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Authors: Tim Curran

Resurrection (6 page)

BOOK: Resurrection
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Mitch had a mad urge to lie. To lie his ass right off. But when he opened his mouth, all he could say was: “Not so good, Tommy. She’s having a hell of a hard time with it. You wouldn’t recognize her.”

Tommy just nodded. “They were tight, man. Even for twins they were tight. What was her name? Marjorie?”

“Marlene.”

“Right. Jesus, what a thing. I feel for you and Lily.”

That was followed by maybe ten seconds of uncomfortable silence. Poor old Tommy, he didn’t know how to handle things like this. He was your average blue collar guy with your average blue collar guy’s sense of compassion. It wasn’t that he was some hardassed redneck with no sympathy, it was just that he’d spent most of his life keeping his emotions on a high shelf in the closet where they wouldn’t cause any trouble and when he did take them out, they were damn rusty and he was damn clumsy trying to put them to work. Like pulling a car out of a garage every few years and turning it over, expecting it to pull a smooth and sweet idle when what it invariably did was sputter and shake and miss, cough lots of blue smoke.

But that was okay. Tommy Kastle was the salt of the earth, in Mitch’s opinion. He’d do anything for you. Give you the shirt off his back or an extra kidney, whatever you needed. Mitch could see it in his eyes, the warmth and empathy that just couldn’t get past his lips. And that’s all Mitch had to know.

Tommy cleared his throat. “All I can say is that I’m sorry about that mess, Mitch. And that’s all I’m gonna say. We go any farther with this, we’ll have to break out the fucking Kleenex and hold hands, watch goddamn Oprah together or something.”

Mitch burst out laughing. “God, but you’re an asshole.”

Tommy grinned, back on ground he knew well. “My mother said to go with your strengths.”

Mitch was feeling better. Those creeping heebie-jeebies seemed to have crawled off his spine now. He felt okay. He felt hopeful and wasn’t entirely sure what had been squeezing his nuts in the first place. It was good to be with Tommy. They’d grown up together. Traded skinned knees and Little League baseball for long hair and Black Sabbath records and then traded them again for the trappings of the working class: callused hands, mortgages, and middle-aged paunches, all that wonderful childhood idealism buried in the same hole with plans to be rock stars and NFL running backs. Maybe that stuff
was
buried, but if you looked real close at Mitch and Tommy, you could still see it twinkling in their eyes when they were together. There was a connection between them, an understanding. They’d grown from the same roots and all these years later flowered the same buds.

Tommy asked Mitch how things were going over at Northern Fabricators where he worked. Mitch was a machinist, a C & C lathe man.

Mitch just laughed. “Well, you figure that one. Northern is over in Bethany and we’re closed until things dry up.”

Tommy said it was the same at the wireworks out on Junction Road. Goddamn flooding. Closed until further notice. “I’m just glad I’m a single guy. No mouths to feed. All I got is me.”

Mitch just nodded. Tommy liked to say things like that, but underneath you could almost hear the sorrow of his existence echoing out like a slow and distant thunder.

“Lookit goddamn Hubb over there, will ya?” Tommy said.

Mitch did.

Hubb Sadler was the last remaining Sadler brother, Chum having dropped dead behind the counter almost fifteen years before from a coronary occlusion. Hubb sat on a metal folding chair behind the long glass counter, sucking off a bottle of oxygen to ease his emphysema which was greatly acerbated by the fact that he went in at over three-hundred pounds. Not a good thing when you were on the downside of seventy. His eyes were gray marbles pushed into narrow draws, his head shaped roughly like a jar and capped with a crewcut that was startlingly white. His face was seamed and deeply-etched with diverging lines. The only time the oxygen mask came off was when he needed to reel out a string of profanity at someone.

The Sadler brothers had done well for themselves, yes, but they’d both been miserable, evil-tempered sonsofbitches every day of their lives. A legacy Hubb kept alive.

Some college girl, maybe eighteen or nineteen, was working the cash register. She had brilliant blue eyes and a head of long, curly black hair that hung over her shoulders. Her breasts were large and high, pulling her shirt up even as her jeans rode low on her hips. Every man in the place was getting an eyeful of her flat belly and pierced naval.

“Jesus, lookit that shit, will ya?” Tommy said. “I don’t remember ta-ta’s like that when I was young. Bet she makes her own gravy. Look at Hubb! He’s just eating that up, sitting back there while she shakes her can in his face.”

Hubb did look pleased. But Mitch was thinking it wasn’t because of the girl, but because of the sales he was racking up. People were standing in line with raincoats and boots, lanterns and freeze-dried food packets, sleeping bags and plastic tarps. Old Hubb hadn’t made a killing like this since Y2K.

“What would you say if I told you I was taking her out tonight?” Tommy said.

“I’d say you were a lying sonofabitch.”

“And you’d be right.”

Hubb sat there, holding court with a couple other old-timers: Hardy and Knucker. Both in their seventies, they were regulars at Sadler Brothers. Hardy was probably one of the finest bullshit artists in Crandon and Knucker, well Knucker was just Knucker. For many years she’d been known simply as “Knucker’s Old Lady,” but after Knucker himself—Pauly Knuck—had passed on, she inherited the coveted crown.

More people came through the front door, a blast of wet chill coming in with them. They joined the twenty or so that were already mulling around, ready to spend their money and flash their plastic.

Some guy neither Mitch nor Tommy even knew came right up to them, rain dripping off the brim of his bright yellow baseball cap. He looked worried, his eyes darting around. “Phone’s are all dead,” he said. “TV’s off the air. What the hell’s going on? Is it the weather?”

“I’m thinking so,” Tommy told him.

“Well, I’m not liking it,” was all he said to that.

He marched past them, going for the bins of freeze-dried food. He grabbed a couple boxes of packets, then took a hatchet off the shelves, stood there staring at it. Everyone who passed by got to hear how the phones were dead and the TV was off the air. It was to be expected, Mitch figured, but you could almost see the panic threading through the store.

“Radio’s dead, too,” some teenaged kid announced, a waterproof poncho tucked under one arm.

Hubb pulled his oxygen mask off. “Try that fucking radio,” he told his college girl. “Go ahead for chrissake, turn the cocksucker on.”

Nervously, she tried the radio on the shelf above Hubb’s head. Then she tried the phone, shook her head.

Hubb scowled. “Well, what in the fuck next? Jesus H. Christ!”

“Yup,” Hardy said, “seen this shit before. The Red October of fifty-two. Weather got funny like this. Summer was hot. Wicked hot. Fall was too cold. By Sept the fifteenth, we had an inch of snow on the ground. Then that Red Rain came. It was ugly, by God, it was ugly.”

The college girl was intrigued. Possibly a bit naïve, too. “What happened? Did it really rain red?”

“Ahhhhhh…don’t encourage him, honey,” Knucker said. “He’ll go on all day if he has an audience.”

Hardy ignored her. “Sure did, missy. Pissed outta the sky red as blood. Poisoned wells and rivers and killed twenty people. That
was nineteen-fifty-two.”

“Ahhhhhh…forty-nine that was,” Knucker said, not looking up from her crossword.

“Fifty-two.”

“Forty-nine!”

“Fifty-two, you stupid old bat! I should know! That was the fall my kid brother got electrocuted up on the roof.”

“Ahhhhhh…your brother lives in Sauk City.”

Tommy laughed. “Goddamn Hardy. What a guy. Red Rain, my ass.”

Hubb looked over at college girl. “What’re you fucking standing there for, sweet cheeks? We got cocksucking people here! Chop! Chop!”

Back on went the oxygen mask.

Tommy shook his head. “That silver-tongued devil. He just has a way with the ladies.” He laughed and turned back to Mitch. “Least that radio’s off the air. You been hearing what Brother John’s been saying?”

“Yeah, I heard all right.”

“Last night it was build your own ark and today it was something about the rain falling and the dead rising. How you like that shit?”

Mitch said he didn’t like it at all.

But what he was thinking about was Lily. How was she going to be handling this? Christ, she wasn’t holding herself up these days with much more than a wet straw and with no radio and no TV, phones down, she might just lose it completely.

“I should be getting back home,” he said.

“Sure,” Tommy said. “Don’t want to be leaving your family, not with all this shit happening. Especially Lily, you know.”

Mitch was going to leave, but he didn’t. He wasn’t exactly sure why. His wife was probably needing him and if Chrissy had come home, there was every possibility they would start fighting. Chrissy was a good kid—smart, witty, and oddly urbane for a fifteen-year old—but she was still a teenager. And if God had ever created a more self-serving, sassy, and selfish tribe than teenagers, Mitch didn’t want to know about them. Lily wasn’t up to putting on the gloves and knocking Chrissy down to size the way she needed from time to time. Not these days. And Chrissy? Well, her teenage drive of self-pity and vanity had amped up to full power these days and it was very hard for her to sympathize with her mother sometimes, particularly when she had trouble seeing anything not reflected in her hand mirror.

So, Mitch should have left and made ready to play referee, but he didn’t. He stood there, almost wishing Tommy would volunteer to come home with him.

“It’s that goddamn Army base, that’s what it is!” somebody said. “That’s what this is all about!”

Tommy and Mitch turned, both saw the woman doing the talking. She was maybe forty, her hair dyed so blonde it was white and set in a spiky ‘do like summer grass baked dead and dry. She had to go in at an easy two-hundred but had decided to squeeze herself into a cherry-red skintight set of Capri’s and matching
sleeveless terrycloth blouse.
An outfit like that might have looked spectacular on the college girl behind the counter, but on this one the profile was that of an over-nourished gourd.

Tommy, ever the mature adult, started giggling soon as he saw her. “Ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag.”

Her face was going about as red as her outfit as she stabbed the air with one straining, pudgy finger. “The government’s behind it all! That explosion with the nuke or the poison gas out there at Providence! You think they want word of that getting out? You think they want you people here telling every Tom, Dick, and Harry out there about these funny rains? Course they don’t! That’s why they’re locking us in here!”

Tommy laughed at her. “Jesus Christ, lady, that was three days ago! You think they’re just getting around to clamping down on us?”

“Who asked
you?”
she said to him, jabbing the air in front of his face with that finger. Her face was flushed almost purple now, sweat beading her brow. “Why don’t you just stay the hell out of it?”

Tommy laughed again.

“Guess she told you,” Mitch said.

“Guess so. Fucking Hot Tamale.”

Another doomsayer, just what the goddamned city needed, Mitch thought.

But people were ringing around her, their common sense telling them to laugh it off, but something else telling them to listen, that this woman had something important to say. People maybe claimed to despise suffering and atrocity, but they loved things like that, Mitch knew. If it disgusted them or frightened them or disturbed them, well, dammit, that was a pie they wanted a piece of and they intended on cutting into it for seconds, thank you very much. It was the same sort of thing that made children ring around some older kid as they described in graphic detail the maggots in that dead dog’s head at the side of the road or what their sister’s hamster had smelled like after they dug it up a week after it was dead.

“They’re loving this shit,” Tommy said.

And they were.

They had suckered their mouths to the soft white underbelly of dread and were feeding on it, on the horror and dark prophesy that crazy fat bitch was slinging like grisly leftovers.

Tommy shook his head. “I had a cousin like that. Linda. Everything was death and doom with her. She’d get worked up about any old thing. She had a gas pain in her stomach, she thought it was cancer. A plane flew too low, it was crashing. She smelled smoke, her house was on fire.”

“What happened to her?”

Tommy shrugged. “She got leukemia, I think. But then a plane crashed into her house and she burned up with it.”

Mitch just shook his head.

“The phone’s won’t work,” Hot Tamale said, “because they’re not
supposed
to work! Can’t any of you see that? This goddamn valley is full of death and the Army don’t want us leaking it! So you know what they’re doing? They’re shooting stuff into the air, signals and vibrations that screw-up your TV and radio and phone signals, they’re, they’re—”

BOOK: Resurrection
11.38Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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