A Song Called Youth (40 page)

If Steinfeld saw this boy, Swenson thought, he would be afraid. He would want to kill him.

But Swenson knew he couldn’t do it.

Watson was looking at the boy with a kind of quiet wonder. And perhaps a trace of fear. He had forgotten about Swenson’s misgivings. He stood, and stretched, and said expansively, “Well! Let’s go back to the house where it’s nice and warm and have some cocoa, shall we?” He turned to Swenson. “Coming, John? A little hot cocoa, eh?”

Swenson smiled, falling back into character, letting the character drive for a while. “Just what the doctor ordered.”

He stood and stamped some feeling into his feet, then followed them out the door, hearing Watson say, “You see, Jeb? We’re all family here.”

Swenson had seen them arriving at Crandall’s compound all day. By sunset, there were forty of them. Twelve of them were children, grave and soft-voiced and much doted on.

At a few minutes after eight that evening, they all set out for the chapel again, this time as part of a candle-light procession. Swenson, like the others, wore the gray-black hooded robe, and held a red candle in a black wooden holder. The night was almost windless; the flames guttered only slightly as they trudged across the snowy meadow between the house and the chapel.

Swenson walked along, looking at the ground as if afraid of stumbling. And he was: afraid he’d fall if he looked up at the chapel. But Ellen Mae moved up beside him, whispered in that Hallmark Card tone of hers, “Look at the chapel! Isn’t it beautiful!”

So he had to look. It glowed against the backdrop of the woods. Light from the windows made a broken, mixed rainbow across the virgin expanse of snow—and the snow was iridescent, crystalline, immaculate.

“The snow around the chapel looks like a clean soul,” she said, and it should have made him recoil inside with contempt. That saccharine drippiness. The show window of a religious souvenirs store.

But it was a measure of his mood, his susceptibility, that he looked at the snow and thought,
Yes, like a clean soul.
“We walk our footprints across it like sins,” he said, saying things himself that would have made him chuckle back in the seminary. “And by morning the Lord wills another snowfall to cover it all. His redemption falls from heaven.”

She reached out and briefly squeezed his arm. He felt a surge of emotion. Real emotion, real feeling for her; for the chapel, the procession. At the same time thinking,
Someone get me out of this.

The chapel’s light glowed out the door and windows. A floodlight illuminated the steel cross up top.
A thing of steel,
he thought. In his mind’s eye he saw Jesus—no, it was Rick Crandall—waist deep in hordes of unclean Muslims and Jews, dwarfish things only coming up to his waist, clawing at him, and Crandall had the steel cross in his hands, was using it like a battle-axe to sweep them from his path, smashing with it, blood flying . . . 

He shook himself, to make the image go. A little hot wax dripped on his hand from the candle he carried, and he cherished its burning reproach.

The snow squeaking under his feet. The chant beginning when they were halfway to the chapel. Crandall and Watson, at the head of the procession, leading the litany.

THE INVOCATION: Who is our Lord?

THE RESPONSE: Jesus is our Lord.

What is His will?

His will is purity.

What does He purify?

The world He purifies.

What is His sword?

Our Nation is His sword.

Who is our Lord?

Jesus is our Lord.

And on. Crandall and Watson chanting the invocation, all the others responding, Swenson too—feeling emotion tremble in his voice, and thinking he heard distant thunder. No, he had heard a single snowflake fall in the forest. Thus the Lord hears all.

Someone get me out.

The children chanting the response:
Our Nation is His sword.

And then Swenson saw the copper boy.

Swenson stared and stopped walking for a moment, so that someone behind him made a tsk of irritation, and Ellen Mae took his arm, whispered, “Are you all right?”

Swenson moved on mechanically but stared at the copper boy, who moved to keep pace with the procession but didn’t walk; his feet didn’t quite touch the snow. Didn’t change his pose. The boy was standing nude, arms down at his side, giving Swenson a puzzled smile. The smile seemed to ask,
Why are you with them?

Ellen Mae looked in the direction Swenson was looking. “What is it?”

She doesn’t see him,
he thought.

He shook his head and kept trudging, staring at the boy, waiting for the mirage to vanish.

It wasn’t really a boy—the youth was on the cusp between boy and man. He’d been precocious, graduating from a high school in Managua at sixteen, going right into the Jesuit college . . . Found in a ditch, the mud mingling with his blood, plants to grow in his decayed flesh . . . 

. . . Swenson/Stisky . . . saw Saint Sebastian lying in the snow, near the procession, the saint breathing hard in a kind of ecstasy of mortification, and with every breath the arrows would sink themselves into him more deeply . . . 

But it wasn’t Saint Sebastian, it was the copper boy, bleeding with the red arrows, the arrows whose fletches were candle flame, the boy saying,
“John, you wrote me a letter once, about the Church . . . you said, It’s the rituals that matter. Nothing else matters. The historical vindication of Jesus doesn’t matter. The Christian philosophy doesn’t matter. Faith doesn’t matter. For me, the rituals, the compression of symbols, the march of our apotheosized yearning for security . . . the sense of family, of belonging . . . and the glamour of the Church’s sweetly absurd artifacts . . . This is what matters to me, what holds me. It’s a kind of fetishism, you said, John, remember? A terrible compulsion that works on me quite apart from my political considerations . . . I hate the Church the way a junkie can hate his dealer. Get away before it’s too late . . . Remember?”

“A ritual is a ritual,” Swenson said.

“What?” Ellen Mae whispered.

He shook his head. He looked at the chapel. They were almost there. He felt the chapel door pulling him. He visualized a fish in a stream reaching a dam, sucked into the spillway. Plunge through into a shining lake where all is enclosed by bank and you never have to wander again . . . 

“No,”
the copper boy said.
“Fight the pull! It’s your sickness.”
Swenson looked and now the boy was dressed as a priest at mass. The black, the gold.
“Don’t go in there, or you will lose me,”
the boy said. But now his face changed, becoming more mature—now he was Father Encendez.
“These people murdered me, John.”

What does He purify?

The world He purifies.

Through the open door he could see the holographic projection floating above the altar: a shining molecule of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA, the double-helix model, turning, shining like a sort of Christmas tree bauble, the images of Jesus and Rick Crandall behind it.

He thought,
If I go in, I’m lost.

But the current was ineluctable: it came from inside him, and a man cannot bite his own teeth. The current swept him along.

The procession took him into the chapel, and the ritual began.

The occupation army had blocked off the roads leading out of the immigrant ghettos in the Twentieth Arrondissement: Algerian ghettos, Congolese, Pakistani, the others. There were SA observation posts in the corner apartments of the buildings overlooking the intersection. Inside the ghetto, the SA proceeded with its registration of all foreign-born residents, or those whose parents were foreign-born. Immigrants were allowed outside the ghettos only if they had SA work permits and photo ID. Once a week, police examiners entered the ghetto bearing lists provided by collaborators; “proved and potential” insurgents were rounded up and taken in two trucks out past the roadblocks, past the checkpoints and the observation stations, into moonlit streets under the cold glitter of the winter sky.

On such a night, at 8:30 p.m. the gray-and-olive four-ton SA trucks with their load of prisoners drove down rue Hermel to rue Ordener, turning at the church across from the
mairie
of the Eighteenth Arrondissement; the ancient mayorage had once housed a police station, now it was a bombed-out shell. Most of the neighborhood, the streets below the hill of the Montmartre, had become architectural crusts, the outlines of the stone row-houses filled with rubble. In the faces of the deserted buildings their windows shadowed deep blue, their cornices and figured-stone ledges picked out all sickly in the chilled aluminum moonlight. One lane of rue Ordener had been cleared of rubble. The trucks turned past the former metro station . . . 

And Steinfeld, in the ruins of the
mairie,
threw a switch. The street blew up ten feet in front of the lead truck, the driver suddenly faced with a fountain of burning asphalt. The truck fishtailed to a stop at the edge of the crater, flame licking up at its grille. It tried to back up, but the second truck, just coming to a stop, was still in the way.

Hard-Eyes was the first out of the eastern exit, Yukio out of the western, followed by Jean-Pierre, Rickenharp.

Behind Hard-Eyes came Jenkins and Willow and Hassan and Shimon.

Hard-Eyes was laughing to himself, all the bottled-up sense of urgency boiling out, a rifle fitted with an M-83 grenade launcher in his hands as he angled left. He stationed himself behind the street-lamp that stood in the rubble choking the sidewalk like the single tree surviving a forest fire. The armored windows of the stymied truck were opening for the driver’s gun muzzle as Hard-Eyes propped the M-83 on a metal collar around the post and aimed.

He heard a crackle in his headset, then Steinfeld’s voice telling the others,
Hold your fire unless you see them outside the truck, until Hard-Eyes—

Hard-Eyes squeezed the trigger, and the rifle’s muzzle jumped, the launcher hissed, there was a splendid Fourth-of-July BOOM, and the truck’s right front tire flew into rubbery flinders, was replaced by a ball of flame; the truck chassis lifted up like a clumsy steer rearing back to stamp a hoof; the blast flame lit up a piece of street and the truck’s underside for a full second—then the truck fell back down onto the flame, splashing it out, huffing a ring of smoke. He could see the axle was bent, the engine twisted unnaturally out of its case, forcing the torn hood back; the oil-spattered engine looked like some primeval hatchling half out of its metal egg. Then smoke twisted up around the engine, small fires licking after it.

Hard-Eyes felt a bubble of elation expand and pop in him. He laughed again, and all his senses hummed; the cold night air crackled on his hands and face. The smell of burning, of cordite and nitro and blood, made his heart pound . . . 

He was chambering another round, a grenade no bigger than two fingers together, when Yukio opened up on the SA in the second cab—or maybe the enemy fired first, it was hard to tell, the flame seemed to leap out simultaneously. Hard-Eyes was aiming, firing, without thinking, without having to, and the second truck’s right front end blew out.

Just over his head, sparks flew from the old iron post. It took him a moment . . . 

And then he knew they had made him, were firing at him, and his cover was scanty. His scalp contracted with fear. He heard Steinfeld shout, “Give Hard-Eyes covering fire!” He glimpsed Rickenharp up and running toward the truck, firing the Uzi-3, a double-barreled submachine gun, letting go from both its barrels, shouting something; the truck door swung open, a man flopped out . . . Hard-Eyes thought,
That guitarist’s got balls.
He ducked back, hunkered behind a big fallen cornice on a pile of debris, almost immediately bullets skittered across rubble just by his head. Not a better spot, maybe worse. Raised his head a fraction to see a man getting out of the truck on the other side, firing through the smoke and flame rising from the twisted hood, returning Rickenharp’s fire. Rickenharp running toward the back of the truck . . . 9-mm rounds kicking chips out of the street at Rickenharp’s heels.

Steinfeld’s voice in his headset shouted,
“Hard-Eyes, if you’re clear, run back of the station, come round to the rear of the truck, supervise the liberation—”

He wasn’t clear but Hard-Eyes ran, thinking,
Any second now I’ll know what it feels like to get a rifle slug in the side of the head.
Maybe it wouldn’t feel like anything, if he was hit by an explosive round. His nervous system would be exploded with the rest of him before it could transit the information.
Sure, keep telling yourself that.

Then he was at the back of the truck and Yukio was there ahead of him, had cut the chains looping through the steel rings (Where was Rickenharp? He heard the maniac rattling of the Uzi-3, realized the rocker had circled behind the truck’s driver, was taking him out . . . heard Willow shout from the back of the second truck, yelling at the prisoners to get out, but where were the guys who’d guarded them? Watch it, watch your ass, those guys must be . . . ) The prisoners—dark faces, leaping out, looking around, eyes wide—

Suddenly a man without a face, SA bull in full armor was there, tracking the pistol to Jean-Pierre. Little Jean-Pierre in his black cap, face blacked out, funny little guy, would scream like the devil if you beat him at checkers and beg you to play again. Standing between Hard-Eyes and the bull. Jean-Pierre’s back to the bull. Yukio turning, trying to shoot past Jean-Pierre. The armored SA soldier pointing something, it was hard to see in the shadow of the truck—Hard-Eyes was trying to get a firing angle—the dark killing thing in the bull’s hand spraying white fire. Jean-Pierre’s head erupted, bits of it flying out to carry the cap off—

Yukio fired and the bull staggered. But he was armored, was still on his feet, tracking the gun toward Yukio. Hard-Eyes thought,
If I hit him at this range with a grenade, it’ll kill Yukio, too.