Cooper watches as they wrestle with this realization. He’s seen this process before, many times. It always ends the same way: They stay. What choice do they have, really?
He waits for them to settle. Then he says, finally, in a slightly raised voice, “There was a murder here last night.”
That quiets the room right quick.
Even Robinson looks surprised.
“Longtime resident,” Cooper continues, “name of Hubert Gable, sweet guy, never harmed anyone, just liked to enjoy a drink. Shot dead in our local bar early this morning. Some of you may have heard the shot. The details are not yet public knowledge so I’d ask you not to repeat any of this until I have a chance to address the whole town.”
He lets the information register, watches their faces as it settles in. He waits for eager hands to rise with questions. None do. He continues.
“Look, I don’t tell you this to scare you. Just to let you know what exactly the stakes are here. This may not be a prison, and it may not be purgatory, but it’s sure as hell not a paradise, either. This is the Blinds.” Cooper leaves those words to linger in the air as well. Then he points to his arm patch. “It may say ‘Caesura’ on the badges, but the Blinds is what everyone here calls it. Because we don’t see the outside world, and they don’t see us, not anymore. So this town’s continued existence—our survival—depends on shared principles, mutual interests, and trust, just like any community. Except in this community, when those principles are compromised, people get hurt. People die. Understood?”
No one speaks. The room is silent. Cooper says, “The most important thing to remember is: The Blinds is both a last stop and a fresh start. Which, for most of us, is exactly what we need. That’s why we’re here. Now y’all have yourselves a pleasant day.”
If Cooper were the type to wear a cowboy hat, this would be the perfect moment to don the hat and tip it to the newcomers. But Cooper’s never been one for a cowboy hat. He’s from the Northeast originally, New England, so he was not born a hat man and he’s never learned to fake it. It’s the great regret of his life. One of them, anyway.
So instead he just lets his practiced words linger, then turns on his heel and heads straight through the door, out into the sunlight, leaving the new arrivals to scan the two lists and decide on their new names.
3.
ROBINSON SLIDES TWO PIECES OF PAPER across the desk to the Probable Hiker. The other three newcomers sit silent and wait their turn. Robinson has his ledger open. He watches her as she considers the two lists.
“What do I do with these?” she asks.
“Mix-n-match,” Robinson says.
“What do the red Xs mean?”
“Those names are already taken.”
She looks up at him. “Why can’t I just choose my own name from scratch?”
“Because, left to your own imagination, we’ve discovered that people choose names linked to their past, even inadvertently. You borrow a name from an old best friend or some classmate from third grade. Or you name yourself after your first dog or the street where you were born. All of which connects you to your former life.”
The hiker nods slightly, as if to say, Seems reasonable. Robinson can sense she’s inquisitive to a fault. Not the type to sit in the back of the class and simply scribble down whatever you tell her. She’s front row. She wants answers. She wants to know if this will be on the exam.
“So why movie stars?” she asks.
“Their names are generic but familiar, so they’re memorable. Like you’ve heard them somewhere before.”
She looks at the other list. “And why vice presidents? Why not presidents?”
“What could be more anonymous than a vice president?” Robinson says with a practiced smile. A joke that he’s made many times before.
She laughs politely. She considers the lists again. She bites her lip in concentration and she is suddenly attractive enough that Robinson instinctively looks away from her and at the clock. Then he looks back at her. “Or I can assign you a name,” he says. “It will be randomly chosen using an algorithm from the available options.”
“I like Bette Davis and Aaron Burr,” she says. “I’ll be Bette Burr.”
The goombah scans the lists. He seems acutely befuddled. “There’s a guy on here named Hannibal,” he says.
“Hannibal Hamlin, that’s right,” Robinson says. “Our fifteenth vice president.”
“Can that be my name?”
“Hannibal?”
“Yeah.”
Robinson leans in, like he’s sharing a confidence. “It’s available, but between you and me, I don’t recommend Hannibal. There’s a reason no one’s taken it. In the very unlikely event that anyone ever comes looking for you, you want them asking around for a John or a William, not a Hannibal.”
“I want to be Hannibal,” the goombah announces.
“Fine. But you have to combine it with another name.” Robinson points to the other list. “One of the movie stars.”
“I want to be Hannibal Gore.”
“Al Gore’s not a movie star.”
“Hannibal Bronson. Like Charles Bronson—”
“Charles Bronson’s not on the list.”
“He’s a movie star.”
“Sure. But he’s not on the list.”
“Okay, then Hannibal Schwarzenegger—”
“It’s got to be a name on the list.” Robinson nudges the list forward slightly.
The goombah nods, in a practiced imitation of comprehension, then reads the list again with great concentration. Robinson’s irritated. He looks at the clock and thinks about lunch. He says finally to the goombah, as a prod, “How about Cagney?”
The goombah looks up, uncomprehending.
“James Cagney,” Robinson says. “He was like the Charles Bronson of his day.”
“Hannibal Cagney. I like it.” The goombah grins. “Let them come,” he says, now beaming. He fires two fingers in the air like pistols. “Let them come and try to take down Hannibal fucking Cagney!”
Robinson writes the name down in the ledger.
“Vivien King,” says the fortysomething woman decisively.
The decision took all of five seconds.
“I do not want a Negroid name,” says the Tattooed Ramrod flatly, staring straight at Robinson.
Robinson and Ramrod are the last two people in the room. Robinson remembers this stare-down game all too well from his previous life as a beat cop in Baltimore. He locks eyes with Ramrod to communicate that he has registered, but will not acknowledge, nor be rattled by, this punk-ass provocation.
“Jefferson, Johnson, Thompson. I do not want a Negroid name,” Ramrod says again.
“They were your names before they were our names,” says Robinson.
Ramrod breaks first. He glances at the list, then back at Robinson. “All the good ones are gone. I can’t have Wayne?”
“No.”
“How about Dean?”
“Already taken.”
“Well, shit,” says Ramrod.
“Forty-four people got here before you. The pickings are getting slim,” says Robinson. “You don’t have to take a male name, you know. You can choose from the women as well.”
Ramrod scans that list, then points to Marlene Dietrich. “How about Dietrich?”
“That’s available. But you need a first name, too. From the VP list.”
Ramrod glances over the second list. “So strange, don’t you think? To ascend to such a high position in your lifetime and then be totally forgotten? I mean, who even remembers Schuyler Colfax? Or John C. Breckinridge?”
“The history books do.”
“In my experience, a history book is the last place you want to go looking for the truth.” Ramrod consults the list again. While he reads, Robinson considers the tattoos that cover the man’s arms and neck, stretching up to his jawbone like a priest’s high collar. Tributes, all of them, from the looks of it. Faces, ringed in halos or roses. Women, men, even a few
small children. All beaming beatifically.
“You know all those people?” Robinson asks, gesturing at the tattoos.
“Yes. Or I did, anyway.”
“And they’ve all passed?”
“Yes, sir, they did.”
“A lot of pain on those arms,” says Robinson, and begins to reconsider his lack of compassion for the man in front of him.
Ramrod sticks his arms out straight and jacks up his loose linen sleeves and regards the tattoos like a man inspecting an expensively tailored suit. “Yes, sir, that is the gospel truth.” Then he points to the bottom of the VP list. “What about Dick?”
“Dick? It’s all yours.”
“Dick Dietrich.” Ramrod smiles. “Got a certain ring, don’t you think?”
“It’s definitely not a Negroid name,” says Robinson, then writes it down.
“Dick Dietrich.” Ramrod nods, pleased with his choice. “Now that’s the kind of name that history remembers.”
Fran Adams’s house is just a five-minute walk from the intake trailer and the main drag of the town, but then, in the Blinds, everyone’s house is just a five-minute walk from pretty much everything else. Cooper walks briskly, head down, up the main northwest street, casting a long, slanted morning shadow. The Blinds has one main dirt road that runs east-west, where the store and the services are found, and another unpaved artery that runs north-south, halving the half dozen or so residential streets into twinned cul-de-sacs, six houses per side. The streets have no names; the houses have no numbers, which, to Cooper, makes sense. It would be counterintuitive, he thinks, to have street signs in a place that is primarily intended to help people hide.
He corrects himself.
Not hide. Flourish.
Just look at us all, he thinks. Flourishing.
The units are all single-story bungalows, wind-blasted, identical, constructed of cinder block, because the town is located in West Texas on the far west edge of Tornado Alley. So the Fell Institute, which established Caesura, decided to make indestructibility, rather than aesthetics, the town’s top priority. And the residents dutifully run their tornado drills, ringing the bells at the chapel and gathering everyone inside, even though, in eight years, the town has never so much as touched the hem of a passing tornado. What weather they do get in summer is sun, sun, sun, and heat; in winter, it’s sun and cold, with occasional wind. Cold is a concept that’s difficult for Cooper to remember right now, given they’re smack-dab in July’s sizzling peak. As he passes the houses, he does his best to avoid the glances from the curtained windows, and only nods at the few lobbed greetings from people out sitting on their porches. He’s not up for his usual, ambling sheriff routine this morning, and he’d rather not field any panicked questions about exactly what the hell happened in the wee hours last night. He’ll address the whole town soon enough. He can quell their fears then, as best he can. But before all that, he wants to check in on Fran Adams. He knows the route to her house by heart.
He marvels again at the little things—the flower boxes, the stubborn gardens, the stained-glass decorations on rubber suckers stuck inside windowpanes to catch the sun—all the ways people try to personalize their tiny, identical parcels of the town. Each house has a scrap of front yard, but no driveway, since no one in the Blinds has a car. Cooper’s the only one in town with regular access to a vehicle—another perk of his position, if you can call a dented pickup with a slippery transmission and 250,000 miles in the rearview a perk—and the town keeps another car on hand, a Chevy Aveo, for emergencies, though that vehicle is usually up on blocks at the repair shop, under Orson Calhoun’s care. It doesn’t matter much; no one ever uses either vehicle, not even Cooper. Unlike the residents, he’s technically allowed the occasional twenty-four-hour furlough to civilization in extraordinary circumstances, though he can’t remember the last time he requested one from the Institute. Once you’re planted here, he’s found, you get pretty much settled, and civilization starts to feel very far away.
As he turns the corner toward Fran Adams’s house, he spots her sitting out on the front steps. Cooper waves as he approaches.
“Morning, Ms. Adams,” he says.
“Morning, Sheriff.” She stands. She’s wearing the same torn jeans and plaid shirt and t-shirt she’d worn the previous night and her hair’s pulled back in a ponytail that says, I’ll deal with you later. “So,” she says, “you planning to tell me just what the hell happened last night?”
Before Cooper can answer, which he’s not eager to do, Isaac runs out the screen door, letting it slap closed behind him.
“Look at these cards,” Isaac says. He holds up a fresh pack of trading cards, a souvenir from the movie they’d gone to see together offsite a few months back. That wasn’t an official furlough—Cooper just snuck that one in himself. He sat beside Isaac in the air-conditioned theater for two hours, munching popcorn, keeping watch, though he can’t recall a single thing about the movie now. Some animated action film for kids with guardian robots in it and monsters who eventually learn to accept themselves.
“I got these, they just came to the store,” Isaac says, fanning the cards out, fresh from the pack, the cardboard still dusted pink with the residue of the bubblegum they arrived with. The cards depict battling robots; apparently, it’s some kind of game. Isaac holds them out proudly. He has his mother’s dark hair, though on his head it’s scalloped into tight curls. He’s a sweet-looking kid, Cooper thinks—he looks a lot like his mother. Kids always look to Cooper like the as-yet-unruined version of their parents, like some remnant of the you that existed before you made all your bad decisions.
“You going to share that bubblegum with me?” asks Cooper.
“I already confiscated it,” says Fran. “Or did we finally get a dentist in this town?”
“Can we go to another movie?” asks Isaac. He speaks in a clipped, insistent, urgent bark, like he’s never had to wait his turn, and he’s accustomed to everyone’s instant attention. Maybe that’s what happens when you grow up the only kid in a town full of adults, Cooper thinks. There used to be another kid for a while—Cooper wonders if Isaac remembers that boy. No one expected kids here; no one planned for it. Once Isaac arrived, the town just made it work. But that was back when he was only a baby, a toddler. Now that he’s going on eight, it’s just not a tenable situation—Cooper’s known this for a while. And he knows that Fran understands that, too. It’s just convincing her to go anywhere else that’s hard. Not that he blames her. Nothing good ever happens to people who leave the Blinds. Including that other boy.
Jacob was his name. Jacob Mondale. And his mother, Jean. It’s important to remember their names, Cooper thinks.
“We’ll see,” he says to Isaac. “I sure had fun last time. But we’ll have to ask your mother.” He winks at Fran, who doesn’t soften.
“Isaac,” she says, “why don’t you go inside and put those cards somewhere safe.” Isaac runs back into the house. She says to Cooper, “I asked Spiro to order those cards a month ago. They finally came through the commissary. I thought they’d make for a nice souvenir. He really did have a good time. Though I still don’t know if it was a good idea.”
“He’s got to see the world eventually. He can’t stay here. Not forever.”
“I thought that was the whole point of this place. To hide from the rest of the world.”
“For most of us. Not for him. He’s not—”
“We’ve had this discussion, Cal. Now are you going to tell me about that gunshot?”
Cooper considers his words. “We had an incident, it’s true. Not a good one. At the bar.”
“An incident? Like, the kind of incident that involves a gun going off into someone’s body?”
“I’m calling a town meeting about it this afternoon. I’ll explain everything then.”
“Can you give me a sneak peek? I have a kid here, Cal. Was it a suicide, like the other one?”
“Not likely, no.” Cooper nods toward the house. “D
id it wake him?”
“No, thank God. He sleeps like a teenager.”
“Count that as a blessing.”
“For him or for me?”
“Depends how many late-night bad habits you’re hoping to hide.”
Fran eyes Cooper, then smiles slightly—finally, a concession, a crack. “There was a time when you were very familiar with my late-night habits, Sheriff Cooper.”
For the second time today, Cooper thinks this would be an excellent moment for a hat. Instead, he just rubs his forehead and squints out at the block. “I can’t let you know anything until I let the whole town know.”
“No special privileges, huh?”
“Not with this.”
She unfolds her arms and squeezes his shoulder. This is as much of a physical intimacy as they’ve ever allowed themselves in public, even back when their private meetings were much more intimate. “Just let me know he’s safe, Cal.”
“He’s safe. You’re both safe. I can promise you that.” He regrets this promise as soon as he’s spoken it. He’s had a lifelong habit of offering promises he’s in no position to deliver. But it’s too late to back down on it now, so he says, “I’ll ring the bell for the town meeting sometime around one. Then I’ll tell you everything I know. I promise that, too.”
As he walks down her steps and back into the street, he regrets that last promise even more.
4.
SO WHAT DO WE KNOW about Hubert Humphrey Gable?” asks Dawes, flipping through her notebook.
“Nothing. Not a fucking thing. That’s precisely the founding principle of this town,” Cooper says. “But more to the point, Dawes—what are you doing sitting at my desk?”
“I warned her,” says Robinson, who’s standing over a pair of uniform pants slung across an ironing board, affecting an earnest but clumsy imitation of ironing.
The Blinds Page 3