Under the Dome: A Novel (35 page)

Rusty had had an equally exhausting day, but he couldn’t sleep, and it wasn’t Jan he was worried about. He thought she was going to be all right, at least for a while. He could keep her seizures at bay if they didn’t get any worse. If he ran out of Zarontin at the hospital dispensary, he could get more from Sanders Drug.

It was Dr. Haskell he kept thinking about. And Rory Dinsmore, of course. Rusty kept seeing the torn and bloody socket where the
boy’s eye had been. Kept hearing Ron Haskell telling Ginny,
I’m not death. Deaf, I mean.

Except he
had
been death.

He rolled over in bed, trying to leave these memories behind, and what came in their place was Rory muttering
It’s Halloween.
Overlapping that, his own daughter’s voice:
It’s the Great Pumpkin’s fault! You have to stop the Great Pumpkin!

His daughter had been having a seizure. The Dinsmore kid had taken a ricochet to the eye and a bullet fragment to the brain. What did that tell him?

It tells me nothing. What did the Scottish guy say on
Lost
? “Don’t mistake coincidence for fate?”

Maybe that had been it. Maybe it had. But
Lost
had been a long time ago. The Scottish guy could have said
Don’t mistake fate for coincidence.

He rolled over the other way and this time saw the black headline of that night’s
Democrat
one-sheet:
EXPLOSIVES TO BE FIRED AT BARRIER!

It was hopeless. Sleep was out of the question for now, and the worst thing you could do in a situation like that was try to flog your way into dreamland.

There was half a loaf of Linda’s famous cranberry-orange bread downstairs; he’d seen it on the counter when he came in. Rusty decided he’d have a piece of it at the kitchen table and thumb through the latest issue of
American Family Physician.
If an article on whooping cough wouldn’t put him to sleep, nothing would.

He got up, a big man dressed in the blue scrubs that were his usual nightwear, and left quietly, so as not to wake Linda.

Halfway to the stairs, he paused and cocked his head.

Audrey was whining, very soft and low. From the girls’ room. Rusty went down there and eased the door open. The golden retriever, just a dim shape between the girls’ beds, turned to look at him and voiced another of those low whines.

Judy was lying on her side with one hand tucked under her cheek, breathing long and slow. Jannie was a different story. She
rolled restlessly from one side to the other, kicking at the bed-clothes and muttering. Rusty stepped over the dog and sat down on her bed, under Jannie’s latest boy-band poster.

She was dreaming. Not a good dream, by her troubled expression. And that muttering sounded like protests. Rusty tried to make out the words, but before he could, she ceased.

Audrey whined again.

Jan’s nightdress was all twisted. Rusty straightened it, pulled up the covers, and brushed Jannie’s hair off her forehead. Her eyes were moving rapidly back and forth beneath her closed lids, but he observed no trembling of the limbs, no fluttering fingers, no characteristic smacking of the lips. REM sleep rather than seizure, almost certainly. Which raised an interesting question: could dogs also smell bad dreams?

He bent and kissed Jan’s cheek. When he did, her eyes opened, but he wasn’t entirely sure she was seeing him. This could have been a petit mal symptom, but Rusty just didn’t believe it. Audi would have been barking, he felt sure.

“Go back to sleep, honey,” he said. “He has a golden baseball, Daddy.”

“I know he does, honey, go back to sleep.”

“It’s a
bad
baseball.”

“No. It’s good. Baseballs are good, especially golden ones.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Go back to sleep.”

“Okay, Daddy.” She rolled over and closed her eyes. There was a moment of settling beneath the covers, and then she was still. Audrey, who had been lying on the floor with her head up, watching them, now put her muzzle on her paw and went to sleep herself.

Rusty sat there awhile, listening to his daughters breathe, telling himself there was really nothing to be frightened of, people talked their way in and out of dreams all the time. He told himself that everything was fine—he only had to look at the sleeping dog on the floor if he doubted—but in the middle of the night it was hard to be an optimist. When dawn was still long hours away, bad thoughts
took on flesh and began to walk. In the middle of the night thoughts became zombies.

He decided he didn’t want the cranberry-orange bread after all. What he wanted was to snuggle against his bedwarm sleeping wife. But before leaving the room, he stroked Audrey’s silky head. “Pay attention, girl,” he whispered. Audi briefly opened her eyes and looked at him.

He thought,
Golden retriever.
And, following that—the perfect connection:
Golden baseball. A
bad
baseball.

That night, despite the girls’ newly discovered feminine privacy, Rusty left their door open.

12

Lester Coggins was sitting on Rennie’s stoop when Big Jim got back. Coggins was reading his Bible by flashlight. This did not inspire Big Jim with the Reverend’s devotion but only worsened a mood that was already bad.

“God bless you, Jim,” Coggins said, standing up. When Big Jim offered his hand, Coggins seized it in a fervent fist and pumped it.

“Bless you too,” Big Jim said gamely.

Coggins gave his hand a final hard shake and let go. “Jim, I’m here because I’ve had a revelation. I asked for one last night—yea, for I was sorely troubled—and this afternoon it came. God has spoken to me, both through scripture and through that young boy.”

“The Dinsmore kid?”

Coggins kissed his clasped hands with a loud smack and then held them skyward. “The very same. Rory Dinsmore. May God keep him for all eternity.”

“He’s eating dinner with Jesus right this minute,” Big Jim said automatically. He was examining the Reverend in the beam of his own flashlight, and what he was seeing wasn’t good. Although the night was cooling rapidly, sweat shone on Coggins’s skin. His eyes were wide, showing too much of the whites. His hair stood out in
wild curls and bumbershoots. All in all, he looked like a fellow whose gears were slipping and might soon be stripping.

Big Jim thought,
This is not good.

“Yes,” Coggins said, “I’m sure. Eating the great feast … wrapped in the everlasting arms …”

Big Jim thought it would be hard to do both things at the same time, but kept silent on that score.

“And yet his death was for a purpose, Jim. That’s what I’ve come to tell you.”

“Tell me inside,” Big Jim said, and before the minister could reply: “Have you seen my son?”

“Junior? No.”

“How long have you been here?” Big Jim flicked on the hall light, blessing the generator as he did so.

“An hour. Maybe a little less. Sitting on the steps … reading … praying … meditating.”

Rennie wondered if anyone had seen him, but did not ask. Coggins was upset already, and a question like that might upset him more.

“Let’s go in my study,” he said, and led the way, head down, lumbering slowly along in his big flat strides. Seen from behind, he looked a bit like a bear dressed in human clothes, one who was old and slow but still dangerous.

13

In addition to the picture of the Sermon on the Mount with his safe behind it, there were a great many plaques on the walls of Big Jim’s study, commending him for various acts of community service. There was also a framed picture of Big Jim shaking hands with Sarah Palin and another of him shaking with the Big Number 3, Dale Earnhardt, when Earnhardt had done a fundraiser for some children’s charity at the annual Oxford Plains Crash-A-Rama. There was even a picture of Big Jim shaking hands with Tiger Woods, who had seemed like a very nice Negro.

The only piece of memorabilia on his desk was a gold-plated baseball in a Lucite cradle. Below it (also in Lucite) was an autograph reading:
To Jim Rennie, with thanks for your help in putting on the Western Maine Charity Softball Tournament of 2007!
It was signed
Bill “Spaceman” Lee.

As he sat behind his desk in his high-backed chair, Big Jim took the ball from its cradle and began tossing it from hand to hand. It was a fine thing to toss, especially when you were a little upset: nice and heavy, the golden seams smacking comfortably against your palms. Big Jim sometimes wondered what it would be like to have a
solid
gold ball. Perhaps he would look into that when this Dome business was over.

Coggins seated himself on the other side of the desk, in the client’s chair. The supplicant’s chair. Which was where Big Jim wanted him. The Reverend’s eyes went back and forth like the eyes of a man watching a tennis match. Or maybe a hypnotist’s crystal.

“Now what’s this all about, Lester? Fill me in. But let’s keep it short, shall we? I need to get some sleep. Got a lot to do tomorrow.”

“Will you pray with me first, Jim?”

Big Jim smiled. It was the fierce one, although not turned up to maximum chill. At least not yet. “Why don’t you fill me in before we do that? I like to know what I’m praying about before I get kneebound.”

Lester did not keep it short, but Big Jim hardly noticed. He listened with growing dismay that was close to horror. The Reverend’s narrative was disjointed and peppered with Biblical quotations, but the gist was clear: he had decided that their little business had displeased the Lord enough for Him to clap a big glass bowl over the whole town. Lester had prayed on what to do about this, scourging himself as he did so (the scourging might have been metaphorical—Big Jim certainly hoped so), and the Lord had led him to some Bible verse about madness, blindness, smiting, etc., etc.

“The Lord said he would shew me a sign, and—”

“Shoe?” Big Jim raised his tufted eyebrows.

Lester ignored him and plunged on, sweating like a man with malaria, his eyes still following the golden ball. Back … and forth.

“It was like when I was a teenager and I used to come in my bed.”

“Les, that’s … a little too much information.” Tossing the ball from hand to hand.

“God said He would shew me blindness, but not
my
blindness. And this afternoon, out in that field, He did! Didn’t he?”

“Well, I guess that’s one interpretation—”

“No!”
Coggins leaped to his feet. He began to walk in a circle on the rug, his Bible in one hand. With the other he tugged at his hair. “God said that when I saw that sign, I had to tell my congregation exactly what you’d been up to—”

“Just me?” Big Jim asked. He did so in a meditative voice. He was tossing the ball from hand to hand a little faster now.
Smack. Smack. Smack.
Back and forth against palms that were fleshy but still hard.

“No,” Lester said in a kind of groan. He paced faster now, no longer looking at the ball. He was waving the Bible with the hand not busy trying to tear his hair out by the roots. He did the same thing in the pulpit sometimes, when he really got going. That stuff was all right in church, but here it was just plain infuriating. “It was you and me and Roger Killian the Bowie brothers and …” He lowered his voice. “And that other one. The Chef. I think that man’s crazy. If he wasn’t when he started last spring, he sure is now.”

Look who’s talking, little buddy,
Big Jim thought.

“We’re all involved, but it’s you and I who have to confess, Jim. That’s what the Lord told me. That’s what the boy’s blindness meant; it’s what he
died
for. We’ll confess, and we’ll burn that Barn of Satan behind the church. Then God will let us go.”

“You’ll go, all right, Lester. Straight to Shawshank State Prison.”

“I will take the punishment God metes out. And gladly.”

“And me? Andy Sanders? The Bowie brothers? And Roger Killian! He’s got I think nine kids to support! What if we’re not so glad, Lester?”

“I can’t help that.” Now Lester began to whack himself on the shoulders with his Bible. Back and forth; first one side and then the
other. Big Jim found himself synchronizing his tosses of the golden baseball to the preacher’s blows.
Whack …
and
smack. Whack …
and
smack. Whack …
and
smack.
“It’s sad about the Killian children, of course, but … Exodus twenty, verse five: ‘For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.’ We have to bow to that. We have to clean out this chancre however much it may hurt; make right what we have made wrong. That means confession and purification. Purification by fire.”

Big Jim raised the hand not currently holding the gold baseball. “Whoa, whoa,
whoa.
Think about what you’re saying. This town depends on me—and you, of course—in ordinary times, but in times of crisis, it
needs
us.” He stood up, pushing his chair back. This had been a long and terrible day, he was tired, and now this. It made a man angry.

“We have sinned.” Coggins spoke stubbornly, still whacking himself with his Bible. As if he thought treating God’s Holy Book like that was perfectly okay.

“What we did, Les, was keep thousands of kids from starving in Africa. We even paid to treat their hellish diseases. We also built you a new church and the most powerful Christian radio station in the northeast.”

“And lined our own pockets, don’t forget that!” Coggins shrilled. This time he smacked himself full in the face with the Good Book. A thread of blood seeped from one nostril. “Lined em with filthy dope-money!” He smacked himself again. “And Jesus’s radio station is being run by a lunatic who cooks the poison that children put into their veins!”

“Actually, I think most of them smoke it.”

“Is that supposed to be
funny
?”

Big Jim came around the desk. His temples were throbbing and a bricklike flush was rising in his cheeks. Yet he tried once more, speaking softly, as if to a child doing a tantrum. “Lester, the town needs my leadership. If you go opening your gob, I won’t be able to provide that leadership. Not that anyone will believe you—”