Under the Dome: A Novel (19 page)

“The canned stuff must be extremely tasty after fifty years.”

“Actually, they rotate in new goods every so often. There’s even a small generator that went in after nine-eleven. Check the Town
Report and you’ll see an appropriation item for the shelter every four years or so. Used to be three hundred dollars. Now it’s six hundred. You’ve got your Geiger counter.” She shifted her eyes to him briefly. “Of course, James Rennie sees all things Town Hall, from the attic to the fallout shelter, as his personal property, so he’ll want to know why you want it.”

“Big Jim Rennie isn’t going to know,” he said.

She accepted this without comment. “Would you like to come back to the office with me? Watch the President’s speech while I start comping the paper? It’ll be a quick and dirty job, I can tell you that. One story, half a dozen pictures for local consumption, no Burpee’s Autumn Sales Days circular.”

Barbie considered it. He was going to be busy tomorrow, not just cooking but asking questions. Starting the old job all over again, in the old way. On the other hand, if he went back to his place over the drugstore, would he be able to sleep?

“Okay. And I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but I have excellent office-boy skills. I also make a mean cup of coffee.”

“Mister, you are on.” She raised her right hand off the wheel and Barbie slapped her five.

“Can I ask you one more question? Strictly not for publication?”

“Sure,” he said.

“This sci-fi generator. Do you think you’ll find it?”

Barbie thought it over as she pulled in beside the storefront that housed the
Democrat
’s offices.

“No,” he said at last. “That would be too easy.”

She sighed and nodded. Then she grasped his fingers. “Would it help, do you think, if I prayed for your success?”

“Couldn’t hurt,” Barbie said.

4

There were only two churches in Chester’s Mill on Dome Day; both purveyed the Protestant brand of goods (although in very different ways). Catholics went to Our Lady of Serene Waters in Motton, and the town’s dozen or so Jews attended Congregation Beth Shalom in Castle Rock when they felt in need of spiritual consolation. Once there had been a Unitarian church, but it had died of neglect in the late eighties. Everyone agreed it had been sort of hippydippy, anyway. The building now housed Mill New & Used Books.

Both Chester’s Mill pastors were what Big Jim Rennie liked to call “kneebound” that night, but their modes of address, states of mind, and expectations were very different.

The Reverend Piper Libby, who ministered to her flock from the pulpit of the First Congregational Church, no longer believed in God, although this was a fact she had not shared with her congregants. Lester Coggins, on the other hand, believed to the point of martyrdom or madness (both words for the same thing, perhaps).

The Rev. Libby, still wearing her Saturday grubs—and still pretty enough, even at forty-five, to look good in them—knelt in front of the altar in almost total darkness (the Congo had no generator), with Clover, her German shepherd, lying behind her with his nose on his paws and his eyes at half-mast.

“Hello, Not-There,” Piper said. Not-There was her private name for God just lately. Earlier in the fall it had been The Great Maybe. During the summer, it had been The Omnipotent Could-Be. She’d liked that one; it had a certain ring. “You know the situation I’ve been in—You should, I’ve bent Your ear about it enough—but that’s not what I’m here to talk about tonight. Which is probably a relief to You.”

She sighed.

“We’re in a mess here, my Friend. I hope You understand it, because I sure don’t. But we both know this place is going to be full of people tomorrow, looking for heavenly disaster assistance.”

It was quiet inside the church, and quiet outside. “Too quiet,” as they said in the old movies. Had she ever heard The Mill this quiet on a Saturday night? There was no traffic, and the bass thump of whatever weekend band happened to be playing at Dipper’s (always advertised as being
DIRECT FROM BOSTON!
) was absent.

“I’m not going to ask that You show me Your will, because I’m no longer convinced You actually
have
a will. But on the off chance that You are there after all—always a possibility, I’m more than happy to admit that—please help me to say something helpful. Hope not in heaven, but right here on earth. Because …” She was not surprised to find that she had started to cry. She bawled so often now, although always in private. New Englanders strongly disapproved of public tears from ministers and politicians.

Clover, sensing her distress, whined. Piper told him to hush, then turned back to the altar. She often thought of the cross there as the religious version of the Chevrolet Bowtie, a logo that had come into being for no other reason than because some guy saw it on the wallpaper of a Paris hotel room a hundred years ago and liked it. If you saw such symbols as divine, you were probably a lunatic.

Nevertheless, she persevered.

“Because, as I’m sure You know, Earth is what we have. What we’re sure of. I want to help my people. That’s my job, and I still want to do it. Assuming You’re there, and that You care—shaky assumptions, I admit—then please help me. Amen.”

She stood up. She had no flashlight, but anticipated no trouble finding her way outside with unbarked shins. She knew this place step for step and obstacle for obstacle. Loved it, too. She didn’t fool herself about either her lack of faith or her stubborn love of the idea itself.

“Come on, Clove,” she said. “President in half an hour. The other Great Not-There. We can listen on the car radio.”

Clover followed placidly, untroubled by questions of faith.

5

Out on Little Bitch Road (always referred to as Number Three by Holy Redeemer worshippers), a far more dynamic scene was taking place, and under bright electric lights. Lester Coggins’s house of worship possessed a generator new enough for the shipping tags still to be pasted on its bright orange side. It had its own shed, also painted orange, next to the storage barn behind the church.

Lester was a man of fifty so well maintained—by genetics as well as his own strenuous efforts to take care of the temple of his body—that he looked no more than thirty-five (judicious applications of Just For Men helped in this regard). He wore nothing tonight but a pair of gym shorts with ORAL ROBERTS GOLDEN EAGLES printed on the right leg, and almost every muscle on his body stood out.

During services (of which there were five each week), Lester prayed in an ecstatic televangelist tremolo, turning the Big Fellow’s name into something that sounded as if it could have come from an overamped wah-wah pedal: not
God
but
GUH-UH-UH-ODD!
In his private prayers, he sometimes fell into these same cadences without realizing it. But when he was deeply troubled, when he really needed to take counsel with the God of Moses and Abraham, He who traveled as a pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night, Lester held up his end of the conversation in a deep growl that made him sound like a dog on the verge of attacking an intruder. He wasn’t aware of this because there was no one in his life to hear him pray. Piper Libby was a widow who had lost her husband and both young sons in an accident three years before; Lester Coggins was a lifelong bachelor who as an adolescent had suffered nightmares of masturbating and looking up to see Mary Magdalene standing in his bedroom doorway.

The church was almost as new as the generator, and constructed of expensive red maple. It was also plain to the point of starkness. Behind Lester’s bare back stretched a triple rank of pews beneath a
beamed ceiling. Ahead of him was the pulpit: nothing but a lectern with a Bible on it and a large redwood cross hanging on a drape of royal purple. The choir loft was above and to the right, with musical instruments—including the Stratocaster Lester himself sometimes played—clustered at one end.

“God hear my prayer,” Lester said in his growly I’m-really-praying voice. In one hand he held a heavy length of rope that had been knotted twelve times, one knot for each disciple. The ninth knot—the one signifying Judas—had been painted black. “God hear my prayer, I ask it in the name of the crucified and risen Jesus.”

He began to whip himself across the back with the rope, first over the left shoulder and then over the right, his arm rising and flexing smoothly. His not inconsiderable biceps and delts began to pop a sweat. When it struck his already well-scarred skin, the knotted rope made a carpet-beater sound. He had done this many times before, but never with such force.

“God hear my
prayer
! God hear
my
prayer! God
hear
my prayer!
God
hear my prayer!”

Whack
and
whack
and
whack
and
whack.
The sting like fire, like nettles. Sinking in along the turnpikes and byroads of his miserable human nerves. Both terrible and terribly satisfying.

“Lord, we have sinned in this town, and I am chief among sinners. I listened to Jim Rennie and believed his lies. Yea, I believed, and here is the price, and it is now as it was of old. It’s not just the one that pays for the sin of one, but the many. You are slow to anger, but when it comes, Your anger is like the storms that sweep a field of wheat, laying low not just one stalk or a score but every one. I have sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind, not just for one but for many.”

There were other sins and other sinners in The Mill—he knew that, he was not naïve, they swore and danced and sexed and took drugs he knew far too much about—and they no doubt deserved to be punished, to be
scourged,
but that was true of
every
town, surely, and this was the only one that had been singled out for this terrible act of God.

And yet … and yet … was it possible that this strange curse was not because of
his
sin? Yes. Possible. Although not likely.

“Lord, I need to know what to do. I’m at the crossroads. If it’s Your will that I should stand in this pulpit tomorrow morning and confess to what that man talked me into—the sins we participated in together, the sins I have participated in alone—then I will do so. But that would mean the end of my ministry, and it’s hard for me to believe that’s Your will at such a crucial time. If it’s Your will that I should wait … wait and see what happens next … wait and pray with my flock that this burden should be lifted … then I’ll do that. Your will be done, Lord. Now and always.”

He paused in his scourging (he could feel warm and comforting trickles running down his bare back; several of the rope knots had begun to turn red) and turned his tearstained face up toward the beamed roof.

“Because these folks need me, Lord. You
know
they do, now more than ever. So … if it’s Your will that this cup should be removed from my lips … please give me a sign.”

He waited. And behold, the Lord God said unto Lester Coggins, “I will shew you a sign. Goest thou to thy Bible, even as you did as a child after those nasty dreams of yours.”

“This minute,” Lester said. “This
second.
”

He hung the knotted rope around his neck, where it printed a blood horseshoe on his chest and shoulders, then mounted to the pulpit with more blood trickling down the hollow of his spine and dampening the elastic waistband of his shorts.

He stood at the pulpit as if to preach (although never in his worst nightmares had he dreamed of preaching in such scant garb), closed the Bible lying open there, then shut his eyes. “Lord, Thy will be done—I ask in the name of Your Son, crucified in shame and risen in glory.”

And the Lord said, “Open My Book, and see what you see.”

Lester did as instructed (taking care not to open the big Bible too close to the middle—this was an Old Testament job if ever there had been one). He plunged his finger down to the unseen page, then
opened his eyes and bent to look. It was the second chapter of Deuteronomy, the twenty-eighth verse. He read:

“The Lord shalt smite thee with madness and blindness and astonishment of the heart.”

Astonishment of the heart was probably good, but on the whole this wasn’t encouraging. Or clear. Then the Lord spake again, saying: “Don’t stop there, Lester.”

He read the twenty-ninth verse.

“And thou shalt grope at noonday—”

“Yes, Lord, yes,” he breathed, and read on.

“—as the blind gropeth in darkness, and thou shalt not prosper in thy ways: and thou shalt be only oppressed and spoiled evermore, and no man shall save thee.”

“Will I be struck blind?” Lester asked, his growly prayer-voice rising slightly. “Oh God, please don’t do that—although, if it is Thy will—”

The Lord spake unto him again, saying, “Did you get up on the stupid side of the bed today, Lester?”

His eyes flew wide. God’s voice, but one of his mother’s favorite sayings. A true miracle. “No, Lord, no.”

“Then look again. What am I shewing you?”

“It’s something about madness. Or blindness.”

“Which of the two dost thou thinkest most likely?”

Lester scored the verses. The only word repeated was
blind.

“Is that … Lord, is that my sign?”

The Lord answered, saying, “Yea, verily, but not thine own blindness; for now thine eyes see more clearly. Lookest thou for the blinded one who has gone mad. When you see him, you must tell your congregation what Rennie has been up to out here, and your part in it. You both must tell. We’ll talk about this more, but for now, Lester, go to bed. You’re dripping on the floor.”

Lester did, but first he cleaned up the little splatters of blood on the hardwood behind the pulpit. He did it on his knees. He didn’t pray as he worked, but he meditated on the verses. He felt much better.

For the time being, he would speak only generally of the sins which might have brought this unknown barrier down between The Mill and the outside world; but he would look for the sign. For a blind man or woman who had gone crazy, yea, verily.

6

Brenda Perkins listened to WCIK because her husband liked it (
had
liked it), but she would never have set foot inside the Holy Redeemer Church. She was Congo to the core, and she made sure her husband went with her.