After Death(69)
He has not been faithful to the gangbanger creed. He has left his homeys unavenged. He can live with that.
THERE COMES A MOMENT WHEN EVERYTHING IS STILL AND RIPENS
As they make their way through the orchard without risking the flashlight, the rain stops, but the wind sighs a while longer. The trees rattle their bare limbs like dry bones, as if they were never wetted in the downpour.
Michael leads John and Nina, who still limps slightly, across the surging torrents in the drainage ditch, where the runoff passes through a culvert. The road lies dark and untraveled, and it seems they might be the only people in the world.
The one remaining gangbanger never sets upon them. Maybe he’d been sent into town to call for help before the shooting started.
Where the body of Masud was once marked by a portion of his raincoat filled with air and ballooning above the racing water, there is now no indication of him. Perhaps the coat deflated, and he lies waiting to be revealed when the flood relents, or maybe he has been washed farther south.
The Bentley stands alongside the highway, where Michael left it, such a handsome and unlikely conveyance that it might be taken for a mirage. They are wet and muddy, but it doesn’t matter what a mess they will make of the interior, for even a Bentley is just a car.
John gets into the rear compartment with the duffel bag that contains nearly four hundred thousand dollars, and he slumps on the back seat, under which lie millions more. Peering out at Michael, the boy says, “Is it over?”
“Yes. That part is over.”
“Was that the worst?”
“I hope so.”
The boy shrugs. “I guess we’ll see.”
When Michael leaves his rifle with the boy and closes the door and turns, Nina is there with him, although he thought that she had gone to the passenger side of the sedan. She puts her arms around him, her head against his chest. He embraces her, and they stand in silence. A moment has come when everything is still, when perhaps something is happening that he has not anticipated but that he is willing to accept.
THE BUSY BEE HAS NO TIME FOR SORROW
In the rain and then in the absence of rain, in the rainless wind and then in the absence of wind, Orlando Fiske lies among the dead. He’s taking time to think through his predicament. He also wants to be sure that those he failed to kill are long gone, that there is no chance he will encounter and be shot by the rifleman. As he rests in the company of the dead, an agreeable calm settles over Orlando, for no one in this moment and place is capable of deceit or violence. Nevertheless, he doesn’t want to fall asleep among them.
After twenty-six minutes as measured by his digital watch, he rises from the discreetly draped carnage around him. The rifleman has no reason to linger with the woman and boy. He will have taken them away in whatever vehicle brought him here. Nevertheless, for now, Orlando keeps the pistol ready in his right hand.
With his left, he undoes the radiant cross by plucking one flashlight off the ground, leaving the other as memorial until its batteries fail. Before departing, he plays the beam across the gable walls of the six structures, imprinting the scene in his memory, so that he can craft a story for Alana that is full of vivid details.
Leaving the buildings, he heads north into the orchard. He is overcome by the strange feeling that he is walking out of a dream, that if he turns to look back, he will find only the edge of a cliff and a bottomless abyss beyond. Being read to by Alana has made him aware of metaphor and symbol; therefore, maybe the fear that the scene he remembers was never real is an expression of his amazement that he has proved to be capable of mercy in the name of love. Or maybe the cliff and abyss are a metaphor that stands for the fate that awaits him if he can’t explain his survival to those who will rise to fill the vacancies in the gang leadership. This metaphor and symbol business is tricky, with numerous possible interpretations that conflict with one another. If only he had finished high school, he might not be so confused in moments like this.
The light by which he finds his way also reveals to him a body lying faceup in a harvesting alley. Mouth and eyes wide open, Speedo says nothing, sees nothing. What a night.
When he reaches the Aviator that Masud had been driving, in which Orlando had been riding shotgun, it stands where it broke down in concert with the other three SUVs. The front passenger-side door remains open, as he left it.
On the seat lies his iPhone, where he threw it in disgust as “Macarena” shrieked forth. The screen brightens. He winces, but no dance music ensues. The charge is at only 20 percent.
Whoever the rifleman had been, he was also a wizard, not like Merlin with his spells and formulas or itinerant Gandalf roaming all the lands of Middle-earth, but a tech wizard no less powerful than those wielding true magic. The story that Orlando is crafting—not the one for Alana, but the different one for Antoine—will make no mention of a rifleman wizard.
If the phone works again, perhaps so does the car, both having been released from the spell cast over them. He goes around to the driver’s side and gets behind the steering wheel. The key is in the cup holder, discarded there by Masud, and when Orlando presses the ignition button, the engine at once turns over.
He checks his contacts and places a call to Antoine. It’s still an hour till midnight. Antoine doesn’t hit the sack until at least three in the morning. He answers with one word, “Yeah.”