Under the Dome

Gosh!”

The tears, which had slowed, began to ooze again. Andrea once more covered his hand. This time Andy gripped it. Andy and Andrea, Big Jim thought, and a thin smile creased the lower half of his fleshy face. The Dumbsey Twins.

“Hope for the best, plan for the worst,” he said. “What good advice that is. The worst in this case could entail days cut off from the outside world. Or a week. Possibly even a month.” He didn’t actually believe that, but they’d be quicker to do what he wanted if they were frightened.

Andrea repeated: “Surely not!”

“We just don’t know,” Big Jim said. This, at least, was the unvarnished truth. “How can we?”

“Maybe we ought to close Food City,” Randolph said. “At least for the time being. If we don’t, it’s apt to fill up like before a blizzard.”

Rennie was annoyed. He had an agenda, and this was on it, but it wasn’t first on it.

“Or maybe that’s not a good idea,” Randolph said, reading the Second Selectman’s face.

“Actually, Pete, I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Big Jim said. “Same principle as never declaring a bank holiday when currency is tight. You only provoke a run.”

“Are we talking about closing the banks, too?” Andy asked. “What’ll we do about the ATMs? There’s one at Brownie’s Store… Mill Gas and Grocery… my drugstore, of course…” He looked vague, then brightened. “I think I even saw one at the Health Center, although I’m not entirely sure about that one…”

Rennie wondered briefly if Andrea had been loaning the man some of her pills. “I was only making a metaphor, Andy.” Keeping his voice low and kind. This was exactly the kind of thing you could expect when people wandered off the agenda. “In a situation like this, food is money, in a manner of speaking. What I’m saying is it should be business as usual. It’ll keep people calm.”

“Ah,” Randolph said. This he understood. “Gotcha.”

“But you’ll need to talk to the supermarket manager—what’s his name, Cade?”

“Cale,” Randolph said. “Jack Cale.”

“Also Johnny Carver at the Gas and Grocery, and… who in the heck runs Brownie’s since Dil Brown died?”

“Velma Winter,” Andrea said. “She’s from Away, but she’s very nice.”

Rennie was pleased to see Randolph writing the names down in his pocket notebook. “Tell those three people that beer and liquor sales are off until further notice.” His face cramped in a rather frightening expression of pleasure. “And Dipper’s is closed. ”

“A lot of people aren’t going to like a booze shutdown,” Randolph said. “People like Sam Verdreaux.” Verdreaux was the town’s most notorious tosspot, a perfect example—in Big Jim’s opinion—of why the Volstead Act should never have been repealed.

“Sam and the others like him will just have to suffer once their current supplies of beer and coffee brandy are gone. We can’t have half the town getting drunk like it was New Year’s Eve.”

“Why not?” Andrea asked. “They’ll use up the supplies and that’ll be the end of it.”

“And if they riot in the meantime?”

Andrea was silent. She couldn’t see what people would have to riot about—not if they had food—but arguing with Jim Rennie, she had found, was usually unproductive and always wearying.

“I’ll send a couple of the guys out to talk to them,” Randolph said.

“Talk to Tommy and Willow Anderson personally. ” The Andersons ran Dipper’s. “They can be troublesome.” He lowered his voice. “Wingnuts.”

Randolph nodded. “Left -wingnuts. Got a picture of Uncle Barack over the bar.”

“That’s it exactly.” And, he didn’t need to say, Duke Perkins let those two hippy cotton-pickers get a foothold with their dancing and loud rock and roll and drinking until one in the morning. Protected them. And look at the trouble it led to for my son and his friends. He turned to Andy Sanders. “Also, you’ve got to put all the prescription drugs under lock and key. Oh, not Nasonex or Lyrica, that sort of thing. You know the stuff I mean.”

“Anything people might use to get high,” Andy said, “is already under lock and key.” He seemed uneasy at this turn of the conversation. Rennie knew why, but he wasn’t concerned about their various sales endeavors just now; they had more pressing business.

“Better take extra precautions, just the same.”

Andrea was looking alarmed. Andy patted her hand. “Don’t worry,” he said, “we always have enough to take care of those in real need.”

Andrea smiled at him.

“Bottom line is, this town is going to stay sober until the crisis ends,” Big Jim said. “Are we in agreement? Show of hands.”

The hands went up.

“Now,” Rennie said, “may I go back to where I wanted to start?” He looked at Randolph, who spread his hands in a gesture that simultaneously conveyed go ahead and sorry.

“We need to recognize that people are apt to be scared. And when people are scared, they can get up to dickens, booze or no booze.”

Andrea looked at the console to Big Jim’s right: switches that controlled the TV, the AM/FM radio, and the built-in taping system, an innovation Big Jim hated. “Shouldn’t that be on?”

“I see no need.”

The darned taping system (shades of Richard Nixon) had been the idea of a meddling medico named Eric Everett, a thirtysomething pain in the buttinsky who was known around town as Rusty. Everett had sprung the taping system idiocy at town meeting two years before, presenting it as a great leap forward. The proposal came as an unwelcome surprise to Rennie, who was seldom surprised, especially by political outsiders.

Big Jim had objected that the cost would be prohibitive. This tactic usually worked with thrifty Yankees, but not that time; Everett had presented figures, possibly supplied by Duke Perkins, showing that the federal government would pay eighty percent. Some Disaster Assistance Whatever; a leftover from the free-spending Clinton years. Rennie had found himself outflanked.

It wasn’t a thing that happened often, and he didn’t like it, but he had been in politics for many more years than Eric “Rusty” Everett had been tickling prostates, and he knew there was a big difference between losing a battle and losing the war.

“Or at least someone should take notes?” Andrea asked timidly.

“I think it might be best to keep this informal, for the time being,” Big Jim said. “Just among the four of us.”

“Well… if you think so…”

“Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead,” Andy said dreamily.

“That’s right, pal,” Rennie said, just as if that made sense. Then he turned back to Randolph. “I’d say our prime concern—our prime responsibility to the town—is maintaining order for the duration of this crisis. Which means police.”

“Damn straight!” Randolph said smartly.

“Now, I’m sure Chief Perkins is looking down on us from Above—”

“With my wife,” Andy said. “With Claudie.” He produced a snot-clogged honk that Big Jim could have done without. Nonetheless, he patted Andy’s free hand.

“That’s right, Andy, the two of them together, bathed in Jesus’s glory. But for us here on earth… Pete, what kind of force can you muster?”

Big Jim knew the answer. He knew the answers to most of his own questions. Life was easier that way. There were eighteen officers on the Chester’s Mill police payroll, twelve full-timers and six part-timers (the latter all past sixty, which made their services entrancingly cheap). Of those eighteen, he was quite sure five of the full- timers were out of town; they had either gone to that day’s high school football game with their wives and families or to the controlled tburn in Castle Rock. A sixth, Chief Perkins, was dead. And while Rennie would never speak ill of