Nos4a2

by Joe Hill

  Vic put a hand over her mouth and made a sound somewhere between a sob and a cry of rage. She bent double and shook in the freezing garage.

  When she had recovered herself, she straightened, lifted the phone, and calmly called the operator.

  “Can you give me the number that just rang this line?” Vic asked. “We were cut off. I want to be reconnected.”

  “The line you’re on?”

  “Yes. I was cut off just a moment ago.”

  “I’m sorry. I have a phone call from Friday afternoon for an 800 number. Do you want me to connect you?”

  “A call came in just a moment ago. I want to know who it was.”

  There was a silence before the operator replied, a caesura in which Vic could make out the sounds of other operator voices speaking in the background.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t have any calls to this line since Friday.”

  “Thank you,” Vic said, and hung up.

  She was sitting on the floor, beneath the phone, with her arms wrapped around her, when Lou found her.

  “You been, like, sitting out here for a while,” he said. “Do you want me to bring you a blanket or a dead tauntaun or something?”

  “What’s a tauntaun?”

  “Something like a camel. Or maybe a big goat. I don’t think it matters.”

  “What’s Wayne doing?”

  “He snoozed off. He’s cool. What are you doin’ out here?”

  He looked around the dimness, as if he thought there was a chance she might not be alone.

  She needed to tell him something, make up some explanation for why she was sitting on the floor in a cold, dark garage, so she nodded at the motorcycle he had primed.

  “Thinking about the bike you’re working on.”

  He considered her through narrowed eyes. She could tell he didn’t believe her.

  But then he looked at the motorcycle and the transfer paper on the floor beside it and said, “I’m worried I’m going to fuck it up. You think it’ll come out okay?”

  “No. I don’t. Sorry.”

  He shot her a startled look. “For real?”

  She smiled weakly and nodded.

  He heaved a great sigh. “Can you tell me what I did wrong?”

  “‘Hardcore’ is one word, not two. And your e looks like the number 8. But also, you have to write in reverse. When you stick the transfer paper on and make the copy, ‘hardcore’ is going to be backward.”

  “Oh. Oh, shit. Dude. I’m such an idiot.” Lou cast her another hopeful glance. “At least you liked my skull, right?”

  “Honestly?”

  Lou stared at his feet. “Christ. I was hoping Tony B. would throw me fifty bucks or something for doing a good paint job. If you didn’t stop me, I’d probably have to pay him fifty for ruining his bike. Why am I not good at anything?”

  “You’re a good dad.”

  “It ain’t rocket science.”

  No, Vic thought. It was harder.

  “Do you want me to fix it?” she asked.

  “You ever painted a bike before?”

  “No.”

  He nodded. “Well. Okay. If you fuck it up, we’ll just say I did it. No one will be surprised. But if you kick its ass, we should tell people who really painted it. Might pull in some more jobs.” He gave her another long look, sizing her up. “You sure you’re all right? You aren’t out here pondering dark female thoughts are you?”

  “No.”

  “You ever think, like, you shouldn’t have quit on therapy? You’ve been through some shit, dude. Maybe you ought to talk about it. About him.”

  I just did, she thought. I had a nice little chat with the last kid Charlie Manx kidnapped. He’s some kind of cold vampire now, and he’s in Christmasland, and he wants something to eat.

  “I think the talking is done,” she said, and took Lou’s hand when he offered it. “Maybe I’ll just paint instead.”

  Sugarcreek, Pennsylvania

  EARLY IN THE SUMMER OF 2001, THE NEWS REACHED BING PARTRIDGE that Charlie Manx was bad sick. Bing was fifty-three by then and had not put his gasmask on in five years.

  Bing found out from an article on AOL, which he accessed using the big black Dell computer he had received from NorChemPharm for thirty years of service. He looked at AOL every day for news out of Colorado about Mr. Manx, but there had been nothing for ages until this: Charles Talent Manx III, age unknown, convicted murderer, suspect in dozens of child abductions, had been moved to the hospital wing of FCI Englewood when it proved impossible to wake him up.

  Manx was examined by prominent Denver neurosurgeon Marc Sopher, who described his condition as one for the medical books.

  “The patient appears to suffer from adult progeria or a rare form of Werner syndrome,” Sopher said. “In the simplest terms, he has begun to age very rapidly. A month is more like a year for him. A year is close to a decade. And this guy was no spring chicken to begin with.”

  The doctor said there was no way to tell if Manx’s condition could partially explain the aberrant behavior that led to his brutal slaying of PFC Thomas Priest in 1996. He also declined to describe Charlie Manx’s current state as a coma.

  “He doesn’t meet the strict definition [of coma]. His brain function is high—as if he’s dreaming. He just can’t wake up anymore. His body is too tired. He doesn’t have any gas left in the tank.”

  Bing had often thought of writing Mr. Manx, to tell him he was still faithful, still loved him, would always love him, would be there to serve him until the day he died. But while Bing was maybe not the shiniest bulb on the Christmas tree—ha, ha—he was smart enough to know that Mr. Manx would be furious with him for writing, and correct to be. A letter from Bing would for sure lead to men in suits knocking on the door, men in sunglasses with guns in armpit holsters. Hello, Mr. Partridge, would you mind answering a few questions? How would you feel about us planting a shovel in your basement, digging around for a bit? So he had never written, and now it was too late, and the thought made him feel sick.

  Mr. Manx had passed a message to Bing once, although by what means Bing didn’t know. A package had been dropped on the doorstep with no return address on it, two days after Mr. Manx was sentenced to life in Englewood. Inside were a pair of license plates—NOS4A2/KANSAS—and a little card on ivory laid stock, with a Christmas angel stamped into the front.

  Bing had the license plates in the root cellar, where all the rest of his life with Charlie Manx was buried: the empty stolen tanks of sevoflurane, his daddy’s .45, and the remains of the women, the mothers that Bing had brought home with him after many a mission of salvation with Mr. Manx . . . nine missions in all.

  Brad McCauley had been the ninth child they had saved for Christmasland, and his mother, Cynthia, the last whore Bing had dealt with in the quiet room downstairs. In a way she had been saved as well, before she died: Bing had taught her about love.

  Bing and Mr. Manx had planned to save one more child in the summer of 1997, and that time Bing would go all the way to Christmasland with Mr. Manx, to live where no one grew old and unhappiness was against the law, where he could ride all the rides and drink all the cocoa and open Christmas gifts every morning. When he thought about the cosmic unfairness of it—of Mr. Manx being ripped away right before he could swing wide the gates of Christmasland to Bing at last—he felt smashed inside, as if hope were a vase that had been dropped from a height, crunch.

  The worst of it, though, was not losing Mr. Manx or losing Christmasland. It was losing love. It was losing the mommies.

  His last, Mrs. McCauley, had been the best. They had long talks in the basement together, Mrs. McCauley naked and tanned and fit, clasped against Bing’s side. She was forty but stringy with muscle that she had built up coaching girls’ volleyball. Her skin radiated heat and health. She stroked the graying hair on Bing’s chest and told him she loved him better than her mother or father, better than Jesus, better than her own son, better than kittens, better than sunshine. It felt
good to hear her say it: “I love you, Bing Partridge. I love you so much it’s burning me. I’m all kindling inside. It’s burning me alive.” Her breath had been sweet with the smell of the gingerbread smoke; she was so fit, and so healthy, he had to dose her with his flavored sevoflurane mix once every three hours. She loved him so much she cut her own wrists when he told her they couldn’t live together. They made love one last time while she bled out—while she bled all over him.

  “Does it hurt?” he asked.

  “Oh, Bing, Bing, you silly thing,” she said. “I’ve been burning with love for days. A couple little cuts like these, they don’t hurt at all.”

  She was so pretty—had such perfect mommy tits—he couldn’t bear to pour the lye on her until she began to smell. Even with flies in her hair, she was pretty; extra pretty, really. The bluebottles glittered like gems.

  Bing had visited the Graveyard of What Might Be with Mr. Manx and knew that if Cynthia McCauley had been left to her own devices, she would’ve killed her son in a steroid-fueled rage. But down in his quiet room, Bing had taught her kindness and love and how to suck cock, so at least she ended her life on a good note.

  That was what it was all about: taking something awful and making something good of it. Mr. Manx saved the children, and Bing saved the mommies. Now, though, the mommies were over and done. Mr. Manx was locked-up gone, and Bing’s gasmask hung on a hook behind the back door, where it had been since 1996. He read the story in the news about Mr. Manx falling asleep—into a deep, endless sleep, a brave soldier under a wicked enchantment—and then printed it and folded it and decided to pray on it some.

  In his fifty-third year, Bing Partridge had become a churchgoing man once again, had returned to the New American Faith Tabernacle in the hopes that God would offer some comfort for one of his loneliest children. Bing prayed that one day he would hear “White Christmas” playing in the driveway and would push back the linen curtain and see Mr. Manx behind the wheel of the Wraith, the window rolled down and the Good Man gazing out at him. Come on, Bing! Let’s go for a ride! Number ten is waiting for us! Let’s go grab one more kid and take you to Christmasland! Heaven knows you’ve earned it!

  He climbed the steep hill, in the smothering heat of a July afternoon. The foil flowers in his front yard—twenty-nine of them—were perfectly still and silent. He hated them. He hated the blue sky, too, and the maddening harmonic of the cicadas throbbing in the trees. Bing trudged up the hill with the news story in one hand (“Rare Condition Befalls Convicted Murderer”) and Mr. Manx’s final note in the other (“I might be a while. 9.”) to speak to God about these things.

  The church stood in a hectare of buckled blacktop, shoots of pale grass as high as Bing’s knees sticking up through the cracks. A loop of heavy-duty chain and a Yale lock held the front doors shut. No one except for Bing himself had prayed there for going on fifteen years. The tabernacle had belonged to the Lord once, but now it was property of the moneylenders; a sun-faded sheet of paper in a clear plastic envelope tacked to one of the doors said so.

  The cicadas buzzed in Bing’s head, like madness.

  Out at one end of the lot was a big sign like they’d have out in front of a Dairy Queen or a used-car lot, telling people which hymn they’d be singing that day. ONLY IN GOD and HE’S ALIVE AGAIN and THE LORD NEVER SLEEPS. DEVOTIONS were promised for 1:00 P.M. The sign had been promising those same hymns since Reagan’s second term.

  Some of the stained-glass windows had holes where kids had chucked rocks at them, but Bing didn’t climb in that way. There was a shed out to one side of the church, half hidden back in the dusty poplars and sumac. A rotting cord doormat lay in front of the shed’s door. A bright brass key was hidden beneath it.

  The key opened the padlock on the sloped cellar doors at the back of the building. Bing let himself below. He crossed a cool subterranean room, wading through the smell of old creosote and mildewed books, and came up into the big open theater of the church.

  Bing had always liked church, back in the days when he still went with his mother. He had liked the way the sun came through the twenty-foot-high stained-glass windows, filling the room with warmth and color, and he had liked the way the mommies dressed, in white lace and heels and milky-white stockings. Bing loved white stockings and loved to hear a woman sing. All the mommies who stayed with him in the House of Sleep sang before they took their last rest.

  But after the pastor ran away with the whole treasury and the bank locked the church up, Bing found that the place troubled him. He did not like the way the shadow of the steeple seemed to reach for his house in the late of day. Bing found after he started taking mommies back to his home—a place Mr. Manx had christened the House of Sleep—he could hardly stand to look at the top of the hill anymore. The church loomed, the shadow of the steeple an accusing finger that stretched down the slope and pointed at his front yard: HERE IS A DEADLY KILLER! NINE DEAD WOMEN IN HIS BASEMENT!

  Bing tried to tell himself he was being foolish. He and Mr. Manx were heroes, really; they did Christian work. If someone wrote a book about them, you would have to mark them down as the good guys. It did not matter that many of the mothers, when dosed with sevoflurane, would still not admit to their plans to whore their daughters or beat their sons and that several contended they had never taken drugs, did not drink to excess, and did not have criminal records. Those things were in the future, a wretched future that Bing and Mr. Manx worked hard to prevent. If he was ever arrested—because of course no lawman would ever understand the importance and basic goodness of their vocation—Bing felt he could talk about his work with pride. There was no shame in him about any of the things he had done with Mr. Manx.

  Still, he occasionally had trouble looking up at the church.

  He told himself, as he climbed the steps from the basement, that he was being a ninny, that all men were welcome in God’s house and Mr. Manx needed Bing’s prayers—now more than ever. For himself, Bing had never felt so alone or forlorn. A few weeks earlier, Mr. Paladin had asked Bing what he was going to do with himself after he retired. Bing was shocked and asked why he would retire. He liked his job. Mr. Paladin blinked and said after forty years they would make him retire. You didn’t get a choice in the matter. Bing had never thought about it. He had assumed that by now he would be drinking cocoa in Christmasland, opening presents in the morning, singing carols in the night.

  The vast empty sanctuary did not put his mind at ease that afternoon. Just the opposite, in fact. All the pews were still there, although they were no longer lined up in neat rows but had been shoved this way and that, were as crooked as Mr. Manx’s teeth. The floor was littered with broken glass and chunks of plaster, which crunched underfoot. The room smelled rankly of ammonia, of bird piss. Someone had been in here drinking. The bottles and beer cans left behind littered the pews.

  He went on, pacing the length of the room. His passage disturbed the swallows in the rafters. The sound of their beating wings echoed, a noise like a magician spraying playing cards into the air.

  The light that slanted in through the windows was cold and blue, and motes of dust turned within the bars of sunshine, as if the church were the interior of a snow globe just beginning to settle.

  Someone—teenagers, homeless—had made an altar in one of the deep-set window frames. Deformed red candles stood in hardened puddles of wax, and set behind the candles were several photographs of Michael Stipe from R.E.M., a scrawny queer with pale hair and pale eyes. Someone had written “LOSING MY RELIGION” on one of the photographs in cherry lipstick. Bing himself felt there had not been a single thing worth listening to in rock music since Abbey Road.

  Bing set the card from Mr. Manx and the printout from the Denver Post in the center of this homemade altar and lit a couple candles for the Good Man. He cleared some space on the floor, kicking aside chunks of broken plaster and a dirty pair of panties—little hearts on them, looked like they’d fit a ten-year-old—and got on his knees.

&nb
sp; He cleared his throat. In the vast echoing space of the church, it sounded as loud as a gunshot.

  A swallow rattled its wings, gliding from one rafter to another.

  He could see a line of pigeons leaning forward to stare down at him with their bright, rabies-red eyes. They watched him with fascination.

  He shut his eyes and put his hands together and spoke with God.

  “Hey, there, God,” Bing said. “It’s Bing, that old dumb thing. Oh, God. Oh, God God God. Please help Mr. Manx. Mr. Manx has the sleepies, bad, and I don’t know what to do, and if he doesn’t get better and come back to me, I’ll never have my trip to Christmasland. I tried my best to do something good with my life. I tried my best to save children and make sure they’d have cocoa and rides and things. It wasn’t easy. No one wanted us to save them. But even when the mommies screamed and called us awful names, even when their children cried and wet themselves, I loved them. I loved those kids, and I loved their mommies, even if they were bad women. And I loved Mr. Manx most of all. Everything he does, he does so other people can be happy. Isn’t that the kindest thing a person can do—spread a little happiness around? Please, God, if we did any good at all, please, help me, give me a sign, tell me what to do. Please, please, please, pl—”

  His face was tipped back and his mouth was open when something hot hit his cheek, and he tasted something salty and bitter on his lips. He flinched; it was like someone had cum on him. He swiped at his mouth and looked at his fingers, now coated with a whitish green crud, a sloppy liquid mash. It took a moment to identify it as pigeon shit.

  Bing groaned: once, then again. His mouth was full of the salt-crème taste of bird shit. The stuff cupped in his palm looked like diseased phlegm. His moaning rose to a scream and he pitched himself backward, kicking plaster and glass, and put his other hand down on something damp and sticky, with the soft texture of Saran Wrap. He glanced down and discovered he had planted his hand on a soiled condom crawling with ants.