into the background again.
We had matches, of course, and salt (someone said vaguely that he had heard salt was the thing to put on bloodsuckers and things like that); and all kinds of O‘Cedar mops and long-handled brooms. Most of the people continued to look heartened, and Jim and Myron were too plotzo to sound a dissenting note, but I met Ollie’s eyes and saw a calm hopelessness in them that was worse than fear. He and I had seen the tentacles. The idea of throwing salt on them or trying to fend them off with the handles of O’Cedar mops was funny, in a ghastly way.
“Mike,” Miller said, “why don’t you crew this little adventure? I want to talk to Ollie and Dave here for a minute. ”
“Glad to.” Hatlen clapped Dan Miller on the shoulder. “Somebody had to take charge, and you did it good. Welcome to town.”
“Does this mean I get a kickback on my taxes?” Miller asked. He was a banty little guy with red hair that was receding. He looked like the sort of guy you can’t help liking on short notice and—just maybe—the kind of guy you can’t help not liking after he’s been around for a while. The kind of guy who knows how to do everything better than you do.
“No way,” Hatlen said, laughing.
Hatlen walked off. Miller glanced down at my son.
“Don’t worry about Billy,” I said.
“Man, I’ve never been so worried in my whole life,” Miller said.
“No,” Ollie agreed, and dropped an empty into the beer cooler. He got a fresh one and opened it. There was a soft hiss of escaping gas.
“I got a look at the way you two glanced at each other,” Miller said.
I finished my Hershey bar and got a beer to wash it down with.
“Tell you what I think,” Miller said. “We ought to get half a dozen people to wrap some of those mop handles with cloth and then tie them down with twine. Then I think we ought to get a couple of those cans of charcoal lighter fluid all ready. If we cut the tops right off the cans, we could have some torches pretty quick.”
I nodded. That was good. Almost surely not good enough—not if you had seen Norm dragged out—but it was better than salt.
“That would give them something to think about, at least,” Ollie said.
Miller’s lips pressed together. “That bad, huh?” he said.
“That bad,” Ollie agreed, and worked his beer.
By four-thirty that afternoon the sacks of fertilizer and lawn food were in place and the big windows were blocked off except for narrow loopholes. A watchman had been placed at each of these, and beside each watchman was a tin of charcoal lighter fluid with the top cut off and a supply of mop-handle torches. There were five loopholes, and Dan Miller had arranged a rotation of sentries for each one. When four-thirty came around, I was sitting on a pile of bags at one of the loopholes, Billy at my side. We were looking out into the mist.
Just beyond the window was a red bench where people sometimes waited for their rides with their groceries beside them. Beyond that was the parking lot. The mist swirled slowly, thick and heavy. There was moisture in it, but how dull it seemed, and gloomy. Just looking at it made me feel gutless and lost.
“Daddy, do you know what’s happening?” Billy asked.
“No, hon,” I said.
He fell silent for a bit, looking at his hands, which lay limply in the lap of his Tuffskin jeans. “Why doesn’t somebody come and rescue us?” he asked finally. “The State Police or the FBI or someone?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think Mom’s okay?”
“Billy, I just don’t know,” I said, and put an arm around him.
“I want her awful bad,” Billy said, struggling with tears.
“I’m sorry about the times I was bad to her.”
“Billy,” I said, and had to stop. I could taste salt in my throat, and my voice wanted to tremble.
“Will it be over?” Billy asked. “Daddy? Will it?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and he put his face in the hollow of my shoulder and I held the back of his head, felt the delicate curve of his skull just under the thick growth of his hair. I found myself remembering the evening of my wedding day. Watching Steff take off the simple brown dress she had changed into after the ceremony. She had had a big purple bruise on one hip from running into the