| A DANCE
WITH THE DEVIL by Tima Smith |
CHAPTER TWO
The rain stopped coming down in
drops and started coming down in sheets. It plastered the windshield,
turned the wipers useless, so that after a while all Allie could
see in the glass was the white reflection of the subpoena sitting
on the dashboard.
She leaned close to the steering
wheel and drove that way for another hundred feet, keeping her
eyes glued on the wavery patch of road that hovered momentarily
every time the wipers arced, until she couldn’t stand
it anymore and started inching toward the side of the road.
Or at least where she thought the side of the road should be.
She sat there with her foot pressed
hard on the brake, slid back onto the gas and inched over a
little more, because going into a two foot gully full of rocks
and water was probably preferable to getting rear ended by an
eighteen wheeler.
She turned off the wipers.
Better. There was something about
all that frantic, useless back and forth.
She turned up the radio. “...
flooding on River Road has closed access to Lower Falls. The
State Police are evacuating diehards who refused to leave last
night. Reports are that most of the Mill Building foundation
has washed away ...” the signal went static for a few
seconds, “... imminent danger of collapse ... utility
pipes exposed on Main ...” there was more static, then
silence. She flipped across the channels, past scratchy country
music, someone praising the Lord, an announcer speaking French.
She clicked it off.
The rain pounded the roof, cascaded
across the glass, and she wondered how long she was going to
have to sit there. Then something caught her eye and she looked
at the wet stain spreading across the light blue carpet near
the passenger door. Wasn’t it enough it was filling up
every gully and lowland in the state? Now it wanted to fill
up the damn car, too?
She looked back at the water sheeting
the glass and tried thinking about something else. But the stain
was like a magnet. It kept getting bigger and bigger, while
the air inside the car kept getting closer and closer.
She felt a tiny blossoming of
panic, grabbed it quick and shoved it inside the wooden chest
she kept under her bed when she was a kid. Then she slammed
the lid shut and turned the key.
She reached for the small brown
paper bag on the passenger seat and sat there with her hand
on it. Just in case it came to that.
It made no sense. This was the
place where practically nothing at all had happened the first
seventeen years of her life. The place she’d come to regroup,
find some inner peace. This place that was turning into the
site of the bible’s second great flood.
The panic kicked around inside
the wooden chest, wanting out, and she glanced at her watch.
Concentrate concentrate. Six before three. Greg would be clearing
off his desk right now, maybe taking one last phone call, getting
ready to set his stop watch, cross Fourth, head two blocks down
Federal, decide whether to take Cross or go another block up
to Union, depending how far the construction had moved that
day, then sprint across Kennedy, usually against the light,
and see how good his time was as he pulled open the door and
passed under the River Gym sign. Seven minutes. It was driving
him nuts. Because the one time she’d clocked herself,
she’d done it in six forty-eight, and it still bothered
him. She sat back, smiling a little. Of course that’s
what made his client list twice as long as anyone else’s
-- that undying competitiveness, that stubborn unwillingness
to lose. It made the rest of them – every other lawyer
in the firm -- seem positively agreeable.
“Impossible,” he’d
said. “You timed it wrong.”
“How could I time it wrong?
I left work, I hit the sidewalk at two minutes after three,
I walked into River’s at exactly 3:08:48. That’s
six minutes and forty-eight seconds.”
“You were running.”
“I wasn’t running.
I was walking. Just like you do. A fast walk.”
“Then there couldn’t
have been any traffic.”
“There was traffic, Greg.
Regular traffic.”
You could tell when he was annoyed
by the way his upper lip went thin. Just a little annoyance,
and you could barely notice it, but if he was majorly pissed,
his whole lip disappeared. And sometimes, when they talked about
having kids, she’d think about that. How a kid would use
Greg’s lip like a barometer, come to dread it, and how
she didn’t know if she could do that to a child of hers.
Her eyes settled on the subpoena
and she took it off the dashboard and tossed it over her shoulder
into the back seat.
Like it wasn’t enough the
whole damn incident had essentially disrupted her entire life.
Now they were going to make sure she never got over it. And
as if to prove the point, she was suddenly in the bus again
-- smelling the diesel fumes, looking into the terrified face
of the woman across the aisle, feeling the cold metal against
her temple. She closed her eyes, picked up the paper bag and
put it in her lap.
“Leaf-cutter ants,”
she said, “create their own food source by cultivating
a mushroom-like fungus in underground nests. The nests can be
up to fifteen feet below ground level, and spread out over many
yards.” She swallowed. “The underground nests protect
leaf-cutters from attack by predators. The ants gather leaves,
carry them down to the nest, chew them up and use them as mulch
to fertilize the fungus, which has been cultivated for millions
of years.” She closed her eyes and pictured them taking
care of business year after year, not knowing why, not asking
why.
“And what if breathing into
the bag doesn’t work, Dr. Broder?”
“It always works. Hundred
per cent. It’s purely physiological.”
And so far he’d been right.
Still, she liked to save it for last because if other things
worked first, things that weren’t physiological, then
that meant she was in control, that what went on inside her
head was up to her, that it wasn’t just a matter of carbon
dioxide.
“Concentrating on something
might help control the attacks?”
“It’s worth a try.”
“What kind of thing should
I concentrate on?”
“Anything.” That’s
when they’d both looked at the ant crawling across the
corner of his desk calendar. “Ants,” he said, “anything.”
She stared at the pattern of the
rain reflecting along the top of the dash. “So, every
time a new leaf-cutter queen starts her own colony, she brings
some of the fungus with her and plants it in the first tunnel
she digs ...”
The panic was almost gone now,
but she didn’t want to stop until it wasn’t there
anymore at all, so she kept reciting, not noticing that the
rain had let up to a kind of normal downpour until the sound
of a second engine intruded.
She turned to look at the pick-up
stopped beside her. She could see a man’s face, distorted
through the wet glass, and her finger went to the automatic
door lock, but it was already depressed. Then she remembered
where she was, on Route 16 in Tyler, Missouri, not on the Jersey
Turnpike. She rolled her window
down a little.
“Trouble with your car?”
She looked at him. Longish hair,
strong chin, a nose to reckon with, wide-set eyes that made
the nose okay, and a set of cheekbones that could cast shadows
in the right light. She couldn’t help it. It was the way
she’d been seeing things ever since Broder’s clay
therapy and her sculpture class had become the only things she
had to look forward to every week.
She shook her head. “No.
Thanks. I was just waiting for the rain to let up a little.”
“You might not want to sit
here too long, there’s a decent drop just a couple of
feet from your wheels. The ground’s taken a lot of water
and there’s edge erosion all along the road.”
“Oh,” she nodded,
“okay. Thanks.”
“And when you do pull out,
just go in a straight diagonal line back onto the road. Don’t
make any sharp turns with the wheel, okay?”
She pictured herself on the edge
of the Grand Canyon. She nodded.
He smiled a little. “So
like I said, don’t wait too long.” He pointed straight
up. “This may be the only break we get.”
She started the wipers. She could
see the road now. And she could see the edge of the road. It
wasn’t the Grand Canyon, but it wasn’t two feet,
either.
“Thank you.”
He held his palm up, started to
close his window, then he stopped and the window came down again.
He stared at her. “Allie?”
For a second, she was back in
junior high. Mr. Dennehey was writing functions on the board
and a tomato came flying from the back of the room and exploded
six inches from his chalk.
He’d been every teacher’s
nightmare. They called him Geronimo and it almost came out of
her mouth now, but she caught herself.
“Michael Quinn?”
“Allie Hutchins ... what
the heck are you doing here?” |
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