World of Trouble (9 page)

Becket, in the Berkshires, was a red town: ten teenagers tailed us on puttering mopeds, chanting for blood like savages. Stottville, New York, was red. De Lancy, Oneonta. Dunkirk, the town where we saved the small family from the fire but left them defenseless on the firehouse steps—bright red.

Green towns were just the opposite, communities where it seemed like some sort of agreement had been made, spoken or implied, to plug along. Folks raking leaves, pushing strollers, waving good morning. Dogs on leashes or bounding after Frisbees. In Media, Ohio, we were astonished to hear the SpongeBob SquarePants theme song being sung lustily by three hundred or more people in a public park at dusk. After the sing-along everyone hung around on the village green: there was a knitting circle, a book club, a demonstration on making candles and another on making bullets. A local sport-shooters association had organized a hunt-and-gather system, traversing the local woods and farmland to bring back venison and beef and distribute it by priority: women and children, the old and the infirm.

A sure sign of a green town was some sort of a garbage system. A trash pyre burning outside the city limits, or even just a dump still in use, people hauling their bags of refuse down there, going out of their way for the mutual benefit. If we didn’t see garbage heaped on curbs, Cortez and I, when we rolled into a certain spot, we knew that town was okay for a night of rest.

Black towns are empty. Blue towns feel empty, but they’re not, they’re just so quiet they might as well be. They’re empty except for occasional scurrying, nervous souls darting from one place to another, some feeling safer in the day, some at night. Peeking out of windows, clutching guns, measuring out what they’ve got left.

By noon we have worked our way through downtown, and Houdini and I reluctantly turn our search to private homes. I set the protocol as knock, wait, knock again, wait again, push in. I find houses cluttered with small personal items: unseasonal clothing, waffle irons, trophies, the sorts of things people leave behind when they leave in an emergency. But tool sheds are empty, like the fridges, like the pantries and the gas cans. At one tidy little aluminum-sided one-story I knock, wait, knock again, wait again, push in, and find a tiny, very old man asleep on an armchair, with a faded
Time
magazine spread out on his chest, like he fell asleep a couple years ago and is about to wake up to a terrible surprise. I tiptoe backward out of there and creep the door shut.

Blue town. Classic blue town.

*  *  *

It’s two o’clock now on the Casio. At some point the sun has burned the clouds away. Time passing and passing.

The thought comes from nowhere, unbidden, big as a hovering spaceship, filling the sky:
She’s dead, back there. Back there in the woods. Somewhere I didn’t see her
.

Or else she’s down in that hole and she’s not coming out because she doesn’t want to, and what I’m doing here is I’m wasting time until the end.

Keep walking, Hen. Keep searching. Do your job. She’s fine.

On Brookside Drive, six short blocks from the American Legion hall, is a small brick ranch house, partially surrounded by some kind of blast wall, a ten-foot-high barrier of concrete. Serious business, like this modest one-story home is an American embassy in Baghdad or Beirut. Thick concrete, smooth face, with slits in the surface, as if for arrows. This fortification was built to withstand not the end, but the events leading up to the end. Thieves. Bandits on the road.

“Hello?” I call up toward the slits. “Hello?”

The sky erupts with the deafening clatter of machine-gun fire. I drop down to my knees. Houdini goes bonkers, chasing himself in a wild circle. Another rip of live fire.

“Okay,” I say, yelling into the muddy lawn, where I threw myself down. “Okay.”

“I still have the right to defend my home,” says a voice, thick and hoarse and slightly manic, from somewhere beyond the wall. “I still have the right to my home.”

“Yes, sir,” I say again. “Yes, sir, I know.”

This is a blue-town man. I can’t see his face, but I can feel his
fear, his anger. I look up slowly, very slowly, and get a good look at the gun muzzle, long and stiff like the nose of an anteater, poking through one of the slits.

“I’m going,” I say, “I’m sorry to bother you,” and I go, I crawl away, nice and slow, butt up in the air and hands down.

Worming my way out of there takes me right past the base of the wall, and I see where the man who built it—whoever built it—put a tradesman’s stamp in the stone. It’s a single word, colored in a deep somber red:
JOY
.

The only suicide victims I find in Rotary are in a screened-in sunporch on Downing Drive: gunshots, husband and wife, a pitcher of lemonade on the glass-topped front-porch table between them, sugar crystals clinging to the sides, lemon wedges rotting at the bottom. The husband still holds the rifle, clutched between his hands, sunk into his lap. I get a quick read on the scene, instinctively, without even wanting to. He was the shooter, he killed her first, cleanly, and then himself; he took one high on the cheek—a first try, a miss—and then a second shot, under the chin and correctly angled.

I feel a quick swell of good feeling toward the dead man, the bottom of his face a red hole, for having honored their bargain. First his wife and then himself and he followed through, as promised. The lemonade pitcher buzzes with bees, attracted to the fading sweetness.

They don’t have a sledgehammer. I check their garage, and then even inside, in the closets. It’s just not a common household item.

Houdini and I step down off the porch on Downing Drive into a warm wafting smell, buoying up off the road and surrounding us, and I swear we look at each other, the dog and I, and obviously he can’t talk but we do, we say it to each other: “Is that fried chicken?”

Saliva fills my mouth, and Houdini begins whipping his little head this way and that. His eyes are shiny with excitement, like glossy marbles.

“Go,” I say, and Houdini bolts for the source of the smell and I bolt after him. We’re sprinting along a side street I had not yet explored, a long narrow one-laner dwindling westward off of Elm Street. More shuttered small houses, a filling station with the pumps torn from the ground. As I run after the dog my stomach starts to growl and I laugh a little, a little jagged riff of madman laughter, contemplating the possibility that this is some sort of desert-island mirage: the madman running for the hazy sight of water, the tall hungry policeman hurtling after an illusory bucket of chicken.

The road slopes upward a little, passes through a couple of stoplight intersections, and then to the right is a parking lot—at the center of which, disconcertingly, is the instantly recognizable form of a Taco Bell. The garish exterior in purple and gold, the cheap stucco walls, one of a million such small purpose-built structures that bloomed in the outskirts of small towns in the last half century of American civilization. But there is no question
of it being cut-rate Mexican, the smell now billowing thickly around Houdini and me. It’s fried chicken, rich and smoky and unmistakable. I wipe my chin. I’m drooling like a cartoon character.

There’s music playing, too, that’s the other odd thing. We are crossing the Taco Bell parking lot, slowly, me first with gun drawn, Houdini behind me at my pace, inching forward at my feet, and we hear big beat-driven music blaring from the restaurant—from behind the restaurant, it sounds like—raucous music, fuzzy guitars, sing-shout vocals.

I stop moving and whistle sharply at the dog, and he grudgingly heels beside me. I take a good look at the building, smashed windows showing plastic booths inside, linoleum tables, napkin dispensers. The front doors are propped open by a telephone book.

It’s the Beastie Boys. The music, blaring from the other side of the parking lot. It’s “Paul Revere,” from that really big Beastie Boys record. The chicken smell wafts toward us on the breeze, along with the music.

“Sit.” I point at the dog. “Stay.”

He obeys, more or less, making small fidgety motions while I edge along one side of the tacky little building. “Hello?” I say, back to the wall, gun up, tiptoeing my way around. “Who’s there?”

Nobody answers, but I can’t be sure I’ve made myself heard above the music. I was never a huge Beastie Boys fan. I had a friend, Stan Reingold, who was into hip-hop for about a week in junior high school. A bunch of years ago I heard that he had
enlisted and ended up in Iraq with the 101st Airborne. He could be anywhere now, of course. I raise the SIG Sauer to chest level, take a big step over the hedges and into the drive-through lane.

I no longer seriously suspect that this is a mirage. The smell of the cooking chicken is too strong, mingling with the gritty tar odor of the asphalt, damp from the rain. Maybe it’s some sort of a trap, someone luring unsuspecting passersby with party music and delicious smells and then—who knows?

My view of whatever is going on back here is blocked by a gigantic RV, twenty-five feet long, backed up to the rear of the restaurant and extending perpendicularly out into the parking lot. The massive boxy vehicle is up on blocks, doors all wide open, windows down. Articles of clothing are draped over the windshield and across the popped front hood. There are red stripes along the long tan sides, and the legend H
IGHWAY
P
IRATE
is airbrushed in fanciful calligraphy along the flank. The music is coming from inside the RV, it seems like. Houdini gives a small yelp at my feet—he gave up on waiting. I bend down and pat him on the neck and hope he stays quiet. He’s not really a very well-trained dog.

The music stops, there is a breath of silence, and then it starts again, Bon Jovi now, “Livin’ on a Prayer.” We keep moving, Houdini and I, we creep along the side of the RV, and when I come around the back of it I can see the parking lot, and there is a man there with a shotgun pointed at my head.

“Stop in your tracks, brother,” he says. “Quit movin’ and tell the dog to quit.”

I quit moving and thankfully Houdini does, too. There are two of them, a man and a woman, both half naked. He’s shirtless in boxer shorts and flip-flops, dirty brown hair in an overgrown mullet. She’s in a long, loose flowery skirt, red hair, black bra. Each of them has a beer in one hand and a shotgun in the other.

“All right, brother, all right,” says the man, squinting at me. Big sweaty biceps, ruddy forehead. “Please don’t make me blow your head off, all right?”

“I won’t.”

“He won’t,” says the woman, and she takes a pull off her beer. “I can tell. He’s a good boy, right? You’re a good boy.”

I nod. “I’m a good boy.”

“Yes. He’s gonna be real good.” She winks at me. I stare at her. It’s Alison Koechner. The first girl I ever loved. The lean white body, wild curls of orange hair like ribbons on a gift.

“I’m Billy,” says the man. “This one’s Sandy.”

“Sandy,” I say, and blink. “Oh.”

Sandy grins. That’s not Alison. She looks nothing like her. Not really. What is wrong with me? I clear my throat.

“I’m sorry to stumble in on you like this,” I say. “I mean no harm.”

“Shit, man, neither do we,” says Billy. His voice is warm and boozy, soaked in laughter and sunshine.

“No harm in the world,” says Sandy.

They clink their bottles together, both still smiling, both still holding their shotguns, raised and pointed. I smile back uneasily, and then there’s a long moment, everybody assured of everybody
else’s good intentions, everybody nevertheless frozen with guns drawn. The way of the world. Behind Billy and Sandy, between their RV and the back of the Taco Bell, is the little private universe they’ve created. A big old charcoal grill, heavy and black and belching smoke like a steam engine. A rickety beer-making apparatus, a tangle of plastic hoses winding around cylinders and barrels. And there, behind a low wire fence, running around on a ragged layer of straw is a bustling tribe of chickens—rushing past and around each other on their weird alien feet, cackling like merrymakers on a parade ground, waiting for a concert or an execution.

Billy breaks our tableau, stepping forward one step, and I retreat one step, aim the SIG at his face. He squints and pulls his head away, mild annoyance, like a lion ducking back from a mosquito.

“Here’s the story, brother man,” he says. “I got the beer and I got the gun, you can see that, right? You can take the beer and hang out for a bit, we’ll even feed you somethin’ before you shove off. We got a chicken on the cooker right now, since it’s coming up on suppertime. It’s a big one, right, baby?”

“Right,” she says. “Claudius.” She grins. For a confusing half second I think she’s calling me Claudius and then I realize that’s the chicken. “Three birds a day,” she says. “It’s how we keep track of the countdown.”

Billy nods, “That’s right.” Then he sniffs, tosses his hard-rock hair. “Or, option B, you do anything hilarious, you try and fox one of our chickens, and Sandy’ll shoot you dead.”

“Me?” she says, laughing with astonishment.

“Yeah, you.” Billy smiles at me, like we’re in on this together. “Sandy’s a better shot’n me, especially when it gets later and I got a buzz on.”

“Shit, Billy,” she says. “You always got a buzz on.”

“Like you don’t.”

This woman looks nothing at all like Alison Koechner, it is clear to me now. The resemblance has receded like a tide.

“Well, brother?” says Billy. “A beer or a bullet?”

I lower my gun. Sandy lowers her gun, and then at last Billy lowers his and hands me the beer, which is warm and bitter and delicious. “Thank you,” I say, as the two of them step back and gesture me into the courtyard. “My name is Henry Palace.” The dog shuffles in behind me, staring warily at the fat feathery strangeness of the chickens.

A new tune is blaring from the speakers, something heavy metal, something I don’t recognize. There are two hammocks suspended on ropes between the restaurant and the RV, swaying above paper plates littered with old chicken bones. Chinese lanterns are hung from the trees around the edges. The speakers are mounted on the outside of the vehicle; the engine is on and idling, powering the tunes, the lights, the world.