Stanton Court had been a cornfield on the edge of Wapsipinicon until sometime during the War, when the university had annexed it and thrown up row after row of long, low, jerry-built barracks, sheathed in tar paper and roofed with corrugated metal. It was supposed to be a temporary measure, but the additional housing space had become indispensable, and the city had grown up around it in the years since then. Sometime during the sixties the barracks had been recovered in aluminum siding, as a tacit admission that they were probably going to stand there as long as the university did. A few months later an enormous hailstorm had come through, pelting the south and west sides of the buildings with knobby fists of ice moving horizontally at sixty miles an hour.
The marks were still clearly visible a quarter of a century later as the high beams of the Murder Car swept across them. Clyde was using the country brights because it was Halloween night, and Stanton Court probably had the highest density of small children of any location in the state of Iowa. The university used these barracks as cut-rate married-student housing, and they were populated by members of ethnic groups who, unlike their American counterparts, had no hang-ups about having children.
By the standards of the average Iowan, it always looked like Halloween on these narrow streets, where saris and turbans were more common than Tshirts. But however determinedly the parents might cling to their cultures, their children were growing up American and were aware of the fact that on this one night of the year they could obtain virtually unlimited amounts of candy simply by knocking on doors and demanding it. They were all out in their Batman and Ninja Turtles gear, much of which was larded down with reflective tape that glared acid colors in Clyde’s headlights. But some of the parents had ginned up homemade costumes that were invisible at night, so Clyde used the high beams.
He stopped in front of a barracks and put the station wagon in park. The tiny front yard lacked the usual assortment of plastic tricycles and sword-fighting equipment, but looking through the tiny kitchen window, which was wreathed in steam, Clyde could see baby bottles drying on a rack, and he could see the back of Farida’s head as she labored over the stove.
Maggie was still asleep in the backseat, and Clyde knew she’d wake up if he tried to move her. Clyde got out of the car, pushed the door shut without latching it, and tripped down a short front walk that had been plowed up from underneath by the roots of a scrawny crabapple tree.
He was hoping they wouldn’t make a big fuss over him, but they did; Farida had tea going and had baked some kind of little pastry, extremely sweet, and flavored like Earl Grey tea. When they realized that Clyde was reluctant to leave Maggie alone in the car, Farida made a brief phone call. Something like fifteen seconds later a teenaged Vakhan Turk girl arrived, a calculus textbook under her arm, and cheerfully agreed to sit in the car and look after Maggie for as long as might be necessary.
Clyde was directed to the best piece of furniture in the house, an overstuffed chair that had been draped with a heavy, colorful woolen fabric to hide the fact that all the stuffing was falling out of it. The fabric was rough and nubbly, with little designs woven into it, and Clyde figured that it was probably homemade. If this tapestry was replaced with a tatty afghan knitted of garish polyester yarn, the chair would be just like all the furniture that Clyde had grown up on, so he immediately felt right at home. A cup of tea and plate of pastries were set before him, Fazoul took a seat on an equally devastated hide-a-bed sofa, and they munched and sipped and discussed weather and football and infant rearing for some half an hour.
After Clyde had eaten enough of the pastry to satisfy Farida’s ferocious and implacable hostessing instincts, he allowed himself to relax and sit back in the chair. He could see more of the tapestry when he did this, and as he listened to Fazoul going on about his son’s latest round of ear infections, his eyes began to focus on it.
He slowly realized that it was not an abstract geometric design. The border of the fabric was a long train of green boxes on wheels with curlicues on them that Clyde took to be some kind of letters. The wheeled boxes had mustachioed heads popping out of the tops. The heads had green helmets on them. Others had black sticks poking out of them in various directions, and some of the black sticks had red dotted lines coming out of them. The red dotted lines converged on little brown huts that reminded Clyde of the tent that Fazoul and his cohorts had erected in Albertson Park. There were small human figures around these tents. Some were lying on the ground with red stuff coming out of them. Others were carrying little black sticks of their own. Spreading his legs apart and shifting back into the sunken recesses of the chair, Clyde could see that he had been sitting on top of an elaborate rendition of a helicopter with red lines radiating from it in all directions. Headed directly for Clyde’s crotch, and for the helicopter’s tailpipe, sitting on a rooster tail of yellow-and-orange flame, was a surface-to-air missile.
If Fazoul noticed that Clyde was noticing all these things, he didn’t show any sign of it, just kept talking about normal parent things—now it was the relative merits of cloth versus disposable diapers. Farida kept jumping up to get candy for trick-or-treating children.