Of the fifty-nine people in the McDonald’s that lunchtime, only thirty-one heard the deadened report of the final shot. Twelve of those were dead before dark, bringing the toll to forty. Among those who lived was the girl behind the counter, who never walked again and became an alcoholic before finding God and then losing him once more. One of the little girls also survived. She was fostered out to an aunt in Iowa, and went on to live a life of relative peace. One of Trent’s friends made it, and four years later was a coast guard on Laguna Beach.
Pete Harris also survived. By rights he should have died early, in the first sweep of gunfire down the left side of the restaurant, but Suzy Campbell’s body had crashed on top of him just as he tried to slip under his table. Her weight caused him to slew off his seat and crunch headfirst to the ground. They were joined moments later by Suzy’s husband, who was already dead. Neither of the Campbells’ faces would have been recognizable from their passports (both carefully stowed in their jacket pockets, in case somebody broke into the car while they ate), but the clothes the couple were wearing – some carefully packed back in England, others frugally acquired at a Gap sale in Boston’s Back Bay area – were virtually unblemished. Barely a brush-down would have been needed and they could have walked out the door, climbed back in their hire car, and driven on up the road. Perhaps in some better reality that was allowed to happen, and Mark found the Goldberg Variations by happy chance at a town up the way, and they drove the rest of the day along a long straight road between trees with leaves that seemed lit from within: riding the crests and dips of the highway as it took them into afternoon and then evening, never noticing that they rode alone.
In this world they merely saved the life of another human being, as Pete Harris lay frozen beneath them, stunned into immobility by the contact of his head with the tiled floor. All around him were limbs, and all he could see was chaos and death: all he could feel was the whistling of his cuts and a cold ache in his head that developed into a concussion so severe that some days he felt as if it never went away. A young staff nurse, who seemed to regard him with superstitious awe because he had survived when almost everyone else had died, spent the night in the hospital in Pipersville keeping him awake, when he would have much preferred to have slept.
But that was later, as was the heart attack in 1995 that achieved what the bullets had not. He never tried to find out if the Victorian house was for sale. He just worked until he dropped.
Above the measured snap of gunfire and the coughs and screams of the dying, the distant sound of approaching sirens became evident. The gunmen fired for perhaps another twenty seconds, clearing a small pocket by the counter where the mother and her girls had found temporary respite. Then they stopped.
They looked around the room, faces betraying no reaction to what they’d done. The younger of the two – the boy called Billy – took a step back, and shut his eyes. The other man shot him point-blank in the face. While Billy’s body still languidly spasmed on the floor, the man squatted to wash his hands in the blood. He stood again to write something on the glass door, working calmly, in big dripping letters, then surveyed the room once more, calmly, at his ease. He didn’t even glance at the cop cars hurtling up Main, far too late to influence an event that would finally put Palmerston back on the map.
Then, when he was good and ready, the man jumped through the shattered window behind the Campbells’ bodies and disappeared: escaping, it was believed, along the track of the old railroad line. He was never apprehended. No one was ever able to give a clear description of his face, and in time it was as if he slipped out of the event and into shadow. The blame ended up being wholly Billy’s: a young boy who had only been doing what he was told, by a man he’d thought was a new friend.
When he heard the sound of the police cars pulling up outside, Pete Harris tried to sit up, tried to gather the strength to push the Campbells’ bodies off. He failed, but succeeded in raising his head far enough to see what had been written in blood on the doors.
The letters had dripped, and his eyesight was clouded by a white light in his head, but the words were clear enough. They said ‘The Straw Men’.
Eleven years passed.
Of the hill, not on the hill …
Frank Lloyd Wright,
on the architecture of Taliesin
The funeral was a nice affair, in that it was well-attended and people dressed appropriately and nobody stood up at any point and said ‘You realize this means they’re dead.’ It was held in a church on the edge of town. I had no idea what denomination it might be, still less why it should have been stipulated in the instructions left with Harold Davids. So far as I’d known, my parents had no religious views save a kind of amiable atheism and the unspoken belief that if God did exist he probably drove a nice car, most likely of American manufacture.
Organization for the event had been efficiently undertaken by Davids’s office, leaving me with little to do except wait to turn up. I spent most of the two days in the lounge of the Best Western. I knew I should go up to the house, but I couldn’t face it. I read most of a bad novel and leafed through a large number of hotel-style magazines, without learning anything except that you can pay an awful lot of money for a watch. Early each morning I left the hotel, intending to walk along the main street, but got no further than the parking lot. I knew what was on offer along the shopping drag of Dyersburg, Montana, and I was in the market for neither ski gear nor ‘art’. I ate in the hotel restaurant in the evenings, had room-service sandwiches delivered to the bar at lunch. All meals were accompanied by fries whose texture suggested that a number of industrial processes had intervened between the soil and my plate. It was impossible not to have fries. I discussed the matter on two occasions with the waitresses, but relented in the face of mounting panic in their eyes.
After the preacher had explained to everyone why death was not the complete downer it might at first appear, we filed out of the church. I was sorry to leave. It had felt safe in there. Outside it was very cold, and the air was crisp and silent. Behind the graveyard rose the foothills of the Gallatin range, the peaks in the distance muted, as if painted on glass. Two side-by-side plots had been prepared. There were about fifteen people on hand to witness the burial. Davids was there, and someone who appeared to be his assistant. Mary stood close to me, white hair strictly pulled back in a bun, her lined face battered smooth with the cold. A couple of the others I thought I vaguely recognized.
More words were said by the priest, comforting lies in which to swaddle these events. Possibly they made a difference to some of the mourners. I could barely hear them, concentrating as I was on stopping my head from exploding. Then a couple of men – whose job it was, who did this kind of thing every week – efficiently lowered the coffins into the ground. Ropes were gently fed through their hands, and the coffins came to measured rest six feet below the flat plain on which the living still stood. A few more sentences of balm were offered, but muttered quickly now – as if the church recognized that the time to make its pitch was running out. You can’t put people in wooden boxes under the ground without the audience realizing that something very amiss is afoot.
A final quiet pronouncement, and that was that. It was done. Nothing would ever happen to Donald and Beth Hopkins again. Nothing that bore thinking about, at least.
Some of the mourners lingered for a moment, aimless now. Then I was alone. I stood there as two people. One whose throat was locked into fiery stone, and who could not imagine ever moving again; another who was aware of his iconic stature beside the graves, and also that, a little distance away, people were driving past in cars and listening to the Dixie Chicks and worrying vaguely about money. Both sides of me found the other ridiculous.
I knew that I couldn’t stand there for ever. They wouldn’t expect me to. It would make no sense,