Countdown City

EPILOGUE

We all hear it at the same time. It’s the middle of the night and the house comes to life, cops rolling out of bed or leaping off mattresses, jamming guns into the waistbands of sweatpants; cops sticking their heads into the bedrooms crowded with kids, whispering “stay where you are, guys” and “everything’s fine”; cops streaming outside to back up Officers Melwyn and Kelly, who are on porch duty tonight and are therefore the commanding officers on the scene, per our agreed-upon rules of engagement.

“Three sharp crashes,” barks Officer Melwyn, holding his Beretta up against his chest, addressing the group. “On the property or just over the line.”

“We need a team for the south lawn,” says Officer Kelly, everybody nodding, weapons drawn. I’m carrying a SIG Sauer now, the same handgun I used to carry on patrol. We’re breaking into clusters, getting ready to move, when we all hear the noise again: a loud crashing, like metal on metal, and everybody freezes.

“It’s a bear,” says Officer McConnell.

“What?” whispers Melwyn.

“Look. Bear.”

We all look, the group of us, a crowd of cops on a porch in the western woods of Massachusetts at two, maybe three o’clock in the morning, flooded with adrenaline and staring at the massive lumbering figure of a brown bear pawing at the door of the shed. It’s one of our several outbuildings, and it houses blocks of ice, barrels of raw sugar and salt and dried oats, boxes full of iodine tablets and bleach, stores of ammunition and a few pounds of explosives. For a second we are all paralyzed, awed by the burly majesty of the bear. It gives up on the padlocked shed and lopes across the lawn, making its shaggy way back toward the surrounding brush.

“Beautiful,” whispers McConnell.

“Yeah,” I say.

“We should shoot it,” says Capshaw.

No one objects. Officer Capshaw steps down off the porch, a big man with a moon of a head and a buzzed scalp. He aims a rifle in the moonlight and brings down the bear with two quick shots, pop, pop.

Volunteers are asked for to skin and dress the bear, and the rest of us go back to bed.

What the children decided, after much debate and discussion, was that the big converted-barn country house in Furman, almost at the New York state line, should just be called Police House. Some of the younger kids spent a whole afternoon in secret, in the area of the barn designed for arts and crafts, painting an elaborate sign for Police House, with golden badges, arcing rainbows, peace signs, and sparkling silver stars. Among the adults there was intense debate, much to the children’s consternation, about the wisdom of hanging such a colorful display above the eaves of what is, after all, a hideout. I was among the most skeptical. Trish, however, took the kids’ side: “It’s not like we’re inconspicuous anyway, right?”

We are nineteen adults and thirteen kids altogether: all policemen and policewomen and police spouses and the children of police, plus three members of the support staff, including Rod Duncan, the saturnine but beloved ex-con who served as the CPD janitor for twenty-nine years. The children range in age from four to fifteen. Houdini is not the only pet: there are two cats, one rabbit, and a goldfish bowl that was transported effortfully by Officer Rogers’ nine-year-old twins, balanced on laps for two hundred forty miles at ninety miles an hour. There is also a massive sheepdog named Alexander, the property of a patrolwoman named Rhonda Carstairs. Alexander is a shambling old creature with watery eyes and a befuddled expression who, despite being ten times Houdini’s size, follows my dog around like an aide-de-camp.

Despite the size of the house and its attendant outbuildings, sleeping space is limited, and at some point Officer McConnell and I made the mutual decision, with very little discussion, to share a bedroom. I asked her if she felt it was important to have a conversation with Kelli and Robbie about this, maybe offer some delicate explanation of the change, but Officer McConnell said no.

“They like you,” she says. “They’re happy.”

“Are you happy?” I say.

“Well, shit.” She leans against my torso. “As happy as it’s gonna get. How’s the arm?”

“I can feel it. When I poke it, it hurts.”

“So stop poking it.”

This was a Saturday morning, last Saturday—we were standing on the porch watching Kelli and two of the other kids on an improvised parade, with Houdini yipping along beside them like he was Secret Service protection, Alexander shambling behind.

Officer Capshaw and I are the guards on duty, and he is in the woods just past the property line, urinating against a tree, when a slow-moving vehicle appears in the distance, a dim bobbling light a hundred yards or so down the one narrow lane that approaches the house.

I stand up. Houdini stands up, too, tail at a sharp angle, snout pointed out toward the road, toward the strange noise we’re hearing now: the unmistakable clip-clop of hooves along the roadway.

Houdini barks. “I know,” I say. “I know.”

It’s a horse and carriage, appearing out of the darkness as if from the pages of a fairy tale, rattling along the graveled county road toward the house. Perched on the seat is Cortez, grinning, in a top hat, holding the reins of a speckled mare with comical gentility.

“Oh, hello,” he says, reins in the horse and tips his hat. He’s wearing his hair in a loose ponytail, like Thomas Jefferson.

I keep the gun raised. “How did you find me here?”

“You don’t want to know how I got the carriage and the horse?”

“I want to know how you found me.”

“Fine.” Cortez climbs out of his gig and tosses the top hat onto the porch, as if he’s been living here all along and is very happy to be home. “But the horse story is better.”

“Keep your hands where I can see them, please.”

He sighs and obeys, and I ask him again for the story. Turns out there’s a young officer named Martin Porter who was part of the original Furman-house plan but dropped out when he met a girl in Concord who wanted to go to Atlantic City because she’d heard about a countdown party getting going down there. Cortez knew Porter because Porter had a bunch of crystal meth he’d gotten from the evidence room before it was sealed, and Cortez had been selling it for him, fifty-fifty split, to some beach junkies on the Seacoast.

“Anyway, last week Ellen and I had a bit of a disagreement.” Cortez waggles his left hand, and I see in the dim light of our outside torches that the tip of his pointer finger has been shot off. “And she got custody of our Office Depot. Porter tells me about this crazy hideaway in the woods, for policemen only! And I thought to myself: Hey, I know a policeman.”

I am trying to formulate a reaction to some part of this story when Capshaw returns dramatically, bursting out of the woods with his gun drawn and aimed at Cortez.

“Put your hands in the air,” he barks.

“My hands are already in the air.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“It’s okay, Capshaw,” I say. “I know him.”

“I didn’t ask if you know him, I said who is he?”

Capshaw is all keyed up, ready to make an arrest, build a jail and toss this guy in it. He’s red faced, stormy eyed, brow furrowed under his crew cut. His T-shirt says Señor Frog’s Spring Break Fiesta Cancun 1997.

“Hey, you know what you should do?” says Cortez mildly. “Search the carriage.”

Capshaw looks at me and I shrug. He does it, stomps down the porch steps and begins rifling through the carriage while the horse shivers and tosses his head in the darkness. I keep the SIG Sauer pointed at Cortez as he leans against the rail of the porch stair, hands still in the air, unconcerned, humming. “Golden Years.” David Bowie.

“Clothing. Personal effects,” reports Capshaw, zipping closed a small black toiletries bag and tossing it in the dirt.

“There’re Ecstasy pills there, too,” says Cortez, to me, confidentially. “He missed the Ecstasy pills.”

“Cooking oil,” says Capshaw, taking out two big plastic drums. “A box full of magazines.”

“Mostly that is pornography.”

“Knives,” says Capshaw. “More knives.”

Cortez looks at me, winks. “He’ll find it in a second. Don’t worry.”

And then I hear it, a thick rustling sound like quarters in a casino cup. Or beans. My God. Beans tumbling over one another in a foil package. My heart catches in my throat, and Cortez grins. Capshaw looks up in amazement, tosses the bag back and forth in his hands, feeling its weight like recovered pirate treasure.

“Coffee beans,” he says, gaping up at Cortez, who takes his hands down from the air.

“Many hundred pounds of them. You want to know where I got them? It’s a great story.”

Most days, as we get closer to the end, I am content to just be, to wait, to enjoy the company of McConnell and the others, to conscientiously perform the share of tasks that fall to me. And I am usually successful in my efforts to keep my mind focused on the immediate present, on whatever event or requirement comes next—to see not too far into the future, nor too far back into the past.

We tend to get up early, McConnell and I, and it’s morning now, and we’re drinking coffee in the kitchen and looking out the window at the lawn, the sheds, and past that the wooded expanse of the world. The very beginnings of autumn in western Massachusetts, the green trees goldening at their edges. Trish is across the table, telling me about an irritating conversation she had last night with Officer Michelson.

“I’m serious, I was about to fucking strangle the guy,” she says. “Because basically what he was saying is, at this point if it didn’t hit—if there was some last-minute thing, you know, some crazy scenario, like they can blow it up after all, or deflect it, or the religious people pray it out of the sky—Michelson says maybe that would be worse, at this point. You know how he is, sort of smirking, so you don’t know if he’s being serious or not, but he goes, at this point, imagine winding it back. With everything that’s gotten f’ed up, imagine starting over? And I just said, ‘Man, anything is better than death. Anything.’”

“Yeah,” I say, “of course,” and I’m nodding, trying to pay attention, but the moment Trish said the word deflect, my mind exploded with thoughts of Nico: memories of my vanished sister are suddenly everywhere in my head, like invaders pouring across a border. She is four years old and toppling off her bicycle; she is six and staring in confusion at the crowds during the funerals; she is ten and drunk and I am telling her that I will never let her go. The helicopter swoops down to lift me up from blockhouse at Fort Riley, and Nico presses masses of white washcloths into my mess of an arm, tells me it’s going to be okay.

“Hank?”

“Yeah?” I say, blinking.

“You all right?”

In five minutes of talking I tell Trish the whole thing. About Next Time Around, about Jordan and the blonde girl and the computer, about the helicopter. She asks, so I give her what details I remember about the plan itself: the nuclear-standoff blast and the “back reaction”; a sufficient change in velocity with a minimum of ejecta; the secret scientist moldering in the military prison.

“Jesus H. Christ,” says Trish.

“I know.” My coffee is cold. I get up to refill it.

“If the government is so determined to keep this from happening, why didn’t they kill the scientist?”

“Oh, hey,” I say. “Great question. I didn’t even ask that one.”

“Listen, you can’t beat yourself up about it,” murmurs Trish. “If she was going to go, she was going to go.” She had met Nico a couple times over the years—at cop parties, at the station, at my house once or twice.

“Go where?” says Kelli, wandering in in her Sleeping Beauty nightgown.

“Nowhere, honey.”

Kelli is holding hands with her brother, and she opens the pantry to get them snack cakes. Police House follows a strict “kids can eat whatever they want” policy.

“You should go and find her.”

We hadn’t seen Cortez come in. He is standing in the doorway, his expression unusually serious.

“Why?” says McConnell, looking at him. They have yet to make up their minds about each other, these two.

“She’s his sister,” says Cortez. “Can I have one of those, please?”

Kelli hands him a snack cake, and he unwraps it while he talks.

“She is family. She matters to him. Look at him. Everything is different. The asteroid will strike in one and a half months. What if she’s in trouble? What if she needs help?”

Cortez studies me while he bites into the snack cake. McConnell is looking at me, too, her hand on my forearm while I watch the steam rise off my cup.

Yeah, is what I’m thinking. What if?