Skeleton Crew (13 page)

She opened her mouth to say something more, and a small, neat man in red pants and a natty sport shirt struck her openhanded across the face. His hair was parted with ruler evenness on the left. He wore glasses. He also wore the unmistakable look of the summer tourist.

“You shut up that bad talk,” he said softly and tonelessly.

Mrs. Carmody put her hand to her mouth and then held it out to us, a wordless accusation. There was blood on the palm. But her black eyes seemed to dance with mad glee.

“You had it coming!” a woman cried out. “I would have done it myself!”

“They’ll get hold of you,” Mrs. Carmody said, showing us her bloody palm. The trickle of blood was now running down one of the wrinkles from her mouth to her chin like a droplet of rain down a gutter. “Not today, maybe. Tonight. Tonight when the dark comes. They’ll come with the night and take someone else. With the night they’ll come. You’ll hear them coming, creeping and crawling. And when they come, you’ll beg for Mother Carmody to show you what to do.”

The man in the red pants raised his hand slowly.

“You come on and hit me,” she whispered, and grinned her bloody grin at him. His hand wavered. “Hit me if you dare.” His hand dropped. Mrs. Carmody walked away by herself. Then Billy did begin to cry, hiding his face against me as the little girl had done with her father.

“I want to go home,” he said. “I want to see my mommy.”

I comforted him as best I could. Which probably wasn’t very well.

 

The talk finally turned into less frightening and destructive channels. The plate-glass windows, the market’s obvious weak point, were mentioned. Mike Hatlen asked what other entrances there were, and Ollie and Brown quickly ticked them off—two loading doors in addition to the one Norm had opened. The main IN/OUT doors. The window in the manager’s office (thick, reinforced glass, securely locked).

Talking about these things had a paradoxical effect. It made the danger seem more real but at the same time made us feel better. Even Billy felt it. He asked if he could go get a candy bar. I told him it would be all right so long as he didn’t go near the big windows.

When he was out of earshot, a man near Mike Hatlen said, “Okay, what are we going to do about those windows? The old lady may be as crazy as a bedbug, but she could be right about something moving in after dark.”

“Maybe the fog will blow over by then,” a woman said.

“Maybe,” the man said. “And maybe not.”

“Any ideas?” I asked Bud and Ollie.

“Hold on a sec,” the man near Hatlen said. “I’m Dan Miller. From Lynn, Mass. You don’t know me, no reason why you should, but I got a place on Highland Lake. Bought it just this year. Got held up for it, is more like it, but I had to have it.” There were a few chuckles. “Anyway, I saw a whole pile of fertilizer and lawn-food bags down there. Twenty-five-pound sacks, most of them. We could put them up like sandbags. Leave loopholes to look out through . . . .”

Now more people were nodding and talking excitedly. I almost said something, then held it back. Miller was right. Putting those bags up could do no harm, and might do some good. But my mind went back to that tentacle squeezing the dog-food bag. I thought that one of the bigger tentacles could probably do the same for a twenty-five-pound bag of Green Acres lawn food or Vigoro. But a sermon on that wouldn’t get us out or improve anyone’s mood.

People began to break up, talking about getting it done, and Miller yelled: “Hold it! Hold it! Let’s thrash this out while we’re all together!”

They came back, a loose congregation of fifty or sixty people in the corner formed by the beer cooler, the storage doors, and the left end of the meat case, where Mr. McVey always seems to put the things no one wants, like sweetbreads and Scotch eggs and sheep’s brains and head cheese. Billy wove his way through them with a five-year-old’s unconscious agility in a world of giants and held up a Hershey bar. “Want this, Daddy?”

“Thanks.” I took it. It tasted sweet and good.

“This is probably a stupid question,” Miller resumed, “but we ought to fill in the blanks. Anyone got any firearms?”

There was a pause. People looked around at each other and shrugged. An old man with grizzled white hair who introduced himself as Ambrose Cornell said he had a shotgun in the trunk of his car. “I’ll try for it, if you want.”

Ollie said, “Right now I don’t think that would be a good idea, Mr. Cornell.”

Cornell grunted. “Right now, neither do I, son. But I thought I ought to make the offer.”

“Well, I didn’t really think so,” Dan Miller said. “But I thought—”

“Wait, hold it a minute,” a woman said. It was the lady in the cranberry-colored sweatshirt and the dark-green slacks. She had sandy-blond hair and a good figure. A very pretty young woman. She opened her purse and from it she produced a medium-sized pistol. The crowd made an
ahhhh-
ing sound, as if they had just seen a magician do a particularly fine trick. The woman, who had been blushing, blushed that much the harder. She rooted in her purse again and brought out a box of Smith & Wesson ammunition.

“I’m Amanda Dumfries,” she said to Miller. “This gun ... my husband’s idea. He thought I should have it for protection. I’ve carried it unloaded for two years.”

“Is your huband here, ma’am?”

“No, he’s in New York. On business. He’s gone on business a lot. That’s why he wanted me to carry the gun.”

“Well,” Miller said, “if you can use it, you ought to keep it. What is it, a thirty-eight?”

“Yes. And I’ve never fired it in my life except on a target range once.”

Miller took the gun, fumbled around, and got the cylinder to open after a few moments. He checked to make sure it was not loaded. “Okay,” he said. “We got a gun. Who shoots good? I sure don’t.”

People glanced at each other. No one said anything at first. Then, reluctantly, Ollie said: “I target-shoot quite a lot. I have a Colt .45 and a Llama .25.”

“You?” Brown said. “Huh. You’ll be too drunk to see by dark.”

Ollie said very clearly, “Why don’t you just shut up and write down your names?”

Brown goggled at him. Opened his mouth. Then decided, wisely, I think, to shut it again.

“It’s yours,” Miller said, blinking a little at the exchange. He handed it over and Ollie checked it again, more professionally. He put the gun into his right-front pants pocket and slipped the cartridge box into his breast pocket, where it made a bulge like a pack of cigarettes. Then he leaned back against the cooler, round face still trickling sweat, and cracked a fresh beer. The sensation that I was seeing a totally unsuspected Ollie Weeks persisted.

“Thank you, Mrs. Dumfries,” Miller said.

“Don’t mention it,” she said, and I thought fleetingly that if I were her husband and proprietor of those green eyes and that full figure, I might not travel so much. Giving your wife a gun could be seen as a ludicrously symbolic act.

“This may be silly, too,” Miller said, turning back to Brown with his clipboard and Ollie with his beer, “but there aren’t anything like flamethrowers in the place, are there?”

“Ohhh, shit,” Buddy Eagleton said, and then went as red as Amanda Dumfries had done.

“What is it?” Mike Hatlen asked.

“Well . . . until last week we had a whole case of those little blowtorches. The kind you use around your house to solder leaky pipes or mend your exhaust systems or whatever. You remember those, Mr. Brown?”

Brown nodded, looking sour.

“Sold out?” Miller asked.

“No, they didn’t go at all. We only sold three or four and sent the rest of the case back. What a pisser. I mean . . . what a shame.” Blushing so deeply he was almost purple, Buddy Eagleton retired into the background again.

We had matches, of course, and salt (someone said vaguely that he had heard salt was the thing to put on bloodsuckers and things like that); and all kinds of O‘Cedar mops and long-handled brooms. Most of the people continued to look heartened, and Jim and Myron were too plotzo to sound a dissenting note, but I met Ollie’s eyes and saw a calm hopelessness in them that was worse than fear. He and I had seen the tentacles. The idea of throwing salt on them or trying to fend them off with the handles of O’Cedar mops was funny, in a ghastly way.

“Mike,” Miller said, “why don’t you crew this little adventure? I want to talk to Ollie and Dave here for a minute. ”

“Glad to.” Hatlen clapped Dan Miller on the shoulder. “Somebody had to take charge, and you did it good. Welcome to town.”

“Does this mean I get a kickback on my taxes?” Miller asked. He was a banty little guy with red hair that was receding. He looked like the sort of guy you can’t help liking on short notice and—just maybe—the kind of guy you can’t help not liking after he’s been around for a while. The kind of guy who knows how to do everything better than you do.

“No way,” Hatlen said, laughing.

Hatlen walked off. Miller glanced down at my son.

“Don’t worry about Billy,” I said.

“Man, I’ve never been so worried in my whole life,” Miller said.

“No,” Ollie agreed, and dropped an empty into the beer cooler. He got a fresh one and opened it. There was a soft hiss of escaping gas.

“I got a look at the way you two glanced at each other,” Miller said.

I finished my Hershey bar and got a beer to wash it down with.

“Tell you what I think,” Miller said. “We ought to get half a dozen people to wrap some of those mop handles with cloth and then tie them down with twine. Then I think we ought to get a couple of those cans of charcoal lighter fluid all ready. If we cut the tops right off the cans, we could have some torches pretty quick.”

I nodded. That was good. Almost surely not good enough—not if you had seen Norm dragged out—but it was better than salt.

“That would give them something to think about, at least,” Ollie said.

Miller’s lips pressed together. “That bad, huh?” he said.

“That bad,” Ollie agreed, and worked his beer.

 

By four-thirty that afternoon the sacks of fertilizer and lawn food were in place and the big windows were blocked off except for narrow loopholes. A watchman had been placed at each of these, and beside each watchman was a tin of charcoal lighter fluid with the top cut off and a supply of mop-handle torches. There were five loopholes, and Dan Miller had arranged a rotation of sentries for each one. When four-thirty came around, I was sitting on a pile of bags at one of the loopholes, Billy at my side. We were looking out into the mist.

Just beyond the window was a red bench where people sometimes waited for their rides with their groceries beside them. Beyond that was the parking lot. The mist swirled slowly, thick and heavy. There was moisture in it, but how dull it seemed, and gloomy. Just looking at it made me feel gutless and lost.

“Daddy, do you know what’s happening?” Billy asked.

“No, hon,” I said.

He fell silent for a bit, looking at his hands, which lay limply in the lap of his Tuffskin jeans. “Why doesn’t somebody come and rescue us?” he asked finally. “The State Police or the FBI or someone?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think Mom’s okay?”

“Billy, I just don’t know,” I said, and put an arm around him.

“I want her awful bad,” Billy said, struggling with tears.

“I’m sorry about the times I was bad to her.”

“Billy,” I said, and had to stop. I could taste salt in my throat, and my voice wanted to tremble.

“Will it be over?” Billy asked. “Daddy? Will it?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and he put his face in the hollow of my shoulder and I held the back of his head, felt the delicate curve of his skull just under the thick growth of his hair. I found myself remembering the evening of my wedding day. Watching Steff take off the simple brown dress she had changed into after the ceremony. She had had a big purple bruise on one hip from running into the side of a door the day before. I remembered looking at the bruise and thinking,
When she got that, she was still Stephanie Stepanek,
and feeling something like wonder. Then we had made love, and outside it was spitting snow from a dull gray December sky.

Billy was crying.

“Shh, Billy, shh,” I said, rocking his head against me, but he went on crying. It was the sort of crying that only mothers know how to fix right.

 

Premature night came inside the Federal Foods. Miller and Hatlen and Bud Brown handed out flashlights, the whole stock, about twenty. Norton clamored loudly for them on behalf of his group, and received two. The lights bobbed here and there in the aisles like uneasy phantoms.

I held Billy against me and looked out through the loophole. The milky, translucent quality of the light out there hadn’t changed much; it was putting up the bags that had made the market so dark. Several times I thought I saw something, but it was only jumpiness. One of the others raised a hesitant false alarm.

Billy saw Mrs. Turman again, and went to her eagerly, even though she hadn’t been over to sit for him all summer. She had one of the flashlights and handed it over to him amiably enough. Soon he was trying to write his name in light on the blank glass faces of the frozen-food cases. She seemed as happy to see him as he was to see her, and in a little while they came over. Hattie Turman was a tall, thin woman with lovely red hair just beginning to streak gray. A pair of glasses hung from an ornamental chain—the sort, I believe, it is illegal for anyone except middle-aged women to wear—on her breast.

“Is Stephanie here, David?” she asked.

“No. At home.”

She nodded. “Alan, too. How long are you on watch here?”

“Until six.”

“Have you seen anything?”

“No. Just the mist.”

“I’ll keep Billy until six, if you like.”

“Would you like that, Billy?”