a cog upstairs. He backed away from anybody because he saw no allies in the group of misfits around him. “Don’t think I don’t know what this is all about! I know! I know! None of you have ever wanted me in this neighborhood and now you’ve seen your chance to play a little joke on me and now you’ve had your stupid little laugh at my expense! Well, ha, ha, joke’s on you! Because I won’t be a party to this madness and I will not be your rubber stamp! Not now and not ever!”
He started backing towards the door with a wild look in his eye like he thought maybe they were all going to jump him and beat him up. But nobody made a move. They just watched him back to the door and then go running right out of it, talking to himself the entire time.
“Well, scratch that asshole,” Tommy said. “He’ll be dead by dawn.”
After that, things got a little uncomfortable. Nobody seemed to know what to say and probably because there really wasn’t anything they could say.
Miriam looked happy about it all. For the first time in his life, Mitch actually thought she was looking happy.
Margaret finally said, “Mitch? Mitch, is it really true? Is all that really true?”
He nodded solemnly. “Yes, I’m afraid it is.”
Russel needed no more prompting. He took his mother by the arm and hurried her out the door and presumably to their house down the way where Mitch fervently hoped he would lock the door and not open it again.
“Miriam,” he said, “your door is shot up. You can’t stay here. You can’t-”
“You don’t worry about what I can or can’t do, Mr. Mitch Barron! I’ll take care of myself and I don’t need any effing help from the likes of you! So get off my property! Get off my property and stay off! Because next time, I swear to God, I will not miss!”
Tommy pumped the shells out of her Remington and then handed it back to her. Then they got out just like she’d suggested.
“What now?” Tommy said when they were outside in the rain.
“I wished to Christ I knew,” Mitch told him. “My goddamn head is spinning.”
They ducked under a tree and had a smoke, not saying anything, just twisted up tight inside and confused, overwhelmed.
“I been thinking,” Tommy finally said. “If the water keeps rising…it won’t be just River Town and Bethany that go under.”
“No, whole damn city will sink.”
Tommy pulled off his cigarette. “We might want to remember where the tallest buildings in town are.”
“It gets bad, there’s always the old Bleeding Heart Orphanage.”
Bleeding Heart sat on the highest ground in town, right in-between Crandon and East Genesee, overlooking Bethany. On a clear day, you could see it from just about anywhere in the city sitting atop Crooked Hill. The orphanage was a big, looming pile of brick that had been closed down for some twenty years now, was mostly boarded up, a nice home for rats and pigeons and bats. There was nothing else up there but lots of trees, an old ruined church, and a graveyard. The ownership of the property was disputed between the city and the Catholic diocese. It was all tangled in red tape and in the courts where it would probably languish for years to come.
“I’m thinking I’d rather drown than have to go up to that goddamn haunted house,” Tommy said.
Mitch just sighed. “We better get back to Lily.” He looked up at the darkening sky. “Night’s coming and I don’t want to leave her alone any longer than I have to.”
12
And then night came down smooth and swift and coveting. The sun, buried behind layers of leaden clouds, went out like a cigarette dropped in a puddle. It sought its grave and moist earth was thrown in after it and it was simply no more. The people of Witcham who had not wisely escaped this sinking ghost ship locked themselves down in the boxes of their houses and apartments. They fastened and chained the lids and hid in the darkness like spiders in dark crevices. They did not turn on the lights because they were frightened that lights could be seen as beacons by whatever haunted that wet charnel blackness beyond their thresholds. But those that did leave the lights on, left everything burning. Not just bedroom, living room, and kitchen lights, but porch lights and garage lights and driveway lights. And when those were lit, they broke out the lanterns and candles and flashlights. Anything to chase away the grim tangles of shadows that might come knocking on doors or scratching at windows begging treats and offering tricks.
Out there, things dripped and things shifted and other things moved in that leaf-caked dead sea of stagnancy that washed turgid and oily up against the buildings and dirty windows. Now and again, a shadow would move or a pale hand would break the mold of wet leaves or a carnival waxwork of gray-white faces would rise from that watery murk, all grinning vapidly with crooked smiles and staring eyes that were terribly dark and terribly huge and terribly depthless. Then, in unison, they would sink away into the clotted bottoms of River Town like corpses into brine, forever drifting and forever nameless.
13
Night hung over the rooftops of River Town like funeral crepe, black and thick and dank with the smell of rot and things disinterred.
Into this sunken graveyard of burial and un-death, three inflatable boats came, their hulls easily gliding through the leaves and bobbing wreckage that had been vomited up by the drowned city in its death throes. They were each seventeen-footers with fifty-five horsepower Johnson pump jet engines and each carried three men of Bravo Company, 32nd Engineer Battalion, Wisconsin Army National Guard. They had been deployed to search for survivors in the flooded sections of Witcham and they were commanded by none other than First Sergeant Henry T. Oates, a guy with twenty-five years of experience in the regular army. Oates had cut his teeth in the 1^st Infantry and 101^st Airborne Divisions and would only be too happy to tell you so. Just as he would also happily tell you that he was only hooked up with these weekend jugheads in order to put in his thirty and get his retirement.
“Okay, boys,” he called out into the sullen darkness of River Town, “drop your cocks and grab your socks, let’s do this and do this right. We get back, shit yes, we’ll be the pride and glory of the Thirty-second. Which, I might add, is like being the shiniest turd in the kitty box.”
A few laughs rolled through the squad.
Oates was riding shotgun in the lead boat with Hinks and Neiderhauser. Jones had the second boat with Strickland and Chernick. And pulling up the rear was Hopper with Liss and Torrio. Oates tried damn hard to be patient with his squad, being that they were just as virgin as boots fresh out of Leonard Wood, but, Jesus, sometimes it was a little hard to swallow. Oates was a real soldier and here he was bopping with these weekend warriors who spent their weeks flipping burgers at Mickey Dee’s and working housewares at the Walmart when they weren’t parading around in baggy pants wearing goddamn earrings and listening to faggot rap music.
Yeah, it was all just pretty damn peachy, this situation.
But maybe it was just the whole damn new Army with their high-tech toys, half-ass politically correct leadership, and those damn fairy berets that made ‘em look like a bunch of French pedophiles. And these weekenders were the very lower strata of that particularly limp-wristed organization. Oates just thanked God that this bunch didn’t get deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan or some equally cheery hellhole, because these boys would get bagged in a week in a real combat duty station.
Not that the Army seemed to understand that or the fat-cat politicos in Washington. Need came, they’d deploy these misfits. But that was the American way, Oates figured. Getting into wars we had no business fighting in the first place. Sticking our noses into one smelly cow-pie after another. But he supposed that was the American way of war: whoever grabs the quickest, gets the mostest…even if no pre-planning went into it.
Not to take away from God, country, and all that happy horseshit, Oates thought.
