Big Guns

by Steve Israel

  “Lemme know as soon as you hear anything,” Sunny ordered. She stood, rendered a nervous breath, and walked toward the sun-filled windows overlooking Penn Quarter. Far below, workers plodded back from their lunch hours. They clutched supersized receptacles of iced caffeine. Their earbuds were firmly in place, sealing them off to events in Asabogue.

  The Capitol dome rose against a cloudless sky, topped by the Statue of Freedom. She’d been perched there since 1863, in a gaze of eternal indifference, staring frozenly through war and peace, depression and prosperity, protests and pageantry; staring past the homeless living on sidewalks in the shadows of Capitol Hill, the crime scenes in nearby neighborhoods and in the marbled building below. Sunny had a theory on why her nineteenth-century handlers had positioned her facing eastward, her back turned on the entire continent. She was a national monument to looking the other way.

  The cell phone chirped again. Sunny’s heart pounded, then sank. It was Bruce.

  “Otis wants a conference call. Hold on. I’ll put us through.”

  Sunny paced while the theme song from The Guns of Navarone warbled through the phone. She imagined the explosions on Main Street carrying to Otis’s high sanctuary on the Bluff. She wondered whether the pop-pop-pop of the bullets interrupt the soft slapping of waves on his beach, prompting him to cock his head, wondering what was happening downtown.

  Would he even ask about Lois?

  “Hullo? Who’s on?” Otis’s voice sounded an octave higher than normal.

  Bruce answered, “Me. And Sunny.”

  Otis squawked: “Good Lord! This shooting! Right in my neighborhood!”

  Well, not exactly your neighborhood. We lobbied the post office to give the Bluff its own zip code, remember?

  “What’s our response?” Otis demanded.

  Silence.

  Otis blurted impatiently, “Hullo? Hullo? Anyone alive out there?”

  Sunny tried to swallow Otis’s ill-timed choice of words. They left behind a burning trace.

  Bruce said, “Uhhhhh. Same as always? Let it blow over?”

  “Except this time it’s blowing right over Asabogue, Bruce! What do you think, Sunny?”

  I think you should ask me about my mother.

  “Sunny!”

  “Bruce is right.”

  Someone gasped. Probably Bruce, she thought. “He’s right,” she repeated. “It’ll blow over.”

  “Exactly!” Bruce’s voice rang with renewed confidence.

  “Do you both understand that the entire national press corps is in Asabogue? They’re probably heading my way right now! I can just imagine the headlines: ‘Mass shooting near gunmaker’s home.’ We need a statement!”

  “How about this,” Bruce ventured. “‘If everyone in that bakery had a gun, it would’ve been safer.’”

  “Ummmm. Almost everyone did have a gun,” Sunny reminded him.

  “C’mon, people! I can practically hear the reporters banging on my gates!”

  “Don’t answer!” Bruce yelped. “Pretend you’re not home!” Sunny heard Otis’s frustrated groan. “So my only option is to sit tight. Behind closed doors. In the dark. With Lucille.”

  “Just for a few days,” Bruce said assuringly. “By then no one will remember what happened in Asabogue.”

  The words stung at Sunny.

  “You agree, Sunny? Just lay low?”

  Or fuck off.

  “Sunny?”

  “I’m here.”

  “You’re awfully quiet.”

  “Bruce said it all.”

  “Hmmmm. You all right?”

  My mother is missing, my hometown is a shooting gallery, and I may be in the middle of a serious breakdown. Other than that, I’m peachy.

  “When does Congress come back from its taxpayer-funded August vacation?” Otis asked.

  “That would be in September. A few weeks.”

  “Will this delay the vote on the Dirkey bill?”

  Bruce chortled. “If Congress delayed gun votes every time there was a violent shooting, there wouldn’t be any votes. Right?”

  Oh. My.—

  Otis grumbled, “Sunny, call the Speaker’s office. Make sure AFFFA’s on track. This shooting’s bad enough. We can’t let it kill our bill.”

  God.

  Then, “Have you heard from your mother?”

  Wait. Is this the faint sign of a heartbeat? “Not yet. I’m a little—”

  “I mean, if she hadn’t tried banning guns, we wouldn’t be in this mess. This is her fault!”

  For Sunny McCarthy, that was the heaping of insult to possible injury. Or worse.

  “Get back to me when you hear from Speaker Piermont!” Otis commanded, then hung up.

  Sunny stared at the television. It was all so familiar, this American ritual. The BREAKING NEWS banners crawling across the screen. The steely glare of the news anchors trying to summon a fresh urgency to lines repeated from the last episode. The montage of images: the swirling lights and yellow tape, the shadowy movements from crime scene surveillance cameras, the faces contorted with grief and swollen cheeks flooded with tears, the eyes widened in monstrous horror, the fusing of bodies into quaking hugs. Sunny knew what was coming. The ragged nest of microphones sprouting from a podium; the officials huddled around the podium. The obligatory references to “thoughts and prayers” going out to the victims and their families, the platitudes about “pulling together.” The gnashing of teeth, wringing of hands, and beating of hearts. The governor. The sheriff. The police chief.

  The mayor?

  The fade to black.

  “We’ll be back,” the anchor would promise.

  Yes, they would, thought Sunny. After all, this was America’s longest television rerun.

  She grabbed her cell phone but didn’t dial Speaker Frank Piermont.

  *

  Jack Steele kicked back in a plush recliner in the media room at Villa di Acciaio. It was designed to replicate a vintage Hollywood theater, complete with heavy red velvet wall panels, ornate chandeliers, and the piped-in scent of popcorn. The room was dark, except for the glow of SOSNews on a wall-sized flat-screen, like a cozy fire in winter. One of his housekeepers—Maria, or Rosa or whatever her name was—stood dutifully at the door. Jack had publicly ranted against the illegal immigrants who he believed swarmed America’s borders, broke its laws, took its jobs, coveted its women, stole its guns, and decimated its language. But for as long as he had gardens to be manicured and his favorite sangria to be mixed, he could demonstrate a quiet pragmatism on the issue.

  SOSNews had assembled a panel of experts to diagnose the prospects for AFFFA in light of the “Muffin Massacre.” There was Megan Slattery, Robert Thomas, and Ashley Barnes.

  And the sultry pundit Cailee Cox. Even at his advanced age, Jack felt a pleasant sensation in the vicinity of his prostate surgery whenever Cailee Cox appeared on-screen. She was called “the Insultress.” Sleek thighs spilling from tight black-lace skirts; beautiful cleavage; shimmering blond hair that fell almost to her hips. But it was mostly her sumptuous, pouty lips that aroused Jack. When opened, they released incinerating flames at her many targets, her top two being godless Democrats and gutless Republicans.

  Cox groused: “Nineteen people get shot at one bakery and the liberals want to take everybody’s guns away. Yesterday ninety people were killed in car accidents and I haven’t heard a single liberal demanding the confiscation of their Saabs, have you?”

  The SOSNews anchors nodded righteously.

  “Congress reconvenes in less than two weeks. If Speaker Piermont delays this vote by so much as one day, it will reveal to his caucus what a spineless wonder he is. And trigger the coup that will remove him from the Capitol and put him where he belongs: on display at the Invertebrate Exhibit at the National Zoo!”

  Cailee Cox could take or leave Frank Piermont.

  “Stay with SOS!” Megan Slattery commanded.

  *

  As Speaker of the House, Frank Piermont enjoyed many p
rivileges. High on the list was not having to return home when Congress was on recess. His district was electorally safe, which meant he could remain a safe distance from those pesky constituents who reliably elected him every two years. Now he was slumped on a broad red-striped couch in his Capitol office. The walls were a satiny yellow and exhibited mementos from happier times. There were the family portraits with his wife, Francine, and daughters Faith, Fawn, and Felicity, and his prized Golf Illustrated montage of the most beautiful courses in America (he’d played them all). The room was dominated by a massive mahogany cabinet housing six televisions, all set to a low drone. His eyes meandered from screen to screen, then landed on Cailee Cox.

  “Turn it up,” he instructed a staffer through lips clamped on a cigarette.

  He began puffing angrily, leathery cheeks expanding and contracting, his mouth spewing smoke like an overworked furnace, agitated wheezing accompanying each gust.

  His staff lined the walls, shifting on their feet, eyes darting nervously from Cailee Cox to their mobile devices to the Speaker. They waited for him to react, but the Speaker was speechless. His shoulders heaved as he puffed. His bloodshot eyes narrowed against the thick haze. His cigarette had burned to a tiny stub between his nicotine-stained fingers. A stream of sunlight fell through a window, turning the cigarette smoke into soft bluish wisps hovering flatly in the air. Outside the window stretched the entire National Mall, from Capitol Hill to the Washington Monument and behind that, the Lincoln Memorial. All the majesty and power of Washington was at the very feet of the Speaker. Who was now being compared on national television to a species without a skeletal system.

  The communications director, a wiry young man who had taken up chain-smoking in order to acclimate his lungs to the job, muttered under his breath.

  “She’s fomenting a caucus rebellion!”

  The Speaker crushed the cigarette stub in an overflowing ashtray. Then he said, “Get the bill on the floor. First thing we vote on when the Members get back.”

  He lit another cigarette.

  *

  President Henry G. Piper sat in the White House Situation Room, which was actually several rooms of different sizes, depending on, well, the situation. Mass shootings were generally “mediums,” requiring enough space for the president, attorney general, and the heads of various agencies, bureaus, divisions, and departments. At the front of the room were rows of red digital clocks blinking DC time, Zulu time, and the times in Kabul, Paris, Oman, and now a place called Asabogue. Television screens were mounted on every wall. On one screen, a network was airing its slickly packaged “Muffin Massacre” complete with foreboding music and a still image of a blood-streaked Harry Holt. A mahogany conference table was cluttered with water bottles and styrofoam cups imprinted with the gold presidential seal.

  An aide sought the president’s approval of the usual statement offering the deepest condolences of a heartbroken nation. Piper approved it with a sullen grunt.

  Across the table sat the attorney general, strangely overdressed for the Situation Room, in black tie and cummerbund. He tapped his forefingers on the table, obviously annoyed about being late to a campaign fund-raiser. “Mr. President, now is not the time to consider a law mandating gun ownership for every citizen. You must issue a veto threat. You must stop Congress. Immediately.”

  The attorney general spoke with great moral certitude. And no moral certitude was greater than his political survival. The administration’s approval of AFFFA, he calculated, would sink his campaign for governor of left-leaning California.

  The president sighed. “We don’t have the votes to sustain a veto.”

  “Use your bully pulpit . . . sir!” That last word dripped mordantly.

  Piper thought, There is no bully pulpit anymore. Just a thin sheet of ice melted by the hot air of blowhards like you. Where presidents slip and slide before falling on our asses.

  The president pressed his thumb and index finger against his forehead. By now that blemish looked like an overripe black cherry.

  *

  At the back of her mind—an organized place where she stored rarely utilized thoughts as if on the high shelf of a closet—Sunny always considered the possibility of a situation requiring contact with someone in Asabogue. Her “in case of emergency, break glass” scenarios included, and were generally limited to, Lois falling off her bike, a mild heart attack, a broken hip. Getting shot was never contemplated. Now she searched her phone for the number she’d stored long ago. She pressed Call, heard several rings, and pleaded, “Pick up!”

  “Hullo?” Sam Gergala’s voice was barely audible through crackling static.

  “It’s Sunny McCarthy.”

  “Sunshine?”

  “I tried calling my mother. She didn’t answer. I—”

  “She broke a wrist in the panic,” Sam reported, matter-of-factly. “I’m at her place now.”

  Relief washed over Sunny. “Can you put her on?”

  “She’s sleeping.”

  “But she’s okay?”

  Several seconds passed. “You really wanna know?”

  Sunny’s eyes squeezed closed. “Tell me.”

  “No, she’s not okay. Nothing in this town is okay. Your friends at Cogsworth—they don’t just want to beat your mother, they want to destroy her. And Asabogue. We need help, Sunshine.”

  “Sam—”

  “Come home.”

  “I can’t. I have work to do in Washington.”

  “Just for a few days. Tell us what to do, so we have a fighting chance. Give your mother that, at least.”

  Sunny gazed out her window, at the statue above the Capitol dome. “Two days, Sam. Tops.”

  She figured the statue would still be there when she returned.

  29

  For the occasion of Louie Delmarco’s interment, Ralph Kellogg skimmed Pericles’s Funeral Oration and some Shakespeare. He quickly realized that they hovered well above the grasp of the newly consolidated Louis Del-marco Division of Defiance. It was Ralph’s idea to merge the various militias that had converged on Asabogue and rename them in Louie’s memory. After all, the man had died for his principles (and, an autopsy revealed, indirectly from plunging blood sugar levels). So Ralph arrived at the funeral with a eulogy befitting Louie: short, simple, and undernourished.

  They gathered under a slate-gray sky at Asabogue Rural Cemetery, just next to a shabby brick building with a warped tin roof that housed the village animal shelter. The wailing of dogs added to the sense of despair. In addition to the representatives of various militias, several of Louie’s coworkers from the Parks Department showed up in their dress blues, which were the same as their ordinary uniforms, only laundered for the eternal adieu to their comrade in shovels. Flags fluttered at half-mast in a gentle breeze, like the lineup outside the United Nations. American flags, Confederate flags, skull and crossbones flags, and the flags of various county and state militias. A single television cameraman was there, leaning against his tripod. SOSNews was devoting a full twenty seconds to the ceremony in a package poignantly called “Louie.” A bugler from the former Rio Grande Border Militia played “Taps,” with a slight hint of Herb Alpert’s “Tijuana Taxi.” The farewells were fond; bloodshot eyes glistened as Louie was lowered into the Asabogue dirt he’d spent an entire career trying to avoid digging.

  Ralph was angry.

  There were no official dignitaries at the funeral, despite the placement of an entire row of gray metal folding chairs stenciled with VILL. OF ASABOGUE in white. Lois Liebowitz didn’t show up. Or Jack Steele. The chair with a placard that said GOVERNOR was empty. So were the chairs reserved for the Suffolk County executive, and the neighboring village mayors. No town fathers or mothers. Ralph never expected a state funeral, but, Christ, could they at least have sent the deputy assistant director of the Parks Department? Show a little respect?

  Respect. It had eluded Ralph his entire life. And now, it eluded Louie Delmarco, even in death.

  He stared
at the grave of Louis Alfonso Delmarco, his fingers reflexively shredding the text of the eulogy. His prepared words were overtaken by a frothing indignation that reddened his cheeks. Through a clenched jaw, in a voice deep and bitter, Ralph said, “I won’t let you die in vain, Louie. The whole world is watching Asa-bogue. Now we’re really gonna give ’em a show.”

  The mourners harrumphed righteously.

  Ralph flexed his big fists.

  In his own grave, Pericles would be spinning.

  30

  Sunny McCarthy wondered, What do you get for a mother you’ve tried ignoring for years? Will a nice blueberry pie do?

  On the outskirts of Asabogue, she brought her rented car to a rumbling stop in the gray gravel parking lot of Marion’s Famous Farmstand. It was a landmark for weary travelers to the Hamptons. They loved its rustic charm; the wooden lean-to that slouched over crates of freshly picked produce, and the satisfaction of supporting a local farm whose cheap migrant labor worked the soil so close to, but safely out of view, of the resident’s tennis courts. Marion’s offered bountiful selections of corn on the cob, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, cauliflower, and nearly two dozen varieties of pie. Plus, to satisfy recent consumer demand, there were piles of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and American Resistance magazine, and a rack of cell phone chargers. Sunny headed to the counter. Behind it stood a woman with a contented gaze, plump arms folded. She wore a ragged black T-shirt that said: MARION’S! BEST FORK OF PIE IN THE SOUTH FORK. Soft wrinkles spread across a puffy face. Her thin brown hair was pulled back, revealing gray roots.

  Sunny ordered a blueberry pie and slid cash across the dirt-encrusted counter.

  The woman chirped, “Howya doin’?”

  Sunny nodded politely.

  “Ohhhh, you don’t remember me, do ya?”

  “I’m sorry. I—”

  “It’s Kay!”

  “Kaaaaay . . .”

  “Kay Hardameyer! Patsy’s daughter! We were in school together. You lived at Twenty-Eight Love Lane. I’m at Twenty-Three.” “You’re still—”

  “You bet! Hey, the rent’s cheap!” Kay Hardameyer’s laugh was a languorous wheeze, gulped back with a loud snort. “My mom told me you were coming back. Welcome home, Sunshine!”