Due to the absence of identification, Lowell and Maynard Griner were buried in unmarked graves. Much later, when the Aurora craziness began to subside (not that it ever did, entirely), their fingerprints were matched with the extensive sheets on file and the brothers were officially declared dead. It was doubted by many, however, especially by folk who lived out in the brakes and hollers. Rumors abounded that Little Low and Maynard had made themselves a home in the shaft of an abandoned wildcat mine, that they were running Acapulco Gold further south under assumed names, that they drove the hills in a jacked-up midnight black Ford F-150 with a severed boar’s head chained to the grill and Hank Williams Jr. blasting from the stereo. An award-winning author, a man who had lived in Appalachia as a young man and fled as soon as he turned eighteen, heard some of the legends from his relatives, and used them as the basis of a children’s picture book titled The Bad Stupid Brothers. In the picture book, they end up as miserable toads in Poopy Swamp.
8
The stream that the Bright Ones cult had dammed near their compound in Hatch, New Mexico, broke, and the waters ripped the community’s buildings from their foundations. When the waters receded, the desert moved in; sand covered up the few discarded weapons that had been overlooked by the feds; a few pages of their new nation’s Constitution, which declared their dominion over the lands and waters they had seized and their rights to bear arms, and the United States federal government’s lack of standing to demand they pay their share of taxes, were speared on cactus needles. A graduate student studying botany, hiking to collect specimens of native desert plants, discovered several of these spiked pages.
“Thank you, God!” she cried and snatched them off the cactus. The graduate student’s stomach was bothering her. She hustled off the mountain path, defecated, and used the providential papers to wipe herself.
9
To continue the march to her thirty-year pension, Van Lampley took a job at the women’s prison in Curly, which was where the vast majority of Dooling’s surviving prisoners were shifted. Celia Frode ended up there, though not for long (paroled), and so did Claudia Stephenson.
They were, by and large, a rough bunch at Curly Correctional—lots of tightly wired girls, lots of tough women with felony priors—but Van was up to it. One day a white girl with faux gold teeth, cornrows, and a forehead tattoo (it said EMPTY in bleeding letters) asked Van how she got the limp. The inmate’s sneer was both piggy and jovial.
“I kicked a little too much ass,” Van said, a harmless lie. She had kicked exactly the right amount of ass. The officer rolled up her sleeve to show the tattoo on her mighty left bicep: YOUR PRIDE, etched on the gravestone with the wee arm. She turned the other way and rolled up the other sleeve. On her equally impressive right bicep another gravestone had been inked. ALL YOUR FUCKING PRIDE was etched on this one.
“Okay,” the tough girl said, losing the sneer. “You’re cool.”
“You better believe it,” Van said. “Now move along.”
Sometimes Van prayed with Claudia, now the ordained Reverend Stephenson. They prayed for forgiveness for their sins. They prayed for Ree’s soul. They prayed for Jeanette’s soul. They prayed for the babies and the mothers. They prayed for whatever needed praying on.
“What was she, Claudia?” Van asked once.
“It’s not what she was, Vanessa,” said Reverend Stephenson. “It’s what we are.”
“And what would that be?”
The reverend was stern—very unlike the old Claudia, who would not say boo to a goose. “Resolved to be better. Resolved to be stronger. Ready to do whatever we have to do.”
10
It would have killed her, the cervical cancer that had been brewing in Janice Coates, but the clock on the other side of the Tree had slowed its growth somehow. Also, her daughter had seen it on the other side of the Tree. Michaela took her mother to an oncologist two days after the women awoke, and the warden was receiving chemotherapy two days after that. Janice acquiesced to Michaela’s demand that she step down from her position immediately, allowing Michaela to make all the arrangements, to take care of her, to order her to the doctor, to bed, and to take her meds on a regular basis. Michaela also made sure her mother stopped smoking.
In Michaela’s humble opinion, cancer was horseshit. She had lost her father at a young age, and she was still working through some of the emotional horseshit that had come with that. But horseshit abounded. Horseshit was something you had to shovel pretty much non-stop if you were a woman, and if you were a woman in television, you had to shovel it double-time. Michaela could shovel it triple-time. She had not driven home from DC, rammed a bad biker’s vintage ride, stayed awake for days smoking Garth Flickinger’s meth, and survived a gruesome armed conflict in order to succumb to any variety of horseshit whatsoever, even if that horseshit was a disease that actually belonged to her mother.
Following her course of chemo, when the clean scan came back that told them Janice was in remission, Michaela said to her mother, “All right. What are you going to do now? You need to stay active.”
Janice said Mickey was absolutely right. Her first plan: to drive Michaela to DC. Her daughter needed to go back to work.
“Are you ever going to try and report on what happened?” Janice asked her daughter. “Personal experience type of thing?”
“I’ve thought about it, but . . .”
“But?”
There were problems, that was the but. First, most people would say that the adventures of the women on the far side of the Tree were horseshit. Second, they would say that no such supernatural creature as “Evie Black” had ever existed, and that Aurora had been caused by perfectly natural (if as yet undiscovered) means. Third, if certain authorities decided Michaela wasn’t spouting horseshit, questions would be raised that the authorities in Dooling—especially former Sheriff Lila Norcross—could not answer.
For a couple of days Janice stayed with her daughter in the capital. The cherry blossoms were long gone. It was hot, but they did a lot of walking anyway. On Pennsylvania Avenue they saw the president’s motorcade, a train of gleaming black limos and SUVs. It went straight through without stopping.
“Look.” Michaela pointed.
“Who gives a shit?” Janice said. “Just another swinging dick.”
11