(It's coming in trickles now.. two weeks on the road has me brain-dumb. Fiddled pictures -- not much for the old write-write: two pages. It's taken a month. Here is the trick of quitting it)
MAGGIE FELT. She felt. She felt the sheets on the old man's bed wet with his sweat. He had finished his story, and now sickness came into the room. Came out of him. He was sinking. The stink was out of him, and in that sweat. She cried a little for Oliver. Some dead girl's daddy.
He said, Go on downstairs.
On his forearm a tattoo of a round green apple. She touched his skin there. He smiled. Teeth missing in the back.
He asked her, What's the story?
No story.
GUNSHOTS. Downstairs. Pop-pops. Then voices. Then a few more rounds fired off -- clicking off -- like the rungs of mechanized wheels, utilities clicking around a dial, tick, tick, tick; so arbitrary is gunfire. But Oliver came up out of the bed, not jumping, not reactionary in a human way of jumping at the doctor's mallet to the knee, but as if called. He came up, and turned her over turning himself to stand. She fell as if it were a slapstick. And from the floor she watched him reach his great body up and out. He was naked, and old, and the cancer had sucked holes in what should have been solid places on him: his thighs, his chest -- he was a strong beast full of cavities.
He said, Maggie, come with me. And he took her hand, and lifted her up.
He took her out into the hall, and pulled her around against the door of another room.
Please hide. He said.
What is it?
He opened the door, and shoved her in. She closed the door. The room was like his room, a bed. Hide? Hide under a fucking bed?
Maggie went to the window, and looked down: there was a triangle of the yard in view between the sloping stone shingles under her window, and the old gate, but she saw no one down there.
Three more gunshots fired off. But further away. Then she saw Oliver's head appear in the yard. He circled around, he was clothed. He disappeared.
Nothing. She watched. No more gunfire.
SHE HEARD the door open downstairs. Feet up the stairs. More than one pair. Maggie ducked down, and knelt behind the bed. She clutched. The quilt had a half-moon stitched to it, yellow over deep blue.
THE DOOR came open, and three men came in. Not her soldiers, the 88's. These were different soldiers, in black vests and simple stupid caps like olden times. They were strong, and squeezed her arms, and locked her between them, and left the room.
ON THE STAIRS she tried to wrestle loose, and they yanked her off her feet, and pulled her down, her feet slapping out of her shoes off the steps. Then the old man came in through the front door.
HE CAME in so slow, like he didn't expect to see them dragging her down the steps. But he did know. He reached out, and took two of them from grabbing her so that the one left hooking her stumbled back against the incline of the stair, and held her like a lover, just to keep hold of her, like that would make what was coming better. Maybe they fired rounds. It didn't matter. Oliver killed them. The first he knocked cold. The second he hooked under the throat, and dragged into the next room. Then he came back for the second, like a big hunched ape he came back, and grabbed a boot, and pulled that one out of the room. The third, holding her, let her go, and ran upstairs. Oliver went by her, knocking her aside, and went up after him. And she heard the kid scream.
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