The Blade Between

by Sam J. Miller

  * * *

  Mayor Nathan Coffin announced this morning on WRGB—and on Twitter—that this evening’s Winter Fest will take place as planned.

  The controversial decision came after days of demands from both sides of the recent war over Hudson’s future that the event be canceled or postponed until cooler heads could prevail.

  “We’ve beefed up the security and scaled back the venue,” he said, “in anticipation of smaller crowds, and in the hopes of better ensuring the safety of all concerned, we’ll gather at the Hudson boat launch.”

  Responses to the announcement ranged from celebratory to antagonistic, with some Twitter users saying “Goddamn right, we’re not going to let a bunch of thugs ruin our good time,” and others tweeting at the mayor “DIE YOU FAT FUCKING SELLOUT WHALE.”

  * * *

  Wallace Warsaw works his contacts, struggling—after all that’s happened—to summon the stern clout he used to carry. To cajole, to browbeat, to plead when he has to. Whatever it takes to get people there.

  Treenie Lazzarra posts from her hospital bed, blitzing social media to beg people to turn out. I’m stuck in this hospital bed with a damn harpoon wound, so there’ll be no Winter Fest for me. Doctor’s orders. But I implore the rest of you, don’t let them take this away from us. And don’t let them try to tell you this is an Old-Hudson-vs-New-Hudson thing. It was never about old vs. new. If it was, I wouldn’t have gotten stabbed—my family’s been in Hudson three generations. No, this is about the people who want to keep Hudson for themselves, even if it means staying a depressed miserable middle-of-nowhere, and those who want to actually build a future. Together. We’ve worked hard to turn this [ . . . ]

  * * *

  ZELDA IS MAKING TURN-OUT CALLS, too, but to a much smaller set of people. These are not random seat fillers, a wide net intended to swell the crowd. Everyone Zelda calls has a very specific task to accomplish tonight. She doesn’t look up when someone knocks at the door of her office down at CPS. “Come in,” she barks.

  “You got a minute?” Attalah asks, sticking her head in the door.

  “Of course,” she says, but still doesn’t look up. Hopes that this will convey that she doesn’t have a minute, has barely thirty seconds for whatever foolishness she’s come for.

  “You doing okay?” Attalah asks, sitting down across the desk from Zelda. “You look” (like shit) (like you haven’t slept in days and are fiending for some kind of drug that does terrible things to your skin and eyes) “tired.”

  “You don’t look so hot yourself,” Zelda says, finally taking in the lack of makeup on Attalah’s face, the slightly-less-than-immaculate clothes she’s wearing. Attalah’s off days look a damn sight better than most people’s on days.

  “Been going through a tough patch in my personal life. Just between us. Some super upsetting stuff has been happening. I’ll leave it at that.”

  “I hear you,” Zelda says, turning off her computer screen, leaning back. She wonders if Attalah knows she knows exactly what she’s talking about. If she’s aware what the Hudson rumor mill is handing around, about Attalah’s choir-boy husband. She permits herself a moment of unclenching. A deep breath, even.

  “What have you got planned for tonight?”

  Zelda smiles. “Don’t worry about it, Attalah. We got this under control.”

  “I don’t doubt it. And I want to help.”

  “I don’t think you do,” Zelda says, reveling in this rare instant of superiority. Of power. Nothing ever made her feel powerful before, outside of bed or substance abuse. “I know you, Attalah. You talk a good game, about fighting the power and all that shit, but at the end of the day all you want is to make the machine run a little nicer. You don’t want to break the damn machine in half. That’s what we’re going to do tonight.”

  “You don’t know me,” Attalah says, her voice dropping dangerously. “And you don’t know anything about this machine you’re talking about, if you think I don’t want to fucking break it in half. Hard as you’ve had it in life, you haven’t seen the tip of the iceberg of how it chews people up and spits them out. I’m not trying to say that Black people are the only ones getting fucked over by it. I’m saying no one has been fucked over as hard as we have. And whatever you’re going through, little miss middle-class third-generation Irish daughter gone wrong, you never had to see your sister slowly wasting away over a fry vat at McDonald’s because she couldn’t go to college and that was the best she could do. You never saw your brother behind bars. Or your aunt’s foot amputated because she didn’t get the care for her diabetes she should have. Have you?”

  Zelda shakes her head no.

  “And you damn sure never had to know in your heart that the man you love most in the world is broken inside, because his dad raised him to believe that the best way for a Black man in this world to survive is to make his own needs less important than those of the white people around him, so he’d betray his marital vows just because his best friend needed him to.”

  Silence. So deep it seems like they can hear the hammering down at the waterfront. The Ferris wheel being assembled.

  “So I want to know what you’ve got planned for tonight, and I want to help. I want to break the fucking machine into a thousand fucking pieces.”

  Zelda smiles. “Okay. Okay. Sorry, I just had to check. You know how it is.”

  “Of course,” Attalah says, also smiling.

  Zelda leans across the table and starts to talk.

  * * *

  “I DON’T UNDERSTAND,” weeps the man in the hospital bed. “I don’t know how this could have happened.”

  “It’s okay, Rudy,” Dom says, rubbing his foot beneath the sheet. “Just tell me about that evening.”

  “That’s the thing,” he says. “It’s all like a dream. The harpoon in my hand, the whale mask on my head, the fact that I’m fucking standing in the alleyway threatening Treenie Lazzarra, who was my sister’s best fucking friend in high school . . . I don’t remember how any of that happened. Just pieces. Moments. But, like, weird moments. Stuff that doesn’t make sense. Like I was on a boat, like I was drowning. You know me, Dom. I’d never . . .”

  Classic dissociative state, Dom thinks. Cop training comes back. Psych 101. The brain, unable to process a traumatic event—or, the sense of self unable to accept its own culpability in that event, clouds the memories until they no longer make sense.

  Either that, or the monsters made him do it, too.

  “We need to know who you were with,” Dom says. “That’s all. Because they’re probably planning to hurt more people, and I know you don’t want that.”

  Rudy starts crying again. Dom comes around to hold his hand.

  “We only wanted to scare her. That’s what we said. I know that much. I never . . . I wouldn’t have . . .”

  “Who’s we, Rudy?”

  “I got some kind of crazy tumor,” Rudy said, tapping at his chest. “I thought I was imagining it but the doctors saw it on the X-ray. They tried to take a piece to biopsy it and they said it’s made of fucking metal, like old shrapnel, except I was never in a goddamn war, never got shot, wounded”—and here his voice rises to a shriek—“So how the hell did it get under my skin, Dom?”

  Oh good, Dom thinks. He’s lost his fucking mind.

  * * *

  “WE’RE NOT GOING to hurt the four of them,” Zelda says, at last. “We just want to humiliate them. Make an example of them. It’ll be unpleasant, for sure, but we mean them no harm.”

  She leans back. Puts her feet up on the desk. Red Converse All-Stars.

  Attalah doesn’t say anything at first. Then she grins. “You have no idea how excellent that sounds to me. How can I help?”

  * * *

  LILLY’S PHONE KEEPS PINGING. Assembly of the Ferris wheel is all finished; all ten bulldozers have been dropped off at the construction sites; enough gasoline cannisters to power a fleet of band saws and jackhammers and forklifts. Come Monday morning, the Pequod Arms will
be under way. And unstoppable.

  None of that feels real.

  Two dirty mugs sit on her kitchen table. They feel real.

  Lilly made hot chocolate, for her and Heather. They sat in the dark until the sun started to rise, and then Lilly got up and went to the kitchen. She’d briefly entertained the idea of calling the cops to report the woman for breaking and entering. She was crazy, yes, but who could blame her? Lilly had never really thought about it before: how traumatic an eviction would be. She can’t imagine what something like that would do to her.

  So Lilly made Heather hot chocolate instead of calling the cops on her. And sat with her, and talked. And thought. And planned. Read a ton of stuff, online, about evictions. And alternatives. By daylight Heather looked even more worn and frayed than she had seemed in the dark. A lot sadder. Like she’d come to some decision, and it was nothing good.

  * * *

  OFFICER PADDOCK IS ALONE on guard duty inside the old library when they come. His partner has the car; is making a run to Bagel Tyme. He’s surprised that they got past the high-tech lock on the back door, but only for a second. Of course they got in. All the members of the board of directors of the library have key cards. Chief Propst probably miscalculated. He would have known that they’d have keys, but must have figured they’re all upstanding citizens, pillars of the community, and they’d never be a party to any vigilante murder nonsense.

  All of this is happening at a glossy black-and-white slow-mo remove. The people with whales on their heads pointing harpoons at his belly, they can’t be real. Can’t be serious.

  One of them says, “You know why we’re here, Joe.”

  “I guess I do.”

  “You gonna let us take him?” says another, a woman. “Or are you going to die to protect a fucking pedophile rapist?”

  “Well, when you put it like that,” Officer Paddock says.

  In the movies, the cops who fold like cowards always ask to get beat up a little, a black eye or flesh wound to show they tried their hardest to do their jobs. Officer Paddock doesn’t much feel like any of that. He hands them the keys and steps aside. Two go downstairs to grab Jark Trowse. Two remain to keep their harpoons aimed for his soft and squishy parts, in case he gets any funny ideas about calling for help. Once they’ve gotten what they want, one will remain behind for ten minutes to make sure he doesn’t summon the cavalry.

  It’s unnecessary, all of it. Joe Paddock has never been one for funny ideas.

  * * *

  IT’S PURE DUMB LUCK that Attalah stops by the office of UPLIFT Hudson on her way to her first Zelda errand. She rarely does these days. The staff she hired runs the arts programming, the youth work. She just needed something familiar, something stable.

  “Mrs. Morrison?” asks an eager but wild-eyed young white woman as soon as she walks in the door.

  “Yes?”

  “My name’s Lilly, and I work for Penelope’s Quilt. I know that doesn’t exactly predispose you toward kindness toward me, but—there’s something we’d like to offer you.”

  Pure dumb luck, too, for this lost little girl, that Attalah says yes. Leads her into her office. She hadn’t planned on it. Wouldn’t normally. Doesn’t want any of the things that Penelope’s Quilt has tried to offer her over the years. Mountains of money; a big brand-new space. We want to be good neighbors, said the guy they used to send—this girl’s boss, probably, a white man with soft hands, who believed his good intentions made up for all the damage he caused. She never took any of it, no matter how badly she needed the resources. Once she did, she’d be hooked. Unable to say a single bad word about them, ever again. It’d have been different if she could have used that money to meaningfully fight to protect her people, stop the displacement. But no. They were too smart for that.

  So whatever this girl has come to offer? It isn’t anything Attalah wants.

  Except information. The company’s back is up against the wall. Whatever she came for, whatever she needs—she’ll probably spill plenty, without even meaning to.

  “What can I do for you, Lilly?” Attalah asks once they are sitting down in her office. “It’s a busy day for me, as I imagine it is for you. Big plans for this evening.”

  “Yes,” Lilly says, not taking the bait. “I’m sorry. I’ll make this quick. We’re in a weird position over at Penelope’s Quilt these days. With J—with our CEO in jail, the board of directors is trying to steer the ship, but our CEO always kept them in the dark about day-to-day operations—didn’t want them interfering in the work too much. He still doesn’t. So he has given a ton of power and resources to a bunch of the department heads. And, well, some of us—mostly just me—we want to do something with that money that’s actually helpful to Hudson.”

  Attalah smirks. “Like what? A scholarship in your name? New books for the library?”

  “This is going to sound crazy,” Lilly says. “And I haven’t thought it through, not really. And I don’t have a ton of time before the board figures out what’s up and moves to regulate the resources I’m sitting on. Two, three days tops. So what I’m asking is for you to sign on to something super vague and full of kinks to be worked out.”

  “Tell me.” Attalah has to fight to keep a dismissive edge out of her voice.

  “I want to establish Hudson as an Eviction Free Zone, calling for a moratorium on police involvement in execution of eviction proceedings and asking landlords to sign a pledge. Penelope’s Quilt owns five buildings around town, and we’d sign the no-evictions pledge and work to get our friends and donors to sign on, too. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s been done in other cities. I think it’s the only way that we who’ve helped displace so many people can start to help heal Hudson.” Attalah starts to say something dismissive, and Lilly adds: “Also, I have five million dollars that I want to put into a fund for low-income tenants who are in rent arrears, and for legal representation in eviction proceedings. I hoped your organization could administer it.”

  Attalah keeps her face expressionless. What she’s offering—that could change everything. Assuming this girl even knew what she was talking about. Assuming they didn’t snatch this ball out of her hands the next morning and fire her just for thinking of such a thing.

  Lilly puts a five-million-dollar check down on the table, made out to UPLIFT Hudson.

  “Tell me more,” Attalah says, stealing a quick glance at the clock.

  * * *

  HIS FIRST THOUGHT WAS, They murdered my dog.

  Rob Creighton came out back and found his beloved rescue pit bull Bethesda covered in blood. Fresh off the trauma of a rancid meat terrorist attack on his antique store, along with seven others, it really wasn’t an unreasonable assumption.

  But, no. Bethesda was fine. Pleased as punch with herself. She had just been having some fun with the giant dead rat someone tossed over the fence into his backyard, that’s all.

  They want me to have a nervous breakdown, Rob thinks. But I will not.

  He goes and gets the gun he’s never shot in his life, never even loaded, just keeps around to potentially scare someone should the need ever arise. He swings by Wal-Mart on the way to Winter Fest for bullets.

  All over Hudson, similar decisions are being arrived at. All together, eighteen ordinary otherwise-innocent citizens put weapons in their pockets or purses or backpacks when they head out to Winter Fest.

  * * *

  THREE HUNDRED HARPOONS are heaped in the back of a truck.

  Ten bulldozers are parked in construction sites around the city. Six canisters of gasoline at each site as well.

  Fifty-seven people are waiting to spring into action. Staring at the clock. Watching the sun set. Checking their cell phones every five minutes.

  Chapter Fifty

  RONAN

  I slept for fifteen hours after leaving Dom and Attalah down at the boat launch. After Attalah took my heart in her hands and ripped it in half.

  Not that she was wrong. That’s why the breaking hurt so bad. Why I
slept for so long. Why I would have slept forever if I could, or stopped breathing altogether.

  My ticket was bought. By 7:00 P.M. Winter Fest would be under way, and I’d be on a southbound train speeding under the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, returning to my real life. For a glorious couple of months I’d been able to convince myself that this was my real life, this was my place, but that couldn’t be true. Attalah was right. Someone as twisted up inside as me could do nothing but damage here. My accidental white savior act had ruined everything. I’d had a dream that I belonged somewhere, and it was a wonderful dream. But now I had to wake up.

  I packed. The suits and nice shirts I’d bought—I left them on the floor. They belonged to that other Ronan, the one who could move in the same circles as the obscenely rich. Who could smile in their faces, shake their hands, drink their single-malt scotch. Trick them. Manipulate them. Make them fall screaming into his traps.

  My father still wasn’t in his recliner. I made coffee, enough for two. Set out our mugs.

  Could you break a power of attorney? Or sign it over to someone else? I’d give it to Margie if I could. Hand her a chunk of Jark’s blood money. Too late to get the butcher shop back; too late to stop the Renaissance from snapping the spine of whatever was left of the Old Hudson. I’d have to live with that. Another thing Attalah was right about: even if the Pequod Arms were folded forever, we couldn’t stop what was coming. Not without horrific violence, or unthinkable effort exerted by both sides.

  “Dad?” I asked, knocking on his bedroom door.

  No answer. I pressed my ear to the door.

  Wind whistled. I dropped to my knees, pressed my fingers to the floor. Freezing.

  I jumped up, tried the door. Locked.

  “Dad!” I cried, and pounded hard against it.

  Here’s a thing I never thought I could do: break down a door. But I did it. Rammed my body into it as hard as I could, three or four times. Fucked my shoulder up something fierce. Door didn’t budge. So I got a hammer and broke the doorknob off, then hammered the lock all the way out. Door swung in.