Within an hour of her plane landing, Charlotte had been live on air, pronouncing the grim details of the realtor murdered in the giant’s shadow. Her heart had pounded so hard she was convinced it would show on camera, but her cameraman had convinced her she’d done a great job, jumping in cold. And now here she was again, at the Little Springs Rural High School gymnasium, ready for her second broadcast in two days.
The school building had closed the year before, when the town’s growth had forced the construction of a new school complex to hold all the students. The old one had the musty, stale smell of an abandoned space.
The basketball hoops had been raised to the ceiling, and the wooden surface of the court held rows of metal folding chairs. Each seat was taken, mostly filled with locals, she guessed. Almost all of them white, many dressed in Western clothing or jeans and T-shirts. Men with plugs of tobacco in their lips. The bleachers were packed with outsiders. Diverse. Well dressed. Styled hair. Two worlds sharing this space but remaining distinct, a line solidly drawn. Even more people crowded in the doorways and out into the hall.
On the stage, the seven members of the village council had begun to file into their seats behind a folding table, with one microphone at the center. Jason Blunt sat at the microphone, holding a small gavel. His father, Dale, sat beside him. They shared the same bulky build, though Dale’s close-cropped hair had gone stark white. At the far right, Henry Smoke eased down his massive frame, wearing a leather vest decorated in Lakota symbols over a blue dress shirt.
The cameraman filmed them from the side of the stage, with Charlotte standing beside him. She was happy to see that none of the other stations had come. None of them knew or cared that the meeting was happening or that it was guaranteed to make for good TV. They were all so focused on the giant. Instead, Charlotte had been looking at the locals. Shadowing them on social media. Hearing what they talked about. And mostly they talked about this. About outsiders building a mosque in their town.
A thrum of voices filled the large room and reverberated from the brick walls, then silenced as Jason banged his gavel. Charlotte smiled. This would be a bloodbath.
David pushed his way into the school past the crowd. People started to give him ugly looks, then stopped once they saw the badge. He had left Brooke outside to keep an eye on the crowd that filled the parking lot. Ahead, he could hear Jason’s voice projected through a loudspeaker. The meeting had begun. Suddenly, a hand grabbed his arm.
“Hey. David.”
Tabby. He had begun to force a smile when he saw Brian next to her, then gave up the effort. Brian was taller than David, dressed expensively, his blond hair shaped into a wave. The marijuana business must be treating you well, David thought but didn’t say. He told himself that’s why he disliked Brian, because he ran a grow house across the state line, where it was legal. Not because Brian had taken Tabby and made her happier than David ever had.
“You sure have your hands full here tonight,” Brian said, a forced attempt at humor to thaw things.
“Sure do,” David said, not reacting. “I should get inside.”
Tabby didn’t let go of his arm.
“We were hoping you could stop by some time. Maybe dinner?”
David nodded.
“Sure. You bet. Now, I really should get.”
She released him, and he angled into the gym, standing at the back. A bigger crowd than had ever gathered here before. More faces than he could hope to recognize. So many outsiders. An instinct struck—a killer is loose in the town. What if the killer is here? Hiding among the throng like a shark out of sight in the water. Just waiting to strike. The gavel banged.
On the stage, Jason leaned his elbows onto the table. He seemed tired, sapped of the seemingly endless energy he’d always possessed, an entirely different person now from the muscular teenager who had sprinted up and down this court, grabbing rebounds and launching himself improbably toward the rim.
“Okay, now, we have one zoning question on the agenda for tonight,” Jason was saying. “This comes with approval from the county zoning committee. Parcel number seven-two-two.”
“No mosque!” someone shouted from the rows of chairs, sparking a tremor of angry voices.
Jason hammered his gavel and read from a piece of paper.
“This application comes from the Islamic Cultural Society for Garden County to convert the parcel into a place of worship, as well as a community center.”
Jason searched the audience, then landed on a face in the bleachers, near the stage. There, David saw Aaliyah and a group of thirty-some others wearing hijabs or burqas, and men in plain suits and taqiyah caps.
“Imam Bey. Would you please grace us with a few words?” Jason asked.
One of the men, tall and thin with glasses and a white beard, stood and walked to a microphone standing in front of the stage. He had to bend down for it to register his voice.
“As-salāmu ‘alaykum,” he said in a soft voice. “That means ‘peace be with you’ in Arabic. And that is my message to you. Our message to you, to our friends in the Abrahamic tradition and those of other faiths or no faith at all. This mosque will be open to all, a place for community and for peace . . .”
“Terrorist.”
David scanned the crowd, trying to see who had said it. The imam pursed his lips and continued.
“A place of learning.”
“Go back to your own country!”
The imam opened his mouth again, but more shouts came, each of them growing louder. The locals on the floor first, then the outsiders in the stands, yelling out in defense of the imam. Then one man stood, his voice rising above the others, and even though the man faced away from David, he could see the missing arm and knew it was Spady.
“Come to my home? My fucking home? You even try to open that thing, I swear to God . . .” Spady was shouting.
David pushed forward onto the court and through seats and people until he came beside his friend and grabbed his left forearm. On the stage, the TV camera pointed at them.
“Spady,” David said, his voice firm but kind.
Spady’s arm tensed with a strength that surprised David, almost throwing him off balance. But David’s training kicked in, and he twisted the arm back, clutching tighter. Finally, David felt the arm go slack.
The crowd seemed to see this and to understand, quieting just enough to hear Jason banging the gavel.
“Enough! Let’s get this over with and hold the vote,” Jason said. “All opposed?”
Dale raised his hand, as did the woman beside him.
“I’m abstaining,” muttered an old farmer, his arms crossed over his chest.
That left four members of the council yet to vote. “All in favor?” Jason asked.
Henry Smoke raised his hand immediately. Slowly, two more members followed. Then, with a shrug, Jason raised his as well.
“The motion carries,” Jason spoke into the microphone. “Now for God’s sake let’s adjourn.”
The room turned to chaos after that. Loud voices. Everyone standing and moving, the locals and outsiders colliding as they squeezed out through the two sets of doors. Spady was gone, and all David could do was yell above the crowd, begging people to move in an orderly fashion, whatever the hell that meant. He glanced for a moment up at the stage, where Jason and Dale seemed locked in argument, but he couldn’t hear what was said.
Outside, the crowd moved slowly toward the old football field, where cars were parked in neat rows. The halogen lights were turned on, and David could see Brooke using her flashlight to guide traffic toward the street.
Just as he was about to thank himself that things hadn’t turned worse, a yell started up. Aaliyah and her group had just walked out of the gym, and a group of locals had spotted them. Maybe forty people, inching forward, yelling. Faces that David knew. People he bumped into in the grocery store and drank beers with and kneeled next to at the front of the Methodist church to take communion. He didn’t see Spady and thought a quick thank you for that.
Aaliyah caught sight of David and opened her eyes wide, imploring. David angled himself between the groups, holding his hands up, palms out.
“Let’s all just go home,” he started to say.
They kept shouting. Then among the angry crowd an arm swung forward, and something sailed past his head. He turned to see a woman in a burqa reel, holding her hands to her face. She looked up again, shocked but seemingly unhurt.
“God damn it that’s enough!” David yelled. “Go home!”
The faces he knew looked at him with anger and disappointment, and then they receded into the night. He went to Aaliyah once he felt sure they were gone.
“How is she?” he asked.
Aaliyah glared at him.
“That was assault. You should arrest them.”
David stammered. He tried to play out the possibility. He hadn’t seen who it was, couldn’t possibly prove anything. But it wasn’t just that. He knew that if he charged anyone, it would pit every local against him.
Before he could offer any real response, Aaliyah shook her head as she and the group walked toward the field. David trailed just behind. The field was mostly empty, everyone gone. Brooke stood with her hands on her hips.
“Good work tonight,” David said.
“I heard that back there. What a shit show.”
She hadn’t seen her husband’s eruption, so at least there was that. Spady stood, smoking, near Brooke’s truck. David and Jason walked over to him, and the three formed a triangle on the field where they’d played football together so many years ago.
“Spady, you’re the only smart one out of the three of us,” Jason said. “You knew better’n to run for office.”
David stifled a yawn.
“If I had just looked at my magic eight ball, it would’ve told me, ‘A giant dead alien is going to drop on your doorstep, and all the world’s problems are going to follow it, so you really should not run for sheriff,’” he said.
Spady sucked hard at the cigarette. Then he turned, stood up on his toes, and exhaled into Jason’s face.
“You sure managed to sell us out to the fucking heathens,” he hissed.
In their lifetime of friendship, Spady had never challenged Jason that directly. A cynical joke here and there, but Jason was the leader of their little group, the id, and the others his wingmen. But Spady seemed changed, absent of any deference. Maybe it was losing his arm. Maybe it was the giant, transforming him as it had transformed everyone and everything else.
Jason pulled back his shoulders, puffing out his chest, looming over Spady.
“The hell was I supposed to do? They bought the land. They crossed every ‘t’ and dotted every ‘i.’ Squeaky-goddamned-clean. If I voted them down, they could’ve come back and sued the council for discrimination. Then I have to spend every last tax dollar we have on a legal case we have no hope of winning. I can’t pay to have trash picked up. Can’t pay his salary.” He nodded toward David.
Spady took another drag, the cigarette incinerating itself in his hand.
“Your old man thought different.”
Spady sauntered off toward Brooke, and the two of them drove away together.
“Seems like everybody has something to say,” Jason sighed to David. “What about you?”
David shrugged.
“Can’t say I expected that. That you’d side with them.”
“Us and them,” Jason muttered. “I remember back when I saw the world that way.”
David wished that Ben Junior was there. He’d been the peacemaker of the group, the one who knew instinctively not just when feelings had been hurt but how to make things good again.
“I didn’t mean . . .” David started to say.
Jason cut him off. “What would you have done, cousin? If that was you up there?”
There was more resignation in his voice than anger. David didn’t answer, and Jason drifted away.
Alone, David looked up into the glare of the halogen lights, and it was possible just for a moment to imagine that he was playing high school football again, that the world wasn’t a centrifuge spinning a hundred million miles an hour, that everything wasn’t going to fly apart at any second, every last bit of matter colliding and fracturing into infinitesimal pieces barreling into the darkest recesses of space.