Black House

When Tansy leads the willing patrons into the Sand Bar’s parking lot, there is none of the carnival raucousness that was the keynote of the cluster fuck at Ed’s Eats & Dawgs. Although most of the folks we met at Ed’s have been spending the evening in the Bar, getting moderately to seriously tanked, they are quiet, even funereal, as they follow Tansy out and fire up their cars and pickups. But it’s a savage funereality. She has taken something in from Gorg—some stone powerful poison—and passed it along to them.

In the belt of her slacks is a single crow feather.

Doodles Sanger takes her arm and guides her sweetly to Teddy Runkleman’s International Harvester pickup. When Tansy heads for the truck bed (which already holds two men and one hefty female in a white rayon waitress’s uniform), Doodles steers her toward the cab. “No, honey,” Doodles says, “you sit up there. Be comfy.”

Doodles wants that last place in the truck bed. She’s spotted something, and knows just what to do with it. Doodles is quick with her hands, always has been.

The fog isn’t thick this far from the river, but after two dozen cars and trucks have spun out of the Bar’s dirt parking lot, following Teddy Runkleman’s dented, one-taillight I.H., you can barely see the tavern. Inside, only half a dozen people are left—these were somehow immune to Tansy’s eerily powerful voice. One of them is Stinky Cheese, the bartender. Stinky has a lot of liquid assets to protect out here and isn’t going anywhere. When he calls 911 and speaks to Ernie Therriault, it will be mostly in the spirit of petulance. If he can’t go along and enjoy the fun, by God, at least he can spoil it for the rest of those monkeys.

Twenty vehicles leave the Sand Bar. By the time the caravan passes Ed’s Eats (the lane leading to it cordoned off by yellow tape) and the NO TRESPASSING sign alongside the overgrown lane to that queer forgotten house (not cordoned off; not even noticed, for that matter), the caravan has grown to thirty. There are fifty cars and trucks rolling down both lanes of Highway 35 by the time the mob reaches Goltz’s, and by the time it passes the 7-Eleven, there must be eighty vehicles or more, and maybe two hundred and fifty people. Credit this unnaturally rapid swelling to the ubiquitous cell phone.

Teddy Runkleman, oddly silent (he is, in fact, afraid of the pallid woman sitting beside him—her snarling mouth and her wide, unblinking eyes), brings his old truck to a halt in front of the FLPD parking lot entrance. Sumner Street is steep here, and he sets the parking brake. The other vehicles halt behind him, filling the street from side to side, rumbling through rusty mufflers and blatting through broken exhaust pipes. Misaligned headlights stab the fog like searchlight beams at a movie premiere. The night’s dank wet-fish smell has been overlaid with odors of burning gas, boiling oil, and cooking clutch lining. After a moment, doors begin to open and then clap shut. But there is no conversation. No yelling. No indecorous yee-haw whooping. Not tonight. The newcomers stand in clusters around the vehicles that brought them, watching as the people in the back of Teddy’s truck either jump over the sides or slip off the end of the tailgate, watching as Teddy crosses to the passenger door, at this moment as attentive as a young man arriving with his date at the junior prom, watching as he helps down the slim young woman who has lost her daughter. The mist seems to outline her somehow, and give her a bizarre electric aura, the same blue of the sodium lights on Beezer’s upper arms. The crowd gives out a collective (and weirdly amorous) sigh when it sees her. She is what connects them. All her life, Tansy Freneau has been the forgotten one—even Cubby Freneau forgot her eventually, running off to Green Bay and leaving her here to work odd jobs and collect the ADC. Only Irma remembered her, only Irma cared, and now Irma is dead. Not here to see (unless she’s looking down from heaven, Tansy thinks in some distant and ever-receding part of her mind) her mother suddenly idolized. Tansy Freneau has tonight become the dearest subject of French Landing’s eye and heart. Not its mind, because its mind is temporarily gone (perhaps in search of its conscience), but certainly of its eye and heart, yes. And now, as delicately as the girl she once was, Doodles Sanger approaches this woman of the hour. What Doodles spotted lying on the floor of Teddy’s truck bed was an old length of rope, dirty and oily but thick enough to do the trick. Below Doodles’s petite fist hangs the noose that her clever hands have fashioned on the ride into town. She hands it to Tansy, who holds it up in the misty light.

The crowd lets out another sigh.

Noose raised, looking like a female Diogenes in search of an hon-est man rather than of a cannibal in need of lynching, Tansy walks—delicate herself in her jeans and bloodstained sweatshirt—into the parking lot. Teddy, Doodles, and Freddy Saknessum walk behind her, and behind them come the rest. They move toward the police station like the tide.

The Thunder Five are still standing with their backs to the brick wall and their arms folded. “What the fuck do we do?” Mouse asks.

“I don’t know about you,” Beezer says, “but I’m gonna stand here until they grab me, which they probably will.” He’s looking at the woman with the upraised noose. He’s a big boy and he’s been in a lot of hard corners, but this chick frightens him with her blank, wide eyes, like the eyes of a statue. And there’s something stuck in her belt. Something black. Is it a knife? Some kind of dagger? “And I’m not gonna fight, because it won’t work.”

“They’ll lock the door, right?” Doc asks nervously. “I mean, the cops’ll lock the door.”

“I imagine,” Beezer says, never taking his eyes from Tansy Freneau. “But if these folks want Potter, they’ll have him on the half shell. Look at ’em, for Christ’s sake. There’s a couple of hundred.”

Tansy stops, the noose still held up. “Bring him out,” she says. Her voice is louder than it should be, as if some doctor has cunningly hidden an amplifying gadget in her throat. “Bring him out. Give us the killer!”

Doodles joins in. “Bring him out!”

And Teddy. “Give us the killer!”

And Freddy. “Bring him out! Give us the killer!”

And then the rest. It could almost be the sound track of George Rathbun’s Badger Barrage, only instead of “Block that kick!” or “On Wisconsin!” they are screaming, “BRING HIM OUT! GIVE US THE KILLER!”

“They’re gonna take him,” Beezer murmurs. He turns to his troops, his eyes both fierce and frightened. Sweat stands out on his broad forehead in large perfect drops. “When she’s got ’em pumped up to high, she’ll come and they’ll be right on her ass. Don’t run, don’t even unfold your arms. And when they grab you, let it happen. If you want to see daylight tomorrow, let it happen.”

The crowd stands knee-deep in fog like spoiled skim milk, chanting, “BRING HIM OUT! GIVE US THE KILLER!”

Wendell Green is chanting right along with them, but that doesn’t keep him from continuing to take pictures.

Because shit, this is the story of a lifetime.