Consequently, the intended object of his quest, young Reverend Joshua Jehoshaphat Jenkins, prospective pastor of the local First Presbyterian Church, arrives after overnight travels at the West Condon bus station unmet. There are numbers he could call, but being a self-reliant fellow, he deposits his bag with the stationmaster (“I see you are planning to settle in here, mister, and have brung your own bricks,” the stationmaster says sourly) and sets out upon the wet glittering streets on his own in search of his future place of employment, humming his favorite Sunday School tunes because he cannot seem to get them out of his head this morning. The downtown near the bus station is full of smiling people, young and old, emerging into the sunlight after the heavy rains. There are SALE signs everywhere, church bells are ringing — it’s a happy day.
Joshua believes in the simultaneous veracity of various and even contradictory modes of discourse, and as he leaves the center and enters the residential neighborhoods, he chooses the descriptive one, which finds its truths in perceptive accuracy, not narrative coherence or moral judgment. Thus, while his observation that with the hot sun he is somewhat overdressed in his new three-piece corduroy suit remains within the descriptive mode, the reasons for his discomfiture (good first impressions!) do not. Not that the descriptive mode is without its own rationale. If everything in existence is God’s handiwork, as Joshua believes it is, then close descriptive attention to one’s surroundings is an approach to understanding God, and — reverentially — feeling His presence. In that respect, this sight of a bountiful garden of hollyhocks and sunflowers is equal to that of a dog squatting to relieve itself, and Joshua mentally records it all, finding in the activity, in spite of distant wailing sirens and a gathering awareness that he has forgotten to have breakfast, a profound peace and satisfaction. “He gave us eyes to see them, and lips that we might tell,” he sings to himself, “how great is God Almighty, Who has made all things well!” Bright and beautiful, yes, all things certainly are, must be. Although, slipping momentarily out of the descriptive mode into the utilitarian one, he could do frankly with a little snap, crackle and pop.
As he thinks that, astonishingly, those are in fact the sounds he hears, as if conjured from his hunger, but caused, he sees, by the distant approach down this sunny tree-lined street of a procession of army trucks. Ah. The mere descriptive mode will perhaps no longer suffice.
Out at the city hospital, the head nurse, on her own up on the second floor, has just hung up from alerting the doctors, nurses, and hospital emergency team to the power blackout — must get the generators turned on to keep the life support systems running and the operation theater functional — when a busty foreign woman and four armed men, one wearing a black stocking mask, another a silk black tie over a luminous flame-red T-shirt, storm up to her station, poke guns in her face, and demand to know what room a man named Suggs is in. She points down the hall, gives them a number, and faints. Seems to. One of them gives her a kick — which seems to satisfy him, or her — and they dash off, their boots clocking on the polished floor. Shots are fired, hundreds of them seems like, as she scrambles desperately, heart pounding, into the restroom at the nurses’ station and locks the door. When they come thumping back they notice her absence, shout death threats, not all in the mother tongue, and shoot up the place. Bullets come smashing through the restroom door, but she is as far away from it as possible, hunkered down behind the toilet. “Basta, Rupe!” she hears the woman say. “Don’ waste your beebees!” “Two minutes!” another calls out. When the boots and voices rattle away and it’s quiet again, Maudie peeks out through the bullet holes. They’re gone. Just the same, she keeps her head below counter height as she hurries in a squat past the ransacked medicine cabinet (more shots below, an explosion), and grabs up the phone. The line’s dead.
Mayor Castle snorts like a horse, roaring har-har sounds. He might be laughing. Georgie has been trying to weasel out of working as a mole for the mayor in Charlie Bonali’s Dagotown Devil Dogs, but needing a job and having already eaten an indigestible bite out of the small bill the mayor gave him, he has been proposing alternative, less life-threatening schemes for keeping tabs on Charlie. “Hell, I didn’t ask you to see me about that, Georgie,” the mayor booms. “You drove a cab up in the city for some years, ain’t that so? Well, I’m just a country boy and city traffic gives me the running shits. Besides, I lost my goddamn license. Something fucking wrong with a town when the mayor can lose his license just because he’s had a few, but that’s the kind of pisshole we live in, right? So right now I need somebody who can get me to the international airport fast and keep his fucking mouth shut. I can trust you, right?” Georgie grins and nods. Of course, he’s always grinning. But now he means it. He can even start working on that lump of pie sitting like a stone in his belly. The mayor lifts a briefcase from the floor, sets it on the desk between them, opens it. It’s full of money. More money than Georgie has ever seen. “There’s over a mill here, Georgie. I’m thinking Brazil. If we make it, we’ll split this pile 60–40. That’s several hunderd Gs for you, minus expenses. Decent taxi fare. We’ll take the official limo. You game?” Hell yes, he’s game. Besides, it occurs to him that Castle didn’t show him that money for nothing. It was to let him know that if he said no, he’d shoot him. “When are we leaving?” he asks. He’s grinning, and the mayor grins back. “Now.” That gives him brief pause. What is he leaving behind? Niente. “All right,” Georgie says, “but I need an advance. Three-thirty, that’s all. It’s to pay off a loan. The thirty is interest.” “Hey, Giorgio, you’re outa here forever. Forget it.” “Can’t. La mammina. It’s all she’s got. We can drop it off on the way out.”
When the Kid assigned him the high school, Houndawg said it was summertime, it would just be empty buildings, ditto the grade schools the others got assigned, and the Kid said, if it belongs to the enemies of the Big One, it’s never empty. Sure enough, it isn’t. There are three army trucks there, guys in summer khakis unloading gear, going in and out of the school gym. Jackpot! “We’re disabling them three trucks,” he says. “Don’t worry about personnel less they get in your way.” Houndawg handled explosives in the army, but this stuff is pretty crude. Just dangerous footlong firecrackers leaking their innards, really, that he and Hacker fused and partly bound in three- and five-stick packs yesterday while they were sitting out the rain. Thinking about Runt. Feeling the wrath. Things could go wrong. The timing has to be perfect. So far so good. Houndawg is a reluctant holy warrior, skeptical of the zealotry that motivates most of the Wrath, but they fill the aimless loneliness that had threatened to steal away what little life he had left in him, and he’s grateful for that. He’s having fun for the first time in a long time, not since the war — even if only for a short time, maybe just this one day long. He has the luxury of the ex-sheriff’s high-powered rifle, but limited ammo, just what they found in the sheriff’s trunk when they were stuffing the kid in there minus what he pumped into the head of that evil old cocksucker who killed Paulie. Silver bullets. He has to make them count. After knocking out the power and phones as a unit, the Wrath divided up into three teams of four to hit a sequence of separate targets simultaneously, synchronizing their moves with stopwatches, with the Kid roaming between the three. Houndawg’s team is the least stable of them. Brainerd is cool, even with one hand disabled, but Sick has been shooting up and X has been eating uppers like they were a bag of Red Hots. It’s the only time X ever smiles, but it’s a twitchy smile and his set-apart eyes jiggle. Still, he’s probably safer than Sick, who has painted his face red to match his boots and put on feathers and seems to be living in some other reality zone. Houndawg, on a heavy dose of painkillers himself, takes one of the trucks, assigns Brainerd and X the other two, explains to them how to pop the hood, and tells Sick to give them cover. “We got just two minutes. In and out. If you have a problem with the nitro, don’t try to solve it. Okay, let’s move.” They have to take a guy out on the way in, catching him by surprise. Nothing personal. He can hear Sick firing away, who knows at what, while he’s planting the squibs. “One minute!” he yells. Other people are shooting now, and he worries Sick may have taken a hit. “Now!” The three of them tear out of there, but Sick’s not in sight. Then he comes backing out of the building, firing away, jumps on his bike and joins them as the building explodes behind him, the trucks blowing up as he guns past them, head down, wahooing like an Indian on the warpath, his topknot fluttering on his gleaming red skull like a raised flag. “Three fucking bells!” Houndawg laughs as they roar away. He can hear shooting, but they’re gone from there.