Angela smiles, hoping her makeup is hiding the flush. And that she won’t get sick. “He was teasing,” she says. “He had to run an errand today for his father. Because of, you know, what’s happening out at the mine hill. Tommy is becoming very important at the bank.” The stupid girl doesn’t say anything. She just stares at her.
Should Angela decide to risk a visit, she would find the bank closed, for Officer Wallace has called to say that Mr. Cavanaugh wants the doors locked until further notice, and they have done that, continuing to serve only those customers who are already in the bank. It’s like an extra day of holiday added to the long weekend, except that he asked them to stay until he got back. But why must they lock up so early? The bank often closes during power failures, but Mrs. Wetherwax, who is filling in for Angela and Stacy, took the phone call and she said the officer made it seem much more urgent than that. So many horrible things have happened of late, almost anything seems possible. And now the phones are dead, too. Just before they closed up, Mrs. Catter came in with Mrs. Smith, and she told them about it and they tried them, and sure enough, they are dead. Mr. Gus Baird, who almost always comes into the bank at this hour, does a little waltzing turn and sings: “All alone, by the telephone, waiting for a ring a ting a ling!” and they all laugh nervously. There’s an irate gentleman speaking with Mr. Minicozzi in Mr. Cavanaugh’s office about the foreclosure on his house (he can be heard plainly all the way out here on the bank floor, and his language isn’t nice), and when he leaves they’ll tell Mr. Minicozzi about the policeman’s call and ask him what it means. He always seems to know what’s happening. Mr. Beeker of the hardware store, just being let out of the locked front door, says he hopes it doesn’t mean the bank is running out of money, and the city hall janitor leaving at the same time—he has been in making a withdrawal, which leaves his account almost empty because the monthly payroll checks are late—says that as long as they have Mr. Beeker’s millions on deposit, there should be no problem, and they all laugh at that and feel a little less nervous afterwards.
Young Mrs. Piccolotti, who is in picking up rolls of coins for the family grocery (they have all had a turn cuddling her cute baby), says the trouble is probably the fault of that awful religious cult out at the edge of town; they’re completely crazy and they don’t belong here. That upsets Mrs. Catter and she says that many of them are friends of hers and have lived in this town just as long as Mrs. Piccolotti’s family, and they are decent Christian people. Religion is a private matter between a person and her God, and no one should interfere with it or make fun of it, the Constitution says so. They all agree and apologize if they’ve said something out of place. Mrs. Smith says she thinks she wants to go home. Mrs. Catter says in fact maybe they should start praying and repenting of their sins, because something very important might be happening, just like it says in the Bible, and Mrs. Piccolotti sighs and says, that’s just what I was talking about, and then she clams up because she’s the only Catholic in the bank except for Noemi and Mr. Minicozzi. It’s getting a bit warm without the air conditioner, and arguments don’t make it any cooler.
Mr. Baird changes the subject by saying he’d really love to see them all in bikinis on a beach in Brazil, that he might make a trip down there himself just for the amazing sight (he rolls his eyes in his comical way), and since they’re the only people in town with their hands on real money, they ought to consider one of his special end-of-summer holiday opportunities. Mrs. Wetherwax knows Mr. Baird as the rather tedious class clown, but to the younger girls he’s the bald guy with a bowtie who runs the local travel agency and is president of the Rotary Club. He wanders in and out of the bank most days, looking for people to tell his silly jokes to.
Then the phone rings and everybody jumps. It’s back on! No, it’s only Mrs. Wetherwax’s husband from the phone company, up a pole somewhere and tapping in. He tells them that the motorcyclists are back, what looks like three or four different gangs, and that they have blown up the power station and phone exchange and radio station. Armored trucks full of soldiers have arrived at the edge of town and there are more helicopters out by the county airport. They should all stay where they are and not go out on the streets. The motorcyclists might be converging upon the center.
In Mick’s Bar & Grill on Main Street, a block or so from the bank, the former Chamber of Commerce secretary has just ordered up another iced vodka when he suddenly remembers why he is supposed to stay off the gin. “Tag that with my social security number, Mick. I’ll be right back,” he says and staggers toward the door, singing “Joshua fit de battle ob Jericho! Jericho!” But the walls do not come tumbling down, and after slapping up against one or another without the door ever finding him in spite of the ever-helpful directions shouted out by his fellow klatchers (to him? to the door?), it is he who succumbs at last to the remorseless force of gravity.
Consequently, the intended object of his quest, young Reverend Joshua Jehoshaphat Jenkins, prospective pastor of the local First Presbyterian Church, arrives after overnight travels at the West Condon bus station unmet. There are numbers he could call, but being a self-reliant fellow, he deposits his bag with the stationmaster (“I see you are planning to settle in here, mister, and have brung your own bricks,” the stationmaster says sourly) and sets out upon the wet glittering streets on his own in search of his future place of employment, humming his favorite Sunday School tunes because he cannot seem to get them out of his head this morning. The downtown near the bus station is full of smiling people, young and old, emerging into the sunlight after the heavy rains. There are SALE signs everywhere, church bells are ringing—it’s a happy day.
Joshua believes in the simultaneous veracity of various and even contradictory modes of discourse, and as he leaves the center and enters the residential neighborhoods, he chooses the descriptive one, which finds its truths in perceptive accuracy, not narrative coherence or moral judgment. Thus, while his observation that with the hot sun he is somewhat overdressed in his new three-piece corduroy suit remains within the descriptive mode, the reasons for his discomfiture (good first impressions!) do not. Not that the descriptive mode is without its own rationale. If everything in existence is God’s handiwork, as Joshua believes it is, then close descriptive attention to one’s surroundings is an approach to understanding God, and—reverentially—feeling His presence. In that respect, this sight of a bountiful garden of hollyhocks and sunflowers is equal to that of a dog squatting to relieve itself, and Joshua mentally records it all, finding in the activity, in spite of distant wailing sirens and a gathering awareness that he has forgotten to have breakfast, a profound peace and satisfaction. “He gave us eyes to see them, and lips that we might tell,” he sings to himself, “how great is God Almighty, Who has made all things well!” Bright and beautiful, yes, all things certainly are, must be. Although, slipping momentarily out of the descriptive mode into the utilitarian one, he could do frankly with a little snap, crackle and pop.
As he thinks that, astonishingly, those are in fact the sounds he hears, as if conjured from his hunger, but caused, he sees, by the distant approach down this sunny tree-lined street of a procession of army trucks. Ah. The mere descriptive mode will perhaps no longer suffice.
Out at the city hospital, the head nurse, on her own up on the second floor, has just hung up from alerting the doctors, nurses, and hospital emergency team to the power blackout—must get the generators turned on to keep the life support systems running and the operation theater functional—when a busty foreign woman and four armed men, one wearing a black stocking mask, another a silk black tie over a luminous flame-red T-shirt, storm up to her station, poke guns in her face, and demand to know what room a man named Suggs is in. She points down the hall, gives them a number, and faints. Seems to. One of them gives her a kick—which seems to satisfy him, or her—and they dash off, their boots clocking on the polished floor. Shots are fired, hundreds of them seems like, as she scrambles desperately, heart pounding, into the restro
om at the nurses’ station and locks the door. When they come thumping back they notice her absence, shout death threats, not all in the mother tongue, and shoot up the place. Bullets come smashing through the restroom door, but she is as far away from it as possible, hunkered down behind the toilet. “Basta, Rupe!” she hears the woman say. “Don’ waste your beebees!” “Two minutes!” another calls out. When the boots and voices rattle away and it’s quiet again, Maudie peeks out through the bullet holes. They’re gone. Just the same, she keeps her head below counter height as she hurries in a squat past the ransacked medicine cabinet (more shots below, an explosion), and grabs up the phone. The line’s dead.
Mayor Castle snorts like a horse, roaring har-har sounds. He might be laughing. Georgie has been trying to weasel out of working as a mole for the mayor in Charlie Bonali’s Dagotown Devil Dogs, but needing a job and having already eaten an indigestible bite out of the small bill the mayor gave him, he has been proposing alternative, less life-threatening schemes for keeping tabs on Charlie. “Hell, I didn’t ask you to see me about that, Georgie,” the mayor booms. “You drove a cab up in the city for some years, ain’t that so? Well, I’m just a country boy and city traffic gives me the running shits. Besides, I lost my goddamn license. Something fucking wrong with a town when the mayor can lose his license just because he’s had a few, but that’s the kind of pisshole we live in, right? So right now I need somebody who can get me to the international airport fast and keep his fucking mouth shut. I can trust you, right?” Georgie grins and nods. Of course, he’s always grinning. But now he means it. He can even start working on that lump of pie sitting like a stone in his belly. The mayor lifts a briefcase from the floor, sets it on the desk between them, opens it. It’s full of money. More money than Georgie has ever seen. “There’s over a mill here, Georgie. I’m thinking Brazil. If we make it, we’ll split this pile 60-40. That’s several hunderd Gs for you, minus expenses. Decent taxi fare. We’ll take the official limo. You game?” Hell yes, he’s game. Besides, it occurs to him that Castle didn’t show him that money for nothing. It was to let him know that if he said no, he’d shoot him. “When are we leaving?” he asks. He’s grinning, and the mayor grins back. “Now.” That gives him brief pause. What is he leaving behind? Niente. “All right,” Georgie says, “but I need an advance. Three-thirty, that’s all. It’s to pay off a loan. The thirty is interest.” “Hey, Giorgio, you’re outa here forever. Forget it.” “Can’t. La mammina. It’s all she’s got. We can drop it off on the way out.”
When the Kid assigned him the high school, Houndawg said it was summertime, it would just be empty buildings, ditto the grade schools the others got assigned, and the Kid said, if it belongs to the enemies of the Big One, it’s never empty. Sure enough, it isn’t. There are three army trucks there, guys in summer khakis unloading gear, going in and out of the school gym. Jackpot! “We’re disabling them three trucks,” he says. “Don’t worry about personnel less they get in your way.” Houndawg handled explosives in the army, but this stuff is pretty crude. Just dangerous footlong firecrackers leaking their innards, really, that he and Hacker fused and partly bound in three- and five-stick packs yesterday while they were sitting out the rain. Thinking about Runt. Feeling the wrath. Things could go wrong. The timing has to be perfect. So far so good. Houndawg is a reluctant holy warrior, skeptical of the zealotry that motivates most of the Wrath, but they fill the aimless loneliness that had threatened to steal away what little life he had left in him, and he’s grateful for that. He’s having fun for the first time in a long time, not since the war—even if only for a short time, maybe just this one day long. He has the luxury of the ex-sheriff’s high-powered rifle, but limited ammo, just what they found in the sheriff’s trunk when they were stuffing the kid in there minus what he pumped into the head of that evil old cocksucker who killed Paulie. Silver bullets. He has to make them count. After knocking out the power and phones as a unit, the Wrath divided up into three teams of four to hit a sequence of separate targets simultaneously, synchronizing their moves with stopwatches, with the Kid roaming between the three. Houndawg’s team is the least stable of them. Brainerd is cool, even with one hand disabled, but Sick has been shooting up and X has been eating uppers like they were a bag of Red Hots. It’s the only time X ever smiles, but it’s a twitchy smile and his set-apart eyes jiggle. Still, he’s probably safer than Sick, who has painted his face red to match his boots and put on feathers and seems to be living in some other reality zone. Houndawg, on a heavy dose of painkillers himself, takes one of the trucks, assigns Brainerd and X the other two, explains to them how to pop the hood, and tells Sick to give them cover. “We got just two minutes. In and out. If you have a problem with the nitro, don’t try to solve it. Okay, let’s move.” They have to take a guy out on the way in, catching him by surprise. Nothing personal. He can hear Sick firing away, who knows at what, while he’s planting the squibs. “One minute!” he yells. Other people are shooting now, and he worries Sick may have taken a hit. “Now!” The three of them tear out of there, but Sick’s not in sight. Then he comes backing out of the building, firing away, jumps on his bike and joins them as the building explodes behind him, the trucks blowing up as he guns past them, head down, wahooing like an Indian on the warpath, his topknot fluttering on his gleaming red skull like a raised flag. “Three fucking bells!” Houndawg laughs as they roar away. He can hear shooting, but they’re gone from there.
Franny Lawson is keeping her sister-in-law Tessie company in the sheriff’s office while her husband Steve is out at the mine hill with the Christian Patriots, doing his thing for God and country. They’re talking about what to name the baby when Sheriff Smith radios in from his car to say he’s on his way in but he’s stuck in traffic. He tried to get away as soon as he got her call about the power plant but still got caught in the jam-up. Did they reach his wife Lucy? Tessie explains about the phone going dead so she’s not sure Lucy got the message, but says that, yes, she was at the beauty shop. The sheriff tells them to shut down the office and go take cover. Gratefully, they do so.
It is a time for thanksgiving. The Brunists have reached the summit of the Mount of Redemption under a midday sun now sallying forth from the clouds as if joining their march and have entered into their outlined tabernacle church, though their numbers exceed its capacity and spill out over the hillside. Children are playing (they have got up a game down by the empty graves and are splashing in and out of them) and their elders are relaxing from the heightened tensions of the morning, when death and injury seemed all too near a prospect. There is still, however, an air of apprehension. The sudden dispersion of the authorities, releasing the Mount to them: was it God watching over them, shepherding them to higher ground, or is something more or other happening? Those ominous ker-whumps in the distance… But they are here now where they belong. Mr. Ross McDaniel, a man from the West of fierce faith and fortitude, has promised them that the Mount is theirs and they will not be moved, and they believe him. They all share the blessed hope of the rapturing of the church by Lord Jesus and the visible return of Christ with His saints to reign on earth for one thousand years, and today could be the day for that—as could any other, but as their young prophet and evangelist Darren Rector says, these days are overripe with omen.
A Brunist Defender and pastor who arrived this morning by bus from east Tennessee with two sturdy members of his congregation, rifles strapped to their backs, steps into the center of the outlined cross to add his voice to the exhortations and prayers of gratitude for their safe passage up here and to lead the assembled Followers in a prayer of remembrance for their fallen leader, Brother Ben Wosznik, a kind and holy man of unbending courage, tireless endeavor, and profound faith. He tells of Brother Ben’s visit with Sister Clara three years ago to his “little church in the wildwood,” as he calls it, and of all the souls that were saved that day through the mere power of the man’s inspired singing. In his memory, they sing—joined by many of the sheriff’s
remaining deputies—some of the famous Brunist songs Brother Ben wrote and recorded, “The Circle and the Cross,” “She Fell That We Might Live” (heads swivel thoughtfully toward the mine road, fingers point, the tale is whispered), and “The White Bird of Glory.” This latter number, with its recounting of “the disaster that struck old Number Nine,” reminds them that they are standing on ground hallowed not only by those members of the faith who stood here on the Day of Redemption and suffered death, incarceration, and persecution because of it, but also by all the brave hardworking men, friends and loved ones of many present, who perished beneath their feet in the worst mine disaster the area has ever known. There are many “amens” and “God blesses” and spontaneous prayers for the souls of the deceased, not excluding the saintly Ely Collins, whose leg is still down there somewhere. His widow, also Brother Ben’s, is said to be too stricken by grief to attend, and she is remembered in their prayers, as are her unfortunate daughter and Brother John P. Suggs in his hospital bed. What a thrill to know he’ll be raptured with an undamaged brain, and Brother Ely with his leg back on! Sheriff Puller, who was so supportive and protective, is also remembered, as is the oldest boy of Brother Roy and Sister Thelma Coates, both Royboy and the sheriff so cruelly murdered. Sister Thelma lets out a sad little wail. Sometimes the world seems completely insane, but they feel protected by each other, and by their faith, the truth they share. There are those who say they should also pray for the souls of the motorcyclists who died in the camp blast, for that is the charitable and pious thing to do, and Sister Sarah Baxter, who has lost her wayward middle son in it, especially seems to want this, but her husband scowls and turns his back, and this part of the Defender’s eulogistic prayer is shortened to a passing mention of their youngest boy, Paul, who will hopefully return to them now that his older brother has passed away.
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