The man called Houdini stood outside with a shotgun gripped low at the hip like he was ready to spray the whole interior at the least provocation. His eyes were wide and darting, and Amanda saw a thin sheen of sweat standing out on his forehead. He looked beyond her into the cabin, jerking his head about in hitching, little motions like a bird then looked down at her empty hands and relaxed visibly. “Good…” he sighed.
Amanda pulled her eyes away from the cavernous twelve-gauge barrel leveled at her pelvis (noting, as she did, that Houdini’s finger rested outside the trigger guard—which she interpreted as that he knew his business… or that he was terrified) and looked beyond him into the commons. Other men were out there roving from home to home with rifles and shotguns, shouting angrily and pounding doors with closed fists. She saw Fred and Alan rousted from the RV beyond George’s old teardrop camper, Samantha walking stoically among the long grass into the dirt patch beyond like a captured Indian squaw in a Western. The man walking close behind pointed a handgun at her heels.
“Mom, what’s going on?” Elizabeth asked from the bedroom. The child’s voice was flat. Almost conversational.
“Go on back in your room, Mija. I’ll come check on you later.”
“No,” said Houdini, shaking his head. “She comes too. He wants everyone out for a meeting.”
She felt her face twist in anger and saw him raise the shotgun barrel by a hair in response. She waited for the flush of hate to subside, then said, “You always give him what he wants?”
Houdini’s shoulders slumped a fraction, and he rolled his eyes. “Lady… just come on, will yah?”
Amanda scoffed and looked back at her daughter. “Come on. Stay close to me.”
They stepped outside. Amanda pulled the door shut and followed Houdini past the corner of Jake’s cabin. As she passed by the juncture of the east and south walls, and then beyond the porch, she saw Clay standing out in the field. There was a gathering of people surrounding him already; Amanda saw Tom and Rebecca, Olivia, Greg, and Alish. Patricia and her lost children were in the process of being herded over by three armed men dressed in a dusky mottling of greens, browns, and blacks, and past the garage, she saw Gibs being prodded toward the gathering by that giant cowboy, Pap. He was carrying that big Texas levergun across his meaty chest like a baseball bat ready to bunt. He thrust it out every few steps into Gibs’s back, jarring him unnecessarily forward despite the fact Gibs showed every intention of complying. Amanda could see the growing rage in her friend’s eyes as this continued and wondered what he was preparing; she knew that look. She knew damned well what it meant.
As she considered this, Pap thrust out the rifle again, bouncing it off Gibs’s shoulder blades, and the old Marine whirled on him as fast and fluid as a trained dancer. The plodding ox recoiled behind a look of poleaxed stupidity, so thoroughly was he caught off guard by the sudden response. Before he could react, Gibs wrapped his hands around the stock of the rifle, yanked back, and twisted the weapon violently from the man’s grip. Pap barked in panic and fell back a few steps while his right hand dipped for the grip of his revolver, but Gibs had already tossed the rifle several feet away into the grass. It was so fast, so effortless, that Pap just stood there with his limp hand hanging off the edge of his pistol, mouth slack and eyes boggled.
Gibs, in the meantime, either ignored or disregarded the condition of the other’s hand; that he seemed ready to haul leather, assuming recovery from his initial shock. He closed the distance on Pap, spit between the man’s feet, and said, “Listen real close, you seven-foot tall stack of sideways, cross-eyed, triple-chromosomed buffalo shit: you go ahead and jab me in the back one more motherfucking time. Rifle, finger, or micro-cock; I don’t care. I’ll drag you by the ear to the nearest table, bend you over it, put on some Barry Goddamned White, and fuck you conscious. I’ll go balls-deep on you before you know what the hell’s happening, then cram my fucking nuts in there as well. I’ll fuck you so thoroughly you’ll fall in love with me and then soil you so completely that all you’ll be able to do is take a shower, burn your clothes, and hide under your fucking Roy Rogers blanky. One more time. Please. I’m… begging… you.”
Amanda watched as Pap’s face went from pink to fire hydrant red. He seemed to expand somehow as if he were a great bellows filling with air, and Gibs, a tall man himself, seemed to diminish by comparison. He appeared not to be put off by the disparity in size; he stood before the growing storm with his feet planted, staring up at the purpling mass of ancestral Irish rage with his chin thrust out in a jaunty fuck-you.
“Pap!” Clay bellowed. “Quit your fucking flirting and bring him here already!”
Pap’s eyes darted over Gibs’s head, then down again to meet his gaze. “That thar’s some angels lookin’ out fer yah. Now turn the fuck around an’ git ’afore I carry y’all th-fuck over!” he hissed. His pink cheeks quivered like disturbed Jell-O.
Gibs blew him a kiss without missing a beat, turned, and strode over to stand by Amanda. His steps faltered en route; attention having been captured by the black duffel bag in the dirt before Clay’s feet. He jerked his eyes back at Amanda, and for a wonder, they were flat and level, but she could see the clenching of his jaw. When he reached her, he turned briefly to look at the gathering of people behind her—the familiar and strange faces combined into a single mass—and breathed the words, “Fuck me!” in a failing whisper.
Amanda jerked her head in a single nod, eyes still pinned on the duffel bag laying in the dirt like a dead accusation.
There’s only the one! Where’s the other? Locked up in the cabin with the rest of the weapons? Do they know? What the hell happened to the second bag?
She tore her eyes from it and looked up at Clay. He stood over it, head bowed in thought, and he rubbed habitually at his eyebrows with thumb and forefinger as if to massage down a headache. His pistol was quite present; he’d made it a point of wearing the shoulder harness outside of his vest. He stood in this fashion a short while longer, drawing out the silence, and then, not looking up nor shifting position, asked, “Is that everybody?”
“Yeah,” Houdini said.
Clay nodded, and his ever-rubbing fingers tracked the motion of his head. “Have a look, then,” he said.
She detected motion to her rear—some combination of the sound they made and the indescribable certainty that somewhere behind her things were happening; a prickling of neck hair brought on by a yet-to-be-understood mode of sensory perception. She turned in both directions, stealing glances over each shoulder, and saw contingents of Clay’s men moving purposefully toward various homes; Barbara’s cabin, Oscar’s container home, Fred’s RV. Each man opened the door of his respective target and entered without hesitation. A few moments later, she heard the muted bang of furniture upset, the hollow clatter of pots and pans thrown to the floor, the soft music of shattering glass. The ruin of glass was a sound profoundly disturbing to Amanda’s ears above all others. She thought, “But we can’t replace that! None of us have learned how to make glass again…”
The tinkle of anonymous baubles transitioning from beauty to destruction sounded to Amanda like the crying of newborn babies. Her fingernails began slowly to scoop the flesh from her palms.
The rape of their homes dragged on for long minutes seemingly without end. Clay lacked the muscle to have each dwelling tossed simultaneously—not while still requiring a detachment of guards to watch his prisoners—so the search party moved among the buildings methodically, slowly, giving lie to the conceit that possessions were destroyed in a need for haste. The slowness with which they conducted their business spoke plainer than any verbalized admonishment; the unspoken instruction imparted precise meaning: we search of a necessity, we brutalize in the name of education.