“I’m too dull,” I said. “Quoting requires an original mind.”
“The little greaseball,” Hoxley said scornfully, not listening to me. “He was a bookie, did you know that? A real, honest-to-God Damon Runyon bookie. Took me to the track from time to time, you know, get to know the boy, make like a best pal.” He shuddered from head to foot, and I became aware that the gun in his hand was shaking violently. “A pal. Me and that revolting gob of phlegm. Shame you never came around. What fun the three of us could have had, him spitting numbers at Lady Luck and you writing airy prose with your left hand and me figuring out how to burn a horse. I did, too, finally. Working my way up, I burned one for Eddie.”
“Do horses have vocal cords?”
“Nay,” he said, and released the shrill laugh from its cage again. “That’s a pun, nay. Do you get it? Say you get it.”
“I get it.”
“Then explain it.” His eyes twitched toward the windows. “Never mind. What time is it?”
“Past eight.” I was watching the gun. It was jumping around in his hand like a live fish.
“Okay,” he said. He pulled his eyes away from the windows and slid his tongue over his lips again, as if unsure what came next. “Here’s the deal. I hate to cut this short, just as we’re getting to know each other again, but fuck it. Get off the counter and turn around. Do it very slowly.” He retreated a step to watch me.
I slid my fanny over the edge of the counter until my feet hit the floor and turned my back to him. “Hands behind you,” he said. “Knot your fingers together. Good and tight now, hear?”
“I hear.”
“I want your knuckles to turn white. You’re doing fine. Now over there, under the counter next to Mom. First, get the stool.”
A tall, four-legged wooden stool stood beneath the counter. I went slowly to it, not looking back at Hoxley, unknotted my fingers, and pulled it out.
“Put it behind you,” he said. “Don’t turn around. Just slide the stool around you until it’s behind your back. Good. Now kneel down-try to do it gracefully-and put your hands back between the legs of the stool. You’ll have to unlace your fingers, of course, and you have my permission to do so. Do it now.”
As I knelt, my knee touched Mrs. Lewis through the plastic sack, and she started violently. Then she began to weep. Small air holes had been torn in the bag covering her head.
“Calm down, Mom,” Hoxley said. “Everything’s going to be fine. Simeon, I want one hand on either side of the leg of the stool. The leg farthest from you. Now put your fingers back together. Shake hands with yourself, my little man. Be your own best pal.” I knotted my fingers together, the wood rough and thick between my wrists. My elbows were captive between the nearer legs. Hoxley opened a drawer behind me, a grinding metallic sound.
Mrs. Lewis went on crying, long, gulping sobs that seemed to tear her soul up by the roots and scatter its pieces into the air. She was quivering, the plastic bags rustling and shaking.
“Now I’m going to have to use both hands for a minute, Simeon,” Hoxley said, “but don’t revert to your youth and get clever, because by the time you pull your arms free, I’ll have lots of time to pick up the gun and blow your head off. Clear?”
“Clear,” I said. My voice sounded like a raven’s croak.
“A little fiber,” Hoxley was saying, “can do us all a world of good.” Something thick was being wrapped around my wrists, pulling at the hair. “Of course, I think you’re suppose to eat it.” Whatever it was went over my fingers, and then I felt him reach around the leg of the stool and wrap it around my forearms. “When in doubt,” he said, “wear it. There we are, fiber tape. Tensile strength, three thousand pounds per square inch. Stronger than affection, stronger than the ties that bind. Stronger than hate? Good question. And while we’re at it, shut up, Mom. Did you know that the web of the common garden spider is the strongest fiber in nature?” He paused, and then knocked something against the stool.
“No,” I said promptly.
“Well, it probably isn’t. Anyway, this will have to do.” He gave my hand a proprietorial pat, and I heard him stand up. “Fine,” he said. “Like the turtle, you carry your home on your back. Now turn around, on your knees, so you can see me. I’ve really lacked an audience, did you know that? Here I am, the greatest act since Houdini, and all the people who’ve seen me in action had short attention spans. Distracted by the here and now, although I can’t really blame them. The here and now was pretty diverting. Still, there have been times when I felt like a great painting hanging in a miser’s basement. For whom, after all, does the Mona Lisa smile? Turn around.”
The stool made it impossible for me to shift my weight, and I almost fell as I turned. Only by throwing one knee in front of me could I stay upright.
“Good boy,” Hoxley said as I faced him. He’d shed the black robe and stood in front of me in a white T-shirt and blossoming boxer shorts. His arms and legs were thin and white, filmed with reddish hair, and I felt my eyes being drawn down to the black shoes, the left one thick and heavy, with a brace that stretched partway up his calf.
“Ah-ah,” he said in a warning tone.
“I knew you’d wear boxer shorts,” I said. “And an undershirt. Even in this weather.”
“That’s marginally safer ground,” he said. “But only marginally. You won’t tell anybody, will you? No, you won’t.” He hobbled over to the black rubber trench coat and put it on, catching the wig in midair as it slipped from the coat’s folds. Another coat, the third one Willick said he had bought, lay crumpled at the bottom of the pile. Turning to a polished aluminum surface above the sink, he adjusted the wig until it was perfect and then intentionally knocked it askew. “Jauntier this way,” he said, studying his reflection. “I really should have thought of the makeup earlier.” Satisfied, he spread his arms and pirouetted toward me, pivoting on the heavy shoe. “So. What do you think?”
“All dressed up,” I said, “and no place to go.”
“Wrong as usual,” he said, sounding smug. “Listen, I really can’t tell you what a pleasure this has been.” He leaned over and picked up a long black cylinder that had been hidden by the coat, vaguely familiar-looking, with straps hanging down from it. “We all have to go sometime, of course,” he said, slipping the straps over his shoulder so that the cylinder was cradled against his chest. It culminated at the top in a stretch of flex cord connected to a funnel. “But what a treat to see an old friend again just before Act Five.”
The thing against his chest was a fire extinguisher.
“Cute, no?” Hoxley said. He took the funnel in his right hand and pointed it at me. “Fwoooooo,” he said. I cringed. “Opposites attract, hey? Here I am, with Mom and my friend along for the epiphany. Except, looky here.”
He backed to the far end of the catering truck and pulled out a box of wooden matches. Pulling the box open, he took one out and struck it. It broke, and he swore and struck another, holding it in front of the funnel.
“Prepare,” he said, “to meet your maker.” I was scrambling backward until the stool struck the counter and its edge cracked me on the back of the head, and Hoxley turned a sort of faucet handle at the top of the cylinder and fire spewed out. I think I screamed.
“Wasn’t that dramatic?” Hoxley asked happily, turning the faucet closed. “ ‘Prepare to meet your maker.’ Those nineteenth-century playwrights really knew their audience. Well, your maker is going to have to wait a few minutes. And why shouldn’t he? The bugger invented time, didn’t he?”
The smell of kerosene filled the truck. I felt my eyes slam shut, and I sagged against the rigidity of the stool.
“I’m sorry we won’t have a chance to discuss time,” Hoxley said, and I opened my eyes to see him turning knobs on the larger of the two stoves. “Is it a straight line or a circle? Does it only happen once. Is there some price, as Dylan said, that we can pay to get out of going through all this nonsense twice? Another quote, maybe more to your liking
than the earlier ones.” He twisted the last knob and limped to the door, opened it, and stood in it, a tall black silhouette with the face of death.
“There are children out there,” I said in a voice higher than Shirley Temple’s. The stove was hissing.
He shrugged. “Can’t be helped. Everything gets boring. Well, this is new. Maybe I’ll experience a last flicker of interest before it’s over. I think I’d like that.”
“Wilton,” I said.
“Or maybe not,” he continued, oblivious. “It’s so hard to find something one truly enjoys these days.” He gave the faucet handle an experimental twirl and then turned it off again. For a moment he stood silent, head down, as though listening to something. Then he looked up and straightened his shoulders. “ ‘Bye, Simeon,” he said. “And, hey. ‘Bye, Mom.”
The door closed behind him, and a moment later, flames erupted outside the windows.
23
Last Spark
The instant the door closed behind Hoxley, Mrs. Lewis began to scream.
I found my way to my feet, the stool pinning my arms behind me, and went to the window. A ridge of flame leapt and shimmered in the weeds about ten feet from the truck. It extended from one edge of my view to the other. For all I knew, it went all the way around.
Now that I was standing, I could smell the gas from the stove. Well, at least we weren’t going to burn to death. When the flames reached the truck, we were going to be spread like peanut butter all over San Bernardino. A last favor for an old friend.
Mrs. Lewis continued to shriek as I backed to the stove and felt for the knobs. I found them, but with my fingers taped together, there was nothing I could do. I tried to brush up against the sides of the knobs and turn them that way, but they wouldn’t move. The gas was sweet and foul and heavy in my throat.
“Be quiet,” I said, and then I started to cough. I was too close to the stove to grab a safe breath, so I backed away from it until I hit the far wall of the truck. I took a lungful of air, held it, and went back to the stove, pushing against its edge, crowding against it, and then, with all my strength, shoved myself away from it and across the corridor into the wall behind me.
The seat of the stool smashed into the back of my head, and I went down like a tree. There was no way to catch myself with my arms immobilized, and my forehead cracked the floor. For a moment I may have gone out, because it seemed to me that Mrs. Lewis stopped crying.
Then a high wail split my ears, and I was back, lying on the truck’s dirty floor with blood in my eyes. The corrupt smell of the propane invaded my nostrils as I fought to my feet again. Okay, change of plan.
Don’t hit something high enough to drive the seat into your head, stupid. Hit something lower.
This time I pushed off from the wall and hurtled back into the edge of the stove. I collapsed immediately to my knees, my head ringing and the hand I’d slammed on the counter firing off high-voltage pain signals, maybe something broken there, but I’d heard one of the stool’s legs crack.
I tried to breathe shallowly as I waited to gain the strength to rise again, and Mrs. Lewis suddenly said, “What are you doing?”
“Tell you later,” I said. My voice was thinner than Kleenex. “Can you get out of that thing?”
“Of course not,” she said, sounding like her old self. “If I could, do you think I’d be in it?”
“Right. Well, hang tight. Here we go again.”
When I stood this time, I seemed to feel the trailer heaving beneath my feet. For a moment, I thought my knees would give way, and I narrowed my focus against panoramic death until I was seeing and feeling one thing only, the stool crumbling like matchwood the next time I hit the counter. When I’d reached the far wall, I wiped the blood from my forehead onto the cool glass of the window and watched the fire. It had advanced a foot or so, and the flames were higher, feeding frantically on the weeds.
“This is going to hurt me more than it does you,” I said to Mrs. Lewis, and this time I threw myself back with such force that I stumbled even before I hit the counter, the leg of the stool striking the counter’s edge above my hands this time, and even as I smashed onto the floor, watching bright points of light bounce around inside my skull, I felt the stool go to pieces behind me.
Well, not quite to pieces. The seat, as I saw when I could open my eyes, was next to me on the floor, but I still had at least two of the legs trapped between my back and my arms, and of course there was the one good old Wilton had taped directly to my wrists. But the important thing was that I could get them over toward one side now; the important thing was that I might be able to sit down.
First, though, I had to stand up. I counted to ten and tried, but I couldn’t make my muscles work. I could tell them to do anything from the neck up, but below the Mason-Dixon Line they weren’t listening. I flexed everything I could locate, including a hand that felt bigger than a boxing glove. The pain had shut down, shock coming to the rescue, and I was happily and comfortably congratulating shock on having the sense to intervene when I realized I had to get away from the hissing stove.
Like a sidewinder, I wiggled across the floor to the door and tried to breathe through the crack at its bottom. The air coming through it was hot.
“Are you all right?” Mrs. Lewis said.
“Practicing my polka,” I said. “We’ll be dancing in no time.”
“Where’s Eddie?” she asked. It shut me up. “He took Eddie,” she said.
I managed to get to my knees without blacking out. I was wringing wet, and I’d left an oval pool of blood on the floor. I got one foot under me and then the other, and, leaning against the wall, pushed myself upright. My ears were ringing, and my eyes refused to focus. The truck’s interior looked as it might have if I’d been seeing it through moving water.
Taking one slow step after another, I crossed to the counter. I had to sit on the counter.
It had been so easy the first time, the time Wilton had told me to do it. Put the hands on the counter behind me, give a little jump, and allez-oop. But now I couldn’t use my hands, and I didn’t have a little jump in me, not even a very little jump. Not a single decorous Easter-bunny hop. The counter was almost as high as the small of my back. It might as well have been as high as the walls of Troy.
“I can’t get up there,” I said to myself.
“Up where?” Mrs. Lewis said. Then she began to cry again. “Where’s Eddie?”
I was getting sleepy. I thought about resting. I’d closed my eyes and let my head slump forward when I heard screams. They were outside, far from the truck, but they cut through the aluminum and through Mrs. Lewis’s sobs, and they galvanized me. Wilton had gone to work.
The frog’s legs twitched on the electrified plate again, only they were my legs this time, and I was sitting on the counter, my arms twisted impossibly to one side, the legs of the stool bisecting my back at an angle like misaligned bicycle spokes. The wooden block with the carving knives wedged into it was directly behind me, and I pushed my hands against it, feeling blades slicing through tape and into skin, feeling hot new wetness behind me, but sawing up and down anyway until the stool leg taped between my hands fell free with a clatter onto the countertop, and I could open my slick, wet fingers. Willing myself to be careful, I pushed the tape between my wrists against the black at the edge of the block, angling veins and arteries away from the other one. I cut myself, deeply, and yanked upward involuntarily, and my wrists were loose.
They were a mess. They looked as though I’d loaned them to someone for suicide practice, but the cuts were clean, and the blood, while plentiful and disconcertingly red, wasn’t alarming. I held my hands above my head for a moment, willing the blood to stop, and then realized I didn’t have the time.
“We’re going,” I said to Mrs. Lewis. “Can you walk?”
No answer, just a kind of steady keening that put me in mind of an Irish wake. “Well,” I said, sliding down from the counter, “you’re going to have to.” I pulled
both of the knives from the block and glanced outside the windows. The fire was washing against the walls of the truck. “In fact,” I said, “you’re going to have to run.”
First I snapped off the knobs on the gas stove. Then I went to her and sliced through the first spiral of fiber tape. “You’re going to do what I say,” I said, pausing. “Because if you don’t, you’re going to die. Do you understand me?”
She stopped crying.
“That’s better,” I said, sawing away. “Here’s the plot. Wilton turned the gas on in the big stove and then set fire to the weeds outside.” I’d started at her feet, and the plastic had parted to reveal slippers and a pale blue terry-cloth robe. She probably dressed for national holidays. “The second problem is how to run across the fire, but even in those slippers you can probably manage it. The first problem is how to open the door without blowing ourselves over the rainbow.” I cut through the last length of tape, and she glared up at me, face shiny with sweat, blond hair matted against her face. Her eyes were puffy, but whatever despair had seized her, it had had the sense to retreat. “Can you stand up?” I asked.
“You look terrible,” she said. It wasn’t a particularly compassionate tone.
“I’m not going to look any better, either,” I said, using a bloody sleeve to smear more blood across my face. “Not unless we work out a way to step outside while remaining physically intact.” I heard my voice enunciate the fussily correct words from a distance, like listening to a practiced orator talking to me from the bottom of a well. I put out a hand to keep myself upright.
“Gas,” she said, wrinkling her nose.
“Are you listening to me? I told you, Wilton-”
“Wilton,” said the Ice Princess dismissively. “We need something to put over the door.”
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