Miriam Blake was on the floor in a blue jogging suit, covering her face with both hands. “Evil effing little bitches! See what they did to me? I take them in, little conniving harlots, and this is how they repay me! It’s their upbringing! Their upbringing! Goddamn parents, that’s what! Goddamn liberal sonsofbitches-”
“You better shut up,” Rita told her and from the tone of her voice, Mitch was thinking that was good advice.
When Miriam peeled her hands away from her face, her mouth was bloody and a blue welt was rising under her right eye.
Mitch sighed as Miriam kept complaining and Rhonda was talking about the guns and how Miriam was a crazy old hag and she knew she wasn’t supposed to say that, but crazy was just crazy, wasn’t it? And Mitch was in stark agreement with her. Tommy grabbed the 12-gauge off the floor that Miriam had tried to pepper them with and not too far away were a couple of little. 32 autos. Tommy shoved them both in the pockets of his raincoat and stood there with the shotgun, looking confused.
When Rhonda was done talking, Mitch said, “She wanted you to shoot us?”
“That’s a lie!” Miriam snapped. “That’s an effing goddamn lie! You little bitch, you little-”
“Shut the hell up,” Tommy told her.
That did it. Miriam sat there, silenced, but hardly out of fight. She glared at Tommy and from that look, he was pretty glad she no longer had access to that Remington pump because she looked just mad enough to use it. Not that he was surprised after the welcome they’d received.
Rhonda started talking again, upset still but calming down an inch at a time. She started repeating verbatim the mad nonsense Miriam had filled her head with: shit about liberal Jews taking over the country and how they controlled the media and the government. How good old American Christian values were being stomped and stifled so that gays could marry and sluts could have abortions. That Hitler had had the right idea because those effing Jews had killed Christ and didn’t they honestly have the Holocaust coming? Well, didn’t they?
Now, Mitch could have given a high hairy shit what Miriam believed in or didn’t believe in, but you didn’t go shoveling this neo-facist bullshit down the throats of impressionable children. You just didn’t.
And handguns? Jesus, you just didn’t pass them out to kids.
“That’s what she kept saying,” Rita told him. “Then when you came up on the porch, she told us to shoot you. And when we wouldn’t, she shot at you instead.”
On the floor, Miriam looked like a cobra all coiled up and ready to spit its venom. Her eyes were fixed and glassy and she was trembling like something in her was ready to explode. Mitch figured if Tommy and he hadn’t been there, she would have killed Rita and Rhonda. Bloody drool was hanging from her lower lip and she did not seem to care.
She made to open her mouth and Tommy shook his head.
She closed it just as quick.
“What happened then?” Mitch asked.
Rita shrugged. “Then I hit her. I punched her in the face twice.”
She was so honest about it, so completely matter-of-fact, that Mitch almost started laughing. Miriam did not seem to think it was funny, though. Her right eye was nearly closed now, black-and-blue and in need of a cold steak. Mitch had to turn away from her. No, it was not exactly humorous that some eleven-year old toughie had flattened her, but at the same time, it was. If Rita had not acted quickly and decisively, Miriam might have killed Tommy or he. There was a very good chance of that. Mitch knew those girls had balls-the entire neighborhood was very much aware of that-he just never knew how much balls. Until now. He could just about envision it in his mind. Miriam going coo-coo and blasting at the door and Rita stepping over and giving her two shots to the face that dropped the old bitch.
And lookit that shiner, will ya? That kid has some kind of hook on her!
Miriam was rocking back and forth on her haunches. She was into her seventies, just a kid by Wanda Sepperly’s gauge, but still pretty old. But looking at her there, she looked not only spry but dangerous.
“Am I allowed to talk now?” she said in her characteristically shrill, catty tone.
Nobody objected. But Rita’s eyes narrowed and you could see the threat in them, the promise to Miriam that if she started running down her parents again, there was a whole can of ass-whooping still on the shelf, seal never broken, and it had Miriam’s name on it.
Mitch thought she was going to start shouting at the girls again, but she didn’t. Instead, she said, “I know you, Mitch Barron. Oh yes, I’ve got your number, Mister Union Man. Don’t think I don’t.”
“It’s in the book,” Mitch said.
Then she looked right at Tommy. “But you? I don’t know you. Now tell me, hotshot, are you a Republican or a Democrat?”
Tommy looked like he was going to laugh, but he held it in. “Neither. I think they’re all a bunch of freaking parasites. So I think you’ve got my number, too.”
Miriam looked like she was ready to leap. “If my husband were alive-”
“If you’re fucking husband was alive, you old hag, I’d hope he’d have more sense than to be handing out guns to grade school kids,” Tommy said to her.
Mitch figured the both of them were about to launch into some half-ass argument, but that didn’t happen. Because the Kneale Street posse arrived.
11
They were one sorry sight: Margaret Boyne and her son Russel, and Lou Darin, the district school superintendent.
“We heard shots,” Margaret said and then saw Miriam Blake sitting there, beaten and bloody. “Oh my God… what happened?”
Mitch said, “Miriam ran out of clay ducks so she thought she’d use us instead.”
He briefly sketched in what had transpired and Miriam didn’t even try to stop him. She looked right at him as he told his story, a scowl on her face. She made sure everyone could see that scowl and how her eyes rolled upwards in their sockets like it was the biggest load of bullshit Mitch Barron had ever shoveled.
Russel just stood there with that stupid expression on his face, the same one he got when people dared asked him how a healthy man pushing forty could live off his mother and never do a day’s honest work. “There’s been weird shit going on all over town. I been hearing things you wouldn’t believe. This whole thing’s like Y2K… except it’s real this time, it’s really happening.”
Margaret just nodded. She always nodded to what Russel said. Maybe the rest of the neighborhood thought he was a bum, but you’d never convince his mother of that.
Lou Darin, however, did not seem interested. “Well, I for one am not surprised. Anyone with all these guns is bound to crack sooner or later.”
Tommy said, “I have a gun and I got more at home.”
Darin just nodded. “Yes, I’m sure you do.”
Mitch had once most colorfully described Lou Darin as a prick wrapped in an asshole and then dipped in a cunt. That had gotten its share of laughs around the neighborhood because Darin wasn’t exactly real popular. He thought he lived in a gated yuppie community sometimes instead of your very average American working class neighborhood. He had numerous times went before the town council trying to get dogs outlawed in the city limits, clotheslines prohibited, and colorful molded plastic children’s toys of the Little Tike’s ilk banned from yards…these things made the neighborhoods look trashy which brought down property values, you know. He was generally disliked on the school board he lorded over and several parent’s groups had tried unsuccessfully to have him removed from office. Lou Darin was the sort of guy who’d run a red light and then swear at you if you dared beep at him. And when he was asked why he couldn’t seem to balance the school’s budget after four years in office, he was quick to point out that it was the fault of the guy before him. Because it certainly couldn’t be Lou Darin’s fault. Maybe he didn’t go around with a button that said I AM GOD…but then he didn’t have to.
Margaret helped Miriam up onto the sofa and Mitch told the Zirblanksi twins to go over to his house, wait there with Lily. Maybe after Miriam, she won’t seem quite so nutty to you guys. He hated himself for thinking shit
