“Catch-22?” says the woman on the staircase.
Before I can say something else, someone shouts “hey-yuh” from the loading dock, and then someone else yells it from the roof, and then the man at the next staircase over yells it, too, and Ethan’s gotta run: he pops back into the truck and pulls the door closed and does a rapid three-point turn in the parking lot and heads back the way he came. The woman with the bandana looks at me, tight-lipped, and shrugs, what can ya do?
“Shit,” I say softly.
Houdini barks his rattling phlegmy bark, and I bend to scratch his ears.
*
I don’t know what happens if I go back without the sledgehammer.
Cortez will have more tricks up his sleeve, or else he won’t, and if he doesn’t we sit on our hands drinking weird bad coffee and making disjointed conversation until Wednesday around lunchtime, when the conversation stops and everything stops.
The town of Rotary is small, but it’s bigger than Pike, where the SuperTarget was. It’s bigger than anything else around. There’s got to be a hardware store.
There’s a church spire and another one, there’s the fat onion bulb of a water tower with the word ROTARY painted in mile-high letters in the classical small-town style. Autumn dogwoods along the sidewalk, leaves orange and red, branches drooping with rain. No people, no sign of people.
It’s got to be here: towns like this one still have hardware stores, or they did until last year, the mom-and-pop operations, beloved by the locals, losing money every year. There will be a sledgehammer at the hardware store, a row of them, a display, and I will take one and strap it in the wagon and mule it back up Police Station Road.
We go from door to door up Main Street: ice cream store, pizza parlor, pharmacy. A bar with an old-timey saloon theme called the Come On Inn. No one anywhere, no signs of life. “Blue town,” I say to Houdini as we’re poking around an abandoned ice cream shop. He’s nosing into an empty box of sugar cones, trying to get his teeth into something that’s food. There is a utility closet in the basement of the one-story redbrick municipal building, with an acrid reek of ammonia and mop water, a stack of bright orange safety cones, countdown hatch marks scratched in the wall by some bored custodian. No sledgehammer. No tools of any kind.
*
We called the towns with color names because of the package of multicolored Post-it Notes that Cortez had; he had them left over from his Office Depot warehouse. When we left a town behind us we would assign it a color, just keeping track, just to keep ourselves amused. All the degrees of dissolution, the differing extents to which each town or city had collapsed under the weight of all this unbearable imminence. Red towns were those seething with active violence: towns on fire, towns beset by marauding bands, daylight shootings, food foragers and food defenders, homes under siege. Only occasionally did we encounter active organized law enforcement: you’d see National Guardsmen patrolling red towns in small clusters, whether officially or unofficially it was hard to say—brave young kids, hollering for order, firing their guns into the air.
Becket, in the Berkshires, was a red town: ten teenagers tailed us on puttering mopeds, chanting for blood like savages. Stottville, New York, was red. De Lancy, Oneonta. Dunkirk, the town where we saved the small family from the fire but left them defenseless on the firehouse steps—bright red.
Green towns were just the opposite, communities where it seemed like some sort of agreement had been made, spoken or implied, to plug along. Folks raking leaves, pushing strollers, waving good morning. Dogs on leashes or bounding after Frisbees. In Media, Ohio, we were astonished to hear the SpongeBob SquarePants theme song being sung lustily by three hundred or more people in a public park at dusk. After the sing-along everyone hung around on the village green: there was a knitting circle, a book club, a demonstration on making candles and another on making bullets. A local sport-shooters association had organized a hunt-and-gather system, traversing the local woods and farmland to bring back venison and beef and distribute it by priority: women and children, the old and the infirm.
A sure sign of a green town was some sort of a garbage system. A trash pyre burning outside the city limits, or even just a dump still in use, people hauling their bags of refuse down there, going out of their way for the mutual benefit. If we didn’t see garbage heaped on curbs, Cortez and I, when we rolled into a certain spot, we knew that town was okay for a night of rest.