Free State Of Dodge Page 3

  Jackson had always followed the law closely, with the exception of a few speeding tickets and the like and planning not to turn in his lead ammunition, as the new federal law required. Gazing at town hall, which rested on the opposite side of Highway 75, on the corner of the highway and Polecat Road (which was Nazareth Road before you crossed over), he decided not to take the chance that someone was watching, even though it was doubtful that anyone would be. His vision shifted to the gas station on the opposite corner, and he contemplated the hyper inflated price of gas—$15.25—astounded by how far and fast things had fallen.

  He looked to his right and saw the closed First Bank of Dodge and got the time off their clock. He then looked to his left at the longtime closed Dodge Pizza and beyond that to his place of employment, Frank’s Welding & Repair.

  After what seemed like a thirty-minute wait, just as he was thinking of running the red light, it clicked to green. That was ridiculously pointless, he thought, and he cursed this stupid light under his breath as he turned right toward the Piggy Wiggy. The grocery store, which had once been Piggly Wiggly and had become Dodge Grocery, was still referred to by the name it had instantly achieved when the light behind the L in Piggly on the front of the store burned out. Even though he had been sitting beside the bank while waiting an eternity for the light to change, he didn’t notice it until he saw the clock in front of it. It had had few visitors since the bank runs. These bank runs had not come close to comparing to the ones of the Great Depression, but they had done plenty of damage to the economy. Jackson was just glad he was not one of those poor suckers who had trusted strangers to hold on to their money; he had always kept his cash at home and had invested it in ammunition and other trade goods. He wasn’t hoping for things to collapse, but he was somewhat prepared.

  He glanced to his right; down the road from the bank, across the highway from the pharmacy, lay the well-maintained Dodge Cemetery, the place where everyone who was anyone in Dodge was buried. Some of the plots were marked as having been filled over a hundred years ago, and he tried to picture how those people had survived. They hadn’t been waiting for everything to go to shit; they had just been living.

  Those people didn’t have electricity or automobiles, and they lived prosperous lives. “So why can’t we?” he angrily grumbled to the air. If everything did collapse, in a few generations people would live and die just as they had a hundred years ago.

  He turned his head to the left and noticed that the pharmacy and hardware store were completely vacant. As he continued down the highway, he passed the post office, with its government employees obligated to be there and, as usual, do nothing. He turned on his left blinker to pull into the grocery store parking lot. Pike’s Pistol and Pawn’s parking lot connected to this one, so in essence the two businesses shared one large parking lot. He couldn’t find a reason, but he had always used the entrance for the grocery store, even though the pawnshop’s parking lot had an entrance from the highway.

  Upon arrival he guessed this was the only business in town to have the rarity of customers, considering the two vehicles parked at the front. He pulled to the other side of the building, backed into a space, killed the engine, and turned his head, eyeing a familiar flatbed that was similarly parked in the spot right beside his. His father had always taught him this was the safest way to park your vehicle, and, if possible, you make sure your driver’s side was facing opposite from the most likely point of possible danger. While he was pretty sure there weren’t going to be any drive-by shootings in Dodge today, he did this as a learned habit.

  At one time, before the federal highway system had reached out this far, this building had been a general store and had been built not directly facing the highway but set on the corner of some long-forgotten road that would have run straight through the grocery store and whatever road the highway once was, so it was at an almost twenty-five-degree angle to the highway. Jackson tried to remember if he had ever heard the names of those ancient roads as he sat in his truck surveying his surroundings.

  A few yards in front of him lay a curbed stretch of green grass that divided the parking lot of the pawnshop from the now-empty restaurant beyond. The restaurant building had been a fixture in Dodge for as long as anyone could remember and had been everything from a steakhouse to a burger joint to a Mexican buffet to the short-lived Dodge Tobacco and Feed Outlet, which everyone referred to as Luanne’s (the name of the steakhouse that had originally occupied the building). His head maintained its slow path from left to right, taking in his surroundings as he always did before exiting his vehicle, and his eyes crossed the only building for miles on the other side of the highway: Dodge First Baptist.

  Surrounded by an open field and connected to the cemetery by a battered sidewalk, First Baptist was actually two buildings. The steepled main building, the oldest part of the church, had been added on to and was joined to the new larger building to provide space for Sunday school classes. To the passerby the church would appear as one building, but members of the church and locals had been considering it two buildings since before Jackson could remember.

  There were other churches in Dodge, but if you lived within the town limits and were Baptist, you were probably a member, just as Jackson and his close family were. His father had been a deacon for decades, and his mother had taught Sunday school classes for just as long, so the Pikes were considered a prominent family within the church. Jackson had been saved and baptized here at the age of six, and he was never afraid to tell anyone about his faith, but he knew he had backslidden over the years. Occasionally he would try to leave his sinful ways, but he would always end up sliding back down again.

  That brought his thoughts to Redstone, his brother from another mother, as Redstone had once titled them, and how disgusted he was at himself for never finding out if Redstone was a Christian. Even though Redstone often referred to himself as a “laxed Lutheran” (which Jackson always found amusing, because he didn’t know of a Lutheran church in the county); a “backsliding Baptist”; or, his favorite John Wayne quote, a “Presby-goddamn-terian,” other than special occasions when pretty much everyone would have been forced to go to church, Jackson could not recall ever seeing him there. In the few seconds it took for this to run through his brain, Jackson planned to say something at the next opportunity.

  Once finished with the inspection of his surroundings, he opened the creaking door and pulled himself out of the bench seat and onto the pavement. It was a warm, sunny day, with a slight breeze and a few white clouds in the sky. With no traffic in earshot, shutting his door seemed extraordinarily loud, and he was sure the sound echoed for miles. He turned and walked around the back of the truck to the front of the pawnshop, gently running his hand along the familiar flatbed as he walked.

  This flatbed and business were owned by his father, Jeff Pike, who had purchased and renovated the old, vacant settlement store a few years before the recession started—about five years ago now, just as his maintenance job at a manufacturing plant came to an abrupt halt. One of his coworkers was moving a steel press using the forklift. The press fell from about three feet up and would have killed Jeff if he had not been fast on his feet, but it still crushed three toes on his right foot. The employee who was moving the press was found to be inebriated and had not done the proper procedures to secure the press to the forklift. After a generous settlement from his employer, rather than simply retiring, Jeff paid for this building in cash and started Pike’s Pistol and Pawn. This ancient structure had once been the center of Dodge, but when the school had been erected in the 1930s, the town center had shifted toward it, and the closed general store became nothing more than a landmark until recently.

  Before he reached the corner of the brick-and-mortar building and the front entrance of the store, he heard an older man speaking in what resembled a one-party conversation. Jackson instantly recognized the unaccented voice of the town’s only attraction, Old Ben.

  Ben Kennard was Dodge’s town od
dity and had been given his nickname, Old Ben, because of his uncanny resemblance to Obi-Wan Kenobi (from Star Wars Episode IV) and similar name. With his thinning gray hair and seamless beard, it was impossible to guess his exact age, and no one had ever bothered to ask him. He could have been anywhere from 60 to 120, but he didn’t show his age during his youthful sprints between the pawnshop and the Piggy Wiggy drink machines.

  He had appeared out of thin air one day many years ago and, as far as the townsfolk were concerned, had always been there. He had given his political rants and tirades at the town hall and the other businesses of Dodge and had recently taken Pike’s as his new podium, where people would come from miles away just to listen to his political sermons. He had probably chosen this business as a soapbox because many customers were like-minded and more inclined to what he had to say, and because Jeff had long conversations with him and would always bring an extra lunch for him. Jeff didn’t mind having the town’s sole tourist attraction at his front door, considering the extra customers he acquired, even though Old Ben was assumed to be homeless. There were not alleys of cardboard boxes or any other homeless people in town, but Old Ben did not seem to have a vehicle, a job, or a place to live. Though seemingly destitute, he was always healthy and clean. He never asked for handouts and had change to buy a Coke every day.

  Jackson figured that Old Ben was just bored with the lack of listeners because of gas shortages and hyperinflation and was preparing a speech for the next passerby. With the mention of Ben Bernanke, Jackson was sure that was what Old Ben was doing, and he planned to make a smartass remark about how no one had time to listen to the older man anymore.

  As Jackson rounded the corner, though, he realized Old Ben was in an argument about the Federal Reserve with a confused-looking horse! Jackson had not noticed the beast when he entered the parking lot; it was standing, tied to a post at the front of the building. Old Ben was obviously as crazy as some people said. Shifting his focus toward the horse, Jackson thought that it was good to see someone else had planned for this collapse and didn’t waste precious fuel for simple trips to town.

  Jackson decided to keep his thoughts to himself about the weird conversation, and Old Ben’s current sentence ended abruptly as he turned toward the sound of boots on the concrete walk. “How you doin’, Mr. Kennard?” Jackson asked as politely as possible as he moved closer to Old Ben, who was stationed on the bench beside the entrance to the store. No one ever called Old Ben anything but Mr. Kennard to his face, and Jackson had always assumed it had something to do with respecting one’s elders.

  “Well, I was doing OK, but I got over it,” replied the master, his usual retort. “And what brings you here, young man? Are you here to learn about how the government is destroying the country?” Every time Old Ben spoke to anyone younger than himself (which could have been everyone, for all Jackson knew), he always referred to that person as “young man” or “young lady,” so Jackson figured he didn’t know anyone by name.

  “Oh, I stopped by to see Daddy, I’m kinda in a hurry,” he lied, not wanting to listen to the Jedi Master rant about the weight of the national debt in various bills or change again. “But I’ll be sure to say somethin’ on my way out.” He ended the conversation as he stepped through the glass door. Old Ben said something, but Jackson couldn’t make it out as the heavy door shut behind him. Jackson enjoyed his company every once in a while, and he didn’t want to be rude, but the old Jedi talked way too much.

  Jackson heard the chime end as the door automatically closed behind him, and he contemplated how his father had installed a reinforced glass door because he wanted the door to match the surrounding picture windows that dominated the front of the store. Every old general store that Jackson could recall—at least in Alabama—were mostly glass around the entrance. However, so much glass posed a challenge to securing a business that dealt mostly in firearms. This problem had been solved with hundreds of pounds of heavy-duty steel bars, dozens of security cameras, and the business’s being less than a mile from the police station/ town hall. Jackson noticed the recently painted-over section of the sign that used to say “Free Ammo with Purchase of a Firearm.” The federal government had outlawed lead ammunition, so giving free ammo was a thing of the past.

  He looked to where his father was normally stationed—sitting on his stool behind the bar, watching the news on a mini TV. The bar, which ran almost all the way from the front of the store to the back, served as the store clerk’s desk. Though his father had made some notable modifications to the bar, such as inlaying glass lockboxes to display pistols and rifle scopes, and knowing this was how general stores were originally designed—with a long bar that had all of these fragile goods on the wall behind it that the employee could retrieve for the customer—the bar had always made Jackson feel as if he were entering a saloon. Hell, he thought, this might not even be the original bar that had come with the store when his father had bought it. But the antiquity of the wood and the various nicks and scratches made him believe it was. Either way, he had always wanted to prop himself up against it and order a drink.

  He knew the place had never been a bar, and the wall behind it had never been lined with mirrors but rather with shelves (now replaced with racks that held rifles and shotguns) and small drawers (now containing ammunition and other small items). And Axton County had been dry since Prohibition. A couple of cities had become wet in the past twenty years, but there were no liquor stores in the county otherwise. It always irritated Jackson that he had to drive a whole nine miles to Maryton to get his alcohol when there should be an ABC store in Dodge, so it was a good thing he kept a healthy stock at home.

  Looking up from his silent TV toward the clanging of the door’s chime Jeff Pike gave his son an expressionless nod and lazily lifted a crossed arm to form a half wave. He stood as Jackson slowly walked closer, admiring the beauty of each gun he passed. As Jeff stood there, keeping an eye on the news for any developments, he uncrossed his arms and reached up to brush the dandruff off of his shoulder. He wasn’t morbidly obese but carried a few extra pounds, and his tucked-in, dark-gray polo shirt seemed almost skintight against his torso and was stitched with the business’s logo across the left breast.

  When Jackson was only a few yards away, Jeff rested his elbows on the bar in front of him, preparing for a discussion about the morning’s events in Washington. Now that they were separated by only the thin bar, anyone could see that the two were somehow related. Jeff’s combed-back salt-and-pepper hair compared to his son’s short dark-brown hair and Jackson’s slightly trimmer physique were their most noticeable differences. Their noses, their jaw lines, their mannerisms, and even their bluish-green eyes were so similar that one could not deny they were kin.

  Jackson laid his hands on the edge of the bar, noticing the First Freedom magazine beside his father’s elbow, and moved his eyes toward Jeff’s face. “Did you hear?” He eyed the older Pike, knowing he would have been watching the news all morning.

  “Yeah, I’ve been watchin’ all mornin’, and there’s supposedly five of ’em dead. Mr. Kennard came in here a little bit ago and saw it, and he thinks it sounds fishy, and I tend to agree with him.”

  “Come on, Daddy. It’s a little early to be thinkin’ up conspiracies, ain’t it?”

  Jeff pondered his son’s question, lifting his head to a point where he could look Jackson straight in the eye. Being only about half an inch shorter than his son made it fairly easy, and he retorted, “Just because you ain’t ready to think it yet, don’t mean it ain’t one.”

  He could see Jackson’s gears turning as he replayed the reported events over in his head, and he slowly opened his mouth to speak. “But why would they pull a stunt like this? They could just use car crashes or gas leaks or somethin’ to get rid of people, and I think at least one of the guys who got killed had supported some of the gun laws! And the people who attack—”

  His father cut him off, almost as if he knew what Jackson was thinking. �
�That group probably thought they were makin’ their move on their own and didn’t know they had any help. It sure is convenient that they didn’t meet any guards before they got in there.” Jackson opened his mouth to speak again, but Jeff wasn’t finished yet. “It didn’t look like they shot too many people before the cavalry arrived. What’s the death toll up to now? Eight or nine? Six in the Senate chamber, two maintenance men, and a security guard?”

  Jackson’s mouth almost dropped. He knew his father believed all of this, so there was no point in asking if he was saying the government had murdered public servants on live television for having opposing political views. He wondered if Old Ben had brought this craziness up, but he figured his father originally had the idea, and Old Ben had just stirred the pot. Hell, even Jackson thought the government had something to do with 9/11, but that was a long time ago now. Everyone had had years to think about that, but these people were still warm! He just thought it was too soon to be accusing the government of facilitating terrorists.

  “But what do you think they would get from it?” Jackson asked with honest curiosity.

  His father replied, “What do you think? These people were usin’ guns. And what has the president been tryin’ to get rid of since he took office?”

  Jackson looked down, studying his hands and pondering this line of questions. He probably would have come to the same conclusion eventually, but Jeff was always quick to think up conspiracy theories and even quicker in deciding they were fact. Jeff wasn’t one of those people who believed in alien abductions or Sasquatch, but he believed that the government was getting bigger, was steered by anticonstitutionalist liberals, and was growing as subversively as possible. He didn’t believe Elvis was alive, but he suspected that the government monitored “persons of interest” such as him.