The caravan backs up at the turn into the church. There are two men standing in the bed of a pickup truck parked off to the side behind the gate. Both of the men are wearing bulletproof vests in desert tan, an odd color choice, Jessup thinks, for upstate New York, and both are holding unmodified AR-15s that they must have already owned before the passage of the New York SAFE Act. One of the guns is wrapped in a camouflage skin, but it doesn’t make the silhouette look any less like a military weapon. Wyatt’s dad has an AR-15 and Wyatt and Jessup have taken it out a few times. It looks badass—it’s just a civilian version of an M16—and it’s fun, but Wyatt’s a snob and always goes back to his Remington 700 for shooting from any distance.
Jessup’s mom looks startled. “What are they doing?”
David John pats her leg. “Don’t worry about it. Brandon and Earl think we might have some protesters today. They’re just there for security. And to put on a show for the camera crews.”
“I don’t like the way it looks,” she says. They are talking softly, the way adults talk in a car, as if there is some magic that makes it so the kids in the back won’t listen in. “And I don’t like Brody. I’ve told you that.”
“Well, you don’t have to like him,” David John says. “The two of them are just there to keep things civil.”
Jessup doesn’t know the man holding the camouflaged rifle, but the other one is Brody Ellis. He’s old, in his fifties, a huge guy, six foot, with a belly that makes him waddle. He looks ridiculous with his body armor. He’s the kind of guy who tells little girls they’re going to grow up to be lookers. He asked Jessup’s mom out on a date a few months after David John went to jail. Didn’t seem put off by the fact that he was close to twenty years older than her or that she was still married or that they were all part of the same congregation. He’s got his AR-15 on a sling, the rifle pointed down, but he’s got his fingers hovering over the trigger guard in a way that makes Jessup nervous. He doesn’t like any of this. Brody gives a sloppy salute as the other guy hops down from the bed of the truck and opens the gate so their small caravan can drive through.