He stepped away from his truck and Jenkins called, “You got your gun?”
That made him smile, and he called back, “Yeah, this time.”
And he called to Edna, “I’m coming in, honey.”
23
V
irgil didn’t know what to expect when he went in, but he went in behind the muzzle of his pistol. At the top of the entry stairs, he saw Edna looking at him from the doorway to the living room. She was dressed from head to foot in a dress that was either dark blue or dark gray, and fell in one line from her neck. She said, “There’s nobody to shoot.”
Virgil said, “Why don’t you come around behind me?”
She shook her head and said, “No, we’re all in here,” and she stepped away into the living room. Virgil expected something weird, in keeping with the rest of the night. Instead of following, he edged backward across the kitchen to the mudroom, made sure there was nobody there, who’d be behind him.
Edna came to the doorway again and watched him as he crossed the kitchen—somebody had been frying chicken, but a while ago, without cleaning up, and he could smell the cold grease. He paused at the dining room door, then stepped through: it was empty, but another arch at the end of the dining room led into the living room. With a last glance at the girl in the doorway, he stepped into the dining room, and she said, to somebody he couldn’t see, “He’s coming. He’s checking the dining room.”
A woman’s voice—Alma Flood’s, Virgil thought—said, “Pull that other chair around for him.” He moved forward slowly, got to the arch, did a quick peek into the living room, then moved into it, still behind the muzzle of his gun.
The room was lit by two lamps and a television that had been muted; it had been tuned to either a religious channel or a history channel, because the show involved a tour of Jerusalem.
Virgil was somewhat behind Alma Flood, who was sitting in her platform rocker, facing Wally Rooney and Emmett Einstadt, who sat in two recliners, which had been dragged around to face her. Both men were leaning back with their feet up. The two girls, Edna and Helen, sat to one side, on dining room chairs. And an empty chair sat next to them.
FLOOD WAS LOOKING at Einstadt and Rooney, but when she heard Virgil’s boots on the floor, she glanced at him and said, “Put the gun down, Virgil. Take a seat.”
“I really don’t have a lot of time for conversation—” Virgil began.
Einstadt snapped, “Sit down, goddamnit, she’s got a shotgun pointed at me.”
Alma was left-handed, Virgil noted, which explained why he hadn’t seen the long gun. She had the butt braced against the back of the chair, under her arm, with her trigger hand by her side, her other hand on the forestock. Not a pump; the gun was a Remington semiauto twelve-gauge. The muzzle was about six feet from Einstadt’s belly. That also explained why the men were sitting the way they were. With their feet up, higher than their hips, they couldn’t move quickly. If Alma really wanted to shoot them, she could.
Virgil asked, “What’s going on?”
“Sit down,” Alma Flood said.
“I don’t want to shoot you, Ms. Flood,” Virgil said. “There’s been enough shooting tonight.”
“Maybe and maybe not,” she said. “But I’ve got this trigger about half pulled, and if you move that gun toward me, I’ll pull it the rest of the way. You’ll be killing two Einstadts with one shot.”
“Sit down, please, sit down,” Rooney whined. Rooney was sweating hard, though the room was cool.
Virgil sat. He kept the gun in his hand, resting on his right leg, and put the radio down between his legs, with the microphone up, and hoped that Schickel and Jenkins and the others could hear it. “What happened here?” he asked.
“From what I hear, you know most of it,” Alma said. “We’re talking about that.”
“We’re having a trial,” Helen said. “Because of Rooney, mostly, but then maybe for Grandfather, too.”
“What’d Rooney do?”
The shotgun barrel swung to Rooney, the muzzle moving a short four or five inches, not nearly enough time for Virgil to do anything even if he’d been prepared. Alma said, “In the World of Spirit, nothing too serious. He took his women, just like the rules say he can. That being me, and then the girls. But as I understand it, under most laws, and maybe even normal Bible laws, we were raped.”
“If you didn’t consent, then it’s rape. If he had sexual relations with the girls, it’s rape whether or not they consented, because they’re too young to give consent,” Virgil said.
“I was taught it was the right thing, from the time I was a boy,” Rooney said, a pleading note in his voice.
Edna said, “We were begging you not to.”
“We was always taught girls need to be broke in,” Rooney said. “It’s not my fault we was always taught that.”
Virgil said to Alma, “Let the law take care of this. If you shoot him, you’re going to go to prison. After what you’ve been through, that hardly seems right.”
“What do you think I’ve been in, for forty-three years?” Alma asked.
Helen said to Virgil, “He took me upstairs and he was so ready, he was like a bull; he pulled all my clothes off and he ripped my blouse, not on the seam, but right across the fabric so I can’t fix it, and it’ll always have a rip in it.”
She was fingering her dress; Virgil said, “That’s not such a big deal anymore, even if it was—”
“We’re only allowed two dresses,” Edna said. “More than that would be vanity.”
Alma said, “What’d he do after he pushed you on the bed?”
“He made me suck on him and then he serviced me, and then he made Edna suck on him and he serviced her, and then he made both of us suck on him, and then he went into me the dirty way.”
Alma asked, “Tell Mr. Flowers how often he did that.”
“Almost every day. He’d hit me, slap me, really hard....” The girl’s voice was rising, as though she were reliving it.
Virgil jumped in and said, “Miz Flood, maybe you shouldn’t be putting the girls through this. They need treatment.”
“I think they do, and I’m sure they’ll get it, that you’ll see to it if I can’t,” Alma said. “But that’s not the question here. The question is Rooney. Now, I’m an old crow, and these men don’t like me as much as they used to, and I won’t tell you what Rooney did to me, but I’ll tell you that he had to work harder to get himself excited than he did with the fresh ones. Didn’t you, Wally?”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry if you didn’t like it. I thought you liked it,” Rooney said.
Alma got angry. “Don’t you go saying that. Don’t you go saying that I liked it. I told you I didn’t like it, I screamed at you that I didn’t like it, and the last time, there was blood, and how in the hell can somebody be bleeding like that, how can you think they’re having a good time?”
“Jake used to do it; I seen him,” Rooney said.
“That’s all you got to say? Jake used to do it? I’ll tell you, Wally, if Jake was here, he’d be sitting right next to you, all three of you like birds on a wire.”
“Don’t shoot me, Alma. Please don’t shoot me. I never meant you any harm,” Rooney said.
The muzzle of the gun never moved, but Alma said to her father, “What do you have to say for him?”
Emmett Einstadt said, “Women are supposed to serve men. That’s why God put them on earth. Rooney might not be the best we got, but he tries hard enough. You’da got used to him if you’d gave him some time.”
She shook her head and said, “I don’t believe I would have. I started out liking Jake, and ended up hating him; I started out hating Rooney. How you could ever give us to him, I’ll never understand. How many times did we say no?”
“I didn’t even know that you said no,” Rooney said. “I’m sorry for what you think I’ve done, I didn’t mean any harm by it. But that’s just nature taking its way.”
Virgil said, “Miz Flood, from what they’ve said, we can take both of them in, and I think I can promise you that they’ll be sent to the state prison forever. When word of this gets out, when a judge and jury hears about this, I mean, they’ll be out of your life. Just as clean as if you killed them; but at least you won’t have to pay for killing them.”
“I’m not exactly getting an eye for an eye, though, am I?” she asked.
VIRGIL’S CELL PHONE RANG. They all jumped, and a smile might have flickered over Alma Flood’s face. She said, “Well, answer it. Or the ringing will drive us crazy.”
Virgil fished the cell phone out of his pocket with his free hand, and said, “Yeah?”
“This is Gene. We can hear you. Jenkins is in that tree in the front yard, looking through the front window. He says he’s got a shot at her, but there’s two panes of glass between them and he can’t guarantee that nobody else would get hurt. He said you and the two girls are in his background. He thinks he can probably miss them, but maybe not. He wants you to say yes or no.”
Virgil said, “No, not yet. Definitely no. I really don’t think that would be appropriate at all. I could probably get that done myself; but, I’m really busy here, so I’ll talk to you later. Okay? Yeah, she’s fine, they’re all fine. Listen, I gotta go. I’ll call you later.”
He clicked off and put the phone back in his pocket.
“That was ridiculous,” Alma Flood said.
“Yes, it was,” Virgil said. “Miz Flood, I’ll tell you what...”
She shook her head and said, “Let me finish something here. Girls. What do you think about Wally? Guilty, or not guilty?”
“Don’t do that to the girls,” Virgil said.
Alma asked, “You know what they say about girls out here, Mr. Flowers? They say, ‘Old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher.’ And that’s what they do.” She turned to her older daughter and said, “Edna, what do you say?”
“Guilty,” the girl said.
Helen nodded, her face solemn, and she said, “Me, too. Guilty.”
“Alma...” Rooney said.
Alma said, “I vote guilty as charged,” and she pulled the trigger.
THE BLAST in the small living room was deafening, and Virgil rocked back away from the flash, almost tipped off his chair, and by the time he recovered, the shotgun was pointing at Einstadt and Alma shouted at Virgil, “Don’t. Don’t move that gun.”
Rooney had been knocked back when the blast hit him in the upper chest, throat, and face, but the recliner chair was tipped back so far that he didn’t slump forward; instead, he sat in the chair and bubbled to death, the last breath squeezed out of his lungs as a bloody foam.
Virgil’s phone rang again and he opened it and said, “I’m okay. Miz Flood just shot and killed Wally Rooney. Everybody sit tight, we’re talking.”
Helen said from her chair, about Rooney, “He looks awful.”
“That’s because your mother just shot him in the face,” Einstadt said. “Look at that. That’s what she’s threatening to do to your grandpa. Shoot him just like a sick horse.”
Edna said, “I like him better this way.”
“He was sick. He was sick in the head,” Alma said. “He needed to be put down, just like you’d do with a sick dog. A dog that’s got rabies.”
“You’ve got rabies,” Einstadt said. “Killing an old friend.”
“It’s time to talk about you, Father,” Alma said. She looked over at Virgil. “I want to be fair, and since you’re the law around here, and you want to do everything proper, I appoint you the defense attorney. You can say what you want in his defense, and I will listen to every word. How’s that for fair?”
“Hell, he wants me dead,” Einstadt said. He wiggled in his chair, and the shotgun muzzle, which had been an inch off line, came up.
VIRGIL WAS LOOKING at Rooney, at the mess that used to be Rooney before Rooney left the building. He thought that he might do a tap dance, stalling for time, because the longer they sat looking at the dead man, the more oppressive the body would become. So he asked, looking at Alma, and then at Einstadt, “How did this happen? How did you get here? I can understand, a hundred years ago, it might be all right to marry off young girls, but even then,
this
wasn’t all right. What happened?”
Alma said, “The church got taken over by perverts, including my own father. And grandfather. I don’t think it was like that before then.”
Einstadt said, “No TV.”
Virgil: “What?”
“Sex was what they had before electricity out here until after World War Two. So every night was dark, or lit by lanterns, and there just wasn’t a hell of a lot to do. Hard to read. They were poor, didn’t have much in the way of musical instruments. In the wintertime, you just couldn’t get anywhere, and everybody in the church was really close. . . . I don’t know when it started, but it might have gone right back to the beginning, in Germany. Exchanging wives and some of the wives were young, like you said. Thirteen. Boys were men when they were fourteen, and set to work. Hell, some famous rock-and-roll star married a thirteen-year-old girl back in the sixties, because it was done even then, wasn’t no hundred years ago....”