The deputy grabbed my shoulder. His eyes were intense, and that dark-green mask shuddered as he spoke. “Forget the old man,” he said. “Your pal’s right. We burn them.”
“I thought it was the pigs,” I said. I was a little shaky. I couldn’t stop looking at the dots on my glasses. “The pigs did this, right? But we got rid of the pigs.”
“Word came from upstairs last night,” the deputy said. “They say it’s probably a domesticated bird. They thought it came from the pigs, but now it’s likely a chicken or goose or something.”
“A bird?” I asked. “It doesn’t sound like anyone has any idea what’s happening. There’s lots of birds. It could be any bird.”
The deputy shook me. “Look,” he said, “forget about chickens. Forget turkeys and tweeties and every duck in Peking. This isn’t about one chicken hut. This is about us. Either we beat this thing or we don’t.”
Bondurant said, “There is no infirmary, is there?”
“No infirmary?” I repeated. I was light-headed. “Of course there’s an infirmary.”
The deputy was quiet.
“There has to be an infirmary,” I said. “Where else would the sick people go? Where else would they recover?”
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Then the deputy spoke up: “Just get the kerosene.”
That’s how Bondurant and I ended up walking the length of the chicken coop, pouring kerosene on the floors. I was crazy, I tell you. I was sloshing it everywhere. They stacked the fresh eggs — a hundred eggs a flat, stacked fifty flats high, a whole wall of stacks — and these I sloshed with kerosene. Every egg glistened when I was through. And those stupid birds just watched. They weren’t even scared of us. Their dumb little heads nodded expectantly at everything we did, as if we were about to sit down and read them a story in which chickens got doctoral degrees and went to heaven. We soaked the whole place and then locked the door.
The deputy was the one who lit the match and tossed it through the dormer window. There was quite a flash. Sheets of metal flew off the building. A charge of smoking feathers rolled out. The deputy got the worst of it. The concussion blew his hat and mask off and knocked him down. When he stood up, he was holding his ears. “What?” he yelled at us. “What?”
That’s when Bondurant raced for the woods.
Yellow snarls of smoke flashed through gaps in the metal siding, and we looked from the deputy to Bondurant, running full-bore for the tree break.
When the deputy’s eyes cleared, and he came to understand what was going on, he didn’t chase after Bondurant. Instead, he yelled at us: “Did you hear the rasp in his lungs? That’s a ghost running through the woods. Nobody survives it. That’s a dead man. I promise you, that man will be dead before the moon rises tonight.”
I bent over, breathing in and out, listening. A couple of the guys looked at me, but I didn’t care. I could hear it, down there in my lungs. I was sure I could.
* * *
We returned to town with the Rolling Stones blaring. In the truck bed, none of us spoke. Several patches in the road were red and green with spent shotgun shells. We maneuvered around an abandoned car, doors open, then slowed as we passed a burning farmhouse, the entire downstairs of which was a stream of orange, while above, all was roiling black. We heard the discordant jangle of a piano falling through an upstairs floor and crashing into the parlor below. No one fled these flames. No one watched them burn. No one tried to extinguish them.
We came upon a man crouched in the gully, firing a deer rifle at the telephone poles and power transformers. If he was shooting birds, I couldn’t see them. Near the outskirts of town, a helicopter, rigged with crop-spraying arms, flew low overhead. The mist it laid down looked milky and sweet but tasted like mosquito repellent when it finally floated in. Crossing the Jim River, two women were struggling over the bridge. They tried to flag us down, and when we didn’t stop, one threw cans of tuna at us.
The dark laughter of gunfire rose as we entered town. Short pistol claps alternated with long rolls of rifle fire. Askew on the corner of Clark and Pine was Bill Hasper’s taxi, with its “In Case of Rapture” sticker in the rear window. Bill’s head lay sideways against the steering wheel, as if he were listening to an important message from the cruise control. He was clearly dead. On his face was an expression that said, Wow.
Outside the new middle school, a team of men with pistols ran down the street, shooting at everyone’s rooftops. And any of us who were planning on jumping out of the truck and making a break for it sank lower in the bed at the sight of another string of armed people running backyard to backyard, jumping people’s fences.
Cars roamed aimlessly, and random houses were on the ground, smoldering. Every so often, there was a person or two down in the snow, or slumped over a vehicle. Strange how it was possible to view these neighborhoods as almost normal. One could choose to observe the seasonal decorations hanging in windows. Doors that stood open could be seen in a welcoming way. Newspapers sat on porches, people’s mail flags were up, and recycling bins sat at the curb, awaiting their midweek collection. Even a human sprawled in the open could be imagined fixing a testy sprinkler or inspecting the underside of a car for that loose muffler bracket.
At Broadway, we hit the first roadblock. A deputy in a dark mask held at bay a woman in a suit who was demanding passage. She was waving a stethoscope in his face. Behind her, an old man in a sedan revved his engine as if preparing to ram the deputy’s cruiser. When we neared, the deputy waved us through. With that mask, I couldn’t get any real look at his face, though there was something personal in his wave to a fellow deputy, suggesting he’d been standing out there a long, lonely while.
When we reached the intersection of Douglas and University, there was a fire truck parked sideways, blocking the downtown’s main entrance. With this thing in the way, no one would be able to reach the firehouse or city hall, let alone the sheriff’s station. With the road blocked, you couldn’t get to the park, the university president’s house, the Red Dakotan, or any of the businesses, not to mention the Odd Fellows building.
The deputy honked, and for a few minutes we just sat there, listening to the shooting going on in the center of town. The gunfire was too much to believe. It was silly how many guns were going off. I grabbed hold of a kerosene can, just to steady myself. Finally, a young fireman came and backed up the truck enough for us to enter. He wore yellow fire-gear, and was finishing a hamburger. He thew the white wax paper on the ground and licked his fingers as he fired the engine up and dropped it in reverse.
The town square was the gateway to everything I’d known in Parkton. It was home to the old movie theater, the courthouse, and Glacier Days. From here I could walk to my office, my home, to Trudy’s grad dorm, and just about anyplace Eggers might be sleeping at the time. Yet it felt as if we were entering the Coliseum when the deputy pulled forward. The streets glittered with spent bullet casings like Coronado’s Seven Cities of Gold, and so many windows had fallen into the street, we could have been entering the fabled jewel mines of El Dorado. The truth, once the light shifted, was not so pretty.
Though plumes of smoke rose from all quarters of town, two fire trucks were also blocking the downtown’s other entrances, with the pumper covering Main, and the ladder — cherry picker extended as a sniper nest — controlling Park. We drove slowly toward a makeshift command center at the corner of the square, where all the park’s ducks and geese lay dead in a heap, and most of the city’s municipal workers — sewer workers, ambulance drivers — were eating hamburgers, grilled by the young man, obviously conscripted from Dairy Queen, who’d brought me a burger on the day I was first arrested.