GAVIN HAD BEEN SLEEPING POORLY. HE BLAMED IT ON THE SUMMER heat and the dry air. So many weeks without rain and the country was baked down to its thinnest parts. Some of the men would go up to the lake in the afternoons to cool off on the beaches and banks and drink cans of beer, but that had never held much appeal for him. Though he was glad to have these young men with their energy and belief in what he was doing, he never felt truly joined to them. He preferred the occupation of a hermit, took his contentment from important moments of solitude.
No hour was more meaningful and lonesome than the middle of the night. He knew many engaged their greatest fears and anxieties when waking at some insomniac hour, but it was never that way with him. Time froze when he awoke and could not go back to bed. Everything aligned and took on firmer substance. It wouldn’t be really truthful to say that he suffered sleeplessness as much as endured it as one endures a temporary ailment before rising to greater strength.
He realized that he had taken a preoccupation to bed with him earlier in the evening. Though he’d not consciously registered it at the time, he carried it into his dreams and wrestled with it there in dissolving and occluded images. The stories he’d read on the message boards, the soft blue glow of the computer screen like some pale lamp on his mind.
There had been a change in the Batman fan fictions he was reading and he couldn’t understand what about that change gripped him so intensely. What was strange about it was how much he disliked the direction the new tales had taken. He had been upset that the vigilante, The Emasculator, had been written off casually, being dispatched with little more than a few indifferent descriptions of a quick and clinical death when Bruce Wayne had trampled him under the hooves of his horse on a deserted road and crushed the former slave’s spine. There were no final words between the foes, no satisfying collision that typified their mutual hate. Instead, it was if the writer had simply lost interest in their relationship and couldn’t be bothered with the trappings of suspense. It made Gavin angry to have become so invested in the outcome and then to be emotionally cheated.
But that anger then became confounded when the next story featured a different kind of villain for Batman to face. Her name was The Dreamkeeper and her powers were far more insidious that anything The Emasculator had ever been able to wield. She was a former slave who one day appeared at Wayne’s war-scarred mansion and offered her services. He had taken her on as a matter of philanthropy without thinking much of it until she had begun appearing to him in a starkly different form during violent nightmares. Though the woman was meager of flesh and bone, in the dream world she was immense and commanding. More animal than woman, and more avenging spirit than either. She towered above Wayne, becoming a titan that struck a primitive and impotent fear in him, so that even when he woke and walked the length of his plantation during the day, he shrunk from the sight of the small shuffling woman. He began to doubt himself and withdrew from his commitment to the Virginians he had sworn to protect, a mere shadow of his former heroism.
It was then that The Dreamkeeper began to speak to him. She no longer loomed in the same sinister way. Now, she reduced herself in his presence, invited him to approach her. He did so, though not through an act of self-directed will so much as if he were drawn to her through some psychological magnetism or spell of witchcraft. Regardless of how the distance was bridged, she and Wayne now entered into a diabolical intimacy wherein she revealed the extent of her weird abilities.
She told him that she could grant any wish he might have, that it would indeed become the literal truth of the waking world, though he would never be able to witness the fulfilment of the desire with his own eyes. Wayne, under the delusions of his fever dream, did not question the consequences, and immediately cried out for his parents to be allowed to live once more. The Dreamkeeper smiled broadly and announced that it was done.
As soon as Wayne woke he could hear the sounds of conversation downstairs, and he recognized his father’s booming laughter and his mother’s measured tones. He did not rush down at once to see them. Instead, he absorbed their presence, these living ghosts that had been brought back into his life. He did not even fear the strange magic that had allowed the past to be rewritten.
He gradually dressed, stood before his long mirror and contemplated his own middle-aged appearance. He wondered what his father would make of him now that he had a son older than he. What his father would think of him when he learned of his dual identity and how the two halves had sought to solve the riddle of darkness, both outer and inner.
He went unhurriedly down the stairs so that his parents could hear him, could prepare themselves for their reunion. But as he rounded the balustrade and entered the hallway that would take him to the dining room, he heard them recede, their footsteps carrying them with great swiftness toward the back of the house. He paused, tried to make sense of their sudden flight, but when he went on to find them deeper in the gloom of the house they once more eluded him, their banter carrying in from the verandah. Wayne then bitterly recognized the meaning of The Dreamkeeper’s words and sat down to a solitary breakfast brought to him by the old slave woman, her rheumatic gait belying this new power she held over him.
“You will never see them, Master. Never!”
Gavin closed the laptop, sat there in the room with all of its silent darkness, let time break over his strange and furious helplessness.
THE FOLLOWING week a notice was put in the paper that the county commission would be holding a special meeting behind Rhineman’s BBQ, a place just at the edge of Elizabethton that backed up to the Doe River. It was described as a gathering to “hear public concern,” which doubtless referred to the story about Gerald Pickens. Gavin had been curious how the board would play its next move and now here they had.
The evening of the meeting he brought two of the men who had been in the car when Pickens had opened fire. Harrison had intended to come as well but had some business out of town that prevented it. These two were both Southern boys who did no favors for breaking stereotypes. Big and dull-featured, with cropped hair and a propensity for elaborately incorrect grammar. Still, they were material witnesses to what had happened and their attendance would be an uncomfortable reminder.
There was a sign out front advertising the event, white Christmas lights strung up in the trees. Reminded him of a Sunday afternoon picnic more than a civic meeting, which was exactly the point, he realized. Show that they had nothing to apologize for. A hard stone of resentment began to form somewhere deep inside Gavin’s throat.
Gavin and his men found folding chairs under the limb of a big dogwood tree, sat and watched as the community members began to arrive. Most of them stopped off at the long table where the commissioners stood serving out heaping platefuls of pork barbeque, ears of corn and cornbread baked in cupcake tins. All on the house, they told everybody as they smiled those political smiles of theirs, steam rising from the spoons.
Once the seats had filled and everyone had begun eating, the commissioner chairman went up to a stand where a microphone was lying. He fumbled with it a minute, asked if they all could hear them, which they could.
“It’s a mighty pretty night out here tonight, isn’t it?”
A few voices agreed that it was.
“I appreciate everybody coming out on an evening like this. First, I’d like to say, as the chairman of the board I’m proud to belong to a place that has folks in it that care about their government, about the details of what goes on with the people they elect. I want to let you all know too that we’ve got someone out in the audience with a microphone so that if you have questions you want to ask, we all will be able to hear you. This is meant to be a time when all voices are heard.”
He kept talking like that for a while, speaking expansively of very little while the crowd chewed and gazed on. After a while though, one older man sitting up near the front waved his hand for the microphone. A girl who worked for the restaurant brought it over.
“Come on, Jack. We’re down here to hear the straight damn story about Gerald. You’ve already been elected. We don’t need to hear a stump speech tonight.”
Several people laughed.
“Sir,” the chairman responded tightly, “would you mind saying your name so everyone has a chance to know who holds the floor.”
The old man laboriously came to his feet. He was wearing overalls and a Bank of America ball cap. He briefly turned to the crowd, said, “I’m Jim Turner. Own Turner Feed Store just this side of Warlick.” He faced the table where the rest of the commission sat, pointed and said, “Tell us, Gerald. Did you shoot at those boys like it said you did in the paper?”
The old man leaned to one side to listen to something one of the other commissioners spoke into his ear before he said, “I did discharge a firearm on my property.”
A ripple of astonishment went through the rows.
“Well, you got anything to add to that?” Turner asked.
“Yes, sir. I did so as an act of conscience.”
“Godamighty man. Well, in that case I’ve got a question for the sheriff. And that’s why you weren’t locked UNDER the jail?”
The crowd made a restless and confused sound as several independent and contrary comments sounded.
“There weren’t any charges filed by the district attorney,” Commissioner Dixon broke in. “As a result of that action, the board has come forward to declare its support for Commissioner Pickens. We are proud to take a stand in an issue the board believes deeply matters.”
“A stand in support of criminal assault!” a voice shrieked above the general clamor.
Gavin turned at the sudden cry to see the journalist Sealy had come to his feet. The girl with the microphone circled around to the back and handed it to him.
“Karl Sealy, general assignment reporter for The Carter Citizen. Can you explain why the board is not demanding the resignation of a member of its committee for blatantly disregarding the law and in effect committing assault with a deadly weapon? Can it explain how this isn’t a textbook case of small-town corruption!”
A few people bristled at Sealy’s concluding sentence. Dixon took the commissioners’ microphone and smiled.
“Mister Sealy, where are you from?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“It’s just that I’m trying to figure what constitutes a small town to your mind?”
“Not that it matters, but I’m from Atlanta. North Atlanta.”
“There’s some nice places in North Atlanta. I’ve heard the Braves just built themselves a billion-dollar stadium down there in Cobb County.”
“Can you please answer the question, Commissioner Dixon?” Sealy demanded, his face coloring with heat.
“Well, I’ll tell you something I’ve learned about corruption in my time serving this community, the community where I grew up and came back to after my time away, being educated in the ways and means of a metropolis. Down there in your native land, as a matter of fact, where I studied at Emory. It’s far more common to allow corruption take root in a city so large that people don’t take the time to greet one another when they pass on the street. More common to let corruption thrive when an ideology is allowed to prevail without understanding its eventual human cost. More common for ambition to override empathy too, even in a field in ostensible support of the principles of democracy. A field such as journalism, for example. Whereas, people that commit to service in small towns do so because they can see the result of their good work. The quality of life is appreciable. So, if you want to challenge our decision as a body as a result of something that issues from corruption, I’m simply going to have to assume you don’t truly understand the meaning of the word. Nor, do I think, do you understand the meaning of good civic-mindedness.”
A few shouted their approval and clapped. Sealy stammered something about serving the best interests of the public before he slumped back in his seat. Gavin put his hand up in the air and the girl handed him the mic. He stood and introduced himself.
“Mister Chairman, it’s a pleasure to have the chance to address the board once again. And I’m glad to hear Commissioner Dixon raise this issue of civic responsibility. The people who live in the Little Europe community wholeheartedly agree and abide by the tenets of said responsibility. If we did not, these circumstances would be quite different, as many of you in this gathering might be able to imagine. It’s true that no criminal charges were filed because I was under the impression that there was a misunderstanding on the part of Commissioner Pickens. Perhaps this was due to some age-related cognitive impairment or some other set of circumstances that I simply didn’t understand. Regardless, it was my impression that the best thing for the county at large would to allow the board to self-police, to keep things out of the strict eye of the law. I thought this because as newcomers to the area, we want to be a force for good, for stability. We have tried to reinforce this commitment by our participation in the highway cleanup, an initiative that was blocked by this same governing body for undisclosed reasons, though it seems clear now that it is a simple matter of personal grievance. The actions of the board tonight do nothing to dispel that. I must say too in light of tonight’s declaration of support for Commissioner Pickens that I feel a very clear threat to the safety of those who live in the Little Europe community has been signaled. And I would like it to be fully understood that such threats, physical or otherwise, will be met in the strongest possible terms.”
Half a dozen people came to their feet. One bearded man in a pair of cargo shorts and an unzipped fishing vest said that he was itching to knock a Nazi on his goddamn ass. Chairman Hogan pleaded for a semblance of order so that everyone had a chance to speak their piece, but the meeting was busted wide open by then. People surged out from the rows, chairs knocked askew and toppled over as they argued and jabbed accusing fingers at one another. Hogan finally gave up and set the microphone down. As he did so it rolled from the table top and the speakers squealed. The girl from the restaurant rushed to switch the amplifier off. Randy Travis then came over the speakers singing about endless amens.
Someone threw their Styrofoam cup at Gavin and then a throng of people stepped in front of him, some shouting threats and others encouragement. He told his men that it was time to go. By the time they had cleared the front parking lot and made it to the car where Jonathan waited, the whole place looked like an overturned colony of ants, constituents breaking in all directions. He told Jonathan to not hurry as he drove away. He wanted to see as much of what he had created as he could. He wanted to see what it looked like when people ate themselves.