Free The Fools in Town Are on Our Side by Ross Thomas

his chest much as he would hold his favorite teddy bear. I remember that after the bombs exploded there was that Godawful silence, so profound that all I could hear was my own voice and the tick of the watch which was still strapped to my father’s wrist.
    I must have gone two or three streets past the department stores before I saw her. She wore an organdy dress with lots of ruffles and flounces in a style that I later found had been popularized by an American actress called Deanna Durbin. I’ve yet to see one of her films.
    I thought then, and perhaps still do, that the woman in the organdy dress was the most beautiful person in the world. She stood there at the curb, waving a silk parasol, and yelling for someone called Fat Lisan. Her blond hair was capped by a wide-brimmed, floppy hat. Dark green, I remember, a color that almost matched her eyes. Slightly behind her stood a Chinese woman who also yelled for Fat Li-san.
    I stumbled over to her and stood there, gazing up at her face, my father’s remains clutched tightly to my chest. I bawled. She looked at me, frowned, and gestured that I should go away. When I didn’t, but just stood there bawling some more, smeared from top to bottom with blood, she turned and snapped something at the Chinese woman. She spoke French, but I didn’t know it then. All I knew was that my cuts and scratches and abrasions hurt, that I was lost, and that I couldn’t find the rest of my father.
    The Chinese woman came over to me and knelt down and began speaking softly in English. I knew it was English but I couldn’t understand very much of it and when she saw that it wasn’t working too well, she switched to the Shanghai dialect. That was better. She wanted to know who I was and how I’d gotten hurt and where my parents were. The blond woman in the floppy hat kept waving her parasol and yelling for Fat Li-san. I told the Chinese woman that I was Lucifer Clarence Dye and had she seen my father? The woman in the Deanna Durbin dress moved closer, but not too close. She said something inFrench to the Chinese woman, who turned out to be her
amah.
The
amah
shook her head, rose, and backed off. The woman with the big floppy green hat grimaced and stretched out her hand.
    â€œDonnez la moi!”
she said. Or so she told me later. Much later. I didn’t understand her then, but the outstretched hand made things plain enough and I hugged my father’s severed forearm, wrist, hand, and watch even closer. I bawled some more, partly because I was one of the 865 wounded by the Chinese Air Corps which bombed its own city and partly because my father was among the 729 who were dead for the same reason.
    The woman in the green hat stripped the white glove from her right hand, snatched all that was left of my father away from me, and started to throw it in the gutter. However, she saw the watch and paused long enough to remove it from the wrist. She was always quite practical. After that, she tossed it into the gutter. A dusty red dog covered with sores nuzzled my father’s hand, picked it up in his jaws, and trotted off down the street. The dog seemed to be grinning.
    The woman in the floppy hat smiled at me and started to pat me on the head, but thought better of it. My hair was matted with blood. “We go my house,” she said in her best pidgin English. I understood that and asked her, this time in Mandarin, if she’d seen my father. I wasn’t too familiar with death, not familiar at all really, and I’d have liked to have given my father back his hand and wrist and forearm and watch.
    â€œWe go,” she said and once more yelled for the missing Fat Li-san. A large maroon 1935 Airflow Chrysler, an automotive abortion that was to be rivaled by the Edsel years later, bulldozed its way to the curb, clipping a rickshaw. Fat Li-san had finally arrived. The woman in the green hat sent him off for some newspapers and when he returned he spread