The Genocides

Jackie smiled, her bittersweet smile, the one she reserved for hopeless disasters. She closed her eyes, not to shut out the scene, but because they were very tired, and shook the ash from her short, curling black hair.

Jeremiah Orville closed her in his arms. It wasn’t chilly, but it seemed the right thing to do just then—a traditional gesture, like taking off one’s hat at a funeral. Calmly, he watched the city burn.

Jackie was rubbing her bobbed nose in the scratchy wool of his sweater. “I never really liked that city anyhow,” she said.

“It kept us alive.”

“Of course, Jerry. I didn’t mean to be ungrateful. I just meant—”

“I understand. That’s just my well known sentimentality getting out of hand again.”

Despite the heat and his enclosing arms, she shivered. “We’ll die now. We’ll die for sure.”

“Chin up, Miss Whythe! Tally-ho! Remember the Titanic!”

She laughed. “I feel like Carmen, in the opera, when she turns up the Queen of Spades.” She hummed the Fate theme, and when the last note proved too low, she mumbled: “In an amateur production.”

“It’s no wonder one feels depressed, with the world burning up about one,” he said in his best David-Niven manner. Then, in an authentic Midwestern accent: “Hey, look! There goes the Alworth Building!”

She turned around quickly, and her dark eyes danced in the light of the pyre. The Alworth Building was the tallest in Duluth. It burned magnificently. The whole downtown area was in flames now. To the left of the Alworth Building, the First American National Bank, after a late start, flared up even more splendidly due to its greater bulk.

“Ooowh,” Jackie shouted. “Wheee!”

They had lived these last years in the safe-deposit vault in the basement of the First American National Bank. Their precious store of scavenged cans and jars was still locked in the safe deposit boxes, and the canary was probably in his cage in the corner. It had been a very cozy home, though there were few visitors and they had had to kill most of those. Such luck couldn’t last forever.

Jackie was crying real tears.

“Sad?” he asked.

“Oh, not sad… just a little déracinée. And annoyed with myself, because I don’t understand it.” She snuffled loudly, and the tears were all gone. “It’s so horribly like what they used to call an Act of God. As though God were the source of everything unreasonable. I like to know the reason for things.” Then, after a pause: “Perhaps it was the termites?”

“The termites!” He looked at her unbelievingly, and her cheek began to show its tell-tale dimple. She was pulling his leg. They broke out laughing together.

In the distance, the Alworth Building collapsed. Beyond, in the dry harbor, a ship lay on its side and squirted flames out of its portholes.

Here and there, scuttling about the rubble, the incendiary mechanisms could be glimpsed attending their business. At this remove they seemed really quite innocuous. They reminded Jackie of nothing so much as of Volkswagens of the early Fifties, when all Volkswagens seemed to be gray. They were diligent, tidy, and quick.

“We should be getting on our way,” he said. “They’ll be mopping up the suburbs soon.”

“Well, good-bye, Western Civilization,” Jackie said, waving at the bright inferno, unafraid. For how can one be afraid of Volkswagens?

They coasted—their bicycles along the Skyline Parkway from which they had viewed the burning city. When the Parkway went up hill, they had to walk the bicycles, because the chain on Orville’s was broken.

The Parkway, unniended for years, was full of potholes and cluttered with debris. Coming down from Amity Park, they were in the dark, for the hill cut off the light of the fire. They went slowly with their handbrakes on.

At the bottom of the hill, a clear womanly voice addressed them out of the darkness: Stop! They jumped off the bicycles and spread themselves flat on the ground. They had practiced this many times. Orville pulled out his pistol.

The woman stepped into view, her arms over her head, hands empty. She was quite old—that is to say, sixty or more—and defiantly innocent in manner. She came much too close.

“She’s a decoy,” Jackie whispered.

That much was obvious, but where the others were Orville could not tell. Trees, houses, hedges, stalled cars stood all about. Each would have been an adequate cover. It was dark. The air was smoky. He had lost, for the while, his night vision by watching the fire. Determining to make a show of equal innocence, he reholstered his gun and stood up.

He offered his hand to the woman to shake. She smiled, but did not approach that near.

“I wouldn’t go over that next rise, my dears. There’s some kind of machine on the other side. Some sort of flamethrower, I think. If you like, I’ll show you a better way to go.”

“What does it look like, this machine?”

“None of us have seen it. We’ve just seen the people who got crisped when they got to the top of the bill. Shocking.”