WARNING! FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY! KEEP 2 YARDS (6 FEET) FROM THE DOME! 5 page

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.

“I never told on those girls, although my father was furious and grounded me until June—I could go to school but nothing else. I was even forbidden the class trip to the Portland Museum of Art, which I’d been looking forward to all year. He told me I could go on the trip and have all my privileges restored if I named the kids who had ‘abused’ me. That was his word for it. I wouldn’t, though, and not just because dummying up is the kids’ version of the Apostles’ Creed.”

“You did it because somewhere deep inside, you thought you deserved what happened to you.”

“Deserved is the wrong word. I thought I’d bought and paid for it, which isn’t the same thing at all. My life changed after that. I kept on getting good grades, but I stopped raising my hand so much. I never quit grade-grinding, but I stopped grade-grubbing. I could have been valedictorian in high school, but I backed off during the second semester of my senior year. Just enough to make sure Carlene Plummer would win instead of me. I didn’t want it. Not the speech, not the attention that went with the speech. I made some friends, the best ones in the smoking area behind the high school.

“The biggest change was going to school in Maine instead of at Princeton … where I was indeed accepted. My father raved and thundered about how no daughter of his was going to go to a land-grant cow college, but I stood firm.”

She smiled.

“Pretty firm. But compromise is love’s secret ingredient, and I loved my dad plenty. I loved them both. My plan had been to go to the University of Maine at Orono, but during the summer after my senior year, I made a last-minute application to Bates—what they call a Special Circumstances application—and was accepted. My father made me pay the late fee out of my own bank account, which I was glad to do, because there was finally a modicum of peace in the family after sixteen months of border warfare between the country of Controlling Parents and the smaller but well-fortified principality of Determined Teenager. I declared a journalism major, and that finished the job of healing the breach … which had really been there ever since that day on the bandstand. My parents just never knew why. I’m not here in The Mill because of that day—my future at the Democrat was pretty much foreordained—but I am who I am in large part because of that day.”

She looked up at him again, her eyes shining with tears and defiance. “I am not an ant, however. I am not an ant.”

He kissed her again. She wrapped her arms around him tightly and gave back as good as she got. And when his hand tugged her blouse from the waistband of her slacks and then slipped up across her midriff to cup her breast, she gave him her tongue. When they broke apart, she was breathing fast.

“Want to?” he asked.

“Yes. Do you?”

He took her hand and put it on his jeans, where how much he wanted to was immediately evident.

A minute later he was poised above her, resting on his elbows. She took him in hand to guide him in. “Take it easy on me, Colonel Barbara. I’ve kind of forgotten how this thing goes.”

“It’s like riding a bicycle,” Barbie said.

Turned out he was right.

When it was over, she lay with her head on his arm, looking up at the pink stars, and asked what he was

thinking about.

He sighed. “The dreams. The visions. The whatever-they-are. Do you have your cell phone?”

“Always. And it’s holding its charge nicely, although for how much longer I couldn’t say. Who are you planning to call? Cox, I suppose.”

“You suppose correctly. Do you have his number in memory?”

“Yes.”

Julia reached over for her discarded pants and pulled the phone off her belt. She called COX and handed the phone to Barbie, who started talking almost at once. Cox must have answered on the first ring.

“Hello, Colonel. It’s Barbie. I’m out. I’m going to take a chance and tell you our location. It’s Black Ridge.

The old McCoy orchard. Do you have that on your … you do. Of course you do. And you have satellite images of the town, right?”

He listened, then asked Cox if the images showed a horseshoe of light encircling the ridge and ending at the TR-90 border. Cox replied in the negative, and then, judging from the way Barbie was listening, asked for details.

“Not now,” Barbie said. “Right now I need you to do something for me, Jim, and the sooner the better. You’ll need a couple of Chinooks.”

He explained what he wanted. Cox listened, then replied.

“I can’t go into it right now,” Barbie said, “and it probably wouldn’t make a lot of sense if I did. Just take it from me that some very dinky-dau shit is going on in here, and I believe that worse is on the way. Maybe not until Halloween, if we’re lucky. But I don’t think we’re going to be lucky.”

While Barbie was speaking with Colonel James Cox, Andy Sanders was sitting against the side of the supply building behind WCIK, looking up at the abnormal stars. He was high as a kite, happy as a clam, cool as a cucumber, other similes may apply. Yet there was a deep sadness—oddly tranquil, almost comforting— running beneath, like a powerful underground river. He had never had a premonition in his whole prosy, practical, workaday life. But he was having one now. This was his last night on earth. When the bitter men came, he and Chef Bushey would go. It was simple, and not really all that bad.

“I was in the bonus round, anyway,” he said. “Have been ever since I almost took those pills.”

“What’s that, Sanders?” Chef came strolling along the path from the rear of the station, shining a flashlight beam just ahead of his bare feet. The froggy pajama pants still clung precariously to the bony wings of his hips, but something new had been added: a large white cross. It was tied around his neck on a rawhide loop. Slung over his shoulder was GOD’S WARRIOR. Two grenades swung from the stock on another length of rawhide. In the hand not holding the flashlight, he carried the garage door opener.

“Nothing, Chef,” Andy said. “I was just talking to myself. Seems like I’m the only one who listens these days.”

“That’s bullshit, Sanders. Utter and complete bullshit-aroonie. God listens. He’s tapped into souls the way the FBI’s tapped into phones. I listen too.”

The beauty of this—and the comfort—made gratitude well up in Andy’s heart. He offered the bong. “Hit this shit. It’ll get your boiler lit.”

Chef uttered a hoarse laugh, took a deep drag on the glasspipe, held the smoke in, then coughed it out. “Bazoom!” he said. “God’s power! Power by the hour, Sanders!”

“Got that right,” Andy agreed. It was what Dodee always said, and at the thought of her, his heart broke all over again. He wiped his eyes absently. “Where did you get the cross?”

Chef pointed the flashlight toward the radio station. “Coggins has got an office in there. The cross was in his desk. The top drawer was locked, but I forced it open. You know what else was in there, Sanders? Some of the skankiest jerk-off material I have ever seen.”

“Kids?” Andy asked. He wouldn’t be surprised. When the devil got a preacher, he was apt to fall low, indeed. Low enough to put on a tophat and crawl under a rattlesnake.

“Worse, Sanders.” He lowered his voice. “Orientals.”

Chef picked up Andy’s AK-47, which had been lying across Andy’s thighs. He shone the light on the stock, where Andy had carefully printed CLAUDETTE with one of the radio station’s Magic Markers.

“My wife,” Andy said. “She was the first Dome casualty.”

Chef gripped him by the shoulder. “You’re a good man to remember her, Sanders. I’m glad God brought us together.”

“Me too.” Andy took back the bong. “Me too, Chef.”

“You know what’s apt to happen tomorrow, don’t you?”

Andy gripped CLAUDETTE’s stock. It was answer enough.

“They’ll most likely be wearing body armor, so if we have to go to war, aim for the head. No single-shot stuff; just hose em down. And if it looks like they’re going to overrun us … you know what comes next, right?”

“Right.”

“To the end, Sanders?” Chef raised the garage door opener in front of his face and shone the flashlight

on it. “To the end,” Andy agreed. He touched the door opener with CLAUDETTE’s muzzle.

Ollie Dinsmore snapped awake from a bad dream, knowing something was wrong. He lay in bed, looking at the wan and somehow dirty first light peeping through the window, trying to persuade himself that it was just the dream, some nasty nightmare he couldn’t quite recall. Fire and shouting was all he could remember.

Not shouting. Screaming.

His cheap alarm clock was ticking away on the little table beside his bed. He grabbed it. Quarter of six and no sound of his father moving around in the kitchen. More telling, no smell of coffee. His father was always up and dressed by five fifteen at the very latest (“Cows won’t wait” was Alden Dinsmore’s favorite scripture), and there was always coffee brewing by five thirty.

Not this morning.

Ollie got up and pulled on yesterday’s jeans. “Dad?”

No answer. Nothing but the tick of the clock, and—distant—the lowing of one disaffected bossy. Dread settled over the boy. He told himself there was no reason for it, that his family—all together and perfectly happy only a week ago—had sustained all the tragedies God would allow, at least for awhile. He told himself, but himself didn’t believe it.

“Daddy?”

The generator out back was still running and he could see the green digital readouts on both the stove and the microwave when he went into the kitchen, but the Mr. Coffee stood dark and empty. The living room was empty, too. His father had been watching TV when Ollie turned in last night, and it was still on, although muted. Some crooked-looking guy was demonstrating the new and improved ShamWow. “You’re spending forty bucks a month on paper towels and throwing your money away,” the crooked-looking guy said from that other world where such things might matter.

He’s out feeding the cows, that’s all.

Except wouldn’t he have turned off the TV to save electricity? They had a big tank of propane, but it would only last so long.

“Dad?”

Still no answer. Ollie crossed to the window and looked out at the barn. No one there. With increasing trepidation, he went down the back hall to his parents’ room, steeling himself to knock, but there was no need. The door was open. The big double bed was messy (his father’s eye for mess seemed to fall blind once he stepped out of the barn) but empty. Ollie started to turn away, then saw something that scared him. A wedding portrait of Alden and Shelley had hung on the wall in here for as long as Ollie could remember. Now it was gone, with only a brighter square of wallpaper to mark where it had been.

That’s nothing to be scared of.

But it was.

Ollie continued on down the hall. There was one more door, and this one, which had stood open for the last year, was now closed. Something yellow had been tacked to it. A note. Even before he was close enough to read it, Ollie recognized his father’s handwriting. He should have; there had been enough notes in that big scrawl waiting for him and Rory when they came home from school, and they always ended the same way.

Sweep the barn, then go play. Weed the tomatoes and beans, then go play. Take in your mother’s washing, and mind you don’t drag it in the mud. Then go play.

Playtime’s over, Ollie thought dismally.

But then a hopeful thought occurred to him: maybe he was dreaming. Wasn’t it possible? After his brother’s death by ricochet and his mother’s suicide, why wouldn’t he dream of waking to an empty house?

The cow lowed again, and even that was like a sound heard in a dream.

The room behind the door with the note on it had been Grampy Tom’s. Suffering the slow misery of congestive heart failure, he had come to live with them when he could no longer do for himself. For a while he’d been able to hobble as far as the kitchen to take meals with the family, but in the end he’d been bedridden, first with a plastic thingie jammed up his nose—it was called a candelabra, or something like that—and then with a plastic mask over his face most of the time. Rory once said he looked like the world’s oldest astronaut, and Mom had smacked his face for him.

At the end they had all taken turns changing his oxygen tanks, and one night Mom found him dead on the floor, as if he’d been trying to get up and had died of it. She screamed for Alden, who came, looked, listened to the old man’s chest, then turned off the oxy. Shelley Dinsmore began to cry. Since then, the room had mostly been closed.

Sorry was what the note on the door said. Go to town Ollie. The Morgans or Dentons or Rev Libby will take you in.

Ollie looked at the note for a long time, then turned the knob with a hand that didn’t seem to be his own, hoping it wouldn’t be messy.

It wasn’t. His father lay on Grampy’s bed with his hands laced together on his chest. His hair was combed the way he combed it when he was going to town. He was holding the wedding picture. One of Grampy’s old green oxygen tanks still stood in the corner; Alden had hung his Red Sox cap, the one that said WORLD SERIES CHAMPS, over the valve.

Ollie shook his father’s shoulder. He could smell booze, and for a few seconds hope (always stubborn, sometimes hateful) lived in his heart again. Maybe he was only drunk.

“Dad? Daddy? Wake up!”

Ollie could feel no breath against his cheek, and now saw that his father’s eyes weren’t completely closed; little crescents of white peeped out between the upper and lower lids. There was a smell of what his mother called eau de pee.

His father had combed his hair, but as he lay dying he had, like his late wife, pissed his pants. Ollie wondered if knowing that might happen would have stopped him.

He backed slowly away from the bed. Now that he wanted to feel like he was having a bad dream, he didn’t. He was having a bad reality, and that was something from which you could not wake. His stomach clenched and a column of vile liquid rose up his throat. He ran for the bathroom, where he was confronted by a glare-eyed intruder. He almost screamed before recognizing himself in the mirror over the sink.

He knelt at the toilet, grasping what he and Rory had called Grampy’s crip-rails, and vomited. When it was out of him, he flushed (thanks to the gennie and a good deep well, he could flush), lowered the lid, and sat on it, trembling all over. Beside him, in the sink, were two of Grampy Tom’s pill bottles and a bottle of Jack Daniels. All the bottles were empty. Ollie picked up one of the pill bottles. PERCOCET, the label said. He didn’t bother with the other one.

“I’m alone now,” he said.

The Morgans or Dentons or Rev Libby will take you in.

But he didn’t want to be taken in—it sounded like what his mom would have done to a piece of clothing in her sewing room. He had sometimes hated this farm, but he had always loved it more. The farm had him. The farm and the cows and the woodpile. They were his and he was theirs. He knew that just as he knew that Rory would have gone away to have a bright and successful career, first at college and then in some city far from here where he would go to plays and art galleries and things. His kid brother had been smart enough to make something of himself in the big world; Ollie himself might have been smart enough to stay ahead of the bank loans and credit cards, but not much more.

He decided to go out and feed the cows. He would treat them to double mash, if they would eat it. There might even be a bossy or two who’d want to be milked. If so, he might have a little straight from the teat, as he had when he was a kid.

After that, he would go as far down the big field as he could, and throw rocks at the Dome until the people started showing up to visit with their relatives. Big doins, his father would have said. But there was no one Ollie wanted to see, except maybe Private Ames from South Cah’lina. He knew that Aunt Lois and Uncle Scooter might come—they lived just over in New Gloucester—but what would he say if they did? Hey Unc, they’re all dead but me, thanks for coming?

No, once the people from outside the Dome started to arrive, he reckoned he’d go up to where Mom was buried and dig a new hole nearby. That would keep him busy, and maybe by the time he went to bed, he’d be able to sleep.

Grampy Tom’s oxygen mask was dangling from the hook on the bathroom door. His mother had carefully washed it clean and hung it there; who knew why. Looking at it, the truth finally crashed down on him, and it was like a piano hitting a marble floor. Ollie clapped his hands over his face and began to rock back and forth on the toilet seat, wailing.

Linda Everett packed up two cloth grocery sacks’ worth of canned stuff, almost put them by the kitchen door, then decided to leave them in the pantry until she and Thurse and the kids were ready to go. When she saw the Thibodeau kid coming up the driveway, she was glad she’d done so. That young man scared the hell out of her, but she would have had much more to fear if he’d seen two bags filled with soup and beans and tuna fish.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 597