The Eternal Footman Page 13

  Five minutes later, she emerged holding a small aluminum can, sealed, its label stained with dribbles of blue enamel.

  “Look what I found.” Rachel flourished the can. “Would you mind if I painted something on your truck?”

  “What?” asked Nora.

  “The Star of David. I want us to enter Paramus in style.”

  “Be quick about it.”

  Rachel went to work, using her white scarf as a paintbrush, and soon both of Phaëthon’s panels glistened with garish blue Mogen Davids.

  “There’s something I’ve never understood,” said Nora as they left the Texaco station. “In Chinese culture, once you save somebody’s life, you’re obligated to protect that person forever.”

  “No offense, Nora, but I’m glad we don’t have that rule in America.”

  “But isn’t it a strange rule? You’d think it would work the other way around.”

  “I don’t know about Chinese culture. It’s hard enough being Jewish.”

  “Such a strange rule.”

  Two miles beyond White Plains, the fog lifted to reveal an impressive spectacle. Banners flying, three Connecticut regiments—the Norwalk Irregulars, the Greenwich Grenadiers, the Bridgeport Berets—poured onto the Cross Westchester Expressway. Armed with everything from bazookas to hunting bows, assault rifles to slingshots, they paraded down both shoulders whistling John Philip Sousa’s “Washington Post March.” They were prepared for a long campaign, their backpacks stuffed with bedrolls and bristling with pots and pans. As Phaëthon cruised past these tired but determined volunteers, they pulled off their berets and cheered, evidently heartened by the Mogen Davids and—Nora mused sadly—by the possibility that a motorized Jewish division was not far behind.

  Around five o’clock, the Hudson River swung into view, its waters sparkling in the late afternoon sun as they broadened to become the Tappan Zee. The amateur army soon doubled in size, squad after squad of New York volunteers spilling from the marshes and onto the expressway, melding with the Connecticut troops.

  Only on seeing the burning bridge did Nora finally and fully believe Rachel’s story of an Anglo-Saxon invasion. It was really happening: armed combat, civil war—war with its tactics and body counts, its suicide missions and saboteurs. The present conflagration, said Rachel, was almost certainly the work of the God’s Ear Brigade, those professional demolitionists who’d managed to cut Manhattan off from the outside world. A dozen pockets of flame rose along all four spans like burning sheaves of wheat, crackling and hissing as they ate the asphalt. Smoke billowed upward, obelisks of roiling blackness. And yet the volunteers were not deterred. Eyes flashing, throats erupting in war cries, they advanced across the bridge, dodged the fires, and rushed pell-mell toward the west bank of the Hudson.

  “Pedal to the metal,” ordered Rachel.

  “Pedal to the metal?” wailed Nora. “Are you crazy? We’ve got—”

  “A bay full of gasoline, right. Let’s get it over with.”

  “Remember the Chinese rule? You’re responsible for me! You’re not allowed to endanger my life!”

  “Come on, Nora!”

  “No!”

  “Mexico, Nora! They have the cure! You can’t get to Mexico unless you cross the goddamn Hudson River!”

  Nora floored the accelerator, bringing the truck to the threshold of the first span. The heat arrived as a searing wind. Honking furiously, she improvised a path among the soldiers and around the fires. Smoke filled the cab. The women coughed and wept. A worst-case scenario unspooled in Nora’s mind: melted tires, trapped truck, exploding gasoline.

  “Keep going!” cried Rachel.

  Approaching the second span, Nora heard a low, grinding, insectile drone. The soldiers gestured skyward. She lifted her eyes. An air attack had begun. A propeller-driven dirigible cruised back and forth above the westernmost span while, leaning out a cabin window, a God’s Ear saboteur hurled down a clutch of Molotov cocktails. The bombs hit their target and detonated, turning the asphalt into a bright orange fireball. Through the clearing smoke Nora saw that the explosion had ripped a ten-foot crater in the roadway. She slowed to a crawl, reaching span number three as the saboteurs passed overhead.

  “You’re doing great!” yelled Rachel. “Don’t stop!”

  Seeing the dirigible in her side-view mirror, Nora fixed on the logo and thus learned the source of the brigade’s name. This bulbous vehicle was in fact the famous Goodyear blimp, the letter Y and one of the O’s erased by splotches of black paint, so that the word read GO*D*EAR.

  “One more span! You can do it!”

  The Greenwich Grenadiers counterattacked. In her mirror Nora observed some twenty soldiers tear off their coats and start beating the flames while a handful of their fellows pulled out the components of a portable cannon, assembling the weapon with the frantic efficiency of auto mechanics performing a pit stop at Le Mans.

  “Blow them out of the sky!” screamed Rachel.

  Having completed one bombing run, the God’s Ear blimp languidly reversed direction. The instant the war balloon cruised within range, the Greenwich Grenadiers fired their bazooka, but the shot proved as impotent as the US Navy’s recent efforts to eradicate the plague with Polaris missiles.

  “They’re just warming up,” said Rachel.

  And in fact, as the dirigible bore down on the center of the bridge, the Grenadiers fired again. The helium envelope ruptured, six thousand cubic feet of inert gas whooshed into the air, and the blimp dropped toward the Hudson like an immense tear shed by the Cranium Dei.

  With nowhere to go but forward, Nora urged Phaëthon along the final span. The fires bellowed; the burning blacktop stank like fear syrup. She drove on, swerving past the smoking crater, pedal to the metal, just as Rachel wanted.

  At last the tollbooth appeared, a comforting image, like the sight of Kevin’s bicycle chained outside Meadowbrook Manor: evidence that he was safely home. Entering the shadow of the booth, she disengaged the transmission and applied the brakes. For two minutes she simply sat there, shaking. As her nerves settled, she retrieved a quarter from her Celtics jacket, rolled down her window, and tossed the coin into the basket.

  “What did you do that for?” asked Rachel.

  “It’s not a toll,” said Nora. “It’s an offering.”

  “Huh?”

  “Of thanksgiving.”

  “Who’re you thanking, Mr. Smiley Face up in the clouds?”

  “No.”

  “We’re not even in Jersey yet. If I were you, Nora, I’d save all my money for Mexico.”

  Nora Joins the Circus

  AFTER THE CARNAGE at the Tappan Zee Bridge, the remainder of their Paramus journey seemed blessedly uneventful. Nora drove Phaëthon west on Route 87 for about five miles to the Garden State Parkway, motoring past a volunteer regiment called the Stratford Spearshakers, then turned south and crossed the border into Jersey. Empty as a fetch’s womb, the parkway afforded the privacy Nora always preferred when ministering to Kevin. She pulled off near a pine grove and began the grim rituals of prevention: dressing his boils to head off infection, feeding him to forestall malnutrition, exercising his muscles against atrophy. She locked her gaze on Kevin’s. His pleading stare horrified her, and yet she maintained eye contact. It was the one sort of connection he could still apparently feel.

  “Are you Nietzsche-positive?” asked Rachel.

  “Not yet,” said Nora. “You?”

  Rachel nodded. “I shot her. The bullets had no effect, but I gave the bitch quite a fright.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “I scared the shit out of her.”

  Having bandaged, nourished, and massaged her son, Nora replenished the fuel tank with five gallons of Gansevoort premium and guided Phaëthon back onto the highway. As dusk fell over the Garden State, a significant detachment of the Army of Northern New Jersey emerged from the shadows. Two dozen brigades were bivouacked in Beth-Elohim Cemetery, their flimsy pup tents rising incongruously amid th
e marble tombstones and granite mausoleums, their banners proclaiming their homes: East Orange Historical Society, Passaic Art Appreciation Guild, Montclair Book Discussion Group, Hackensack Kennel Club, Ridgewood Softball League. Like their Connecticut counterparts, the New Jersey volunteers took heart at the sight of a motorized vehicle decorated with Mogen Davids, and for a fleeting instant Nora considered contributing Phaëthon to the cause. A noble sentiment, but impossible, she decided. It was the truck, and only the truck, that elevated her Coatzacoalcos scheme above the level of a pipe dream.

  Entering the Montclair Book Discussion Group’s headquarters, a collapsible aluminum-and-vinyl gazebo originally designed to shield well-fed suburbanites from the midday sun, Nora and Rachel explained themselves to a rawboned black woman wearing a lieutenant’s bars and camouflage fatigues. The lieutenant directed them toward a vehicle that, thanks to her familiarity with Kevin’s plastic models, Nora knew to be an “ontos,” a caterpillar tractor with a triad of recoilless rocket launchers swivel-mounted on both sides. Perched atop the turret was the brigade’s recruiting sergeant, Nathan Kitman, a tightly wound little man who, it developed, had taught Jewish studies at Columbia before the plague struck. After gratefully accepting Rachel’s services, Sergeant Kitman explained that she was now in the Army of Northern New Jersey’s newly created Third Division, one of five poorly equipped but resolute corps committed to engaging the enemy the next day on the Areola Golf Course. In Kitman’s view, the battle would prove decisive. Either the Christian Brotherhood’s main body would be destroyed (with a subsequent lifting of the siege of Manhattan) or the Army of Northern New Jersey would go down fighting (with a consequent collapse for the average Jew of all meaningful distinction between Durward Montminy’s America and Adolph Hitler’s Europe). At one point in his narrative the sergeant leaned forward, drummed his knuckles on a rocket launcher, and observed that the ontos had seen its last battle, its fuel tank being empty.

  “Diesel?” asked Rachel.

  “Diesel,” said Kitman.

  “Interesting,” said Rachel, inflicting a pointed glance on Nora.

  Rachel was pleased to report that not only were the Stratford Spearshakers moving down the Garden State Parkway, but three additional Connecticut regiments had recently marched over a sabotaged but passable Tappan Zee Bridge. Assuming they avoided the Anglo-Saxon brigades, Rachel theorized, these spirited volunteers would probably reach Beth-Elohim Cemetery by 11:00 P.M.: they would have plenty of time to pitch their tents and enjoy a decent night’s sleep. Casting a covetous eye on Phaëthon, Kitman remarked that the key to Rachel’s reconnaissance work had obviously been the panel truck. How lamentable that Nora intended to leave at dawn. Normally he wouldn’t think twice about commandeering her vehicle, but the Third Division’s fetches had threatened to murder them the moment they violated any part of the Decalogue save the law against killing.

  Right after supper—a feast of baked beans and boiled cabbage reminiscent of nearly every meal Nora had consumed since the plague hit its stride—the brigade’s commanding officer, a retired Marine colonel named Sol Weiskopf, assembled his troops. The five hundred volunteers gathered in concentric circles around the ontos. The Coleman lanterns imparted a ghostliness to the soldiers, as if Beth-Elohim Cemetery had recently experienced an epidemic of resurrection. Although Weiskopf failed to fit Nora’s mental image of a marine—his shoulders were narrow, his stature diminutive, his uniform ragged—he radiated both courage and competence. Even without her diesel fuel, she felt, the Army of Northern New Jersey stood a good chance of winning.

  The colonel’s speech began with a question. “How many of you have ever killed anyone?”

  Only three raised their hands, a chubby youngster wearing a blaze-orange hunting jacket, a burly middle-aged man dressed in camouflage fatigues, and Rachel.

  “Tell me about it.”

  The young hunter related how he’d accidentally shot and killed a farmer’s wife on the first day of antlered deer season in central Pennsylvania. “Worst thing that ever happened to me.” The middle-aged vet revealed that he’d machine-gunned thirty-one Iraqi tank crewmen during Operation Desert Storm. “I was just doing my job, but I still have nightmares.” Rachel told of dispatching a devout spiritualist with her Uzi earlier that day. “It was so easy.”

  “Most of you are probably asking if you have what it takes,” said Weiskopf, walking back and forth on the ontos. “When the battle begins, will you be able to pull the trigger? Were the technology available, I would now run video clips from the siege of Manhattan, images that would galvanize the self-doubters among you. Luckily, we have the next best thing. Sergeant Kitman’s sister-in-law, the celebrated New Yorker cartoonist Donna Szydlowski, has spent the past week creating a presentation called The Way of the World.”

  From his duffel bag Sergeant Kitman obtained a stack of glass slides and an antique brass-and-wood projector that Nora immediately recognized as a magic lantern. (Eric had employed one at the start of his act, using it to display Victorian placards such as SPITTING IS PROHIBITED and LADIES, PLEASE REMOVE YOUR HATS.) Kitman ordered the Colemans doused, then set the magic lantern on an engine louvre, ignited the kerosene lamp, and aimed the beam toward the side of a mausoleum housing the Goldstein family. While a Playwrights Horizons actor read the narration and a New York Philharmonic musician played Hebrew folk melodies on his violin, Kitman projected the paintings. The tepid titles scarcely conveyed the horrors they depicted: a dozen atrocities perpetrated by the Anglo-Saxons during the siege of Manhattan. Nora was especially moved by Firebombing a Synagogue, with its terrified congregants leaping through the windows, Looking for Swallowed Diamonds, which documented a mass evisceration, and War of Attrition, a tableau of starvation, each victim so bereft of fat and muscle that his skin had become an organic ossuary, bones poking out in stark detail femur, ulna, radius, pelvis, ribcage.

  “The Anglos are a formidable foe, but they aren’t invincible,” said Weiskopf as Kitman cranked down the wick and stifled the flame. “Even as I speak, over a thousand Connecticut volunteers are racing to join us. When the sun rises tomorrow, we shall match the enemy soldier for soldier.”

  On this encouraging note, the colonel dismissed his brigade.

  Ten minutes later, holding two milk jugs by their handles and cradling two more against her chest, all four gallons sloshing to and fro, Nora approached the ontos, where Rachel and Sergeant Kitman were packing up the magic lantern. The nine remaining gallons from Sheridan’s school bus, she reasoned, would probably be sufficient to purchase Kevin’s treatment.

  “As luck would have it, Rachel and I came into some diesel fuel today,” Nora told the sergeant, setting the milk jugs on the mud shield.

  “May your fetch keep her distance,” said Kitman.

  “I’ll help you get the other gallons,” said Rachel.

  “No, that’s it,” Nora told her.

  “Don’t you remember? We siphoned thirteen.”

  “They’re my ticket to the clinic.”

  “Thirteen gallons would probably last us the entire battle,” said Kitman.

  “Listen to the sergeant,” said Rachel.

  Head to foot, Nora bristled. Yes, Rachel had delivered her from Harvey Sheridan’s Angelic Plane—but her friend had no right to make such a request. “I’m already taking a risk giving four away,” said Nora.

  “May God forgive you,” said Rachel.

  “Didn’t you watch His trial?” Nora pointed to the Cranium Dei. “God reprimanding His creatures for selfishness is like a door-to-door serial killer criticizing his victims for having illegible numbers on their houses. I don’t want God’s forgiveness, Rachel. I want yours.”

  “You’ll have to settle for God’s.”

  “If you were a mother, you’d understand.”

  “Well, I’m not, so I don’t,” Rachel replied. “Now get out of my sight. If I never see you again in my life, it will be too soon.”

  Dawn spilled softly into the c
argo bay. Nora awoke sheathed in sweat. She rose and exercised Kevin’s limbs. Hunger rumbled in her stomach, a need she assuaged with beef jerky and raisins. Her head ached, her back hurt. It was not her true self, she felt, but some enfeebled, fetchlike facsimile who now got behind the wheel and drove Phaëthon out of Beth-Elohim Cemetery.

  Her plan was simple. She would take the Garden State Parkway to Interstate 80, pursue 80 into Pennsylvania until she hit 81, then follow 81 south through Virginia.

  She never even reached the parkway. The Third Division jammed the road from shoulder to shoulder, a sea of unsmiling volunteers. Grabbing her Triple A Atlas, she turned to the relevant map and plotted her alternatives. Her next two attempts to connect directly with 80, Pascack Road and Highland Avenue, also failed; both thoroughfares were clogged with brigades from the Second Division. She implemented plan three, steering Phaëthon west on Linwood Avenue into the tidy little town of Ridgewood, where she easily attained Prospect Road, a promising escape route from the war zone.

  Twisting and turning, the highway cleaved to the meandering Saddle River, whose waters rushed southward along the perimeter of the Areola Golf Course. As the air vibrated with drum cadences and bugle calls, the two armies took up strategic positions on the fairways, thousands of infantry troops pouring into opposing mazes of trenches and foxholes. Fearsome walls of wooden stakes guarded the forward redoubts of the Anglo-Saxon line. Barbed wire defended the Jewish salients, the clawed coils unraveling across the field like some vast demonic Slinky.

  The instant Nora shifted into fourth gear, two supernatural events caused her to slam on the brakes: the sudden materialization of a naked Quincy Azrael on the front seat, exuding a loamy fragrance, and the equally abrupt transformation of the steering wheel into a red snake, its tail fixed in its mouth, a perfect circle. Screaming, she stopped the truck and removed her hands from the snake, which proceeded to slither around the gearshift lever, turning it into a machine-age caduceus. The reptile, yellow-eyed, stared directly at Nora, its forked tongue flicking about like a miniature dowsing rod.