By then it was clear that the forensic evidence against Junior Baxter in his more conventional murder trial was all but conclusive, the bullets in the heads of the two men at the camp trailer park matching the one in Billy Don’s brain, all three coming from the gun in Junior’s possession, still hot from firing at the time of his arrest, no prints on its handle or trigger except his. Moreover, when they arrested him within yards of the scene of the crime, he was wearing Billy Don’s broken sunglasses. Probably couldn’t even see through them. And he was certainly capable of it; he had shot at her, after all, and with even less reason. But she found it narratively more interesting to stick to her original assumption that it was, in effect, a dark love story, allowing her to get inside the warped mind of that megalomaniacal zealot and experience vicariously an act of impassioned yet cold-blooded murder. She named her victim Donny Bill, or Donny B and, stealing a famous name from the Anabaptists, called the killer Jan, a sexually ambivalent name for a pretty boy with blond curls, and one who, though eloquent and smart, was susceptible to spooky ideas, as in real life, so-called, both Darren’s and Jan’s. The Dark Lady who might have been responsible for Donny B’s fatal defection went unnamed and was eventually omitted. Mere debris. She set the story at the church camp but made them all Bible college students on retreat, avoiding the complications of the cult while keeping the weirdness of their beliefs, especially as embodied by mad Jan. Since she was telling the story from Jan’s point of view, she was able to use some of her research into the history of chiliastic sects and play with end-times language in suggestive sexual ways during Jan’s attempted seduction of Donny B, and she even managed to include a paragraph in which Jan, in a pure and saintly manner, not unlike Santa Teresa, imagines making love to Jesus, an act mostly concealed by mystical religious speculations and revealed primarily by the self-evident fact that the boy has been masturbating throughout. Donny B finally gets fed up with Jan’s mad touchy-feely evangelism and decides to leave the camp. Jan, jilted, is both enraged and grief-stricken and maybe afraid that Donny B might tattle on him, and he asks his friend to meet him up on Inspiration Point, away from the others, to say goodbye. Sally was losing sympathy with her crazed hero and his nutty apocalyptic imaginings and she had to work hard to make the genuineness of his emotions believable. Donny B was easier, a more or less commonsensical, good-natured guy who rarely said no to any request and so found himself up on the Point, all alone with Jan, with a gun in his face. His own, taken from his packed suitcase. The story ends: “‘Close your eyes, Donny Bill, and pray.’ Stubbornly he won’t do that. He just stares back at Jan with an icy glitter in his eyes. Sad. Only one thing to do.”
Sally didn’t like the story very much, her favorite bit being the Jesus paragraph (she got excited by her own sensuous description of Christ’s body and masturbated right along with Jan), but it was a big hit in the workshop. It was almost like being born again amidst well-meaning believers, and even the undercover Christians, with a few theological quibbles, praised it. Home at last! But then she followed it with a comicbook story about Sweet Jesus and his sidekick Dirty Pete, in which Sweet Jesus’ basic magical stunt is resurrection and the bad guys are all trying to learn his secret or expose him as a sham, and she got hammered again. The professor gave her some credit for light satire, but then effectively trashed it as a frivolous and arrogant provocation (which, admittedly, it was; she was tired of this clubby little gathering), and she left both workshop and college. Broke and jobless, she had no choice but to go home, weather her father’s drunken dopiness and her mother’s sad frustrations, and get the writing done.
That winter, West Condon was enjoying a rare if illusory moment of prosperity rising out of the summer’s horrors. Just about anyone who wanted a job had one, and a lot of out-of-towners were moving in to pick up the leavings. Her dad, unemployed and more or less unemployable, was an exception, though the new owners of Mick’s Bar & Grill gave him occasional free drinks and a sandwich to sit on a bar stool and regale the tourists with anecdotes from that memorable day, most of which he had to make up, having spent much of the time in a stupor on the floor. They’d hired Mick to do the cooking to keep it authentically inedible at twice the price and even put a wrecked helicopter, though not the same one, back on the roof again. Tourism had tailed off some since the end of summer, but the ongoing TV coverage of the conspiracy and murder trials still drew out-of-state cars and occasional busloads, so rooms were often at a premium. All the area motels were doing full capacity business, and townsfolk were offering rooms with breakfast in their homes to take in the overflow. Her mom had planned to do just that, hoping for construction company officials, before Sally came home and reclaimed her space. They were embarrassed when she offered to pay for her room, but in the end they accepted her help. The Roma Historical Society, once interested in the now decimated West Condon Hotel, acquired a cheap derelict motel near the Sir Loin steak house, an old one that still had individual cabins, offering their guests a bit of rustic tin-shower nostalgia, plus slot machines in the office lobby, conveniently situated a few yards beyond city limits, and a ten percent discount at the Sir Loin next door, which was doing good business like all the area eateries that remained, HELP WANTED signs in their windows for the first time she could remember. The gambling joints and whorehouses in and around Waterton were also prospering, it was said, thronged less with tourists than with locals, hard cash suddenly burning their pockets. Chestnut Hills had filled up again with squatters, hosting everything from poker games to prayer meetings, and roadside tents reappeared at the town’s edges. Old-timers said it reminded them of West Condon’s boom time in the first part of the century, when coal was king and laws were few, when the town was three or four times bigger than it is now and workers were living in railway freight cars fitted out with bunks and stoves — zulu cars, as they were called — and fighting was more common than fucking. Not exactly how it got said, but that’s how Sally wrote it in her notebook.
The big money was in construction, supported by state and federal disaster relief funds, and there were several companies in town vying for contracts, including two new home-based outfits, Bonali Family Builders and West Condon NOW, a consortium put together by the bank president and other local businessmen. The acting mayor/city manager favored the former, but the city council was still dominated by friends of Tommy’s dad, and moreover, he was able to pull in a sharp young architect from a big-city firm owned by a fraternity brother of his, making it difficult for Bonali Builders to compete except by way of intimidation and backroom influence. Charlie had appointed his dad president, his sister bookkeeper, and had hired his private army of Dagotown Devil Dogs as construction workers; it wasn’t clear where the start-up money was coming from. Angela was also the new secretary in the temporary mayoral office above the Knights of Columbus hall, occupied by the city manager. Sally, protecting her writing time, signed on three days a week with West Condon NOW to help write up proposals and pitch their designs, and was given a desk in the old Chamber of Commerce office where her dad once clowned about, bullet holes still in the Main Street windows, left there for the tourists to photograph.