As for Cooper, he’ll move in with Fran, if she’ll have him. He hasn’t proposed it yet. There’s no need to decide it tonight, or to decide what happens after that. All he knows is that he’ll go about it slowly, the whole project, not just with her, but with the whole town, and with himself, he understands this. With no forced urgency, but a humble process of determining who in the town can forgive him. Whether any trust yet remains. Perhaps there isn’t any, and if not, he’ll deal with that, too. But everyone here has their own pasts to grapple with. He won’t rush them or force them to grapple too quickly with his. He has his own grappling to do.
The fax machine will be dispatched, of course, that is the next order of business. In fact, he has half a mind to lug it out from the police trailer right now and toss it onto the flames. He trusts Eleanor Sung to run things from afar, and if she needs to reach them, she can drive out and visit face-to-face. For his part, he doesn’t intend to bother her. They’ll need some emergency lifeline, he guesses, though he’s increasingly inclined to believe that whatever the town needs, it will find within its borders or not at all. They should be able to puzzle out the problem of survival together. For starters, they’ve got $200,000. The money’s still there, still accessible, he double-checked from a pay phone during the trip into town. It could all disappear tomorrow, he knows that, too, but he suspects it won’t. Call it a bribe, or hush money, for services rendered and secrets kept. Those funds should suffice for a while. After that, they only face the same challenges of every new hopeful settlement that’s ever been established in human history. Which is a fact that Cooper finds heartening, perhaps foolishly so.
Frankly, he’s less concerned with how they’ll survive than with who will come next to challenge them. Not just Rigo, not just Vincent, but all the accumulated enemies of the town who still harbor festering vendettas. Given there’s no one in the outside world to shield their secrets or their whereabouts.
Then again, he thinks, we’re a town of notorious cutthroats and criminals and killers, who only now have an inkling of who we are and what we’ve done. And what we’re capable of.
So let them come.
As for the files, all the files, they’ll go in a box, he thinks, into his drawer, in his office, with a lock, and he’ll hold the key. It will be his last and only responsibility to the town. Given the riot today, some people here already know all there is to know about themselves. Some know half. Some know nothing. But those who ask will always have access.
That will be his rule. The only rule of the Blinds.
Fran holds Isaac hefted in her arms like a much younger child and together they stand next to Cooper. He hasn’t asked if she’ll have him, or even if she plans to stay, and tonight’s not the night to ask.
Instead, they watch the bonfire.
“It kind of feels like a holiday,” she says.
“Bonfire Day,” says Cooper. “We should mark it on the calendar.”
“We could celebrate it every year.”
“But what are we going to burn?” Cooper asks her.
“Whatever needs burning,” she says.
Hours later, as the fire fades, there is no further revel to speak of, though a few townspeople linger as though at a festival. It’s deep into the early morning before the last one heads to bed. And even though there’s no one among them, not Cooper, not Fran, nor any of those who remain, who doesn’t still fear some coming intrusion, some enemy galloping toward them from the past, for the first time in the town’s history, they sleep with the gates wide open.
Cooper buries the padlock in the ground himself. At dawn, in the desert, just beyond the fence. He digs a shallow hole, and before he covers it over, he tosses in his sheriff’s star besides.
Let Dawes earn her own star, he thinks, not this tarnished hand-me-down.
He pats the dirt with the toe of his boot. Then he plants a homemade sign above the hole. A sign he made an hour ago in Orson’s workshop, with some old timber and black paint. He pounds the sign into the ground with Orson’s dented hammer. Then he pockets the hammer, turns, and heads back toward the town.
He leaves the sign out front of the open gates to greet anyone who cares to call.
As a welcome, or a warning, or both.
The sign, hand-lettered, simply reads:
WELCOME TO THE BLINDS