WHAT WAS THAT NONSENSE OTTO MULLIGAN spouted? The day I met him at Jury of Your Pours? The insignificant play he recalled from the Michigan State game, the one that preserved a first down in the fourth quarter with us up by twenty and nothing on the line. Who remembers that shit? Two of us, I guess.
I rolled left, juked, scrambled, and plowed into Renner. Caught in his dreamlike rapture of end times and war, he didn’t react quickly enough and went down hard, losing the cell phone as it clattered onto the pavement. I held my breath, waiting for an explosion that didn’t come. I gave the phone a nudge with my foot, spinning it out of Renner’s reach, and ran.
Ran—not the way I run around Schiller Park, which is to speedy running as ketchup is to five-alarm hot sauce, but like a man possessed. Like a man about to lose everything.
I caught up as the truck passed the Athletic Club by Fourth. Glanced briefly at the name emblazoned on the side of the blue truck: David’s Desserts. I leaped onto the passenger side running board, swung the door open, was nearly flung off as the truck juddered over a manhole cover, regained my balance, and hurled myself inside. We were moving straight ahead. Renner had calculated it well. In front of me I saw wooden traffic barricades and police officers staring at us, realizing something was wrong. Behind them hundreds of people—thousands—with no idea at all that things were amiss.
We passed Chase Bank, then the Rhodes Tower, with its statue of the late namesake governor James Rhodes, briefcase in hand, as he strode toward another workday, and started to gain on Jack & Benny’s all-night diner, filled with patrons.
A hundred feet to Broad and High.
Fifty feet.
Police officers screaming at me, guns in hands.
The crowd screaming too, but oblivious to the approaching danger. People’s eyes heavenward. “Five! Four! Three! . . .”
I mashed myself against Abdi and cranked the steering wheel as hard as I could. I willed myself to become part of the truck as it veered left, left, left, so reluctantly, with such motorized intransigence, a heavy-laden boat being asked to divert from its expected mooring at the end of a long voyage. Tires screeched in protest and the cops’ yelling intensified and Abdi suddenly moaned and the truck ran up onto the corner by the old Huntington Bank building and rumbled back down onto High, bump, bump, bump.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Night became day as fireworks filled the sky and cut sharp shadows across downtown. Above me, exploding over the Scioto River, brilliant pinwheels of red, white, and blue lights.
The show had begun.
I hit the gas and drove all the way down the middle of the street, past the Huntington Center and the Riffe Center and a guy and a girl arguing about something at a bus stop and brought the truck to a halt at the far southwest corner of the Statehouse grounds. I threw it in park and opened the driver’s door and clambered out over Abdi. I stood there, breathing hard, listening to the explosions overheard. I turned and saw men and women in uniforms sprinting toward me.
“Hands up! Don’t move!”
“Get away from the truck!”
“Get down on the ground!”
“The phone!”
The phone?
I looked to my right and saw JaQuan Williams sprinting down the sidewalk, chasing Trey Renner, who was limping toward us with the phone in his right hand, raised high.
“Go back!” I yelled at JaQuan.
He stopped, confused.
“Run!”
I turned and tore the bindings loose from Abdi’s hands and hauled him out of the truck and threw him over my shoulder and thought just for an instant how light he was, a man in the body of a boy, like holding Joe that morning in my backyard as we sat in my Adirondack chair.
“Run!” I yelled at JaQuan. He ran. And so did I, not away from but toward the police.
“It’s a bomb it’s a bomb it’s a bomb get back get back get back!”
They got back.
Roy and Lucy said later they could hear the explosion at their house, nearly five miles up the road.