Resurrection (18 page)

Rita and Rhonda finally separated. Caked with leaves and grass clippings, soaking wet, faces streaked with dirt, they pulled away from each other. Miriam Blake was standing on her screened
-
in porch dressed in an electric blue jogging suit with red piping up the legs and down the arms. She held a Remington pump shotgun in one sallow, blue
-
veined old lady’s claw.

The gun did not make Rita and Rhonda call off hostilities.

They had grown up next door to the Blake’s and seeing the old lady walking around the yard with a firearm was pretty much par for the course. No, what made them break apart was that regardless of the fact that they were known as “The Twin Terrors” or “Those Little Zirblanski Witches”, they had been raised to always respect adults and though many of those teachings evaporated in the blazing light of their tempers, this one managed to stand the test of time. Rita and Rhonda invariably did as adults told them…at least until said adult backs were turned.

Miriam, the shotgun looking much bigger than she did, just stood there on the porch in her blue jogging suit with the nearly
-
matching blue rinse in her hair. “Well?” she said. “What in the name of Peter, Paul, and Mary do you think you little vixens were doing?”

“We were fighting, ma’am,” Rhonda admitted freely.

“Yes, I saw that, Miss Sassy Mouth…but
why?
Good God, you’re sisters! And you’re twins! Mirror images of each other! You should be mad about each other! Simply mad! Not fighting and pecking and clawing like a pair of randy fighting cocks!”

Rita and Rhonda looked at each other when that last word was mentioned. Cocks? Did she just say
cocks? Did she just compare us to a pair of fighting penises?
They looked at each other, dirty water running down their faces, both hearing the same thing and thinking the same thing as was their way, and trying desperately not to laugh. It was very hard and they pulled their mouths into such tight, severe lines that their lips practically disappeared. But this was just another thing their mother had imparted to them: You do not laugh at adults. Sometimes they don’t make any sense and very often they did not have a clue, but you didn’t laugh at them. And particularly old people who more often than not were confused.

“Where are your parents?” Miriam wanted to know.

“Gone,” Rita and Rhonda said simultaneously.

“I might have suspected.” Miriam looked at the two wayward girls. “Well, come up here then. You heard me! Get up here both of you and make it snappy!”

To emphasize this, Miriam stomped her foot twice on the porch and maybe if that hadn’t worked, she might have clicked her heels and fired a round from the Remington.

Rita and Rhonda sullenly came up the steps and through the screen door, picking leaves from their short, dark mops.

“Come inside,” Miriam told them, stomping her foot one more time. “I’m alone and you girls are alone so we might as well wait together.”

Miriam made them deposit their wet things at the door and noticed with some disappointment that they were not dressed alike. Rita wore jeans and a T-shirt and Rhonda wore a skirt and a pullover sweater. In Miriam’s thinking, twins should always dress alike. It was one of those things you expected from twins.

She sat them on the sofa and fetched them both a hot chocolate which they thanked her for. You could say what you wanted about the Zirblanski twins, but they always remembered their manners.

Rita and Rhonda looked around, taking in framed pictures of old people on the wall and on the mantle shelf, most of them black and white. Which was pretty much to be expected, the twins knew, because old people had a thing for black and white. That’s how they liked their pictures and that’s how they liked their movies. There were also framed medals on the wall which must have belonged to Mr. Blake, because when he was alive he’d always been talking about all the Japs he’d killed in the war. There were a few paintings, too. Neither Rita nor Rhonda could say who they were, just a bunch of old men. Though Rita thought one was a painting of Ronald Reagan who’d been president a long, long time ago. She was pretty sure it was him because they’d made a big deal of it when he’d died and it had been on TV all the time. Just like when the pope died. Rita and Rhonda’s Uncle Johnny said that was ridiculous, because Reagan wasn’t much of a president anyway. He said Reagan had made movies with a talking monkey, if that was any indication of the sort of character he was.
Just an actor playing a part, that’s all he was,
Johnny said when Reagan died.
Liked to talk tough about the unions over in Poland, but first chance he had he broke up the air traffic controller’s union over here. Goddamn hypocrite. Good riddance, I say.

Of course, the twin’s mother always told them not to listen to what Uncle Johnny said because sometimes he drank and when he drank he got mean. But their dad seemed to think Uncle Johnny was okay. Agreed with him on most things. Dad wasn’t real crazy about the Blake’s because they were Republicans and worse than that, they were
conservative
Republicans which he made sound like a disease you might catch off a toilet seat. Uncle Johnny said that the real problem with Republicans is that they were in bed with the Jesus
-
ers.
Them Jesus
-
ers have their way,
he liked to say,
won’t be no more separation of church and state. Next thing you know we’ll be burning witches and starting the crusades again.

All of which meant very little to Rita and Rhonda.

The only thing that bothered them about being in the Blake’s house is that both their mother and father had warned them never to enter that house because the Blake’s were “gun freaks.” And guns and children don’t mix, they said. Which was something Rita and Rhonda pretty much believed anyway after Josh Denehew got hold of his father’s .22 pistol and shot three of his toes off. Which their mother had said was “Getting off easy.”

So there they sat, Rita and Rhonda, across from Miriam Blake in that tidy living room with the trappings of the conservative Republican cult all around them, wondering just how and when they would be turned into “brainwashed flag-wavers” like Miriam Blake.

So far, they didn’t feel any different.

But both had noticed that unlike most people’s homes, the Blake’s had gun cases right in their living room.

Miriam said, “You know, I’ve been watching you two girls pound the beejeesus out of each other for years. And always, I’ve been wondering why. When my Roger was alive he said you two were always just too wild for your own good. But I told him you girls had a lot of wild oats to sow. And by the looks of things, you’re still sowing them. My goodness, you must have more oats sowed than Quaker Mills. But why, girls? Why do you fight?”

Rita and Rhonda looked at each other as if the question had never occurred to them before. “I don’t know,” Rhonda finally said.

Miriam shook her head. “Well, there you go, girls! Nobody in this country ever knows! Yet they fight and squabble and raise Cain on a daily basis! The whites don’t like the Jews and Jews don’t like the Chinks and the Chinks don’t like the coloreds. One nation under God! Hah! That’s a laugh! I think we’d all be getting along fine if it wasn’t for the liberals sticking their noses where they surely don’t effing belong. Are you with me on that girls?”

“Yes, ma’am,” they said in unison, though they had no idea what she was talking about.

“If the liberals have their way, there won’t be any ‘God’ in this nation. Tell me something, girls. Do you pray in school?”

“No,” Rita said.

“Why not?”

“Because that’s for church,” Rhonda said.

“Oh dear God, now who’s been poisoning your brain with that trash?”

They just looked at each other.

“Do you go to church?”

They shook their heads. “No, ma’am.”

“And why not?”

Rita had to keep her mouth closed so she didn’t say the things her dad did.
No child of mine is going to one of those places. I’m raising my girls to think for themselves, not let someone else do their thinking for ‘em.
Of course, their dad said this to their mother, but both twins had overheard as they overheard most things. Just like they’d overheard their dad saying,
you know what those old deviants are doing to altarboys…just imagine what they do to the girls.

“Don’t you know you’re supposed to?”

Rita, a bit of color touching her cheeks, said, “Nope.”

Miriam just shook her head, but sensing she was running into a wall here, one that might fall right on her head if she pushed too hard, moved right along. “See, girls. The problems in this country mostly stem from the Jews. See, it’s because of the Jews that all those nasty A
-
rabs don’t like us. We protect the Jews and they hate us for it. The Jews killed Christ. Did you know that?”

“Nope,” they said together.

“Well, it’s true, the Jews killed Christ and here we are protecting them and getting mixed up in wars just to save them when we ought to be throwing those Yids right to the dogs. That’s something they won’t teach you in effing school.”

Rita and Rhonda figured most of what Miriam Blake was telling them they wouldn’t learn in school. And something was telling them that that was probably a good thing.

Miriam went on to explain to them that, again, it was all the liberals fault. Because good God
-
fearing Americans didn’t have any truck with Jews. It was the rich liberals who forced the government into protecting the Jews and that’s where all the trouble stemmed from. Rhonda was going to point out that she thought it was the oil companies that caused all the trouble in the Middle East, but she kept her mouth shut.

“Now, girls,” Miriam said, “what I’m going to do now is for your own good. What with the flooding, it’s only a matter of time before things get out of hand. And, I’m thinking, they already have. Have either of you girls ever shot a gun before?”

“No,” Rita told her. “We’re not allowed to touch them.”

“Why for heaven’s sake?”

“Because they kill people,” Rhonda said.

That made Miriam shake her head vehemently. “Oh, no, no, no. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”

“Guns make it easier, though,” Rita pointed out.

Miriam didn’t like that one and was pretty much suspecting by this point that the Zirblanski’s were nothing but a stewpot of bubbling liberalism. She took the girls over to one of her gun cabinets and pulled out a matching pair of small, sleek .32 pistols.

“It’s very easy, girls. You take the weapon off safety, pull back the slide to work a round into the chamber, then pull the trigger.”

The twins were shaking their heads, knowing they couldn’t possibly hold those guns, yet, they very much wanted to. Miriam finally put them in their hands.

“We’re standing guard tonight,” she said. “Any of those effing weirdos try to come through that door, we shoot the bejeesus out of them. Do you understand?”

But the girls just shook their heads. Maybe they knew and maybe they were afraid to admit as much.

“I mean we point our guns at them and shoot!”

“We kill people?” Rita said.

“No, honey, not
people,
just the bad ones. The bad ones that are going to be coming.”

“The liberals?” Rita said.

Miriam just made a face at that.

The girls looked at each other, then at the guns in their hands.

“How will we know?” Rhonda said.

Miriam smiled. “Oh, don’t worry, you’ll know them on sight.”

20

“The weirdest shit you ever saw,” Dave Rose was saying to Pat Marcus as they cruised East Genessee, the rain falling and falling, the patrol car’s wipers whipping back and forth madly. “Me and Eddie, we’re over at one of those tenements on Pennacott, right? Some call came in, kids were worried about their mother. So they send me and Eddie. Okay, what the hell? We get over there and these three kids meet us downstairs. Oh, shit, Pat, they were dirty and they smelled.”

Marcus chuckled under his breath. “That’s Pennacott. Lots of those kids over there are dirty and stink.”

“Well this is different. Me and Eddie we start talking to these kids and, holy shit, they start telling us this stuff. Man, it was bad. Their mother locked herself in her room for a couple days and didn’t come out. Kids thought she was dead. Then yesterday, they said, she starts moving around in there. She doesn’t come out, but she starts telling the boy that she wants
things.”

Marcus slowed as they moved through a puddle that stretched across the street. “What kind of things?”

Rose swallowed. “Man…well, dead things.”

“Dead things?”