Cold Fire

At the other end of the room, bells were ringing, horns blaring, on the TV game show.

No traffic accident had killed Jim's parents.

That story was his way of avoiding a recounting of the terrible truth.

She had known. She had known, and refused to know.

Her latest dream had not been a warning prophecy but another memory that Jim had projected into her mind as they had both slept. She had not been herself in the dream. She had been Jim. Just as she had been Lena in a dream two nights ago. If a mirror had given her a look at her face, she would have seen Jim's countenance instead of her own, as she had seen Lena's in the windmill window. The horror of the blood-drenched restaurant returned to her now in vivid images that she could not block from memory, and she shuddered violently.

She looked toward the window, the courtyard, frightened for him.

"They were performing for a week at a club in Atlanta," Henry said.

"They went out for lunch to Jimmy's favorite place, which he remembered from the last time they'd played Atlanta.”

Voice trembling, Holly said, "Who was the gunman?" "Just a nut. That's what made it so hard. No meaning to it. Just a crazy man.”

"How many people died?" "A lot.”

"How many, Henry?" "Twenty-four.”

She thought of young Jim Ironheart in that holocaust, scrambling for his life through the shattered bodies of the other customers, the room filled with cries of pain and terror, reeking with the stench of blood and vomit, bile and urine from the slaughtered corpses. She heard the heavy sound of the automatic weapon again, chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda, and the please-please-please-please of the terrified young waitress. Even as a dream, it had been almost beyond endurance, all the random horror of existence and all the cruelty of humankind boiled down to one devastating experience, a savage ordeal from which full psychological recovery, even for an adult, would take a lifetime of struggle. For a ten-year-old boy, recovery might seem impossible, reality intolerable, denial necessary, and fantasy the only tool with which to hold on to a shred of sanity.

"Jimmy was the only survivor," Henry said. "If the police had gotten there a few seconds later, Jimmy wouldn't have made it either.

They shot the man down." Henry's grip tightened slightly on Holly's hand. "They found Jim in a corner, in Jamie's lap, in his daddy's lap, his daddy's arms, all covered with. with his daddy's blood.”

Holly remembered the end of the dream — the crazyman is coming straight at her, knocking tables and chairs aside, so she scrambles away and into a corner, on top of a dead body, and the crazyman is coming closer, closer, raising his gun, she can't bear to look at him the way the waitress looked at him and then died, so she turns her face to the corpse — and she remembered awakening with a jolt, gagging in revulsion.

If she'd had time to look into the face of the corpse, she would have seen Jim's father.

The avian shriek shrilled through the recreation room again. It was louder this time. A couple of the ambulatory residents went to the fireplace to see if any birds were caught behind the damper in the chimney.

"In his daddy's blood," Henry repeated softly. It was clear that, even after all these years, the consideration of that moment was intolerably painful to him.

The boy had not only been in his dead father's arms but surely had known that his mother lay dead among the ruins, and that he was orphaned, alone.

Jim sat on a redwood bench in the Fair Haven courtyard. He was alone.

For a day late in August, when the seasonal drought should have been at its peak, the sky was unusually heavy with unshed moisture, yet it looked like an inverted bowl of ashes. Mixes of late-summer flowers, cascading from planting beds onto the wide concrete walkways, were missing half their color without the enhancement of sunshine. The trees shivered as if chilled by the mild August breeze.

Something was coming. Something bad was coming.

He clung to Holly's theory, told himself that nothing would come unless he caused it to appear. He only had to control himself, and they would all survive.

But he still felt it coming.

Something.

He heard the screaky cries of birds.

The birds had fallen silent, After a while Holly let go of Henry Ironheart's hand, took some Kleenex from her purse, blew her nose, and blotted her eyes. When she could speak, she said, "He blames himself for what happened to his mom and dad.”

"I know. He always did. He'd never talk about it, but there were ways it showed, how he blamed himself, how he thought he should have saved them.”

"But why? He was only ten years old, a small boy. He couldn't have done anything about a grown man with a submachine gun. For God's sake, how could he feel responsible?" For the moment, the brightness had gone out of Henry's eyes. His poor lopsided face, already pulled down to the right, was pulled down farther by an inexpressible sadness.