Skeleton Crew

  "Thanks." I took it. It tasted sweet and good.

  "This is probably a stupid question," Miller resumed, "but we ought to fill in the blanks. Anyone got any firearms?"

  There was a pause. People looked around at each other and shrugged. An old man with grizzled white hair who introduced himself as Ambrose Cornell said he had a shotgun in the trunk of his car. "I'll try for it, if you want."

  Ollie said, "Right now I don't think that would be a good idea, Mr. Cornell."

  Cornell grunted. "Right now, neither do I, son. But I thought I ought to make the offer."

  "Well, I didn't really think so," Dan Miller said. "But I thought--"

  "Wait, hold it a minute," a woman said. It was the lady in the cranberry-colored sweatshirt and the dark-green slacks. She had sandy-blond hair and a good figure. A very pretty young woman. She opened her purse and from it she produced a medium-sized pistol. The crowd made an ahhhh-ing sound, as if they had just seen a magician do a particularly fine trick. The woman, who had been blushing, blushed that much the harder. She rooted in her purse again and brought out a box of Smith & Wesson ammunition.

  "I'm Amanda Dumfries," she said to Miller. "This gun ... my husband's idea. He thought I should have it for protection. I've carried it unloaded for two years."

  "Is your huband here, ma'am?"

  "No, he's in New York. On business. He's gone on business a lot. That's why he wanted me to carry the gun."

  "Well," Miller said, "if you can use it, you ought to keep it. What is it, a thirty-eight?"

  "Yes. And I've never fired it in my life except on a target range once."

  Miller took the gun, fumbled around, and got the cylinder to open after a few moments. He checked to make sure it was not loaded. "Okay," he said. "We got a gun. Who shoots good? I sure don't."

  People glanced at each other. No one said anything at first. Then, reluctantly, Ollie said: "I target-shoot quite a lot. I have a Colt .45 and a Llama .25."

  "You?" Brown said. "Huh. You'll be too drunk to see by dark."

  Ollie said very clearly, "Why don't you just shut up and write down your names?"

  Brown goggled at him. Opened his mouth. Then decided, wisely, I think, to shut it again.

  "It's yours," Miller said, blinking a little at the exchange. He handed it over and Ollie checked it again, more professionally. He put the gun into his right-front pants pocket and slipped the cartridge box into his breast pocket, where it made a bulge like a pack of cigarettes. Then he leaned back against the cooler, round face still trickling sweat, and cracked a fresh beer. The sensation that I was seeing a totally unsuspected Ollie Weeks persisted.

  "Thank you, Mrs. Dumfries," Miller said.

  "Don't mention it," she said, and I thought fleetingly that if I were her husband and proprietor of those green eyes and that full figure, I might not travel so much. Giving your wife a gun could be seen as a ludicrously symbolic act.

  "This may be silly, too," Miller said, turning back to Brown with his clipboard and Ollie with his beer, "but there aren't anything like flamethrowers in the place, are there?"

  "Ohhh, shit," Buddy Eagleton said, and then went as red as Amanda Dumfries had done.

  "What is it?" Mike Hatlen asked.

  "Well . . . until last week we had a whole case of those little blowtorches. The kind you use around your house to solder leaky pipes or mend your exhaust systems or whatever. You remember those, Mr. Brown?"

  Brown nodded, looking sour.

  "Sold out?" Miller asked.

  "No, they didn't go at all. We only sold three or four and sent the rest of the case back. What a pisser. I mean . . . what a shame." Blushing so deeply he was almost purple, Buddy Eagleton retired into the background again.

  We had matches, of course, and salt (someone said vaguely that he had heard salt was the thing to put on bloodsuckers and things like that); and all kinds of O'Cedar mops and long-handled brooms. Most of the people continued to look heartened, and Jim and Myron were too plotzo to sound a dissenting note, but I met Ollie's eyes and saw a calm hopelessness in them that was worse than fear. He and I had seen the tentacles. The idea of throwing salt on them or trying to fend them off with the handles of O'Cedar mops was funny, in a ghastly way.

  "Mike," Miller said, "why don't you crew this little adventure? I want to talk to Ollie and Dave here for a minute. "

  "Glad to." Hatlen clapped Dan Miller on the shoulder. "Somebody had to take charge, and you did it good. Welcome to town."

  "Does this mean I get a kickback on my taxes?" Miller asked. He was a banty little guy with red hair that was receding. He looked like the sort of guy you can't help liking on short notice and--just maybe--the kind of guy you can't help not liking after he's been around for a while. The kind of guy who knows how to do everything better than you do.

  "No way," Hatlen said, laughing.

  Hatlen walked off. Miller glanced down at my son.

  "Don't worry about Billy," I said.

  "Man, I've never been so worried in my whole life," Miller said.

  "No," Ollie agreed, and dropped an empty into the beer cooler. He got a fresh one and opened it. There was a soft hiss of escaping gas.

  "I got a look at the way you two glanced at each other," Miller said.

  I finished my Hershey bar and got a beer to wash it down with.

  "Tell you what I think," Miller said. "We ought to get half a dozen people to wrap some of those mop handles with cloth and then tie them down with twine. Then I think we ought to get a couple of those cans of charcoal lighter fluid all ready. If we cut the tops right off the cans, we could have some torches pretty quick."

  I nodded. That was good. Almost surely not good enough--not if you had seen Norm dragged out--but it was better than salt.

  "That would give them something to think about, at least," Ollie said.

  Miller's lips pressed together. "That bad, huh?" he said.

  "That bad," Ollie agreed, and worked his beer.

  By four-thirty that afternoon the sacks of fertilizer and lawn food were in place and the big windows were blocked off except for narrow loopholes. A watchman had been placed at each of these, and beside each watchman was a tin of charcoal lighter fluid with the top cut off and a supply of mop-handle torches. There were five loopholes, and Dan Miller had arranged a rotation of sentries for each one. When four-thirty came around, I was sitting on a pile of bags at one of the loopholes, Billy at my side. We were looking out into the mist.

  Just beyond the window was a red bench where people sometimes waited for their rides with their groceries beside them. Beyond that was the parking lot. The mist swirled slowly, thick and heavy. There was moisture in it, but how dull it seemed, and gloomy. Just looking at it made me feel gutless and lost.

  "Daddy, do you know what's happening?" Billy asked.

  "No, hon," I said.

  He fell silent for a bit, looking at his hands, which lay limply in the lap of his Tuffskin jeans. "Why doesn't somebody come and rescue us?" he asked finally. "The State Police or the FBI or someone?"

  "I don't know."

  "Do you think Mom's okay?"

  "Billy, I just don't know," I said, and put an arm around him.

  "I want her awful bad," Billy said, struggling with tears.

  "I'm sorry about the times I was bad to her."

  "Billy," I said, and had to stop. I could taste salt in my throat, and my voice wanted to tremble.

  "Will it be over?" Billy asked. "Daddy? Will it?"

  "I don't know," I said, and he put his face in the hollow of my shoulder and I held the back of his head, felt the delicate curve of his skull just under the thick growth of his hair. I found myself remembering the evening of my wedding day. Watching Steff take off the simple brown dress she had changed into after the ceremony. She had had a big purple bruise on one hip from running into the side of a door the day before. I remembered looking at the bruise and thinking, When she got that, she was still Stephanie Stepanek, and feeling som
ething like wonder. Then we had made love, and outside it was spitting snow from a dull gray December sky.

  Billy was crying.

  "Shh, Billy, shh," I said, rocking his head against me, but he went on crying. It was the sort of crying that only mothers know how to fix right.

  Premature night came inside the Federal Foods. Miller and Hatlen and Bud Brown handed out flashlights, the whole stock, about twenty. Norton clamored loudly for them on behalf of his group, and received two. The lights bobbed here and there in the aisles like uneasy phantoms.

  I held Billy against me and looked out through the loophole. The milky, translucent quality of the light out there hadn't changed much; it was putting up the bags that had made the market so dark. Several times I thought I saw something, but it was only jumpiness. One of the others raised a hesitant false alarm.

  Billy saw Mrs. Turman again, and went to her eagerly, even though she hadn't been over to sit for him all summer. She had one of the flashlights and handed it over to him amiably enough. Soon he was trying to write his name in light on the blank glass faces of the frozen-food cases. She seemed as happy to see him as he was to see her, and in a little while they came over. Hattie Turman was a tall, thin woman with lovely red hair just beginning to streak gray. A pair of glasses hung from an ornamental chain--the sort, I believe, it is illegal for anyone except middle-aged women to wear--on her breast.

  "Is Stephanie here, David?" she asked.

  "No. At home."

  She nodded. "Alan, too. How long are you on watch here?"

  "Until six."

  "Have you seen anything?"

  "No. Just the mist."

  "I'll keep Billy until six, if you like."

  "Would you like that, Billy?"

  "Yes, please," he said, swinging the flashlight above his head in slow arcs and watching it play across the ceiling.

  "God will keep your Steffy, and Alan, too," Mrs. Turman said, and led Billy away by the hand. She spoke with serene sureness, but there was no conviction in her eyes.

  Around five-thirty the sounds of excited argument rose near the back of the store. Someone jeered at something someone else had said, and someone--it was Buddy Eagleton, I think--shouted, "You're crazy if you go out there!"

  Several of the flashlight beams pooled together at the center of the controversy, and they moved toward the front of the store. Mrs. Carmody's shrieking, derisive laugh split the gloom, as abrasive as fingers drawn down a slate blackboard.

  Above the babble of voices came the boom of Norton's courtroom tenor: "Let us pass, please! Let us pass!"

  The man at the loophole next to mine left his place to see what the shouting was about. I decided to stay where I was. Whatever the concatenation was, it was coming my way.

  "Please," Mike Hatlen was saying. "Please, let's talk this thing through."

  "There is nothing to talk about," Norton proclaimed. Now his face swam out of the gloom. It was determined and haggard and wholly wretched. He was holding one of the two flashlights allocated to the Flat-Earthers. The corkscrewed tufts of hair still stuck up behind his ears like a cuckold's horns. He was at the head of an extremely small procession--five of the original nine or ten. "We are going out," he said.

  "Don't stick to this craziness," Miller said. "Mike's right. We can talk it over, can't we? Mr. McVey is going to barbecue some chicken over the gas grill, we can all sit down and eat and just--"

  He got in Norton's way and Norton gave him a push. Miller didn't like it. His face flushed and then set in a hard expression. "Do what you want, then," he said. "But you're as good as murdering these other people."

  With all the evenness of great resolve or unbreakable obsession, Norton said: "We'll send help back for you."

  One of his followers murmured agreement, but another quietly slipped away. Now there was Norton and four others. Maybe that wasn't so bad. Christ Himself could only find twelve.

  "Listen," Mike Hatlen said. "Mr. Norton--Brent--at least stay for the chicken. Get some hot food inside you."

  "And give you a chance to go on talking? I've been in too many courtrooms to fall for that. You've psyched out half a dozen of my people already."

  "Your people?" Hatlen almost groaned it. "Your people? Good Christ, what kind of talk is that? They're people, that's all. This is no game, and it's surely not a courtroom. There are, for want of a better word, there are things out there, and what's the sense of getting yourself killed?"

  "Things, you say," Norton said, sounding superficially amused. "Where? Your people have been on watch for a couple of hours now. Who's seen one?"

  "Well, out back. In the--"

  "No, no, no," Norton said, shaking his head. "That ground has been covered and covered. We're going out--"

  "No," someone whispered, and it echoed and spread, sounding like the rustle of dead leaves at dusk of an October evening. No, no, no ...

  "Will you restrain us?" a shrill voice asked. This was one of Norton's "people," to use his word--an elderly lady wearing bifocals. "Will you restrain us?"

  The soft babble of negatives died away.

  "No," Mike said. "No, I don't think anyone will restrain you."

  I whispered in Billy's ear. He looked at me, startled and questioning. "Go on, now." I said. "Be quick."

  He went.

  Norton ran his hands through his hair, a gesture as calculated as any ever made by a Broadway actor. I had liked him better pulling the cord of his chainsaw fruitlessly, cussing and thinking himself unobserved. I could not tell then and do not know any better now if he believed in what he was doing or not. I think, down deep, that he knew what was going to happen. I think that the logic he had paid lip service to all his life turned on him at the end like a tiger that has gone bad and mean.

  He looked around restlessly, seeming to wish that there was more to say. Then he led his four followers through one of the checkout lanes. In addition to the elderly woman, there was a chubby boy of about twenty, a young girl, and a man in blue jeans wearing a golf cap tipped back on his head.

  Norton's eyes caught mine, widened a little, and then started to swing away.

  "Brent, wait a minute," I said.

  "I don't want to discuss it any further. Certainly not with you."

  "I know you don't. I just want to ask a favor." I looked around and saw Billy coming back toward the checkouts at a run.

  "What's that?" Norton asked suspiciously as Billy came up and handed me a package done up in cellophane.

  "Clothesline," I said. I was vaguely aware that everyone in the market was watching us now, loosely strung out on the other side of the cash registers and checkout lanes. "It's the big package. Three hundred feet."

  "So?"

  "I wondered if you'd tie one end around your waist before you go out. I'll let it out. When you feel it come up tight, just tie it around something. It doesn't matter what. A car door handle would do."

  "What in God's name for?"

  "It will tell me you got at least three hundred feet," I said.

  Something in his eyes flickered ... but only momentarily. "No," he said.

  I shrugged. "Okay. Good luck, anyhow."

  Abruptly the man in the golf cap said, "I'll do it, mister. No reason not to."

  Norton swung on him, as if to say something sharp, and the man in the golf cap studied him calmly. There was nothing flickering in his eyes. He had made his decision and there was simply no doubt in him. Norton saw it too and said nothing.

  "Thanks," I said.

  I slit the wrapping with my pocketknife and the clothesline accordioned out in stiff loops. I found one loose end and tied it around Golf Cap's waist in a loose granny. He immediately untied it and cinched it tighter with a good quick sheet-bend knot. There was not a sound in the market. Norton shifted uneasily from foot to foot.

  "You want to take my knife?" I asked the man in the golf cap.

  "I got one." He looked at me with that same calm contempt. "You just see to paying out your line. If it b
inds up, I'll chuck her."

  "Are we all ready?" Norton asked, too loud. The chubby boy jumped as if he had been goosed. Getting no response, Norton turned to go.

  "Brent," I said, and held out my hand. "Good luck, man."

  He studied my hand as if it were some dubious foreign object. "We'll send back help," he said finally, and pushed through the OUT door. That thin, acrid smell came in again. The others followed him out.

  Mike Hatlen came down and stood beside me. Norton's party of five stood in the milky, slow-moving fog. Norton said something and I should have heard it, but the mist seemed to have an odd damping effect. I heard nothing but the sound of his voice and two or three isolated syllables, like the voice on the radio heard from some distance. They moved off.

  Hatlen held the door a little way open. I paid out the clothesline, keeping as much slack in it as I could, mindful of the man's promise to chuck the rope if it bound him up. There was still not a sound. Billy stood beside me, motionless but seeming to thrum with his own inner current.

  Again there was that weird feeling that the five of them did not so much disappear into the fog as become invisible. For a moment their clothes seemed to stand alone, and then they were gone. You were not really impressed with the unnatural density of the mist until you saw people swallowed up in a space of seconds.

  I paid the line out. A quarter of it went, then a half. It stopped going out for a moment. It went from a live thing to a dead one in my hands. I held my breath. Then it started to go out again. I paid it through my fingers, and suddenly remembered my father taking me to see the Gregory Peck film of Moby Dick at the Brookside. I think I smiled a little.

  Three-quarters of the line was gone now. I could see the end of it lying beside one of Billy's feet. Then the rope stopped moving through my hands again. It lay motionless for perhaps five seconds, and then another five feet jerked out. Then it suddenly whipsawed violently to the left, twanging off the edge of the OUT door.

  Twenty feet of rope suddenly paid out, making a thin heat across my left palm. And from out of the mist there came a high, wavering scream. It was impossible to tell the sex of the screamer.

  The rope whipsawed in my hands again. And again. It skated across the space in the doorway to the right, then back to the left. A few more feet paid out, and then there was a ululating howl from out there that brought an answering moan from my son. Hatlen stood aghast. His eyes were huge. One comer of his mouth turned down, trembling.