Let the Fire Fall

Chapter Ten

HERE are some of the things Lisa Daniels never told Matt:

1. She had to do all the shopping in downtown Cincinnati. The village grocery refused to trade with short hairs.

2. There were seven new Listener’s Booths between the market and the bus stop.

3. A long-haired bitch pushed her off the sidewalk and into the gutter.

4. She had to walk four miles and shop six stores to find the things she needed for Derek’s birthday party.

5. Someone in a cab (a long-short hairs were never picked up now) had thrown an apple core and hit her right between the shoulders.

6. Every time she left the house during the day someone scrawled obscenities all over the first-floor windows.

Matt was still straight and stiffly erect, graying slightly, and she thought, much better-looking than he had been when younger. They talked occasionally of moving far away, of going to one of the spots where the long hairs were either non-existent, or in a very small minority, but they didn’t go. And wouldn’t, unless forced out. There were too few doctors who would treat patients from the ranks of the short hairs for anyone of them to give up and leave now. Eventually, Matt said forcefully, the maniacs would come to their senses and everything would get back to normal. Meanwhile they’d just have to be careful.

Lisa made dinner while Matt showered and she hummed thinking about the birthday party for Derek, and about Lorna’s first visit home since leaving for college almost a year ago. In the middle of dinner the view phone chimed and it was the chief surgeon at Matt’s hospital. He was bald and perspiring heavily. He was wearing his surgeon’s paper gown, paper mask dangling about his neck.

“Another of those nights, Matt. Can you come back?”

“Good God!” Matt said, but in resignation.

The two words shook the surgeon, who glanced about quickly. “You’d better come in your copter. I wouldn’t want to drive anywhere in town tonight.”

“Right,” Matt said. “National Guards out?”

“Not yet, but any minute.”

Lisa unclenched her hands before Matt turned to her. She smiled briefly. “Be careful, darling.” She would not start an argument. It was too hot. They would both get upset, she’d end up with a headache, and the weekend was too important to spoil that way.

As soon as he was gone she turned on the news, but as usual they were not giving any riot facts while the riot was taking place. She turned the sound down and washed the few dishes, slamming them about until she broke a glass. Then she relaxed a little. The water pressure was too low to run the dishwasher. She read for a while, conscious of the flickering three dimensional figures across the room from her, apparently enacting in pantomime a tragic love affair. At eleven the Savers clustered at the gate to the Daniels’ yard and sang: The Lord is My Strength; the Lord is My Power and Find a Refuge in the House of the Lord. The tambourine was terrible, the bass fiddle had a loose string, the trumpeter must have been yanked from some junior high school Band 1 class, and the ensemble as a whole caricatured an old Salvation Army group. Lisa recited a list of curses, then stifled a laugh that sounded suspiciously like a sob, and checked her doors and windows. All locked. They never tried to get in, as far as she knew, but they might. They had an electronic hookup that brought the voice of the young Messenger inside the house, putting it at her elbow. He said: “There is no salvation outside the Church. There is no life outside the Church. All outside the Church are dead already. Accept salvation now and forever. Come to the Voice of God Church and be born again in the strength and the power and the might of the Lord.”

Some people were so terrified at the sound of the voice so close, so intimate that it seemed almost to originate within them, that they opened their doors and invited the Savers inside and were converted on the spot, or they joined the roving band with fanatical zeal and henceforth became Savers also. Lisa held her hands over her ears until silence returned.

She was left alone then until Matt returned. The riot had started, he told her, when one long hair pulled a handful of hair from another long hair in the mistaken belief that it was a wig. The rumor had started that the meeting at which this happened was crawling with ringers, women wearing wigs pretending to be believers. A hair-pulling fray ensued that erupted into the street and enmeshed twelve city blocks before the Guards arrived with antimob foam bombs and dispersed the rioters. Lisa sighed. It didn’t matter how it started, it always ended the same, with Matt being called to the hospital to treat short hairs who got the worst of it, and they always did.

Derek arrived at noon the next day. He had become a six-footer, with broad shoulders, dark like his father, and as straight, but not giving the same impression of rigidity. He was doing his doctorate work in astrophysics that year, and his proudest possession, which he pulled from his pocket as soon as the kisses had been finished with, was his pass to gain him admittance to the spaceship whenever he chose that summer.

Lisa hung back as Derek and Matt talked. She brushed tears away angrily as she stared at her tall son, and again and again she tore her gaze from him and tried to banish the smile she knew must be foolish-looking. Matt grinned at her sympathetically and didn’t comment.

Lisa was thinking: my son will be in the convertible air car, skimming along the street flanked by honor guards, preceded by a mounted guard, with confetti and ticker tape and bands, five, ten bands, foreign dignitaries, the king of England, the Russian premier, our president. We’ll be on the review stand, next to the president, and the photographers will tell him please to move aside just a little, don’t obstruct the clear view of the doctor and his wife, if you don’t mind. The Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the Einstein Medal, the U. N. Distinguished Gold Cup….

“What?” she said to Matt, who had closed his hand over hers.

“I said, are you doing anything about lunch?”

She left to prepare lunch, thinking: there isn’t room any longer for so many of us, so different, the ones who don’t really care about going into space, and who don’t want to have anything to do with the Voice of God Church. No middle ground, and what’s left over anyway now? You have to belong to one or the other group, and we don’t. I don’t.

Thinking: will Obie Cox stop Derek and the others? Day and night they keep pushing to learn the ship, and they don’t learn it, but there is so much they are doing now. Soon Derek says we’ll really be a space-sailing world. Soon? Will Obie Cox be sooner?

She looked up as an air cab beat the air outside the garden and she shrieked to Matt and Derek, “Lorna! She’s here!”

They rushed out to meet Lorna, who was still digging coins from a purse for a tip. The taxi driver was holding her credit card patiently. Lorna completed the transaction and he released the door so she could step out. Her bags had already been slid from the compartment ramp. Lorna was a blur of pink dress and golden hair as she sped to her mother and father, talking. laughing, kissing them and Derek.

“You all look great. It’s so good to be home again! Let me tell you about school. I got A’s in everything! Everything! Can you believe it! And my job. I love it. I’m counselor to thirty girls, all under thirteen. It’s a great big camp up in the mountains, with laurel forests that smell divine in April, and are so dark and mysterious and cool. And there’s a waterfall where—”

“Good God,” Matt broke in. “You haven’t changed a bit, Lorna! Chatter, chatter. Under this broiling sun. Get! Inside with you.”

Lorna laughed and kissed him quickly, then looped her arm through Lisa’s and they walked together ahead of Matt and Derek. Derek was grinning broadly. “Boy, she’s worse if anything.”

Suddenly Matt stopped, and her suitcase dropped from his hand. Quickly he grasped it again and continued before anyone even noticed. He had just realized what he was looking at: Lorna’s hair. Beautiful golden hair that caught the sun and reflected it in a thousand bursts of fiery red light, hair that bounced and was brilliant and loose and half way down her back.