IV.2
Saturday 4 July
Tommy Cavanaugh’s hastily assembled, ragtag West Condon Fourth of July parade turns the corner out of Third, nearly two hours late, and heads up Main Street in the glittering sunlight toward the patient citizenry. Not much to do in this town. This is something to do. They can wait for it. Sally steps out of her “Four Freedoms” tee shop to watch it go by and wave a manikin limb at Tommy. Leading it is the West Condon mayor, riding in the back seat of Tommy’s bright red convertible, the expression on his face that of a man listening to a dirty joke. He is accompanied by a supporting convoy of other area bigwigs and followed by a marching band of high school kids—long on drums, short on horns—tootling away at what is probably supposed to be “Stars and Stripes Forever,” or maybe it’s the high school marching song or even “White Christmas.” Next comes the heaving and yawing “New Opportunities for West Condon” float with young girls in swimsuits hanging on for dear life, and behind it whooping police cars, ambulances, and fire engines, and finally all the marching groups Tommy has lined up, some with their own drum corps, from churches, unions, civic and social clubs, businesses, scout troops and sewing circles, including an armed mob carrying a CHRISTIAN PATRIOTS banner and some Italian neighborhood heavies led by Angie Bonali’s uniform-shirted brother Charlie, who busted Tommy’s nose and is supposed to be in jail but isn’t. They also have a banner: KNIGHTS OF COLUMBUS VOLUNTEER DEFENSE FORCE, it says. Also armed. People with childish ideas and grown-up weapons out to ruin the world. Tommy told her he had talked the sheriff into riding a white horse in the parade, but apparently he chickened out. Or maybe the horse did after seeing the sheriff. She once read in a pop psych book that parades were scarcely disguised representations of thrusting penises, drum majorettes at the tip wearing high plumed hats like French ticklers and twirling their batons in cocky foreplay, but on this dead street that would amount to a kind of necrophilia.
The corpse, however, is well-dressed for the occasion, with tricolor litter bins, ribbons on the lampposts, flags hanging from shop fronts, and a red-white-and-blue stripe down the middle of the street. Even the potholes have been filled in, if only with loose gravel. Sally has helped clean up and paint the empty Main Street stores for this weekend of rent-free entrepreneurialism, mostly taken up for rummage and bake sales, so-called arts and craft shows, charity drives, and town boosterism displays, and she has claimed this old once-bustling women’s clothing store for her own showroom, celebrating freedom from pulpit, flag, marketplace, and FROM THE CULTURE OF WILLFUL IGNORANCE—which more or less includes everything else and is the theme of her current work-in-progress. This she has reshaped into “Living with the Cretins,” in which she describes the town and nation beyond as a vast terminally Christianized loony bin, entering it into the first annual West Condon Fourth of July essay contest. The only other entry, no doubt at Tommy’s urging, was by that dweeb Babs Wetherwax, “Why I Love My Country.” Ah yes, let me count the ways. Sally got second prize, which was more than she expected even with the limited submissions. Boobs will read her winning essay at the bank-sponsored Independence Day picnic this afternoon; Sally has not been invited to do so, but she may read her own anyway.
On the shop walls and in the front window, she has pinned up hand-printed poster-sized quotes from the Founding Fathers—Jefferson, Adams (THIS WOULD BE THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS, IF THERE WERE NO RELIGION IN IT), Washington, Franklin, Madison—and such patriots as Tom Paine and Albert Einstein and Susan B. Anthony and Ambrose Bierce, all gathered for her Cretins essay, plus her own notebooked gems of wisdom (THE ENLIGHTENMENT: WHO HIT THE OFF-SWITCH?), even a few of her fiction fragments (literature! yay!). She put all her old unwashed T-shirts up for sale (once published, you don’t repeat yourself), spreading them out on tables made of planks on sawhorses, and inked up some new ones for the occasion, including variations on her Four Freedoms and ones bearing messages like Mark Twain’s SACRED COWS MAKE THE BEST HAMBURGER and H. L. Mencken’s DEEP WITHIN THE HEART OF EVERY EVANGELIST LIES THE WRECK OF A CAR SALESMAN. The clothing store used to have a bargain basement where her mom always shopped and down there in the murk she found some broken manikins—headless torsos, loose heads, scattered hands and feet—and she used them in the window to model her shirts. Filthy creatures and grotesquely battered, but perfect for the occasion. She put the heads on the floor of the window, chins propped by their feet and gazing up admiringly (or abashedly, who could tell?) at the headless bosoms in their amazing tees, and she twisted the waists on some of those that had them so that they wore their bottoms at the front, then inscribed upon the glossy cheeks her own parodies of religious and patriotic clichés. When Tommy saw it, he said: “You’re just trying to get people mad at you,” and she agreed with him.
After the parade has stumbled past, her friend Stacy Ryder comes in, showing off a white ceramic elephant with its trunk broken off that she says she found in a white elephant sale and couldn’t resist. “I mean, how often do you find just what you’re looking for?” She’s wearing shorts and a cut-off shirt that shows off her midriff. The sort of body that breaks hearts. “‘Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man,’” she says, reading one of the pinned-up placards. “Did Thomas Jefferson really say that?”
“Who knows what anyone said in the past? I can’t tell you what I said yesterday. But it’s in the history books, whatever history is. Jefferson was definitely no mindless Christian, though, nor were most of the founders. Different country then. Before the cults took over.”
“My Puritan forebears should have sunk off Plymouth.” She pauses in front of one of Sally’s story fragments taped to the wall. “‘A Place Called Suicide.’ I hope you’re not thinking of going there…?”
“No. A response to that shoe store guy.” When they offered up the empty Main Street stores for temporary occupation today, nobody wanted that one. “I’m only a tourist, taking pictures. That’s why I turned it into a place. So I could do that.” There is a place, not so much at the center of the city as inside the center of the city; it is a place children cannot discover, though adolescents sometimes stumble upon it in their anxious posturing. That’s the line Stacy is reading now. Maybe she shouldn’t have tacked it up. But publishing it on the wall like that led Sally to another line she’d scribbled at the bottom: True travelers do not even see the boundary notices, but are there before they realize they have set out. Which will lead to another, already formulating itself in her head. She could never go to such a place, it’s not in her nature, but the story can.
“When I was learning to ride a bicycle,” Stacy says, “my mother always insisted I ride on the left, facing the traffic, so I could see what was coming. The way she put it was, Stay off the suicide of the road.” Stacy smiles her smile, but a kind of sadness settles in. She doesn’t think Stacy is going to stay around much longer. She picks up a rose-colored shirt that reads SUPPORT ATHEISM: A NON-PROPHET ORGANIZATION and holds it up in front of her. “Hah,” she says, “it’s my lucky day. Perfect thing for the bank floor. How much?”
“Given the slogan, I could hardly charge you for that one.”
“I was thinking of it more like tithing.”
“How about community service? I promised to help clean up the street after the parade. Want to give me a hand?”
“Sure. Then I have to go serve wienies at the bank picnic. I understand things are about as wobbly out there as that sinking float.”
“Saw your boss pass by looking out of sorts. Is that what he was so agitated about?”
“My boss? No. Well, maybe. It was mainly about the sheriff, I think.”
“You mean, why he didn’t turn up?”
“Right. I think he’s dead. That’s what I heard.”
“Oh wow! But how—?”
“I don’t know. I heard people say his car might have caught on fire. Or got set on fire. And there was apparently some poor kid locked in the trunk.”
“Holy shit!
That’s really scary! Who was the kid?”
“I didn’t hear.”
Later, at the bank picnic, Tommy tells her: Royboy Coates. Sheriff Puller was found in his burnt-out car, his wrists handcuffed to the steering wheel. The sheriff’s radio dispatcher said she’d tried to reach him before she shut down, but he didn’t answer and she figured he’d turned in for the night. She also said it was Royboy who apparently set the trap with a call about a highway motorcycle accident. “Roy-boy was just totally fucked,” Tommy says, breathing noisily around his bandaged reconstructed nose. “The only odd thing at the scene was a Dick Tracy comicbook on the ground near the front bumper. It was old and beat up, but showed no signs of having been out in the weather, so they may have dropped it there as a kind of taunt to the cops. Maybe they can get fingerprints.” For some reason that strikes Sally as funny in a sick way, but she doesn’t say so. Tommy is pretty rattled. His dad tried to contact the governor to ask for troops, as he’s been doing the last few weeks, but he was told the governor was out on a statewide tour of Fourth of July parades and couldn’t be reached until Tuesday, and his dad said Tuesday was too late. “He was yelling at whoever he had on the phone, telling him this was an emergency, that the governor had to cancel his fucking joyride and get on top of this, order up the National Guard, we need them now, and the jerk at the other end said something about there being little he could do, it was a national holiday weekend and the available troops were all deployed at one parade or another. Dad shouted, ‘Well, goddamn it then, redeploy them!’ and slammed the phone down. He’s mad as hell. He also called both senators, our congressman, and his pal at the FBI, yelling and swearing at all of them or whoever answered the phones. Answering service operators, mostly, who probably thought they were talking to a madman. And those armed Christian Patriots you saw today in the parade? They’ve all been deputized by the new sheriff.”
Onward, Christian Soldiers. The real battle hymn of the Republic. Things are not going well for Captain America and his young masked sidekick. “I saw Charlie Bonali in the parade, too. He seems to have got up a gang of his own.”
“The Knights of Columbus Volunteer Defense Mob, alias the Dagotown Devil Dogs. That vicious fucking asshole. Fleet said they turned up at his deli asking for money, pushed him around, threatened him, stole stuff. Romano tried to keep them out of the parade, and those fundamentalist Klan types, too, but couldn’t. When the chief said they couldn’t be in the parade if they were armed, they both said it was their constitutional right to bear arms and they’d just fall in behind the last lot and march anyway. Which would have meant they’d be marching together, and that seemed too dangerous. They were already eyeing each other like they couldn’t wait to get at it. So the chief let them in and kept them separated, his own squad car and other marching groups, between them. Man. The whole day has just turned to shit. Things are fucking out of control.”
“It’s the Fourth, Tommy. An American holy day. What did you expect? Killing is patriotic.”
“Killing cops isn’t.”
“Sure it is. Patriots are made by revolutions. Which are against cops and the guys who own the cops.” She means that as a general historical principle, but he’ll take it that she’s slamming his father again. She lights up a smoke and tells herself to ease up. “What about your dad’s resurrection circus tomorrow? Is that still on?”
“Dad’s completely shot, about as low as I’ve seen him. Something’s really got him down—Mom being so sick and all, maybe trouble at the bank, I don’t know. I know he advanced Lem Filbert a lot of money, and Osborne too, and all that’s down the tubes. And now what’s happened today. He has worked so hard to try to turn things around, and this is what he gets. But, yeah, as far as I know he’s going through with it. He figures none of this would be happening if those evangelical dingbats hadn’t come back, so if he can get them to wise up and move on, the other problems may take care of themselves.” Another Twain quote she found while composing her Cretins essay was “Against a diseased imagination demonstration goes for nothing.” Twain wasn’t talking to the diseased imaginations, they’re a lost cause, something the human horde has to live with; he was talking to the fool who thinks he can do anything about it.
The whole town is out here at the high school playing fields, the nearest thing it has to a park. They used to have one in the center, but now it’s a parking lot with a drive-in root beer stand on one corner. The townsfolk are lapping up the ice cream and free eats and soft drinks under the hot afternoon sun, and there’s a lot of beer being passed around from personal coolers, but the mood is more apprehensive than festive. When the word got around, a lot of people dashed out to the Deepwater No. 9 access road where the sheriff’s car was found to get a glimpse of his scorched body before it was taken away, and though they all thought they wanted to see it, after they saw it they knew that they didn’t. It was like a sickening echo of the mine disaster and has brought the nightmares back. Sally follows Tommy’s gaze and sees Stacy at one of the bank food stalls, where she’s cooking up hot-dogs and serving paper plates of potato salad and baked beans. Stacy waves and she waves back. She apparently lacked the nerve to wear the “non-prophet” shirt out here. Or maybe she didn’t want to hide what she’s got. Can’t compete with that. “She’s so cute,” Sally says, and Tommy turns away with a sad clownish grin under his swathed nose and says, “Yeah, but not very friendly.”
The fat lady’s family, the ones who cleared out the swimming pool, are all over there at Stacy’s stall, grabbing up whatever’s offered, pocketing what they don’t eat. The little girl in the pink slipper is wearing Sally’s stolen “sacred cow” tee backward, down to her ankles like a dress. It left her shop along with lots of other things while she and Stacy were cleaning up the street. That’s okay. Spread the evangel. A fifth freedom. From the private ownership of the world. The girl and her brothers have been running about, throwing firecrackers at the squirrels and butterflies, trying to stamp out all the grasshoppers, helping themselves to the sports day prizes, shooting water pistols.
Sally has put on her John Adams “holy lies and pious frauds” tee for her Independence Day meeting with Billy Don, but maybe she should change to something more suggestive for later. Something straightforward like “Why Not?” Or “Ripe Fruit.” Hanging by a thread from the Tree of Knowledge. My Cunt-Tree. ’Tis of thee. For thee. She drops her cigarette and grinds it out with her sneaker heel. Stupid. “I have to go, Tommy. I promised to meet that kid from the camp. But how about watching the fireworks together tonight? I’ll invite Mary Jane along for company. I’ve got what’s left of her stowed away somewhere in a dirty sock.”
Tommy gazes at her thoughtfully with his discolored eyes. He’s probably not seen a lot of action since he dropped Angela and had to get his busted nose repaired. It has been a hard week and he’s tired and it shows. “Sounds just about right,” he says. Her heart’s pounding. She hopes it isn’t making her tee bounce. Like in the cartoons. She feels like a cartoon. Goose Girl. Thump thump. She snaps a cigarette out of a rumpled pack and lights up again, trying to hang loose, as the boys say. “Dad has called an emergency meeting of the NOWC committee with the chief and the acting sheriff, and I still have to run the raffle and a couple of races, make sure the stage mikes are working, and play a game of ball on one of the teams Fleet has put together. But by the time they light up the sky, if we’re not all dead, I’ll be ready to cool out.”
They meet at a pull-in near the path to the old abandoned municipal cemetery. Sally has ducked out of the town picnic, hoping to miss all the patriotic bunkum, go back after it’s over with stash in her pockets and a better tee. Billy Don wants to show her the filled-in grave, the one that Darren holds to be an otherwise inexplicable signal that the Rapture, or something like it, has begun. Or maybe he only wants to get her alone in a dark place. Billy Don is alarmed when he sees the garden spade she has brought along and he stops in his tracks, so she shrugs, winks, and tosses it back in the car,
gets out the sandwiches and sodas she has picked up at the picnic.
They haven’t seen each other since their interrupted midsummer swim at the lakes two weeks ago, so on their walk down the overgrown path through the woods to the buried graveyard, both of them in shorts and having to pick their way carefully past all the thorns and scratchy bushes and poison ivy, they fill each other in on the recent town and camp news. Billy Don tells her that he was one of those who found the sheriff. The guards on night duty last night said they saw a fire over near the mine from up on Inspiration Point, but it died down and they figured it was probably just a brush fire or kids getting off to an early start on the Fourth, and decided to wait until daylight to go over there, especially since they’d been hearing motorcycles again and were worried that that gang might be back. So after breakfast Billy Don and some of the other fellows armed themselves and drove over—and came driving right back again to call the deputy sheriff on the office phone. They didn’t open the trunk, only heard about that later. Billy Don says there’s a lot of anxiety at the camp because of the loss of their two most powerful protectors, first Mr. Suggs and now the sheriff, and because of the possible return of the bikers, though Darren thinks these are just further signs of the looming End Days. “You know, the horsemen. In the Bible. Those bikers. It was your aunt who saw the connection.” Billy Don tells her about Aunt Debra’s arrest, what Colin said in front of everybody. No wonder Aunt Debra seemed so shattered. Billy Don says Colin is “a mischievous liar.” Colin in turn now calls him Judas and screams accusations at Billy Don every time he leaves the camp. He is Darren’s little buddy, and Darren has moved over to Colin’s cabin. To take care of him, he says. Actually, that’s the best part. Darren has taken his worktable with him and Billy Don now has the cabin to himself. He is turning it into a proper church office, he says, so they can close the other one and finish the men’s restroom. After that, well, he doesn’t know… He casts a sideways wall-eyed glance her way.