Сигрид Нуньес - Salvation City

Downtown was mostly dead. He passed Hix’s Hardware (“Not today, brother, I got work to do”). He passed the drugstore, the used furniture store, the barber shop, the yarn store, the pizzeria, and the gun shop. He made a right at the post office and rode past the bank and the thrift shop, in front of which a woman had just placed a sign: “Brand New Used Maternity Clothes.” Beyond the thrift shop was a diner that had closed sometime before Cole moved to town. It had closed suddenly, and if you looked in the window you could see the tables still set for lunch, the dishes slowly filling up with dust. The car dealership at the end of the street had also gone out of business. A parallel Cole wheeled along in the glass.

The church was a plain beige building with brown roof and trim, the kind of place you’d expect to go for some mundane but useful thing, like lumber or tools or house paint. Cole knew it had once been an American Legion Post, and long before that, about a hundred years before, a meeting-house had stood on this site, a white clapboard building that had been burned to the ground by the Ku Klux Klan after a Quaker pastor gave shelter to a black man—a hobo from Kentucky—accused of pocketing a nickel a white farmer had dropped on his way to town.

When he rode up to the church, Cole saw that no one was there. The parking lot was empty except for a few starlings pecking at the tufts of grass sprouting through cracks in the asphalt. Cole figured PW must have sent everyone straight home and then gone home himself (and most likely right back to bed). He must have just missed them. He figured Clem was probably right about people starting to calm down, and a feather of satisfaction tickled him when he thought how they must be starting to feel pretty foolish, too.

There was a cross mounted on the wall to the right of the church’s main entrance. To the left, rising from a grassy circle on the pavement, was a pole bearing the American flag. There was not the slightest breeze to stir the flag, which was flying at half-staff. Cole had almost forgotten about Jeptha Ludwig. He’d never met Jeptha, but he knew his parents from church, not nearly as well, though, as he knew Jeptha’s grandfather. He tried to think what he would say to Boots the next time he saw him.

“Whatever you say, don’t say ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’” That was his mother speaking. Those words had driven her mad after her parents had died. An expression people got from TV, she said. From cop shows. It had been said to Cole himself many times, and though it had never consoled him, it had always brought back his mother’s disgust.

If he kept going on this road he would eventually reach the old schoolhouse where the Harleys lived. Cole thought of Clem. Poor Clem. He understood why Clem had run away like that this morning. He might be grown-up in a lot of ways, Cole thought, but he was still only thirteen. A year ago, maybe even less, Cole might have followed on his heels.

In his big hurry to leave, Clem had forgotten a notebook he had brought with him. Cole had found it where he’d left it, lying next to the computer. Inside were notes Clem had made for the sermon he was working on. “2 B Xtn = 2 4gv.” The text was from Ephesians. “Be kind and tenderhearted toward one another, and forgive one another as God through Jesus Christ has forgiven you.”

Yes, yes, he thought. He would forgive them.

He would forgive them all.

Except Mason.

Now that he was standing still, Cole felt the heat like a hand pressing down on him. Even his elbows were perspiring. He wavered, wondering if he should continue on to Clem’s and see how he was doing. But he wasn’t really worried about Clem. He couldn’t worry about Clem—not when there were so many other people to worry about.

Starlyn!

But he mustn’t let himself think about Starlyn now, either. It would be too much for him. It would leave no room for all the other thinking that needed to be done. And when he thought about all the people he knew who were in some kind of trouble, he sighed and slumped over his handlebars. Who could say when PW and Tracy would be all right again?

As he turned his bike toward home (yes, home , he thought: they were not his parents but it was his home; he didn’t have any other), he felt the tension inside him ease. He was not unhappy. In fact, he could not recall another time when the future had looked so bright and full to him. He had made up his mind, and he had no doubt that he would go to Berlin. He did not know exactly when, but he was determined to get there. He had no doubt, either, that he was going back to school, and that one day he would go to college. What else was he to make of that perfectly clear image of himself up ahead, wearing jeans and a leather jacket and the glasses he’d probably need by then (from all that studying), shaking up a lecture hall with his comments? (Girls would dawdle after class to ask would he mind clarifying some point he had made and he’d pretend not to know it was just an excuse to flirt with him.)

He did not believe the world was about to end, and he saw himself living a long time and going many places and doing many different things. “Your whole life ahead of you”—never more than just an expression before—now came to him with the ring of a blessing.

But it was not just to new places Cole wanted to travel. He felt a great longing to retrace his steps, to return to places he had already been, where so much had happened but which remained so dreamlike and murky in his head that he could not lay hold of them. Even if all he could do was stand in the street and look at it, he wanted to go back to the house in Little Leap, as he wanted to go back to Here Be Hope—just to see what it felt like to be there. He wanted to go to Chicago and find out for himself how much had changed since he had lived there and what had happened to everyone, even if what he found out was bad.

He knew that much of the world was dangerous, that America was far more dangerous now than when he was a little boy, but he wasn’t afraid to go anywhere. He understood why Addy had left Chicago, but for the very reasons she had fled he wished he could be there. He thrilled at the idea of being somewhere truly dangerous, a place where anything might happen, a place mad full of action. A disaster area, a revolution, a war. What would it be like to be in a real war? What kind of soldier would he make? He might be a hero after all. If he could learn how to shoot.

He had decided his parents were right about life being too short, and the proof was this: no matter how long you lived you could never see the whole world. But when he thought about what lay ahead, all the adventures and discoveries waiting for him, he felt full to the brim with excitement.

He knew the things he wanted now he wanted badly enough that nothing would stop him. It was only for a little while longer that his place was here. He knew that he would stay, and then, when the time came, he would go away. He did not know if he would return.

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