At the foot of the hill, the town banker and team captain, having positioned his gathered forces in preparation for wresting the hill away from the cultists and their adversaries, delivers his ultimatum to the governor. His price is a multi-million dollar emergency rescue fund for the town. “Otherwise, these cameras are writing your political obituary. You might as well go up there and lie down with the others.” The governor, though clearly shaken by events, tells him to go to hell, his jaw thrust forward in political poster defiance. “Moreover, Governor, I can prove criminal negligence. I have all the evidence. Including recorded phone conversations.” The governor cries out in exasperation as someone else cries: “Look out!”
A backhoe bears down on them like some long-necked prehistoric monster, head bobbing and smacking the earth, iron jaws agape, picking up speed as it careens down the hillside, rolling over the crippled and the dead, taking out the little tree, its lifeless black-bearded operator slumped over the controls. They barely have time to lurch out of the way, the banker shouting a warning to those huddled down behind the school buses, when the backhoe slams into them, overturning one of them, somersaulting over its own bucket and dipper stick and landing on top of the heap, belly up.
Shocked silence follows, broken only by scattered moans.
And then: “Fire! Fire at the camp!”
Pillars of smoke are indeed rising over the camp. “It’s the biker gang!” The helicopters go wheeling urgently in that direction. “Yes, there’s a motorcycle down there!” comes the crackly report from the sky. “And a couple of dead guys. One’s wearing a badge, might be a cop. And—wait!—we do see movement! Over near some kind of shed! Looks like they might be shooting at us!”
“Whoever they are,” the governor screams, “take them out! Now!”
“Careful, Kirk, there may be some innocent people over there.”
“Out of my way, Cavanaugh! Captain! Mobilize your forces! Prepare to occupy the camp!”
The banker shakes his head, lifts the megaphone, and directs his own hastily assembled troops to move up the hill with him, drawing a net around the belligerents, just as the Knights of Columbus Volunteers appear at the top, weapons leveled at the cultists, ordering them not to move. Their leader, grinning around a thick wad of gum, waves the banker up, saluting him ironically. One last moment of suicidal madness, and then it is over. At least on the Mount of Redemption. Not far away, the camp is being shelled. And then that stops, too. It is not yet three in the afternoon.
The Brunist Tabernacle of Light, represented by the chalky cross carved out on the side of the hill, slowly empties out, its traumatized worshippers and their Defender and Christian Patriot guardians ported off to jails, hospitals, mental institutions, and the temporary morgue in the West Condon city hospital parking lot. Some at the foot have cheered the takeover of the mine hill and the humiliation of the cult, shouting insults at them as they are led away, but the majority, somewhat awed by all that they have witnessed, watch quietly, then they drift away, returning to their smoldering town. Most West Condoners, like people everywhere, even if church-goers of one persuasion or another, are content to live out their insignificant lives (ultimately, they console themselves, all lives are insignificant) within the conventions of human history, the modest everyday stuff as found on tombstones and in newspaper obituaries. It is for them that the many reporters and cameramen are recording all these happenings, looking always for those iconic moments by which large events are later remembered—the helicopter on the bar-and-grill roof, for example, the runaway backhoe, the present scatter of abandoned tunics on the hillside—and they find another now when the young Brunist evangelist with the blond curls rises peaceably from the empty grave at the foot of the trenched cross with his terrified friend clinging to his side. Though the young man respects human history as evidence, sometimes hidden, of God’s entrammelment in human affairs (this is how the Christ story is to be understood), he himself lives within divine history, as best he understands it. Today that history has been full of a terrible violence, but, as he knows, it is not terrible to God, for whom death is only a kind of brief translation to a more glorious state and not to be feared. Both are handcuffed, and as the terrified boy is torn away from his side and commences to scream hysterically, the young man says, “Please. Don’t hurt him. He needs help.” There is a vulgar reply, which will be cut from the evening newscasts, and then he who lives in divine history turns to the news cameras on the slope below him, and with a sad, forgiving smile, raises his manacled wrists above his golden head, and this is the image that will appear over and over that evening across the nation.
Wait a minute, you can’t leave me!
Of course I can. I am already on my way. Electric shocks, drugs, needles in the brain: who knows what terrible scourgings they have in mind? The baths probably aren’t as much fun as the ones we’ve had either.
But what will I do? Who will I be?
You will be what’s left when I am gone. You have to admit it wasn’t a perfect arrangement. No man can serve two masters, as they say.
As you said, you thieving sophist. But where will you go?
Who knows? The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head…
There are NO VISITORS and RESTRICTED AREA signs posted on the taped-up hospital doors, but Ted Cavanaugh speaks with the staff, checks the admissions lists at the nurses’ stations, looks in on employees, bank clients, people he knows. Too many. Some are in isolated intensive care; others have already been sent home. Some have died. In general, a scene of controlled chaos. More or less controlled. Rooms full. Loaded gurneys in the corridors. A lot of moaning and crying. Medics and nurses rushing about, strangers mostly, volunteers from the towns around somewhat lost but getting the job done. Many of the victims are out under Red Cross and army field tents on the hospital grounds and in the parking lot; he makes a mental list, will visit them before returning home.
Where he will be watching over Irene on his own tonight. When he stopped in on his way in from Deepwater, where he’d stayed until the mine hill was cleared and secured, he found Tommy alone with her, Concetta and her friends off doing their grieving—the whole town is grieving—and he promised to relieve him as soon as he has finished his hospital run. Ted told Irene a bit of what had happened at the bank, leaving out most of the details so as not to upset her, and what she said was, “Well, dear, you should be more careful.” He saw by the snaking of the cord that the phone had been back in her room. Tommy said it was some friend and they were praying together in her new R.C. fashion. Meaning that conniving prick from their college days is still calling her. It was too early for a drink, but he poured one anyway. Tommy said that while one of Concetta’s friends was still in the house, he had gone back to the bank as Ted had asked, and had found the office broken into and ransacked. “I think I surprised someone because I heard noises at the back and found the security door open back there. It’s locked up again now, but probably too late.”
No doubt in Ted’s mind who it was. On a television screen over one of the nurses’ stations, he sees him now, taking credit for overseeing the emergency operations in the unexplained absence of the mayor. Some fear, he says, that the mayor might have been killed in the powerful blast at city hall, where the search for survivors goes on. Nick knows damned well that the mayor has absconded and he may know where he is, may have been in on it. On the car radio driving here: a news bulletin from the city, where they have apprehended an armed criminal at the international airport said to be a man named Giorgio Lucci from West Condon, driving a stolen official vehicle and suspected of grand larceny. Rumors of mob connections. Ted knows Lucci. Town loafer, no scruples, no brains. A fall guy. Nick tells the reporter now that the city is applying for federal disaster relief funds, and the governor has personally assured him that emergency state funds will be made immediately available to them. He mentions in passing that Marine veteran Charles Bonali, “one
of the heroes of the police intervention at the mine hill,” has been appointed to the city force as temporary replacement for the murdered officer Monroe Wallace. Never knew Monk’s real name before. That’s what obituaries are for. Get to know somebody. Certainly he has gotten to know Nick Minicozzi. When the crisis is over, Ted has work to do. And he will do it. Kirkpatrick makes a cameo appearance. Ted heard the governor on the car radio complaining about the local corruption, arrogance, and incompetence that had forced the state to step in to prevent total anarchy. He lamented the local failure to heed his constant warnings about the perversion of traditional Christian values by a conspiracy of militant extremists with known communist histories. Now, however, they are showing images of the two small children killed during the shelling of the church camp, the only known victims, and he is more subdued. All he can say is that the camp was a closed-off area; the reporters who went in there were breaking the law.
Gus Baird, the Rotary president and travel agent, is on one of the gurneys in the corridor. He looks pretty far gone, but he winks at Ted and Ted grins and winks back. Gus is humming weakly. “Smoke got in my eyes,” he wheezes. “You’ll be all right, Gus.” Gus shakes his head, winks again. “Something deep inside,” he warbles faintly, a joker even in extremity, “cannot be denied…”
Doc Lewis comes down the corridor, stripping off translucent gloves, and instructs a couple of nurses’ assistants to wheel Gus into the emergency room where doctors are waiting for him. Lewis fills him in briefly on who’s dead, who’s not, who’s likely to be. “Not sure how long the old generator will hold out. We’re beginning to move many of the less critically wounded to other hospitals around.”
“Not been a great day.” Ted realizes he has been thinking in tight abbreviated phrases. Like a lot of song lyrics. And repeating himself the way songs do. Someday, when I’m awfully low, when the world is cold… “One thing out at the mine hill, M.L., really got me down. There was a lot of shooting going on and people were getting killed. And down at the foot of the hill were all these people from town. Our fellow citizens. Cheering loudly whenever one of the cultists fell.”
Lewis nods grimly. “I know. We’ve received phone calls from people saying we shouldn’t be doctoring them, they deserve to die.” M.L. looks as exhausted as Ted feels. He’s ready to call it a day. Nothing to eat since breakfast. Go home, put a couple of steaks on the grill for him and Tommy, open a fifth of sour mash. Another way of communing with the higher powers. “By the way,” M.L. says, “they brought in some preacher they picked up on the hill named Jenkins. Not from around here. But he mentioned your name.”
“Jenkins! Christ! Our new minister! Forgot all about him! Where is he?”
“I’m going that way. I’ll take you to him. I can’t find anything physically wrong with him except that he’s incontinent and rather badly bruised, probably from getting trampled on. But when we try to stand him up, he just falls down again.”
On the way in, a nurse passing by shakes her head sadly at the doctor. “Mr. Baird,” she says.
Jenkins is a pale puffy young fellow with startled wet eyes and unwiped mucus on his upper lip. Looks as if all his blood has just been sucked out of him. Damp, funky smell. Ted tells him he’s sorry he wasn’t there to meet him when he arrived, but it’s not clear that the man registers anything. He is trying to say something, but it’s inaudible. Ted bends down, asks him to repeat himself. “Don’t…” Still can’t quite catch it. The man stares at him as if at his worst nightmare. Ted closes his right ear with a finger, leans in with the left ear to the man’s lips. “I don’t think…” Reverend Jenkins whispers faintly, “…I want the job.”
When Sally Elliott finally pulls herself out of the culvert in the ditch, dusk is settling on the camp behind her, and on the mine hill across the way, fast falling the eventide. She is stiff and sore, her knees are banged up, her breasts are raw from sunburn and the grit she’s been lying in, her throat and lungs are raspy from wood smoke. But she’s still here. Wasn’t confident she would be. She’s not hungry, but her belly is so empty it hurts. When she fell from the tipple, she dropped her notebook, cameras, T-shirt, backpack, banged her knees and most everything else, but the fall probably saved her life, the bullets dinging off the tipple supports above her. She crawled frantically toward her bicycle behind the mine buildings, expecting the worst, fearing they might come over after her, but by then there had been a massive explosion like a bomb had been dropped, and they were shooting at each other. She had apparently been forgotten. Her knees were shaky, but she was able to pedal away from the mine, always keeping the buildings between her and the cultists and not looking back, heart pounding, until she reached the old county road. That in turn, heading home, carried her past the shiny pea-green bump she’d seen from the tipple. Smoke was rising from the camp. She should have kept going.
Looking. Knowing. Her mantra. Big deal. There are some things she doesn’t want to see, know. Sure. But she can’t stop herself. She always has to look. It’s a kind of systems flaw. She tried not to cry, but when she started, she couldn’t stop. If she had eaten anything all day, she would have been throwing up. Instead, a kind of hiccuppy weeping that was worse than throwing up. Next thing she knew, somebody was shooting at her again, and she threw herself into the ditch. There was an open culvert there and she crawled in, still crying. She heard a bullet hit the car and break a window. Then suddenly there were much louder sounds. Helicopters rattling away overhead, shells exploding. Sirens. The loud crackle of a big fire. The culvert was the right place to be. By the time the shelling had stopped, so had her sobbing. A moment of relative quiet and then a lot of men running past overhead, shouting commands, discovering the car, shouting some more, obscenities mostly, then running on into the camp. Gunfire. Shouts: they found somebody. She stayed where she was.
Eventually they brought whoever it was over to the car and grilled him about the body in it. They called him names. It sounded like they were slapping him around some. He was whimpering and crying out each time they struck him. He was only guarding the camp for his father, he whined. He didn’t do anything; it was the motorcycle gang. They asked him whose bicycle that was and he said he didn’t know. That was probably the creep shooting at her, but he didn’t give her away, she has to give him that much. More likely he really didn’t know who she was or where she was and was maybe afraid, if they did find her, she’d tell them he’d been trying to kill her, or she’d already be dead, and he was in enough trouble already. She could have stepped out and answered a lot of questions for them, but she decided it wasn’t a good idea. Especially being shirtless. There was a conference around the car, some walkie-talkie talk, and then an ambulance arrived and they took the body away and a police car came and took their prisoner away.
There were soldiers in and around the ditch for a while, so she stayed put. Taking mental notes. Thinking about teleological fantasies. The madness of “grand narratives”: history going somewhere. Her theme of the day. Wishing she had her notebook with her. One of the soldiers told a dirty joke, but nobody laughed. They bitched about the smoke, the officers, the bizarre things they’d seen. Life and death got mentioned. Eventually they all left, and as the long summer day drew to a close, it grew dimmer, darkness descending. It seemed safe. She crept out.
They have taken her bicycle. Which means she’ll have to walk home. Probably have to answer some questions. She’ll tell them she ran away into the woods and just kept on going. She won’t say anything about being shot at; fair’s fair. Over the camp, black smoke is rising; still burning. Across the way the mine hill is empty except for a small patrol of soldiers at the foot. It looks sad and worn out. Abused. Cratered. A few abandoned tunics. A lot of wrecked vehicles. The little tree isn’t there anymore. She wonders if her notebook is still over there somewhere under the tipple. Full of unforgettable musings she’ll never remember. She’ll go back tomorrow and look for it. Too tired now. Too tired to walk home, too, and her battered knees are
killing her, but she has no choice, and so she sets out, humming along bravely. The darkness deepens…
Car lights. She considers throwing herself into the ditch again. But too late, they’ve seen her. It’s all right. It’s the family car. Her mother. Says she has been looking all over for her. Where’s her shirt? And she starts to cry again. Her mother begins to get a bit hysterical, asks if it was those soldiers, did they do something, should they go see the doctor, which makes her laugh. So she’s laughing and bawling at the same time and completely out of control, which is just about right if you’ve been through the Apocalypse and crawled out the other side.
IV.7
Wednesday 8 July and beyond
The first question Mr. John P. Suggs asks when he wakes up in Lem’s bedroom the next morning is: Where am I? Bernice knows what’s coming, all she needs is the W, but she takes her time, lets him work a bit, get his broken wits about him. “A safe place, Mr. Suggs,” she tells him when she acknowledges at last that his eye-blink question has been understood. “Sheriff Puller arranged it through the secret service. Them evil Baxter people, they tried to murder you, but the sheriff he held them off long enough for us to get away.” It is difficult to read his thoughts because his face is so frozen. Distrust? Fright? Gratitude? Mere confusion? “Abner has called his bad biker boys back. You recollect that dynymite they stole? The whole hospital got exploded and a lot of people was shot. But it was you they was aiming at. God spoke to me and I come a-running. We only got out barely just in time.” When she found the Brunist camp empty early yesterday morning, even Clara’s trailer gone, she drove over to the mine hill, where people were massing up at the crossroads. Those two old coalminers from West Virginia waved at her, and then the others did, too, but mostly they were not people Bernice knew. She didn’t see Clara’s trailer or Mabel Hall’s caravan anywhere, but she did see ill-tempered Abner Baxter, and he seemed to be in the middle of things. She couldn’t find a place to park without walking half a mile back, it was still rainy, there were a lot of guns, people weren’t getting on, so she decided to return to the hospital to check on Mr. Suggs. Was God speaking to her? He was. Through Abner Baxter and her distaste for the man and his wrathful elocutions, which chased her off. “Sheriff Puller and his men they killed a lot of them, but them bad boys blowed up the sheriff’s car. That made him mad. You might of heard that.”
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