Happy Policeman (21 page)

Chapter Forty-Nine

DeWitt ran to his car. The air was hushed and sticky. Around Hattie’s ranch, melting snow conjured from the cold earth a viscous, knee-deep fog. It trickled down the incline where her house stood and, seeking its level, pooled deep in the hollow near the road

He started the engine, flicked on the headlights. Their glare danced across the top of the mist, as if his car were a plane riding a bank of cloud. Purblind, he inched down the gravel road toward the highway, driving by landmarks. To his right, the top rungs of Hattie’s board fence; to his left, the leaves of her sapling magnolia. Then the road dipped, and he drowned in white.

The fog was blank, close, shimmering. As if, now freed, all the ghosts from behind the Line had gathered.

A looming form at the driver’s side. A pale, haunted face in the glass. The sharp
rap-rap
of knuckles.

“DeWitt?”

Hattie. He braked and threw the car into Park.

She was crying helplessly. Soggy, chest-hitching sobs, her hands at her sides and her mouth a tortured, wailing “O”.

“I woke up and you were gone. You were gone, Wittie! And everything was so hot and quiet and strange. I ran everywhere looking for you. And then I saw your taillights leaving. You left me! How could you do that?”

She had slept in her navy-blue suit; but had run barefoot down the gravel drive. Her toes were stubbed and bleeding.

He got out, put his arms around her. “The Line’s down,” he said. “Don’t cry. Please don’t cry. Get in the car now, Hattie. We’re going to Granger’s.”

He drove, her quivering hand in his.

Granger’s porchlight was lit. The huge farmer was standing on the porch with his wife.

“Stay here,” DeWitt told Hattie. “I’ll be up there on the porch where you can see me. Let go of me, Hattie, please.”

He waded through the mist, Halfway up the steps, he saw the butcher knife in Granger’s hand.

“You seen it?” Granger’s baritone squeaked falsetto. “You seen how hot it is?”

“Yeah, I know. Put down the knife.”

“Pastor Jimmy was right, Wittie.”

Granger’s wife was statue-still. The vacancy DeWitt saw in her eyes unnerved him,

“We died six years ago in a nuclear war, and we never knew it,” Granger said. “This is what death is.”

Fog licked the edge of the porch. Sweat broke out on DeWitt’s body; and where the hot wind touched, his skiin burned.

“Granger, drop the knife.”

Light glinted along the blade. “Them Torku was sent to judge us, and we been found wanting. Demons coming after us now. I’ll be ready for them when they come, Chief. And they’re coming, you can bet on that.”

In the small voice of sanity, DeWitt said, “You’re scaring your wife.”

“She needs to know how the cow ate the corn. Everyone needs to know. Oh God, Wittie.” A deep inhuman sound, like the groan of floorboards. “We should’ve forgive Billy Harper.”

DeWitt stared at the knife, afraid to move.

A beep from a car horn. Granger’s wife gave a sharp little cry. DeWitt turned and saw headlights puncturing the fog. A Bronco, engine rumbling, stopped in the yard. The driver’s door opened and a dark figure materialized in the gloom.

Doc’s familiar bray. “Hi, Granger. Seen your lights on. DeWitt, you got to come with me. Pastor Jimmy’s congregating people down on Main. Everybody’s scared, Wittie. They’re plumb ape-shit with panic, and there’s no telling what they’ll do.”

Chapter Fifty

On main street the people of Coomey stood disheveled and disoriented in the ankle-deep fog, like people awakened by a house fire. Under the glow of street lights women clutched robes shut over nightgowns, and men wore jeans pulled up over pajamas. Pastor Jimmy was in the bed of a pickup, preaching.

DeWitt freed his hand from Hattie’s. Easing from behind the wheel of his squad car, he caught a heart-stopping cameo of Janet before the milling mob swallowed her.

Foster broke from the crowd and ran to them. “Did you see? The Torku are gone! I can’t believe it! I just can’t believe that Seresen gave up on us like that! Where
are
we, anyway?” he wailed. “Why is it so dark out there?”

Doc ambled up. “Hubert? Stop bitching and go talk some sense into these people. You, too, Hattie.” He watched as the pair reluctantly left. “DeWitt? You go down to where the Line used to be.”

“What?”
Wait.

“That’s your job.”

But I’m not ready.
Anything could be waiting. The ultimate nothing: a crack between universes.

“That’s what we pay you for,” Doc said.

“I haven’t been paid in six years!” DeWitt’s shout was so loud that Pastor Jimmy, arms still upraised, stopped preaching. “That’s the goddamned definition of a job, when you get paid for it, right? Why do you expect me to do all your dirty work? Jesus, I even killed a man for you people. What more do you want?”

“If you’re scared . . .” Doc began.

“If you’re not scared, why don’t
you
go see? Tell you what. I’ll wait here, and if you’re not back in thirty minutes, I’ll go looking for you. Okay? Let’s check our watches.” DeWitt looked down at his digital. 10:15 A.M., his watch blinked, and it was still pitch-dark.

“I could call Bo . . .” Doc said.

“No, forget it. I’ll go.” DeWitt had to. Or he would go crazy. He couldn’t stand with the crowd on Main, listening to Pastor Jimmy’s terrified sermon and waiting for a dawn that might not come.

Doc nodded. “I’ll get up on that pickup and see if I can prepare everybody for a possible attack, just in case you run into survivors. I got some of Purdy’s unexposed film. When you get back, we’ll see if it’s fogged, and then we’ll know for sure.”

“Know what for sure?”

He shoved an envelope into DeWitt’s breast pocket. “If there’s radiation.”

Chapter Fifty-One

Jimmy Schoen gazed into the upturned faces, faces as pallid and unreachable as moons. The street lights were distant galaxies. Coaxed by fluctuating, eternal entropy, everything in the universe was moving away.

Dee Dee stood with Foster. Doc stood muttering with Purdy. Not even God stood at Schoen’s side.

He was afraid. He’d preached so long of wrath that he’d overlooked mercy.

“Pray!” he screamed.

Surely God, even deafened by His rage, would hear the piteous entreaties of his children.

“Pray!” His own fear reflected in a hundred faces.

Some of the crowd were mumbling. Some were silent and bewildered.

Jimmy Schoen said, “Pray for mercy.” And he tried his very best to imagine compassion falling like rain.

Chapter Fifty-Two

DeWitt wished that dawn would break—and just then the sky caught fire. He jerked his car to the shoulder and stopped. On the eastern horizon the sun popped up over the fog nonchalantly, as though it were accustomed to rising at eleven in the morning.

Heart lurching, DeWitt drove on. Ahead should be the Tucker house. And, just like the sun, there it was, its gap-toothed porch railing looming from the mist.

The closer he got to the Line, the slower he drove. He passed bare-limbed winter forest. A Mexican dove hooted from a deadfall.

What if the real test was starting now? Maybe Seresen had left a blank slate to be filled in by imagination. Maybe, if DeWitt thought hard enough, the war would have never happened.

But what if he found the place he saw in dreams: a star-shot, bottomless well? He pictured himself getting too close to the edge, pictured himself falling into . . .

No, not limbo. He mustn’t create a limbo. Too much depended on him. He’d concentrate hard, because home had to be there.

He let the car coast around the last bend. The speed limit sign caught the pink from the rising sun. And then, where the Line used to be . . .

DeWitt gasped and stood on his brakes. The town’s memorial trinkets lay in a forlorn row, bordering the place where the fog ended.

He hadn’t been strong enough, had not held on tight. He’d let time slip: even in the dim light he could see that the foliage beyond lacked the hopeful glossiness of spring. Those leaves were dusty, beaten down by a long Texas summer and weeks of drought.

He shut off the motor. The hot engine ticked.

In the land of high summer, boys, bats in hand, would walk to the plate. People would be washing cars, watering lawns, sitting down to barbecue lunches.

And his father would be waiting.

DeWitt put his head in his hands. The Torku took them in March. He tried to imagine sudden thunderstorms and budding chartreuse leaves. But summer, chlorine-scented, hammock-indolent summer, called in a vacation-happy voice.

He opened his eyes: the trees hadn’t changed. The sun was molten gold by the time he gave up the fight. He left the car to gather memories in his arms: a beer stein TO JERRY DEITZ, BEST FRIEND; a rain-worn lace tablecloth FOR AUNT RACHEL. He pocketed the police chief’s badge. When the road was clear, he got behind the wheel.

What if the forest was an illusion? If he tried to drive through, he would tear that movie backdrop. The squad car’s tires would spin on air. And he would be trapped between universes forever.

His hands clenched the wheel so hard, they cramped. He thought good thoughts so furiously that he poured sweat. He let the car take its time, and as it crawled, he hurriedly put a highway beneath it. He brought the forest ahead into being. Woods. More woods. The sun mounting the sky.

Beyond the crest of the next hill there should have been a logging road. And there it was, its barbed-wire and plank fence sagging. Around a curve, the mile marker, a blur in the pale light. For a terrifying instant he couldn’t remember what lay around the next bend. And then he knew, and he built it there.

Beside the highway, a neat white frame building. A gravel parking lot. Warm light flooding from the windows. He parked and got out of the car. His hand moved to his breast pocket, to Doc’s envelope. Radiation would be bouncing like popcorn from the trees, invading marrow, rending cells. He was already dying.

Christ, what was the matter with him? There was no nuclear war. There couldn’t be. Couldn’t be. He had to remember that.

He trudged the steps, put his hand to the knob, and froze. From beyond the curtain came the clink of silverware. Television sounds.

Zombies. Zombies were in there, having breakfast. The charred dead risen from their graves.
His mama’s eyes, white and empty. Her burned face oozing.

Oh, fuck. This is too hard. I’m just not ready.

But he took a breath and opened the door.

The walls of Olivia’s Cafe were paneled. DeWitt remembered them as pale blue. His heart started to race. Not a big problem, though, not really. He just hadn’t thought about the walls, that was all.

Except for Olivia, the diner was empty. For some reason he had made her thirty pounds heavier. Made her hair shorter and grayer. “Hey, DeWitt. Still got that cold?”

He stood stock-still in panic. Time was moving too fast, and he couldn’t keep up. If he didn’t focus his thoughts, the world would crumble. What would happen to him then? Not death. An eternal half-life.

“Summer colds are the worst kind of shit. Ain’t that right, Hudson?”

A summer cold? Where had that come from?

Hudson poked his dark face through the slit between counter and kitchen. “Sure is. Hey, man, you losing weight. Want the usual?”

DeWitt’s mind frantically leaped the six years. The usual. Eggs sunnyside up, a rasher of bacon, and hash browns.

“Sit down, honey.” Olivia poured a cup of coffee and set it on the counter.

DeWitt shuffled across the room and sat. He watched himself pick up the cup. Watched Olivia light a cigarette. On the wall-mounted television a gray-suited W.C. Fields of a man preached from the top of a tank.

The Pearl Beer clock read 6:07. A beefcake calendar was taped to the wall. Mr. August’s shirt was open, his pants unzipped. The pouty, muscular Mr. August of 1991.

“You look like shit.” Olivia leaned close and put the back of her hand to his forehead. “You’re so pale. Didn’t I tell you yesterday you ought to get into bed?”

Yesterday. August 1991. The Torku had stolen six years; DeWitt had carelessly misplaced six months. In DeWitt’s trembling fingers the cup shook, sloshing coffee.

“Why are you so damned quiet, Wittie? Something happen?” Olivia placed his breakfast in front of him. Dry whole-wheat toast. Oatmeal.

Everything was wrong. Time, the breakfast, the walls. The world was slipping. If he didn’t work hard . . .

But up there, on the TV screen, Russians queued up at McDonald’s. Statues of Lenin toppled. A general of the Evil Empire made jokes and drank Pepsi Cola as he was interviewed by CNN. People laughed in Moscow streets and waved striped banners of red, white, and blue. DeWitt couldn’t remember seeing Russians laugh before.

Time wasn’t important: what DeWitt saw on the screen was. He sat back and smiled. Outside the curtained windows the diurnal Earth revolved and his newly minted sun climbed the sky.

Chapter Fifty-Three

He drove back to town fast. Success couldn’t come that easily. He looked in his rearview mirror, afraid he would see his world rolling up like a poster freed from its frame.

Yet it stayed put. And on the Coomey side of the Line, the winter-blasted trees were budding.

The crowd on Main was singing hymns. The sun had topped the trees, the buildings. Blue shadows striated the ground.

When DeWitt got out of the car, Denny burst from the gathering and ran to him. “You was gone so long, Daddy. And Tammy kept asking if you was dead, and Pastor kept saying as how we was all going to Hell, and all the grownups was crying.”

He lifted the child. “Daddy took care of it.”

“I know.” Denny nodded. “I wasn’t scared.”

For children faith was effortless. The world beyond the Line seemed misty now, like a land DeWitt had once visited in dreams. DeWitt pressed his son to him, that warm body where his adult belief was held in account: a blind trust.

He took a breath. Walked toward the pickup, saw Jimmy Schoen turn. Heard the singing trail to silence. Noticed peripherally that the crowd had hushed.

DeWitt grabbed the fender and stepped onto the tailgate.

His voice, when it emerged, was still and quiet. And very humble. Nothing like the voice of a world-builder.

“Why don’t we turn on
Good Morning America?”
he said.