Disclaimer: I own nothing of the Outsiders
*It's impossible for you to die on the eve of your death~ Spanish saying*
*Waiting for Superman to pick her up~Daughtry*
Cherry's voice is sudden and sharp as she rushes into his study, throwing open the mahogany door was a force that had Ponyboy Curtis on his feet, the great American novel halfway finished on his computer forgotten. The look in the eyes of his wife of more than twenty years was that bad.
"What is it hon?" Pony tried to ask her, pushing back strands of her still deep red hair, cupping her face. They were both so much older now than the boy who nearly drowned in a park fountain and the girl who asked him not to take it personally if she didn't say hi. Older, fatter (well, he was), and a little bit wiser. But Cherry was still so dang pretty, in his sight. More pretty for the fact that she couldn't remain so, would not last eternally. Would people truly be able to love something, if they had the assurance it would last forever?
She stammered something about "T.V" and " ya need to see."
So he let her pull him from his room, sun-lit and golden, down the hall into the living room, where she left the television on Good Morning America. And this is what Diane Swayer had to say:
"We want to tell you what we know, as we know it, but we just got a report in that there's been some sort of explosion at the World Trade Center in New York City. One report said, and we can't confirm any of this, that a plane may have hit one of the two towers of the World Trade Center, but again, you are seeing the live pictures here. We have no further details than that. We don't know anything about what they have concluded happened there this morning. But we're going to find out, and of course, make sure that everybody knows on the air."
The first thing Ponyboy can process on the screen behind the looking glass of twenty-century technology was the sky was the most startling shade of blue. Holy Mary Blue, his mother once fondly dubbed it, the same shade that covered the Virgin's weeping head as she stood below her crucified Son. In his mind's eye, he could see Molly Curtis now, golden hair curled up, breathing in deep, smiling wide at the sky, and telling him and his brothers to look up at it too. A blue sky like this means it gonna be a good day. Clear, crystalline, and cerulean, the very definition of blue almost made him wish he was in Manhattan with some paints and a canvas, attending a business meeting at the top of the world like Darry was today-
Darry.
That's the thought that got Pony to notice the raising black column of smoke, bleeding out of the Tower like blood from the side of Christ.
Holy Mary, Mother of God-
Pony doesn't know if he said it or thought it or prayed it. Pray for us sinners...
"Jesus Christ, that's some accident..." he breathed. Cherry sniffed with a harsh sound somewhere between a scoff and a choke.
"No kiddin'. That's not Darry's Tower though, right?" Cherry demanded, voice becoming more furious the more she didn't know something, her grip on Pony's sleeve bleeding her knuckles white with panic. "It has the antenna thing on it? That's not Darry's Tower."
She said more as a demand than a question as if she could make it so by force of will. Luckily, she was right that not Darry's Tower. Darry's in the South Tower.
Cherry wilts with relief when he tells her that. "Oh thank god," she said. Then she straightened, heading for the landline.
"I'm callin' Soda."
Now and at the hour of our death amen...
B*D*S
Soda had been driving his wife Olivia to a dentist appointment when they got Cherry's call on Soda's cell phone. One insane U-turn and a few angry drivers later, they were pulling into the round parking lot of their best-selling brother and brother-in-law's home.
Soda was out of his beat old truck first, at a run that belied his age. Soda had kept in reasonably good shape over the years -life as a fireman would do that. He had aged gracefully, the crinkles around his sun-beat face the ones you get from laughing.
He wasn't laughing now.
"Have ya heard from him?" he asked urgently, and beside him, Olivia, tiny, bird-like, and brown-skinned from her half-Negro (Black...what are they calling it now?) half-Indian blood, bit her lip and tucked her small hands into Soda's arm. Like a bird clinging to its nest.
Pony shook his head as he swept them inside.
"Nothin' yet," he told him, as the second Curtis couple stopped dead in front of the tv screen, where Cherry was still glued.
Soda's jaw was slacked as he took in the scene, his face full of open pity. "Jesus Christ. That's awful. What happened?"
Cherry shrugged helplessly, shaking her head a bit, tugging at the pearl necklace that had been in her family for two generations. So Pony answered. "The news said it was a plane. It was flying too low. Engine malfunction, maybe. No one knows yet."
Soda didn't answer, but Pony could see the Fireman mode Flipping on as sirens blasted through the audio, New York's bravest roaring to the Trade Center. Those buildings were so massive, filled with so many people on each floor. With its gaping wound, it seemed monstrous, suddenly. Devouring. What the hell kinda damage could something like that could cause?
"To cause something like that, it needed to be a big-ass plane," Soda muttered.
"Those poor people," Olivia moaned through her fingers, as a particularly distressing closeup of folks on the upper floors appeared, waving hands and white towels. Even from this far away, it was clear they were desperate.
B*D*S
Meanwhile in a different part of town, in front of his own auto repair shop, the rest of the Curtis gang was glued to the small tv they had, sharing it with the crowd of customers.
"Jesus CHRIST!" Steve Randle bellowed in disbelief when the image of a chain of falling people, a man whose jacket looked like wings, a woman holding down her skirt in a last act of modesty. "The hell can't they get helicopters up there!?"
"Don't know," Two-Bit Matthews answered him calmly -or well, calmly as he could. Normally there would've been a smart aleck remark added on, but Two-Bit couldn't recall anything less funny in his life. "Guess they can't-"
Then his butt buzzed. Or the telephone he was sitting on buzzed. He answered, glad for the distraction.
"Hello? Pony?...yeah, Stevie boy's with me...we haven't heard from Superman..."
A scream pierced the air then, the kind of blood-curdling scream Two-Bit thought only existed in horror films. The woman who issued it is pointing to the screen, where there is a second fireball rising.
B*D*S
The eleventh of September shouldn't have been anything but another day.
Just another day. People went about their lives expecting the expected; they woke up, they ate breakfast, they went to work or school, the unthinkable never crossing their minds because life-altering, world-shattering events rarely announced themselves. It was just another ordinary day.
But at 9:02 Pony and Soda can only watch in horror with their wives as a Mother. Fuckin'. Airplane. flies into the television screen, and slams into the South Tower.
Darry's supposed to be on the 79th floor.
And over the sound of the girls' screaming, one solid, cold fact solidified then.
That wasn't an accident," Soda hissed, his face livid with wild rage. The fireman was gone, replaced by the feral eighteen-year-old Marine who saw the darkness of the human heart in Vietnam. He'd seen evil, he seeing it now. "That was no fuckin' accident. We're under fuckin' attack."
They still haven't heard from Darry.
B*D*S
Denial is the heart's best defense against pain. It doesn't soften it. But it brings it in in smaller dosages, so you don't die by blood poisoning.
Steve and Two-Bit pull up and walk through the open door, joining them without a word as they watched the bright promise of the new century burn against a Holy blue sky.
"C'mon Superman..." Two-bit muttered, gray eyes as nailed to this cross as any of 'em. Pierced and bleeding. He'd know Darry before either Soda or Pony were even born. They used to watch the Fleischer Superman cartoons, then run around with ratty red bath towels tied around their necks. One episode, the Bullet Car, had something like this, nuts in a flying machine terrorizing a city.
Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.
Or in the Darrel Curtis Jr. edition...smarter than a speeding bullet...more stubborn than a locomotive...able to raise two brothers in a dead-end job...
Yeah...it wasn't only Darry's muscles that made him Superman. Not even close. He was their hero, their cornerstone as America burned.
Both the Towers and the Pentagon.
"C'mon Superman..."
B*D*S
When they finally get a call, it's from Darry's number. But it's not Darry. It's some woman fumbling, struggling to get words out.
"He couldn't get a signal through where we were, so he gave his phone to me and sent me down," she whimpered quietly through the line, as six people desperately crowd around the landline to hear. "He's still up there, trying to get more people out."
Oh fuck-it Superman...
"He told me to tell you that he's fine, but he got a job to do. He loves you and he'll can you when he can."
They don't say it but looking around the room, the sentiment was in each of their eyes, the mourning process has already begun...
Even before the South Tower collapsed. In the tumble and heat and M.A.D (mutual assured destruction) of a new century...
A sentence that's confirmed when its Twin tumbles down after it. Jack-and-Jill like.
"Good Lord...there are no words." the television said.
No shit.
New York is covered in ashes, gray and poisonous, a ruin heap where there was once Twin Towers. The girls were in their husband's arms, bawling into their chests. Pony and Soda both just hold them, jaws locked as they held back the urge to howl like wolves for their brother. To bawl for him as they had for their parents. Only this time it was worse, much worse. Their parent's death had been an accident. This was deliberate.
Evie wasn't here to do the same for Steve, so he just ripped the air a new one, cursing heaven and hell seven ways.
And even though the horror, even through the grief in which it looks like nothing can ever be golden again, there is a fitting epitaph to a country, an age, as well as to a man who had been both a leader and a childhood friend. Two-Bit is the first to think it.
"It would take an airplane to bring down Superman," he said softly.
Its grim comfort, but grim is all their gonna get now.
Until 5:00 that evening:
"Ponyboy? Wait, is this Soda's...Never-mind. It's ok. I made it out. I'm alright little buddy. I'm alright."
Read and review. I was only three when 911 happened, I have only faint memories. My prayers to all the victims.