Black towns are empty. Blue towns feel empty, but they’re not, they’re just so quiet they might as well be. They’re empty except for occasional scurrying, nervous souls darting from one place to another, some feeling safer in the day, some at night. Peeking out of windows, clutching guns, measuring out what they’ve got left.
By noon we have worked our way through downtown, and Houdini and I reluctantly turn our search to private homes. I set the protocol as knock, wait, knock again, wait again, push in. I find houses cluttered with small personal items: unseasonal clothing, waffle irons, trophies, the sorts of things people leave behind when they leave in an emergency. But tool sheds are empty, like the fridges, like the pantries and the gas cans. At one tidy little aluminum-sided one-story I knock, wait, knock again, wait again, push in, and find a tiny, very old man asleep on an armchair, with a faded Time magazine spread out on his chest, like he fell asleep a couple years ago and is about to wake up to a terrible surprise. I tiptoe backward out of there and creep the door shut.
Blue town. Classic blue town.
*
It’s two o’clock now on the Casio. At some point the sun has burned the clouds away. Time passing and passing.
The thought comes from nowhere, unbidden, big as a hovering spaceship, filling the sky: She’s dead, back there. Back there in the woods. Somewhere I didn’t see her.
Or else she’s down in that hole and she’s not coming out because she doesn’t want to, and what I’m doing here is I’m wasting time until the end.
Keep walking, Hen. Keep searching. Do your job. She’s fine.
On Brookside Drive, six short blocks from the American Legion hall, is a small brick ranch house, partially surrounded by some kind of blast wall, a ten-foot-high barrier of concrete. Serious business, like this modest one-story home is an American embassy in Baghdad or Beirut. Thick concrete, smooth face, with slits in the surface, as if for arrows. This fortification was built to withstand not the end, but the events leading up to the end. Thieves. Bandits on the road.
“Hello?” I call up toward the slits. “Hello?”
The sky erupts with the deafening clatter of machine-gun fire. I drop down to my knees. Houdini goes bonkers, chasing himself in a wild circle. Another rip of live fire.
“Okay,” I say, yelling into the muddy lawn, where I threw myself down. “Okay.”
“I still have the right to defend my home,” says a voice, thick and hoarse and slightly manic, from somewhere beyond the wall. “I still have the right to my home.”
“Yes, sir,” I say again. “Yes, sir, I know.”
This is a blue-town man. I can’t see his face, but I can feel his fear, his anger. I look up slowly, very slowly, and get a good look at the gun muzzle, long and stiff like the nose of an anteater, poking through one of the slits.
“I’m going,” I say, “I’m sorry to bother you,” and I go, I crawl away, nice and slow, butt up in the air and hands down.
Worming my way out of there takes me right past the base of the wall, and I see where the man who built it—whoever built it—put a tradesman’s stamp in the stone. It’s a single word, colored in a deep somber red: JOY.
2.
The only suicide victims I find in Rotary are in a screened-in sunporch on Downing Drive: gunshots, husband and wife, a pitcher of lemonade on the glass-topped front-porch table between them, sugar crystals clinging to the sides, lemon wedges rotting at the bottom. The husband still holds the rifle, clutched between his hands, sunk into his lap. I get a quick read on the scene, instinctively, without even wanting to. He was the shooter, he killed her first, cleanly, and then himself; he took one high on the cheek—a first try, a miss—and then a second shot, under the chin and correctly angled.
I feel a quick swell of good feeling toward the dead man, the bottom of his face a red hole, for having honored their bargain. First his wife and then himself and he followed through, as promised. The lemonade pitcher buzzes with bees, attracted to the fading sweetness.
They don’t have a sledgehammer. I check their garage, and then even inside, in the closets. It’s just not a common household item.
Houdini and I step down off the porch on Downing Drive into a warm wafting smell, buoying up off the road and surrounding us, and I swear we look at each other, the dog and I, and obviously he can’t talk but we do, we say it to each other: “Is that fried chicken?”
Saliva fills my mouth, and Houdini begins whipping his little head this way and that. His eyes are shiny with excitement, like glossy marbles.