After Dice parked he beckoned me to the slopes beyond the storage house. The cows were out in the field, their bells clanging at all pitches. Dice pointed to the electric fence, which rhythmically snapped with current. “Touch it,” Dice said.

“Really?” Little sparks flew from where the wires connected.

“Don’t think about it. You want to.”

So I didn’t think about it. I reached out and grabbed the wire. For a moment it was only hot, and then every muscle in my body cramped. I let go and my organs, hand, and tongue were on fire.

“Good girl,” Dice said.

fall

CHAPTER 29

Dice showed me how to make slow-burning fuses of shoelaces soaked in a potassium chemical and granulated sugar. He showed me how to make tidy newspaper packets of cotton soaked in gasoline and Green Thumb fertilizer, but we didn’t assemble any yet. “Cuke and Osha,” he said, “misjudged this blast.” We kept our wares in a flameproof metal box, the kind used for paint solvents. The whole family was seized with urgency. Dice didn’t say whether we would be burning our napalm in the power plants or the dragline excavators or the banks that financed the mountaintop removal or the houses of coal CEOs, or the new exurban sprawl, the developers, or whether we’d wait for the creek-testing man to return, but we trusted he’d find the right place to strike. We were hurtling toward winter.

We stepped up our labors. It seemed like most of the family now was preparing to fight. Dice showed me a faster method to make napalm: I could just dump Styrofoam into the gas, and the gas ate it hungrily and turned to sticky sludge the color of sunshine.

Dice and Sara shared their private stash of moonshine with me—private, but not unauthorized, because now I deserved that kind of luxury. I needed new tools with which to prepare for the action. It was only rotten sorghum. The alcohol made me weak but also marvelously calm and tranquil. Maybe now, calm and quiet, dizzy and tired, bleary-eyed and able to carry out only simple, repetitive tasks—which was everything on the farm—I’d become a mountain lion, a sheep, or a leaf, and dissolved my definite self. I was a collection of memories, some mine, some Dice’s, some straight from the earth and instinct.

* * *

And then Queen came home.