A baseball cap went cartwheeling between his legs, and Garraty looked over his shoulder and saw a small boy looking after it longingly. Scramm grabbed it and tried to scale it back to the kid, but the wind took it in a big boomerang arc and it wound up in a wildly lashing tree.
Thunder whacked. A white-purple tine of lightning jabbed the horizon. The comforting sough of the wind in the pines had become a hundred mad ghosts, flapping and hooting.
The guns cracked, a small popgun sound almost lost in the thunder and the wind. Garraty jerked his head around, the premonition that Olson had finally bought his bullet strong upon him. But Olson was still there, his flapping clothes revealing how amazingly fast the weight had melted off him. Olson had lost his jacket somewhere; the arms that poked out of his short shirtsleeves were bony and as thin as pencils.
It was somebody else who was being dragged off. The face was small and exhausted and very dead beneath the whipping mane of his hair.
"If it was a tailwind we could be in Oldtown by four-thirty!" Barkovitch said gleefully. He had his rainhat jammed down over his ears, and his sharp face was joyful and demented. Garraty suddenly understood. He reminded himself to tell McVries. Barkovitch was crazy.
A few minutes later the wind suddenly dropped off. The thunder faded to a series of thick mutters. The heat sucked back at them, clammy and nearly unbearable after the cushy coolness of the wind.
"What happened to it?" Collie Parker brayed. "Garraty! Does this goddam state punk out on its rainstorms, too?"
"I think you'll get what you want," Garraty said. "I don't know if you'll want it when you get it, though."
"Yoo-hoo! Raymond! Raymond Garraty!"
Garraty's head jerked up. For one awful moment he thought it was his mother, and visions of Percy danced through his head. But it was only an elderly, sweet-faced lady peeping at him from beneath a Vogue magazine she was using as a rain-hat.
"Old bag," Art Baker muttered at his elbow.
"She looks sweet enough to me. Do you know her?"
"I know the type," Baker said balefully. "She looks just like my Aunt Hattie. She used to like to go to funerals, listen to the weeping and wailing and carrying-ons with just that same smile. Like a cat that got into the aigs."
"She's probably the Major's mother," Garraty said. It was supposed to be funny, but it fell flat. Baker's face was strained and pallid under the fading light in the rushing sky.
"My Aunt Hattie had nine kids. Nine, Garraty. She buried four of 'em with just that same look. Her own young. Some folks like to see other folks die. I can't understand that, can you?"
"No," Garraty said. Baker was making him uneasy. The thunder had begun to roll its wagons across the sky again. "Your Aunt Hattie, is she dead now?"
"No." Baker looked up at the sky. "She's down home. Probably out on the front porch in her rockin' chair. She can't walk much anymore. Just sittin' and rockin' and listenin' to the bulletins on the radio. And smilin' each time she hears the new figures." Baker rubbed his elbows with his palms. "You ever see a cat eat its own kittens, Garraty?"
Garraty didn't reply. There was an electric tension in the air now, something about the storm poised above them, and something more. Garraty could not fathom it. When he blinked his eyes he seemed to see the out-of-kilter eyes of Freaky D'Allessio looking back at him from the darkness.
Finally he said to Baker: "Does everybody in your family study up on dying?"
Baker smiled pallidly. "Well, I was turnin' over the idea of going to mortician's school in a few years. Good job. Morticians go on eating even in a depression."
"I always thought I'd get into urinal manufacture," Garraty said. "Get contracts with cinemas and bowling alleys and things. Sure-fire. How many urinal factories can there be in the country?"
"I don't think I'd still want to be a mortician," Baker said. "Not that it matters."
A huge flash of lightning tore across the sky. A gargantuan clap of thunder followed. The wind picked up in jerky gusts. Clouds raced across the sky like crazed privateers across an ebony nightmare sea.
"It's coming," Garraty said. "It's coming, Art."
"Some people say they don't care," Baker said suddenly. "Something simple, that's all I want when I go, Don." That's what they'd tell him. My uncle. But most of 'em care plenty. That's what he always told me. They say, "Just a pine box will do me fine." But they end up having a big one... with a lead sleeve if they can afford it. Lots of them even write the model number in their wills."
"Why?" Garraty asked.
"Down home, most of them want to be buried in mausoleums. Aboveground. They don't want to be underground'cause the water table's so high where I come from. Things not quick in the damp. But if you're buried aboveground, you got the rats to worry about. Big Louisiana bayou rats. Graveyard rats. They'd gnaw through one of them pine boxes in zip flat."
The wind pulled at them with invisible hands. Garraty wished the storm would come on and come. It was like an insane merry-go-round. No matter who you talked to, you came around to this damned subject again.