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"Uh-oh," Danny said to Carmella. "You should be nice to Six-Pack, Ketchum," Danny told the old logger. "In fact, I think you should marry her--or try living with her again, anyway."
"Constipated Christ!" Ketchum shouted, slamming the door to his truck. Pam's dogs immediately commenced barking, but not the stoic Hero.
Six-Pack came out the trailer door from her kitchen. "The country is under attack!" Pam screamed. "Bush is flyin' around in Air Force One--the coward must be hidin'! The Israelis have all gone home to defend themselves! It's the beginnin' of the end of the world!" Six-Pack shouted at Ketchum. "And all you can do, you crotchety asshole, is rile up my dogs!"
"Marry her?" Ketchum said to Danny. "Why would I want to live with her? Can you imagine coming home every day to a deteriorated state of mind like that?"
"It's all true!" Six-Pack wailed. "Come see for yourself, Ketchum--it's on television!"
"On television!" Ketchum repeated, winking at Carmella--which doubtless drove Six-Pack around the bend. "Naturally, if it's on TV, it must be truer than most things."
But neither Six-Pack nor Ketchum had thought very much about where they were--in an orderly, fastidiously neat trailer park, in the Saw Dust Alley campground, where there were many stay-at-home women with young children, and some retired or unemployed older people (both men and women), and a few unattended teenagers who were skipping school while their working parents didn't have a clue.
It was Ketchum who clearly didn't have a clue about how many people had overheard him and Pam, and both Ketchum and Six-Pack were unprepared for the diversity of opinion among the trailer-park residents, who had been glued to their television sets all morning. Given that the walls of their trailers were paper-thin, and that many of them had been talking with one another in the course of the day's unfolding events, they'd expressed quite a variety of views--in regard to what some of them saw as the first installment of the Armageddon they were witnessing--and now this notoriously belligerent intruder had come into their small community bellowing, and the famously loudmouthed Ketchum (for the former river driver was indeed famous in Errol) seemed to be unaware of the developing news.
"Ain't you heard, Ketchum?" an old man asked. He was stooped, almost bent over--wearing red-and-black wool hunting pants on this warm September day--with his suspenders loosely cupping his bony shoulders, and his bare, scrawny arms dangling from a white sleeveless undershirt.
"Is that you, Henry?" the logger asked the old man. Ketchum had not seen the sawyer since they'd shut down the sawmill in Paris--years before they had bulldozed it half-underground.
Henry held up his left hand with the missing thumb and index finger. "Sure it's me, Ketchum," the sawyer said. "It's the war in the Middle East, the war between the Muslims and the Jews--it's started here, Ketchum," Henry said.
"It started long ago," Ketchum told the sawyer. "What's going on?" the logger asked Six-Pack.
"I've been tryin' to tell ya!" Six-Pack screamed.
There was a young woman with an infant in her arms. "It's a terrorist attack--no airport is safe. They've closed them all down," she said to Ketchum.
Two teenage boys, brothers who'd skipped school, were barefoot; they wore jeans and were shirtless in the midday sun. "Hundreds of people are dead--maybe thousands," one said.
"They were jumpin' from skyscrapers!" the other boy said.
"The president is missing!" a woman with two small children said.
"Well, that's good news!" Ketchum declared.
"Bush ain't missin'--he's just flyin' around, stayin' safe. I told ya," Six-Pack said to the logger.
"Maybe the Jews did it--to make us think it was the Arabs!" a young man on crutches said.
"If it's your brain that's addled, you don't need crutches," the old woodsman told him. "Constipated Christ--let me have a look at the TV," Ketchum said to Six-Pack. (The former river driver, now a reader, was possibly the only resident of Errol who didn't own a television.)
They traipsed into Pam's kitchen--not just Ketchum, with Danny holding Carmella's arm, but also Henry, the old sawyer with the stumps instead of a thumb and an index finger, and two of the women with young children.
The young man on crutches had hobbled away. Outside, the teenage boys could be heard by the kennel. After exchanging pleasantries with the dogs, one of the teenagers said, "Look at the tough bastard with one ear--he's been in a fight."
"Some fight," the second boy said. "It musta been with a cat."
"Some cat!" the first boy said appreciatively.
On Pam's kitchen TV, the media kept replaying that moment when Flight 175 crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center--and of course those moments when first the south tower and then the north tower came down. "How many people were in those towers--how many cops and how many firemen were under those buildings when they fell?" Ketchum asked, but no one answered him; it was too early for those statistics.
At 1:04 P.M., speaking from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, President Bush said that all the appropriate security measures were being taken--including putting the U.S. military on high alert worldwide. "Well, that sure as shit makes us all feel safer!" Ketchum said.
"Make no mistake," Bush said on the TV. "The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts."
"Oh, boy," Ketchum said. "It sounds to me like that's what we should be afraid of next!"
"But they attacked us," the young woman holding the infant said. "Don't we have to attack them back?"
