Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [65]
She felt remote from the occasion even as it pressed upon her. Police helicopters went beating overhead and there was a rank of men chanting and screaming at the marchers. Justin took a leaflet from a woman in a black headscarf. She had pigment dappled on her hands and looked off toward some middle distance, avoiding eye contact. People stopped to watch a burning float, papiermâché, and the crowd became more dense, collapsing in on itself. She tried to take the kid’s hand but that was over now. He was ten and thirsty and went dodging off to the other side of the street, where a man sold soft drinks from stacked crates. There were a dozen police nearby, positioned in front of red netting that was draped beneath a construction scaffold. This is where they would detain the overcommitted and uncontrollable.
A man came up to her, slouching out of the crowd, black man, hand on heart, and said, “This here’s Charlie Parker’s birthday.”
He was almost looking at her but not quite and then moved on and said the same thing to a man wearing a T-shirt inscribed with a peace sign and in his reproachful tone she caught the implication that all these people, these half million in their running shoes and sun hats and symbol-bearing paraphernalia, were shit-faced fools to be gathered in this heat and humidity for whatever it was that had brought them here when they might more suitably be filling these streets, in exactly these numbers, to show respect to Charlie Parker on his birthday.
If her father were here, if Jack, he would probably agree. And, yes, she felt a separation, a distance. This crowd did not return to her a sense of belonging. She was here for the kid, to allow him to walk in the midst of dissent, to see and feel the argument against war and misrule. She wanted, herself, to be away from it all. These three years past, since that day in September, all life had become public. The stricken community pours forth voices and the solitary night mind is shaped by the outcry. She was content in the small guarded scheme she’d lately constructed, arranging the days, working the details, staying down, keeping out. Cut free from rage and foreboding. Cut free from nights that sprawl through endless waking chains of self-hell. She was marching apart from the handheld slogans and cardboard coffins, the mounted police, the anarchists throwing bottles. It was all choreography, to be shredded in seconds.
The kid turned and watched the man weave through the crowd, stopping here and there to make his announcement.
“Jazz musician,” she told him. “Charlie Parker. Died forty or fifty years ago. When we get home I’ll dig out some old long-playing records. LPs. Charlie Parker. Known as Bird. Don’t ask me why. Before you ask, don’t ask because I don’t know. I’ll find the records and we’ll listen. But remind me. Because I forget.”
The kid took more leaflets. People stood at the edges of the march handing out material on behalf of peace, justice, voter registration, paranoid truth movements. He studied the leaflets as he walked along, head bobbing so he could see the marchers in front of him, read the printed words in his hand.
Mourn the Dead. Heal the Wounded. End the War.
“Give yourself a break. Walk now, read later.”
He said, “Yeah right.”
“If you’re trying to match what you read and what you see, they don’t necessarily match.”
He said, “Yeah right.”
This was a new thing, the two drawled words of breezy dismissal. She pushed him toward the sidewalk and he drank his soda in the shade with his back against a building wall. She stood next to him, aware that he was slowly sinking down along the wall, a gestural comment on the heat and long walk, more drama than complaint.
Finally he came to rest in a tiny sumo squat. He sorted through his literature, spending some minutes looking at a particular leaflet. She saw the word Islam at the