by Joe Hill
“You’ve done enough. I want you to stay right here. You might have to get on the phone in a minute and tell your side of the story to the police,” she told him, in a voice that brooked no argument.
Lou sighed, in a shaky sort of way, and his shoulders went slack. He looked relieved, looked like he wanted to lie down. Vic thought she understood—heroism was exhausting business.
“Ladies,” Alan Warner said, nodding to Cady and Vic as he went by.
Tom Priest led the other man out the door and pulled it shut behind them, the little brass bell tinkling. Vic watched the whole thing from the front windows. They all did.
She saw Priest and Warner cross the asphalt, the soldier in the lead, carrying the .45 down by his right leg. The Rolls was on the far side of the pumps, and the driver had his back to the two men. He didn’t look around as they approached, continued filling the tank.
Tom Priest didn’t wait or attempt to explain himself. He put his hand in the center of Manx’s back and shoved him into the side of the car. He planted the barrel of the .45 against his back. Alan stood a safe distance away, behind Tom, between the two pumps, letting the soldier do the talking.
Charlie Manx tried to straighten up, but Priest shoved him into the car again, slamming him into the Wraith. The Rolls, built in Bristol in 1938 by a company that would soon be engineering tanks for the Royal Marines, did not so much as rock on its springs. Tom Priest’s sunburned face was a rigid, unfriendly mask. There was no hint of the child’s smile now; he looked like a vicious son of a bitch in jackboots and dog tags. He gave an order in a low voice, and slowly, slowly, Manx lifted his hands and set them on the roof of the Rolls-Royce.
Tom dipped his free left hand into the pocket of Manx’s black coat and removed some coins, a brass lighter, and a silver wallet. He set them on the roof of the car.
At that point there was a bang, or a thump, at the back end of the Rolls. It was forceful enough to shake the whole vehicle on its frame. Tom Priest glanced at Alan Warner.
“Alan,” Tom said—his voice was loud enough now that they could hear him inside. “Go around and get the keys out of the ignition. Let’s see what’s in the trunk.”
Alan nodded and started around the front of the car, pulling his hankie out to squeeze his nose. He made it to the driver’s-side door, where the window was open about eight inches, and reached in for the keys, and that was when things began to go wrong.
The window went up. No one was sitting in the car; there was no one to turn the crank. But the glass rose smoothly, all at once, slicing into Alan Warner’s arm, trapping it in place. Alan screamed, throwing his head back and shutting his eyes, rising up on his toes in pain.
Tom Priest glanced away from Charlie Manx for a moment—only one—and the passenger door flew open. It caught the soldier in the right side, knocked him into the pump, and turned him halfway around. The gun clattered across the blacktop. The car door seemed to have opened itself. From where Vic stood, it appeared no one had laid a hand on it. She thought, automatically, of Knight Rider, a show she had not watched in ten years, and the way Michael Knight’s slick Trans Am could drive itself, think for itself, eject people it didn’t like, open its doors for people it did.
Manx dropped his left hand and came up holding the gas hose. He cracked the metal nozzle into Tom’s head, banging him across the bridge of the nose and squeezing the trigger at the same time, so gasoline gushed into the soldier’s face, down the front of his fatigues.
Tom Priest issued a strangled cry and put his hands over his eyes. Manx hit him again, slamming the nozzle of the hose into the center of his head, as if trying to trepan him with it. Bright, clear gasoline flew, bubbled over Priest’s head.
Alan screamed and screamed again. The car began to creep forward, dragging him by the arm.
Priest tried to throw himself at Manx, but the tall man was already stepping back and out of the way, and Tom fell to all fours on the blacktop. Manx poured gasoline all down his back, soaking him as a man might water his lawn with a garden hose.
The objects on top of the car—the coins, the lighter—slid off as the car continued to roll gently forward. Manx reached and caught the bright brass lighter as effortlessly as a first baseman reaching for a lazy infield fly.
Someone shoved Vic from the left—Lou Carmody—and she staggered into the blonde named Cady. Cady was screaming her husband’s name, bent over almost double from the force of her own yells. The toddler in her arms was yelling too: Waddy, Waddy! The door flew open. Men spilled onto the porch. Vic’s view was momentarily obscured by people rushing past her.
When she could see the blacktop again, Manx had stepped back and flicked his lighter. He dropped it onto the soldier’s back, and Tom Priest ignited in a great blast of blue fire, which threw a burst of heat with enough force to rattle the windows of the store.
The Wraith was rolling steadily now, dragging the game warden named Alan Warner helplessly along with it. The fat man bellowed, punching his free hand against the door, as if he could pound it into letting him go. Some gasoline had splashed up the side of the car. The rear passenger-side tire was a churning hoop of flame.
Charlie Manx took another step back from the burning, writhing soldier and was hit from behind by one of the other customers, a skinny old man in suspenders. The two of them went down together. Lou Carmody leaped over them both, pulling off his jacket to throw it on Tom Priest’s flaming body.
The driver’s-side window abruptly went down, releasing Alan Warner, who dropped to the blacktop, half under the car. The Rolls thumped as it passed over him.
Sam Cleary, the store owner who looked like Popeye, rushed past Vic, holding a fire extinguisher.
Lou Carmody was hollering something, swinging his jacket into Tom Priest, beating at him. It was like he was swatting a stack of burning newspaper; big black flakes of ash drifted through the air. It was only later that Vic understood those were flakes of charbroiled skin.
The toddler in Cady’s arms slapped a chubby hand against the storefront window. “Hot! Hot Waddy!” Cady seemed to suddenly realize that her child could see everything and turned on her heel and carried him across the room, away from the window, sobbing as she fled.
The Rolls trundled another twenty feet before coming to a stop with the bumper against a telephone pole. Flames painted the whole back end, and if there was a child in the trunk, he would’ve been suffocated or burned to death, but there was no child in the trunk. There was a purse belonging to a woman named Cynthia McCauley, who had disappeared three days before from JFK Airport, along with her son Brad, but neither Brad nor Cynthia was ever seen again. No one could explain the thumping noise that had seemed to come from the rear of the car—like the window rolling up or the door flying open and smashing into Tom Priest, it seemed almost that the car had acted with a mind of its own.
Sam Cleary reached the two old men fighting on the ground and used the fire extinguisher for the first time, bringing it down two-handed to hit Charlie Manx in the face. He would use it for the second time on Tom Priest, not thirty seconds later, by which time Tom was well dead.
Not to mention well done.
INTERLUDE:
THE SPIRIT OF ECSTASY
2000–2012
Gunbarrel, Colorado
THE FIRST TIME VIC MCQUEEN TOOK A LONG-DISTANCE CALL FROM Christmasland, she was an unwed mother, living with her boyfriend in a double-wide, and it was snowing in Colorado.
She had lived in New England her whole life, and she thought she knew about snow, but it was different in the Rockies. The storms were different. She thought of the blizzards in the Rockies as blue weather. The snow came down fast and hard and steady, and there was something blue about the light, so it was as if she were trapped in a secret world under a glacier: a winterplace where it was eternally Christmas Eve.
Vic would walk outside in her moccasins and one of Lou’s enormous T-shirts (which she could wear like nightgowns) to stand in the blue dimness an
d listen to the snow fall. It hissed in the branches of the pines like static, like white noise. She would stand there breathing in the sweet smell of woodsmoke and pines, trying to figure out how in the hell she had wound up with sore tits and no job, two thousand miles from home.
The best she could work out, she was there on a mission of vengeance. She had returned to Colorado, after graduating from Haverhill High, to attend art school. She wanted to go to art school because her mother was dead set against it and her father refused to pay for it. Other choices her mother couldn’t bear and her father didn’t want to know about: Vic smoking pot, skipping class to go skiing, making out with girls, shacking up with the fat delinquent who had rescued her from Charlie Manx, getting pregnant without bothering to get married. Linda had always said she wouldn’t have anything to do with a baby born out of wedlock, so Vic had not invited her after the birth, and when Linda offered to come, Vic said she’d rather that she didn’t. She had not even bothered to send her father a picture of the baby.
She still remembered how good it felt to look into Lou Carmody’s face, over coffees in a yuppie café in Boulder, and to say, bluntly and pleasantly, “So I guess I should fuck you for saving my life, huh? Least I can do. Do you want to finish your coffee, or should we just split now?”
After their first time, Lou admitted he had never slept with a girl before, his face glowing dark red, from both his exertions and his embarrassment. Still a virgin in his early twenties: Who said there was no wonder left in the world?
Sometimes she resented Louis, for not being satisfied with sex alone. He had to love her, too. He wanted talk as much as he wanted sex, maybe more; he wanted to do things for her, buy her things, get tattoos together, go on trips. Sometimes she resented herself, for letting him corner her into being his friend. It seemed to her she had planned to be stronger: to simply fuck him a time or two—to show him she was a girl who knew how to appreciate a guy—then drop him and get herself an alternative girlfriend, someone with a pink streak in her hair and a few beads in her tongue. The problem with that plan was, she liked guys better than girls, and she liked Lou better than most guys; he smelled good and he moved slow and he was roughly as difficult to anger as a character from the Hundred Acre Wood. Soft as a character from the Hundred Acre Wood, too. It irritated her that she liked to touch him and lean against him. Her body was constantly working against her, toward its own unhelpful ends.
Lou worked out of a garage he had opened with some cash given to him by his parents, and they lived in the trailer in back, two miles outside of Gunbarrel, a thousand miles from anything. Vic didn’t have a car and probably spent a hundred and sixty hours a week at home. The house smelled of piss-soaked diapers and engine parts, and the sink was always full.
In retrospect Vic was only surprised she didn’t go crazy sooner. She was surprised that more young mothers didn’t lose it. When your tits had become canteens and the soundtrack of your life was hysterical tears and mad laughter, how could anyone expect you to remain sane?
She had a single occasional escape hatch. Whenever it snowed, she left Wayne with Lou, borrowed the tow truck, and said she was going into town for an espresso and a magazine. It was something to tell them. Vic didn’t want to let them in on the truth. What she was actually going to do felt like a curiously private, possibly even shameful, personal matter.
So it happened one day, all of them trapped inside together: Wayne was banging on a toy xylophone with a spoon, Lou was burning pancakes, the TV was blaring Dora the fucking Explorer. Vic let herself into the yard for a smoke. It was blue outside, and the snow fell hissing in the trees, and by the time she had smoked her American Spirit down far enough to burn her fingers, she knew she needed a ride in the tow.
She borrowed the keys from Lou, put on a Colorado Avalanche hoodie, and crossed to the garage, locked up on that frozen blue Sunday morning. Inside, it smelled of metal and spilled oil, an odor very like blood. Wayne had that smell on him, all the time, and she hated it. The boy, Bruce Wayne Carmody—Bruce to his paternal grandparents, Wayne to Vic, and The Bat to Lou—spent most of the day cooing to himself in the safe enclosure of a tire meant for a monster truck. It was what they had instead of a playpen. Her baby’s father was a man who owned only two pairs of underwear and had a tattoo of the Joker on his hip. It was something, going over all the things that had led her to this place of high rock, endless snows, and hopelessness. She could not quite work out how she had found her way here. She used to be so good at finding the place she wanted to go.
In the garage she paused, one foot on the running board of the truck. Lou had picked up a job, painting a motorcycle for a pal. He had just finished putting a coat of dull black primer on the gas tank. The gas tank looked like a weapon now, like a bomb.
On the floor, beside the bike, was a sheet of transfer paper with a flaming skull on it and the words HARD CORE written below. Vic took one glance at what Lou had painted on the transfer paper and knew he was going to fuck up the job. And it was a curious thing: Something about the crudity of his illustration, its obvious failings, made her feel almost ill with love for him. Ill—and guilty. Even then some part of her already knew she was going to leave him someday. Even then some part of her felt that Lou—Lou and Wayne both—deserved better than Vic McQueen.
The highway switchbacked for two miles down to Gunbarrel, where there were coffeehouses, candle shops, and a spa that did cream-cheese facials. But Vic got less than halfway there before turning off the highway onto a dirt side road that dropped through the pines into deep lumber country.
She flicked on the headlights and buried the gas pedal. It felt like plunging off a cliff. It felt like suicide.
The big Ford crashed through brush, banged through ruts, tipped over ledges. She drove at unsafe speeds, slewing around corners and throwing snow and rocks.
She was looking for something. Vic stared intently into the headlights, which cut a hole in the falling snow, a white passageway. The snow flurried past, as if she were driving through a tunnel of static.
Vic felt that it was close, the Shorter Way Bridge, waiting just beyond the farthest reach of the headlights. She felt it was a matter of speed. If she could just go fast enough, she could force it back into existence, leap off the rutted logging road and onto the old boards of the bridge. But she never dared push the truck beyond the speed at which she could control it, and she never reached the Shorter Way.
Maybe if she had her bike back. Maybe if it were summer.
Maybe if she were not stupid enough to have had a baby. She hated that she’d had the baby. Now she was fucked. She loved Wayne too much to press the pedal to the floor and go flying into the darkness.
She’d thought love had something to do with happiness, but it turned out they were not even vaguely related. Love was closer to a need, no different from the need to eat, to breathe. When Wayne fell asleep, his hot cheek against her naked breast, his lips smelling sweetly of the milk from her own body, she felt as if she was the one who had been fed.
Maybe she could not bring forth the bridge because there was nothing left to find. Maybe she had found everything the world had to offer her: a notion very like despair.
It was no good being a mother. She wanted to start a website, a public-awareness campaign, a newsletter, to get the word out that if you were a woman and you had a child, you lost everything, you would be held hostage by love: a terrorist who would only be satisfied when you surrendered your entire future.
The lumber road dead-ended at a gravel pit, which was where she turned back. As was often the case, she drove back toward the highway with a headache.
No. Not a headache. It wasn’t a pain in her head. It was a pain in her left eye. A slow, soft throb.
She drove back to the garage, singing along to Kurt Cobain. Kurt Cobain understood what it tasted like to lose your magic bridge, the transport to the things you needed. It tasted like a gunbarrel—like Gunbarrel, Colorado, perhaps.
She parked
in the garage and sat behind the wheel in the cold, watching her breath smoke. She might’ve sat there forever if the phone hadn’t rung.
It was on the wall, right outside the door to the office Lou never used. It was old enough to have a rotary dial—like the phone in Charlie Manx’s Sleigh House. Its ring was harsh and brassy.
Vic frowned.
The phone was on a separate line from the one in the house. It was comically referred to as “the business line.” No one ever called them on it.
She dropped from the front seat, a good four feet to the concrete floor. She caught the phone on the third ring.
“Carmody’s Car Carma,” she said.
The phone was painfully cold. Her palm, clutching the receiver, made a pale frost halo on the plastic.
There was a hiss, as if the call were coming from a great distance. In the background Vic heard carolers, the sounds of sweet children’s voices. It was a little early for that—mid-November.
A boy said, “Um.”
“Hello? Can I help you?”
“Um. Yes,” the boy said. “I’m Brad. Brad McCauley. I’m calling from Christmasland.”
She recognized the boy’s name but at first she couldn’t place it.
“Brad,” she said. “Can I help you? Where did you say you’re calling from?”
“From Christmasland, silly. You know who I am. I was in the car,” he said. “At Mr. Manx’s house. You remember. We had fun.”
Her chest was icy. It was hard to breathe.
“Oh, fuck you, kid,” she said. “Fuck you and your sick motherfucking joke.”
“The reason I’m calling,” he said, “we’re all getting hungry. There hasn’t been anything to eat forever, and what’s the point of having all these teeth if you can’t use them on something?”
“Call back and I’ll put the cops on you, you deranged fuck,” she said, and banged the phone down in the cradle.