his words almost running together while tears run down his cheeks. “I went in to see what it was, and a man tried to grab me. A man in a black helmet and a flak jacket, and he had a gun. He tried to grab me, and I hit him in the neck, I . . . I . . .”
Jack produces the blood-sticky trowel in one shaking hand, holds it out for a moment, and lets it drop to the floor.
“I think I killed him, Dad,” Jack says.
His father turns off the water and grabs for a towel.
“Did it say anything on the flak vest?” his father asks.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Jack moans. “I think . . . I think it said ATF? Dad, there’s more of them out there. I saw two other black helmets in the corn, and, Dad, oh, Dad, Beth came to look for me, and I think they got her,” Jack says, all breathless. “I heard her shout.”
His father pushes past him. In the bedroom he grabs his jeans off the floor and steps into them, cinches his belt. The Glock is in its holster as always. Jack put it back after unloading the magazine.
“Dad, I don’t think any of the other men in the corn know about the one I stabbed, I don’t think they’ve found his body yet, but what’s going to happen when they do?” His voice rises to a keening wail, and his whole body is shaking. It isn’t hard to feel sick with grief. His mother is in the dirt, and she’s not even a plant either, just food for plants. His mother is never coming back. Also, Jack’s brain itches. He has been wondering in the last few moments if there might be ants in his head. It’s been itching ever since he finished murdering Beth.
“What’s going to happen,” his father says, “is we’re going to put a hurt on them like they never knew they could be hurt. But first we need the guns in the barn.”
He doesn’t bother with a shirt or shoes but plunges out of the room in nothing more than his jeans, leaving behind a cloud of steam and Ivory soap smell. Ivory soap, not geranium-scented hotel-room soap. Maybe the crazy old thing at the farm stand was just a crazy old thing, not his hundred-year-old witchy grandmother come to give him magic seeds so he could grow a new mum. Maybe there is nothing in the garden but dirt and roots and plants and Beth’s corpse and a piglet Jack himself slaughtered in his sleep.
But Bloom McCourt didn’t drink, not anymore, and the sliding glass door in her hotel room didn’t lock, and Jack knows what he smelled on Beth’s hands. He didn’t dream that. His father sent Beth to visit Bloom as a sympathetic friend, to find out who she might’ve told about the explosive materials in the barn. Once Beth made sure Bloom hadn’t told anyone, she smashed his mother’s head in, and watched her drown, and planted the empty bottles of gin. Jack might suffer from night terrors, but not idiocy, and the facts have been in front of him for some time now.
Jack hurries after his father. As Hank crosses the porch, he grabs the clapper in the old rusted dinner bell and gongs it, once, twice, a third time: the signal for a raid.
His father crosses the dirt apron in front of the farmhouse, angling toward the barn. He doesn’t seem to notice that Jack has moved the F-150. As Hank reaches the big double swinging doors, Jack sees Connor coming up the road, moving in a jerky, hopping stride, his eyes wild and his shirt unbuttoned, a hunting rifle in both hands.
“What . . . ?” Connor cries.
“They’re here,” Jack’s father says. “It’s happening. They’ve got Beth, so she’s out of it. We move quick enough, we can cut through them like a knife through butter, shoot our way through their line and get to the east side of Long Field. The old Jeep is parked in the corn shed. We could be in Iowa by lunch. There’s plenty of men in the movement who will hide us. But we need the guns buried under the tractor.”
“Fuck!” Connor says, and staggers into the darkness of the barn.
His father yanks himself up into the John Deere. Connor hurries to the air compressor, flips it on, and grabs the big post-hole digger. They can have their