Thus, John’s annual Pioneers Day barbecue drew, somewhat abruptly, toward a close, for some a pleasure, others not, some lives changed by it, most merely in some small wise spent, a few wishing it could go on forever, others that it had never happened, or, having happened, that it could be forgotten, of all wishes wished, the one most likely to be granted; but first, while many were still finishing their last, or nearly last, drink, police chief Otis arrived, raised his bullhorn, and addressed the remaining guests in John’s backyard.
He said: “Folks, sorry to butt in here when you’re having a good time, but this town’s got a serious problem and I need your help!” There was applause, and Edna clapped, too, because Floyd did. But were the others applauding the police officer or the problem? It seemed a touch wild out here and she wished she was back home, just her old simple home with the running toilet, forget grand ambitions. Like her stepmother always said: Edna, sometimes the worse thing can happen to you is getting your dreams come true. “If you haven’t been home today,” the burly police officer hollered through his bullhorn, “you probably been robbed!” Oh dear. That got everybody’s attention. At least the new porcelain lamp was safe in the trunk of the car, though she didn’t know if she ever really wanted to see it again. The officer went on to tot up all the crimes that the giant lady and the mental boy from the drugstore had committed, and she could see by the tall list why he hadn’t wanted to bother about a mix-up with one little secondhand rug. His voice, which sounded like an old radio broadcast, seemed to be coming out of the night sky. It had got dark almost as soon as he’d begun to talk and now you couldn’t hardly see his face, it was like a curtain had dropped. “People around town are reporting dented cars and broke doors and windows and shingles knocked off roofs,” his voice said. “They’ve used a airport hangar like a latrine, there’s a church been desecrated and busted up, she’s almost completely indecent and scaring little kids, and everywhere she goes she’s leaving a filthy trail of slime and garbage!” “If I was completely indecent,” some lady squawked in a high voice, “I’d scare everybody!” The people around her laughed and said “I know what you mean,” but if it was a joke, Edna didn’t get it. But then she was not in a humorous mood. She felt ashamed and confused and responsible for the change that had come over Floyd ever since leaving the police station. She and Floyd were standing talking to the bank president and his wife, he having taken a sudden new interest in Floyd what with his promotion, and what his wife said now was: “You work so hard to make a decent life for yourself and then these irresponsible ruffians come along and try to take it away from you, it just doesn’t seem fair!” “No,” said Edna, “it don’t rightly,” and the policeman with the bullhorn said: “And now she’s got so big she’s disrupting traffic and bringing down phone lines and TV antennas!” Fortunately the lady’s husband was so drunk he didn’t notice how Floyd, who’d been so friendly and fairly popping his britches with big money talk before, had pretty much shrunk back into his old squint-eyed meanness, untrusting and shutmouth, except when he had something to recite from the Bible, and moresoever since the police turned up. The sour old Floyd was not so good at impressing bankers maybe, but Edna knew how to talk to the old one better than the new smiley one who scared her with his noisy swoll-up ways, and so she told him now plain out that she never took that rug, that John’s wife give it to her and just went away and left her stuck in all that trouble, and where was she anyhow, and Floyd, finally listening to her, said what the hell are these buggers trying to do to us, you think? The police chief meanwhile was introducing the new mayor who got up and declared that this was a tough ballgame, but they all had to hunker down and dig in and get ready for a butt-kicking bone-crunching free fight. “We gotta get our back off the mat!” he shouted through the bullhorn. “That’s one big piece a meat out there and she’s playin’ hardball with us, so now it’s our job to team up and take her out! Together, neighbors, we can do it!” Floyd said: “We’ll be goin’ now.” “We should oughta say goodbye and thank you,” Edna said, but she wasn’t sure who to, except maybe the little boy. “It don’t matter,” Floyd said. “Come on.”
While his old coach and math teacher, who was now the mayor, however that had happened, was winding up the crowd in his punchy lockerroom style, telling them about the shoot-out at the old airport hangar and how the bandits nearly ran him down, Otis, given the first moment he’d had in what seemed like weeks just to catch his breath and think, posed the question to himself: What had he set in motion here? What was the final objective of these troops he was lining up? Would Pauline, as Snuffy’s rhetoric and even his own as he thought back on it seemed to imply, have to be, well, taken out? This had not been his original game plan. He’d set out just to bring Pauline home and turn her over to people who knew more about how to deal with her problem. If only she hadn’t broke out and teamed up with that dimwit from the drugstore. Of course she had to get out, she was hungry: Otis remembered how she had demolished that bag of doughnuts and wished now he’d brought her a couple hundred bags more. Though that wouldn’t have been enough either, she was one ravenous lady. Her husband should have done something, damn it, all of this could have been prevented. But, that’s right, he had been under arrest. Or, rather, he’d been a temporary guest of the police department. So things happened. Too many things, really, for Otis to be able to manage them all, one crisis piling up on another, civic order collapsing around his ears, and then all those crimes they committed, seemed like he was getting a call a minute, they were running him ragged, and so, next thing he knew, here he was in John’s backyard forming up an armed posse to go out and hunt both of them down. He glanced over toward the cruiser in the drive where Pauline’s daddy sat, manacled, in the backseat, grinning out at him under his ballcap. He spat through the gap in his teeth, dirtying the inside of the cruiser window. The incorrigible bastard. A menace to society. And not just mean and crazy but no doubt a cold-blooded murderer as well. If he were genuinely serious about justice, Otis should’ve tried to find out years ago about that “dead sister” Pauline had chillingly described during their investigative sessions out at the trailer, and whatever it was had happened to her missing momma. So he was taking a big risk getting Duwayne released to him like this, the sonuvabitch was dangerous even when locked up in a padded cell and he still harbored a homicidal grudge against Otis, blew a gob straight in his face first time he saw him today, then just grinned when Otis cocked his arm to throw the punch he couldn’t throw. But Pauline had often told Otis about all the times she’d tried to run away and how Daddy Duwayne always tracked her down and dragged her home to the trailer again, and Otis was running out of options. She had to be stopped, whatever that meant, and wherever she was. Still, he was having his doubts. Otis desperately wished John hadn’t taken off. He’d know what to do, as he always did. Otis had come here, not just because this was where most everyone in town he could count on could be found, but more because he needed John to lead this thing and see that it came out right. But no John, no anyone except the two kids, even John’s parents had checked out. Otis had brought the abandoned Porsche here and had had to give John’s daughter the keys, uneasy as that made him feel, and what she’d said was that her father had got called away on an emergency. A friend of hers was in trouble. A former friend, she’d added and turned away. And now he didn’t see her anywhere or the little boy either. A lot of people had left, even while he and Snuffy were speaking to them, and he found himself feeling a bit like a sheriff in one of those old oaters, come here like a fool to appeal to the cowardly cabbageheads in the town saloon. Of course he would not, like those forsaken sheriffs, have to face Pauline all alone, Otis knew that; on the contrary, the problem would be to keep the drunks, zanies, curiosity seekers, and hell-raisers away, which was mostly what he saw out there in the darkness now. Maybe he ought to postpone all this until morning when John got back. Hell, he didn’t even know where he was going to take his squad once he’d picked them. But then he got
a call on his cellular phone from the Country Tavern out by Settler’s Woods: “They’s some humungous animal out here, Otis, looks a lot like a nekkid woman, and she just stomped the bejesus outa old Shag, he’s flatter’n a day-old pancake! And I can’t even find Chester, she musta et him!” Now it was murder. And he knew where they had to go. He took the bullhorn back.
She didn’t mean to. It was a dark moonless night and she was hungry and that boy with the automatic zinger had not come back and she could not remember where he had hid their food. She saw lights and heard music and crept over there. Well, crept. It felt to her like creeping but she did break a few trees and accidentally tipped a car into the ditch. She could smell cooked meat and beer and so she went poking around in the garbage cans at the back and that was where she stepped on something. Just made a little squeak. She figured it was better not to look. There wasn’t much to eat but what there was she quickly put away, eating straight from the tipped-up cans. Everything tasted pretty good, even the plastic bags, though she cut her mouth when she bit into the bottles. There was something else sniffing around back there so she ate that, too. Then some people came out and started making a fuss and she remembered that she was supposed to keep out of sight so nobody would know where they were. It was probably too late, but it was dark so she thought she might be able to slip away unnoticed, and she might have, too, if they hadn’t had all those cars and trucks in her way. They made quite a racket so it was obvious to everyone which way she was going. Still, no one seemed to want to follow her, and in fact most of them were running to their cars and going home, if their cars still worked, so while they were busy at that she burrowed deeper into the woods and found a dark place that was scratchy but warm where she could snuggle down and wait for her friend to return. But no sooner had she got settled than she realized she had to go to the bathroom again, that was the trouble with all this eating, so she crawled over to the big ditch she’d used before and did her business there, then found her way back into her secret place, keeping her head down all the while, scuffing up the brush behind her so they couldn’t follow her tracks. She didn’t know why she had to do this, but she knew it was important. Her friend, whose name she could not quite remember, had said so. Why had he not come back? She did not know that either, but she never doubted that he would. Unless he’d had an accident or had got caught himself by whoever it was that was chasing them. It was mostly her fault they were being chased, because of how big she was. There were many things she did not remember now, but she knew she had not always been this big. Exactly why it bothered everybody so much, she couldn’t be sure, but she guessed it was just something they weren’t used to and that got on their nerves. She could appreciate how they felt because she wasn’t used to it either, and didn’t know if she ever would be. She missed things like beds and those white things—bathtubs—too much. But maybe, after she’d forgotten them, like everything else, she’d stop missing them and things would be all right. She curled up in a nest of wrinkled sheets she’d earlier worn like someone in her old life used to call, as he tore them off her, her “seventh veil,” and there half dozed with one eye open, her ears and nose alert, listening for footfalls or men talking, her empty stomach gnawing at her again, and wishing her friend would come back soon and show her where their hidden food was. It was awfully late. Where was he anyway?
At the door. And through it. Found at last, when least expected, nor where he’d have thought to look. All the way out here, slipping through back streets and unmarked roads in the borrowed truck, Cornell had been thinking about his escape from Yale’s girlfriend’s apartment after, well, after what had happened to her, and how his whole life since then seemed like a single thread: through those scary streets, down into the ground below, then through that dark stinking maze of tunnels and sewers, up the metal stairs, out the door at the top, into a life with that clubfooted lady that was, somehow, already underway, then out again to find the one true friend he had in the world, and now once more on the run, but aboveground and with something important to do and no longer all alone. That thread of his life, he sensed (he remembered Marie-Claire’s horrible final message: maybe what she’d meant to say was THINK!), was now being knotted, he didn’t know how, but it was all coming round full circle, and he was suddenly sure he would find at last the door that he’d been looking for, solving the mystery of his life and freeing himself from the sensation of there being not just one of him but two. That second Corny, the mixed-up married one, shaken off for awhile, was back with him now, not so much riding in the seat beside him or in the truckbed behind as actually sharing the driver’s seat and interfering with his moves, even if he was trying to help, as he sometimes did on hairy turns or in heavy traffic with his video games reflexes, but more often determined, it seemed, to lead him astray in some random rerouting of his intentions: he had to be single-minded about this business and simply could not. What he had to do now, if the other Corny would only let him, was return this cumbrous truck and pick up his old van, make a quick grocery run, then meet his friend in the woods, which was where he now imagined he might discover that elusive door (something about the smell of the place had stirred a faded memory and excited that imagining) through which they could make their escape before the crazy people in this town caught up with them. The last place they’d tried to hide was an unused hangar out at the airport and that had worked for a little while, poor Pauline could even stand up and walk around a little, but they’d hardly settled in when they’d been surprised by four or five very mean guys, including one of Corny’s former high school teachers, who’d actually shot at them with a gun. Holy cow! Corny had had to floorboard it out of there, right through the lot of them and crashing out the half-opened door, and, with all the roads out of town cut off by police cars, there was nowhere big enough left to go but Settler’s Woods. Not perfect. Once inside there was no easy exit, and it was risky to be so near the highway and strip, though the motel was useful for food and clean sheets, which Pauline wore like diapers now that her red cloak hardly came below her armpits. The Country Tavern was close by as well, and there was a mall Corny could reach by foot. So, after finding a safe place to hide Pauline and the truckload of food (it didn’t look like a place where a door might be, but that was where the sensation struck him, gazing up at his friend as she squatted to offer him her finger between his legs—zowie!—that he was at least getting warm), he left a few false garbage clues to send the police chasing and then took the back roads to the Ford garage, skirting danger as best he could whenever the second Corny wasn’t making him take wrong turns—as he did too often, turning the trip out into a maze. Corny was worried, hopping down out of the truck at the car lot, about all the time he’d lost: he’d left Pauline in the woods in blazing midday sunshine, and already it was pitch-dark! He found the old van, but locked up: the keys must be in the office. Which, fortunately, though everything appeared closed down for the night, was unlocked. He turned the handle and crossed the threshold and that was when it came to him that the door he’d been looking for all this time was the one he’d just stepped through.
Across town in the retirement home built by John, Barnaby stepped through his bathroom door, dragging his leaden leg behind him, staggered over to the laundry basket, and tipped it over. “God, Barnaby!” Audrey snapped, from her seat on the toilet, “can’t you give a woman a little privacy?” “Too old for that, Aud. I just thought of something.” “Well, that’s a novelty,” she said sarcastically, but she seemed uneasy, watching him as he struggled to tip the hamper upside down. Not a simple trick for a crippled puddinghead. But he managed it and, sure enough, the old handgun he’d been looking for all this time clattered out onto the tiled floor. She leapt up off the pot, but she was hobbled by her lacy drawers (Audrey always was one for fancy underthings), so for once he was able to beat her to it simply by falling on top of it. Not sure how he was going to get up again, but he had the gun and it was pointed, however unsteadily, from under his chin, up at he
r. “Now sit back down there,” he said. “We’re gonna have a little talk about that rewrote will.” She plopped back in place looking a bit deflated as he pushed up onto his elbows and knees, waving the gun more or less in her direction and reminding her that he was a mite shaky so she shouldn’t get adventurous. “I thought I’d moved it from there,” she sighed, staring at all the dirty laundry scattered across the floor. “I must have forgotten.” Using the tub and lavatory, he was able to haul himself to his feet, but not without the gun going off, sending a bullet ricocheting out of the washbasin, off the medicine cabinet mirror, and into the ceiling, and provoking a squawk from Audrey, who jumped a foot off the stool, then snapped: “You damned fool! You want to kill somebody? You can’t undo what’s already been done!” In some remote subdivision of his devastated brain he knew that was true, but in the front war-room lobes behind his eyes, from which heavily fortified enclosure he was organizing this do-or-die operation, there remained a stubborn hope for victory. “We can try,” he said heroically, and accidentally fired off a shot through the window. Audrey winced and ducked but stoically kept her seat. “You’re a crazy old buzzard who ought to be locked up,” she said. She was really boiling. “It’s a good thing John’s running the company, or we’d all be ruined. I’m glad I changed that will!” “Why do you favor that coldhearted boy, Aud?” he asked, trading anger for anger. “On account of he reminds you of your old beau?” “Oh brother! Why don’t you stick that peashooter up your backside, lamebrain, and leave us all in peace?” “Hey, tell me, love of my life, I’ve always wondered, did you ever have a tumble with that ruthless whoremonger?” “Well, what can I say, Barn? Mitch was once a handsome man, and he had a charming way with the ladies. Which is more than can be said for present company!” The doorbell rang. “That’s likely the police,” Audrey said, reaching for the toilet paper. “They probably want to know why you’ve been shooting at the neighbors.” The bell rang again and someone banged on the door with his fist. “All right! All right! I’m coming!” he shouted, though he knew that was not what it sounded like to others. Audrey was the only one who understood him now, so it was just as well he hadn’t knocked her off, he might need her to get him out of trouble. He limped out, trying unsuccessfully to holster his weapon in the sock sewn into the armpit of his robe, and as he opened the door, shot the carpet. There was Mitch with a dead wet cigar in his mouth. “Don’t shoot, Sheriff, I’ll marry your daughter!” Mitch said, and took the gun away from him, looked it over skeptically. He glanced past Barnaby’s shoulder and added: “You all right, hon?” She came running over and fell into Mitch’s arms, and he gave her a big hug. “I’ve been so frightened, Mitch!” Mitch backed out with that two-timing woman under his arm, the little silver gun pointed at Barnaby’s kneecaps. The sonuvabitch was stealing his damned wife, right from under his nose, but Barnaby wasn’t surprised, they’d taken everything else. Wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d shot him either. Wished he had. He was really all alone now. Couldn’t even do himself in. He shut down the war room and his daughter came in and closed the door. “Where have you been?” he croaked. “I’ve needed you!” He was crying, he couldn’t help it. She put her finger to her lips and shushed him and led him over to his bed to tuck him in. “It’s all right,” she said. “I’m here now.”