Salvation City - By Sigrid Nunez Page 0,84
even prettier in her new soft dreaminess. Not that he’d lost all fear of her, but most of his feelings for her were tender ones, including something he wouldn’t have expected to feel and which he thought she might find insulting. He found it baffling: what reason could there be for him to feel sorry for her?
Yes, he’d caught her crying while listening to her iPod—but what girl didn’t cry at “O Lonesome O Lord”? Cheerful-ness was beneath apocalyptic girls, but no one would have called Starlyn unhappy. Nothing came easier to her than making friends. And this summer there was an exciting new face: Amberly, who was twenty and newlywed and who’d just moved to town from Evansville. Amberly wasn’t apocalyptic, but she had dramatic dark eyes and the grace and perfect posture of a ballerina. Starlyn was flattered that a twenty-year-old married woman would want to hang out with her. They saw each other almost every day. It occurred to Cole that at least some of the time Starlyn was supposed to be with Amberly she might actually be with Mason. But no one shared that suspicion as far as he knew.
At first he figured it was because of Mason that Starlyn was spending so much time visiting Salvation City—why else? But then he thought it could be Amberly, and later he learned of another factor. Starlyn’s mother, divorced already a few years from Starlyn’s stepfather (her real father had run off before she was born), had just started dating a certain man. There’d been other men since the divorce, but “This one’s a keeper” (Tracy). Cole sensed a problem, though, something about which everyone was tight-lipped, at least around him.
Lovebirds need a little privacy, he was told. But Cole thought maybe Starlyn and this man, Judd, didn’t like each other. Starlyn herself never spoke of Judd. But once Cole made the mistake of mentioning him, and Starlyn turned so sharply on her heel that her hair, which she happened to be wearing braided that day, smacked him in the mouth like a cable. The sting lasted a remarkably long time, and whenever Cole was tempted (and he was tempted a lot) to ask Starlyn whatever happened to that boyfriend of hers in Louisville, he felt it again.
Starlyn didn’t talk about that boyfriend anymore, but she didn’t talk about Mason, either, and for all Cole knew there was nothing to talk about. Say it was just one kiss, just that one time, just playing around, no biggie. No secret love. No love at all.
But Mason, too, was a different person these days. In Bible study he often had trouble sitting still, instead bouncing around the room or pacing the floor like someone expecting major news or an important visitor any minute. He mixed up names and faces as he hadn’t done before. He mixed up Cole and Clem, for example, who, though they usually sat next to each other, looked nothing alike.
Riding his bike downtown one day, Cole saw Mason walking along, and though he waved and even called out, Mason ignored him.
Once again, as when they’d first met, Cole found Mason scary-looking. The same tense, starving-wolf look as the three men on the mountain. A wolf with one supersharp, blood-shot, ever-shifting eye.
Cole wasn’t the only one to notice a change in Mason.
“It’s like he’s shook up somewhere deep” (Tracy). Probably for the same reason as her own whirlpool-stomach feeling. It wasn’t just the two of them, either. It was another epidemic: more and more people feverish with the notion of living on the cusp of Something Big.
Partly it was the weather—though the era of extreme weather was old by now, and if the floods and droughts and violent storms that struck season after season really were a sign of the end, no one could say what the Lord meant by dragging it out. Once again that year, spring had brought a record number of tornado outbreaks and enough rainfall to cause flooding throughout the Midwest. Now it was heat waves. Late July was especially bad, and nowhere worse than in Chicago.
It’s been over a hundred for five days straight, and I’ve never felt humidity like this before. The anxiety level is pretty high, too, because everyone knows the city doesn’t have the resources to cope with an emergency.
With this message Addy sent Cole links to articles about the connection between extreme weather and global warming.
“Whatever you call it, and you can call it global warming or climate