Monday, Monday: A Novel (3 page)

The smell of blood baking into the ground sickened her. She was aware of the dead boy lying behind her, and heard moaning and cries. The tower clock struck fifteen minutes after the hour. She wondered if she would live to the half hour. When the gunfire blasted down again, she felt it through the ground. Fragments flew over the wall. Thoughts arose in pieces: her mother spreading jelly over a slice of buttered toast, a dog in the distance barking, her father changing a flat tire—his shoulders moving as he pumped the jack.

Count the seconds
, she thought.
Count the seconds that I can stand this.
She was waiting for the bells.

*   *   *

Wyatt knew the girl in the pedal pushers was dead the moment they lifted her from the ground, but there was no time to reconsider the effort to save her. They carried her down the steps, skirting the dead man. Wyatt lost his footing once and lost his grip on the girl’s legs, but dragged them up again.

They laid her close to the wall. She was soaked in blood from her chest to her thighs and smelled of feces. A blue clip tacked her bobbed hair to her temple. She was stocky and muscular—stout through the middle and short-legged. Her pretty face stared blindly upward, past the face of Woodrow Wilson and through the limbs of an oak tree.

People had started firing up at the tower; gunshots came from the English and history buildings and peppered the air from the football stadium. An ambulance from a funeral home backed hurriedly toward Wyatt and Jack on the narrow street that ran between the steps and the tree-covered parts of the mall. Then a bullet pierced the rear window, and the driver pulled forward again. Wyatt felt the girl’s wrist for a pulse. But he knew she was dead.

“The girl by the hedge,” Jack said. “Did you see if she was alive?”

“I only got a glimpse. She wasn’t moving. I saw somebody moving on the ground up closer to the main building, but he’d be hard to get to.” He wasn’t sure he could bring himself to go back out on the plaza, but pulled his shoes off anyway.

A policeman with a shotgun came running from the direction of the fountain, darting through the trees and then across the street to where Wyatt and Jack crouched over the girl’s body. He positioned himself beside them and was surveying the plaza from between the balusters that topped the wall, when a series of rapid shots chipped at the balusters and he pulled his head down and squatted between Jack and Wyatt, nearly stepping on one of the girl’s hands.

“Mother of God. That was a carbine. An M1,” he said.

“That’s the first I’ve heard it; it’s been bolt-action,” Jack told him.

“You think there’s more than one asshole up there?” Sweat streamed from under his cap.

“I think he’s got more than one gun. He’s pinned down by return fire and shooting from the rainspouts. What’s the plan?”

“My plan is to get up there and kill the son of a bitch.” He raised himself cautiously for another look and then, after a glance, lowered himself again and settled his back against the wall, his boots planted in bird droppings beside the dead girl’s head. Pulling his hat off, he wiped an arm across his face.

A volley of gunfire came from the business and economics building, and the bells chimed the half hour. The rapid, flat, cracking sound of the carbine moved to the west side of the tower. The officer shoved his hat on and tugged at his sweaty uniform. Struggling up from his crouched position, he leaned to look cautiously up the steps, his gaze lingering only a second on the dead man. “You boys stay here,” he said, and mounted the steps at a run.

Wyatt raised his head high enough to look between the balusters and see the top of the tower. Bullets fired from the ground had struck the clock face and freckled the stone. But the shooter up there was invisible. The officer moved rapidly across the bright plaza in a loping stride, bullets striking the ground around him and flinging up dust at his heels.

“At least now we have police here,” Wyatt said.

But how many police were there? He had seen only the one, who didn’t have much of a plan for storming the tower and whose shotgun would be useless from the ground against a high-powered rifle and an automatic carbine.

“If the other police aren’t armed any better, they might as well throw rocks up at the fucker,” Jack said.

A bullet nicked the baluster. Ducking his head, Wyatt noticed a movement on the plaza. The corpse of the girl lying beside the hedge opened her mouth and lifted her head from the ground.

*   *   *

Shelly called to the policeman running past her, a spray of bullets nicking the ground at his heels. When he was gone, she pulled her legs in closer to make herself smaller, and lay motionless, watching a fly move about in the blood on her arm. The arm was becoming numb. She was unbearably thirsty. She heard shouting, sirens in the distance, and continual gunfire, and thought she still heard the song playing—
Every other day, every other day / Every other day of the week is fine, yeah
—but then realized this was only in her mind. The ground started to rumble and her field of vision was invaded by a large vehicle—an armored car of the type she had seen transporting money on the highways—lumbering heavily across the plaza. She thought it was coming to rescue her, but then she began to fear it, it looked so sightless and enormous. It blocked her view. The sound of the motor drowned her thoughts, and the exhaust made her cough, jolting her injured body. She felt an eerie rising up of the ground, and opened her eyes again and saw the monstrous creature leaving, making its way slowly across the terrace. The bells chimed again, sounding heavy and ominous in the upside-down world. A second policeman followed the path of the first, passing her by. She had stopped hoping for rescue. Her legs had started to shake and to jerk at the knees. She thought of the gap in the hedge. The gap would open to grass, and grass would offer—if not refuge—relief from the scalding heat.

She was thinking of trying to crawl again, when two men came running rapidly up the steps in her direction. They were the same two guys who had carried away the girl in the pedal pushers. The shorter one was quick and athletic. His white shirt was smeared with blood. The other was tall and barefoot with a colorful madras shirt that was coming untucked from his trousers. He wore glasses with black frames. They came to her quickly, and she braced herself for the pain. The shorter one took hold of her twisted arm and laid it over her chest. “Don’t!” she screamed, trying to kick him away.

But they did what they had come to do. “Take this, take her arm, take her
arm, goddamn it
—” “She’s bleeding from the chest—” “Support her head—” “We’re going to get you out of here. It’s okay, it’s okay.”

The pain was unimaginable. “It’s not okay!” She turned her head and vomited as the ground receded and she was lifted. She couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe, and her screeching and squealing seemed to come from someone other than herself. The blue sky turned white. The guys steadied her arm. Her blood-soaked fingers grasped the madras shirt.

Concrete burst around her, and the deafening boom of the rifle emptied the world of air. “Ah, God, he’s shooting at us!” one of the guys was saying. “Don’t drop her—” “We can’t make it to the steps—This way,
this way, fuck
—” “Support her arm—” “The flagpole’s closer—” “It’s not enough—” “Go to the flagpole—” They pressed her arm so tightly she heard the bones grating. The tall boy’s eyeglasses were askew. The world jostled from red to blue; the faces blocked the light for parts of seconds. The slanted flagpole sliced the sky in two.

*   *   *

The last thing Wyatt saw before his glasses fell to the ground was a face in the large center window on the third floor of the English building, just under the red tile roof. It seemed to be looking at him. From a window next to it, someone fired up at the tower and retreated.

But the face in the center window never moved, as if frozen in a sudden awareness that the sky could drop, life could stop, the world could instantly explode into pieces. It looked weirdly disembodied—pale and blanched—the clarity of the features, at such a distance, abnormal, as if the face were not exactly human but instead an artist’s rendering of how a human face reacts to horror. Like the primal face of fear. For half a second, an inexplicable wintry sharpness invaded the hot August air, and then the face dissolved with the rest of the world when Wyatt’s glasses fell. He reached out but couldn’t find them. He snagged a bare foot in the grass and stumbled. The girl sagged in his arms.

“Goddamn it!” Jack cried.

They threw themselves to the ground behind the circular block of concrete that was the base of the flagpole. In the grass nearby, a boy in shorts and a surfer shirt lay writhing, bleeding from the neck. Wyatt folded the girl into his lap as Jack tried to move in closer. But the space couldn’t shield all three of them. A bullet hissed in the air; the grass kicked up. “He’s aiming at us!” Jack shouted, “The fucker’s aiming at us!”

Wyatt locked his knees around the girl to hold her steady, her back against his chest. Planting his feet on either side of her body, he placed her mangled arm against her stomach and tried to make more room for Jack, who pushed himself in sideways. “Pull your knees up,” Wyatt told him, inching back. “Get your back against her stomach.”

“I’m too far out.” Jack said. He paused to catch his breath. A bullet hit the ground beside his foot, another beside his knee. “Fuck, I’m getting out of here. There’s no room.” He got to his feet and ran. Wyatt held the girl more tightly.

Jack was running when the bullet hit him. Wyatt saw him fall. He saw it indistinctly without his glasses. Drawing his knees to his chest, Jack rolled from side to side, yelling to Wyatt, “Stay where you are! I can get up!” But he didn’t get up. He clutched his thighs. “Wyatt?” he yelled, more plaintively.

“God, Jack—”

“Wyatt?”

“Can you get up?”

“It’s bad—”

“I’m coming to get you—”

“No … stay there.”

“Where are you hit?”

“Shit. Ah, God—”

“Where are you hit?’

“Don’t come.”

“Can you walk?”

His knees were tucked to his chest.

“Is he up there?” Wyatt yelled. “Can you see him up there?”

“No. Don’t come for me. You hear me? Fuck you if you come for me!”

“I’m coming for you, Jack—”

He tried to think of a way to let go of the girl and still protect her. A bullet hit the flagpole over their heads, and the vicious vibration made him think he had been shot. He looked at the girl and saw that she was screaming, but he couldn’t hear her. “Can you stay upright, on your own?” he shouted. But he couldn’t hear his words, and he wasn’t sure he had said them. He had no sense of what he needed to do.

Only gradually, as he held her, did the whimpering of the girl break through.

*   *   *

Shelly’s mouth was dry, her voice trapped by her clattering teeth. The blood still flowed out of her arm. She harbored herself between Wyatt’s knees, her back against his chest. His sweat had soaked her. He was holding her arm too tightly against her body. But if he let go, it would drop. He maneuvered himself slightly away; she felt his knuckles against her spine as he unbuttoned his shirt. She felt him peeling the shirt away. He swept it around the front of her and knotted the sleeves at her chest. “What’s your name? What’s your blood type?” he asked her.

“Shelly Maddox.”

“Your blood type?”

“A-positive. I think. I don’t know.”

“How does my cousin look? How bad is he? I can’t see without my glasses.”

“He’s on his side. I think he’s shot in the legs. The thighs.”

“The other guy—is he moving?”

“I can’t tell.” She tried to focus her eyes. The world was heaving from side to side. Every breath was painful. She noticed a man’s face staring down from the center window on the third floor of the English building, and for an instant saw herself through those distant eyes: how small she looked, bundled into the arms of the stranger.

A small plane in the sky started to circle inward. “Could they shoot him from up there?” she whispered.

“From up where?”

“The airplane—is it coming to help us?”

“I don’t see a plane.”

She tried to nod in that direction to show him where it was. The airplane looked as flimsy and weightless as a bird. She watched it drop, and thought it was falling, but then it bounced back up again, the canvas sides rippling in the wind. Gradually it started circling inward. But after a rapid firing of gunshots from the tower, it turned away and disappeared behind her line of vision.

Jack was getting up. Wyatt shouted to him over Shelly’s head. Jack yelled back, but Shelly couldn’t understand what it was he said. He pivoted onto a knee, as awkward as an inchworm. His hands clawed at the grass. Wyatt leaned out, trying to see the tower. “Don’t,” Shelly murmured, her mouth so dry the word sounded inhuman, and then, in a whisper: “Don’t go.” She intended to mean it for his sake. But then she said, “Don’t leave me.” She said it several times, and tightened her hold on his arm, sinking herself into the heat of his body.

Jack struggled toward the wall, hunched in the middle and dragging a leg. When he had nearly reached it, someone climbed over the balustrade from the other side and helped him over and out of view.

Wyatt rested his face against Shelly’s head. He seemed to be melting into her. But his weight stayed solid against her back. His knees on either side of her walled out the world. His naked arms, locked tightly around her, kept her from falling sideways. His shirt secured her arm; his bare feet were like the feet of stone pillars in the grass beside her. She felt he wouldn’t allow her to die, as if he breathed for them both. She allowed herself to drift, her mind to wander.

Her fear began to drain away. Closing her eyes to the bright light, she was aware she was whispering and he was whispering back. Vibrations of his voice rose and fell like the notes of a song, though she couldn’t make sense of his words. She felt he was trying to keep her awake, and begged him not to stop talking.

But then she grew tired, and after a while stopped listening. The clock was chiming the hour.