Chapter 46
“I
Something metal pokes me from behind. It's Dinah, holding Clint's flamethrower. She blasts a cloud of fire into the air and giggles. She's wearing a linen pencil dress made up entirely of the Texas flag with the hemline high above her knees. She sports a leather cowboy hat and boots.
“Ah! Don't do that,” I say.
“I can't wait till the video of me lighting these books on fire makes the rounds on the internet,” she gloats.
“Be careful not to waste that fuel. It's almost out,” Clint says.
Dinahmiters start to trickle into the square. Of course, they're all basically men. They're flanked by porta-potties and tables piled with Plutonium Cactus for sale.
Clint waves me offstage to ask me to introduce him at the beginning of the rally, and then a look of pure terror washes over his face. When I look, Rosferatu looms behind us, pushing a cart full of boxes.
“Well, well, well! Clinton D. Holtz. How long it's been,” she says, kicking the brake down on the cart.
“You know him?” I ask. Clint shakes his head vigorously and starts to edge away.
“Of course! I was his babysitter.”
“Shut up, you liar!” He jabs his finger at her like he's air-stabbing her.
“Poor dear had an accident one night when his parents left him with us. He tried to sneak out of the house and climbed over our metal gate. Unfortunately, he slipped onto the spikes,” she says, her finger brushing over her knuckle in circles.
“You diseased corpse of a woman. You hideous bat virus,” he interrupts.
“One of his testicles had to be removed,” she adds. “I'll never forget the screams. Bless your sweet little heart. Anyway, the rally is about to start! See you later!” She sashays away, and Clint scuffs the ground with his boot like a scolded eight-year-old.
“The day a house falls on Rosalyn Wetherly will be right up there with the Berlin Wall coming down,” he says. “She came to the hospital and would read all this chick lit shit and force me to listen. Heidi. Motherfucking Nancy Drew.”
“You know there's no shame in having one testicle, right?” I mean, if there's one person who's not going to derive joy from somebody else's bodily injury, it's going to be me.
He scuffs the ground again, his hands tight in his pockets. “There is shame in losing any body part! My fertility rate dropped in half forever that night. Now drop it!”
“Clint! It's time to start!” Dinah hollers from the other side of the stage. Clint motions for me to get out there.
I walk to the front and adjust the microphone. The square is packed now, and everybody is mostly just staring at my face. “Um… thanks for coming. Here's Clint,” I say, and the crowd ignites into rip-roaring cheers as he runs out onstage past me to do his stupid Pecos bit.
When he calls Dinah onstage, she struts out and does a little spin-and-dance act on her way to the microphone.
Meanwhile, the stagehand is trying to set the pyro off, but it's not working.
Dinah turns around and glares at us. I shrug.
She tosses her hair back and smiles at the crowd, which greets her with tepid applause.
“Welcome to our first annual Filth Cleanse! As the founder and host of Dinahmite!, I'd like to thank you all for being here today as well as Rosalyn Wetherly for her help in organizing this event.”
I stand behind the stagehand and ask them what the issue is, but they ignore me. Clint pushes me out of the way and grabs the stagehand by his shirt and sticks his finger in his face.
“Are you dumb? You ruined my girl's entrance!”
Meanwhile, Dinah's put the whole audience to sleep. “You know, I created Dinahmite! to give a voice to misunderstood women like me who are tired of the status quo,” she says.
“Pecos!” somebody yells from the crowd.
“In doing so, I—” she starts to say, until another man shouts the word. And then another. Pretty soon, everybody's shouting it to the point that they sound like crows cawing in a field.
Dinah smirks. “Sounds like y'all want Clint?” These idiots have entered the bear's den.
If she could shoot bolts of electricity out of her hands, this crowd would have been dead three seconds ago.
“Maybe he should come back out,” she says through her teeth, but he's already halfway back to the stage with his guitar and an amp.
“How about I play y'all a little something I wrote? You can download it for a dollar ninety-nine. It's called ‘The Woman I Need'!”
Dinah waves at everybody, holding onto her smile for dear life, then storms off stage as soon as the song starts. As she flounces away, the entire set of pyro goes off and the crowd goes wild. She freezes for one agonizing moment of humiliation, then disappears.
I helm the Plutonium Cactus booth while Clint plays his music and the IntegriTruth Moms toss all the books into one giant pile. A burly man in a short-sleeved plaid shirt and ripped jeans slaps a twenty on the table.
“Gimme one of them Plutonium Cactus bottles.” He takes the bottle from me and dumps a fistful of the pills into his mouth. He pours the entire liquid from a beer can down his throat, then crunches the can on his head and chucks it onto the ground. He burps so loud that his whole face vibrates.
Another person tugs me from behind.
“Can you not touch m—”
It's Byron. He's disguised in sunglasses.
“Byron, I'm delighted to see you here!” Mrs. Wetherly says.
“Back off, Velma Von Tussle. I ain't here for you,” he says. He's got a sad, reflective look on his face, even with the eyes covered. Like a rich, grieving widow.
“Listen, I'm sorry about the way I broke the news about Carsten to you,” I say. “I thought I was—”
“Firenze is the name of the restaurant Carsten works at.
He works the Friday shifts, early evening.
Make a reservation for two ASAP and I'll meet you there.
They fill up fast. When we're done there, we'll go to the movies to bump into your dumb friends. Et voilà,” he says, floating away like a ghost who had twenty seconds to deliver a message before disappearing back into the void.
I rush to a less crowded area to call the restaurant and make the reservation.
“Can you put flowers on our table and make it look super romantic while you're at it?” I ask the person on the phone. When I secure the reservation, I realize Dinah has been listening the whole time from behind.
“You're going to Firenze? On a date?” She's got the flamethrower in her arms. Shit. “What did I tell you about your gay shit? You're going to blow our whole operation. And you should be rehearsing for your stupid musical instead of going out on dates!”
“It's not a real date. It's a fake date.”
“Of course that's what you gay guys are going to say! God, I am so good to you, yet you continue to break my trust. I try to be a good person and do good things, and what does the universe pay me back in? Shit!” A flaming burst of rage blows out of the flamethrower, but thankfully she's pointing it at the sky.
Clint's song ends, and the square roars with delight.
Mrs. Wetherly stands behind Clint, who jolts in the air when he sees her, and takes the microphone from him.
“Now on to the cleansing!” Mrs. Wetherly calls the crowd to the book pile that reaches far into the sky.
Dinah picks up the flamethrower and struts like an executioner on a runway.
Mr. Deel steps out in front of the crowd with a little red book. “Here's one that's full of lies and should have been banned long ago!” As he tosses it into the pile, I can briefly see the smiling black-and-white face of Anne Frank and the words “The Diary of a Young Girl” on the cover.
“It's Dinah o'clock!” Dinah says, her finger wrapped on the trigger. As she lifts the weapon and aims at the pile, Clint runs out of the crowd, tugging Leo Steger forward, who doesn't look any more lucid than he did the night of the safari.
“Dinah! This guy's got a grenade!” He holds the grenade up as the rest of us duck. Dinah lowers the flamethrower and sighs.
“So?” Dinah asks.
“So, it would be even cooler if we blow the books up with this! Think of the clicks!” His eyes shine like a child's in a toy store.
Leo stares above. “They're watching us from the trees! I'm telling you, throw it in the trees!”
“I thought we agreed I would use the flamethrower,” she says.
“Please let me use the grenade! Please please please please please!”
“Whatever you want, Clint,” she tells him, and walks away.
He yells a victorious “Yes!” before sticking his fingers in his mouth to whistle.
“Listen up, everybody! We're at a defining moment in the history of Oyster Pit.
We've got a holy war here in our backyard, and it's gonna take every one of us to stand up and fight.
Bundy the Sasquatch exerts his influence with these books.
We're gonna destroy this filth and extripate this Sasquatch's mind control!”
“Do you mean to say ‘ex-tir-pate'?” Mrs. Wetherly asks.
“Be gone, you cloven-hooved minotaur from hell,” Clint says, shooing her away. I don't want to be around Clint and a grenade, so I start backing away.
“All right, folks! This is a movement of love, my friends! You can't stop this smile, you can't stop this 'stache! Pecos!” He yanks the pin and stuffs the grenade into the bottom of the pile, then skitters away with the crowd.
I follow Dinah to the other side of the town hall building, where she's quaking a 10.
0 on the Richter scale. There's a row of cutesy animal statues made out of recycled objects that were created for the Oyster Pit Children's Festival.
Something in Dinah snaps, and she lights up the artwork for an entire twenty seconds until the fire runs out and nothing remains but puddles of liquefied plastic.
She tries a few more clicks, but the fuel is spent.
She throws the flamethrower to the ground with a furious grunt and strolls off to who knows where.
“Dinah!” Clint calls from afar. “The grenade was a dud! We need the flamethrower. Dinah? Dinaaaaaaaah!”