Under the Dome: A Novel (62 page)

“I did,” she said. “I did have it.” And if she told him where she had left it? Bad luck for Andrea. She started to get up. “You had your chance. Now I’m leaving.”

“Your other mistake was thinking you’d be safe outside on the street. An
empty
street.” His voice was almost kind, and when he touched her arm, she turned to look at him. He seized her face. And twisted.

Brenda Perkins heard a bitter crack, like the breaking of a branch overloaded with ice, and followed the sound into a great darkness, trying to call her husband’s name as she went.

21

Big Jim went inside and got a Jim Rennie’s Used Cars gimme cap from the front hall closet. Also some gloves. And a pumpkin from
the pantry. Brenda was still in her Adirondack chair, with her chin on her chest. He looked around. No one. The world was his. He put the hat on her head (pulling the brim low), the gloves on her hands, and the pumpkin in her lap. It would serve perfectly well, he thought, until Junior came back and took her to where she could become part of Dale Barbara’s butcher’s bill. Until then, she was just another stuffed Halloween dummy.

He checked her carrier-bag. It contained her wallet, a comb, and a paperback novel. So
that
was all right. It would be fine down cellar, behind the dead furnace.

He left her with the hat slouched on her head and the pumpkin in her lap and went inside to stash her bag and wait for his son.

1

Selectman Rennie’s assumption that no one had seen Brenda come to his house that morning was correct. But she
was
seen on her morning travels, not by one person but by three, including one who also lived on Mill Street. If Big Jim had known, would the knowledge have given him pause? Doubtful; by then he was committed to his course and it was too late to turn back. But it might have caused him to reflect (for he
was
a reflective man, in his own way) on murder’s similarity to Lay’s potato chips: it’s hard to stop with just one.

2

Big Jim didn’t see the watchers when he came down to the corner of Mill and Main. Neither did Brenda as she walked up Town Common Hill. This was because they didn’t want to be seen. They were sheltering just inside the Peace Bridge, which happened to be a condemned structure. But that wasn’t the worst of it. If Claire McClatchey had seen the cigarettes, she would have shit a brick. In fact, she might have shit two. And certainly she never would have let Joe chum with Norrie Calvert again, not even if the fate of the town hinged upon their association, because it was Norrie who supplied the smokes—badly bent and croggled Winstons, which she had found on a shelf in the garage. Her father had quit smoking the year
before and the pack was covered with a fine scrim of dust, but the cigarettes inside had looked okay to Norrie. There were just three, but three was perfect: one each. Think of it as a good-luck rite, she instructed.

“We’ll smoke like Indians praying to the gods for a successful hunt. Then we’ll go to work.”

“Sounds good,” Joe said. He had always been curious about smoking. He couldn’t see the attraction, but there must be one, because a lot of people still did it.

“Which gods?” Benny Drake asked.

“The gods of your choice,” Norrie answered, looking at him as if he were the dumbest creature in the universe. “
God
god, if that’s the one you like.” Dressed in faded denim shorts and a pink sleeveless top, her hair for once down and framing her foxy little face instead of scrooped back in its usual sloppin-around-town ponytail, she looked good to both boys. Totally awesome, in fact. “
I
pray to Wonder Woman.”

“Wonder Woman is not a goddess,” Joe said, taking one of the elderly Winstons and smoothing it straight. “Wonder Woman is a superhero.” He considered. “Maybe a superher-
ette.
”

“She’s a goddess to me,” Norrie replied with a grave-eyed sincerity that could not be gainsaid, let alone ridiculed. She was carefully straightening her own cigarette. Benny left his the way it was; he thought a bent cigarette had a certain coolness factor. “I had Wonder Woman Power Bracelets until I was nine, but then I lost them. I think that bitch Yvonne Nedeau stole them.”

She lit a match and touched it first to Scarecrow Joe’s cigarette, then to Benny’s. When she tried to use it to light her own, Benny blew it out.

“What did you do that for?” she asked.

“Three on a match. Bad luck.”

“You
believe
that?”

“Not much,” Benny said, “but today we’re going to need all the luck we can get.” He glanced at the shopping bag in the basket of his bike, then took a pull on his cigarette. He inhaled a little and
then coughed the smoke back out, his eyes watering. “This tastes like panther-shit!”

“Smoked a lot of that, have you?” Joe asked. He dragged on his own cigarette. He didn’t want to look like a wuss, but he didn’t want to start coughing and maybe throw up, either. The smoke burned, but in sort of a good way. Maybe there was something to this, after all. Only he already felt a little woozy.

Go easy on the inhaling part,
he thought.
Passing out would be almost as uncool as puking.
Unless, maybe, he passed out in Norrie Calvert’s lap. That might be very cool indeed.

Norrie reached into her shorts pocket and brought out the cap of a Verifine juice bottle. “We can use this for an ashtray. I want to do the Indian smoke ritual, but I don’t want to catch the Peace Bridge on fire.” She then closed her eyes. Her lips began to move. Her cigarette was between her fingers, growing an ash.

Benny looked at Joe, shrugged, then closed his own eyes. “Almighty GI Joe, please hear the prayer of your humble pfc Drake—”

Norrie kicked him without opening her eyes.

Joe got up (a little dizzy, but not too bad; he chanced another drag when he was on his feet) and walked past their parked bikes to the town common end of the covered walkway.

“Where you goin?” Norrie asked without opening her eyes.

“I pray better when I look at nature,” Joe said, but he actually just wanted a breath of fresh air. It wasn’t the burning tobacco; he sort of liked that. It was the other smells inside the bridge—decaying wood, old booze, and a sour chemical aroma that seemed to be rising up from the Prestile beneath them (that was a smell, The Chef might have told him, that you could come to love).

Even the outside air wasn’t that wonderful; it had a slightly
used
quality that made Joe think of the trip he’d made with his parents to New York the previous year. The subways had smelled a little like this, especially late in the day when they were crowded with people headed home.

He tapped ashes into his hand. As he scattered them, he spotted Brenda Perkins making her way up the hill.

A moment later, a hand touched his shoulder. Too light and delicate to be Benny’s. “Who’s that?” Norrie asked.

“Know the face, not the name,” he said.

Benny joined them. “That’s Mrs. Perkins. The Sheriff’s widow.”

Norrie elbowed him. “Police Chief, dummy.”

Benny shrugged. “Whatever.”

They watched her, mostly because there was no one else to watch. The rest of the town was at the supermarket, apparently having the world’s biggest food fight. The three kids had investigated, but from afar; they did not need persuasion to stay away, given the valuable piece of equipment that had been entrusted to their care.

Brenda crossed Main to Prestile, paused outside the McCain house, then went on to Mrs. Grinnell’s.

“Let’s get going,” Benny said.

“We
can’t
get going until she’s gone,” Norrie said.

Benny shrugged. “What’s the big deal? If she sees us, we’re just some kids goofing around on the town common. And know what? She probably wouldn’t see us if she looked right at us. Adults
never
see kids.” He considered this. “Unless they’re on skateboards.”

“Or smoking,” Norrie added. They all glanced at their cigarettes.

Joe hooked a thumb at the shopping bag sitting in the carrier attached to the handlebars of Benny’s Schwinn High Plains. “They also have a tendency to see kids who are goofing around with expensive town property.”

Norrie tucked her cigarette in the corner of her mouth. It made her look wonderfully tough, wonderfully pretty, and wonderfully
adult.

The boys went back to watching. The Police Chief’s widow was now talking to Mrs. Grinnell. It wasn’t a long conversation. Mrs. Perkins had taken a big brown envelope from her carrier-bag as she came up the steps, and they watched her hand it to Mrs. Grinnell. A few seconds later, Mrs. Grinnell pretty much slammed the door in her visitor’s face.

“Whoa, that was rude,” Benny said. “Week’s detention.”

Joe and Norrie laughed.

Mrs. Perkins stood where she was for a moment, as if perplexed, then went back down the steps. She was now facing the common, and the three children instinctively stepped further into the shadows of the walkway. This caused them to lose sight of her, but Joe found a handy gap in the wooden siding and peered through that.

“Going back to Main,” he reported. “Okay, now she’s going up the hill … now she’s crossing over again….”

Benny held an imaginary microphone. “Video at eleven.”

Joe ignored this. “Now she’s going onto
my
street.” He turned to Benny and Norrie. “Do you think she’s going to see my mom?”

“Mill Street’s four blocks long, dude,” Benny said. “What are the chances?”

Joe felt relieved even though he could think of no reason why Mrs. Perkins’s going to see his mom would be a bad thing. Except his mother was all worried about Dad being out of town, and Joe would sure hate to see her more upset than she already was. She had almost forbidden him to go on this expedition. Thank God Miz Shumway had talked her out of
that
idea, mostly by telling her that Dale Barbara had mentioned Joe specifically for this job (which Joe—Benny and Norrie, too—preferred to think of as “the mission”).

“Mrs. McClatchey,” Julia had said, “if anyone can put this gadget to use, Barbie thinks it’s probably your son. It could be very important.”

That had made Joe feel good, but looking at his mother’s face—worried, drawn—made him feel bad. It hadn’t even been three days since the Dome had come down, but she’d lost weight. And the way she kept holding his dad’s picture, that made him feel bad, too. It was like she thought he’d died instead of just being holed up in a motel somewhere, probably drinking beer and watching HBO.

She had agreed with Miz Shumway, though. “He’s a smart boy about gadgets, all right. He always has been.” She looked him over from head to foot, and sighed. “When did you get so tall, Son?”

“I don’t know,” he had replied truthfully.

“If I let you do this, will you be careful?”

“And take your friends with you,” Julia said.

“Benny and Norrie? Sure.”

“Also,” Julia had added, “be a little discreet. Do you know what that means, Joe?”

“Yes, ma’am, I sure do.”

It meant don’t get caught.

3

Brenda disappeared into the screening trees that lined Mill Street. “Okay,” Benny said. “Let’s go.” He carefully crushed his cigarette in the makeshift ashtray, then lifted the shopping bag out of the bike’s wire carrier. Inside the bag was the old-fashioned yellow Geiger counter, which had gone from Barbie to Rusty to Julia … and finally to Joe and his posse.

Joe took the juice lid and crushed out his own smoke, thinking he would like to try again when he had more time to concentrate on the experience. On the other hand, it might be better not to. He was addicted to computers, the graphic novels of Brian K. Vaughan, and skateboarding. Maybe that was enough monkeys for one back.

“People are gonna come by,” he said to Benny and Norrie. “Probably lots of people, once they get tired of playing in the supermarket. We’ll just have to hope they don’t pay any attention to us.”

In his mind he heard Miz Shumway telling his mom how important this could be to the town. She didn’t have to tell
him
; he probably understood it better than they did.

“But if any
cops
come by …” Norrie said.

Joe nodded. “Back into the bag it goes. And out comes the Frisbee.”

“You really think there’s some kind of alien generator buried under the town common?” Benny asked.

“I said there
might
be,” Joe replied, more sharply than he had intended. “Anything’s possible.”

In truth, Joe thought it more than possible; he thought it likely. If the Dome wasn’t supernatural in origin, then it was a force field. A force field had to be generated. It looked like a QED situation to
him, but he didn’t want to get their hopes up too high. Or his own, for that matter.

“Let’s start looking,” Norrie said. She ducked under the sagging yellow police tape. “I just hope you two prayed enough.”

Joe didn’t believe in praying for things he could do for himself, but he
had
sent up a brief one on a different subject: that if they found the generator, Norrie Calvert would give him another kiss. A nice long one.

4

Earlier that morning, during their pre-exploration meeting in the McClatchey living room, Scarecrow Joe had taken off his right sneaker, then the white athletic sock beneath.

“Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat,” Benny said cheerfully.

“Shut up, stupid,” Joe replied.

“Don’t call your friend stupid,” Claire McClatchey said, but she gave Benny a reproachful look.

Norrie added no repartee of her own, only watched with interest as Joe laid the sock on the living room rug and smoothed it out with the flat of his hand.

“This is Chester’s Mill,” Joe said. “Same shape, right?”

“You are correctamundo,” Benny agreed. “It’s our fate to live in a town that looks like one of Joe McClatchey’s athletic socks.”

“Or the old woman’s shoe,” Norrie put in.

“ ‘There was an old woman who lived in a shoe,’ ” Mrs. McClatchey recited. She was sitting on the couch with the picture of her husband in her lap, just as she had been when Miz Shumway came by with the Geiger counter late yesterday afternoon. “‘She had so many children she didn’t know what to do.’”