Chapter Sixteen

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

COUNTDOWN TO ZERO HOUR 13 HOURS AND 57 MINUTES

EVERYTHING IN TOWN was burning, destroyed, or completely untouched. It looked like the aftermath of a tornado that took the barn but missed the house.

“Were you a Mustang?” Carla asked, glancing over at the high school’s marquee as the red Dodge Ram tore past it at a speed far exceeding the school-zone limit. It was the first thing either one had said since they left the plant.

The area around the school was desolate, as was most of the town they’d driven through. Neither of them had commented on it, but they were both thinking it: Where is everybody? Had they already evacuated? Were they locked up inside, sheltering in place? Occasionally they’d see a car barreling down a road, seemingly headed out of town. But then a little farther down, they’d pass a man rocking on his front porch.

“Class of ’94,” said Joss. “You?”

“Class of 2011.”

“Of—wait, what ? How old were you on September eleventh?”

“Second grade. So eight.”

“I was in grad school. Fuck, I’m old.”

What Carla remembered most about September 11 was how Mr. Evans kept wiping his eyes while he was telling the class that something bad had happened. It was the first time she’d seen a grown man cry, and the way he seemed so determined not to let a single tear fall only made her feel more scared and more confused. It was a weird day to be that age. Old enough to know something big had happened but too young to understand what. The adults had tried to explain it in a way that wasn’t scary, which was hard to do when it inherently was. All day, she just remembered an overwhelming sensation of I don’t understand .

That was her generation’s where were you when moment, like the Kennedy assassination or Pearl Harbor was for generations before. For Carla’s students, their moment would be today—and they were first-graders, almost the same age as she had been in 2001. Carla wished she had made that connection earlier today, as it was happening, but you typically realize the whole world has changed only after it has. Not that she would have done anything differently. But maybe.

How many of her students would include Miss Carla in their own stories of today, just as she did with Mr. Evans? Was she a part of Mr. Evans’s memory of 9/11, just like she knew she would always include little Benjamin asking if he was going to grow a tail in her memory of today?

The football field was empty—the pale, dormant grass not yet showing signs of spring’s arrival. But the stands looked the same, Joss thought, remembering how cold her butt used to get sitting on those metal bleachers during the fall football games. Carla must have seen her looking because she asked if Joss had been a cheerleader.

“Good God, no.” Joss laughed. “I was a nerd back when that meant something. Like, stuffed-in-your-locker vintage of nerdom.”

“You just looked nostalgic,” Carla said.

“Oh, well. Yeah. I was in the marching band. We’d play at halftime.”

“Flute?”

“Sousaphone. It’s like a small tuba,” she added, seeing Carla’s expression. “I told you. Nerd.”

Carla was right about one thing, though. Joss was feeling nostalgic. She loved those Friday-night games. Afterward, the football players and cheerleaders would go to parties and get drunk while the marching band would go to Bermuda Bliss for Hawaiian shaved ice, still wearing their uniforms. Only a few of the kids had cars, and they’d pack themselves in like sardines, sitting on each other’s laps, squished up against the windows, laughing at stupid inside jokes as they sang along to show tunes while doing their best attempts at flirtation.

The first time she’d ever held a boy’s hand was on one of those Friday nights in the back seat of Jamie Gilbert’s blue Ford Probe. He was the drum major and she’d had a huge crush on him all year but wasn’t sure if he felt the same. When his pinkie brushed against hers, she’d frozen, unsure if it was accidental or on purpose, but when he laced his fingers through hers, she figured it out. By the end of the night, they were boyfriend-girlfriend and they’d stayed that way for many, many wonderful years after that.

The boy was Ethan.

The truck passed endless soybean and cornfields and the turnoff for Joss’s house. They went past the rich neighborhood with the one house that gave out full-size candy bars on Halloween. They passed the section of the Mississippi where teens still broke curfew while making out in their parked cars. And as they tore down a deserted Main Street, it struck Joss how little had changed.

Most places evolved over time. Grew. Modernized. Not here. Waketa moved ahead so slowly, it was practically in reverse. Before Clover Hill, farming was the only industry around these parts. But when the plant was built, it attracted a new population, eager to get in on the ground floor of all the promise a nuclear town brought.

Problem was, that promise had never been fulfilled.

Growth became stagnation; stagnation became decline. The announcement that the plant was to be decommissioned was the final nail in the coffin. No one wanted to invest in a place that had no future. Some stayed. Most left. Sure, it was still lovely, full of quaint Norman Rockwell charm. A simple, quiet town where you could raise a family. But it wasn’t a great place if you had ambition. Which was why Joss left.

Fifteen years in DC going up against red-tape political bullshit had worn her out, though. Beyond getting her idealistic sheen worn off, she was sick of the way big cities viewed pockets of the country like Waketa: Expendable. Too bumpkin to be important. She’d lost count of how many meetings she had been forced to sit in quietly while towns with populations like Waketa’s were discussed with clinical impartiality. She’d learned quickly that anything that wasn’t located in a swing-state county of importance wouldn’t even make it to a briefing sheet. And she’d learned even faster that pointing that out was a surefire way not to get the funding her research needed. It was an exercise in futility, and she’d finally decided she no longer wanted to be a part of the political theater. So she’d come back home.

But as they say: “You can’t go home again.” Once she was back, she became nearly as frustrated with the local people and the provincial mindsets that made them stand in the way of their own progress as she’d been with the bureaucrats and politicians.

She’d always felt stuck in the middle, never fully fitting into either side while seeing and understanding both—and being considered an outsider by each. Somewhere along the way, she’d resigned herself to accepting that the feeling of isolation, whether perceived or actual, was just how it would be.

But she was disappointed. Disappointed for them all. She knew what each side stood to gain but never would because both were blind to what the other had to offer.

Carla turned the truck onto an unpaved road. Hay-colored soybean fields, flattened and awaiting spring, surrounded the private drive, making the modest 1960s farmhouse and barn sitting at the end of the road stand out.

“R.J. won’t take well to new people,” Carla said. “Especially if you say you’re with Clover Hill. I should probably do most of the talking.”

“Agreed,” Joss said, reading a sun-faded sign nailed to the side of the barn as they passed: NO TRESPASSING—I’M TIRED OF HIDING THE BODIES .

They parked next to a massive heavy-duty tow truck whose maroon paint was barely visible under an inch of dirt. Walking to the house, Carla noticed that some kid had finger-scribbled Wash me on the back window. On closer inspection, she saw it actually said Eat me. She was thinking it was probably R.J.’s own handiwork when the warning shot hit the ground at her feet.

“Jesus!” she yelled as both women jumped back.

On the back porch, Ray Jay Brown grabbed the rifle’s bolt handle, and with a lift and a click and a pull-back, the shell was ejected. Weight shifted to one side, an unbuttoned flannel covering a ribbed white tank, a patchy, dirty-blond beard, R.J. jutted his chin at Carla as he aimed the firearm back at her feet.

“You got my CDs?”

Carla was dumbstruck. “You can’t be serious.”

“I told her I didn’t want to see none of you until I got them back.”

“R.J. That was, like, over a decade ago.”

“Did Stephanie send you? What’d she say?”

Carla put her hands on her hips. “Are you nuts? That was sophomore year. You dated for, like, two months.”

“Three months. What’s she doing now?”

“I don’t know, R.J.! She moved literally fifteen years ago.”

“And took my CDs with her. All my CDs.”

“Oh my God. Put the gun down—”

“Metallica. Alan Jackson. Blink-182.”

“Listen. We need to talk to—”

“Eminem. AC/DC.”

“This is serious—”

“Mariah Carey’s Christmas album—”

“Listen, jackass. I’ll buy you every fucking CD your hillbilly heart desires if you put the gun down, shut the fuck up, and listen to what we have to say,” Joss yelled.

Carla and R.J. both turned. Joss couldn’t tell if he was impressed or just trying to figure out where in her body to put the first bullet. When he spun and walked into the house, she took it as a good sign.

The inside of the house was surprisingly clean. Spare and utilitarian, but with a tidy sense of calm and a faded smell of this morning’s bacon. On the mantel, a framed picture of R.J. in his Marine dress blues, probably taken five years and ten pounds ago, sat beside a framed triangle-folded American flag. On the other side was a picture of a Marine in what looked to be Vietnam. Next to it, a black-and-white photo of a Marine standing under a German street sign. The family resemblance was undeniable.

R.J. plopped down in a La-Z-Boy. The women sat on the couch. Joss got right to it.

In frank, uncomplicated terms she explained what had happened and what the state of the plant was. She told him about the pool, about the damage it had sustained, the repairs that it needed. She described what would happen if they didn’t get it fixed—to the community, to the country, to the world. Finally, she got to why they were there. They needed his gear, and they needed his help.

R.J. listened silently all the while with a beer in one hand and the rifle in the other, resting against his knee. When Joss finished, he looked at Carla.

“It’s all true,” Carla said. “We just came from the plant. I saw the plane. I saw the damage with my own eyes.”

“We wouldn’t be here if we had other options,” Joss added.

“Then I’m the kid picked last for the team?” he said.

“That’s not what I meant. Sorry,” Joss said. “I meant that I know we’re asking a lot. Look, you don’t know me. I show up at your house asking for your gear. Your expertise. Your help. Asking you to risk your life for a company that, frankly, betrayed you and betrayed this town. But if you don’t, R.J., it’s all over for Waketa. It’s…” She paused, looking around the living room, trying to figure out where to go next. “It’s Kline’s frozen custard. It’s cruising Main on a Saturday night. It’s picking apples at Shady Acres every fall. It’s the church’s lawn parties in the summer. It’s Tuesday-night trivia and dollar-fifty drafts at Minder Binders. All of it’s over. Is it fair that it’s coming down to you? No. But we’re used to not fair around here. So… so, yeah. That’s it. We need you. We need your help.”

The antique grandfather clock across the room ticked loudly as the pendulum swung back and forth. R.J. took a sip of his beer and stared at the floor while he considered. Finally, he looked up.

“No.”

Carla and Joss shared a look. “ No as in—”

“ No as in Clover Hill can fuck off, the government can fuck off, you all can fuck off. After everything I’ve done, after everything my family has given, you come here to ask for more ?”

Joss leaned forward, elbows on knees. “R.J. You understand that if we fail—”

“Oh, I get it. I just think it’s real interesting that I get a knock on my door now when someone else needs something. Where was the door for me to knock on when I needed something? There wasn’t one. ’Cause it’s my fault if I need help. I can’t control any of it, it’s all bigger than me—but it’s my fault. I gotta figure it out. Just bootstrap it, son.” R.J. clucked his teeth with a shake of his head. “We’re left to rot out here—until they need something. Then it comes. Then the knock comes. But it only goes one way.”

Joss stood up abruptly, surprising them both. She knew a dead end when she saw it and they didn’t have time to waste. “Right,” she said, taking a vial of pills out of her pocket. Shaking a few into her hand, she laid them on the coffee table. “One now, one every twenty-four hours until they’re gone,” she said. “Take them. Don’t. Whatever. But you and I both know getting cancer treatment covered by Uncle Sam will be a losing battle, so I’d take them.”

Carla followed Joss to the door, and they were almost gone when R.J. called after them, “You can have the gear.”

They turned. He shrugged and took another sip of beer.

“What’s left of it, anyway. It’s just collecting dust in the barn. Sold some, but most of it’s still there. You can have the gear. But I’m not doing it.”

The women loaded the gear into the truck by themselves, but they could see R.J. watching occasionally from the kitchen window. As they were about to leave, he came out to the back porch.

“If you got a CB, turn it to channel seven,” Carla said. “We’re broadcasting updates from the plant. Any changes, any directives, you’ll hear it there first. Spread that to anyone you talk to. Please.”

“All right,” he muttered in an uninterested way. “Tell Stephanie I want my CDs back.”

Carla shook her head as she closed the tailgate. She got behind the wheel, but before she shut the door, she paused.

“You know what, R.J.,” she said, looking out at the barren field, “I get it. I do. I’m pissed too. This life out here? The deck is stacked against us. And that’s not just the way it feels, it’s the way it is. You don’t want to be the guy risking it all for people who don’t give a shit about you. That’s fine. But you seem real proud of yourself. You seem to think you’re putting one over on us by saying no. Whoever that us is, anyway—the company, the government. Whoever you’ve always blamed for keeping you down, keeping you where you are. I get that anger, R.J. I get it, I swear I do.

“But we come to you today, hat in hand, asking for help. You got what we need and you’re the only one who has it.” Carla stuck a thumb back at Joss. “She’s got the president on speed dial and she’s saying, ‘R.J., you’re our only hope.’ You want to talk about knocking? Well, we’re knocking on your door with the goddamn winning lottery ticket.” Carla pointed to the gear in the bed of the truck. “And I’m just strolling out of here with everything I need while you stay here. The story will go on and you won’t be a part of it because you couldn’t see what you had. It’s called leverage, R.J. It’s called opportunity. For once in your life, you had the winning hand, but you didn’t see it. And that is on you.”