Blackout

7

My mission, as it was, had been a complete failure. My wife was still missing and I hadn’t been able to alert the authorities or get help of any kind. All I brought back with me were new fears.

It calmed me to see Piccamore.

It was alive with flashlight beams and battery-powered lanterns. Candles were burning inside houses. There was activity and I knew Al had really lit a fire under a lot of asses to get people motivated like that, especially in the middle of the night. The best thing was that there was a patrol car parked in front of my house. I felt instantly relieved. I sighed as I pulled to a stop.

Al was there along with Billy and Bonnie Kurtz and Ray Wetmore. I caught sight of half a dozen other neighbors in the glow of a lantern. Paula Renfew was there, so were David and Lisa Ebler and their boys. I passed by them and went over to Al and the cop. He was a big bull of a fellow with a bald head and a neck like a pine stump. He introduced himself as Sergeant Frankovich and began pelting me with questions.

“So, you can’t say that she did go outside,” he said.

“Well, she had to,” I told him, “since she’s not in the house. And the back door was open.”

“Sure,” he said. He entered the pertinent stuff on an iPad and looked around in the darkness. “This is a mess. A real mess.”

“How long do you think it’ll be until the power’s back on?” Bonnie Kurtz asked him.

In the glow of Al’s lantern, he looked at me and I saw something in his eyes that seemed to say, never. He smiled at Bonnie and told her he did not know. She complained that she had a freezer full of meat and there was going to be hell to pay if it all went bad.

“If it goes bad,” Billy said, “we’ll buy some more. Quit your yapping already. We got bigger fish to fry here.”

She came over to me and clutched my arm. “I’m so sorry, Jon,” she said. “We’re all worried sick about Kathy. I know she’ll turn up. She has to.”

The way she said it made me think she didn’t believe it would happen at all. The tone of her voice was reserved for funerals when you told the widow what a good man her husband was and how the world was a worse place for his absence. I didn’t blame Bonnie because I felt very much like a widower. I didn’t honestly think I was going to see Kathy again either and my greatest concern was not for what I had possibly lost but how I was going to tell Erin that her mother was gone. I would call Italy only when I was certain there was no hope.

And then I thought: And who’s to say all this is localized? Maybe it’s national or even fucking global.

But I wasn’t going there. Not just yet. I didn’t really know what was going on and I wasn’t about to charge into any of it with a defeatist attitude, despite the fact that my optimism was bottomed out and dragging its feet.

Iris Phelan was there in her bathrobe demanding to know what was being done about it all and asking Frankovich if he would look for her missing cat.

“Mitzy is always there when I open the door but she wasn’t there tonight,” Iris said. “I don’t like it. It’s not right.”

Billy Kurtz told her not to worry. “Cats are smart, Mrs. Phelan. Don’t worry. Once the hubbub has died down, she’ll come back. Cats are like that.”

“Sure,” Bonnie said.

Ray Wetmore was blaming it all on the ineffectiveness of the town fathers. He told anyone that would listen—and nobody wanted to—that if he was on the board, an outage like this would have been taken care of “lickety-split.” “See,” he lectured, “the problem is accountability. Those bums on the council want to sit on their fat white behinds and rake in the cash from their rich benefactors. They don’t want change. They don’t want to take action. The idea of stirring the waters of the status quo gives them the cold sweats. That’s why they don’t want me involved in the process and have fought tooth-and-nail to keep me out. I’m progressive. I embrace change. I thumb my nose at the rich and their underhanded scheming. I’m for the people. I’m for the majority. I’m a man of action that demands accountability!”

“Here, here,” Billy Kurtz, who was half in the bag, said. Ray was the only one that didn’t catch the sarcasm beneath his words that was so thick you could have sliced it like cheese.

Ray was getting worked up. “The power should be on by now! If I was on the council—and you can bet your sweet fucking bippy that I’m going to be, hell yes—I would demand to know what’s going on! I would demand to know why action hasn’t been taken! I would personally crawl down the throat and up the ass of everyone from the super of the electric company to the guy throwing the switches at the power plant! Every lineman and every desk jockey at city hall would know my name and when they saw me coming, brother, they’d know I meant business!”

“Praise Jesus!” Billy said, toasting him with his beer.

Frankovich looked stunned. It was easy enough to see by his face that he was of the mind they had enough goddamn trouble downtown without Ray Wetmore getting involved.

“Well, I’m sure everyone is doing everything they can,” he said.

“I hope they are,” Ray told him. “God in heaven, I hope they are.”

Billy belched. “You tell him, Ray! You give it to him! Amen, brother!”

“Knock it off,” Bonnie said to him. “Just knock it off, you idiot.”

He saluted her and belched again.

Frankovich said he had to get back to the station, fielding about a dozen questions as he walked to his patrol car. I caught him before he got in and he complained to me how the radio wasn’t working.

“I was just down there,” I told him. “There’s no one. There’s nothing.”

“Mr. Shipman, I want you to relax. We’re going to do everything we can to find your wife. People just don’t disappear into thin air except on TV. I’ll get the wheels rolling on this.”

“You don’t understand. There’s no people downtown. They’re all gone.”

In the light coming from inside the car, I could see his face was pinched and sweaty. “It’s going to work out, Mr. Shipman. One way or another, it’s going to work out.”

“No, you don’t get it. You don’t understand—”

He hopped in the patrol car and pulled away and I knew then it wasn’t that he didn’t understand, he just didn’t want to understand. He was going through the motions because he really didn’t know what else to do. What I sensed in him I sensed in the others. Instinctively, and perhaps psychically, their backs were up. They were feeling something they could not adequately put a name to and it was easier to pretend business as usual than to face the dark truth of what was closing in around them. God knew I felt it, too. It was thrumming inside me like electricity. I could almost feel the noose that encircled us gradually being tightened.

There was a flash of light behind me and I turned quickly, only to discover that Al Peckman had dragged his portable fire pit out into the front yard. Flames were burning bright in it. It threw a lot of light and a lot of warmth. It was very comforting. The Ebler boys had hauled over a nice stack of wood. Everyone pushed closer into the ring of light.

“Hey, might as well turn a bad thing into a good thing,” Al said, dragging out a cooler of beer and pop. “Who’s for roasting marshmallows and burning a couple weenies?”

“I’m already there,” Billy Kurtz said, helping himself to a beer.

A lot of beers made the rounds at that moment. There’s nothing more soothing to the human beast than the protection of fire and the mellow buzz of alcohol. I stood off in the darkness with Bonnie, not knowing what to think. I found myself studying the faces of everyone in the firelight. In the flickering orange glow, they stared into the flames, lips drawn into straight lines. They did not speak and they did not move. These were the faces of savages looking at the only true god they had ever known—the one that lit their world, kept the beasts at bay, and cooked their meat. They were transfixed by it, pulled together by its light and heat. Now that technology had failed, they returned to the old god of fire to keep the shadows away.

“I got an idea,” Billy Kurtz said. “Let’s make a picnic of it. Have ourselves a regular clambake. Let’s get some picnic tables out here and a couple more fire pits. We got a lot of steaks and chops that are going to go bad if the juice don’t come back on soon, so let’s eat our fill.”

Everyone else loved the idea. People were talking and laughing again. They were released from their grip of superstitious terror. They all thawed and got into the spirit of things. All except for me. I was seeing beyond it all and maybe thinking too deeply, but what they were doing seemed like some kind of festival to propitiate the pagan gods of darkness. I was probably reading too much into it, but maybe not.

“Are you in the mood for a party, Jon?” Bonnie asked me.

“No, not in the slightest.”

“Me either.”

I wasn’t in the mood for much at all. I was thinking of Kathy and I was thinking of Erin in Italy. I couldn’t think of anything else. I had to do something. I couldn’t just sit there hoisting beers and gnawing on T-bones and chops while my world crumbled around me. Besides, there was no room for food in my belly. It felt like a great brick of dread had settled in there.

The party never really got going because we saw lights coming in the distance and then there was a horrendous crash and the festivities ground to a halt.