The shoppers began to come back in shifts. Apparently they had split up inside the Walmart, each with his own list. Aziz came back with half a dozen plastic grocery bags dangling from each hand. Women’s work. Mostly these contained food, but he had also purchased a cheap webcam, shaped like a little eyeball, in a blister pack, and an extension cord for its USB cable. The feminine hygiene supplies were in there too; these were hurled disgustedly back down the length of the RV and ricocheted against the bedroom walls and came to rest, on the bed, somewhat dented around the corners. Sharjeel came with even more camping equipment: sleeping bags, tents, tarps, ropes, and various fleece garments. He tossed the clothing back to Zula, then went back into the store. Fifteen minutes later he and Jones came back, each pushing a big flatbed cart. They brought in a Skilsaw, a cordless drill, construction screws, insulation, two-by-fours, plywood. A full four-by-eight-foot sheet would have been awkward in the RV’s confines and so they had presawn them into four-by-four pieces. Aziz was sent back into the Walmart and came back with a roll of black roofing paper and a white plastic package, about the size of a well-stuffed garbage bag, with a Pink Panther cartoon on it: fiberglass insulation.
The group now divided up, the lovers Mahir and Sharif going out and getting into the car along with the miserable Aziz, while fat Zakir and weaselly, efficient Sharjeel remained in the RV. At a command from Jones, Zakir spun his chair around and fired up the RV’s engine, then pulled the great land yacht out onto the open road. Jones unboxed the Skilsaw. The RV had a generator that would produce wall power. He figured out how to get it started. Then he began to take measurements in the back bedroom, scooting politely past Zula each time he went in or out. With a fat Walmart contractor’s pencil he stroked out long lines on the plywood panels, then fired up the Skilsaw and cut them to shape, two at a time, suffusing the RV’s confines with sawdust, smoke, and a screeching din. He carried these back into the bedroom as they were completed, pushed them up against the windows, and then used the cordless drill, with a screwdriver attachment, to screw them into the RV’s walls. This was all done with the curtains closed so that anyone outside would see only curtains, drawn for privacy.
In only a few minutes’ time, he was able to screw plywood over all the windows. He deputized Sharjeel to put in more screws while he planned out the next phase of the operation. Sharjeel went to it with a will, driving the screws in at intervals of no more than two inches. It was a statement. Those panels were not coming off.
In the meantime, Jones had been cutting two-by-fours into lengths. He tossed these in through the door, flying right over Zula’s head like spears, and directed Sharjeel to screw them down on their edges to the plywood underlayment. This he did miserably. The procedure, as Zula could have told him, was called toenailing, and it was tricky.
Abdallah Jones slashed open the package of fiberglass and it began to expand uncontrollably, threatening to completely fill the interior of the RV. Wrestling and stomping and cursing, he cut off batts of it and passed them back to Sharjeel who stuck them up against the plywood with duct tape.
When all of the plywood had been thus insulated, they pulled over to the side of the road where Jones vindictively kicked all of the insulation, save one six-foot batt of it, out onto the shoulder. Once they were back under way, he busied himself again with plywood. When he had cut the first set of panels, he had always worked with double sheets, making two copies of each shape, and keeping half of them in reserve. Now he and Sharjeel put these spares up over the insulation and screwed them down into the studs. The Colorado School of Mines didn’t raise no dummies.
So the whole three-sided bay of the bedroom was now a completely opaque arrangement of insulated plywood walls. Presently it became even darker as Jones and Sharjeel unrolled long strips of black roofing paper and staple-gunned them over the plywood, covering the entire interior surface of the room, including the ceiling, with monochrome black, relieved only by the sporadic glint of staples. A few moments’ work with a box cutter removed a disk of tar paper from around the overhead light fixture, so that some dingy yellow light was shed into the space.
They then unlocked Zula’s ankle and let her know that her place was back there on the bed. She retreated, sat down, and busied herself picking wood shrapnel and loose tufts of fiberglass off the bedspread (a quilt that had quite obviously been hand-stitched by the old lady butchered yesterday) as Jones and Sharjeel applied a similar treatment to the inside of the bedroom door, reinforcing it with plywood and then building it out to a full depth of five inches, with a bat of insulation in the middle. This had the desired side effect of completely covering up the inside doorknob, making it impossible for Zula to open the door even if it were not locked.
Jones chucked a long fat bit into the drill and put a hole all the way through the reinforced door, then fed the little webcam’s USB cable through. Using a web of zip ties, duct tape, and drywall screws, he mounted the little eyeball to the inside surface of the door up near the top. Meanwhile Sharjeel had zip-tied the cable and its extension down the length of the RV’s central corridor to its kitchen table and plugged it into the laptop. A long adjustment procedure ensued in which Jones would close the door, leaving Zula alone in the room, and walk up to view the camera’s output on the laptop, then tromp back and open the door and wiggle the camera this way and that, getting the angle just right so that (Zula supposed) it could see all parts of the room.
The entire procedure had taken perhaps two hours. Like all home improvement projects, it had started with amazing energy and speed and then slowly petered out as Jones and Sharjeel had gotten hung up on details. But now it was done, and Zula was well and truly locked in. They slammed her shut in there and did not bother opening the door for maybe six hours.
Day 15