The Blinds

by Adam Sternbergh

  MAP

  DEDICATION

  For my parents

  EPIGRAPHS

  You could die just the same on a sunny day.

  —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

  Who wants a smart sheriff?

  —Jim Thompson, Pop. 1280

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Map

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  She’s old enough…

  Monday Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Chapter 7.

  Tuesday Chapter 8.

  Chapter 9.

  Chapter 10.

  Chapter 11.

  Chapter 12.

  Wednesday Chapter 13.

  Chapter 14.

  Chapter 15.

  Chapter 16.

  Chapter 17.

  Chapter 18.

  Chapter 19.

  Thursday Chapter 20.

  Chapter 21.

  Chapter 22.

  Chapter 23.

  Chapter 24.

  Chapter 25.

  Chapter 26.

  Chapter 27.

  Chapter 28.

  Chapter 29.

  Chapter 30.

  Chapter 31.

  Chapter 32.

  Chapter 33.

  Chapter 34.

  Chapter 35.

  Chapter 36.

  Chapter 37.

  Friday Chapter 38.

  Chapter 39.

  Chapter 40.

  Chapter 41.

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Adam Sternbergh

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  SHE’S OLD ENOUGH…

  SHE’S OLD ENOUGH, at thirty-six, to remember flashes of other places, other lives, but her son is only eight years old, which means he was born right here in the Blinds. She was four months pregnant on the day she arrived, her secret just starting to show. If the intake officer noticed, he didn’t say anything about it as he sat her down at a folding table in the intake trailer and explained to her the rules of her new home. No visitors. No contact. No return. Then he taught her how to properly pronounce the town’s official name—Caesura, rhymes with tempura, he said—before telling her not to worry too much about it since everyone just calls it the Blinds.

  Caesura.

  A bad name, she thought then and thinks now, with too many vowels and in all the wrong places. A bad name for a bad place but, then, what real choice did she have?

  Reclining now at two A.M. on the wooden steps of her front porch, she pulls out a fresh pack of cigarettes. The night is so quiet that unwrapping the cellophane sounds like a faraway bonfire. As she strips the pack, she looks over the surrounding blocks of homes with their rows of identical cinder block bungalows, each with the same slightly elevated wooden porch, the same scrubby patch of modest yard. Some people here maintain the pretense of giving a shit, planting flowers, mowing grass, keeping their porches swept clean, while others let it all grow wild and just wait for whatever’s coming next. She glances down the street and counts the lights still on at this hour: two, maybe three households. Most everyone else is sleeping. Which she should be, too. She definitely shouldn’t be smoking.

  Well, she doesn’t smoke, she tells herself, as she pulls a cigarette free from the pack.

  After the intake officer explained to her how things would work in the Blinds—the rules, the prohibitions, the conditions, the privations—he asked her to choose her new name. He didn’t know her real name and, by that point, neither did she. He passed her two pieces of paper: a list of the names of famous movie stars and a list of ex–vice presidents. “One name from one list, one name from the other,” he told her. She scanned the lists. She didn’t remember much about who she used to be, but she had a feeling, deep down, that she wasn’t an Ava. Or an Ingrid. Or a Judy, as much as she loved Judy Garland. That much she remembered.

  “Did you do this, too?” she asked the officer, more as a stalling tactic than anything else.

  “Yes, ma’am. That’s the rules.”

  “So what did you choose?”

  “Cooper.”

  “Like Gary Cooper?”

  He nodded.

  She laughed. “Of course you did.” She pointed to a name far down among the movie stars. “How about Frances Farmer? I’ll take Frances. Fran for short.”

  The officer wrote the first name down on her intake form. “You’ll need a last name, too,” he said, and gestured to the sheet of vice presidents. She looked it over, then picked the first name she saw, right at the top.

  “Adams. Fran Adams.”

  The intake officer wrote her full name on the form.

  “You got a first name, Cooper?” she asked him.

  “Calvin. Cal for short. Or so I imagine. We’ll see what sticks.” The officer signed the paper, held a hand stamp over it, then paused. “You sure you don’t want to go with Marilyn? Audrey? Something more glamorous? They’re all available.”

  “I like Frances. Frances was Judy Garland’s real name. Frances Gumm. I like that.”

  The officer nodded, stamped her paper, then slipped it into a folder.

  “Welcome to Oz, Frances,” he said.

  On her front steps eight years later, under a sky saturated with stars, Fran Adams wedges the unlit cigarette between her lips. She enjoys this drawn-out moment—the delicious anticipation that, in many ways, is better for her than the smoking itself. She leans forward, producing her lighter from a pocket, resting her bare forearms on her knees. She’s still wearing the same jeans she wore during the day, and the same old plaid shirt worn loose over her sleeveless undershirt. She looks down at her slapped-together outfit, which taken together screams hot weather and housecleaning, which pretty much describes the day she’s had. Pretty much describes the last eight years. If it weren’t for Isaac, she’d have run already. Or so she likes to tell herself.

  No visitors. No contact. No return.

  With her sleeves rolled up against the stubborn night that’s stayed just as warm as the day, she glances, unthinking, at the series of numbers tattooed like a delicate bracelet across the back of her left wrist.

  12500241214911

  No idea what it means. No idea how it got there. She can recall some ragged snippets of her previous life, childhood mostly, but she doesn’t remember that. All she knows is that the tattoo predates her time in the Blinds, since she rode into this place with the numbers already etched on her wrist. No one else here has the numbers—she knows; she’s checked. And she long ago gave up trying to decipher whatever coded message the tattoo’s trying to send her. As far as she’s concerned, it’s just a souvenir of some past adventure she forgot she took, some past mistake she forgot she made. It belongs to someone else, some previous woman, not Fran Adams, who’s only eight years old, after all.

  Fran Adams, born eight years ago, just like her son.

  She finally lights her cigarette and listens happily to the pleasing hiss of the first long drag. The paper flares in a vibrant circle, then withers. This is all she wants right now, right here. The crinkle of cellophane, the sour taste of the cotton filter, the sniff of butane, that first crackle of paper, then the fragrant heat-blossom in the fragile bellows of her lungs. In the stifling night, she loves this lonely ritual. She loves it so much, apparently, that she’ll kill herself a little bit every day just for another chance to experience it.

  If she smoked.

  Which she doesn’t.

  Starting tomorrow.

  She takes another long drag.

  Then she st
ubs the cigarette out and brushes the ashes away, worrying Isaac might see the faint guilt rings of burn marks lingering on the painted steps in the morning. She flicks the spent butt in the bushes, far enough away that she can always blame it on a passing neighbor if Isaac finds it. He’s still young enough that she can continue to pretend he doesn’t know all the things he’s clearly starting to understand.

  If she could get him out of here, she would. It’s time. It’s long past time. If she had somewhere else to take him. If she had any idea what was waiting for both of them out there. Or who.

  But she doesn’t. So they stay.

  She thinks about all the people who’ve arrived since she first came. She was in the first batch, the original eight, but there’s been two or three new people who’ve come every few months ever since. She heard that four people arrived just today, the bus rumbling in after dark. Two women and two men. Of course, she can’t help but speculate on what they did and how they wound up here. That’s the kind of gossip people here tend to traffic in. Especially her next-door neighbor Doris Agnew, who always seems to know what’s going on, gossip-wise. When she told Fran that she’d heard Sheriff Cooper was thinking of organizing a field trip outside the facility, just for Isaac, to a movie, in a real-live movie theater, Fran hadn’t believed it, didn’t dare to, but that rumor turned out to be true. The sheriff assured Fran it would be safe, but knowing what had happened to that poor boy years ago, and his mother, when they both left, Fran couldn’t help but panic. Watching Cooper’s truck leave with Isaac inside, his face pressed against the passenger-side glass, waving back at her, looking both lost and excited, was the worst and best she’s felt since the day she arrived here.

  Just come back, she said to no one, as the truck trundled off in a shimmer of dust, and the entry gates closed behind it.

  He came back. He’s growing up. And now he’s seen the outside world. It was all she ever wanted for him, until it actually happened.

  She stands up and wipes her hands on her jeans. Two drags. That’s all she allows herself. The second drag is always a disappointment anyway, just an unsatisfying echo of the first. But she always takes that second drag, just to be sure.

  She lingers a moment longer on the steps, savoring the silence, then starts to head inside, to shower off the smoky smell, and that’s when she hears the shot.

  A single gunshot. Far away but loud enough to startle her.

  In the movies, people always mistake other things, like firecrackers or a car backfiring, for gunshots. But in real life, in her experience, no one ever mistakes a gunshot for anything other than what it is.

  That’s one thing she remembers from her previous life.

  That a gunshot sounds like nothing else.

  And even at this early hour, up and down the rows of houses, lights go on.

  MONDAY

  1.

  HUBERT HUMPHREY GABLE, real name unknown, lies slumped on the bar at Blinders, his head resting in a curdling puddle of splashed beer and spilled brain matter, both of which used to be his. Gable’s face is no longer useful for purposes of identification but the other three people assembled in the bar all know him well enough. Greta Fillmore, the bar’s owner, stands newly awakened and angry, with the unkempt, hastily swept-up gray hair of a wizened frontier widow. She lives in the bungalow adjacent to the trailer that houses the bar and she dashed over at the sound of the shot. She’s dressed, presumably hastily, in a colorful African-print dashiki. She looks pissed.

  Calvin Cooper stands next to her, in his wrinkled brown sheriff’s uniform, a concession to the propriety of his office that he considers important, even at this early hour. He wears his sheriff’s star, too, and his gun belt, the full getup, though his revolver is not currently loaded, and hasn’t been for the past eight years. Technically, he’s not even officially a sheriff. He’s a privately employed security guard with previous training as a corrections officer. The star he wears was a gag gift on his first day of work. But given that he’s tasked professionally with keeping order in this town, the title of sheriff has proven to be a useful shorthand. Most often, what he deals with in Caesura are drunken fights or noise complaints, and the occasional teary breakdowns by residents who’ve spent too much time staring into the bottom of an emptied bottle. Now he stands at a remove from the body in question, studying the scene with the weary air of a man who’s just returned from a particularly tedious errand to find that his car’s been keyed.

  Behind him, Sidney Dawes, his deputy, takes notes. She’s always taking notes.

  “‘Execution-style’ seems like the correct descriptor,” Dawes says, scribbling her thoughts.

  Cooper winces, or deepens his existing wince. “All that tells me is that, before you got here, you spent too much time watching TV, Dawes.”

  Cooper would be the first to admit that, as a sheriff, he’s not much of a sheriff, but then this town’s not much of a town, and this bar is not much of a bar. It’s just a few stools set in a crooked row in front of a long sheet of stained plywood slung across two stacks of tapped-out beer kegs. There’s a scatter of bottles on display on the shelves behind the bar, with enough variety on offer to allow patrons the illusion that what they’re drinking matters to them. Blinders doesn’t have to worry about customer loyalty, given it’s the only bar in town, as well as the only source of liquor for about a hundred miles in any direction. During normal hours, it’s reliably hopping. Right now, though, Hubert Gable is, or was, the only customer. It’s nearly two thirty in the A.M. and well past closing time.

  Cooper regards the body. To say Gable was a hefty man would be to extend a euphemistic posthumous kindness, given that Gable’s impressive backside threatens to swallow the stool he’s sitting on. Cooper recalls that when Gable arrived in this town, seven years ago or so, he’d been simply burly, a big guy, like a bouncer or a night watchman, someone you might even have called muscular. But time and booze and food and boredom conspired to engorge him. None of which matters to Gable anymore, of course, only to the other three people in the bar, all of whom are considering, to varying degrees, how he got in this current state and how exactly they’re going to move him.

  Cooper says to Greta, “Naturally, you didn’t see anyone else in here after closing.”

  “Nope,” she says. “I often let Hubert close the place down. I left him here around midnight and headed off to bed. Beauty sleep, you know.” Greta’s eyes have a youthful vigor, but her hands are veined and gnarled in a way that suggests her true age; like several of the longtime residents in the Blinds, she’s on the far side of sixty and looks like she lived every day twice. On her fingers, she wears colorful rings with costume stones, each larger and more ornate than the last. As she talks, she twists and fidgets with the rings. “Hubert would usually lock up, then drop the keys in my mailbox,” she says. “And he was always good about marking in the ledger exactly how much he drank.”

  “I don’t doubt that,” says Cooper. There’s no cash exchanged in the Blinds, but people still have to account for everything they’re consuming, be it food, liquor, clothes, or other sundries. And Greta, in turn, as town barkeep, must justify every bottle she orders as replenishment. Besides which, as Cooper has learned, in this town, everyone knows everyone, so tabs of all sorts tend to get settled, one way or the other.

  “Do you want me to wake up Nurse Breckinridge?” says Dawes.

  “Not much she can do about this now,” Cooper says. “Just call it in to Amarillo. They’ll send out an agent first thing. Hubert here won’t be any less dead in the morning, and the cause of death should be fairly evident. Unless anyone wants to forward the theory that he was poisoned with arsenic before being shot in the head.”

  “How do I—” asks Dawes.

  “You can call on the fax phone.”

  Dawes exhibits a flush of pride, which she tries to hide, unsuccessfully. She’s never before been authorized to make a call on the fax phone.

  “What about my bar?” Greta says. “Wh
en can I open up again? I have morning regulars.”

  “If you can stay closed until noon,” says Cooper, “I’d consider it a favor.”

  Dawes stows her notebook in her left breast pocket, where it fits perfectly. She’s the kind of person who’s never happier than when someone’s given her a task. She’s just turned thirty, she’s only six weeks on the job, and she keeps her uniform crisp and her hair shaved close, with daily touchups from the clippers she brought herself in a little box. When she started work here, she assumed she’d be the only black person in the Blinds, but it turns out she’s not even the only black deputy. But the other deputy, Walter Robinson, is presumably sleeping soundly right now. He sets two alarms and once slept through a tornado drill, so it would take more than a far-off gunshot to rouse him.

  As for Sheriff Cooper, so far he’s yet to fully warm to the presence of his new deputy. She’s a keen one, he’ll give her that. She’s wearing her uniform, even at this early hour, and she showed up minutes after the shot. No badge, though. There’s only one badge to go around, even a toy one, and Cooper’s wearing it.

  “You’ll have to meet the agent in the morning,” he tells her. “I’ll be busy with the new arrivals.” He turns to Greta: “We got four brand-new residents, just arrived last night. They haven’t gone through intake so they don’t even have names yet. They came in late so I figured I’d let them get a night’s rest first, get them settled. Just goes to show what I know.”

  “You think this is connected to them?” says Dawes.

  “I don’t think anything yet,” Cooper says. “But since tomorrow’s intake day, I’ll be busy giving the welcome-wagon spiel bright and early. So I’ll need you to talk to Amarillo and report this. Talk to Dave Brightwell. He’s our liaison with the U.S. Marshals.”

  Dawes smiles to herself. Not unpleased to get this minor assignment. “And what should I tell Brightwell when I call him?”