The Blinds

by Adam Sternbergh

  He looks to Rigo, pleading. “I’m not that man,” he says weakly. “I’m Lyndon Lancaster.”

  “Does that even sound like a real name to you?” says Rigo. Then he pulls out an automatic pistol from his waistband. He holds it, grip out, toward Lancaster. “I’m going to give you a choice, Sammy ‘The Wolverine’ Lemme. You can take this gun, and you can shoot me, certainly, that is an option—though my agents might take issue with that, and they’ll not only kill you, but that lovely girl that they’re currently standing with. But, if you like, you can shoot me, maybe piss on my body when you’re done”—Rigo looks around clownishly at the crowd, as though goading them to cheer—“but what’s that old expression? Don’t shoot the messenger!” Rigo laughs. Then he turns back to Lancaster. “Or you can go another route”—Rigo thrusts the gun out toward Lancaster—“and take this pistol and do what the state should have done to you three fucking years ago when they first arrested you, rather than cutting you a deal and wiping your sins away and depositing you here to live in blissful anonymity among this motley crew of murderers and rapists. Your choice.”

  Cooper calls out urgently: “Lyndon, just walk away.”

  Only his friends call him Lyndon and Cooper hopes that might snap him awake.

  Lancaster looks at Cooper blankly, looks back at Rigo, then looks at the gun.

  Cooper shouts now: “Lyndon, they don’t want you. This isn’t about you. Just go home.”

  Instead, Lancaster reaches out and takes the gun. He examines it, in his hand, like it’s a gift he wasn’t expecting and isn’t quite sure what to make of, but is increasingly delighted to have received.

  Cooper: “Lyndon, don’t!”

  Lancaster holds the gun to his temple.

  Rigo sticks his index finger up under his own chin. “It’s much better right here,” he whispers. “Much higher success—”

  But Rigo’s last words are swallowed by the sharp report, and the boom of the blast echoes idly over the main street, drifting like smoke over the watching crowd. Lyndon’s brain matter scatters in an antic plume before spattering to the gravel like summer rain. His body falls.

  Rigo stoops and picks up the gun, gingerly, pinched between two fingers. He pulls a handkerchief from his inside breast pocket and wipes off the gun ceremonially. He toes Lancaster’s body. A puddle of blood widens on the gravel. Rigo puts the gun back in his waistband. Then he looks up at Cooper.

  “That’s one,” he says. “Any time, Sheriff, you can call this off.”

  Cooper says nothing.

  “No?” Rigo turns and walks back to Santayana, who’s still seated in the lawn chair. He hands her Lancaster’s folder, which she sticks back into the legal file. Then she pulls out another one, a new one, and hands it to Rigo. He flips it open and reads, turning back to the assembled crowd.

  He says loudly, “Is there a Doris Agnew here?”

  They hear the shot, even inside the chapel, and everyone jolts, before the room abruptly stills. Hannibal, who’s been watching at the window, recoils. “Holy shit,” he says quietly, to no one.

  Finally, Fran calls out: “What happened?”

  “Some guy just shot himself in the fucking head,” Hannibal says. The room murmurs. A soundtrack of confusion, the prelude to a panic.

  “Why?” Fran says, though what answer she’s expecting, she can’t imagine.

  “I don’t know, from something that guy was reading maybe. It’s hard to hear,” says Hannibal.

  “What could he be reading?” says Spiro, fearful, from the back of the room.

  But Fran knows. And soon Spiro knows, too. The whole room knows. And no one says anything. The knowledge of it, dawning on all of them, spreads silently through the room like a dreaded contagion.

  “He’s calling another name now,” says Hannibal.

  “What name?” someone asks from the back.

  “Don’t—” says Fran, but it’s too late.

  “Doris Agnew,” says Hannibal.

  At the back of the chapel, at the sound of her name, Doris Agnew stands.

  “Doris Agnew,” Rigo repeats.

  Nothing. No one answers.

  “Last call for Doris Agnew,” Rigo yells.

  Behind Cooper, the chapel door groans open. He turns quickly to block her but the door locks behind her and she steps forward and past him, with the blank momentum of a sleepwalker. Cooper grabs her shoulders and yanks her and says, “Doris, no,” but she shakes his hands loose and keeps walking toward Rigo, undeterred.

  Toward the promise of knowledge.

  Cooper watches her. He knows her well. She’s a sweet woman. Mid-sixties by now. She’s been in the Blinds maybe six, seven years. A bit of a notorious gossip. Her soft southern accent gives a hint as to her former life.

  “Read it to me,” she says to Rigo, facing him, in her musical lilt.

  “Your name,” Rigo says, “is Louise Evelyn Hucks. You were a nurse, apparently. Do you know what an ‘angel of death’ killer is?”

  “No,” she says.

  “It’s tough to know an exact number, but thirty-eight seems like a good guess,” Rigo says. “Infants, all of them. Maternity ward. Poison, and whatnot, a few suffocations. They think maybe you couldn’t have a baby of your own, is what drove you to do it, though that seems like some amateur armchair psychoanalysis to me.” He shakes his head dramatically, as though in mock wonder at the scale of the crime. “How the hell you swung a deal to end up here, though, is beyond me.” He scans through her folder, flipping pages. “Ah, here we go. The old insanity defense. I guess they bargained for a transfer here. Maybe they wanted to see how the memory-wiping process would affect such a damaged mind.” He slams the folder shut. “How about you, Louise? You feeling crazy?”

  “No,” she whispers.

  “You’re pretty lucky, actually,” Rigo says. “At least you didn’t flip on anyone, so there’s that. Of course, on the other hand, that means you offered them nothing in return for your life—”

  “Just do it,” she says softly. Even Rigo is surprised.

  “I’m sorry—?”

  “Just do it,” she says. “I don’t have the guts. Not like Lyndon. You do it for me.”

  Rigo glances over at Cooper, shrugs, then addresses the silent crowd. “What do you think, folks?”

  Cooper starts to move toward Rigo, who draws the gun again and points it at Cooper, and Cooper halts.

  “Don’t torture me. Just do it,” Doris whispers.

  Rigo turns the gun crisply on her and shoots her dead in the street, the shot sounding like a whip crack as she falls.

  Burly and Gains move swiftly to cart her body away, hoisting her and retreating to the doorway of a nearby building, where they’ve already deposited Lyndon’s corpse.

  “You all saw that,” says Rigo to the crowd, shrugging, still holding the pistol. “She asked me. She begged me. And no court in the country would convict me. I mean, thirty-six infants? That they know of.” He turns to Cooper. “Come on, Sheriff. We’re not here to execute the whole town. For one, it’s going to start to get very messy. And, given how hot it is, pretty smelly, too.”

  “You’re not getting that boy,” Cooper says quietly. “Just go home.”

  “That’s your counteroffer?” says Rigo. “You are a fucking terrible negotiator, you know that?”

  “Give him the kid!” someone yells from the street’s edge. Cooper flinches. This is exactly what he’s most afraid of. That the crowd will turn.

  In her lawn chair, Santayana smiles. And she moves her ankles closer to clutch the large black legal box at her feet. You can always threaten to kill people, she thinks, but that’s an amateur’s bluff. There are too many stupid people who are willing to die these days, and too many stupid things they’re willing to die for. So the real trick is to figure what is worse for them than death.

  Like what’s in these files.

  She clutches them closer.

  This is working so much better than she let herself i
magine.

  Cooper can’t place the source of the voice from the crowd and, for the moment, he’s glad he can’t, because he knows he would stride right into the mob and find that person and break him.

  Rigo shrugs. “Listen to your constituency, Sheriff.” Then he strolls back over to Santayana. “Let’s read another one.” He addresses the assemblage in a raised voice as he waits for her to dig a file out. “Do y’all know that ‘file’ is an anagram for ‘life’? That just occurred to me.” He gives a self-satisfied nod. Santayana keeps shuffling, her lacquered nails riffling performatively, like a lottery girl spinning the basket full of numbered balls. “I mean, you can’t all be serial killers, right?” says Rigo, still waiting. “Just, like, statistically speaking? I assume some of you must be, like, penny-ante B&E guys, or Wall Street bullshit artists. But maybe not. I guess we’ll find out.”

  Santayana finally finds the file she’s looking for, slides it free of the case, and hands it to Rigo with a flourish. He flips it open.

  “Oh, this should be good,” Rigo murmurs.

  Then he repeats it loudly, for the crowd, for effect, tapping the paper with his slender finger: “This should be good!”

  Ever the showman, he rustles the folder and clears his throat.

  “Calvin Cooper,” he says, in his ringmaster’s tone. As though he’s introducing, to the waiting patrons, the next act for their astonishment and amazement.

  39.

  ORSON CALHOUN HEARD THE SHOTS, OF COURSE. That sporadic chatter of ordnance. Then silence. Sometimes long silences. Then another burst. All day yesterday. It went on for hours.

  And he’s not hiding, he just has work to do. He figured the shots would find him eventually. In the meantime, he wants to get his workshop back in order, as best he can.

  Order. Without that, what do we have?

  So this has been his dedicated task for the past several days, ever since someone broke in and ransacked his shop in the early hours of the morning, laying waste to his carefully organized tools, overturning his tables, trashing his repair projects, scribbling nonsense words about Damnatio and Memorae all over his walls. For a long while, after he first discovered the carnage, and after he reported it to Cooper, he just stood and stared at the wreckage despondently. Cried, even, sure—he cried. Jobs he’d long been toiling on were lost causes, in total disarray. Gears and nuts and finer pieces that he’d laid out patiently, over weeks, just so, carefully assembled and displayed on oilcloth on his worktable, had been scattered, haphazard, in the dust. All that work, all that order, undone. Like time itself was moving backward toward chaos. The universe undoing itself.

  Besides which, his tools were everywhere—and what is a man without tools? Every hammer, every wrench, every screwdriver, every awl, all of which had their own prescribed slots on the pegboard, their own designated nails to be hung from carefully, their own individual outlines on the pegboard traced lovingly by Orson’s own hand, so that when a tool went missing you could see exactly where it once belonged and where it would one day return. Well, that entire wall was bare. Nothing but ghostly outlines, left on the wall like the reminder of a crime. Like the chalk outlines of corpses after a massacre.

  The emptiness of it all overwhelmed him.

  So he had only one recourse. Get back to work.

  Now, after a day or so, he is maybe halfway back to normal. Almost all the tools are replaced in their proper spots. There’s a hammer missing here, pliers absent there, but, as a whole, there’s something like order in evidence. Something like tranquillity restored to his troubled mind. The individual projects, too, have been reassembled as best he can manage, the apparent detritus grouped and bundled together by job. That took time. But at least it’s a starting point, he thinks. He knows in some part of his heart that this workshop will never be fully restored, and he suspects he may not live long enough to restore it. But the work of attempting this restoration has given him solace and quelled his roiling soul.

  For the past few days, that’s been enough.

  He stands now with a weighted hammer in his hand. It’s a twenty-eight-ounce framing hammer, a good weight for most everyday jobs. He searches for its proper spot on the wall. Only a few spaces are left vacant now. He notes a ballpeen hammer hanging in the wrong spot on its nail. Stupid, Orson, he thinks, then pulls it off and hangs it in a loop on the waist of his overalls until it can find its proper place. The hammer, the right one, that belongs in that spot is still missing, apparently, and this realization sparks a surge in his skull of the same stabbing painful despondency that’s been plaguing him for days. The sense that not only will this task never be finished but that all tasks, always, are fraudulent, a joke. But without tasks—well, he won’t allow himself to entertain that notion.

  Instead, he searches the board for this hammer’s proper spot, its home, and in that quiet moment, he hears the name of the sheriff—Calvin Cooper—called out loudly from somewhere outside. It comes from the street in a voice that he doesn’t recognize. It must be one of those visitors, he thinks. These men who arrived yesterday and brought the gunfire with them. He assumes eventually they’ll come for him. If they want to find him, he’s here, in his workshop, working. And, to be honest, that’s exactly where he’d want to be if they should come.

  But something about the name of the sheriff draws him away from his task and to his workshop door. The sheriff has also been good to him, kind to him, giving him tasks and projects, even with things that weren’t desperate for fixing. The sheriff seemed to understand the turmoil in his mind, and how the work would calm it. So he was always good about finding broken things for Orson to fiddle with, bringing them to him like offerings. Just so Orson could puzzle over them for weeks and thus pass his hours away.

  So Orson walks over to the doorway of his shop to see if he can spy the nature of the proceedings he’s overheard. Who is calling the sheriff? There’s some hubbub, he sees, over by the chapel. A small crowd of residents gathered there. A few of those visitors assembled there, too. A woman sitting in a lawn chair, for some reason.

  He watches a minute longer, holding the hammer loosely in his hand, putting the work of the workshop aside for just a moment, and listens.

  Fran watches at the window. They can’t hear everything, but she heard Cooper’s name, she’s sure of that. She enlisted a few of the older residents in the chapel to watch over Isaac, and take him to the back; they even found a deck of playing cards stashed in a cabinet. Isaac had never seen a deck of cards before. He stared at it in wonder.

  Now Fran’s free to linger at the window and watch, which feels like a bad idea, yet she can’t pull herself away. Whatever’s happening out there is not good, that’s obvious. Two people are dead already. And they just called out Cooper’s name.

  Robinson hears the name, too, and comes to the window and joins her.

  “What’s going on?” he says in a quiet voice.

  “I don’t know. They just called Cooper’s name.”

  “Calvin Cooper,” Rigo says again, loudly, like a judge about to pronounce sentence.

  Cooper steps forward.

  “Let me save you the trouble,” says Cooper, in a steady voice, but loud enough that everyone can hear. Rigo’s surprised at this, which is good, Cooper thinks. Just give me this one moment of advantage.

  He strides toward Rigo, until they’re standing just a few feet apart.

  “What are you doing?” asks Rigo.

  “Confessing,” says Cooper. Then he addresses the crowd. “Calvin Cooper,” he announces, parroting Rigo’s tone. “Born John Lyon Barker in the great state of Vermont, forty-five years ago this week. Like everyone else here, I changed my name on the day I arrived, because just like all of you”—and here he gestures to the assemblage—“I needed a fresh start. A last stop and a fresh start—isn’t that how the welcome speech goes?” The street is silent, save for Cooper’s voice. Rigo closes the folder slowly. He seems unsure what to do next. Which is more or less the intended
effect, Cooper thinks, as he watches Rigo waver. Santayana simply regards the proceedings from her lawn chair, silent, like a judge on the bench. She, too, is not sure where this is going, but it’s hard not to be transfixed. It’s like bearing witness to a self-immolation: a man in the street, doused with gasoline and now standing, trembling, the lit match pinched between his fingers.

  “Let me tell you all what’s in that file,” Cooper continues. “Calvin Cooper, age forty-five, currently resides in Caesura, Texas, known locally as the Blinds. When I was sixteen, I fucked my best friend’s girlfriend and lied about it to his face repeatedly, until one afternoon he shot me in the shoulder with a crossbow as revenge.” Cooper taps his left shoulder. “I’ve still got the scar to prove it. My friend claimed it was an accident, but I know it was a warning, and, either way, it hurt like a motherfucker, and still does. Luckily, it wasn’t my pitching shoulder—I say luckily, because later that year I fathered a son, by a different girl, a teenager, we were both seventeen, and I abandoned her and the child both. And the reason I gave her for why I couldn’t stay was because I had to pursue my baseball career, which was bullshit. Even then I knew I wasn’t good enough, not really. But she didn’t know that, and she bought it, at least long enough for me to leave. She did a great job, though, without me. In fact, she did such a good job that she wrote a whole book about it. It’s called Raising Icarus. You should check it out. It became a big bestseller. It’s all about overcoming adversity to raise a wonderful kid. She’s become a kind of parenting guru. As for me, that’s the only way I know my son. From reading about him in a book. And that’s the only way I deserve to know him.”

  Cooper is crying now; he doesn’t care, because his voice stays steady, and that’s what matters. As long as his voice stays steady, he doesn’t care about the rest.