Thirty percent of Americans believe that angels and demons are active in the world.
“But why me?” says Simon.
“Because those who refuse his call are worse than those who never hear it at all.”
Simon thinks of his room at Float, the bed he made before he left, his clothes on hangers in the closet, the entrances and exits he committed to memory. A system. He had a system there. Structure. All he has now is chaos. Terrible things could happen if they’re not careful, and they are not being careful. They are being the opposite of careful. They are breaking laws. They are arming themselves.
Louise, sitting on the floor next to Simon, puts her head on his shoulder. “Come on, kid,” she says. “You’re overthinking this thing.”
“Overthinking.”
“You can’t reason your way out of a holy war.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s the only way out.”
Louise rubs his arm. “This is our planet. They had their chance, and what did we get—Mexican babies drowning inside their daddy’s shirts. Rising seas and bump stocks. Shit. We got shit, and what’s their solution? Conspiracy theories and magical thinking. Well, maybe it’s time we got some magic thinking on our side too.”
She stands, holds out her hand.
“Let’s go get ’em.”
Simon stares at her hand for a long moment. The paper bag at his side is forgotten. For as long as he can remember, all he’s known is fear. But there’s a bigger emotion inside him now. A feeling with no name. He reaches up and takes her hand.
“All right, all right,” says Flagg, taking the cigarette from behind his ear and putting it between his lips. “Now let’s get this shit loaded up.”
Avon DeWitt
It was said there wasn’t a jail on Earth that could hold Avon DeWitt. The fact that it was Avon who said it and that he had never once escaped from a lockup of any kind was beside the point. What was important was that every time they sent Avon away, he walked right back out the door—usually six to twenty-four months later （although in 2004 he did a spell of three years, six months for assaulting a police officer with a deadly weapon, i.e., the driver’s-side door of his Cutlass）。 This time he’d been in for four months for tax evasion, a term he disagreed with—as he said while representing himself in Miami-Dade County Municipal Court—violently.
If you keep moving, Avon used to tell his son, Samson, they never catch you on the big stuff. Which is why they’d lived in ten states in eleven years. Cowboys of the interstate. American nomads. Samson is grown now, living somewhere in the middle of the country. They talk infrequently these days, and unpleasantly when they do. You teach a boy everything you know, Avon likes to say, and then he spits in your face.
And yet isn’t that what Avon did to his father?
He was sixty-one years old when he went in this last time, Avon. He is sixty-two now, having celebrated the date of his birth in a Miami-Dade County holding facility, lying on a mattress so thin it felt like the cheese on a cheeseburger. Food, it turned out, was the main topic of conversation in Miami-Dade County lockup. Each prison has its own particular voice. In Tallahassee, prisoners talked mainly about cars—cars they’d owned, cars they planned on owning, cars that got them laid, the laser-cut speed machines from Fast & Furious 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. In McCreary—where Avon had done eighteen months for passing bad checks in the nineties—the primary subject of conversation was blowjobs. It was there that Avon met Fat Eddy, who was six foot two and weighed a hundred and forty pounds and who swore that he’d gotten head once from Miss America herself, when she was a flat-chested, fifteen-year-old roller skate waitress at the Hula Hut in Boca Raton. He described it as serviceable, due mainly to her youth and inexperience, but also to the full set of braces she’d had put on just a few weeks earlier.
It was Fat Eddy who introduced Avon to the idea of sovereignty. Which is a bit like saying it was Jesus who introduced the world to the idea of Christianity. That’s the scale of impact the words had on Avon DeWitt, born to Marsha and Dylan DeWitt （sixteen and eighteen respectively） on the Georgia/Florida border in the back of a broken-down Chevy in December 1958. Dylan was driving his fiancée to Jacksonville to take a job on his uncle Dale’s car lot, so as to give his firstborn son a stable home and three squares a day. Dale had offered them the use of a trailer on the back forty of a piece of property he owned behind the Tastee Freez. The trailer was where Avon ate his first solid food, took his first steps, and blew off his left pinkie finger with a blackjack firecracker on the fifth of July, 1966.