Under the Dome: A Novel (114 page)

On the step outside, Big Jim breathed deeply of the smelly air and then sighed with something that sounded like satisfaction. Carter felt pretty satisfied himself. A week ago, he’d been replacing mufflers, wearing goggles to keep the sifting rust flakes from salt-rotted exhaust systems out of his eyes. Today he was a man of position and influence. A little smelly air seemed a small price to pay for that.

“I have a question for you,” Big Jim said. “If you don’t want to answer, it’s okay.”

Carter looked at him.

“The Bushey girl,” Big Jim said. “How was she? Was she good?”

Carter hesitated, then said: “A little dry at first, but she oiled up a-country fair.”

Big Jim laughed. The sound was metallic, like the sound of coins dropping into the tray of a slot machine.

14

Midnight, and the pink moon descending toward the Tarker’s Mills horizon, where it might linger until daylight, turning into a ghost before finally disappearing.

Julia picked her way through the orchard to where the McCoy land sloped down the western side of Black Ridge, and was not surprised to see a darker shadow sitting against one of the trees. Off to her right, the box with the alien symbol engraved on its top sent out a flash every fifteen seconds: the world’s smallest, strangest lighthouse.

“Barbie?” she asked, keeping her voice low. “How’s Ken?”

“Gone to San Francisco to march in the Gay Pride parade. I always knew that boy wasn’t straight.”

Julia laughed, then took his hand and kissed it. “My friend, I’m awfully glad you’re safe.”

He took her in his arms, and kissed her on both cheeks before letting her go. Lingering kisses. Real ones. “My friend, so am I.”

She laughed, but a thrill went straight through her, from neck to knees. It was one she recognized but hadn’t felt in a long time.
Easy, girl,
she thought.
He’s young enough to be your son.

Well, yes … if she’d gotten pregnant at thirteen.

“Everyone else is asleep,” Julia said. “Even Horace. He’s in with the kids. They had him chasing sticks until his tongue was practically dragging on the ground. Thinks he died and went to heaven, I bet.”

“I tried sleeping. Couldn’t.”

Twice he’d come close to drifting off, and both times he found himself back in the Coop, facing Junior Rennie. The first time Barbie had tripped instead of jigging to the right and had gone sprawling to the bunk, presenting a perfect target. The second time, Junior had reached through the bars with an impossibly long plastic arm and had seized him to make him hold still long enough to give up his life. After that one, Barbie had left the barn where the
men were sleeping and had come out here. The air still smelled like a room where a lifelong smoker had died six months ago, but it was better than the air in town.

“So few lights down there,” she said. “On an ordinary night there’d be nine times as many, even at this hour. The streetlights would look like a double strand of pearls.”

“There’s that, though.” Barbie had left one arm around her, but he lifted his free hand and pointed at the glow-belt. But for the Dome, where it ended abruptly, she thought it would have been a perfect circle. As it was, it looked like a horseshoe.

“Yes. Why do you suppose Cox hasn’t mentioned it? They must see it on their satellite photos.” She considered. “At least he hasn’t said anything to me. Maybe he did to you.”

“Nope, and he would’ve. Which means they
don’t
see it.”

“You think the Dome … what? Filters it out?”

“Something like that. Cox, the news networks, the outside world—they don’t see it because they don’t need to see it. I guess we do.”

“Is Rusty right, do you think? Are we just ants being victimized by cruel children with a magnifying glass? What kind of intelligent race would allow their children to do such a thing to another intelligent race?”

“
We
think we’re intelligent, but do they? We know that ants are social insects—home builders, colony builders, amazing architects. They work hard, as we do. They bury their dead, as we do. They even have race wars, the blacks against the reds. We know all this, but we don’t assume ants are intelligent.”

She pulled his arm tighter around her, although it wasn’t cold. “Intelligent or not, it’s wrong.”

“I agree. Most people would. Rusty knew it even as a child. But most kids don’t have a moral fix on the world. That takes years to develop. By the time we’re adults, most of us have put away childish things, which would include burning ants with a magnifying glass or pulling the wings off flies. Probably
their
adults have done the same. If they notice the likes of us at all, that is. When’s the last time you bent over and really examined an anthill?”

“But still … if we found ants on Mars, or even microbes, we wouldn’t destroy them. Because life in the universe is such a precious commodity. Every other planet in our system is a wasteland, for God’s sake.”

Barbie thought if NASA found life on Mars, they would have no compunctions whatever about destroying it in order to put it on a microscope slide and study it, but he didn’t say so. “If we were more scientifically advanced—or more spiritually advanced, maybe that’s what it actually takes to go voyaging around in the great what’s-outthere—we might see that there’s life everywhere. As many inhabited worlds and intelligent life-forms as there are anthills in this town.”

Was his hand now resting on the sideswell of her breast? She believed it was. It had been a long time since there had been a man’s hand there, and it felt very good.

“The one thing I’m sure of is that there are other worlds than the ones we can see with our puny telescopes here on Earth. Or even with the Hubble. And …
they’re
not here, you know. It’s not an invasion. They’re just looking. And … maybe … playing.”

“I know what that’s like,” she said. “To be played with.”

He was looking at her. Kissing distance. She wouldn’t mind being kissed; no, not at all.

“What do you mean? Rennie?”

“Do you believe there are certain defining moments in a person’s life? Watershed events that actually do change us?”

“Yes,” he said, thinking of the red smile his boot had left on the Abdul’s buttock. Just the ordinary asscheek of a man living his ordinary little life. “Absolutely.”

“Mine happened in fourth grade. At Main Street Grammar.”

“Tell me.”

“It won’t take long. That was the longest afternoon of my life, but it’s a short story.”

He waited.

“I was an only child. My father owned the local newspaper—he had a couple of reporters and one ad salesman, but otherwise he was pretty much a one-man band, and that was just how he liked it.

There was never any question that I’d take over when he retired. He believed it, my mother believed it, my teachers believed it, and of course
I
believed it. My college education was all planned out. Nothing so bush-league as the University of Maine, either, not for Al Shumway’s girl. Al Shumway’s girl was going to Princeton. By the time I was in the fourth grade, there was a Princeton pennant over my bed and I practically had my bags packed.

“Everyone—not excluding me—just about worshipped the ground I walked on. Except for my fellow fourth-graders, that was. At the time I didn’t understand the causes, but now I wonder how I missed them. I was the one who sat in the front row and always raised my hand when Mrs. Connaught asked a question, and I always got the answer right. I turned in my assignments ahead of time if I could, and volunteered for extra credit. I was a grade-grind and a bit of a wheedler. Once, when Mrs. Connaught came back into class after having to leave us alone for a few minutes, little Jessie Vachon’s nose was bleeding. Mrs. Connaught said we’d all have to stay after unless someone told her who did it. I raised my hand and said it was Andy Manning. Andy punched Jessie in the nose when Jessie wouldn’t lend Andy his art-gum eraser. And I didn’t see anything wrong with that, because it was the truth. Are you getting this picture?”

“You’re coming in five-by.”

“That little episode was the last straw. One day not long afterwards, I was walking home across the Common and a bunch of girls were laying for me inside the Peace Bridge. There were six of them. The ringleader was Lila Strout, who’s now Lila Killian—she married Roger Killian, which serves her absolutely right. Don’t ever let anyone tell you children can’t carry their grudges into adulthood.

“They took me to the bandstand. I struggled at first, but then two of them—Lila was one, Cindy Collins, Toby Manning’s mother, was the other—punched me. Not in the shoulder, the way kids usually do, either. Cindy hit me in the cheek, and Lila punched me square in the right boob. How that hurt! I was just getting my breasts, and they ached even when they were left alone.

“I started crying. That’s usually the signal—among kids, at least—that things have gone far enough. Not that day. When I started screaming, Lila said, ‘Shut up or you get worse.’ There was nobody to stop them, either. It was a cold, drizzly afternoon, and the Common was deserted except for us.

“Lila slapped me across the face hard enough to make my nose bleed and said, ‘Tattle-tale tit! All the dogs in town come to have a little bit!’ And the other girls laughed. They said it was because I told on Andy, and at the time I thought it was, but now I see it was everything, right down to the way my skirts and blouses and even my hair ribbons matched. They wore clothes, I had outfits. Andy was just the last straw.”

“How bad was it?”

“There was slapping. Some hair-pulling. And … they spit on me. All of them. That was after my legs gave out and I fell down on the bandstand. I was crying harder than ever, and I had my hands over my face, but I felt it. Spit’s warm, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“They were saying stuff like
teacher’s pet
and
goody-goody-gumdrops
and
little miss shit-don’t-stink.
And then, just when I thought they were done, Corrie Macintosh said, ‘Let’s pants her!’ Because I was wearing slacks that day, nice ones my mom got from a catalogue. I loved them. They were the kind of slacks you might see a coed wearing as she crossed the Quad at Princeton. At least that’s what I thought then.

“I fought them harder that time, but they won, of course. Four of them held me down while Lila and Corrie pulled off my slacks. Then Cindy Collins started laughing and pointing and saying, ‘She’s got frickin Poohbear on her underpants!’ Which I did, along with Eeyore and Roo. They all started laughing, and … Barbie … I got smaller … and smaller … and smaller. Until the bandstand floor was like a great flat desert and I was an insect stuck in the middle of it.
Dying
in the middle of it.”

“Like an ant under a magnifying glass, in other words.”

“Oh, no! No, Barbie! It was
cold,
not hot. I was
freezing.
I had
goosebumps on my legs. Corrie said, ‘Let’s take her pannies, too!’ but that was a little farther than they were prepared to go. As the next best thing, maybe, Lila took my nice slacks and threw them onto the roof of the bandstand. After that, they left. Lila was the last one to go. She said, ‘If you tattle this time, I’ll get my brother’s knife and cut off your bitch nose.’ ”

“What happened?” Barbie asked. And yes, his hand was definitely resting against the side of her breast.

“What happened at first was just a scared little girl crouching there on the bandstand, wondering how she was going to get home without half the town seeing her in her silly baby underwear. I felt like the smallest, dumbest Chiclet who ever lived. I finally decided I’d wait until dark. My mother and father would be worried, they might even call the cops, but I didn’t care. I was going to wait until dark and then sneak home by the sidestreets. Hide behind trees if anyone came along.

“I must have dozed a little bit, because all at once Kayla Bevins was standing over me. She’d been right in there with the rest, slapping and pulling my hair and spitting on me. She didn’t say as much as the rest, but she was part of it. She helped hold me while Lila and Corrie pantsed me, and when they saw one of the legs of my slacks was hanging off the edge of the roof, Kayla got up on the railing and flipped it all the way up, so I wouldn’t be able to reach it.

“I begged her not to hurt me anymore. I was beyond things like pride and dignity. I begged her not to pull my underwear down. Then I begged her to help me. She just stood there and listened, like I was nothing to her. I
was
nothing to her. I knew that then. I guess I forgot it over the years, but I’ve sort of reconnected with that particular home truth as a result of the Dome experience.

“Finally I ran down and just lay there sniffling. She looked at me a little longer, then pulled off the sweater she was wearing. It was an old baggy brown thing that hung almost to her knees. She was a big girl and it was a big sweater. She threw it down on top of me and said, ‘Wear it home, it’ll look like a dress.’

“That was all she said. And although I went to school with her for
eight more years—all the way to graduation at Mills High—we never spoke again. But sometimes in my dreams I still hear her saying that one thing:
Wear it home, it’ll look like a dress.
And I see her face. No hate or anger in it, but no pity, either. She didn’t do it out of pity, and she didn’t do it to shut me up. I don’t know why she did it. I don’t know why she even came back. Do you?”

“No,” he said, and kissed her mouth. It was brief, but warm and moist and quite terrific.

“Why did you do that?”

“Because you looked like you needed it, and I know I did. What happened next, Julia?”

“I put on the sweater and walked home—what else? And my parents were waiting.”

She lifted her chin pridefully.

“I never told them what happened, and they never found out. For about a week I saw the pants on my way to school, lying up there on the bandstand’s little conical roof. Every time I felt the shame and the hurt—like a knife in my heart. Then one day they were gone. That didn’t make the pain all gone, but after that it was a little better. Dull instead of sharp.