by Jason Mott
But even if it had been her—even if it had been his “Liz”—it would not have mattered. He had left her before because he had known, he had always known, that she would leave him. She would grow tired of him, his religion, his large, slow frame, his utter normalness.
Liz had been the type of person to dance without music, and he was the type of person to dance only when forced to. All those years ago, if he had not left her and gone back home, she would have left him and gone on to New Orleans, just like this specter of Liz wanted to do now.
That much of her lingered in this Returned young girl—just enough of Lizzy to remind Robert of all that was grand and terrible about himself. It was enough to make him see the truth: that no matter how much he had loved her, no matter how much he had wanted her, their romance would not have worked. And in spite of how it turned out for her, even if he had stayed with her all those years ago, if he’d gone off with her and, perhaps, been able to keep her from dying, it wouldn’t have changed anything. The thing that he loved about her would have died the longer she stayed with him until, eventually, she would be gone. Maybe not physically, but all that he loved about her would be gone.
And they would both lament it.
So Pastor Robert Peters stood in the Meridian Detention Center and danced with the sixteen-year-old girl who he had once loved, and he lied and told her he would take her away from here. And she lied back to him and told him she would be waiting for him and that she would never leave him.
They danced together this last time and told each other these things.
It was happening like this all over.
Connie Wilson
Everything was moving toward the coming terror. She felt it. It was inevitable now, like when the earth is dry and barren, the trees gray and brittle, the grass brown and parched—something must change. All those in the town of Arcadia could feel it, she believed, though none knew exactly what the feeling was. She tried to ignore her fears, bury them in the day to day of taking care of her husband and keeping her children fed and clean, but she was worried about Ms. Lucille. They’d come across her husband, Harold, once since coming here, and she had intended to stay with him and Jacob, to keep tabs on them, for Ms. Lucille’s sake.
But then things had gotten away from her and now she didn’t know where either of them were.
“It will be okay,” she said often.
The Returned were still prisoners of the small town, still prisoners of the Bureau and a world unsure. And the True Living of Arcadia were victims in their own right, their entire town stolen away from them, its very identity absconded.
“None of this will be okay,” Connie said, seeing all of this before her.
Then she took her children in her arms and, still, the fear would not release her shoulders.
Seventeen
HAROLD AND BELLAMY stood together beneath the oppressive summer heat of Arcadia for what would be their final interview—a fact that didn’t particularly bother Harold. The New Yorker was getting good at horseshoes. Too good.
Bellamy was being transferred, finally, in spite of his many protests. The colonel had seen to it, citing the overcrowding and general lack of time at the Arcadia Detention Center for Bellamy’s interviews to be conducted. There were other jobs for Bureau agents to do, much more urgent jobs, but they weren’t the type of jobs Bellamy would agree to being involved in, so the colonel was sending him away.
Bellamy tried not to think about it. Tried not to think about what it would mean for his mother. He tossed his horseshoe and hoped for the best. It landed solidly.
Klink.
“I suppose you know that I’m leaving,” Bellamy said in his smooth, direct way.
“I’d heard something about it,” Harold said. “Or, rather, I’d figured as much.” He took his shot.
Klink.
Neither man kept score anymore.
They still played in the small strip of grass in the middle of the school, as if there weren’t other places to choose from. But there was something about this particular place that they had both gotten used to. It was slightly more private now that the whole town was available for the rest of the prisoners. People had gone about the business of spreading outward, migrating out from the school and the few other interim buildings the Bureau had set up. Now the town of Arcadia was full. All the buildings that had been left empty by years of a town existing and failing and people moving away were transformed into places where people could live. Even the streets—what few there were in Arcadia—had become places where people could pitch tents or set up areas for the distribution of necessities by the Bureau. The consumption of Arcadia was complete now.
But even without all that, this place, this small stretch of town, was where they had both spent the past few weeks chipping away at each other.
Bellamy smiled. “Of course you did.” He looked around. Up above, the sky was a sharp, hard blue, punctuated here and there with rainless white clouds. Off in the distance, the wind was blowing, rustling through the trees in the forests, swinging back through the heat and humidity and drumming up against the buildings of the town.
When the breeze hit Harold and Bellamy, it was only an exhalation of heat and mugginess. It smelled of sweat and urine and too many people kept too long in poor conditions. Nearly everything in Arcadia smelled that way these days. It was stuck on everything, that smell. So much so that everyone, including Agent Bellamy, hardly noticed it anymore.
“Are you going to ask me or not?” Harold said. He and Bellamy walked together through the heat and stink to retrieve their horseshoes. Jacob was not far away, just inside the schoolhouse, with Mrs. Stone—someone who had been on Harold’s mind for a while now. “And before we spend too much time playing games—pun intended—let’s just both agree to skip all the dancing, if you don’t mind. We both know who she is.”
“When did you know?”
“Not long after she got here. I didn’t think it was coincidence that she wound up in our room.”
“I suppose I’m not as clever as I think, huh?”
“Nothing like that. Your judgment was clouded, is all. I’ll try not to hold it against you.”
They both took their turn. Klink. Klink. The wind picked up again and, for a moment, the air smelled fresh, as if some change were slowly coming. Then it was gone and the air was hot again and the sun crossed the sky.
“How is she?” Agent Bellamy asked.
Klink.
“She’s fine. You know that.”
“Does she ask about me?”
“All the time.”
Klink.
Bellamy thought for a moment, but Harold was not finished. “She wouldn’t know you if you sat down in front of her and kissed her on the forehead. Half the time she thinks I’m you. The rest of the time she thinks I’m your daddy.”
“I’m sorry,” Bellamy said.
“For what?”
“For getting you involved in all this.”
Harold straightened his back and fixed his feet and took aim. He tossed a good, solid shot and missed the stake completely. He smiled. “I would have done the same. In fact,” he continued, “I plan to.”
“Quid pro quo, I suppose.”
“An eye for an eye sounds better.”
“Whatever you say.”
“How’s Lucille?”
Bellamy sighed and scratched the top of his head. “Good, from what I hear. Doesn’t leave the house much, but honestly there isn’t much in this town to come out for.”
“They’ve done a number on us,” Harold said.
Bellamy took his shot. It landed perfectly.
“She’s started carrying a gun,” he said.
“What?” The image of his old handgun flashed in his mind, followed by the memory of the night before Jacob’s death and the dog he’d been forced to put down.
“That’s what they tell me, at least. She stopped at one of the checkpoints on the highway. Had it in the seat of your truck. When they asked
her about it she gave some speech about ‘the Right of Safety’ or some such. Then she threatened to shoot. Not sure how serious she was about that, though.”
As Bellamy went to the other end of the track, dust rising beneath his footfalls, Harold stood and looked up at the sky and wiped the sweat from his face. “That doesn’t sound like the woman I married,” he said. “The woman I married would have shot first and made her speech second.”
“I always thought of her as more of the ‘let God handle it’ type,” Bellamy said.
“That came later,” Harold said. “Early on, she was a hell-raiser. You wouldn’t believe some of the things we got into when we were younger.”
“Nothing that showed up on a record. I’ve run files on you both.”
“Just because you don’t get caught doesn’t mean you ain’t breaking the law.”
Bellamy smiled.
Klink.
“You asked about my mother once before,” Bellamy began.
“I did,” Harold said.
“She, eventually, died of pneumonia. But that was at the end. It was the dementia that really took her, piece by piece.”
“And she came back the same way.”
Bellamy nodded.
“And now you’re leaving her.”
“It’s not her,” Bellamy said, shaking his head. “She’s a photocopy of someone, that’s all. You know that as well as I do.”
“Ah,” Harold said coldly. “You’re talking about the boy.”
“You and I,” Bellamy said, “we’re alike in that. We both know that the dead are dead and that’s the end of it.”
“Then why’d you bring her to me? Why go through so much trouble?”
“For the same reason you stay with your son.”
The air stayed hot and the sky a hard, impenetrable blue for the rest of that day. The two men went around and around, game after game, neither tallying the points, neither sure exactly how many games they’d played or what the point of it all was. They only orbited each other in the middle of a town that was not the way it had been, in a world that was not the way it had been, and they let the world turn, with all their words buzzing in the air around them.
* * *
When the evening came, it found Lucille hunched at her writing desk and the Hargrave house filled with the scent of gun oil. Reverberating throughout the house was the sound of a wire brush worrying steel.
Beneath the gun Lucille had found the small cleaning kit that had only occasionally been used in all these years of ownership. There were instructions next to the supplies. The only hard part had been disassembling the gun.
It was unsettling, having to point the barrel one way while applying a tool to turn some bushing; there were springs to mind and small, hard bits that couldn’t be lost when the time came to put everything back together again. All of this she struggled with while reminding herself, every single second, that the gun wasn’t loaded and that she wouldn’t mess around and shoot herself like some kind of fool.
She removed the bullets and they now stood in a line on the far end of the desk. She’d cleaned them, as well, using only the wire brush and keeping clear of the cleaning solvent on account of fearing some mysterious chemical reaction should the turpentine-smelling solvent mingle with the gunpowder inside.
Maybe she was being overly cautious, but she was okay with that.
When she was unloading the bullets, she found something harmonic in the sound they made, one after the other, as they popped from the slender, steel magazine.
Click.
Click.
Click.
Click.
Click.
Click.
Click.
She held seven lives in her hand. An image came to her then of herself, Harold, Jacob and the Wilson family all dead. Seven deaths.
She rolled the small, heavy projectiles in her palm. She made a fist and concentrated on the feeling they gave her hand—the smooth, round tips digging into her palm. She squeezed them so tightly she thought, for a second, that she might hurt herself.
Then she lined them up along the desk with care and gentleness, like little mysteries. She placed the gun in her lap and read the instructions.
The paper showed an image of the top of the gun sliding back to reveal the inside of the barrel. She picked up the gun and examined it. She placed her hands near the back of the slide the way the picture showed her and pressed. Nothing happened. She pressed harder. Still nothing. She examined the photo again. She seemed to be doing everything right.
She gave it one final try, pressing so hard that she could feel the veins of her body rising. She gritted her teeth and gave a little groan and, all of a sudden, the slide flew back and a bullet leaped from the gun and clattered to the floor.
“Lord,” she said, her hands beginning to shake. For a very long time she let the bullet rest there on the floor and she only stared at it, thinking about what might have been. “I may have to be ready for that,” she said.
Then she retrieved the bullet and placed it on the desk and went about the business of cleaning the weapon and thinking on exactly what the evening might bring.
* * *
When the time came to leave the house, Lucille made her way out front and stood next to Harold’s tired old truck and looked back, and for a very long time she said nothing. From far enough away, she imagined, she could be seen orbiting the weathered old house where she had been married and loved and raised a son and grappled with a husband—a husband who, now that she was apart from him, she realized had never been quite so ornery and contemptible as she often thought; he loved her, for every day of their fifty-some years together, he loved her—and now, as the evening rose up around her, she was leaving.
For her part in things, Lucille breathed in, held the image of the house and all that it meant to her in the universe of her lungs until she thought she might faint. Then she held it longer, clawing at this moment, this image, this life, this single breath, though she knew she would have to let it go.
* * *
The guard on duty that night was a young, skittish boy from Kansas. Junior was his name and he’d come to not mind guarding the town quite so much on account of the crotchety, funny old man he’d made friends with.
And Junior, like all participants in a tragedy, had the sense that unfortunate things were in the works. He’d spent the evening compulsively checking his phone for new messages, worried by a feeling that there was something important he was destined to say to someone.
From inside the guardhouse, he cleared his throat at the sound of an old Ford rumbling up out of the distance. It was a little strange to him, sometimes, the way the fencing around the town ended so suddenly and the single, two-lane road emptied so suddenly into the countryside. It was as if all that was going on inside the fencing, inside the Barricade, inside the entirety of the town that was now contained, was meant to all end suddenly.
The engine loped and chugged and the headlights skittered a little over the road as if whoever it was behind the wheel was having trouble. He thought it might have been some kid out joyriding—he had memories of stealing his father’s old truck one fall evening back when he was of the age when such things were what a person did.
Kansas and North Carolina weren’t so different, Junior thought. This part of North Carolina wasn’t so different, at least. Flatlands. Farms. Regular, hardworking folks. If it wasn’t for the damned humidity that hung in the air like a specter, then maybe, just maybe, he could think about settling down here. They hardly ever had tornadoes, and the people, with all that Southern hospitality he’d heard about, were friendly enough.
The truck’s squealing brakes brought Junior’s attention back where it belonged. The blue pickup chugged for a moment and then the engine went silent. The headlights still burned, bright and hard. He remembered a training he’d had once about such things. Headlights were supposed to blind everyone so that the person inside could get out and move around and pick their sh
ots without ever being seen.
Junior had never cared for guns—which was a good thing because, as it happened, he was a terrible shot. Just now the high beams went low and he was able to make out, finally, the seventysomething-year-old woman behind the wheel—her face tight and filled with rage—and he was struck with the impression that, more than anything, there should be no guns anywhere in the area just now. But he was a guard, so he had his gun. And when Lucille finally stepped out of the truck he was able to see that she had her gun, as well.
“Ma’am!” Junior shouted, moving quickly from the makeshift guardhouse. “Ma’am, you’re going to have to put down the weapon!” His voice was shaky, but his voice was always shaky.
“This ain’t about you, child,” Lucille said. She came around and stood in front of the truck, the headlights still turned on, glaring behind her. She was dressed in an old, blue cotton dress that came down, flat and even and with no flourishes, almost to her ankles. It was the dress she wore for doctors’ appointments when she wanted to let the doctor know, right from the beginning, that she wasn’t about to accept any news she didn’t particularly like.
A crowd of Returned filed out of the truck bed and out of the cab. So many of them that Junior had memories of the circus that used to come through every fall.
The Returned clustered together behind Lucille, forming a small, silent crowd. “It’s a matter of decency and proper behavior,” Lucille said, not necessarily speaking to the young soldier. “Just basic, human decency.”
“Sir!” Junior called out, not quite sure exactly who he was calling for, knowing only that whatever was happening now was something he didn’t particularly care to be a part of. “Sir! We’ve got a situation here! Sir!”
There was the clump, clump, clump of booted feet approaching.
“Thy rod and thy staff comfort me,” Lucille said.
“Ma’am,” Junior said. “You’re going to need to put down that weapon, ma’am.”
“I’m not here to have trouble with you, child,” Lucille said. She made sure to keep her pistol pointed down.