An open challenge, compelling response. But before one can be made, there is a powerful explosion. “The camp!” someone cries. “They’re attacking the camp!” People break for their cars, clambering down the hillside, tunic hems lifted. Colin drops the pick and runs after them. Somewhere, a second blast can be heard. The police run too. Motors are turning over, wheels are spinning. There are shouts. The sirens start.
“Dark,” Darren thinks, left alone under the turbulent sky, feet planted apart to stay the earth in its violent turning. It is beginning to sprinkle. “Light.”
IV.4 Sunday 5 July
Spider says the chawing noises are making him sick, and the rest more or less share the ink artist’s disgust. Not Nat’s favorite grub, but he accepts what Deacon offers him. You have to learn to eat what’s set in front of you, as his evil old man used to say, belting him one if he didn’t. Deacon, stripped to his vast hairy pelt while his clothes dry near the fire, has danced around naked in the storm, netting a dozen or so small birds, sparrows and wrens mostly, huddling in the bushes. He has skewered them live and held them over the fire to burn their feathers off, then dipped them in and out of a barbecue sauce made of molasses and hot spices, cooking them crisp in several passes over the fire. He and Nat are eating them whole, crunchy heads and feet and all. Better than the grasshoppers Deacon fried up in the same sauce earlier, calling them crispies. Some of the others have gone off in the squally rain, looking for small game like coons, possums, chipmunks, squirrels — what Brainerd calls mountain boomers — which in truth don’t taste any better or even as good and can be tough as old shoes, the best being the occasional family pet dumped in the park by their owners. Last night it was a pair of half-grown cocker spaniel pups down by the entrance, just squatting there waiting for them, their tails wagging. Let’s give them a good home, Deacon said, lifting them tenderly by their napes.
The Wrath of God are bivouacking in a state park known for its giant rock formations, upheaval of another time, regrouping here after the bad hit they took, tending to their wounded, some grieving. Old Houndawg, for example. Alone, silent, his damaged leg wrapped with a bloody shirt, Paulie’s head in his lap, still wearing its black eyepatch. Nat watches him and wonders at the hurt Houndawg is showing. Nat doesn’t share Houndawg’s grief, though maybe he should. The sheriff’s murder of Littleface brought an end to that feeling — unless rage is a form of it, in which case he is grieving most of the time. People: they come and go in their garbagey way, always more following on. But when the End comes, this sick recycling of flesh stops. Nat plans to be in on that. The Big One put that nitro in his hands for a reason. He will do his part. The only real grief Nat feels is for the loss of his bike, Midnight. An impulsive decision, pushed into it by Deacon and Houndawg. But probably the right one. He’ll get over it. Too much at stake for sentimental brooding. He has ridden hard over the past two months, dragging himself and his pals through tough and dangerous times, assembling the Wrath for a holy battle worthy of superheroes. Half of whom are either dead or have now abandoned him. He’s angry about those who have ducked out, but there are still plenty for getting the job done. Fewer for the enemy to shoot at. The enemy is worldly power itself, he reminds himself, munching a bird; it’s no pushover, you have to expect to take some losses. Sometimes you have to pull back, take off your cape, shake off the krypton factor, get your strength back. Something Face might have said. Might say: he still feels his presence. Hears him talking to him sometimes. Littleface had the idea that when you die you come back as someone else, like a comic superhero, or villain. Nat doesn’t quite believe that, but he watches out for him just the same. He thought he saw something of Littleface in one of the Crusadeers. Wrong.
Together with the Crusadeer pals of Juice and Face and others they’d picked up, they rolled in Friday evening. Quietly: the detachable baffles Houndawg has fashioned for the pipes that work something like gun silencers mean they can now prowl like cats or roar like wild bears. Cool. They had numbers now. Power. Their first order of business that night was to avenge Littleface, but on the way in they picked up some of the stolen boxes of dynamite they’d buried. Before pulling out of the area two months ago, they’d divided the boxes into smaller parcels and scattered them about in different locations, figuring the cops might find some but not all of it. One of their pick-up stops was at the old cemetery, where Nat used to take Paulie and Amanda to play the Lazarus game because nobody ever came there. The hole they’d dug for their game was still there and they’d used it. Amanda was the one who usually got buried. Once he had her in the hole and unable to move with just her face peeking out, he’d scare her with stories about dead people coming after her, or pretend to be one himself, sitting on the grave so she couldn’t get out, making horror faces and noises, brushing dirt toward her mouth whenever she tried to scream or bawl. Why did she keep going back for more? Because she was dumb. When she came home dirty, their old man would pull down her pants and spank her, and she never complained, but he never laid the strap on her the way he and Paulie got it. He always babied Amanda. The old derelict graveyard spooked Cubano, who refused to go in. Nat laughed and told Paulie to show Cubano how to be a man, but Paulie had a fit, the first since he got his head stove in. That crazy lady actually left a big dent in his skull. Blinded him in one eye, too. Popped his eyeball right out and they had to push it back in, though it didn’t work after that. Did seem to cure his fits, at least until Friday night, but left him stupider than ever. That night, after they’d executed the sheriff, they holed out in the old man’s abandoned farm shack, stowed what they’d picked up so far under the floorboards there. They peered in on the squibs they’d hidden behind small logs in the old wood-burning stove two months ago and everything seemed all right so they left them. Maybe everything wasn’t all right.
Earlier that night they’d grabbed the Coates kid, out wandering around drunk, and before using him to set the trap for the sheriff, they pumped him for information, learning about the parade the next day and the Brunist ceremony on the Mount planned for Sunday, which Royboy said his family wasn’t invited to but were going to anyway. Meaning the town would be busy with the Fourth on Saturday, giving the Wrath a certain freedom of movement out at the edges, and then the camp would be vacated for a while on Sunday, allowing them to pick up the big chunk buried in the wild part down there, a little known corner of the camp discovered by Nat shortly after his family first arrived back. Which his fatass brother and the Collins whore also evidently discovered for their sick games. Or God led them there to get what was coming to them. The O.T. God. Nat’s God. The Big One. The one at war with the N.T. wimp. Nat’s theology. Though he has come to appreciate Jesus as a man of wrath. A comicbook in Nat’s saddlebag shows how he was betrayed and rewritten, softened up to be sold to the crowd. They also learned from Royboy that Nat’s old man had got kicked out of the camp after what they did to the Collins girl (Royboy was giggling nervously at this point) and that Junior had later led an attack on the camp in which Royboy’s brother Aaron got a butt full of buckshot and everybody got arrested and Nat’s old man got beaten up in jail by some wop cops. Didn’t sound like Junior, but you never know what a little healthy scarring will do for you. Royboy also told them that the Collins girl was very sick and maybe possessed by the Devil, that old man Suggs had had a stroke and was in hospital, that some people had suicided themselves — one guy right in his shop window at high noon — and that there was a big fire one night at the used-car garage at the edge of town that didn’t happen by itself but which was better than the Fourth of July. Deacon had grinned in his beard and said: “Whoa! I love this place!”