The Extinction Event (23 page)

“It's been weeks since I've done anything smart,” Jack said. “Years.” He took a slug of the bourbon. “My whole life.”

“I'll get you some coffee,” Caroline said.

“My wife,” Dixie said, “came from the last generation of women to travel with hatboxes.”

“I'll get it myself,” Jack said.

Jack hobbled across the room to the sideboard, which held a twelve-cup coffee urn.

“Coal chutes and straw on blocks of ice,” Dixie said. “The scissor man and the junk-dealer's horse-drawn cart,” sounding like Jack, when he was trying to convince Caroline he was too old for her.

“For God's sake, Jack,” Nicole said, “take a towel with you.”

“You're all in Technicolor,” Dixie said.

“You'll ruin the rug,” Nicole said.

“I live a black-and-white life,” Dixie said.

Jack put a cup under the coffee spigot and depressed the handle. The cup filled. When Jack pushed the handle back upright, the coffee kept pouring.

“There's something wrong,” Caroline said, getting up.

Coffee spilled over Jack's cup.

“The spigot's broken,” Caroline said, trying to help Jack stop the flow. “It's burning your hand.”

Caroline grabbed Jack's cup out of the way.

Nicole watched horrified as the coffee urn emptied itself onto the Kurdistan rug.

Jack said, “You people are nuts!”

He stomped from the room, slamming out the front door.

“Jack,” Caroline called.

She ran to the door. Opened it.

But Jack had flagged down a car and was climbing into it.

Inside the house, Dixie was saying, “I don't think I want to be cremated after all. I want a headstone.”

Caroline watched the car pull away. Heard the change in pitch as the car changed gears.

She closed the door behind her and came back into the living room.

“Now, see what you've done?” Caroline said to Dixie and Nicole. “You've driven him away.”

“Did you notice the back of Jack's head?” Dixie said. “The low bulge? Above the middle part of the cerebellum? Phrenologically speaking, that indicates philoprogenitiveness. Jack will make a good father.”

2

Fuck them,
Jack thought as he settled in the car he'd flagged down.

“I almost hit you, standing in the middle of the street like that,” the guy driving said. A wiry man in jeans and white T-shirt. The right sleeve was folded up over a pack of Camels. His short red hair stood straight up.

“What happened to your leg, man?” the driver asked.

“My girlfriend bit me,” Jack said.

“Cool,” the driver said.

When Jack saw the pistol angling out of the driver's belt, the driver said, “Don't worry, fella, I got a carry permit. You don't think I'd of picked you up if I was traveling light, do you?”

With his left hand the driver reached across his body and unfolded the pack of cigarettes, which he shook, held up to his lips, plugging a cigarette into his mouth.

“Want a smoke?” he asked.

“No thanks,” Jack said.

The driver tossed the pack onto the dashboard. From his pocket, he took a lighter with a picture of a bathing beauty on its plastic side.

When the lighter was upside down—as it was in his hand—the bathing beauty was naked. Her flesh the color of a baby's pacifier. The driver turned the lighter right side up. A white one-piece bathing suit slid over the naked body. He lit the cigarette, slit his eyes as he inhaled.

“Don't sit on the Windex,” the driver said.

Jack moved the plastic Windex bottle from behind him, where it was half tucked into the seat.

“Wiper fluid used to be ninety-nine cents a gallon,” the driver said. “Now, it's five times that. Why not save a little, using Windex, until winter?”

As they passed Big Pig Bar-B-Q, smoke from the outside pit billowed across the highway into the car.

It smelled to Jack like Robert's burning body.

3

Jack climbed out of the car a few blocks away from Bix's one-story cottage. The fifty-year-old rust-colored asphalt shingles were stripped away from under the front window, revealing the tar paper beneath.

Bix's truck wasn't parked in the driveway. Two clunkers were on the lawn.

The wind dropped. The electric wires, which had been singing in the breeze, went silent.

Jack hobbled up the walk to the house, his cut pant leg flapping.

Jack opened the door. Bix never locked the house.

Bix wasn't home.

The house smelled of old bacon grease.

Jack stumbled into the living room and eased himself onto the couch.

He figured he'd just remove Caroline from his life. Bit by bit. Like shrapnel.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

1

At dawn, Jack sat bolt upright on the couch in Bix's cottage. Wide awake.

His pant leg—the previous night, he'd flopped down to sleep without getting undressed—was crusted with new blood. The couch cushion was also crusted, so thick, it flaked when Jack moved.

From outside, Jack heard a Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings song. That must have been what woke him up.

Aching, light-headed from loss of blood, Jack eased himself up from the couch and took a few loping steps to the door of the cottage, which he opened.

Rays of green shot from the horizon into the dawn sky, like an opening fan.

In front of the shack, Jack's brother, Bix, was smashing the windshield of one of the clunkers—a battered Chevy.

The music had changed to “The Night Hank Williams Came to Town.”

“County fair's next week, little brother,” Bix said. “Got to get ready for the demolition derby.”

“I'm too old,” Jack said.

“You wasn't too old last year,” Bix said, eying Jack's bloody pant leg and newly battered face.

“You got to get yourself a new hobby,” Bix said, nodding at Jack's injuries.

“This year,” Jack said about the demolition derby, “you ride solo.”

“We ain't never missed a year since you was nineteen,” Bix said.

Bix swung the crowbar backhanded and left a spiderweb crack in a side window.

“I got another crowbar,” Bix said.

“I need a gun,” Jack said.

“You got a gun,” Bix said.

“Two guns,” Jack said.

“Crowbar's better,” Bix said, “for this work.”

“Both untraceable,” Jack said.

“You ask Mama?” Bix asked.

“I don't want to put Mama Lucky on the spot,” Jack said.

“But I'm family, huh?” Bix said.

“Not the kind of spot I mean,” Jack said. “I go to Mama, you find out, you go bawl her out.”

“Then,” Bix said, “I whop you upside the head for not coming to me.”

Bix was smiling, but Jack knew how serious he was.

“You know I can get you what you want,” Bix said. “Why go outside the family? You got something you want to tell me?”

“Where's the crowbar?” Jack asked.

Bix reached into his battered white Chevy truck and handed it to Jack.

Jack swung the crowbar, shattering first one then the other taillight. Despite the stab of pain in his side.

“Your condition,” Bix said, “you sure you should be doing that?”

“Fuck, yes,” Jack said.

2

By the time Caroline arrived, Jack and Bix had stripped most of the glass and chrome, anything that might shatter during the demolition derby, from the clunker.

“You weren't home,” Caroline said. “You didn't answer your cell. I thought you might be here.”

Jack was prying off trim.

“No one's going to bother you,” Jack said. “Not with your uncle, your family around.”

“That wasn't why I was upset you left,” Caroline said.

Bix was welding the junker's doors shut. In his plastic goggles he looked like a BEM—bug-eyed monster—from a 1950s sci-fi movie, an effect heightened by the acetylene torch that seemed to shoot fire from his alien hand.

“I think we should call the cops,” Caroline said.

“You trust them?” Jack said.

He circled the clunker. His leg throbbed.

“Someone should give your sister a good spanking,” Jack said.

“Wouldn't she just love that!” Caroline said.

Jack gave the side trim a crack with the crowbar.

“Having fun?” Caroline asked.

Jack handed her the crowbar, which she swung with all her might at the side of the car.

“Everyone should keep a car like this in their yard,” Caroline said. “There'd be fewer wars.”

“Pry off the trim,” Jack said.

Caroline did, working her way along the side of the car.

“Does Nicole know what happened to Robert?” Jack asked.

Caroline nodded.

“Big news in the local papers,” she said. “Even over the border here in New York.”

“I always said Robert was a real ball of fire,” Jack said.

Caroline scowled. Not amused.

“The funeral's this afternoon,” Caroline said.

The trim clattered to the stony ground.

“By the way,” Caroline said, as she handed the crowbar back to Jack, “I saw someone standing outside our house last night.”

Jack froze.

“Across the street,” Caroline said. “I couldn't sleep. I was on my way to get a glass of water and happened to glance out the window. I'm sure he was watching the house.”

Jack held the crowbar so tightly his knuckles went white.

“And all these years I've been afraid of aliens and vampires,” she said.

3

“I'm not going to discuss it,” Caroline said, as she and Jack crossed the grass toward Robert's funeral.

“A guy's watching your house—”

“Maybe.”

“—and you think you don't need a gun?”

A dozen-and-a-half people were gathered around the grave.

“I can't kill anyone, Jack,” Caroline said.

“A guy's squeezing your neck,” Jack said, “you can't breathe, you know you're dying, and you tell me you wouldn't pull the trigger.”

Caroline walked faster. Away from Jack.

Bix had promised to get Jack two guns. And a third for himself.

“When I'm not around,” Jack had asked Bix, “keep an eye on her. When you can.”

The tombstones lined up in neat rows looked like pieces on a giant Stratego board, as if someone were playing a cosmic game against—who? What?

God? Nature? Fate?

In the old cemetery to the right, all the tombstones were leaning or knocked over, as if whoever was losing had tried to end the game—against God, nature, fate—by upsetting the board.

Weatherworn skulls grinned lopsidedly from the old stones. A dancing skeleton, wearing victor's laurels, held in one boney hand the moon and in the other a smiling, spiky sun. A poker-faced Adam and Eve stood on either side of the Tree of Knowledge—or Life—staring down any passerby who might notice their effaced nudity.

Demons holding arrows of death.

Fierce angels blowing Trumpets of Doom.

Thunderbolts from stone clouds striking a stone earth.

God's wrath.

God's vengeance.

Human suffering.

Human evanescence.

Jack passed a grave decorated with a small, tattered American flag—a military flag with fringe—and a black-and-white flag in honor of missing Vietnam POWs. Along with a young man's birth and death, the tombstone was engraved with:
Hold Your Mud
.

A man in a seersucker suit and black-and-white spectator shoes caught up to Jack and asked, “Do you know where the pet cemetery is?”

Jack shook his head
no
.

The man shrugged and handed Jack a business card:
Pet bereavement: three sessions. Pet genealogies our specialty.

“For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past,” the minister droned, “and as a watch in the night…”

Jack took his place next to Caroline.

Under the bandages, his leg itched.

When he breathed, his ribs ached.

Across Robert's grave, Jack saw Keating. His chin seemed longer, the pouches under his eyes grayer, his cheekbones sharper. His face was crosshatched with fine lines, as if it were covered with a web of burlap.

But he stood erect, almost military in his posture, in a dark hat, dark suit, white shirt, dark bowtie, and black shoes so polished they reflected—Jack thought—the scudding clouds.

A trick of light?

Keating moved, not his head, but his eyes, and fixed his gaze on Jack's face.

“He knows,” Caroline whispered, “we were with Robert when he died.”

Watching Keating's raptor's eyes, Jack figured she was right.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

1

Jack caught up with Shapiro at his home on Amity Street. Shapiro had dodged calls at his office. He spotted Jack entering Judie's, where Jack had been told Shapiro was having lunch, and slipped out unseen.

Jack had to ring the front doorbell six times before Shapiro reluctantly answered.

“I'm busy,” Shapiro said.

“Why did Keating Flowers get you fired?” Jack asked.

Without answering, Shapiro turned and headed along a hallway, decorated with old movie posters: Paul Muni in
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
,
Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend: Bug Vaudeville
,
Come Blow Your Horn.
…

On the wall next to the door at the end of the hall was a faded
New Yorker
cartoon of two modern bearded prophets, one holding a sign
Love thine enemies
and the other holding a sign
Love thy neighbor
.

The caption—one prophet saying to the other:
I'm telling you for the last time—keep the hell off this corner
.