Before leaving West Condon for the writers colony at the end of August (forever, she felt), Sally paid a final visit to the Brunist file drawer in the Chronicle job room. Somebody, she discovered, had been poking around in the files since she was last there. The drawer was open and the “Abner Baxter Family” and “Millennial Cults” folders were out on top of the cabinet. She asked and the little mustachioed print shop owner said the only other visitor had been the mayor, who was in just before he disappeared, buying up a stack of the final edition of the paper at a nickel each “for the city archives,” but he himself was in there with the fellow the whole time and he had no interest in the files. Does anyone else have a key? He didn’t know. He’d never changed the locks, and the previous newspaper people might still have theirs. “No need for locks, really,” he said with a cheerful, pink-cheeked smile. “This is a safe town where you can trust your neighbors.”
It was hot and stuffy in that windowless room. She put the hook on the job room door, took off her shirt, and started with the “Cults” file, which she wanted to explore as fodder for her Cretin Wizards, and in it she found the scrawled note: “The great majority of men do not think with abstract ideas, only with colorful images or with concrete facts. Abstract spiritual ideas and principles must be clothed in some vivid and compelling form, even if, like this note, borrowed from elsewhere. Thus, the heroic journey, the parables, the miracles, the Easter story, the cross.” Which she herself might have written, if not so succinctly. She copied the lines out in her notebook next to another thought she’d stolen from somewhere about imagination both illumining and darkening the mind, which she read as her kind of fiction versus the Christian sort, though she could see how it might work both ways. And then, without really registering the moves that got her there, she found herself stretched out on the leather couch again, smoking a joint and fantasizing about the new life that awaited her. It did not seem to include the cult or the town, not even as masked in the fairytale form of “Against the Cretins.” It was grander than that, more heroic, and at the same time more modest, at least in scale: Wit. Bright and quick and unforgettable. Ever since her night at the Moon with Tommy and their exchange of hero stories, she’d been playing with the hero idea. She had returned home that night and written: “She did not know if she was a real hero or a false hero, but she knew the first thing she had to do was leave home in order to proceed to what the Saturday morning cartoons called the ‘threshold of adventure.’” The new hero who emerged that night called himself or herself many names, but most recently Dawn, meaning lecherous, moist, wet, rutting; also graceful, but with the ancient sense of “one who has beautiful pudenda.” Perhaps, she was thinking as she lay there, Dawn’s first mind-opening adventure, sallying forth, radiant with purpose yet utterly in the dark, would be to awaken the Sleeping Prince in the Woods, that two-dick wonder (it was the circumcised one that mattered, though Dawn might not know that and have to try them both), then blithely send him on his way into the life of empty-headed princesses and ambitious chambermaids which were his destiny. Her hand by now was between her legs, hash in her lungs and behind her eyes. She was thinking about the Prince’s beautiful backside while he stood at the motel window, his sturdy prick glistening with the stains of a ruptured hymen, the bathing of it under the waterfall of the shower — feet, she knew then, just a euphemism in the Jesus stories. Her eye fell on the darkroom door with its glass panel, behind which the photographer had been hidden. She stood, took off the rest of her clothes, and lay down again, staring tauntingly at the secreted photographer and remembering Billy Don, the flushed expression on his face in the Tucker City drugstore when he showed her the pictures of this couch and the violated Bruno girl upon it, and she spread her legs and took her hand away and raised her inside arm against the back of the couch in imitation of one of those photos (the difference was the roach in her other hand), wondering if she had the imaginative power to make herself come without touching herself. While the invisible photographer watched, stunned by what he saw, but greedily snapping away. She was close to it.
But her erotic imaginings were chilled by the lingering image of Billy Don, no longer that of him in the drugstore, but the final one: dead and bloodless in his wrecked car in the ditch at the edge of the camp, that hole in his forehead. She remembered suddenly that he was not wearing his dark glasses. This fact struck her at the time, it made him look so strange, he was never without them, even at night, but then she had forgotten it. Apparently Junior Baxter was wearing them when he was arrested, another strike against him. Junior had been found guilty of his murder and several other crimes on top, and had been sentenced to die in the electric chair. Arguing that charges of murder and conspiracy to murder seemed almost inadequate for the enormity of the crimes committed, the prosecutor secured death sentences for Junior’s father as well and for his surviving uncaptured brother, plus four so-called “Brunist Defenders,” two surviving Christian Patriots, and the entire membership of Nathan Baxter’s “Wrath of God” motorcycle gang, all sentenced in absentia, however many and whoever they were. Presumably this was good for a lot of votes. Abner Baxter’s closest lieutenant, Roy Coates, facing murder charges like the others, was given immunity for turning state’s witness, providing critical evidence against many of the “armed criminals” on the mine hill that day, including Baxter himself. This might have been the same reason Darren Rector only got a suspended three-year sentence; that and his pretty blond innocence. During the appeal process that followed, much of Coates’ testimony was found insubstantial and contradictory and was discounted, resulting in lesser punishments for two of those sentenced to death and the outright release of another, but all that was later on. Clara Collins-Wosznik and others named with her were charged with conspiracy to foment violence and civic disorder, but as they were no longer in the state and were not on the hill that day, the charges were eventually dropped. Not long after the sentencing, Nathan Baxter alias Tobias Rivers alias Kid Rivers was killed in southeast Texas in what looked like a gang execution, along with others assumed to be members of the Wrath of God gang, who had apparently renamed themselves the Crusadeers. Baxter had been hideously burnt and was all but unrecognizable, identifiable only by his Tobias Rivers driver’s license and wrecked motorcycle, making investigators cautious: Was this really Nat Baxter, or was he living on under yet another stolen identity?