Read Online The Radio Magician and Other Stories by James van Pelt - Free Book Online Page B

written on it in my future.” She still held his wrist. “There may be no forgiveness for us, what we do here, but we’re small monsters stopping giant ones, and the victims here are volunteers.”
    Chastity’s voice came down the stairs. “Are you ready for the next?” She sounded profoundly tired.
    Trellis twisted his wrist away, covered his nose and mouth as if the air were poisonous, a contagion to be blocked. Half way up the stairs, he nearly knocked over an old man wearing a bathrobe holding Chastity’s hand. In a blink Trellis stood inside the mall, gasping for breath. Soft music washed over him. A young mom balancing a toddler on her hip put a dollar in quarters into the rent-a-stroller display. Three teenager girls wearing ear phones talked animatedly as they looked into each others’ bags from The Gap. “That color would look so good on me,” said one. “Oh, you can borrow it whenever,” said her friend.
    Trying not to stagger, Trellis found an empty table in Café Court. Shoppers came and went carrying trays filled with pizza or hamburgers or rice bowls. Conversations babbled around him. After he’d sat for over an hour, his breathing settled but his muscles hung without an ounce of strength. The mall music played an instrumental version of Barry McGuire’s “The Eve of Destruction.” A string and piano rendition of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” followed.
    In the music he could hear the stone chamber breathing before the man with the Marine Corps patch pitched backward, the solid thud the knife made when it connected, like a fist hitting a watermelon. But he also heard air raid sirens and the chant of “duck and cover.” And for a long time his thinking locked into a droning mantra, the light of a thousand suns the light of a thousand suns the light of a thousand suns (It was murder, wasn’t it, what he saw? Surely murder!). He caught himself sobbing. Seek safety now, he longed to shout to the patrons around him. SEEK . . . SAFETY . . . NOW, and he wondered how he could have gone day to day for all his years with such denial, such forgetfulness.
    How would he go on from today?
    Time passed. He knew it did. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was what he should do. All that mattered waited in a silver Airstream sitting on the edge of the parking lot, ten feet from passing traffic, a block from a Starbucks to the north, a block from Barnes and Noble to the south, and directly above the throat of the world, a deep, dry and hungry well.
    The night guy sat in the chair opposite Trellis. “Mall’s closing in twenty minutes, bud, and you haven’t started the evening check list. You all right?”
    Trellis leaned back. His vertebrae crackled. How long had he been hunched at the table? He looked around. A couple of the restaurants had pulled their security gates part way from the ceiling, even though they weren’t supposed to close up before the end of the day. The dark blue of twilight filled the skylights above.
    “I’ll be there in a minute.” His voice didn’t quiver, which surprised him.
    The night guy’s expression turned concerned.
    Trellis forced a smile. “Really, give me a minute.”
    Soon after the night guy left, Jennifer filled his seat. In the mall’s light her hair was more silver than gray and the age rays around her eyes were more pronounced.
    “I would have thought you would pull up stakes when I left.”
    Jennifer shook her head. “You wouldn’t call the police. Only people willing to come our way find us.”
    “I don’t know what you mean,” he said, but it occurred to him that the night guy wouldn’t have known what Trellis was talking about if he had asked him about the trailer.
    She wrapped her hands over his. “You didn’t answer me earlier. You do have nuclear nightmares, don’t you? You wake up at night so sick with fear you can hardly move? That’s why you came to us.”
    Trellis tried to remember. Did he have those dreams often? Were his