The Fourth

At first, Indigo McCarthy hadn’t realized that an agent from the Department of Agriculture was shadowing him. But he soon learned. The pursuit started at U.S. Postal Service Station No. 4245. The Ag agent was a mole in USPS who’d requested a transfer to Vermontville, the tiny hamlet bordering the resort lake. A lot of middle managers from the city spent summer weekends there with their families. It was the weekend of the Fourth. At the post office, the Ag agent found that he liked sifting through other people’s mail, particularly when the mail had the potential—the energy of activation—to contain harmful animal or vegetable products. Such secret parcels threatened the nation.

In Indigo’s case, it was a manila envelope with no return address and a Berkeley postmark (itself suspicious), which contained three small packages of Kool-Aid powder: Lemon Punch, Fruit Cocktail, and Wacky Blueberry. Oh, Indigo McCarthy must have been up to something, the agent knew.

In the tiny post office break room, he blew his nose on a standard-issue department handkerchief, a wheat stalk embroidered on each corner. He double-checked the pump load ammo in his wrist gun, and resealed the envelope with a glue stick he’d picked up from the Ben Franklin store in town. None the wiser. He grimaced. The field office in Milwaukee had the wherewithal to give him a wrist gun, but a ninety-cent glue stick was apparently out of its league.

A few men and women in trim blue uniforms were coming into the break room from the Secret Break Room that even the infiltrating Ag agent dared not venture into. The aggie hurried. Any one of them could be a plant, he reasoned, from any agency. It was best to be too careful. Indigo knew none of this fifteen minutes later, as he yanked the envelope and two postcards from his PO box and walked away. How could he have? Professional spies were on the scene.

As he drove his cherry-red SUV from the post office to the lake, past a series of dales and abandoned hobby farms, an Immigration and Naturalization Service official in an SUV followed him. Star-spangled rectangles of cloth rippled on every street corner. The air exploded with toy explosives. The INS agent’s SUV was white and didn’t blend in well. She’d been working this case for a few days, and it was finally coming to fruition. Suspicious packages always portended something suspicious. The INS agent had Indigo’s credit report on the front seat, as well as a Xerox of his recent international itineraries to Canada and Mexico. For “business.” The agent chortled. Indigo had two girls. His wife was a pharmacist. The wife waved at him as he pulled up to their time-share lake cottage. Clean white stucco, worn in, peonies obscuring the cobblestone path through the front yard. But in a pleasant way.

The INS agent sped on, but not before a metal strip adhering to her passenger-side doorknob took several photos of Indigo’s hand, which held the postcards and envelope. The photos were uploaded to a satellite and then down to a processing station in the basement of a Miami funeral home.

Unbeknownst to the INS agent, the ghostly afterimages of the photos were intercepted by a Department of Transportation agent hiding in some shrubs across the street, holding something akin to a laser pointer. She uploaded the images and started running away from the SUV, toward the nearest airport, where there was a Cessna waiting to take her back to Duluth.

“Who are those from, honey?” Marsha, the wife, said. A quick, hot peck on the cheek. It was hot outside. Their marriage was on the rocks. (One didn’t need to be a spy with advanced training to see that!) The two girls, Esther, five, and Miranda, seven, were in the lake, splashing, adorned with life preservers shaped like smiling killer whales. Below the submerged black fins and the legs kicking out, an Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms bureau agent waited with scuba gear and sonar implants, listening. Like Virginia Woolf, he had stones in his pockets when he jumped into the water. He’d learned that through a debriefing of “great American subversives,” and won a certificate for the idea, which hung over his desk back at the Cedar Rapids headquarters. He was quite proud of both the certificate and the desk. The girls giggled. A trout was brushing against their toes.

“I don’t know,” Indigo said. “I haven’t really looked at them. It’s probably just junk.” It’s all junk, he thought. “I need a beer.”
“Get it yourself.” Freeze, retreat. Snap, Indigo opened the screen door and got a beer, postal cargo still in hand, snap, a wide-angle lens captured Marsha’s backside as she walked down the cobbled sandstone path to the lake. The sandstone was imported from France. Super suspicious, code red. Snap again, the cobblestones and her ankles, for good measure. Not everyone was honorable.

Within the lake’s circumference (it was shaped like a pill bug, twitching, ready to curl up), other children played, but in a desultory fashion, as if they knew something unpatriotic were going on in the McCarthy household. Speedboats sped by in front of their cabin a little more slowly. In a few hours they would be angrily shaking their fists, assembling in the town hall, shouting, “Burn down the stucco! Burn down the stucco!” (If the Forest Service agent hiding in a stand of trees had his way.) He couldn’t get close to the house without blowing his cover, which was that of a middle-aged man who had just lost his consultancy job, masturbating amongst the trees, and that was all that could be said about him, except for the pictures he took, three-fourths of which were of Marsha’s behind. Forestry espionage was hard, especially since it was department policy to deforest, which left very few trees for hiding places.

Indigo sank into the inviting folds of the sofa with his beer. Before he sipped, he set the beer down on the coaster. The coaster released a pheromone undetectable by the human nose. Indigo moved toward the blinds to draw them—a cold chill brushed against his neck, the kind of primitive but still efficient “first strike” response that Indigo’s ancestors had used when hunting for giant elk in the Pictish highlands. Most of the time they didn’t succeed. His wife went into the bathroom to make a call and masturbate. The vibrator was hidden in a carved-out copy of The Prince. Not that little fellow who planet-hopped and got his ass handed to him by a snake; rather, the no-holds-barred paragon from Florence, back when Europe mattered. The pheromone drifted out of the living room and underneath the front door, to a badger waiting in the brush five hundred feet away. Upon detecting the scent, the badger rose to its hind legs to get the circulation going and scurried around the perimeter of the lake through the brushy, as yet undeveloped lot adjoining the McCarthys’. The badger was much more nimble than his species profile; a strict Department of the Interior training regimen ensured this. He also had a small but deadly explosive charge wired to his cerebral cortex, with plasticine woven through his underbelly, but his superiors hoped it wouldn’t come to that. The secret logo of the Department of the Interior was the badger. Screw the docile buffalo, content to chew prairie grasses on the official stationery and apparel of the department. (What happened to the buffalo? Buffalo Bill happened to the buffalo, that was what.)

“C’mon, little buddy,” the badger handler of the DOI said, waiting in a pickup truck on a road on the other side of the lake, listening on headphones to the badger’s labored breathing. But then the breathing stopped.

“Honey, do you smell something funny?” Indigo said, calling out to his wife. She didn’t answer. The packages of Kool-Aid still rested unopened next to Indigo’s elbow. Trembling in the air conditioning. The daughters in the lake were listening too, in anticipation. Children had intuitions about perfect summer days, that they could disappear at the drop of a hat. It was a survival tactic.

There was a soft, but still distinct, explosion a couple of lots over. A man screamed: “I’m on fire, I’m on fire.” Forgetting his cover. But what else could be expected from a Health and Human Services agent who had no experience with badgers in the field? Explosives-laden badgers, at that? The HHS agent—who’d convinced himself through several seminars that his work was to protect the McCarthy children, always think of the children—saw the wiring running underneath the badger’s belly and then pounced from his hiding place in the marshy scrub. He had attempted to take the badger by the tail and club it to death against a rock. But the nearest rock was barely within sight along the lake path, a good two-minute walk away, which required hauling the badger by hand. The animal wasn’t human and therefore didn’t require health or services. For all he knew, the badger could be a double agent for those nasty Belgians. The badger, then, sacrificing everything for the good of the department, exploded.

Screaming ensued. Indigo, startled, sat up. The Interior agent began crying and sped away, the mission lost. The ATF agent at the bottom of the lake chucked all of his stones at once and began to surface. Indigo called out to his wife again, who again didn’t answer. The screaming stopped. All was still, pleasantly so. Fishers cast their rods. Sunbathers, pale as groupers, turned over on their floating rafts in syncopation.

Indigo couldn’t decide what to do next. He needed backup, 911. He needed a fire marshal in his corner. He picked up the phone, but the line was dead. Marsha had his cell phone.

“Marsha?” he called. “Kids?” He went to the bathroom door and tapped on it. No answer. He rattled the handle in that special push-pull that only he knew. Marsha had locked herself in before.

The bathroom was empty. The window was open, letting in a breeze that felt much too cold, too much in the throes of autumn. Too much autumn. The lake would close and board up in autumn, leaving the residents of Vermontville to waddle between snowbanks en route from car to church or bar. Which was what they probably wanted. They wanted to be left alone by people like Indigo, sophisticated to the point of having agents after him. He looked out the window and saw no one in the yard or the black, quiet lake. He started yelling “Marsha, Marsha,” veering back to the living room. Sitting in the chair he had recently departed from was a man in a black suit. He was wiry thin, and his pianist’s hands were tearing into the manila envelope. Beer frost was on his lips. He had drunk from Indigo’s beer, an outrage somehow more vile than his very presence. Indigo stood there, too afraid not to speak, but lacking words to adequately express what was now in front of him.

The agent ignored Indigo and tipped the open package down into his lap. The three Kool-Aid packages slid out like origami. The agent carefully placed the manila envelope onto the coffee table and made a stack of the Kool-Aids. Indigo could see, with the motion of hands, the shine of pearlescent gloves.
“Who are you?” Indigo said.

“The members of your family are being held as enemy combatants.” The agent didn’t look up. “I imagine you want to know about your family. Families are important.”

“Who are you?” Indigo asked again. And then, “‘Enemy combatants’?”

“Stop asking so many questions. It’s clear you hate your family. Since you didn’t ask about them. So let me ask the questions, buster.” The agent stood up. “What do you know about these Kool-Aid packages?” He shook the lurid colors.

“I don’t know—I don’t know who sent this—”

“Let me give you a hint. Bad people. People are either good or bad.”

“I want a lawyer.”

The agent snorted. “Listen, I told you. Your family consists of enemy combatants. They are thus exempt from the Geneva conventions as well as U.S. jurisprudence. Let us not speak of them again.”

“My daughters—they’re just kids.” Indigo considered rushing the man, or rushing away. He couldn’t decide. It seemed like an important decision. He wanted it decided for him.

“Children enjoy Kool-Aid. This is natural.” This statement was simple enough that Indigo suspected a trap. “But as I advised you before—”
Indigo cocked his head. “What’s that noise?” There was a noise. He wasn’t paranoid, not really. It was a sound like a video game, pixels chiming and exploding, a player raking in a high score.

The agent put a hand to his ear. For the first time, panic filled his eyes. He straightened his spine. “Fuck,” he said to himself. “It’s too early.” Then he realized that Indigo, a noncommissioned citizen, was his audience. “There’s a Blackbird coming,” he said. “A drone has been launched. Your cottage—” The firework sounds increased. Yes, it was the Fourth of July, a holiday designed to remember the Declaration of Independence that several wealthy planters and shippers had made against a king. But the screeching sound was different, from the sky, plowing down like the future instead of the past. The future always came from the sky.

The agent got up and ran, ignoring Indigo. The Kool-Aid packets were still on the coffee table. Indigo could hear the agent screaming on the lawn, running toward the lake. For cover. The boom was fast and deafening. Seconds passed. Indigo scooped up the packets and dived under the coffee table. He didn’t quite fit there, but then again, the imitation plywood would afford little solace from the detonation of a smart bomb, anyway. So Indigo was not worried. I have a stomachache, he thought, as the sleek chrome object hit the surface of the earth. Bomb-shelter position as he learned in Catholic school, hands over head, orange-juice light—

Not exactly the surface of the earth.

The surface of the lake turned white and horizoned. The window steamed and then shattered, letting in the hothouse air from the outside. Indigo slid out from under the coffee table, clutching the Kool-Aid to him. His whole body shook as he stumbled out of his house, toward the hot lake. The grass on the water’s perimeter was scorched. No one boated or cavorted. The sky, it seemed to Indigo, as he began running toward his car, ought to have been splotched with gray, ready to rain. But the weather never tracked anyone’s interior state—the sky was jewelry blue.

Something white and light landed on his shoulder, and he flinched. Something landed in his hair. He fished it off. A leaflet. Leaflets falling everywhere: “Your locale has been targeted for subversive activity. Please vacate the premises and contact proper authorities.” The too-late leaflets began to snow around him in earnest. He couldn’t see the source; there wasn’t a plane in the sky.

He opened the door of his SUV and entered the cool vinyl cave. His wife was lying on the backseat. His children were lying on the backseat behind the backseat, curled into each other. They all slept. He didn’t want to disturb the moment so he started the drive into town. Opening the window, he tossed the Kool-Aid packets out, one by one. He touched the button; the window sealed shut like a guillotine.

The silence in the car had no precedents, no antecedents. The silence was a vehicle with four bodies in it. Indigo didn’t want to disturb anything. Close to town, the abandoned farmhouses encroached on the newly built super-Wal-Mart. Or was it the other way around. At any rate, the farmhouses loomed with doorless thresholds, sagging floorboards, gutted ovens. He didn’t want those abandoned places. He didn’t want to be abandoned. At this point in the game, watching what he said appeared the best way to achieve that goal. Marsha snored, beginning to wake. He would not tell her about the agent. He would not ask about the package or let on that he knew about her affairs. Probably she had affairs. All he wanted was to drive into town, and then his family would wake, and once in town there would be a parade to attend—patriotic clowns on stilts, the VFW marching with their scarecrow uniforms, cheerleaders throwing sparkled batons high in the air. The batons would fall into hands. And later, when the sky was dark, fireworks would burst upon the public square. Marsha opened her eyes. She sat up and yawned, stretching her arms. It was unclear whether she had a care in the world.

“Indigo,” she said, still half-asleep, peering down at their children. He clenched the wheel until his knuckles whitened. “Indigo, the kids don’t have their seat belts on. But they’re lying down. Should I wake them? Are they safe?”

NOTE: “The Fourth” is from Alan DeNiro’s debut collection of short fiction, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead, recently issued by Small Beer Press.