Selectman Bert Miller wanted to know if there was a fire extinguisher. “Coach Wittstock’s got asthma and the smoke from those assholes’ tire fires is drifting over here.”
“Sure,” Terry said, and pointed to a nearby cruiser. “In the trunk.”
“Thanks, Sheriff.” The selectman went to fetch the extinguisher. There was a cheer from the dicing men as somebody made a hard point.
Terry lurched up from the camp chair and oriented himself toward the parked cruisers. As he walked, he unbuckled his gunbelt and let it fall into the grass. Fuck this shit, he thought. Just fuck it.
In his pocket were the keys to Unit Four.
6
From his seat on the driver’s side of the animal control pickup, Frank observed the acting sheriff’s silent resignation.
You did that, Frank, Elaine said from beside him. Aren’t you proud?
“He did it to himself,” Frank said. “I didn’t tie him down and put a funnel in his mouth. I pity him, because he wasn’t man enough for the job, but I also envy him, because he gets to quit.”
But not you, Elaine said.
“No,” he agreed. “I’m in it to the end. Because of Nana.”
You’re obsessed with her, Frank. Nana-Nana-Nana. You refused to hear anything Norcross said, because she’s all you can think of. Can you not wait at least a little longer?
“No.” Because the men were here, and they were primed and ready to go.
What if that woman is leading you by the nose?
A fat moth sat on the pickup’s wiper blades. He flicked the wand for the blades to clear it off. Then he started the engine and drove away, but unlike Terry, he intended to return.
First, he stopped at the house on Smith to check on Elaine and Nana in the basement. They were as he had left them, hidden away behind a shelving unit and tucked beneath sheets. He told Nana’s body that he loved her. He told Elaine’s body that he was sorry that they could never seem to agree. He meant it, too, although the fact that she continued to scold him, even in her unnatural sleep, was extremely irritating.
He relocked the basement door. In the driveway, by the headlights of his pickup, he noticed a pool had collected in the large pothole that he had planned to fix soon. Sediments of green and brown and white and blue sifted around in the water. It was the remains of Nana’s chalked drawing of the tree, washed away by the rain.
When Frank reached downtown Dooling, the bank clock read 12:04 AM. Tuesday had arrived.
As he passed the Zoney’s convenience store, Frank noticed that someone had smashed out the plate glass windows.
The Municipal Building was still smoking. It surprised him that Norcross would allow his cohorts to blow up his wife’s place of work. But men were different now, it seemed—even doctors like Norcross. More like they used to be, maybe.
In the park across the street, a man was, for no apparent reason, using a cutter to work on the verdigris-stained trousers of the statue of the top-hatted first mayor. Sparks fountained up, doubling in the tinted slot of the man’s welding helmet. Farther along, another man, a la Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain, was hanging off a lamp post, but he had his cock in his hand and he was pissing on the pavement and bellowing some fucked-up sea chanty: “The captain’s in his cabin, lads, drinking ale and brandy! Sailors in the whorehouse, where all the tarts are handy! Way, haul away, we’ll haul away, Joe!”
The order that had existed, and which Frank and Terry had tried to shore up over the last few chaotic days, was collapsing. It was, he supposed, a savage kind of mourning. It might end, or it might be building to a worldwide cataclysm. Who knew?
This is where you should be, Frank, Elaine said.
“No,” he told her.
He parked behind his office. Each day he’d found half an hour to stop in here. He fed his strays in their cages and left a bowl of Alpo for the one that was his special pet, his office-dog. There was a mess in the holding area each time he came, and they were restless, shivering and whimpering and howling, because he usually was only able to walk them once a day, if that, and of the eight animals, probably only a couple had ever been housetrained to begin with.
He considered putting them down. If something happened to him, they would almost certainly starve; it wasn’t likely a Good Samaritan would come along and take care of them. The possibility of simply releasing them did not cross his mind. You didn’t let dogs run wild.
A fantasy sketched itself in Frank’s mind’s eye: coming in the next day with Nana, letting her help feed and walk them. She always liked to do that. He knew she would love his office-dog, a sleepy-eyed beagle-cocker mix with a stoic manner. She would love the way his head drooped down over his paws like a kid slumped over a desk, forced to listen to some never-ending school lecture. Elaine didn’t like dogs, but no matter what happened, that no longer made a difference. One way or another, he and Elaine were through, and if Nana wanted a dog, it could stay with Frank.
Frank walked them on triple leashes. When he finished, he wrote a note—PLEASE CHECK ON THE ANIMALS. MAKE SURE THEY HAVE FOOD AND WATER. GRAY-WHITE PITBULL MIX IN #7 IS SKITTISH APPROACH CAREFULLY. PLEASE DON’T STEAL ANYTHING, THIS IS A GOVERNMENT OFFICE.—and fastened it to the outside door with duct tape. He stroked the office-dog’s ears for a couple of minutes. “Look at you,” he said. “Just look at you.”
When he returned to his pickup and headed back to the roadblock, the bank clock read 1:11 AM. He’d start prepping everyone for the assault at four thirty. Dawn would come two hours later.
7
Across the prison athletic fields, on the far side of the fence, two men with bandannas over their mouths were using fire extinguishers to put out the tire fires. The extinguisher spray glowed phosphorescent through the night vision scope and the men were limned in yellow. Billy Wettermore didn’t recognize the larger man, but the smaller one he knew well. “Yonder dingleberry in the straw hat is Selectman Miller. Bert Miller,” Billy said to Willy Burke.
There was ironic personal history here. While attending Dooling High, Billy Wettermore had, as a National Honor Society student, interned in the selectman’s office. There he had been forced to silently attend to Bert Miller’s frequent thoughts on homosexuality.
“It’s a mutation,” Selectman Miller explained, and he dreamed of stopping it. “If you could wipe out all the gays in an instant, Billy, perhaps you could stop the mutation from spreading, but then again, much as we might not like to admit it, they’re human, too, aren’t they?”