“It’s got to be a name on the list.” Robinson nudges the list forward slightly.
The goombah nods, in a practiced imitation of comprehension, then reads the list again with great concentration. Robinson’s irritated. He looks at the clock and thinks about lunch. He says finally to the goombah, as a prod, “How about Cagney?”
The goombah looks up, uncomprehending.
“James Cagney,” Robinson says. “He was like the Charles Bronson of his day.”
“Hannibal Cagney. I like it.” The goombah grins. “Let them come,” he says, now beaming. He fires two fingers in the air like pistols. “Let them come and try to take down Hannibal fucking Cagney!”
Robinson writes the name down in the ledger.
“Vivien King,” says the fortysomething woman decisively.
The decision took all of five seconds.
“I do not want a Negroid name,” says the Tattooed Ramrod flatly, staring straight at Robinson.
Robinson and Ramrod are the last two people in the room. Robinson remembers this stare-down game all too well from his previous life as a beat cop in Baltimore. He locks eyes with Ramrod to communicate that he has registered, but will not acknowledge, nor be rattled by, this punk-ass provocation.
“Jefferson, Johnson, Thompson. I do not want a Negroid name,” Ramrod says again.
“They were your names before they were our names,” says Robinson.
Ramrod breaks first. He glances at the list, then back at Robinson. “All the good ones are gone. I can’t have Wayne?”
“No.”
“How about Dean?”
“Already taken.”
“Well, shit,” says Ramrod.
“Forty-four people got here before you. The pickings are getting slim,” says Robinson. “You don’t have to take a male name, you know. You can choose from the women as well.”
Ramrod scans that list, then points to Marlene Dietrich. “How about Dietrich?”
“That’s available. But you need a first name, too. From the VP list.”
Ramrod glances over the second list. “So strange, don’t you think? To ascend to such a high position in your lifetime and then be totally forgotten? I mean, who even remembers Schuyler Colfax? Or John C. Breckinridge?”
“The history books do.”
“In my experience, a history book is the last place you want to go looking for the truth.” Ramrod consults the list again. While he reads, Robinson considers the tattoos that cover the man’s arms and neck, stretching up to his jawbone like a priest’s high collar. Tributes, all of them, from the looks of it. Faces, ringed in halos or roses. Women, men, even a few small children. All beaming beatifically.
“You know all those people?” Robinson asks, gesturing at the tattoos.
“Yes. Or I did, anyway.”
“And they’ve all passed?”
“Yes, sir, they did.”
“A lot of pain on those arms,” says Robinson, and begins to reconsider his lack of compassion for the man in front of him.
Ramrod sticks his arms out straight and jacks up his loose linen sleeves and regards the tattoos like a man inspecting an expensively tailored suit. “Yes, sir, that is the gospel truth.” Then he points to the bottom of the VP list. “What about Dick?”
“Dick? It’s all yours.”
“Dick Dietrich.” Ramrod smiles. “Got a certain ring, don’t you think?”
“It’s definitely not a Negroid name,” says Robinson, then writes it down.
“Dick Dietrich.” Ramrod nods, pleased with his choice. “Now that’s the kind of name that history remembers.”
Fran Adams’s house is just a five-minute walk from the intake trailer and the main drag of the town, but then, in the Blinds, everyone’s house is just a five-minute walk from pretty much everything else. Cooper walks briskly, head down, up the main northwest street, casting a long, slanted morning shadow. The Blinds has one main dirt road that runs east-west, where the store and the services are found, and another unpaved artery that runs north-south, halving the half dozen or so residential streets into twinned cul-de-sacs, six houses per side. The streets have no names; the houses have no numbers, which, to Cooper, makes sense. It would be counterintuitive, he thinks, to have street signs in a place that is primarily intended to help people hide.
He corrects himself.
Not hide. Flourish.
Just look at us all, he thinks. Flourishing.
The units are all single-story bungalows, wind-blasted, identical, constructed of cinder block, because the town is located in West Texas on the far west edge of Tornado Alley. So the Fell Institute, which established Caesura, decided to make indestructibility, rather than aesthetics, the town’s top priority. And the residents dutifully run their tornado drills, ringing the bells at the chapel and gathering everyone inside, even though, in eight years, the town has never so much as touched the hem of a passing tornado. What weather they do get in summer is sun, sun, sun, and heat; in winter, it’s sun and cold, with occasional wind. Cold is a concept that’s difficult for Cooper to remember right now, given they’re smack-dab in July’s sizzling peak. As he passes the houses, he does his best to avoid the glances from the curtained windows, and only nods at the few lobbed greetings from people out sitting on their porches. He’s not up for his usual, ambling sheriff routine this morning, and he’d rather not field any panicked questions about exactly what the hell happened in the wee hours last night. He’ll address the whole town soon enough. He can quell their fears then, as best he can. But before all that, he wants to check in on Fran Adams. He knows the route to her house by heart.
He marvels again at the little things—the flower boxes, the stubborn gardens, the stained-glass decorations on rubber suckers stuck inside windowpanes to catch the sun—all the ways people try to personalize their tiny, identical parcels of the town. Each house has a scrap of front yard, but no driveway, since no one in the Blinds has a car. Cooper’s the only one in town with regular access to a vehicle—another perk of his position, if you can call a dented pickup with a slippery transmission and 250,000 miles in the rearview a perk—and the town keeps another car on hand, a Chevy Aveo, for emergencies, though that vehicle is usually up on blocks at the repair shop, under Orson Calhoun’s care. It doesn’t matter much; no one ever uses either vehicle, not even Cooper. Unlike the residents, he’s technically allowed the occasional twenty-four-hour furlough to civilization in extraordinary circumstances, though he can’t remember the last time he requested one from the Institute. Once you’re planted here, he’s found, you get pretty much settled, and civilization starts to feel very far away.
As he turns the corner toward Fran Adams’s house, he spots her sitting out on the front steps. Cooper waves as he approaches.
“Morning, Ms. Adams,” he says.