Connor thinks it over. Suddenly he laughs and lifts his chin. His face is almost in profile, and his eyes are shining with excitement, and his mouth is open slightly. Jack sees something, a quality of his cousin he has never before observed, but which he supposes was always there: stupidity.
“Can you imagine!” Connor says, and claps his hands—bang! “There’ll be pieces of them falling three states away. It’ll be raining chunks.”
“There’ll be pieces of them knocked into orbit,” Hank agrees.
Connor bows his head to examine the maps once more. When he speaks again, his voice is somber. “You’ll look after Beth?”
“I already do.”
“That’s right. Yes, you do. Better than I can.” This last is said with a certain bitterness.
“Shhh. What got done to you over in the sand was a crime—but you didn’t come home any less of a man. You came home more of a man, and little Bethy knows it. Beth knows what you can do, and so do I. Someday everyone will know.”
Connor straightens. “I wish we were doing it tomorrow.”
“The big regional ATF assembly is in October. That’s soon enough.”
“If we have till October. If she didn’t tell anyone.”
“She didn’t.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“I am, though. I’m sure of it. Beth got everything out of her. Bloom knew what would happen if we got raided by the feds again. She knew it would be like putting a gun to her son’s head. I warned her. I told her more than once. I said if they came, I wouldn’t hesitate—I’d put the boy in the ground myself before I let the law take him away from me. No. She was crazy, Connor. But she wasn’t stupid.”
Jack’s glass slips. His fingers tighten on it before it can drop to the tiles.
He sets his glass down very carefully in the stainless-steel sink and flies back to his bed, like the shadow of an owl moving across a moon-washed field.
9.
He can’t sleep. At ten to five he is up again and outside, legs trembly and stomach spoiled.
The sky shines a soft marigold. A streaming mist shimmers above the long, sloping fields, where green stalks of wheat are just beginning to prod their way out of the earth. He thinks he ought to pass a word with Bloom about what he’s heard and walks in bare feet through the wet grass, all the way out to the family graveyard. He lets himself in through the wrought-iron gate, beaded with dew, and finds her grave, and sinks to his knees before it. The mums are coming up in bunches of oily green stalks, with broad dark leaves. No sign of flowers. Not yet. They need a little more time before they’re ready to blossom.
He can’t think about the rest of it now: something about the ATF, something about what happened to Connor in Afghanistan, where he was almost killed by friendly fire, victim of a drone strike operated by his own government. What happened to Connor below the belt is never discussed, but Jack knows the missing leg is not the worst of it. He has seen Connor with his pants down, has seen the scarred stump of his penis, a horrible thing with no head.
I’d put the boy in the ground myself before I let the law take him away from me. That thought goes off in Jack’s mind again and again, and each time it is like a gunshot, bullet to the head. That and: Beth got everything out of her. There are shades of meaning in this declaration that Jack doesn’t want to examine.
He has to do something with the sick, ugly energy coursing through him. It feels like if he doesn’t break something, he’ll puke, but there’s nothing breakable in arm’s reach, so instead he grabs a fistful of stalks protruding from the ground.
The roots of the mum are embedded surprisingly deep, have an astonishing grip on the soil. He grits his teeth and pulls, and the dirt begins to fall away. It’s almost as if the green stalks are attached to some absurdly heavy gourd. He pulls—shuts his eyes—pulls harder—and opens his eyes—and can’t scream because there’s no air left in his lungs.
He has pulled a head out of the ground.
Not a whole head. Only the top part, from the bridge of the nose up. It is a woman’s face. No—more than that. It is his mother’s face, though her skin is greenish and waxy and her hair isn’t hair at all, but long,