with his unconscious mother, wailed for a while in the heat, then gave up and lay silent, looking around listlessly as sweat rolled out of his fine hair in large clear drops.
6
Standing beside the Globe Theater's boarded-up box office and under its sagging marquee (the Globe had gone out of business five years before), Barbie had a good view of both the Town Hall and the police station. His good buddy junior was sitting on the cop-shop steps, massaging his temples as if the rhythmic whoop of the whistle hurt his head.
Al Timmons came out of the Town Hall and jogged down to the street. He was wearing his gray janitor's fatigues, but there was a pair of binoculars hanging from a strap around his neck and an Indian pump on his back - empty of water, from the ease with which he was carrying it. Barbie guessed Al had blown the fire whistle.