'I'll give you help, if you want help,' Buddy repeated.
Lewis patted his forearm, sunburned and thick. 'This ride is a big help, honest.'
Ten nearly silent minutes later he was watching the boy's forlorn figure trudge down the exit ramp outside Zanesville. Emmie would probably have brained him if he'd come home with a strange dirty boy to feed, but once she'd seen him and talked to him, Emmie would have brought out the good glasses and the plates her mother had given her. Buddy Parkins didn't believe that there was any woman named Helen Vaughan in Buckeye Lake, and he wasn't so sure this mysterious Lewis Farren even had a mother - the boy seemed such an orphan, off on a vast errand. Buddy watched until the boy was taken by the curve of the off-ramp, and he was staring out at space and the enormous yellow-and-purple sign of a shopping mall.
For a second he thought of jumping out of the car and running after the kid, trying to get him back . . . and then he had a moment of recall of a crowded, smokey scene on the six-o'clock news. Angola, New York. Some disaster too small to be reported more than once, that was what had happened in Angola; one of those little tragedies the world shovels under a mountain of newsprint. All Buddy could catch, in this short, probably flawed moment of memory, was a picture of girders strewn like giant straws over battered cars, jutting up out of a fuming hole in the ground - a hole that might lead down into hell. Buddy Parkins looked once more at the empty place on the road where the boy had been, and then stamped on his clutch and dropped the old car into low.
3
Buddy Parkins's memory was more accurate than he imagined. If he could have seen the first page of the month-old Angola Herald 'Lewis Farren,' that enigmatic boy, had been holding so protectively yet fearfully beneath his arm, these are the words he would have read:
FREAK EARTHQUAKE KILLS 5
by Herald staff reporter Joseph Gargan
Work on the Rainbird Towers, intended to be Angola's tallest and most luxurious condominium development and still six months from completion, was tragically halted yesterday as an unprecedented earth tremor collapsed the structure of the building, burying many construction workers beneath the rubble. Five bodies have been retrieved from the ruins of the proposed condominium, and two other workers have not yet been found but are presumed dead. All seven workers were welders and fitters in the employ of Speiser Construction, and all were on the girders of the building's top two floors at the time of the incident.
Yesterday's tremor was the first earthquake in Angola's recorded history. Armin Van Pelt of New York University's Geology Department, contacted today by telephone, described the fatal quake as a 'seismic bubble.' Representatives of the State Safety Commission are continuing their examinations of the site, as is a team of . . .
The dead men were Robert Heidel, twenty-three; Thomas Thielke, thirty-four; Jerome Wild, forty-eight; Michael Hagen, twenty-nine; and Bruce Davey, thirty-nine. The two men still missing were Arnold Schulkamp, fifty-four, and Theodore Rasmussen, forty-three. Jack no longer had to look at the newspaper's front page to remember their names. The first earthquake in the history of Angola, New York, had occurred on the day he had flipped away from the Western Road and landed on the town's border. Part of Jack Sawyer wished that he could have gone home with big kindly Buddy Parkins, eaten dinner around the table in the kitchen with the Parkins family - boiled beef and deep-dish apple pie - and then snuggled into the Parkinses' guest bed and pulled the homemade quilt up over his head. And not moved, except toward the table, for four or five days. But part of the trouble was that he saw that knotty-pine kitchen table heaped with crumbly cheese, and on the other side of the table a mouse-hole was cut into a giant baseboard; and from holes in the jeans of the three Parkins boys protruded thin long tails. Who plays these Jerry Bledsoe changes, Daddy? Heidel, Thielke, Wild, Hagen, Davey; Schulkamp and Rasmussen. Those Jerry changes? He knew who played them.
4
The huge yellow-and-purple sign reading BUCKEYE MALL floated ahead of Jack as he came around the final curve of the off-ramp, drifted past his shoulder and reappeared on his other side, at which point he could finally see that it was erected on a tripod of tall yellow poles in the shopping-center parking lot. The mall itself was a futuristic assemblage of ochre-colored buildings that seemed to be windowless - a second later, Jack realized that the mall was covered, and what he was seeing was only the illusion of separate buildings. He put his hand in his pocket and fingered the tight roll of twenty-three single dollar bills which was his earthly fortune.