“Fuck it!” the voice outside yells. “We’re just going to burn you out!”
The old man puts a hand on Kyle’s shoulder. “Well, there’s only one thing for it,” he says. He walks to the hayloft door at the front of the barn and pitches his LeMat out onto the ground. He yells, “I’m unarmed now!”
“What are you doing?” I hiss.
“Yeah,” the voice outside roars, “but you’ve got cops with you, and they’re armed.”
“I have what you want!” the general shouts. He turns to me and winks. “Ever heard of Stonewall Jackson?”
“What . . . ?”
“It’s September 14 today,” the general says gleefully. “Harpers Ferry. Remember?”
I don’t remember, and as I’m ordering the general to move away from the open hayloft, he stands up, fully exposed to our attackers outside, one hand resting on a tall, bulky object covered with a canvas cloth. An object I’m assuming is a farm implement. He waves the red duffle bag aloft, pulling out a stack of cash. “You burn us, you burn the money too.”
“How ’bout I just shoot you and come up and get the money. Or burn down the house over there, now we know you’ve got it!”
“Then my officer friends will have to shoot you.” There is silence outside the barn and the general continues: “I’ll make a deal with you. Give me your word you’ll leave and I’ll throw down your money.”
The old man’s got guts, I’ll give him that.
“Listen,” I whisper fiercely, “you throw that money down and we’ve lost our bargaining chip.”
The general looks at me, the bag hugged to his chest, his face set, and I know I’ve lost all control or even influence on the outcome.
Crawling closer to the open loft, I dare a quick glance outward and yell down, “Take the deal! Cleburne police are on their way!”
That brings laughter. “Cleburne police. Shut up, bitch! Okay, throw down the money and we’ll leave.”
Without hesitation, the general heaves the bag with all the cash down into the clearing in front of the barn.
There are a few seconds of quiet and then I yell for the general to get down out of the line of fire because I know they’re going to begin shooting at him at any moment. I crawl as quickly as I can away from the open loft, imagining we’re going to have to run for it because, sure as shit, the Mexicans are going to flame the barn and try and shoot us as we come out.
The general slips the canvas off the bulky object—like a silken sheet falling off a bed—and it turns out that it’s not a farm implement, as I had first thought. It’s a cannon. And he’s holding in one hand a long string lanyard attached to the barrel. He announces to us that one of the Mexicans is now approaching the duffle bag, gun drawn.
The general unsheathes his sword and declares to the open air, “When it’s war, draw the sword and throw away the scabbard!” He bounces on the balls of his feet a few times. “I’ve always wanted to say that.” He then turns to us and adds calmly, “Cover your ears.”
He gives the lanyard a good yank and a shattering boom erupts, the explosive recoil sending the cannon careening backward where it plummets over the edge of the loft, crashing into the barn below.
The shooter with the assault rifle starts spraying the loft with bullets, sending wood planks, metal fragments, and strands of hay in all directions around our heads. And then his fire is drawn away from the barn and I realize there are now other shooters in the woods. It’s the Cleburne police, and the two remaining Mexican gunmen are shot and killed within a few minutes of engagement. The third man, the gunman who went to retrieve the cash, has to be bagged in pieces. Evidently, a six-pound cannonball will do that.
* * *
By the end of the night three of the reenactors who were wounded by the attackers’ gunfire had been taken by ambulance to Cleburne. All three recovered. As Kyle had feared, though, two from his group were found dead at the stream. Two other reenactors, both of them overweight smokers, suffered heart attacks during their ordeal, but they survived as well and as far as I know they’re still staging Civil War battles outside of Dallas. They have also raised funds through exhibitions and bought themselves a brand-new cannon.
Soon after our Cleburne episode I looked up the battle at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. It was one of Stonewall Jackson’s most brilliant Civil War engagements: a tactical victory which was ensured by cannon hauled over mountains ranges, some of them during the dead of night, so that they could be fired at federal troops from high ground.
I still get Christmas cards every year from the general with quotes from Stonewall. The general’s favorite? My troops may fail to take a position, but are never driven from one.
And Velasquez? He was not one of the Mexican nationals killed at the encampment. He’s still operating in Texas. But then again, so am I.
Seth’s shoulder healed quickly, and despite his being such a baby about the pain from the wound, I brought him ice cream every day when I was off duty. In between my baiting him about how tough I think ex–football players are supposed to be, and his baiting me about my ugly shoes, we talked about the Cleburne case and about life being stranger than fiction, filled with cosmic collaborations.
He remembered that someone once said that Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare but are consumed in only twelve minutes. Halftimes at football games are twelve minutes. Coincidence? He thought not.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he was quoting Erma Bombeck.
By the way, Erma’s birthday and mine are on the same day.
Coincidence? I think not.
BIG THINGS HAPPENING HERE
BY DAVID HAYNES
Oak Lawn
The first words she spoke to me were to ask what I had seen. Her voice resonated with a practiced nonchalance, not quite masking an equally practiced aggressive undertone. She spoke like a woman who knew that the hourglass was almost empty and the witch was already at the door—and yet with a solid hint, feigned or otherwise, of warmth and openness. She had greeted us at the door of the rec center and hugged Cooper as if she were a long-lost aunt, the brightness of his eyes shining in contrast to the darkness of hers. Confident that I would verify what she already knew to be true, she reached toward me in that moment and placed her hand gently on my crossed arms. The soft warmth of that hand put the lie to what appeared to be gnarled roughness. Just that easily the words spilled from my mouth.
I told her how Cooper and I had headed out for supper at one of those ubiquitous strips of chain restaurants for which our city is universally famous. Brick cubes tricked out as haciendas, Tuscan villas, Caribbean patios; neon lights and interchangeable fiberglass roofs. We are ambivalent about cuisine, and our plan, as usual, had been the crapshoot of the shortest line. Ahead, midblock on the side street where we parked, the door to a bungalow flew open and three men in dark suits dragged a pair of scraggly young dudes from the house and out toward a white van. Another dark-suited man stepped from the vehicle and covered the captives’ heads with what appeared to be pillowcases. They were tossed like last week’s laundry into the back of the white van, which lurched from the curb, turned onto the main drag, and headed north toward the freeway.
For the record, we do not reside in a third world backwater, lorded over by corrupt oligarchs and soldiers on the take. This is a major American metropolis in a large Southern-tier state. Freeway flyovers loop our downtown, where glass and steel boxes point toward the sky. It is the nature of this story that I cannot tell you the name of our city, but you would know it by sight and reputation. People have been killed here—famous ones—and the syncopated country/disco rhythms of its theme song may be echoing in your head at this very moment.
The woman—the kind woman with the soft, gnarled, mahogany-colored hands—nodded when I told her what we witnessed on that day. The nod communicated that she knew just what I was talking about: she understood. A barely perceptible gesture, that nod, accompanied by a modest swipe of teeth at her fu
ll lower lip. It was an expression with which a funeral director might reassure the young widow that he has seen plenty of women with smeared mascara and red-rimmed eyes. Apologies were unnecessary. You are among friends, the woman seemed to be saying to me, and for whatever reason I felt like it was true.
It is my nature to be suspicious of moments like this. Sincerity is often ironic, I find, and moments of even marginal mysticism send my eyes rolling and set off in my head the cliché horror-movie soundtrack with the screeching violins. But the world has turned (or so we are told); the old rules have changed, and all bets are off. These are post-ironic times. And so I, with Cooper at my side, accepted her fellowship alongside a cup of watered-down coffee, and followed the warm and sincere and earnest woman to a cluster of open chairs set to one side of an air-conditioned community center in an obscure corner of our fair city. The meeting was about to begin.
What I had not told the woman was that I doubted my own truth; that even still I test the reality of it in my head, continuing to create alternative explanations for the abductions. Coop and I sat on that side street for what felt like twenty minutes, looking at the place where just moments before we had seen two young men snatched from their home. And wouldn’t we all like to imagine ourselves doing the right things in this moment—the things that Cooper and I neglected to do: scratching down license plate numbers and details about hair color and clothing. Dialing 911. We replayed it in our heads, again and again: the wresting from the door, the high-pitched squeal from the curb. Eventually I reached for my phone, but Cooper grabbed my hand and pressed it into my lap.
“It’s starting,” he said to me, and collapsed into a hysterical fit, his open-palmed hand slapping his ghostly shaved head. His torso beat back and forth to a silent rhythm heard only by him. “Oh, man,” he said, over and over. The good people of the central city continued with their usual business of deadheading petunias and walking their dogs. A golden retriever sniffed casually at a burgundy-colored stain. Beside me my best friend quivered and rocked and disintegrated and moaned.
I got him home and got him inside, but he could not stop pacing and mumbling to himself. Eventually he collapsed on his bed into some sort of trembling sleep state. I went into the living room and watched the local news on every channel, waiting for a mention of missing persons from somewhere around here—which never came.
* * *
Later that night, Coop wandered in and lowered himself stiffly onto the couch. “You’re surprised by this?” he asked, but it wasn’t really a question. His voice had been enervated with the same deadened but still punctuated edge as late-night callers to AM radio stations. He began chain-smoking, as he would do whenever he got into one of his states. “I keep telling you about shit, but you never believe me.”
The blue glow from the television was the only light in the room and I could hear Cooper’s raspy draws on the cigarette and the exhalations of smoke. He had always been subject to fits of melancholy and had told me lots of stories over the years—about military-created mosquito-borne viruses that killed only birds and people; about a laboratory not far from where he spent his days processing insurance claims and I taught AP English, where a team of scientists sequestered and trained a group of superintelligent young children. He’d been drawn to such nonsense since our college days. I had been ignoring such bull for the better part of a decade.
“You see for yourself now,” he chided, aligning me in that moment with those like himself who have known such things long going. And then he said that he wanted me to come . . . somewhere with him, that there were some people I needed to meet. There’d be a woman there, he insisted, who would be someone I should hear.
“She knows things,” he assured me. “She knows.”
It calmed him that I agreed to tag along, and thus the following evening, there we were: Cooper, me, the woman with the hands. A dozen or so others, as well. A ring of beige metal folding chairs circling us together. Next to me, I felt the calm poise of the woman. Upright she sat, her straight spine standing away from the chair, but in a natural and not uncomfortable way. You wouldn’t know that she breathed at all. According to her introduction, she was not the leader of this group, but it was obvious that she owned this room and that these were her people.
Before she said another word, I felt the need to speak with her privately. At the first break I implored her to join me for coffee—soon, if she would. She agreed.
The woman (I will not say her name) wore a hand-crocheted vest over a purple turtleneck. Apparently people still crochet. This sort of woman—the kind who hang around the public library, women with recycling bins, these Whole Foods types—my interactions with them had been limited at best. She seemed like the type who would be a quirky friend of my mother’s, someone with whom she might get together now and again to do the holiday baking or study Bible verses.
There, that night, in the circle of beige chairs, I felt myself oddly attracted to her, someone not remotely my type. She was older than me (though that has never been a criterion). She was heavy: not fat, but solid, and it looked good on her; still, we must have seemed a Laurel and Hardy match, the two times we would have been observed together in public, me being whichever comedy star was the lanky one.
An older guy, one of those university types, all gray beard and serious-looking spectacles, called us to order and insisted that we knew why we were there. Cooper and the woman moved their heads in grave concurrence. The woman radiated heat, pleasant in that cold community center classroom. I remember leaning into her as the storytelling began.
When it was my turn she caressed my fingers and nodded toward the group. “Tell them,” she said, but Cooper interrupted, offering his own version, which was essentially the same as mine, if ever so slightly more turgid and ominous. If any in the group were surprised, you’d not have guessed from their body language; the vague movements of heads and quietly clicked tongues—the low-energy response of people busy accumulating a bit more evidence for a case that to them has long been closed.
“The things people don’t know,” said another woman, in one of those blue power suits that your lawyer-types wear, ready to take her turn. She stared at her feet the entire time she spoke. She sounded like a parent telling a child that the dog has died. She said that because of the work she did, “certain information” crossed her desk on a regular basis.
“Large sums of money are moving,” she whispered. And then she added, “They think I don’t get it. They think that I’m too stupid to understand their codes. They think we’re all stupid.”
Next to me, the woman with the hands smirked; on the other side, Cooper shivered violently.
* * *
The woman suggested a meal instead of coffee, so we went to a vegetarian place she said she liked over in the gayborhood. It’s an old bungalow painted in psychedelic graffiti, and all the food is yellow and orange with sprinkles of green. Some guy who acted like the owner nodded at the woman—she was clearly a regular—and showed us to our seats.
“There are good people out here still,” she said, almost in a whisper. She told me it was important to remember that. She ordered tea for us, and then soft pureed foods to be picked up with tasteless gray triangles of pita.
She told me this about herself: “My father taught high school biology. In the summer he drove the ice-cream truck and his route sometimes took him deep into the city where we lived. It broke his heart when the children didn’t have a quarter for the Dreamsicles and Bomb Pops he sold, and sometimes he would just give them away.”
We ate our mildly seasoned foods, spices so delicate as to be imperceptible. We talked about the weather. Later, after dinner, she insisted I drop her at a corner in a part of the city riddled with struggling clubs and galleries and the sorts of goth girls who seemed to only exist within these few blocks. I asked to see her to her door, but she dismissed me with a wave. I watched her walk briskly into an alley between two buildings.
* * *
Coop
er had begun to keep a bag packed by the front door of the apartment for some reason, and one day I stumbled over it as I entered. I cursed him and his damn suitcase while a stack of spiritless sophomore essays scattered to the floor.
“What the hell’s this for?” I asked him.
“It’s because you never know anymore. And it’s because whenever it comes—whatever it is—I’m going to be ready to go.”
I scoffed, as I always would when teasing him, and I assured him that I didn’t think anything would be happening on this fine spring afternoon. I suggested we screw the damn papers and whatever the hell was going on with the world and head out for a drink or two.
He made some snide comment about fiddling in Rome. It had a sardonic and ugly tone to it. But even on the last day of the planet, he’ll be one you can count on to bend an elbow with you, so he rallied and we walked toward the bars in the trendiest part of town.
“Go to work today?” I asked as we headed past the ranks of new townhomes and boutiques that lined what had once been ghetto streets. I’d been asking this with increasing frequency, and Cooper would always shrug, as he did now. It was a glorious afternoon, and everyone in town had had the same idea, and the streets were full of the young and rich and thin.
We settled into a banquette at an obnoxiously trendy joint that was all velvet and chrome; our regular place—a low-key sports bar—had been shuttered, as had several other places up and down the block. Times were hard in the late ’00s: my school had had layoffs too, and more than a few folks had thrown in the towel and just walked away. The rest of us did what we could do, picking up a class during our preps and subbing at after-school activities.
The server dropped off our cocktails and I pressed again at the question of how he’d spent his day.
“What’s the point? What’s the point of any of it?” he mumbled.
“Oh, I don’t know. Keeps us in the hooch, I guess,” and I raised my Collins glass in his direction, a half-assed toast. Cooper was always one for self-pity, but he was also an easy mark for the cheering up, and I got something of a smile out of him.
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