Under the Dome: A Novel (47 page)

Brenda wasn’t going to let the question bother her this afternoon, because she felt good. If someone had asked her this morning when she thought she might feel good again, Brenda would have said,
Maybe next year. Maybe never.
And she was wise enough to know this feeling probably wouldn’t last. Ninety minutes of hard exercise had a lot to do with it; exercise released endorphins whether the exercise was jogging or pounding out brushfires with the flat of a spade. But
this was more than endorphins. It was being in charge of a job that was important, one that she could do.

Other volunteers had come to the smoke. Fourteen men and three women stood on either side of Little Bitch, some still holding the spades and rubber mats they’d been using to put out the creeping flames, some with the Indian pumps they’d been wearing on their backs now unslung and sitting on the unpaved hardpack of the road. Al Timmons, Johnny Carver, and Nell Toomey were coiling hoses and tossing them into the back of the Burpee’s truck. Tommy Anderson from Dipper’s and Lissa Jamieson—a little New Age-y but also as strong as a horse—were carrying the sump pump they’d used to draw water from Little Bitch Creek to one of the other trucks. Brenda heard laughter, and realized she wasn’t the only one currently enjoying an endorphin rush.

The brush on both sides of the road was blackened and still smoldering, and several trees had gone up, but that was all. The Dome had blocked the wind and had helped them in another way, as well, partially damming the creek and turning the area on this side into a marsh-in-progress. The fire on the other side was a different story. The men fighting it over there were shimmering wraiths seen through the heat and the accumulating soot on the Dome.

Romeo Burpee sauntered up to her. He was holding a soaked broom in one hand and a rubber floormat in the other. The price tag was still clinging to the underside of the mat. The words on it were charred but readable: EVERY DAY IS SALE DAY AT BURPEE’S! He dropped it and stuck out a grimy hand.

Brenda was surprised but willing. She shook firmly. “What’s that for, Rommie?”

“For you doin one damn fine job out here,” he said.

She laughed, embarrassed but pleased. “Anybody could have done it, given the conditions. It was only a contact fire, and the ground’s so squelchy it probably would have put itself out by sunset.”

“Maybe,” he said, then pointed through the trees to a raggedy clearing with a tumbledown rock wall meandering across it. “Or
maybe it would’ve gotten into that high grass, then the trees on the other side, and then Katy bar the door. It could have burned for a week or a month. Especially with no damn fire department.” He turned his head aside and spat. “Even widdout wind, a fire will burn if it gets a foothold. They got mine fires down south that have burned for twenty, thirty years. I read it in
National Geographic.
No wind underground. And how do we know a good wind won’t come up? We don’t know jack about what that thing does or don’t do.”

They both looked toward the Dome. The soot and ash had rendered it visible—sort of—to a height of almost a hundred feet. It had also dimmed their view of the Tarker’s side, and Brenda didn’t like that. It wasn’t anything she wanted to consider deeply, not when it might rob some of her good feelings about the afternoon’s work, but no—she didn’t like it at all. It made her think of last night’s weird, smeary sunset.

“Dale Barbara needs to call his friend in Washington,” she said. “Tell him when they get the fire out on their side, they have to hose that whatever-it-is off. We can’t do it from our side.”

“Good idea,” Romeo said. But something else was on his mind. “Do you reckonize anything about your crew, ma’am? Because I sure do.”

Brenda looked startled. “They’re not my crew.”

“Oh yes they are,” he said. “You were the one givin orders, that makes em your crew. You see any cops?”

She took a look.

“Not a one,” Romeo said. “Not Randolph, not Henry Morrison, not Freddy Denton or Rupe Libby, not Georgie Frederick … none of the new ones, either. Those kids.”

“They’re probably busy with …” She trailed off.

Romeo nodded. “Right. Busy wit what? You don’t know and neither do I. But whatever they’re busy wit, I’m not sure I like it. Or think it’s wort bein busy wit. There’s gonna be a town meeting Thursday night, and if this is still goin on, I think there should be some changes.” He paused. “I could be gettin out of my place here, but I think maybe you ought to stand for Chief of Fire n Police.”

Brenda considered it, considered the file she had found marked VADER, then shook her head slowly. “It’s too soon for anything like that.”

“What about just Fire Chief? How bout dat one?” The Lewiston
on parle
coming on stronger in his voice now.

Brenda looked around at the smoldering brush and charred trash-wood trees. Ugly, granted, like something out of a World War I battlefield photo, but no longer dangerous. The people who had shown up here had seen to that. The crew.
Her
crew.

She smiled. “That I might consider.”

12

The first time Ginny Tomlinson came down the hospital hallway she was running, responding to a loud beeping that sounded like bad news, and Piper didn’t have a chance to speak to her. Didn’t even try. She had been in the waiting room long enough to get the picture: three people—two nurses and a teenage candy striper named Gina Buffalino—in charge of an entire hospital. They were coping, but barely. When Ginny came back, she was walking slowly. Her shoulders were slumped. A medical chart dangled from one hand.

“Ginny?” Piper asked. “Okay?”

Piper thought Ginny might snap at her, but she offered a tired smile instead of a snarl. And sat down next to her. “Fine. Just tired.” She paused. “Also, Ed Carty just died.”

Piper took her hand. “I’m very sorry to hear that.”

Ginny squeezed her fingers. “Don’t be. You know how women talk about having babies? This one had an easy delivery, this one had it hard?”

Piper nodded.

“Death is like that, too. Mr. Carty was in labor a long time, but now he’s delivered.”

To Piper the idea seemed beautiful. She thought she could use it
in a sermon … except she guessed that people wouldn’t want to hear a sermon on death this coming Sunday. Not if the Dome was still in place.

They sat for a while, Piper trying to think of the best way to ask what she had to ask. In the end, she didn’t have to.

“She was raped,” Ginny said. “Probably more than once. I was afraid Twitch was going to have to try his suturing, but I finally got it stopped with a vaginal pack.” She paused. “I was crying. Luckily, the girl was too stoned to notice.”

“And the baby?”

“Your basic healthy eighteen-month-old, but he gave us a scare. He had a mini-seizure. It was probably exposure to the sun. Plus dehydration … hunger … and he has a wound of his own.” Ginny traced a line across her forehead.

Twitch came down the hall and joined them. He looked light-years from his usual jaunty self.

“Did the men who raped her also hurt the baby?” Piper’s voice remained calm, but a thin red fissure was opening in her mind.

“Little Walter? I think he just fell,” Twitch said. “Sammy said something about the crib collapsing. It wasn’t completely coherent, but I’m pretty sure it was an accident.
That
part, anyway.”

Piper was looking at him, bemused. “
That
was what she was saying. I thought it was ‘little water.’”

“I’m sure she wanted water,” Ginny said, “but Sammy’s baby really is Little, first name, Walter, second name. They named him after a blues harmonica player, I believe. She and Phil—” Ginny mimed sucking a joint and holding in the smoke.

“Oh, Phil was a lot more than a smokehound,” Twitch said. “When it came to drugs, Phil Bushey was a multitasker.”

“Is he dead?” Piper asked.

Twitch shrugged. “I haven’t seen him around since spring. If he is, good riddance.”

Piper looked at him reproachfully.

Twitch ducked his head a little. “Sorry, Rev.” He turned to Ginny. “Any sign of Rusty?”

“He needed some time off,” she said, “and I told him to go. He’ll be back soon, I’m sure.”

Piper sat between them, outwardly calm. Inside, the red fissure was widening. There was a sour taste in her mouth. She remembered a night when her father had forbidden her to go out to Skate Scene at the mall because she’d said something smart to her mother (as a teenager, Piper Libby had been an absolute font of smart things to say). She had gone upstairs, called the friend she had expected to meet, and told that friend—in a perfectly pleasant, perfectly even voice—that something had come up and she wouldn’t be able to meet her after all. Next weekend? For sure, uh-huh, you bet, have a good time, no, I’m fine, b’bye. Then she had trashed her room. She finished by yanking her beloved Oasis poster off the wall and tearing it up. By then she had been crying hoarsely, not in sorrow but in one of those rages that had blown through her teenage years like force-five hurricanes. Her father came up at some point during the festivities and stood in the doorway, regarding her. When she finally saw him there she stared back defiantly, panting, thinking how much she hated him. How much she hated them both. If they were dead, she could go live with her aunt Ruth in New York. Aunt Ruth knew how to have a good time. Not like some people. He had held his hands out to her, open, extended. It had been a somehow humble gesture, one that had crushed her anger and almost crushed her heart.

If you don’t control your temper, your temper will control you,
he had said, and then left her, walking down the hallway with his head bent. She hadn’t slammed the door behind him. She had closed it, very quietly.

That was the year she had made her often vile temper her number one priority. Killing it completely would be killing part of herself, but she thought if she did not make some fundamental changes, an important part of her would remain fifteen for a long, long time. She had begun working to impose control, and mostly she had succeeded. When she felt that control slipping, she would remember what her father had said, and that open-handed gesture, and his slow walk along the upstairs hall of the house she had grown up in.
She had spoken at his funeral service nine years later, saying
My father told me the most important thing I’ve ever heard.
She hadn’t said what that thing was, but her mother had known; she had been sitting in the front pew of the church in which her daughter was now ordained.

For the last twenty years, when she felt the urge to flash out at someone—and often the urge was nearly uncontrollable, because people could be so stupid, so willfully
dumb
—she would summon her father’s voice:
If you don’t control your temper, your temper will control you.

But now the red fissure was widening and she felt the old urge to throw things. To scratch skin until the blood came sweating out.

“Did you ask her who did it?”

“Yes, of course,” Ginny said. “She won’t say. She’s scared.” Piper remembered how she’d first thought the mother and baby lying beside the road was a bag of garbage. And that, of course, was what they’d been to whoever did this. She stood up. “I’m going to talk to her.”

“That might not be such a good idea right now,” Ginny said. “She’s had a sedative, and—”

“Let her take a shot,” Twitch said. His face was pale. His hands were knotted between his knees. The knuckles cracked repeatedly. “And make it a good one, Rev.”

13

Sammy’s eyes were at half-mast. They opened slowly when Piper sat down beside her bed. “You … were the one who …”

“Yes,” Piper said, taking her hand. “My name is Piper Libby.”

“Thank you,” Sammy said. Her eyes began to drift closed again.

“Thank me by telling me the names of the men who raped you.”

In the dim room—warm, with the hospital’s air-conditioning shut down—Sammy shook her head. “They said they’d hurt me. If I told.” She glanced at Piper. It was a cowlike glance, full of dumb resignation. “They might hurt Little Walter, too.”

Piper nodded. “I understand you’re frightened,” she said. “Now tell me who they were. Give me the names.”

“Didn’t you
hear
me?” Looking away from Piper now. “They said they would hurt—”

Piper had no time for this; the girl would zone out on her. She grasped Sammy’s wrist. “I want those names, and you’re going to give them to me.”

“I don’t
dare.
” Sammy began to ooze tears.

“You’re going to do it because if I hadn’t come along, you might be dead now.” She paused, then drove the dagger the rest of the way in. She might regret it later, but not now. Right now the girl in the bed was only an obstacle standing between her and what she needed to know. “Not to mention your baby. He might be dead, too. I saved your life, I saved his, and
I want those names.
”

“No.” But the girl was weakening now, and part of the Reverend Piper Libby was actually enjoying this. Later she’d be disgusted; later she’d think
You’re not that much different from those boys, forcing is forcing.
But now, yes, there was pleasure, just as there had been pleasure in tearing the treasured poster from the wall and ripping it to shreds.

I like it because it is bitter,
she thought.
And because it is my heart.

She leaned over the crying girl. “Dig the wax out of your ears, Sammy, because you need to hear this. What they’ve done once they’ll do again. And when they do, when some other woman shows up here with a bloody snatch and possibly pregnant with a rapist’s child, I will come to you, and I will say—”

“No! Stop!”

“‘You were part of it. You were right there, cheering them on.’”

“No!”
Sammy cried.
“Not me, that was Georgia! Georgia was the one cheering them on!”

Piper felt cold disgust. A woman. A woman had been there. In her head, the red fissure opened wider. Soon it would begin to spew lava.

“Give me the names,” she said.

And Sammy did.

14

Jackie Wettington and Linda Everett were parked outside Food City. It was closing at five PM instead of eight. Randolph had sent them there thinking the early closing might cause trouble. A ridiculous idea, because the supermarket was almost empty. There were hardly a dozen cars in the parking lot, and the few remaining shoppers were moving in a slow daze, as if sharing the same bad dream. The two officers saw only one cashier, a teenager named Bruce Yardley. The kid was taking currency and writing chits instead of running credit cards. The meat counter was looking depleted, but there was still plenty of chicken and most of the canned and dry-goods shelves were fully stocked.