Noise Read Online Free Page B

with aluminum bats, standing upright through the T-tops of their Camaros or kneeling on the wheel wells in the beds of their buddies’ pickups. People were stopping and swerving and smashing things.
    We had an open lane—only needed to go ten blocks—but someone was scared in front of us. Weaving between lanes, avoiding bottles, hoping to be ignored. There weren’t other immediate threats around us then, but we couldn’t take the chance. A lot could happen in ten blocks.
    I pulled the .38 from my pack, loaded it, and rolled down my window. I looked at Levi and waited.
    He watched the road, waiting. Eventually, he turned and stared at me.
    “Remove it,” he said.
    I nodded. Refixed my mask. I fired one shot at the old Buick in front of us, which was nearly driving on the median, trying to avoid abandoned cars in the other lane.
    For such a small gun, the explosion made my ears ring. My head rushed with blood, and the recoil jammed my elbow against the window frame. I wasn’t ready for it.
    The Buick’s rear window iced over instantly. Clouded, webbed, a tiny hurricane eye just off center. The driver moved fully onto the median, rocking the car, and veered onto the correct side of the road. We’d been driving on the wrong one.
    One of our early exercises had been the erection of a training dummy. We used scrap wood and parachute cord and a set of pulleys we got from the Army/Navy Surplus Store next to Meyer’s. We’d take turns, puppeting the dummy for each other. We’d swing it in all different directions, at different heights, between the giant sycamores in our front yard. Twenty feet away, cars raced down the road. We lived directly off Broadway, our yard elevated some ten or twelve feet. We could hear the bell tower on campus; we could see the spire on the old courthouse downtown.
    The boards we used for the dummy’s arms splintered easily, but we didn’t care. We kept at it, lacerating our own arms on the things’s shards, keeping track of our progress by the disappearance of our wounds.
    Adam gunned his truck up our driveway, throwing gravel like gunshots, tiny, popping bombards that clacked against the siding. Of our place and the neighbor’s. Jo’s place was an above-and-belowtwo-unit behind the small parking lot in the back, curtained, in places, by all the bamboo growing against the fence.
    We could see the cat, even in the dark, as we skidded past our porch. It wasn’t one we recognized, and it dangled, hanged from the throat, from a length of our parachute cord. Cars raced and braked out on Broadway. People flashed in and out of sight on the sidewalks, streetlit threats running different places.
    I looked away from the cat. I was still wearing the shirt around my face.
    We unloaded the truck. Our cats, Fluff and Edmund, were safe inside, under my bed.
    I stared at them.
    Jo didn’t answer her door.
    She was a vegetarian, and she invited us over sometimes for tasteless spelt pasta or to smoke a bowl. She wasn’t old enough to buy beer, so we’d bring it. We’d sit on her balcony and get drunk and talk. We would stare down the driveway, watching the cars pass in artificial river-motion. Everyone going somewhere else, underground, along the asphalt water. There was an IOOF cemetery down the road, below the road, where indigents lived in crypts like naiads in the riverbed, waiting for the current to deliver something useful they could drag down.
    We would get drunk and talk. We would make sure to say things like “Kierkegaard,” “chic,” and “not just sex, but something spiritual, too.” She hadn’t liked Adam’s punk, and I’d been slow to realize she was a lesbian.
    “Keep a watch,” I told Levi. We’d pulled the shirts from our faces. He turned and looked out over the balcony rail.
    I knocked again.
    “Jo,” I said, not too loudly, “it’s us.”
    I saw the pulse, darkness inside against darkness out. The peephole shutter-blink that anyone could always see. No matter what was