Finally, the very last week of June, Louise was agile enough on her crutches so that Emily felt comfortable leaving her by herself. Henry said it was fine, there was no rush. He didn’t have to say they’d already missed his favorite part of vacation, because it was hers too. She appreciated how patient he’d been, and she was ready. Raised in a backwoods mountain town, she hated summer in the city. The Edgewood Club’s pool was a zoo and it was too hot to sleep at night. They needed to be at Chautauqua.
They chose Wednesday, to beat the weekend traffic. He turned off the mail and the paper and called Arlene, asked Jim Cole to look after their garbage cans.
The day before they left, he drove over to the GetGo on the edge of Wilkinsburg to fill up the Olds so they wouldn’t have to stop on their way out of town. He had a plastic loyalty card on his key ring, along with one for AutoZone and CVS and Staples. For every ten dollars they spent at the Giant Eagle, they received three cents off per gallon, making the trip well worth it. If the neighborhood was iffy, it was no worse than East Liberty, and the next closest GetGo was all the way across the bridge in Fox Chapel. He’d been to this station dozens of times. In the middle of a weekday, right on the main drag of Penn Avenue, he didn’t anticipate any problems, but out of habit, as he pulled up, choosing a front pump so he couldn’t be blocked in, he noted the other cars, and was reassured to see his two fellow customers were both women.
A flat canopy shaded the plaza, teenybopper pop jangling from hidden speakers. His discount was seventy-two cents a gallon, and the Olds had a massive tank. He did the math automatically, the numbers irresistible—he’d be saving over thirteen dollars. He pressed YES to accept, fit the nozzle in and started pumping. The mini-mart at the far end was hopping, as always, people stopping for sodas and chips and cigarettes. He’d had panhandlers accost him before, and was glancing around, nonchalant, checking the sidewalk and the lot of the Rite Aid across the street, when, through the music, he heard a siren approaching.
The women looked up, turning like Henry toward Penn, where a line of cars waited at the light. The siren rose and fell, growing louder, closing on them. Though he scanned the road, he couldn’t locate the source. A block down, across from the Wendy’s, there was a hospital. It was probably just an ambulance dropping off, and then another siren joined in, urgent, filling the air with a whooping like a car alarm, and another, wailing high and sustained in the distance as if to signal an air raid, all three speeding to the rescue, the noise soaring, reverberating all around. Behind the sirens, growling like a pack of motorcycles, came a roaring of engines, mounting, racing straight for them.
Henry saw the lead car, a black SUV chased by two cruisers. They flew down the middle of Penn Avenue, traffic parting on both sides as the sound radiated ahead of them like a shock wave, overtaking the GetGo, drowning out the music. Drivers trapped at the light jumped the curb. Still holding the nozzle, he watched as the SUV and the cops blew through the intersection, a McDonald’s cup tumbling in their wake. Caught in the slipstream, it spun like a top, wobbled and rolled to rest against the curb, the sirens receding, the street returning to normal.
The women shook their heads at each other, united in disapproval, as if they were tired of this kind of foolishness. Henry would have shaken his head in sympathy, but was afraid it wasn’t his place, and concentrated on the pump until he was done.
“You’re lucky you didn’t get shot,” Emily said when he told her, and while she was being melodramatic, he thought she was at least partly right. As the SUV was flying by him, he didn’t duck behind the Olds as he should have, using its tanklike bulk for cover, just stood there transfixed, watching it all like a TV show, his soldier’s instincts deserting him. In basic, before anything, they’d learned to hit the dirt. The hedgerows were full of snipers, and more than once that simple training had saved his life. On patrol he was alert for the smallest sound—a cough, a rustling of grass—prepared to be shot anywhere, at any time. Embree laughed at him, sneaking up behind him in camp and clapping his hands to see him drop. Once, after he was back, a professor snapped a piece of chalk at the blackboard and Henry found himself crouching in the aisle beside his chair. He’d been embarrassed then, the brave G.I. betrayed by his reflexes. Now their degradation bothered him, as if he were defenseless, an easy target.
“From now on,” Emily said, “you’re going to Fox Chapel.”
“There’s nothing wrong with Wilkinsburg.”
“Maybe I should shoot you.”
“Maybe you should,” he said.
At five they turned on the news, but there was no mention of it, and in the morning they were gone.