The Big Dark Sky (4)
Suddenly aware of a new alarming sound, he thrust to his feet and turned and swept the street with his gaze, but he realized that what he heard was his own desperate, ragged breathing. Disbelief gave way to fright and incomprehension. He was terrified, his grip on reality eroding. He faced the unknown, something mysterious, maybe occult. He had no interest in the unknown, no curiosity about it. To hell with the unknown. He wanted his house back. He needed everything to be as it had been throughout the evening: watching slasher movies, drinking beer, and pissing on the roses.
When he had been killing Viola’s rose garden, there had been lights on in a few houses along the street. Now about twice as many neighbors than before appeared to be awake, perhaps roused from bed by the loud hum and the crackling noise. He saw faces at windows. People were watching, wondering. Even in the dark, they could surely see that his house was gone, and they could most likely see him standing alone in the moonlight. Yet none ventured outside to learn what had happened. If he’d been anyone but Harley Spondollar, they might have hurried to the scene with first-aid kits and sympathy, might have set up tables on his lawn and provided casseroles and baked goods for an early we’ll-get-through-this-together breakfast. But he was who he was, and they stayed in their houses. That was all right with Spondollar. He despised the lot of them; there wasn’t one whom he would have invited into his home even when he had a home.
With the piercing wail of approaching sirens, a much-needed sense of reality returned to the night. A fire truck turned the corner, though no fire raged to be fought. Behind the truck came an ambulance with its emergency lights flashing, though no one had been injured. Close on the tail of the EMTs were police in three patrol cars. Spondollar despised cops, whom he considered to be nothing more than the enforcers of a tyrannical system.
None of these first responders had previously seen a house reduced to a mound of small beads. Although they were mystified, they began to wonder if Spondollar had destroyed his own home. He was obviously a victim, not the villain, at least not in this case, but the cops began to doubt him when he said that he’d stepped outside to enjoy the stars just before whatever happened to the house had happened. He couldn’t very well tell them that he’d been pissing on Viola’s roses. Apparently he didn’t strike anyone as a stargazer, for it was this claim that made them suspicious. In the face of the unknown, they strove to deny that anything inexplicable had happened, tried to hammer the fantastic into the mundane. The fact that he was a chemist intrigued them, though he hadn’t worked in that field—or any other—for years. No illegal methamphetamine lab ever exploded without a roar and fire, but they weren’t willing to let go of that ludicrous theory.
He didn’t tell them that he was a chemist. They had learned that on their own, which meant they must have run a background check on him and therefore knew about the embezzlement charge brought against him nine years earlier. He had been guilty, but he’d known worse about his employer than his employer had known about him, so the bastard called a truce.
As if they’d never heard of constitutional rights, the cops moved him from one patrol car to another, trying to keep him off balance, questioning him politely at first, then more aggressively. When he accused them of being fascist vermin, they threatened to take him downtown to grill him further, which they would have done earlier if they hadn’t worried he would demand to have an attorney.
They needn’t have worried about that, because the last thing Spondollar wanted was to put his fate in the hands of a lawyer. He despised lawyers, who in his estimation were unscrupulous ambulance chasers or servants of the ruling class.
They called this patrol-car-to-patrol-car ordeal “crime-scene interrogation in situ,” although there had been no crime, although there had been instead a spectacular eruption of the unknown into an ordinary Oregon night. After more than four hours, just when Harley Spondollar thought they were at last going to take him in and book him on some bogus charge, the mystery man arrived, whereupon the needle on the scale of weirdness pegged out at the top.
Four black Suburbans swept into the street, the kind that the FBI employed in movies, except none was marked with an official insignia or bore license plates. Sixteen agents of some clandestine service, men and women, got out of the vehicles. All were dressed in black suits, white shirts, and black ties. Whoever these people were, they outranked the guys in uniforms. Spondollar was escorted to a Suburban by an attractive blond newcomer with eyes as gray as brushed steel. “The worst is over, Mr. Spondollar. Everything will be made right.” She sounded as insincere as any politician. She left him alone in the front passenger seat. The patrol cars departed.
Maybe two minutes later, a moving van arrived and parked in front of the lot on which Spondollar’s house once stood. Men in black boots and black uniforms, again lacking insignia, spilled out of the big truck, while the agents in suits departed in pairs to all the houses on that block, with what intention Spondollar could only surmise. Soon the men in uniforms were erecting an eight-foot-tall chain-link construction fence around the property, with fabric sheeting that prevented the curious from seeing anything beyond.
In the last minutes of darkness, as these busy worker bees finished installing an opaque gate across Spondollar’s driveway, a white Suburban arrived. It cruised through the gate, around the great mound of finely rendered debris to which the house had been reduced, out of sight onto the backyard. One of the construction crew closed the gate and stood beside it as if on guard.