The White Plague Read Online Free PDF Page B

evening, he ate supper almost four hundred miles away from the place he no longer called home, sitting in a roadside cafe that smelled of rancid grease. He chose a booth that gave him a view of the car parked outside, noting the gray film of dust that gave it a rundown look. That was good. The grille still showed a shallow dent Mary had put there while trying to maneuver out of a supermarket parking lot. John left without finishing the meal and could not even remember what he had ordered.
    Later, he found a motel with an alcove parking place beside his room. He transferred the fireproof box to a place under the bed, put his father’s old .38 Colt under the pillow and lay down fully clothed, not expecting to sleep. He could feel the presence of that box under the bed. The money represented energy for the thing he knew he had to do. Every sound outside brought him to alertness. Headlights sweeping across the window draperies set his heart pounding. Activity outside subsided as the night wore on and he told himself he would nap a bit. Someone starting a car awakened him and he opened his eyes to gray morning light around the edges of the draperies.
    And he was hungry.
     

 
“Those two wains dead will not win us friends. Could you not have waited just a bit?”
– Kevin O’Donnell
     
“Me standing back out of the window I could not see them down there.”
– Joseph Herity
     
     
    I N THE months after their first meeting in the quad, Stephen Browder and Kate O’Gara moved slowly from tentative acquaintance to what her mother called “an understanding.”
    “She’s walking out with this young man who’ll be a doctor,” Kate’s mother told her next-door neighbor.
    “Ahhh, that’s a fine catch,” the neighbor said.
    “Well, my Katie’s no slouch around, and her almost a nurse.”
    “It’ll be a fine thing, two medical people in the family,” the neighbor agreed.
    On a Friday, late in October, Stephen borrowed a fellow student’s car, having arranged to take Kate to the Blackwater Hilltop south of Cork for supper and the dancing afterward. He had been saving for a month to afford this outing and it was a daring thing to do. The B-H, as it was known in Cork, had the reputation of a “fast roadhouse,” but their Guinness was the best and their chef brought regular customers from as far away as Dublin.
    The car was a six-year-old Citroën whose offside showed a long series of scratches from scraping a bridge abutment. It had once been silver-gray, but the student owner had repainted it a garish fluorescent green.
    Kate, suppressing serious guilt feelings, told her mother they were going with other students to the harvest fair at Mallow, and that they planned to stay for the fireworks, the late supper and the music.
    Her mother, remembering similar outings in her own youth, admonished: “Now, Katie! Don’t let your young man make any advances.”
    “Stephen is serious, Momma.”
    “Well, so am I!”
    “We’ll be back by midnight or soon after, Momma.”
    “That’s very late, Katie. What will the neighbors think?”
    “I’ll be giving them no cause to think anything, Momma.”
    “You’ll be with the others all the time?”
    “All the time,” Kate lied.
    Once she was in the car with Stephen, the guilt feelings made Kate angry and there was only one target. The sky was still luminous with the long twilight and there was a large moon low on the horizon, almost full, heavy with orange and the promise of a bright night. She stared out at the moon, intensely conscious of Stephen beside her and the privacy of the car, which purred along accompanied by a faint smell of burning oil. Stephen was not an expert driver and he compensated by holding down his speed. Several cars roared around them and cut in sharply, forcing him to swerve.
    “Why’re we going so slow?” Kate asked.
    “There’s plenty of time,” Stephen said.
    His calm, reasonable tone maddened her.
    “We shouldn’t be doing this, Stephen,