Chapter 61 Cool under Fire
BIRDIE will not tell you how. Not for the reasons a person shouldn’t, though those hold too, but because the how was never the part that mattered. Everybody is always fascinated by the wrong forty seconds of a thing like this.
Here is what the climax of my life was actually made out of.
It was made out of boring. It was made out of a soft, level, dull voice and a wound-up man and the plain arithmetic of a room, who was where and how far from what and how fast could each of them move.
It was made out of getting Ren and Theo to the far side of that room, and then to the doorway, and then, when I judged it right and only when I judged it right, gone, down the back stairs into the hands of Wes’s people at the bottom, so that whatever the next few minutes held, they held them for exactly one person instead of three.
That was the entire game. Get the numbers down.
Everything after that was just nerve, and I had a bright wire of pure terror running the whole length of me the entire time and I did the work straight through it, and the work did not care in the slightest that I was afraid. The work has never once cared.
Cody was the hard part, and Cody was hard in the specific way frightened people are always hard, which is that they are unpredictable in exactly one direction: they will do the thing that lets them go on believing they aren’t the kind of man who does the other thing.
And that, if you are gentle, gentler than you have ever been in your life, is a handle.
He had escalated all summer because escalating was the only thing that had ever, once, made this town turn its head and look at him.
Unpaid now, cornered, done being Holloway’s quiet tool and sick of it, he’d reached for the single biggest thing a man in his position could hold over everyone at once.
The trouble with reaching for the biggest thing is that then you are holding it, and it is heavier than you thought, and some buried part of you is already waiting, praying, for somebody to come along and make it okay to set it down.
I have talked a great many frightened people into setting heavy things down. It is the actual skill. It is worth more than steady hands and it doesn’t show up on any evaluation the Army ever wrote.
I want to tell you I never wavered once the people were out, that the freeze was a sidewalk thing and I left it on the sidewalk, but that would be a lie and I’ve told enough of those to last me.
There was a moment, in the middle, at the exact hinge of it, where the old picture came back up, the young man’s face, the certainty that had failed him, and my hands slowed, and the bright wire went white.
And I did the thing Wes had handed me on the sidewalk, which was not to wait for the fear to leave, because it was never going to leave, but to look at my own hands and decide they were going in anyway.
Not because I was sure. Because I was the one there who could, and because a boy on the sidewalk was counting fire trucks for me.
The picture didn’t go away. I just stopped letting it drive, and went back to work with it riding along in the passenger seat where it belonged.
“You didn’t want it to be a kid,” I told him, low, in the gold light, with Ren and Theo already gone down the back stairs and him not yet knowing it.
“I know you didn’t. Property, all right, that’s a thing a man can talk himself into, a man’s got to eat and this town chewed you up and spit you out too, I know it did, I’ve watched it do it to good people for three years.
But you put Theo at that window so I would come.
Not so he’d — you don’t want to be the man who does the other thing, Cody.
I’ve been standing here five minutes and I can see plain that you don’t.
So let’s you and me not let you become him.
There’s a version of the next five minutes where you’re the man who scared this whole town half to death and got their attention at long last and then did the one decent thing at the very end, and everybody in Halford has to sit with the fact that they never once really looked at you.
That’s a better story. It’s a truer one, too.
Let’s you and me go make that one instead. ”