Bright Ones, they called themselves, and oh, the fucking irony of that. There were about thirty of them, men and women and a few kids, who had declared themselves an independent nation. Besides refusing to pay taxes or send their kids to school or give up their automatic weapons (which they apparently needed to protect their ranch from the tumbleweeds), they had illegally diverted the only stream in the area onto the scrubland they owned. The FBI and the ATF had been parked outside their fences for months, attempting to negotiate a surrender, but nothing much had changed.
The Bright Ones’ ideology disgusted Frank. It was selfishness costumed in spirituality. You could draw a straight line from the Bright Ones to the endless budget cutting that threatened to turn Frank’s own job into part-time employment or outright volunteer work. Civilization required a contribution—or a sacrifice, if that’s what you wanted to call it. Otherwise, you ended up with wild dogs roaming the streets and occupying the seats of power in DC. He wished (without, admittedly, a great deal of conviction) there were no kids in that compound so that the government could just roll on them and clean them out like the scum they were.
Frank was at his desk in his small office. Crowded in on all sides by animal cages of various sizes and shelves of equipment, it wasn’t much of a space, but he didn’t mind. It was okay.
He sipped a bottle of mango juice and watched the TV as he held an ice pack against the side of the hand that he’d used to pound on Garth Flickinger’s door. The light on his cell phone was blinking: Elaine. He wasn’t sure how he wanted to play that, so he let her go to voicemail. He’d pushed too hard with Nana, he saw that now. Potentially, there could be blowback.
A wrecked green Mercedes now sat in the driveway of a rich doctor. Frank’s fingerprints were all over the painted paving stone he’d used to break the Merc’s windows and beat on the Merc’s body, as well as on the planter of the lilac tree that, at the height of his rage, he’d stuffed into the careless motherfucker’s backseat. It was exactly the sort of incontrovertible evidence—felony vandalism—that a family court judge (all of whom favored the mother, anyway) would need to fix it so he could only see his daughter for a supervised hour every other full moon. A felony vandalism rap would also take care of his job. What was obvious in retrospect was that Bad Frank had stepped in. Bad Frank had, in fact, had a party.
But Bad Frank wasn’t entirely bad, or entirely wrong, because, check it: for the time being his daughter could safely draw in the driveway again. Maybe Good Frank could have handled it better. But maybe not. Good Frank was a bit of a weakling.
“I will not—we will not—stand idly by while the so-called United States government perpetrates this hoax.”
On the television screen, Kinsman Brightleaf made his address from behind a long, rectangular table. On the table lay a woman in a pale blue nightgown. Her face was shrouded in white stuff that looked like the fake webby crap they sold at the drugstore around Halloween. Her chest rose and fell.
“What is that shit?” Frank asked the mongrel stray currently visiting with him. The mongrel looked up, then went back to sleep. It was a cliché, but for all-weather company, you couldn’t do better than a dog. Couldn’t do better than a dog, period. Dogs didn’t know any better; they just made the best of it. They made the best of you. Frank had always had one growing up. Elaine was allergic to them—she claimed. Another thing he’d given up for her, far bigger than she could ever understand.
Frank gave the mongrel a rub between the ears.
“We have observed their agents tampering with our water supply. We know that they have used their chemicals to act on the most vulnerable and treasured part of our Family, the females of the Bright, in order to sow chaos and fear and doubt. They poisoned our sisters in the night. That includes my wife, my loving Susannah. The poison worked on her and our other beautiful women while they slept.” Kinsman Brightleaf’s voice bottomed out in a tobacco-scarred rattle that was oddly homey. It made you think of old men gathered around a diner table for breakfast, good-humored in their retirement.
In attendance to the high priest of tax-evasion were two younger men, also bearded, though less impressively, and also draped in serapes. All wore gunbelts, making them look like extras in an old Sergio Leone spaghetti western. On the wall behind them was a Christ on the cross. The video from the compound was clear, marred only by the occasional line scrolling across the image.
“While they slept!”
“Do you see the cowardice of the current King of Lies? See him in the White House? See his many fellow liars on the useless green paper they want us to believe is worth something? Oh, my neighbors. Neighbors, neighbors. So wily and so cruel and so many faces.”
All his teeth abruptly appeared, flashing from amid the wild crop of his beard. “But we will not succumb to the devil!”
Hey now, thought Frank. Elaine thinks she has a problem with me, she should get a load of Jerry Garcia here. This guy’s nuttier than a Christmas fruitcake.
“The parlor tricks of Pilate’s descendants are no match for the Lord we serve!”
“Praise God,” murmured one of the militiamen.
“That’s right! Praise Him. Yessir.” Mr. Brightleaf clapped his hands. “So let’s get this stuff off my missus.”
One of his men passed him a set of poultry shears. Kinsman bent and began to carefully snip at the webbing that coated his wife’s face. Frank leaned forward in his chair.
He felt an uh-oh coming.
When he entered the bedroom and saw Magda lying under the covers, masked in what looked sort of like Marshmallow Fluff, Anton dropped to his knees beside her, banged the jar with his shake down on the nightstand and, spying the trimmers—probably she had been clipping her eyebrows using her iPhone camera again—went right to work cutting it off.
Had someone done this to her? Had she done it to herself? Was it some kind of bizarre accident? An allergic reaction? Some crazy beauty treatment gone wrong? It was confounding, it was scary, and Anton didn’t want to lose his mother.
Once the webbing was sliced open, he cast the bathroom trimmers aside, and dug his fingers into the opening in the material. It was sticky, but the stuff peeled, stretching and separating from Magda’s cheeks in gummy white whorls. Her worn face with its choppy wrinkles around the eyes, her dear face that Anton had momentarily been certain would be melted beneath the weird white coating (it was kind of like the fairy handkerchiefs he saw glistening in the grass in the dawn yards of the first couple of pools each day), emerged unharmed. The skin was a bit flushed and warm to the touch, but otherwise she appeared no different than before.
A low grumble began to come from inside her throat, almost a snore. Her eyelids were working, trembling from the movement of her eyes beneath the skin. Her lips opened and shut. A little spittle dripped from the corner of her mouth.
“Mama? Mama? Can you wake up for me?”
It seemed she could, because her eyes opened. Blood clouded the pupils, wafting across the sclera. She blinked several times. Her gaze shifted around the room.
Anton slipped an arm under his mother’s shoulders and raised her to a sitting position in the bed. The noise from her throat grew louder; not a snore now but more like a growl.