The Blinds

by Adam Sternbergh

  Santayana turns back to Fran. “Now let’s go—”

  “No.” Dawes is still standing. Her gun leveled again. She knows not to pull the trigger, not yet. She only has one bullet, after all.

  The other two agents pull their guns now and draw them on Dawes.

  Fran bolts, dragging Isaac. They scramble down the steps to stand with Dawes. The three of them, in the street. Other neighbors have come to their windows now, drawn to the source of the nearby shot. Dawes struggles to keep the three black-suited agents on the porch all clustered together in her gun sight. Her arm is shaking badly. She can’t tell how bad the gunshot is, but she’s still standing, so that’s something. As an EMT, she learned about trauma, and how gunshots are the worst, because they have no regard for their surroundings. They’re not polite. They tear everything up.

  She keeps her eyes on the agents. Her arm shakes. The gun dances.

  “Santayana, stand down.” Another voice now. A new one, from behind them all, farther down the street. Dawes can’t turn to look, she doesn’t dare to, but she knows who that voice belongs to.

  Cooper.

  Fran turns to see him walking slowly toward them all. No gun. His hands held up, palms out, in surrender. Speaking calmly. “The four of us, we’re going this way, to wait out what’s coming,” Cooper says, pointing a thumb back over his shoulder. “Back to the chapel. Me, Dawes, Fran, and the boy. It’s not safe for any of us out here.”

  “I can’t let you do that,” Santayana says. “He’s coming with us.”

  Pop pop pop, in the distance. The intermittent sound makes their tiny tableau seem comical, inconsequential.

  “Where’s Agent Rigo?” Santayana asks.

  “He sent me,” says Cooper. “To gather up everyone and get them inside. We’ve got bigger problems right now, you know that.” Cooper takes a few steps closer to the porch, his hands still raised. Once his back is to Fran and the boy, he’s says quietly, but tersely, in a clipped whisper, to Santayana: “We’re in this together, remember? Just let me take the boy somewhere safe. There’s a place we can hide while all this plays out. After that, we can take him out of here.”

  Santayana considers this. While she does, Cooper says: “But we have to get out of the streets. Now.”

  Pop pop pop pop pop. Getting closer.

  Santayana holsters her gun.

  Cooper turns back to his party and claps his hands once. “All right. Let’s go. Come on.” Then he shouts and motions to the people watching from their windows. “Everyone—follow Dawes.” Some of them come outside, hustling, while others just stare dumbly, paralyzed, or close the curtains again. Cooper turns back to Santayana. “I’m going to gather everyone in the chapel. It’s in the center of town at the end of the main street. I need to get everyone safe while we deal with Dietrich. After that, we’ll sort this other business out. All right?”

  “All right,” says Santayana.

  The group of them starts to walk away down the street, Dawes hobbling, leaning on Fran, the four of them trailing a caravan of frightened citizens. Cooper says to Dawes, “You okay?”

  “I can walk. It hurts.”

  Cooper pulls out a ring of keys. “Take these. Take everyone to the chapel.” She nods. “Grab anyone else that you see,” he says. “As many as will fit inside. Once you get to the chapel, ring the bells.” Then he lowers his voice, almost whispering. “Then you lock that fucking door behind you.”

  “What about you?”

  “Just lock that door. I’ll get there.”

  She nods.

  “You did good,” he says.

  “I know,” she says.

  Cooper turns to Fran. Says in a hoarse whisper, “Keep him safe. That’s all you need to worry about.”

  “Cooper—” It all comes now, undammed, in a sob. “I remember.”

  He tugs her close and kisses her hair. “Just keep him safe.”

  Pop pop pop.

  He turns back to Dawes.

  “Now give me the gun,” he says.

  Dawes hesitates. Then she understands. “Cooper, that’s suicide.”

  “Just give me the gun.”

  She hands it to him. He opens the cylinder, checks it again, snaps it shut.

  “You saved me the bullet,” he says.

  “I’m sorry that’s all I have for you.”

  “Well, if I’m lucky,” he says, “I’ll only need one.”

  34.

  BUSTER FORD HEARS THE SHOOTING and he knows it’s coming closer. He sits in his living room, cradling his Bible, thinking about the fences. How, after all these years here—and he’s been here eight years, the full eight, it’s hard to believe, but eight years already, how time flies—you stop noticing them. You stop noticing how the fences rise and cut into the endless horizon, claiming their portion of the sky. You stop mentally noting how their mottled shadows stretch across the dirt every day at dusk, like a net thrown over the town. He’s always wondered about the utility of the fences, because you’re ostensibly free to leave at any time.

  Of course, the fences are supposedly there to keep people out, too. But apparently that hasn’t worked out too well.

  Pop pop pop.

  He cradles the Bible. He’s thought of leaving the town, many times. His memory is more intact than most. He remembers almost his entire childhood. He’s in his early sixties now, so a natural erosion has kicked in, on top of what they took away. But he grew up in Pennsylvania, he knows that, just outside Lancaster. His father slowing to steer the car around an Amish carriage as it clip-clopped along at the side of the highway. He remembers the candies he used to get as a kid at the Amish market on weekends and how, later, as a teen, he’d watch the Amish girls in their bonnets, how pretty they looked. He remembers one girl, in particular, he’d see every weekend at her family’s booth, who was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. He tried to talk to her once, but he wasn’t sure what to say. His friends made crude jokes about those Amish women. He never made those jokes.

  His memories get a bit blurry after that; that must have been when his life went astray. But he knows, if he ever does leave the Blinds, he’ll head to Lancaster, and look for that woman.

  Pop pop.

  The bungalow has too few rooms for him to hide in, he knows that, too. He could run, but there’s the problem of the fences. You can only run so far. Besides, he’s old, and no longer much for running.

  The silences after the shots are the worst part. Then more shots, sharp reports, getting closer. Like the knock of a census-taker, stopping at every door on the block, approaching yours.

  He sits in the living room with his Bible and summons all his energy and tries to remember. If only I could know what it is that I did. How I ended up here. Inside these fences.

  He hears more gunfire like insistent knocking, louder still, until he realizes that the knocker has found his door.

  When Bette hears the rapid staccato of shots, far away at first but getting closer, she moves to rise from Wayne’s couch. She thinks that she will run. Or find the sheriff. Or find the agents. The ones who are supposed to take her home.

  Wayne reaches out and stills her with his hand. She sits again. He’s holding his pencil in his other hand, over the half-completed sketch.

  She looks at this bowed, gnarled man, with his wild silver hair, his burrowed eyes, and waits for him to do something more. He doesn’t. He’s still.

  He’s listening.

  Pop pop pop.

  Cooper watches them walk away down the road, the ragged caravan, toward the refuge of the chapel. Santayana and her agents trail behind, at a distance, almost like shepherds, keeping watch.

  Then he walks quickly in the other direction.

  He could try to get the drop on Dietrich. Hide somewhere, like a hunter, wait on Dietrich, try to surprise him, but Dietrich’s armed to the teeth and an expert shot to boot—he proved that on the night of the coydogs. And Cooper’s bum shoulder is barking and even on a good day he can’t reliabl
y knock a can off a fence at twenty yards. So taking on Dietrich, with one bullet?

  Dawes was right. That’s suicide. And as much as the notion has held a certain appeal to him in the past, he’s not much interested in that particular ending today.

  He walks briskly away from the distant sound of the echoing shots.

  Never carried a loaded gun, not for eight years on the job. Never had use for one.

  He turns onto the next block.

  Pop pop pop pop pop, he hears it again, and tries not to think about what each resonant barrage means. How Dietrich is roaming freely, stalking the town, murderous, fatal, like a sickness. How the town is dying slowly around him, plague-struck, helpless. No apparent rescue on the horizon.

  Cooper mounts a set of stairs.

  Well, not entirely helpless.

  If there is one thing the Blinds has going for it, Cooper thinks, it’s that there’s no shortage of people living here who know what to do with a gun. Or did once, and can possibly be prodded to remembrance.

  Some of those people being worse than Dietrich. Or were, once.

  He marches across the porch and knocks hard on the door.

  35.

  THE CHAPEL IS a low-slung cinder block building, not much more than a bunker, really, painted white then tinted brown by years of wind-borne dirt. The structure’s facade makes no exterior concession to holiness. No stained glass or saints or hung crucifix. Just a dented red metal door, with a single small square window in the center of it, at eye level, like a peephole. Two long but narrow recessed windows flank the entrance, and there’s a scrubby stretch of withered grass out front. The building’s set about twenty yards off the main road at the west end of the town’s central thoroughfare, a stone’s throw from the busier commercial outposts. Dawes has been inside this chapel exactly once before, during her initial tour of the grounds, on her very first day of work. She never returned. She’s not much for faith. Though as she unlocks the impressive deadbolt on the door, she suspects she could use some faith right now.

  She swings the heavy door open with a grunt and hustles Fran and Isaac inside, along with about a half dozen or so stragglers they’ve picked up. Most everyone else in town is holed up in their houses, but there were a few people just wandering the streets in a daze. Panic will do that to people. Dawes tried as best she could to wave them down but many of them just scampered off, skittish, as though scared she was beckoning them to their doom. Who knows—maybe she was. If there’s a plan to all this, she’s not privy to it, beyond getting everyone inside this building and locking the door.

  The small party she’s collected spreads out inside the room, which, like the building’s exterior, is spare and rather notably un-churchlike. Three rows of plastic folding chairs face a wooden lectern. Other than that, it’s just a large bare room with musty gray carpeting and dingy white cinder block walls that, she suspects, hasn’t had too many recent visitors.

  Once everyone’s inside, Dawes locks the door. It’s a formidable lock that takes a little doing. Then she sits—slumps, really—into a plastic chair, and only then realizes how painfully her side throbs. The brown coat is stiff with blood over the bullet hole. She unzips it, gingerly. Fran pulls up a chair. “Let me have a look at that,” she says.

  “What, you’re a doctor now?”

  “No, I’m a poet, apparently.”

  Dawes shrugs the coat off.

  “Why are you wearing a winter coat, anyway?” asks Fran, as she tugs the coat off Dawes’s arms and tosses it aside to the floor.

  “You ever read a biography of Andrew Jackson?” says Dawes weakly. It’s all catching up to her now.

  “No,” says Fran.

  “Jackson once challenged a man to a duel. He knew the man was a better shot than him. So he wore an oversized coat, and let the man take the first shot. Which hit the coat, but only winged Jackson. Then Jackson took his shot and shot the man dead. For some reason, I remembered that fact just as I was running out the door to come find you. So I grabbed this coat.”

  Fran pries the torn cloth of Dawes’s uniform shirt away from the wound and sees it. It’s ugly.

  A grizzled, heavyset black man, maybe fifty, walks over and interrupts them both. He’s unshaven. Clearly angry. Fran knows him. Chester Holden, Chet for short. He likes to garden out front of his house. She’s seen him out there on his knees, in his dungarees. That’s about as much as she knows about him. He’s wearing a work shirt and jeans and, Fran only notices now, he’s barefoot. He must have run out of his house to follow them without his shoes on. He must be petrified, she thinks.

  He says to Dawes: “At some point, are you going to tell us just what the hell is going on?” Behind him, other residents stand, listening.

  “I don’t know,” says Dawes. “But these agents aren’t who they say they are. And someone’s loose in the town right now. He’s armed. Sheriff Cooper’s dealing with it.”

  “Yeah? How?” says Holden. “And what are we supposed to do? Just sit here and wait?”

  “You can go back out there if you like,” says Fran sharply.

  A younger man steps forward from the cluster that loiters behind Holden. A big guy with a goombah vibe. Dawes recognizes him from intake day, back on Monday, which seems like a lifetime ago. “Isn’t whoever he is just going to come here and kill us all?” he says. “We’re big, fat sitting ducks in here.”

  “No, we’re not,” says Dawes.

  “He’s right,” says Holden, angry. “We’re sitting ducks.” A few voices from the group concur.

  “Cooper told me to bring you here for a reason,” says Dawes.

  “To a fucking church?” says the goombah. “Why? For last rites?”

  “Look, I know for some of you, memory isn’t your strong suit, but think back to your orientation. This isn’t just a church,” Dawes says.

  Dietrich walks out again into the middle of the street, his rifle hot, thinking, There is no joy in shooting an old man in a chair holding a Bible.

  Not joy, exactly. There is some joy. But sport.

  There is no sport in it.

  And as much as he looked forward to stalking through the town, he’s finding the residents old and weary and, in their way, far too welcoming. Those two agents were a challenging diversion, but they’re dead and there’s only four more like them. Plus, the sheriff and his two deputies. He had planned to hold off on those three till the end, since he already has their tattoos, and it would be kind of funny for them to watch the whole town die. But at this point he’s getting impatient and starts thinking of the most efficient way to bring it all to an end. The only question is whether he should take the kid. He should probably take the kid. He definitely gets a sense that whoever is bankrolling all of this, the only survivor they really care about is the kid.

  He spots a person running, way up the block, hunched over, like how they saw it once in some movie about survival. He hefts the rifle. Sights the person scampering.

  Pop pop.

  Finally, some sport.

  Then he spots another figure. In the distance. Walking toward him. Hands up. Like he’s begging for mercy.

  Dietrich sights the rifle, then stops. Lowers it.

  Squints.

  Now, lookie here. It’s the fucking sheriff.

  Cooper ambles forward in the silence, his empty hands raised in surrender. It’s so quiet you can hear his boots squeak in the road. The early-evening simmer rises off the road in throbbing waves. He spots the figure in the distance, Dietrich, waiting for him, patiently. At this distance, at rest, with his rifle hoisted up and pointed skyward, Dietrich looks like a creature with an extra appendage. His silhouette dances in the heat.

  The town has the smell of blood now. Cooper catches the scent on the feeble breeze. He waves a hand meekly. Summons his voice.

  “Dietrich!”

  Dietrich faces him, square in the center of the street, with no pretense of caution or concern.

  “Sheriff Cooper,” he says. “You
come to arrest me?”

  Cooper inches closer, hands still high. “No. I’ve come to cut a deal.”

  “Too late. I already got the tattoos.”

  “Look, Dietrich. I just need time. To get out. Me, and the boy, and his mother. Just the three of us. I have a truck. Just let us go. Us three.”

  “No.” Dietrich savors the finality of his reply.

  “Come on. You don’t care about that boy.”

  “I don’t. But someone does.”

  “I’ve got information you can use, Dietrich. This town is full of bounties. I don’t mean petty criminals, either. I mean targets whose lives are worth tens of thousands of dollars, even hundreds of thousands, if you take their scalps home to the right people.”

  “As you may have noticed, I haven’t really concerned myself so far with collecting scalps.”

  “Have you ever heard of William Wayne?”

  Dietrich shakes his head. But he’s curious.

  “How about Esau Unruh?” says Cooper. “Does that name mean anything to you?”

  Dietrich listens. The money doesn’t matter much to him. This job was sold to him as a flat-fee undertaking, and while the payment offered was impressive, even flattering, it was meaningless, just more numbers to pile up in a bank account. No, it was the anarchy of the endeavor that appealed to him. Not the planning beforehand, or the payment afterward, but this—these few roiling hours of absolute freedom. This new information intrigues him, however, a little bit. “Yes, I’ve heard that name,” he says. “In prison once. He’s supposed to be, like, some super killer. The person in question, who told me about him, spoke of him like a ghost.”

  “He’s here. In this town. He’s in hiding right now. I can tell you exactly where he lives. And there’s, I don’t know, there’s got to be a dozen men in the outside world who would pay a million dollars each to see him dead. Hell, they’d pay you a bounty just to hear the story of how you did it. You’d be the man who killed Esau Unruh.”