Under the Dome

to get up. “You had your chance. Now I’m leaving.”

“Your other mistake was thinking you’d be safe outside on the street. An empty street.” His voice was almost kind, and when he touched her arm, she turned to look at him. He seized her face. And twisted.

Brenda Perkins heard a bitter crack, like the breaking of a branch overloaded with ice, and followed the sound into a great darkness, trying to call her husband’s name as she went.

21

Big Jim went inside and got a Jim Rennie’s Used Cars gimme cap from the front hall closet. Also some gloves. And a pumpkin from the pantry. Brenda was still in her Adirondack chair, with her chin on her chest. He looked around. No one. The world was his. He put the hat on her head (pulling the brim low), the gloves on her hands, and the pumpkin in her lap. It would serve perfectly well, he thought, until Junior came back and took her to where she could become part of Dale Barbara’s butcher’s bill. Until then, she was just another stuffed Halloween dummy.

He checked her carrier-bag. It contained her wallet, a comb, and a paperback novel. So that was all right. It would be fine down cellar, behind the dead furnace.

He left her with the hat slouched on her head and the pumpkin in her lap and went inside to stash her bag and wait for his son.

IN THE JUG

1

Selectman Rennie’s assumption that no one had seen Brenda come to his house that morning was correct. But she was seen on her morning travels, not by one person but by three, including one who also lived on Mill Street. If Big Jim had known, would the knowledge have given him pause? Doubtful; by then he was committed to his course and it was too late to turn back. But it might have caused him to reflect (for he was a reflective man, in his own way) on murder’s similarity to Lay’s potato chips: it’s hard to stop with just one.

2

Big Jim didn’t see the watchers when he came down to the corner of Mill and Main. Neither did Brenda as she walked up Town Common Hill. This was because they didn’t want to be seen. They were sheltering just inside the Peace Bridge, which happened to be a condemned structure. But that wasn’t the worst of it. If Claire McClatchey had seen the cigarettes, she would have shit a brick. In fact, she might have shit two. And certainly she never would have let Joe chum with Norrie Calvert again, not even if the fate of the town hinged upon their association, because it was Norrie who supplied the smokes—badly bent and croggled Winstons, which she had found on a shelf in the garage. Her father had quit smoking the year before and the pack was covered with a fine scrim of dust, but the cigarettes inside had looked okay to Norrie. There were just three, but three was perfect: one each. Think of it as a good-luck rite, she instructed.

“We’ll smoke like Indians praying to the gods for a successful hunt. Then we’ll go to work.”

“Sounds good,” Joe said. He had always been curious about smoking. He couldn’t see the attraction, but there must be one, because a lot of people still did it.

“Which gods?” Benny Drake asked.

“The gods of your choice,” Norrie answered, looking at him as if he were the dumbest creature in the universe. “God god, if that’s the one you like.” Dressed in faded denim shorts and a pink sleeveless top, her hair for once down and framing her foxy little face instead of scrooped back in its usual sloppin- around-town ponytail, she looked good to both boys. Totally awesome, in fact. “I pray to Wonder Woman.”

“Wonder Woman is not a goddess,” Joe said, taking one of the elderly Winstons and smoothing it straight. “Wonder Woman is a superhero.” He considered. “Maybe a superher-ette.”

“She’s a goddess to me,” Norrie replied with a grave-eyed sincerity that could not be gainsaid, let alone ridiculed. She was carefully straightening her own cigarette. Benny left his the way it was; he thought a bent cigarette had a certain coolness factor. “I had Wonder Woman Power Bracelets until I was nine, but then I lost them. I think that bitch Yvonne Nedeau stole them.”

She lit a match and touched it first to Scarecrow Joe’s cigarette, then to Benny’s. When she tried to use it to light her own, Benny blew it out.

“What did you do that for?” she asked.

“Three on a match. Bad luck.”

“You believe that?”

“Not much,” Benny said, “but today we’re going to need all the luck we can get.” He glanced at the shopping bag in the basket of his bike, then took a pull on his cigarette. He inhaled a little and then coughed the smoke back out, his eyes watering. “This tastes like panther-shit!”

“Smoked a lot of that, have you?” Joe asked. He dragged on his own cigarette. He didn’t want to look like a wuss, but he didn’t want to start coughing and maybe throw up, either. The smoke burned, but in sort of a good way. Maybe there was something to this, after all. Only he already felt a little woozy.

Go easy on the inhaling part, he thought. Passing out would be almost as uncool as puking. Unless, maybe, he passed out in Norrie Calvert’s lap. That might be very cool indeed.

Norrie reached into her shorts pocket and brought out the cap of a Verifine juice bottle. “We can use this for an ashtray. I want to do the Indian smoke ritual, but I don’t want to catch the Peace Bridge on fire.” She then closed her eyes. Her lips began to move. Her cigarette was between her fingers, growing an ash.

Benny looked at Joe, shrugged, then closed his own eyes. “Almighty GI Joe, please hear the prayer of your humble pfc Drake—”

Norrie kicked him without opening her eyes.

Joe got up (a little dizzy, but not too bad; he chanced another drag when he was on his feet) and walked past their parked bikes to the town common end of the covered walkway.

“Where you goin?” Norrie asked without opening her eyes.

“I pray better when I look at nature,” Joe said, but he actually just wanted a breath of fresh air. It wasn’t the burning tobacco; he sort of liked that. It was the other smells inside the bridge—decaying wood, old booze, and a sour chemical aroma that seemed to be rising up from the Prestile beneath them (that was a smell, The Chef might have told him, that you could come to love).

Even the outside air wasn’t that wonderful; it had a slightly used quality that made Joe think of the trip he’d made with his parents to New York the previous year. The subways had smelled a little like this, especially late in the day when they were crowded with people headed home.

He tapped ashes into his hand. As he scattered them, he spotted Brenda Perkins making her way up the hill.

A moment later, a hand touched his shoulder. Too light and delicate to be Benny’s. “Who’s that?” Norrie