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Faye Pfeiffer played taps in her mind. She saluted in silent reverence as the last sliver of sun dropped below the horizon, and then she commenced lowering the flag. As soon as she could reach it, she unlatched the clip connecting the bottom of the flag to the line and snapped it into one of her belt loops, then continued lowering the flag until she could undo the upper clip. She held Old Glory in front of her, with her right arm fully extended perpendicular to the ground, as if she were a human flagpole. Over the years, Faye had mastered a technique by which she could perform the normally two-person job of folding the flag according to military standards. It was a modified version of the method she used for folding coffin blankets, although trickier, because she had to hold one end perfectly taut while tucking in the corners one at a time. It was an ungainly procedure, but since she lacked a partner to assist her, it was necessary.
Having folded the flag to perfect specifications, she placed it into a zipped canvas bag and set it on top of her parents’ monument, then she too hopped up there and sat with her legs dangling, the toes of her oxfords barely touching the ground. Fireflies appeared in the gloaming; they surrounded Faye in all directions, across the open terrain of the cemetery. Ever since she was a little girl, Faye had spent countless enchanted hours watching the courtship signals of fireflies, how the multitudes of them formed kaleidoscopic patterns of streaks, curlicues, and streams of coordinated movement. She admired their artistry and, even though she knew the notion was silly, she indulged herself to imagine that they had whatever passed as fun for fireflies. She sometimes stayed watching until the last lonely firefly blinked out at the end of another long night’s performance. Faye had always wanted to put it to music—Pink Floyd, maybe.
Faye had spent most of that day preparing for the Boom-a-Thon. Working in her embalming lab, she’d compounded a new formula that she hoped would enhance the luster and colors of her fireworks. She was especially anxious to see how the blues turned out; they were the hardest to get right. Additionally, she’d hand-packed shells with an array of stars designed to affect a chain of after-explosions, more spectacular than anything the good citizens of Coon Creek had ever seen. Every year, Faye took pride in manufacturing a Boom-a-Thon fireworks show that was better than the last. Other than the Fourth of July, or when somebody died, she remained pretty much invisible in Coon Creek, so this was the highlight of her social calendar.
Sponsoring Coon Creek’s annual Fourth of July Boom-a-Thon extravaganza had been a patriotic tradition of the Life Eternal Funeral Home since the 1960s. Her grandfather, Frederick Pfeiffer, who’d been excused from military conscription due to chronic inflammatory bowel disease, considered it the least he could do to defend life, liberty, and American values. Besides, it made good business sense for the local mortuary services to subsidize such a popular, life-affirming celebration; it helped to offset negative impressions. Even though Frederick died when Faye was a child, everybody who knew him said he was a jovial man with a hearty laugh that often shook the rafters of the Drink Here Tavern, where he reportedly spent a lot of time.
Frederick passed custodianship of the Boom-a-Thon to his son, Wilbur, Faye’s father. Wilbur turned eighteen soon after the Vietnam War and the draft ended, so he too never served in the military. Instead, he did his part to serve America by improving and expanding the Boom-a-Thon. Wilbur also started the practice of placing little plastic American flags on the graves of every veteran resting in the Amity Valley Memorial Gardens on Memorial Day. And on Thanksgiving, he took out a full-page ad in the Coon Creek Picayune weekly newspaper, thanking veterans for their service.
Wilbur taught his daughter and only child, Faye, the fine art of mixing, packing, staging, and detonating fireworks before she was old enough to drive. Even as a girl, she understood that her father was grooming her to assume not only the family business, but also its annual contribution to the Boom-a-Thon. Still, if she’d only had the chance, after high school she would have enlisted for a stint in the army, especially after they relaxed the rules permitting women to serve in combat operations. She thought she’d be good at it. As she knew all too well, though, death doesn’t accommodate one’s plans, and when her parents died in a tragic automobile accident, theirs was the first funeral that she conducted all by herself. Duty bade no less of her.
Faye sometimes worried that she had no child of her own to whom she could pass on the family’s traditions. True, she figured she still had time for a family. But among the eligible bachelors in Coon Creek, there was nary a one that didn’t turn her stomach, let alone whose seed she would willingly bear. Artificial insemination seemed downright romantic by comparison.
In full darkness around eleven, Faye hiked through a grove of tall oaks and maples to the southeastern meadow, a low-lying section of the cemetery where heavy spring rains pooled and frogs croaked so loud it battered her eardrums. Earlier that day, she’d set up her fireworks apparatus there. From this remote spot, she could test her fireworks and they would not be visible from most of the residential blocks in Coon Creek. The only people likely still awake were holed up in the Drink Here Tavern, and even if they saw something, they might not remember it anyway. Faye was confident that she could sneak in a single volley and nobody would notice.
By the light of a lamp strapped to her forehead, Faye mounted three tubes onto the firing board, dropped a shell into each, clipped igniters onto the fuses, and attached wires to the firing system. Counting off steps, she pivoted to face the launching pad, knelt onto one knee, and steadied the detonator on her raised foreleg. She counted backwards from ten, then turned the ignition key.
The explosive flowering of fireworks never failed to take her breath away. Successive, overlapping bursts filled the sky from end to end. The night sky was her canvas. The brilliant colors swirled like a van Gogh starry night, except this was her masterpiece. Faye flushed with the thrill of it all. She opened her eyes wide and did not blink, allowing the lights and colors to cascade straight into her cerebral cortex. It felt like an optical orgasm, or at least inasmuch as she imagined what an orgasm felt like.
The Drink Here Tavern wasn’t just a place; it was a statement. (You.) Drink. Here. Every person who entered knew exactly what to do. That’s what Boog loved about it. Drinking with Tank, Buzz, Red, and Paddy—AKA “the Galoots”—listening to the same classic country music, and talking the same shit about work, weather, sports, women, and politics was akin to a ritual of renewal. It lifted him in good times and reassured him in bad. His favorite way to pass any evening was to plop down onto his designated stool at the end of the bar around dinnertime and shoot the shit with his friends, not moving except to piss or sometimes play pool, until closing time.
It didn’t always work out that way, though. All it took was one thing to go awry—like a stranger who looked at him the wrong way or a drunk chick who spurned his advances—to ruin the whole night. On those occasions, he brawled, blacked out, broke something, was asked to leave, or all the above. He didn’t take it personally, though. Sometimes messiness was inevitable—shit happens, right?
And Boog knew a thing or two about messy business. That was how he answered anybody who asked him what he did during his tours of duty in Afghanistan—“messy business, really fuckin’ messy.” And when he said that, he snorted and spat to show how the mere mention of that subject pissed him off, so folks learned real quick not to bring it up again. Not only did he not want to talk about it, he insisted that he didn’t need to talk about it. No counseling or support groups for him, not even a service animal. PTSD was for whiners. Hanging out at the Drink Here Tavern worked a whole lot better than any amount of therapy.
Boog had almost finished his second pitcher of Pabst Blue Ribbon while waiting for the Galoots to show up. He needed to get a head start on them, because none could keep up with his pace of drinking. It was like his handicap. Boog drank straight out of the pitcher, pouring it down his throat from the spout. That way if somebody—usually, his ex-wife—asked him how much he’d had to drink, he could say truthfully “just a couple of beers.”
For the most part, the beer was just a decoy, anyway. What really got him buzzing was the oxycodone. He was mostly sure that nobody suspected he popped pills, because he drank enough to explain any stupid shit he did under the influence. It worked like a charm, and nobody was wiser. In Coon Creek’s social order, a raging alcoholic was better than an occasional opiate user.
A Cincinnati Reds game was on the bar television, with the sound off and closed-captioning on. Before he went to Afghanistan, the Reds were pretty good. But now, they were embarrassingly awful, even with Joey Votto. It sometimes seemed like everything had fallen apart while he was gone, almost as if Coon Creek couldn’t function without him.
Boog belched so loud that something popped in his head. Suddenly, he felt stone-cold sober. That happened sometimes, a reality flashback. Maintaining a steady buzz required constant replenishment. Time for a little vitamin oxy booster. Leaving his baseball cap on the stool to save his seat, Boog stumbled to the men’s room.
There were two stalls in the men’s room—one had greenish diarrhea slopped all over the toilet seat, and the other had a puddle of rancid liquid on the floor. Boog selected the one with the puddle, because he needed to sit. Once inside, he removed a small Ziploc baggie containing crushed 30-milligram oxycodone pills from his sock, then shook a small portion onto the back of a credit card on his lap. It looked like a little landing strip of sugar. Boog had recently graduated from swallowing whole tablets to crushing and snorting them up his nose, which gave him a faster, more-potent head rush. But he drew the line at injections; that was only for addicts. Boog used oxy for purely recreational purposes, which he deserved considering all the shit and drama that he had to put up with. He especially appreciated how it gave him enough of a second wind to keep drinking until the bar closed, then afterwards he’d pass out and sleep like a baby. Since returning home from that godforsaken hellhole where he spent the worst four years of his life, oxy was just about the only thing that made him feel like himself.
And so long as he got a discount in exchange for his son’s work, the costs were, well, sometimes hard to sustain, but generally manageable.
Snorting through a soda straw, Boog felt an electrified sensation in all directions from his sinuses and into his head, then it hit him like lightning when it reached the pleasure center in his brain. He no longer sat on a lopsided toilet seat in a dive bar, but was in a pinball machine, bouncing off bumpers of blinding luminescence, slingshotting across brilliant regions of flashes and sparkles, and exploding in a shower of colors every time he hit a target. He had no thoughts, no memories, no anger or frustrations, just absolute, transcendent bliss. Better than sex, and a lot easier to obtain. It was a preview of heaven. It was all that mattered to Boog anymore.
Boog didn’t breathe; it felt like he didn’t have to, like the drug provided all the oxygen he needed. After holding his breath for several seconds—not that he counted—he felt a blackout coming on, and, on the verge of passing out, he sucked in a desperate mouthful of air. The equal and opposite reflex was that he vomited profusely onto his lap.
“Ooooh,” he groaned. “Aaaah.”
He licked his lips. He was now ready to drink some more beer.
Boog cleaned himself with the last of the toilet paper in the stall, then flushed away all evidence of his mishap. Leaving the men’s room, he put his hand against the wall to steady himself and waddled forward. He paused at the end of the hallway to map out a path to his bar stool. The song playing over the speakers, “Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart” by Johnny Cash, sounded to Boog like the most beautiful song ever written. Every word spoke truth to him. He turned his entire will over to just listening.
Between Boog and the speakers, though, a nasty clamor, which sounded like the braying of coyotes, came from a nearby booth. It ruined the perfection of his moment. Still holding onto the wall, he turned to see where all that caterwauling was coming from.
A group of rank strangers occupied the booth. Not only had Boog never seen them before, but they were also strange, as in just plain fucking weird. They stood out amid the usual crowd at the Drink Here like clowns at a funeral. Among the group was a jive black dude with hair turds bundled on top of his head, like tentacles. There was a caramel brown woman with sunken eyes wearing a layered head rag the likes of which Boog hadn’t seen this side of Kandahar. A skinny Asian kid who looked thirteen years old sported a shit-eating grin while doodling on a napkin. The loudest, though, was an old bandito with rings on every finger and frizzy gray hair nearly down to his ass. Even though Boog couldn’t make out a word they said, he could tell just by the looks of them that they were talking trash. It made his ribs rattle.
“Ya’ll ain’t from around here, are ya,” Boog shouted at them with no inflection, more a statement than a question.
The group kept right on chattering, either oblivious to Boog or ignoring him. They had to be from Golden Springs because they looked like nothing found anywhere else thereabouts. Every once in a while, some lost souls from Golden Springs drifted into the Drink Here, but usually they stayed only until they found out they couldn’t get wine coolers or that, no, the bartender would not turn off the game. If they failed to take the hint, well, Boog felt entitled to defend his territory.
What Boog hated most about them, apart from looking like carnival freaks, was their attitude, as if they were better than everybody else in the room. It took a hell of a lot of moxie to trespass into a working-class bar and look down at the regulars as if they were all no better than yokels, rednecks, and hillbillies. There weren’t many places left where a grunt like Boog could have a beer and tell a story among like-minded folks. Venturing outside of Coon Creek to any of the cities—Columbus, Cincinnati, even Dayton for cryin’ out loud—felt like visiting another planet. It was as if those people breathed different air. They sure as shit didn’t have any business breathing his.
“I said where’n the fuck are ya’ll from?” Boog repeated, amplifying.
They had to have heard him that time, even though they continued ignoring him, which was the same as saying to him fuck you, redneck. He didn’t move. He didn’t say anything. He just stared at them with simmering malice.
The woman was the first to notice. She leaned forward and whispered something to the others. Finally, the one with the hair turds turned to him and said, “Hey, dude. What’s the deal?”
Boog heard that as hey asshole, you want to take this outside? His jaws tensed; he balled his hands into fists. There was only one way to answer their impudence. He took one long step in their direction, and then he felt a heavy hand clamp onto his shoulder blade.
“Whoa there, cowboy. Do you want to spend the night in jail?” Burl Slocum asked him.
“Fuck me, Burl. How long can a man be expected to put up with all of this bullshit?”
Burl patted his back. “Don’t retaliate like that. If you do, you’re just asking for trouble. But if you really want to make them shit their pants, all you’ve got to do is put your hat back on.” He picked up the baseball cap that Boog had left to save his seat at the bar and handed it to him. It was red, with the white embroidered words Make America Great Again.
“Wear it proudly,” Burl said.
Boog put the hat on his head, lowered over his brow, and smirked at the outsiders. They quickly huddled up and whispered among themselves. When the group broke from their conference, they hastily finished their drinks, got up, and, without looking at Boog, scampered out of the bar like kids afraid of getting in trouble with their parents.
Boog was elated. It was as if that hat gave him a superpower. From that moment, he resolved never to leave home without it on his head.
Dixie stuck her nose under the sheet and pressed it against the small of Toad’s back. Toad snapped awake with her eyes popping out of their sockets and heart hammering so hard she felt her pulse all the way down to her toes. The bedroom was still dark. Zeke kept snoring. Dixie whimpered, walked to the door, and barked again. Toad turned to look at the digital clock, then said out loud, “Four thirty, Dixie. It’s too early to go for a walk.”
Dixie whimpered and circled her tail nervously.
“Well, well, oh well.” Toad swung her feet onto the floor. “I guess when you gotta go, you gotta go.”
Toad pulled on a pair of sweatpants over her pajama bottoms, slipped one of Zeke’s T-shirts over her head, and worked her feet into a pair of flip-flops without bending over. Dixie led her to the front door, and as soon as Toad opened it enough for her to wiggle through, she dashed into the yard and squatted above a garden gnome, letting go of a long piss.
“I should’ve known you wouldn’t bother me unless it was a real emergency,” Toad apologized to the dog.
As soon as she was done, Dixie scampered to the end of the driveway and looked back at Toad with pleading eyes.
“Let’s go, then. It ain’t like I could fall back to sleep, anyhow.”
Attaching the leash to Dixie’s collar, Toad took a few steps in the direction of their customary morning walk. Dixie resisted. Toad gave the dog some slack in her leash, and Dixie started pulling like an ox plowing a field toward the opposite end of the block. She seemed to know where she wanted to go. It was all Toad could do to hold on.
“Slow down, girl. What’s the matter?”
At the end of the block, Dixie dragged Toad through the alley that led to Main Street, turned the corner, and starting barking at something in the distance. Toad’s night vision wasn’t what it used to be, but by streetlight she saw a tangle of shadows flutter and take flight on the far side of the town square. They hurried into a car with its lights off and slammed the doors shut so hard they echoed. The vehicle peeled out as it drove into the dark.
“What in the...?”
Dixie gave chase, barking repeatedly, triggering a chain reaction among all the other dogs that heard her. Holding tight to her leash, Toad broke stride and soon ran faster than she had in years. Lights turned on in the trailer park off the alley behind the IGA store. Toad didn’t know why, exactly, but something compelled her to call out, “Help!”
The woman and the dog came to a stop, both panting heavily, at the base of the statue of Philander Fink. Toad bent over, hands on her knees, until she caught her breath. When she stood up, she wasn’t sure if she saw what she thought she saw. She squinted and stepped onto the curb to get a better view under the streetlight. Dixie rubbed against her side.
The statue of Philander Fink was dressed in a polka-dot dress and wore a straw hat with a price tag dangling from the brim. Hanging from a chain around its neck was a stenciled sign that read, “Take this racist statue down!”
Toad sat on the nearest bench and petted Dixie behind her ears. “What are we going to do about this?” she asked the dog.
