John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

“Son,” Kahlberg stage-whispered, “you don’t know what you’re messing with.”

Talk about a boy playing a game… by now even the Lieutenant Major could see that whatever was going on, it wasn’t about sex. What kind of sex involved one partner taking hold of the other’s tongue?

“Mrs. Lulucita,” the liaison said, “aren’t you the parent in charge around here?”

“Mary, mother of God.”

“Never mind her. Think about the Siren on the rocks, the devil in a woman. Think about where that tongue has been—”

Or maybe that was what the officer said; Barbara tuned him out, looking instead to the chaplain. Interstate had been silenced with mouth open. One thin arm held a Bible overhead, and his un-sleeved elbow revealed what was either a fresh bruise or more purple shadow. DiPio meantime had clamped one hand around his neck-stuff, the crucifix and Mr. Christopher, and his stare looked likewise clenched. He was rooting for the miracle so openly that Barb had to look away. She had to avert her gaze from all three of these looming full-grown white guys, casting her eyes across the congregation, dun-brown to domino-black, layered in castoff exotic colors (fig-blue to mirror-silver) and quieted for the moment. But the scene the mother had to deal with remained right in front of her, the willowy boy with his hand sunk to the knuckle between the girl’s lips.

At least this time the love-bite hadn’t drawn blood.

Again the cripple’s hand fluttered in Barbara’s. Already Paul was withdrawing his fingers from her mouth, releasing her to an involuntary birdlike moan. And when the gypsy arched her upper body after his retreating spit-slick touch, it seemed natural, a spasm. Certainly she didn’t mean to show off her figure, curving up from where the boy’s other hand still cupped her spine.

“All, all she needed was s-someone to hold her.” Barb heard him clearly that time. “Couldn’t you just f-feel it?”

Mr. Paul let go altogether, sinking onto his haunches, folding backwards from between the girl’s legs. The quake victim collapsed too, dropping into her chair, and Barb found herself thrown into yet another brand of confusion. She suffered a letdown. She didn’t want the girl to collapse. She’d brought everyone out to the chapel, and she wanted something to come of it.

But then the gypsy gathered herself and stood. At that the reporters and the congregation went berserk — erupting, attacking — and Barbara and the others in charge were left looking stupid.

They were left helpless, as the crowd’s toy-store colors flared up everywhere, erupting, smothering. The mother was knocked onto all fours. The wheelchair somersaulted over her back, a stab in the back, an end to her dithering. How could she have been so stupid? How could she never have realized what Paul’s magic would mean for people like these? How many of their barrel-bottom tatters did they need to wave in her face, and how loudly did they need to raise their searching prayers? Now as she lay beside the altar’s riser, at first she couldn’t tell if she were seeing stars or only the dots and dashes that decorated their t-shirts and dashikis. Anyway the view from the floor called to mind something else as well, the slash and blot of cave paintings, lit by dancing torches. Stick-figures agitated the air and the noise wasn’t anything Barb recognized either. She couldn’t tell whether the mob was calling on God or her husband or, in some third or fourth language, somebody else again. She only understood the clang and rattle of chairs toppling over, the whisper of blood-dark tent-hangings spiralling down. The reporters were in it too, shouting and elbowing over her head, fighting for a decent camera angle on Paul and the gypsy.

The resurrected girl had taken Barbara’s youngest boy in a deep embrace. A standing embrace, both on their own feet, though the gypsy had wrapped herself around Paul from neck to ankle. Their hug might’ve been the riot in microcosm, a starved and ferocious response to a child who had no idea what he’d meant when he first held out his offering. Paul’s own arms hung at his sides. He searched beyond the head that lay on his shoulder till his eyes fell on his mother’s, at his feet. He went on mouthing his bewildered denials: Just a touch, th-that’s all .

Well, what was she doing down there? Her legs were fine, her elbows sharp, and in another moment Barb was back on her feet and between the boy and girl. She was bracing herself for a tussle. But the gypsy let go at once, moving out of reach with a toss of her lank hair, a spatter of miracle-sweat. The mother had figured the girl wrong, the girl too. The gypsy’s look might’ve been flinty, almost an accusation. But that was the way a lot of young people appeared to Barbara. Her son was the one she had to worry about, and now she wrapped her arms around his undersized chest and began to haul him backwards. Behind the tumbled coffee-table she shuffled, and her heel caught briefly on the altarcloth, sticky with lamp-oil. The flame had been snuffed, at least, in the fall, and the mother had gotten some breathing room for herself and the boy just by pulling him away from the girl. That dark and attractive stranger was, for a moment, the one drawing a crowd, the reporters in particular. The camerawoman Maddalena already had attached herself to the gypsy. Barbara meantime discovered a protected space, a corner of the tent, loosely walled off by the doctor, the chaplain, and the liaison. All three of the men had regrouped behind the fallen wheelchair and the cross.

It was Interstate who’d taken up the cross, brandishing it like a quarterstaff. With this barricade before him, he began shouting again, throwing some French into the mix. The meaning was as clear as DiPio’s hand signals, palms out, arms out. Calm down, calmavi, calmez vous . A step apart from those two Kahlberg stood relatively unruffled. Relatively — the mother didn’t like the way he fingered his jacket.

Nonetheless in back of these three, in back of the wheelchair and chapel’s storage trunk, Barbara found a moment’s safety for herself and her boy. She shuttled Paul around behind her, one last barricade, and in the process she bumped a hip against the tent’s corner pole. The upright wobbled, the nylon rattled around her ears. With one backwards-reaching hand she discovered a seam was torn.

A torn seam, the least she could expect, in a place like this. Then it occurred to Barbara that she could tell the boy to run. He could duck out through the seam.

Mr. Paul could do it, looked like. Whatever this child’s prodigies took out of him, they left him nowhere near so rattled as Barb. Her own clothes were soaked through, jammed up, and yet while the mother had been pressed against her boy, one hand at his neck and the other across his lightly-downed chest, she’d found Paul’s pulse only a few ticks fast and his muscles just lightly trembling. He still had that carpenter smell, but his skin was dry.

She thought of heatstroke, of shock. One push would put him out in the fresh air. What would other people do?

But both of Paul’s cures had been miracles in an inferno. Today, even if the boy escaped this particular volcanic circle, this bruising ritual of the hunt, he’d still be in the Underworld. He’d have to move through poison clouds. The family portraits overhead were supposed to guide him, but their deformed and colorized smiles had been fake to begin with. The whole camp would be on the child before he’d cleared the central amphitheater, and then there were the infantrymen from NATO. God knows what they might do. So Barb kept her boy with her, crooking one arm around him, and as she eyed the oncoming crowd she set herself the way Jay used to at the scrimmage line.

Hadn’t there been a lot of brave talk about the end of everything? Well what would she call this, out beyond a crucifix turned sideways? The crowd had kicked aside the fallen coffee-table, and behind the people who’d come for the service, others were rushing into the tent. Others wanted to see what the fuss was about, they’d heard something and they’d wanted to see, and more of the chairs went over. There was bawling across the steam and the language of metal. Barb had to worry again about her girls and their guards, about Jay and the boys and the agitators in the camp, the ones in league with the hunger strikers. Not all the refugees would get excited over this, a scrap from the table of the white man’s God.