“Thanks.” I took it. It tasted sweet and good.
“This is probably a stupid question,” Miller resumed, “but we ought to fill in the blanks. Anyone got any firearms?” There was a pause. People looked around at each other and shrugged. An old man with grizzled white hair who introduced himself as Ambrose Cornell said he had a shotgun in the trunk of his car. “I’ll try for it, if you want.” Ollie said, “Right now I don’t think that would be a good idea, Cornell.” Cornell grunted. “Right now, neither do I, son. But I thought I ought to make the offer.”
“Well, I didn’t really think so,” Dan Miller said. “But I thought—”
“Wait, hold it a minute,” a woman said. It was the lady in the cranberry-colored sweatshirt and the dark-green slacks. She had sandy-blond hair and a good figure. A very pretty young woman. She opened her purse and from it she produced a medium-sized pistol. The crowd made an ahhhh-ing sound, as if they had just seen a magician do a particularly fine trick. The woman, who had been blushing, blushed that much the harder.
She rooted in her purse again and brought out a box of Smith & Wesson ammunition.
“I’m Amanda Dumfries,” she said to Miller. “This gun… my husband’s idea. He thought I should have it for protection. I’ve carried it unloaded for two years.”
“Is your husband here, ma’am?”
“No, he’s in New York. On business. He’s gone on business a lot. That’s why he wanted me to carry the gun.”
“Well,” Miller said, “if you can use it, you ought to keep it. What is it, a thirtyeight?”
“Yes. And I’ve never fired it in my life except on a target range once.” Miller took the gun, fumbled around, and got the cylinder to open after a few moments. He checked to make sure it was not loaded. “Okay,” he said. “We got a gun.
Who shoots good? I sure don’t.” People glanced at each other. No one said anything at first. Then, reluctantly, Ollie said: “I target-shoot quite a lot. I have a Colt.45 and a Llama. 25.”
“You?” Brown said. “Huh. You’ll be too drunk to see by dark.” Ollie said very clearly, “Why don’t you just shut up and write down your names?” Brown goggled at him. Opened his mouth. Then decided, wisely, I think, to shut it again.
“It’s yours,” Miller said, blinking a little at the exchange. He handed it over and Ollie checked it again, more professionally. He put the gun into his right-front pants pocket and slipped the cartridge box into his breast pocket, where it made a bulge like a pack of cigarettes. Then he leaned back against the cooler, round face still trickling sweat, and cracked a fresh beer. The sensation that I was seeing a totally unsuspected Ollie Weeks persisted.
“Thank you, Dumfries,” Miller said.
“Don’t mention it,” she said, and I thought fleetingly that if I were her husband and proprietor of those green eyes and that full figure, I might not travel so much. Giving your wife a gun could be seen as a ludicrously symbolic act.
“This may be silly, too,” Miller said, turning back to Brown with his clipboard and Ollie with his beer, “but there aren’t anything like flamethrowers in the place, are there ?”
“Ohhh, shit,” Buddy Eagleton said, and then went as red as Amanda Dumfries had done.
“What is it?” Mike Haden asked.
“Well… until last week we had a whole case of those little blowtorches. The kind you use around your house to solder leaky pipes or mend your exhaust system or whatever. You remember those, Brown?” Brown nodded, looking sour.
“Sold out?” Miller asked.
“No, they didn’t go at all. We only sold three or four and sent the rest of the case back. What a pisser. I mean… what a shame.” Blushing so deeply he was almost purple, Buddy Eagleton retired into the background again.
We had matches, of course, and salt (someone said vaguely that he had heard salt was the thing to put on bloodsuckers and things like that); and all kinds of O’Cedar mops and long-handled brooms. Most of the people continued to look heartened, and Jim and Myron were too plotzo to sound a dissenting note, but I met Ollie’s eyes and saw a calm hopelessness in them that was worse than fear. He and I had seen the tentacles. The idea of throwing salt on them or trying to fend them off with the handles of O’Cedar mops was funny, in a ghastly way.
“Mike,” Miller said, “why don’t you crew this little adventure? I want to talk to Ollie and Dave here for a minute.”
“Glad to.” Haden clapped Dan Miller on the shoulder. “Somebody had to take charge, and you did it good. Welcome to town.”
“Does this mean I get a kickback on my taxes? Miller asked. He was a banty little guy with red hair that was receding. He looked like the sort of guy you can’t help liking on short notice and-just maybe-the kind of guy you can’t help not liking after he’s been around for a while. The kind of guy who knows how to do everything better than you do.
“No way,” Haden said, laughing.
Haden walked off. Miller glanced down at my son.
“Don’t worry about Billy,” I said.
“Man, I’ve never been so worried in my whole life,” Miller said.
“No,” Ollie agreed, and dropped an empty into the beer cooler. He got a fresh one and opened it. There was a soft hiss of escaping gas.
“I got a look at the way you two glanced at each other,” Miller said.
I finished my Hershey bar and got a beer to wash it down with.
“Tell you what I think,” Miller said. “We ought to get half a dozen people to wrap some of those mop handles with cloth and then tie them down with twine. Then I think we ought to get a couple of those cans of charcoal lighter fluid all ready. if we cut the tops right off the cans, we could have some torches pretty quick.” I nodded. That was good. Almost surely not good enough-not if you had seen Norm dragged out-but it was better than salt.
“That would give them something to think about, at least,” Ollie said.
Miller’s lips pressed together. “That bad, huh?” He said.
“That bad,” Ollie agreed, and worked his beer.
By four-thirty that afternoon the sacks of fertilizer and lawn food were in place and the big windows were blocked off except for narrow loopholes. A watchman had been placed at each of these, and beside each watchman was a tin of charcoal lighter fluid with the top cut off and a supply of mop-handle torches. There were five loopholes, and Dan Miller had arranged a rotation of sentries for each one. When four-thirty came around, I was sitting on a pile of bags at one of the loopholes, Billy at my side. We were looking out into the mist.
Just beyond the window was a red bench where people sometimes waited for their rides with their groceries beside them. Beyond that was the parking lot. The mist swirled slowly, thick and heavy. There was moisture in it, but how dull it seemed, and gloomy.
just looking at it made me feel gutless and lost.
“Daddy, do you know what’s happening?” Billy asked.
“No, hon,” I said.
He fell silent for a bit, looking at his hands, which lay limply in the lap of his Tuffskin jeans. “Why doesn’t somebody come and rescue us?” he asked finally. “The State Police or the FBI or someone?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think Mom’s okay?”
“Billy, I just don’t know,” I said, and put an arm around him.
“I want her awful bad,” Billy said, struggling with tears. “I’m sorry about the times I was bad to her.”
“Billy,” I said, and had to stop. I could taste salt in my throat, and my voice wanted to tremble.
“Will it be over?” Billy asked. “Daddy? Will it?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and he put his face in the hollow of my shoulder and I held the back of his head, felt the delicate curve of his skull just under the thick growth of his hair. I found myself remembering the evening of my wedding day. Watching Steff take off the simple brown dress she had changed into after the ceremony. She had had a big purple bruise on one hip from running into the side of a door the day before. I remembered looking at the bruise and thinking, When she got that, she was still Stephanie Stepanek, and feeling something like wonder. Then we had made love, and outside it was spitting snow from a dull gray December sky.
Billy was crying.
“Shh, Billy, shh,” I said, rocking his head against me, but he went on crying. It was the sort of crying that only mothers know how to fix right.