J. Gonzalez - They

Vince felt better now that they had some kind of plan. As he helped clean up the basement, he couldn’t help but wish that this would be over soon. Perhaps the end was drawing near. He felt that it was.

As they ascended the stairs to the main floor of the house, Reverend Powell said, “One of you will have to sleep in the living room. I’ve got linens in the closet.”

“I can do it,” Frank said.

“Maybe we should rotate shifts,” Mike said, pausing in the living room. “One of us stay awake in the living room as a look-out for a few hours.”

“That’s a sound idea,” Hank said.

“I’ll go first,” Frank said, planting himself in an easy chair, well out of sight from outside. “It’s a little after ten o’clock now. How does three hour shifts sound?”

“Three hours is fine,” Mike said. “I’ll go next. Be sure to have a pot of coffee brewed before you wake me up.”

“Of course,” Frank said.

“I can bring a bottle of whiskey up from downstairs if you want a shot or two to help you sleep,” Reverend Powell said.

“That’ll be great,” Mike answered.

When Reverend Powell headed back downstairs for the whiskey, Mike turned to Frank and Vince. “Whatever we do tomorrow, we stick together. Even if we do meet with Sheriff Hoffman.”

“What’ll we tell him?” Vince asked.

“Leave that to me,” Mike said.

Reverend Powell returned with the Jack Daniel’s bottle and handed it to Mike. “Now I think we’d better turn in. I can take the third watch. Vince, you luck out tonight.”

“Get a good night’s sleep because tomorrow you get to be up at two in the morning,” Frank said. Vince grinned as he caught a glimpse of a smirk on Frank’s face.

“I’m in the bedroom at the end of the hall,” Reverend Powell told Frank. “And I’m armed. I know you and Mike came well armed, but is there anything else you may need?”

“I have my nine and an extra clip,” Frank said. He took the gun out of his waistband and laid it on the arm of the chair. “I’ll be fine.”

“I will, too,” Mike said.

“Okay.” Reverend Powell looked at his guests. “The beds are ready, there’s fresh towels in the linen closet and you can have the hallway bathroom. Mike, get me up at four.”

“You got it,” Mike said.

With a curt nod, Reverend Powell retreated down the hallway to the master bedroom.

“Well, I’m turning in, too,” Mike said. “Will you be alright, Frank?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” He turned and headed toward one of the bedrooms.

Vince turned to Frank and shrugged. “I don’t feel tired yet.”

“You’re welcome to hang out with me.”

Vince thought about it for a moment. What he really wanted to do was call Tracy, but he knew Mike would probably be able to hear him in the next room. He knew there was no way he would be able to get out of Frank’s sight long enough to steal downstairs and use his cell phone. He sat down on the sofa reluctantly, facing his old childhood friend in the darkened living room.

They remained seated in the darkness for a minute. The outside shadows were long and dark and the only sounds were those of the crickets chirping in a rhythmic susurration. The toilet in the bathroom upstairs flushed and then the door opened to the sound of padding footsteps making their way to one of the bedrooms. There was the sound of a door closing and then silence.

Except for the crickets.

Vince looked out the window. The curtains were drawn, but there was a thin line between them that he could see out of. What he saw wasn’t much; he tried to see into the darkness, but he knew there wasn’t much beyond the front porch except the long driveway that led to the lonely two lane country road and beyond that a vast corn field.

“I’ve always wondered what it would be like to live in a place like this,” Frank said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Frank replied. Vince’s vision had adjusted to the darkness in the living room, and he could make out Frank seated comfortably on the chair. The handgun was on the arm of the chair, Frank’s hand inches from it. Frank was looking out the window, too. He turned to Vince. “I’ve always lived in cities. Never lived in a place like this before. I’ve always dreamed of escaping from the noise and the shit and just… hiding out here.”

“It’s definitely a great place to get away from the city,” Vince said.

“Yeah.” Frank’s voice had taken on a reflective tone. “Maybe… when this is all over I can… come out to a place like this. Just pack up Brandy and the kids and bring them out to a place somewhere far away from all the shit big cities breed. Violence, despair, poverty, pollution. You know…?”

“With the work you do, you could make a nice living quite easily out here,” Vince said.

“Yeah.” Frank nodded. He turned to Vince. “What was it like for you growing up out here?”

Vince thought about it. When he’d first come to Lititz last week he’d been instantly transported back through time to when he was young and innocent, ready to face the world. He remembered driving by his old friend John’s house, seeing the family car that he remembered from those long ago days and resisting the urge to get out and walk up to the front porch and knock on the door. He remembered hating Lititz when he first moved out here. He’d been plucked out of his junior year in high school in Toronto without warning and whisked almost five hundred miles away, to a place in the middle of nowhere. He’d missed his friends in Canada terribly, but adjusted to life in the country fairly quickly. He told Frank this in quiet tones as the two men sat in the darkness, Frank’s fingers caressing the handgun. He told Frank how he kept expecting to run into people he’d gone to high school with and how that hadn’t happened yet. “Do you want it to happen?” Frank asked, interrupting Vince’s monologue.

“I don’t know,” Vince said. “I guess part of me does because… it would bring me back to those days to when… I was innocent, I guess.”

“You think that coming in contact with some element of your past will bring the innocence back,” Frank said.

Vince nodded. “Yeah. But I know that most of the friends I made here left for college when I did. I kept in contact with some of them, but I haven’t heard from a lot of them in years. They probably don’t live here anymore.”

“You’ve talked to me about your mother and her friend Lillian before,” Frank said. “Do you remember anything that stands out from the time you were living here?”

Vince thought about this. There really wasn’t anything that stuck out as particularly strange or odd. There was nothing in mom’s behavior or what she said that would have suggested to Vince even then that she’d lived the life of a deranged cultist in the late sixties. “No. I can see why mom became such a Christian fanatic, though. The things she was into in California were—”

“Pretty evil?” Frank chuckled. He leaned back in his chair. “Yeah, even though I don’t believe in all this heaven and hell bullshit, I still don’t see the attraction of worshipping a deity that represents evil.”

They talked some more, mostly trading stories of what they remembered from those times. “All I can really remember is when you used to come over,” Vince said, sitting back on the sofa. “And some of the others came by with their kids as well. I don’t really remember many of them.”

“You remembered Nellie.”

“Yeah, I remember her.” The image that came to Vince of Nellie was one of a little blond haired girl around his own age with fair skin, always happy and laughing, always willing to play whatever it was the boys had in mind. “She seemed… I don’t know… she seemed kinda normal.”