I had to nip this in the bud, but damn, they were having so much fun. Watching them gambol and romp in their astounding innocence, it made me happy, too. I needed a little innocence tonight.
I stepped up onto the low brick porch, sheltered from the moonlight in the shadows of the roof and wall, arms crossed to cover my shirt’s light pink letters. In my all-black outfit, I was invisible inside the darkness, so I gave them another minute. I would make them come back in the morning and apologize and clean it up. But right now I let them have the glory of watching the high arcs of paper unfurl, the stifled laughter, the simple pleasure.
Movement caught the corner of my eye. Beside me the screen door swung stealthily open. The dogs were silent, which could only mean that someone had told them to be silent.
Martina Mack stepped out in a voluminous flowered nightie, knee length, with a matching summer housecoat hanging open over it. Her skinny calves stuck out like leathery twigs beneath the hem, disappearing into huge puffy slippers. Her hair hung around her shoulders in iron-gray witch scraggles. She moved slow and crafty, and the kids, intent on wreaking their small havoc, did not see her any more than they saw me.
Her front lip pulled up like an angry donkey’s, and I saw that she’d taken the time to put her teeth in. She must have been up and seen them from the very start. I was about to speak to her, assure her that we would reverse this process, when I saw what she had cradled in her arms.
I was so shocked to see that double-barreled shotgun that my voice caught in my throat. She raised it, too, flesh hanging down in wrinkled dewlaps from her bare arms. She brought it up to bear in a smooth arc. Not at the sky. Not at the ground. Martina Mack raised the silver barrel, and in her mottled hands the shotgun’s arc of wide aim was pointed right at the children.
15
It wasn’t the heat. It was the humidity—so dense I felt that I’d been suspended in a liquid. Birchville had become Atlantis, and I was launching myself through air gone thick and salted toward that gun. I was so slow. I floated like Digby, every move blunted, rendered harmless as a flutter. The barrel swung up through the gelled air, and it moved slow as well, in a long, endless arc. The steel gleamed cold in the moonlight. The gun was almost all I could see, my vision pinholed to its shine.
I felt my hands on it, and the metal felt so cold it burned me, like it was iron and I was half fairy. It bucked once in my grasp like an animal, and the roaring boom, when it came, was louder than planets crashing. In the ear-ringing, awful wake of it, in the stink of smoke and chemicals, I couldn’t tell if I’d been in time.
I had to actually look, look with my watering eyes, to see that the barrel was pointing up, as if Martina Mack and I had conspired to pepper that fat, smug moon with buckshot, right in his pale face.
Then the air was only boiling summer air again. I shivered in it, drenched in my own panicked sweat. The kids were already sprinting away in two directions. Hugh’s T-shirt glowed as white as the tail of a deer in full retreat. They had abandoned the grocery bag, spilling its remaining rolls of Charmin onto the grass. Did Lav know I was here? Or had she just seen a dark shadow moving to block Martina Mack’s scraggly head? Catwoman versus Swamp Hag.
The gun’s unearthly boom was still ringing in my ears, but now, from very far away, I heard dogs going crazy. Martina did not have three or four. I’d been wrong. She had at least a thousand, all hellhounds judging by the rising noise. They were deep in the throes of whole-body barking, near hysterical with joy or fury, who could tell? The raucous chorus got louder as my ears cleared, and I could see the dogs pushing and jostling in my peripheral vision. The screen door had clicked closed behind Martina, or I might have been swarmed by them.
Martina Mack snarled, her pearly dentures gleaming uniform and square, and yanked at her gun with her veiny claws. She was a thousand years old, though, and I was so swamped with adrenaline that I had superstrength. I yanked back, the force of my pull ripping it right from her hands. She cried out, an outraged squawk under the dog noise.
“Are you insane?” I yelled into her face, and my voice sounded far away because of the noise of that shotgun in my ears and the ceaseless clamor of the hysterical dogs. “Are you fucking crazy?”
This woman who had just shot at children blanched at the profanity, then launched one of her own. “Those li’l shits was trespassers! I had every right!”
“To shoot? To shoot at kids? Was your own life in danger from the Charmin double rolls, Martina?”
I had a white-knuckle grip on her stupid, stupid gun, and I was screaming over all the noise, screaming so hard the words hurt my throat. I took a step back, trying to calm down.
She turned to the screen door and shrieked, “You dogs! Shut it!” The barking stopped. Stopped flat. “Sit your butts!” and they promptly sat. I could see them watching us through the screen. There were only three after all, which seemed impossible, given the huge racket they’d been making.
We glared at each other, Martina Mack and I, so upset that our chests heaved in tandem.
“Give me back my gun,” she said.
“Why?” I snapped. “I don’t see any babies to shoot. You want to go find Bambi?”
She held her hands out, adamant. “Give it.”
I cracked the shotgun open and removed the remaining shell. It was strangely light in my hand. I held the gun out to her, unloaded.
Martina snatched it, saying, “What kind of a grown woman brings a gang of teenagers out into the night to torment a old woman!”
I was so gobsmacked by this that my jaw unhinged. “You think I brought them here to roll your house?”
“Looks like,” she said.
“I didn’t bring those kids! I heard Lavender sneaking out, so of course I came looking for her so I could shoot her with a gun. Oh, no, wait. Actually, I didn’t, because that’s insane. I came out to find her and take them home.” It wasn’t completely true, though, was it? I had paused and watched, charmed, for a long, complicit minute. I added a true thing that made me feel better. “Once I saw what they were up to, I had every intention of making them come apologize to you in the morning. I still do. They will be along right after breakfast to clean this up—assuming you can agree not to bury land mines all over your yard to blow their feet off.”
She cradled the gun to her chest, her face sour with disbelief. She really thought I’d formed a team of teenage vigilantes to roll her yard.
“Martina?” called a quavery voice from off the left. It was her equally elderly neighbor, Mrs. Teasedale. She was a Methodist, but I knew her to speak to. “Are you okay? Should I call the police?” She said “police” with a long o, the emphasis landing on the first syllable.
“We’re fine, Fanny! Go on back inside!” Martina hollered at her.
“What’s all that white stuff in your yard?” Fanny Teasedale called.