the lot and keys a message into the driver-side door:
BEAR MACE.
She heads back inside.
* * *
She has a whole plan concocted where she’s going to sneak into the administration office and Shane’s going to run interference because everybody there knows him and loves him and then she’s going to use someone’s computer or get into a file cabinet and find home addresses for both John Elvis and Mitchell, but Shane tells her that plan is dumb.
“Haven’t you ever used the Internet?” he asks.
He shows her that, if you know on what digital door to knock, you can find out pretty much anything. Finding out addresses is, according to him, “Easy like Sunday morning,” which she’s pretty sure is a Lionel Ritchie reference and strange coming out of Shane’s big round head. But then he reminds her that she knew the reference, which makes her strange, too.
“My Daddy used to like him,” she says.
Regardless, they get the addresses. John Elvis doesn’t live all that far from her. Mitchell’s way on the other side of town. Deep past the first ring of suburban houses. Up in the wretched nest of mini-mansions on Gallows Hill. The Internet doesn’t have more information on John Elvis, but it has some more of the 411 on Mitchell: his father’s Orly Erickson, and he along with most of the other mini-mansion inhabitants, is a transplant. Not from local farm-stock but rather, comes here from Dayton, Ohio. Heads up some new “biologics plant” north of here, in Springtown. Some 50,000 foot facility. TNC Biologics. She’s not sure what biologics is, so Shane works more Google-fu.
“Looks like TNC does all kinds of stuff,” he says. “Recombinant DNA. Stem cells. Vaccines.”
She shrugs. Fine. The elder Erickson is a productive member of the business community. His son’s still a gay-bashing bully piece of shit and he has to be taught a lesson.
Still, though: those mini-mansions at Gallows Hill are a gated community.
Which means the first order of business is paying a visit to John Elvis Baumgartner.
* * *
It’s Saturday when they head over there. Chris drives: he’s got his mother’s mini-van, a 1996 Chevy Lumina whose front-end calls to mind the monorail at Disney World, a place Atlanta hasn’t been to for well over ten years but that she still remembers like it was yesterday.
Shane sits in the back, ensconced in a cocoon of kiddy toys. Chris isn’t an only child. He’s got two little brothers and one little sister, all eight years old and under. Atlanta’s not sure if both of his parents are really each his parents or if there’s a remarriage thing that went on. Figures it’s not worth it to ask.
She’s up front. The shotgun in her lap. The barrel cracked in half, just waiting for a shell—of which she has many rattling around the pocket of her camo pants.
John Elvis Baumgartner lives further out than even she. Up Mill Road, past the “clean Amish.” Left on Wagon Hollow, past the so-called “dirty Amish.” (There exists this notion that a subset of the local Amish are somehow of a lower class than their peers. Atlanta thinks it smacks of prejudice, but she has to admit that the dirty Amish do live on properties that look rotten and run-down. Old barns. Uncut lawns.) Finally, up the winding Indian Run Road, past the Blissful Acres Trailer Park, whose acres are blissful only in the heads of the meth addicts that frequent the place.
All the way at the end is the farm on which John Elvis lives. Sits at the base of Grainger Hill. The poor, podunk side. Gallows for the rich. Grainger for the poor. Maker’s Bell sitting smack in the middle.
They park on Indian Run road, off to the side. The farm sits down a long straight driveway, not all too different from Atlanta’s own house. The barn is brown, not red, and has a roof that looks like it could come tumbling down at any point. The house is a smaller affair: water-stained buttercream siding, a seafoam green wraparound porch whose paint is seen peeling even from here. The fields around are not fallow: they’re freshly tilled for planting, in contrast to the rest of the property, which looks dried up and forgotten. Must be that someone else rents the fields from the Baumgartner family.
A dog lays chained out front to a tractor tire. Snoozing.
They hear music, though one might not strictly call it that. It’s a clamor of guitars, a speed-pulse of bass drum and inconsistent