Future Home of the Living God(30)

“I’ve got to talk to my mom and dad.”

“That’s another thing.”

“What?”

“I think they’re okay. Sit down.”

“Tell me!”

“Yeah, of course. I went over to your parents’ house because you couldn’t get them on the phone. I just didn’t know how soon we’d get out, if ever, or maybe we’d have to run. I thought I’d better tell your parents you’re okay. So I went up to the door, knocked, and people who didn’t fit how you described your parents answered.”

“Who were they?”

“They were evasive when I asked their names. They asked me in.”

“Did you go?”

“Sure. They were extremely polite. I asked them if they were relatives, what they were doing in the house, and so on. They said that they were taking good care of the house for Sera and Glen until they got back. I asked from where and they got all concerned. Gooey sweet. They were very worried, they said, about the whereabouts of the Songmakers. They had just been going to ask if I knew where the Songmakers were. They were hoping that I had some information on them. I said no and they made a show of being very disappointed. Then they brought in a cake.”

“A cake?”

“A fresh lemon cake. It was very good.”

“You ate the cake?”

“I wanted to know what was happening. It was really like some kind of dream. They kept talking about your parents and how careful they were being with all of their things, how well they were taking care of the ‘beautiful Songmaker residence,’ and how if I should run into them by chance would I let them know that I had seen Glen and Sera and by the way, who was I? What was my relationship to the Songmaker family? How had I met them?”

“What did you say?”

“I used to work for them, a landscaper. I was concerned about their landscaping going to weeds.”

We stood together for a long while, quiet, just breathing. After a while I asked who was in charge. Phil said God. I said that was the most terrifying thing I’d ever heard and he said, “Yeah, me too. That’s why I bought the Bushmaster.”



August 30

Phil is hiding our little arsenal in the basement crawl space and late in the day I go down with him to look at what he has rounded up for our protection. He has laid them neatly on towels, the new ones with their owner’s manuals; he is learning to use each one, cleaning and loading them. There are five weapons. A Rossi handgun, a .38 special with a laser grip that beams a light on the person you’re going to kill so you won’t miss and they’ll have a red second’s warning they’re about to die. He’s got a beat-up 12-gauge pump-action shotgun with six boxes of bird shot and six boxes of deer slugs. Another black, evil-looking 12-gauge that’s the same as the other, only scarier. A high-tech-looking rifle that Phil taps and calls Bushmaster. There’s ammo for it, and last, weirdly, there is an ornamental Custer’s Last Stand Tribute Rifle. It’s in a case with a label on its side.

“Is this for real?”

“Open it.”

I lift the hinges on the case and there it is, cradled in green pseudo-suede.

“Where’d you get this?”

“Where I got ’em all. One of our fellow parishioners is a gun dealer. I bought it off him.”

I take out the rifle and hold it under the light. Both sides are heavily decorated—one has a thick-of-the-action-type engraving of the battle, plus portraits of George Armstrong Custer and his two brothers, Thomas and Boston. On the other side chiefs Gall, Low Dog, Sitting Bull, the Crow scout Curly, plus the only survivor of the Custer command, a gelding named Comanche, are carefully engraved and finished in what looks like real gold.

“I got it cheap because it’s a reproduction, a lever-action ’73 model Winchester. I mean, it works but it’s not that useful.”

“But wow.”

“But wow?”

“I’m having that kind of Old West–type feeling—I think I’m channeling my unknown maybe Lakota father—I could be related to the guys on the Indian-stock side of this gun, you know?”

No answer.

“So you got it for me?”

Phil shrugs. “I don’t know. It was there. He wanted me to have it.”

I put the rifle back in its special display case. Then I touch the barrel of the Bushmaster semiautomatic. Smooth as glass, and warm. It makes me want to puke all of a sudden. I’m in a knot, confused. I actually think I like the Custer’s Last Stand Tribute Rifle.

“Put them away, Phil,” I say. “Get rid of them. You took a vow to do no harm.” But it’s actually me I’m scared about.

He sits back. The guns are scattered between us. He draws a huge breath, holds it, and looks at me. His face twists and I can’t tell—tears? Sweat? A few drops leak down the sides of his cheeks. He blows his breath out fiercely, shakes his head, and keeps working.



August 31

We have decided that we need information as much as anything else, and that Phil will work at the church and return here secretly. If he cannot obtain gasoline to operate the car, it is a four-mile walk. But he finds right away that the city is adapting, the way all cities do. Although there are endless lines when anything from gas to butter appears, people have quickly organized. There are dates and times for everything to sell and trade, and neighborhood centers for information dispersal. There are already clandestine radio broadcasts and wildcat cable and some sketchy wireless internet connections, even a shadowy television signal. Phil brings an old TV and a radio over from the church basement and we check at odd hours—four and five a.m.