by John Enright
Sissy came and sat beside him on the bed. “And that’s why I’m here, to get my books back. You’re a thief. You took my books. You hijacked my mind.” In the silence that followed, her hand found his knee and rested there. “How are you feeling, Dominick? How are your ribs? I couldn’t stop wondering about you, worrying about you.”
“Mending is a good word. I think I will go with mending. So, Vernon brought you in the back way?”
“Yes, Daddy walked me in from the barn to the garden. That man caught me on the porch. He had a gun. I thought he was going to shoot me. I just wanted to see you and see what was going on.”
“Well, I am here in the dark and not much is going on.”
“Dominick, about that article. That’s not the way I wrote it. My editor changed it, the whole thrust of it. He left out the history, just played up the Wiccan thing. ‘Nobody cares about history,’ he said. ‘That shit has already happened. This is a newspaper; we deal with what’s new,’” she said in a fake male voice. “I didn’t like the way it came out.”
“Are you hungry? I can make you a sandwich,” Dominick said.
“And about that thing that happened between us at my house? I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just … I just wanted you, that’s all. I lost control.” She squeezed his knee. “Those are the two things I came here to tell you. It was easier than I thought it would be, in the dark.”
“Well, I guess I am relieved to hear that you weren’t just following the Lord’s orders.”
In the dark beside him Sissy laughed a little purring laugh. She bumped her shoulder into his. “You’re not angry with me then?”
“I never was angry, just a bit confused, but that’s normal.”
“It wasn’t God telling me to make love to you. It was me telling me to make love to you. Jesus had nothing to do with it.”
“It was on Sunday. You had just come from church.”
“So, is this your room?” Sissy asked.
“No, normally it is Morgan’s room, but she’s gone now so it’s mine.”
“I could smell your cigar, but then a woman’s smell too. Does the fact that you’re here mean you may be staying?”
“Why?”
“Because I was selfishly hoping the answer was going to be yes. I want to learn more about you, find out where your secrets are hidden.”
“I don’t store my secrets. I shred them,” Dominick said. His ribs ached. He stretched back on the bed to ease them.
“My father likes you. He doesn’t like too many people. Is this like pillow talk, where in the dark you just say whatever comes into your head next?”
Dominick put his hand on Sissy’s broad back. She was warm to the touch. “I don’t know,” he said. “Pass me a pillow to help me out.”
Sissy found a pillow at her end of the bed and then hit him with it. “Smells like her,” she said.
Dominick put the pillow beneath his head then said, “Let me see what you smell like.”
Sissy got her own pillow and stretched out beside him in the dark. “You smell of cigar,” she said.
“Not brimstone?”
“I wouldn’t know what brimstone smells like,” Sissy said, sniffing his ear.
“Sulfur, not nice,” he said. “You wouldn’t be here.” He turned his head to smell her there in the dark “You smell good.” This was nice. This was good. He felt at peace.
“Dominick?” Sissy said.
“Hmm?” he answered from the brink of sleep.
“I won’t molest you this time. I’ll just guard you. Go to sleep.”
It seemed to Dominick that the explosion preceded the flash, but he could have been wrong. His eyes were closed and he was somewhere else entirely.
Chapter 25
When it hit the house it rocked her bed. It was the impact not the sound that awoke Amanda. She had been in a deep sleep and woke up confounded by sudden reality, by the nightmare red glow in her room. On warm summer nights like this she liked to sleep in the buff. Now she sat naked on the side of her bed. There was a boom and another red flash outside her windows, followed by gunfire from downstairs—the sound of Denise’s shotgun and the crack crack of a high-powered rifle. In the dark she had trouble finding her clothes. She skipped the underwear.
Her first thoughts were of her brother. Morgan’s room at the center of the house was much more a target than hers on the corner. She couldn’t find her second sandal and switched on her bedside lamp. Almost immediately a bullet took out an upper pane in her front-facing window. She found her sandal and turned off the light. She had latched her door and now in the dark had to find and fumble with the latch. Another flash and boom behind her, more sporadic gunfire.
In the hallway the blackness was complete. Amanda pulled her cigarette lighter from the pocket of her cut-offs and lit it, heading for Morgan’s room.
“Who’s that? Is that you Dominick?” It was a man’s voice from the bottom of the stairway to her right. There was the dim yellow beam of a flashlight with dying batteries down there. “Where’s Sissy?” The beam headed up the stairs. At the top of the stairs Amanda and the man almost collided, and Amanda’s lighter went out. “You’re not Dominick,” the man said, then he yelled out, “Dominick! Where are you? Sissy, let’s go.” And the door to Morgan’s room opened.
“Daddy, what are you doing here?” a voice, Sissy’s voice, said.
“I wasn’t about to leave you here,” the man said. He banged his flashlight against the palm of his hand and it brightened up. “We are out of here. This ain’t our fight. Let’s go. You’re done here. Say good-bye.”
Then Dominick appeared in the doorway, carrying a small flashlight that cast a thin, bright bluish beam. The other man cast his light first on Sissy, then on Dominick, who was dressed in just a pair of boxer shorts. Amanda stepped farther back into the shadows beyond their lights. It was like she was no longer there. Another flare or rocket or whatever it was went off outside. This one hit the house.
“Vernon, glad you are here,” Dominick said. “Can you still get out the back way?”
“Think so. Came in that way. But got to go now. Let’s go, Sissy.”
“Got to get my shoes,” Sissy said.
“You coming?” the man asked.
“No. You go. Take Sissy. I have to check on my sister.”
“I heard on the police band that the sheriff is sending a unit out here. Somebody must have complained about something,” the man Dominick had called Vernon said. “I’d rather not be here.”
“Understood,” Dominick said. More shots were exchanged between the house and the outside. Amanda had by now retreated to the door of her room. Sissy reappeared, wearing just a sundress and slippers. Both of the men turned their lights on Sissy. She gave Dominick a kiss and without a word left with her father down the stairs.
Amanda waited at her room for her brother to come and check on her, but he didn’t.
***
In Morgan’s darkened room Dominick searched for, found, and put on his discarded pants and shirt and shoes. He thought about Vernon, who had acquiesced—probably under protest—to bringing his daughter here but then cared enough not to leave her in possible danger. Dominick had been told by people—parents—that there was no understanding parenting until you had done it yourself, that unless you had been a parent you always in some ways remained a child. Something about responsibility, a responsibility Vernon had just reassumed, relieving Dominick of it.
Another red flare was fired from the foot of the driveway. Dominick had decided that was what they were—aerial signal flares like the ones used on boats. This one hit the house just below the windows of his room and shattered into a sprayed display of phosphorescence. It pissed him off. The idiots. They could set fire to the house. He would see where they were. With his pocket penlight he found his way up the stairs to the cupola. The night vision goggles were on the floor by the broken-out window facing the road. It took him a minute to adjust to them and scan through the darkness below
him before he picked up the green silhouettes of warm bodies. There was a line of them on what must have been the road, then closer a cluster in probably the driveway. Off to both sides individual green ghosts were moving slowly toward the house.
There was another flash, so bright in the goggles that it momentarily blinded him. This flare skittered up onto the front porch below him. Sons of bitches. Dominick put down the goggles and rubbed his eyes. Denise and Floyd two floors below answered the rockets with gunfire into the dark. That was answered by shots from outside, which sounded like relatively harmless pistol shots. They were shooting at his house, his sister’s house. He could smell the pyrotechnic chemicals burning, eating into ancestral wood. The fucking sons of bitches, the mindless shithead motherfuckers.
If there was a safety on the semiautomatic weapon Joshua had left behind, it was turned off. Dominick had to kneel to aim out the broken window, if aim was the right word. Without the goggles he couldn’t see where he was firing. He was returning fire as a statement only. He pulled off a burst of five quick shots. The recoil played a little satanic tune on his ribs, and the pain made him sit down with his back against the wall beneath the windows. His fire was returned, and a few more windows in the cupola were shattered. Out the windows now he could see the flickering red glow of a permanent fire.
Dominick pushed himself back up to look out the window in time to see another flare launched. This one lurched erratically over the house, but he could see from where it had been fired, and he pulled off another five rounds at that spot. This was again answered by a barrage of fire. He sat down again below the window. It was July 6th, going on the 7th. The last disastrous engagements at Gettysburg had occurred on July 3rd, 150 years before. By July 6th and 7th Lee was retreating through Maryland, fighting rearguard battles at Williamsport and Boonsboro, nasty encounters to save a retreat from becoming a rout. The next flare smashed through the windows to his left and kept on going through the far windows. Dominick scrambled to the stairs. It was time to retreat from High Priest Lloyd’s eye in the sky. He took his weapon with him.
In Morgan’s room at the bottom of the stairs the uncertain flickering light from the flames outside had become less uncertain. It lit the room in rust-colored shadows. He headed for the door and Amanda’s room. They would have to leave the house to fight the fire from outside with Susan’s garden hose. The gunfire had stopped, and off in the distance he could hear a siren.
***
When the next rocket hit the porch and caught fire, Amanda dialed 911. She was back in her room, at a loss about what to do. She just gave the address and said her house was on fire. She didn’t know how to report the rest. It would take too long. It wasn’t important. She tried to call Morgan, but that call wouldn’t go through. Just as well. What could Morgan do? The fire on the porch was not going out and would have to be dealt with. Morgan was safely elsewhere. Time had become erratic—not her sense of time but time itself. It would rush forward at tachycardia speed then abruptly stall into super slow motion. It was in slow motion that she went out into the hall, which was still in solid silent blackness. There was a switch for the hall light at the top of the stairs, if she could find it. She stepped forward, still in slow motion, her hands out in front of her. Then a door to her left opened, and the thin blue light of Dominick’s penlight flashed into the hall and pointed directly at her.
“Are you alright?” Dominick asked. “We should go down, don’t you think?” He sounded so calm, as if they were just late for dinner or something.
“Fire,” she said as they came together. She could sound just as cool as he. They met at the head of the stairs. “There’s a light switch,” she said, and she took his hand and turned his flashlight away from her toward the wall where she thought the switch ought to be. She flipped the switch, and the overhead lights in the hallway came on.
Dominick was now dressed in more than just his boxer shorts, and in his other hand, the one she wasn’t still holding, he was carrying a long rifle. A woman’s voice—Denise’s—was now calling out from downstairs, “Fire, fire.” Another doorway down the hall swung open and Susan’s sister and one of Lloyd’s young men came out into the light. They looked very frightened and came running toward them. Time now sped up and got chaotic. Denise and now Lloyd were yelling at them from the bottom of the stairs. The two kids were freaking out; the girl was crying hysterically. Outside, the sound of a siren grew louder. Amanda just stepped back and watched. Dominick handed the rifle to the young man and hurried him and the girl down the stairs. Then he gestured to Amanda to wait and went back into Morgan’s room. When Dominick came back out he was carrying his black leather grip bag. They went down the stairs together.
The glow of the fire on the porch came in through the windows beside the front door and backlit the entryway at the bottom of the stairs. Denise was there with Lloyd, along with all four of their remaining crew. Denise’s two girls were hugging one another, and Lloyd was congratulating the boy on his good shooting. This scene seemed to pass in a second—it didn’t concern her—as Amanda headed for the kitchen and the back door. Dominick was right behind her. Lloyd yelled something after them, but they kept going.
The kitchen, removed from the flames, was dark. Dominick switched on his penlight and pointed the way to the outside door. They stopped there. They could see torch beams in the left and right of the field out back.
“I know where I left the hose,” Amanda said. “Can you find the spigot to turn it on?”
“Yes, I think so. Off to the left, around the corner,” Dominick said. “Shall we? Keep low. You don’t know.” His hand was on her back.
Say something, say something, tell him, the voice in her head was saying, but “Keep low yourself,” was all she could say. She opened the door and they headed out in opposite directions.
***
As Dominick rounded the corner of the house he could see the flashing colored roof lights of a county vehicle down on the road, but it wasn’t a fire truck. He found the hose at his feet and picked it up. He followed it to the spigot on the outside basement wall and turned it on. Now what? he wondered. There was just the one hose. He stepped away from the house to where he could better see the lights down on the road.
A small voice called out his name as a question. “Dominick? Dominick, is that you?”
He turned on his penlight and flashed it in the direction he thought the voice had come from. This was a mistake. A small-caliber gun barked out in the blackness, then another farther away. He heard one shot whistle past him. He turned out the light and dove head first onto the ground. Within seconds, answering fire—what sounded like Denise’s shotgun and a rifle like the one he had fired—issued from the house. More shots came from the direction of the road, then more answering shots from the house. Everyone was firing targetless into blackness. For some reason Dominick thought of the muskets found beside dead boys on Civil War battlefields, guns stuffed with shot but never fired, departed silent pacifists.
An amplified voice came up from the road. “This is the sheriff’s office. This is an order. Cease fire. Cease fire. House, cease fire.”
This was answered by a rapid burst of shots from Lloyd inside the house and sporadic returned fire from the surrounding fields.
“Cease fire! Cease fire! You have been warned.”
In the silence that followed, Dominick headed on his hands and knees back toward where he had come from behind the house.
The small voice was closer this time: “Where is Dominick?”
He was passing the inclined doors that covered the outside stairs to the cellar. He stopped. “Who’s there?”
“Dominick? Is that you? Come, this way.”
He knew that voice. It was Susan’s.
“Come, quickly. They’re everywhere,” she said, and he heard the sound of the hinges on the old plank door opening. In the now faintly fire-glowing darkness Dominick helped raise the door and found his way onto and down the cellar steps, lowering the door
above him.
At the bottom of the stairs Susan switched on an electric torch. “I borrowed this from your glove compartment. I hope you don’t mind,” she said.
“Susan, what are you doing here?”
“I brought you your car. I thought you might need it,” she said. “They didn’t shoot you, did they?” She shined the torch over his body.
“They are very bad shots,” he said. He felt as if he had been shot in the ribs, but it was just the same old pain. “What do you mean you brought me my car? Where is it?”
“On that road behind the barn. Are you sure you are alright, not shot?”
“But how?”
“I listened in when Sissy talked with her dad tonight. I knew where she had hid your keys. I thought you might want to get away, that’s all. It’s such a nice car.”
“But how did you get here?” and Dominick pointed down to where they were standing.
“Oh, the tunnel,” she said. “I knew there was a tunnel from the barn—I used to hide in there—but I didn’t know it came all the way to the house. There were people in the field. I didn’t want to meet them. So I tried the tunnel. Come on, I’ll show you. We can get out that way.”
“No. The house is on fire. I have to help Amanda.”
“But they’ll shoot you.”
“I can’t just leave her to fight the fire alone.”
“Yes, you can.”
“No, Susan. I have to go back.”
“I’ll wait for you then.”
***
The entire front veranda was in flames. When the fire got so hot that the water from the garden hose turned into steam before it got close to the flames, Amanda dropped the hose and walked away into the night beyond the glare. Nobody stopped her. Her hair had been frizzed by the heat; she could smell it now. The heat at her back was intense and she kept walking away from it through the field. She didn’t look back. She would just keep walking.
***
Dominick found the end of the hose on the ground, the water running into the earth. No Amanda. He picked up the hose. The flames were now licking around the edges of the veranda ceiling and onto its roof, and the heat hurt his eyes. He dropped the hose and turned away. It was then he saw Amanda’s back disappearing into the darkness of the field. He called out her name, but she didn’t answer. There was a crash behind him as part of the house fell into the flames in an explosion of sparks. When he looked back at the field, Amanda had vanished into the night.