The Blinds

by Adam Sternbergh

  “She’s got access to all the files. It could be you’re an innocent, Fran. You could walk out of here tomorrow. And even if you’re not, at least you’ll know which direction to run.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Just consider what I’m saying. About leaving. A little money. A head start. You could do well, I know it.”

  “I am—” She starts to say something else but the next words are swallowed by a sudden rising clamor. Barking, and then a heavy whoosh like a gas burner lighting, and then a scream.

  A long, loud woman’s scream that keeps on screaming.

  Cooper turns toward the sound of the ruckus. Fran says instinctively, plaintively, “Isaac,” then runs off, back toward her house. Cooper feels a sharp tug to follow her, but she’s already gone, and the scream is still screaming, so he raises his hand to get a sense against the fence of where in the darkness he is, then he starts to run toward the howling, his fingertips tracing the fence, toward the sound of the scream, a woman’s scream, and toward the barking, a clatter of discordant yelps that now swells in an unsettling way into a wail.

  He runs faster.

  Cooper follows the fence, stumbling; he hears the coydogs baying, their cries now disturbed and constant and piercing, an unholy choral howl. He rounds the corner to the block where Ginger Van Buren lives and runs across the scrubby grass and falters again in the dark, then rights himself, and as he stands straight he sees a brightness dancing in the middle of the street.

  A flame like a bonfire, circling.

  He sees Ginger out on her porch with her nightgown pulled around her, her mouth open and her shrieking face lit by the flames. Cooper reaches for his pistol. On the street, he sees now that several fires are moving as though synchronized, hemorrhaging dank black smoke into the sky, and the sounds of the coydogs keening unfurls like a hellish siren that rises and recedes in piercing waves. He watches as the bonfires move and dance until he understands what he’s seeing. Her coydogs are on fire. Two of them gallop down the gravel road like torches in the hands of a running mob. Two of them have fallen and are burning dead in the dark where they fell. The smell of hair and fat sizzling unfurls in an inky smoke. The stink of it chokes the air. Cooper gags and bends double, then straightens again and peers past the two felled beasts, toward the pair that are running in the street ablaze. Threatening the houses. He smells gasoline intermingled with the smell of burning fur. Cooper unholsters his pistol and his right shoulder barks as he raises the gun and he aims at a coydog and fires. The bullet kicks the gravel yards away. He fires again. Misses again even worse, a plume of dirt spouting harmlessly from the road. That’s two bullets wasted. He’s only got four left in the gun.

  Then beyond the flames and black smoke and the ripples of heat in the road, Cooper sees a figure walking slowly toward him. A lithe form silhouetted in the shadow of the fire. The figure approaches, backlit, and reaches a hand out to Cooper. It’s Dick Dietrich, and he’s asking for the gun. He says warmly, as though in confidence, “Let me take a crack, Sheriff. Trust me. I’m a very good shot.”

  Cooper stands a moment agape and confused by Dietrich’s sudden appearance, his outstretched hand, his calm request, which rattles in Cooper’s brain before it registers. He looks at Dietrich and then at the burning dogs loosed and howling in the street behind him. Then Cooper hands over his revolver.

  Dietrich nods and seems to almost smile and takes the gun and turns. He raises the revolver smoothly and there’s a sharp report and a muzzle flash. The first burning coydog buckles. Now only one beast remains, circling in slow tortured rotations as though befuddled by its curious change in circumstance. A black smear inside a bright flame, like a matchhead at ignition. Other residents have gathered now and stand silent on their porches, clutching robes or simply watching.

  Dietrich raises the pistol again. As calm and confident as a shepherd.

  He sights the pistol and shoots again, his placid face lit by the fire.

  The resonant clap shatters the stillness.

  The last burning coydog falls in a crackling heap.

  WEDNESDAY

  13.

  DAWES HOLDS UP A HAND to halt the supply truck as it pulls up in a growl of gravel just outside the front gate. She rolls open the entrance and waves it through. The driver gives her a smile through the window but already he can tell, just from her brown deputy’s uniform and her refusal to smile back, that something’s wrong, something’s up, and he’s going to wish he never got out of bed this morning.

  It’s a small delivery truck, with Texas plates and a cargo box that’s covered in graffiti. Dawes walks around the back and slaps loudly on the rear door as the driver disembarks to open up. Greta, who normally receives this truck alone every week, at least for the drop-off of bar supplies, stands just behind Dawes. She’s fidgeting nervously with her rings.

  “You have a manifest?” Dawes asks the driver.

  “Sure—you mean, like, what? Invoices?” he says. “I got a list of what’s aboard.” He grabs a clipboard from the cab and walks over and hands it to her. There’s a sheath of pink and yellow carbon papers clipped haphazardly to it. Dawes looks them over as he rolls open the back door of the truck. Inside, it’s half-full with crates of food and stacks of cardboard boxes.

  Dawes looks the driver over—he’s a yokel-for-hire who’s been conscripted by the Institute from some nearby backwater town to do the weekly supply runs from Amarillo. Dawes flips through the carbon papers, then looks up and catches Greta giving the driver a look that says, Stay cool. The driver, for his part, looks nervous as hell. Dawes hoists herself into the back of the truck and quickly counts the boxes inside, checking the contents against what’s listed on the clipboard. There’s a crate of softening mangoes, a crate of browning bananas, a crate of bruised apples—the usual haul for the produce section of Spiro’s general store. There’s two cardboard boxes containing plastic-wrapped t-shirts, socks, and undergarments in various sizes, listed on the invoices as “sundries.” There’s an open box with a few used paperbacks, romances mostly, along with a small pile of local newspapers bundled together with twine, some of them a few weeks out of date and already yellowing. There’s a plastic crate full of assorted liquors, the bottles separated by cardboard dividers.

  “Not too much produce this time around,” the driver calls into the back of the truck. “Refrigerator truck’s only available once a month. So no dairy on this haul. In case you were hoping for some cream in your coffee.” He turns to Greta. “But don’t worry, I got your bottles. Two of everything, just like you asked. Should hold you till the end of the month, at least.” He stands rocking with his hands jammed in the pockets of his jeans, while Dawes says nothing, just keeps counting. The driver gives Greta a look like, What’s with the third degree? but Greta just watches Dawes.

  “I should probably get those mangoes to the shop before they spoil,” the driver says loudly. “Though feel free to grab a couple for yourself. I hear they’re a hot commodity, likely won’t last too long.” Dawes ignores him, though she notes an increasingly anxious edge to his voice.

  She checks the invoices again. Eighteen boxes. Then she counts the boxes again.

  Nineteen boxes.

  There’s a box marked MALLOMARS on the top of one pile that’s been opened already and then taped up sloppily. If the commissary has ever carried Mallomar cookies, she’s sure she would have noticed. Out here, indulgences are rare and valued, and they don’t tend to go undetected.

  She pulls out a penknife, then pauses, blade open, and calls back to the driver, “You mind?” Right away, she knows from his face that she’s found something he didn’t want her to find.

  The driver doesn’t answer, just glances nervously at Greta, who looks resigned to whatever’s coming next.

  Dawes slices the tape on the box and opens the box flaps.

  Inside, there are letters. Envelopes. Postcards.

  Mail.

  “I don’t—” says the driver, but Greta hu
shes him with a bejeweled hand placed gently on his arm.

  Dawes steps out of the back of the truck into the road, holding the box of mail. She puts the box down on the rear gate of the truck and starts fishing around in it, pulling out a handful of envelopes and shuffling through them. All are hand-addressed to real names, names she doesn’t recognize: Eduardo Figueroa. Anthony Mancuso. Theresa Benedict. And all of them are addressed to the same P.O. Box in Abilene, where they were presumably picked up and brought here. No return addresses on any of them.

  She peers inside the box again. Shakes it. Maybe a dozen letters in all, plus a small paper-wrapped package.

  Dawes looks up at Greta. “You know about this?”

  Greta steps toward her, her face set defiantly. “So we run a little mail. People need some kind of contact. It’s not humane otherwise.”

  “So you know who all these people are? These names?”

  Greta shrugs.

  Dawes looks down at the envelope in her hand. Figueroa. Her mind swims—it doesn’t make any sense. Because even if these envelopes are addressed to the real names of people who live in the Blinds, how does Greta know who those people are? What’s more, how do they know who they are? And how do people on the outside know that they’re here to send them mail?

  She’s about to ask Greta these questions, and when she holds up one of the envelopes as proof, that’s when she spots it. On the back of the envelope. A photograph. A small, smiling snapshot, like a passport photo. Taped to the back.

  She recognizes Eduardo Figueroa. He’s Spiro Mitchum.

  Dawes drops the envelope back in the box and starts turning over the others. They all have photos stuck on the back, of people she recognizes from the town. Doris Agnew. Ginger Van Buren. Marilyn Roosevelt, the librarian.

  “How do people out there know these people are living here?” says Dawes.

  “I don’t ask a lot of questions,” says Greta. “I just deliver it. If it’s got a photo, and I know the person, I drop it off. Trust me, we get a lot of mail addressed to people I’ve never seen before, people who never lived here, as best I know, and I’ve been here since day one. I think some people find out about the P.O. Box and just send letters in hopes that a person they’re looking for might be living here. And sometimes they’re right.”

  “Who sends this mail?”

  “Relatives. Friends. Old neighbors,” says Greta. “You might not remember the world, but the world remembers you. Sometimes the world even takes some pains to track you down. Let you know you’re not forgotten.”

  Dawes shuffles through the mail again. There’s a postcard with a photo of Lyndon Lancaster on it; real name: Sam Lemme. There’s an envelope addressed to someone named Kostya Slivko; when she flips it over, on the back, there’s a photo of Errol Colfax, who’s been dead for two months. She looks up at Greta. “This is serious,” Dawes says softly, almost like she’s reaffirming it to herself. She can’t believe this. She looks back into the box. Every one of these envelopes links a resident to their former identity, which is a fundamental breach of Caesura security. And every one of them means that someone in the world knows who’s living here, and knows how to contact them. She thinks a moment, then turns to the driver and says quietly, by way of dismissing him: “You better get those mangoes to the store.”

  He glances at Dawes, then at Greta, then back to Dawes, then, without another word, steps quickly back into the cab and starts the truck, happy to escape his punishment.

  As the truck trundles away, Dawes turns to Greta. “Does Sheriff Cooper know about this?”

  “Why don’t you ask him yourself?” Greta gestures toward the box. “Please. People are expecting those.” She sounds plaintive now, pleading, like a child who let you look for a moment at something valuable and is now worried you’re never going to give it back.

  Dawes nods toward the box she’s still holding in her arms. “Do you know what this means?”

  “Sure,” says Greta. “It means someone out there still remembers you. That you had a life before this place that hasn’t been forgotten. Once you’ve been here five, six, eight years, you might understand how that feels.”

  Dawes clutches the box closer to her chest and says simply, “I’m sorry.” Then she peers inside the box again. At the bottom, she spots the small paper-wrapped package. About the size of a box of matches.

  She picks it out. Puts the box down. Shakes the package. Like a kid on Christmas.

  It rattles.

  Addressed to someone named Lester Vogel.

  “You know who this is? This Lester Vogel?” Dawes asks.

  Greta says nothing. Dawes turns the box over. There’s a photo. It’s Gerald Dean. Dawes can’t believe what she’s seeing yet is also not surprised in the least. She unwraps the package.

  It’s a brand-new box of 9 mm bullets.

  She hefts it in her hand, then holds the box up to Greta. “Is this the kind of thing you usually deliver?”

  “Look, I’m not customs. I’m just the postmaster,” Greta says. “If it comes in on the truck and has a photo on it, I deliver it.”

  Dawes puts the package back in the box. She closes the flaps, hoists the box in her arms, and heads off with her contraband toward the police trailer, confident that the day ahead will prove to be the best one she’s enjoyed yet here in the Blinds.

  14.

  COOPER HASN’T SLEPT. He hasn’t had time to change his clothes. He spent the night awake on his sofa, nursing the dull burn in his shoulder and staring at the ceiling, visited by bright visions of burning beasts turning in endless circles. A few visions of Errol Colfax, too, and the back of Hubert Gable’s head. Now, as morning beckons, he finds himself on Dick Dietrich’s porch. After last night’s commotion, he was too busy calming everyone down to deal with Dietrich—people pooling in the street, panicked and yammering, some with flashlights, some with lanterns, all with insistent questions about what the hell just happened. Some hauled buckets of water to try to stanch the burning corpses, but the water just splashed over the stubborn fires with an impotent hiss. Finally, Robinson arrived in his bathrobe, armed with a fire extinguisher, and snuffed out the fires, the extinguisher roaring. Foamy water ran in rivulets in the dusty gravel road; Cooper sees puddles of it still lingering this morning. The burned-animal smell is still on his tongue, in his throat, in his lungs, on his clothes. He recalls, too, how last night people circled Dietrich, thanking him, clapping him on the back, applauding the newcomer, stepping up to shake the hero’s hand.

  Cooper’s barely finished his first knock when Dietrich swings open the door and welcomes him in.

  “I heard the dogs—”

  “They’re coydogs,” says Cooper.

  “—the coydogs wailing,” says Dietrich, now standing in his kitchen, pouring two mugs of black coffee. “So I came out, and I saw what was happening, and I knew they were in pain. It seemed like the humane thing to do.” He hands a mug to Cooper, who’s seated in a chair, and Dietrich sits opposite him on the sofa. His feet are bare and he wears jeans and a white linen pullover shirt with an open mandarin collar, and he crosses his legs at the knee and smiles. Save for the tattoos, he looks like an annoyingly optimistic therapist. If he brought an extra stitch of clothing with him to Caesura or a single other personal effect, Cooper notes, there’s no evidence of any of it in his bungalow. There’s nothing in the room save the standard-issue furniture: the cheap sofa, the modest coffee table, a lonely standing lamp. The closet door is ajar and the closet sits empty. If Dietrich spent the last two days getting settled, it’s hard to see what exactly he was settling.

  “Thanks again for your help,” says Cooper.

  “Just trying to be a good neighbor, like you said.” Dietrich holds up his mug. “I’d offer you something stronger, but when I made my way to the commissary for provisions yesterday, there wasn’t much left for the taking.”

  “That’s okay, it’s a little early in the day for me.”

  “I thought one of the ben
efits of this place is that you get to dispense with those kinds of proprieties.” Dietrich sips his coffee. “That Mexican grocer told me the new shipment of goods comes today.”

  “Spiro. His name is Spiro Mitchum.”

  “You ever look at that ink he’s got on him? Speaks to a cartel background.”

  “We don’t speculate on that kind of thing here,” says Cooper. “Besides, you’re a fine one to talk about excessive ink.”

  Dietrich jacks his loose sleeves up and inspects his arms. The tattooed portraits of beatific faces crowd into one another. “I like to keep track of the people I’ve encountered.”

  “That’s a lot of people.”

  “I used to work in community outreach. Or so I’m guessing!” Dietrich laughs and slaps his knee. “Either way, I’m pretty handy with a firearm, if you’re ever looking for a wingman. You never know when you might need to put down another animal in pain.”

  “Ex-military?” asks Cooper.

  “What do I know? My memory’s been wiped clean, right?”

  “Not everything. Most people remember some things. Just not the bad things.”

  “I’m afraid for me that’s most of it,” says Dietrich. “The bad things.”

  “Well, I already have two deputies, but thank you for the offer,” says Cooper. “Speaking of which—one of them, Deputy Dawes, found an empty gas can last night over by the coydog kennel. It had been stolen that morning from Orson Calhoun’s repair shop.”

  Dietrich takes another sip, as though he’s pondering this information, like Cooper’s come to him to ask advice. “And what do you make of that?”

  Cooper sets his mug aside, in hopes of signaling to Dietrich that the niceties portion of the conversation is now concluded. “As much as I’m grateful to you for helping me stop those poor animals, I’m just as interested in finding out how they got on fire in the first place.”