He edged toward the door. “Oh, I know, Biff, because—well, when I step out of the house on a night like this—now, and next year, and for years to come—I get a sinking sensation in my guts. For a minute I won’t know why. It’ll just be there—cold and hard. I’ll look up and down the street to see what’s wrong, Biff, and then I’ll know. The moonlight.”
“Moonlight?”
“Yeah. My guts will be saying, ‘See it? See the moon! Bright! Good visibility! They’ll be over soon, now.’ The sirens’ll start. The motors will begin to throb like your own pulse. And then—” He whistled. “Wham! Whoom! All around! Stuff like that. That’s why I know Shirer’s not lying. ’Night, keed.”
The music teacher lived near the river. Jimmie walked slowly, humming to himself. He still had time to kill. Once he turned and started back to the hospital. He decided his errand would keep till morning. His feet clicked on the cold pavement. His shadow rippled lithely on lawns and hedges. The eight-thirty ship out of Muskogewan left the airport with far-off thunder and passed overhead at a few hundred feet, portlights bright, wings tipped in red and green, exhausts pale lavender. Jimmie stood stark still to look at it, with goose pimples washing up and down his back. He went on, humming songs that came over the radio which Sarah and his parents seemed to play incessantly. They were all sad songs—about refugees, and the last time somebody saw Paris, and what somebody’s sister would disremember.
Depressing songs. Popular songs. A nice, incisive index, Jimmie thought, of the defeatist ebb of spirit in a country that thought of itself as the Colossus of the West. Sick Colossus!
The river flashed inkily through the naked trees. Cars streamed over the Maple Street bridge, starting and stopping-a dancing river of taillights, a pale avalanche of dimmers. Dan and Adele lived in a white clapboard house with a white picket fence and wrist-thick vines winding up over the roof of the porch. The curtains were drawn in the front rooms—yellow blinds down across lace. Jimmie poked the bell. Somebody was playing the piano with a rippling dissonance, and so many handfuls of notes they seemed to be showering from the keys at a humanly impossible rate. The music stopped and the door opened.
“Hello, Jimmie.”
“Hello, Audrey.”
“Come in.”
He came in. There was no change in the huskiness of her voice—or its mood. He had expected that they would pick up the threads of their first, and only, afternoon together, through studied speeches, conventions, an exaggerated ritual of re-meeting. But that was not going to be so. It was as if he had interrupted a song by lifting the arm of a phonograph, and left it there for a long while, and then set it back at the same place in order to hear the rest of it. Audrey walked into the living room ahead of him and turned around. She stood quietly. Lamplight fell on her. She wore a gray silk dress that went round her in three climbing spirals and had turquoise trimming.