by Joe Hill
“This weekend,” Vic said. “We’ll go up there this weekend.”
“You’ll have to check my calendar,” her mother said. “I might have plans.”
The rain stopped the next morning, and instead of taking her mother to Lake Winnipesaukee that weekend Vic took her to the graveyard and buried her beneath the first hot blue sky of May.
SHE CALLED LOU AT ONE IN THE MORNING EAST COAST TIME, ELEVEN o’clock Mountain time, and said, “What do you think he’ll want to do? It’s going to be two months. I don’t know if I can keep Wayne entertained for two days.”
Lou seemed utterly baffled by the question. “He’s twelve. He’s easy. I’m sure he’ll like all the things you like. What do you like?”
“Maker’s Mark.”
Lou made a humming sound. “You know, I guess I was thinking more like tennis.”
She bought tennis rackets, didn’t know if Wayne knew how to play. It had been so long for herself that she couldn’t even remember how to score. She just knew that even when you had nothing, you still had love.
She bought swimsuits, flip-flops, sunglasses, Frisbees. She bought suntan lotion, hoping he wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time in the sun. In between her stints in the crazy house and rehab, Vic had finished getting her arms and legs fully sleeved in tattoos, and too much sun was poison on the ink.
She had assumed that Lou would fly to the East Coast with him and was surprised when Lou gave her Wayne’s flight number and asked her to call when he got in.
“Has he ever flown alone?”
Lou said, “He’s never flown at all, but I wouldn’t worry about it. Dude. The kid is pretty solid at taking care of himself. He’s been doing it for a while. He’s, like, twelve going on fifty. I think he’s more excited about the flight than he is about getting there.” This was followed by an awkward, embarrassed silence. “Sorry. That totally came out more douchey than I meant it to.”
“It’s okay, Lou,” she said.
It didn’t bother her. There was nothing Lou or Wayne could say that would bother her. She had every bit of it coming. All those years of hating her own mother, Vic had never imagined she would do worse.
“Besides. He isn’t really traveling alone. He’s coming with Hooper.”
“Right,” she said. “What’s he eat anyway?”
“Usually whatever is on the floor. The remote control. Your underwear. The rug. He’s like the tiger shark in Jaws. The one Dreyfuss cuts open in the fisherman’s basement. That’s why we named him Hooper. You remember the tiger shark? He had a license plate in his stomach?”
“I never saw Jaws. I caught one of the sequels on TV in rehab. The one with Michael Caine.”
Another silence followed, this one awestruck and wondering.
“Jesus. No wonder we didn’t last,” Lou said.
Three days later she was at Logan Airport at 6:00 A.M., standing at the window in the concourse to watch Wayne’s 727 taxi across the apron and up to the Jetway. Passengers emerged from the tunnel and streamed by her, hurrying in silent bunches, rolling carry-ons behind them. The crowd was thinning, and she was trying not to feel any anxiety—where the hell was he? Did Lou give her the right flight information? Wayne wasn’t even in her custody yet, and she was already fucking up—when the kid strolled out, arms wrapped around his backpack as if it were his favorite teddy bear. He dropped it, and she hugged him, snuffled at his ear, gnawed at his neck until he laugh-shouted for Vic to let him go.
“Did you like flying?” she asked.
“I liked it so much I fell asleep when we took off and missed the whole thing. Ten minutes ago I was in Colorado, and now I’m here. Isn’t that insane? Going so far just all of a sudden like that?”
“It is. It’s completely insane,” she said.
Hooper was in a dog carrier the size of a baby’s crib, and it took both of them to wrestle him off the luggage carousel. Drool swung from the big Saint Bernard’s mouth. Inside the cage the remains of a phone book lay around his feet.
“What was that?” Vic asked. “Lunch?”
“He likes to chew on things when he’s nervous,” he said. “Same as you.”
They drove back to Linda’s house for turkey sandwiches. Hooper snacked on a can of wet food, one of the new pairs of flip-flops, and Vic’s tennis racket, still in the plastic wrap. Even with the windows open, the house smelled of cigarette ash, menthol, and blood. Vic couldn’t wait to go. She packed the swimsuits, her bristol boards and inks and watercolors, the dog, and the boy she loved but was afraid she didn’t know or deserve, and they hauled it north for the summer.
Vic McQueen Tries to Be a Mother, Part II, she thought.
The Triumph was waiting.
Lake Winnipesaukee
THE MORNING WAYNE FOUND THE TRIUMPH, VIC WAS DOWN ON THE dock with a couple of fishing rods she couldn’t untangle. She had discovered the rods in a closet in the cottage, rust-flecked relics of the eighties, the monofilament lines bunched up in a fist-size snarl. Vic thought she had seen a tackle box in the carriage house and sent Wayne to look for it.
She sat on the end of the dock, shoes and socks off, feet trailing in the water, to wrestle with the knot. When she was on coke—yeah, she had done that, too—she could’ve struggled with the knot for a happy hour, enjoying it as much as sex. She would’ve played that knot like Slash hammering out a guitar solo.
But after five minutes she quit. No point. There would be a knife in the tackle box. You had to know when it made sense to try to untangle something and when to just cut the motherfucker loose.
Besides, the way the sun was flashing on the water hurt her eyes. Especially the left. Her left eye felt solid and heavy, as if it were made of lead instead of soft tissue.
Vic stretched out in the heat to wait for Wayne to return. She wanted to doze, but every time she drifted off, she twitched awake all of a sudden, hearing the crazygirl song in her head.
Vic had heard the crazygirl song for the first time when she was in the mental hospital in Denver, which was where she went after she burned the town house down. The crazygirl song had only four lines, but no one—not Bob Dylan, not John Lennon, not Byron or Keats—had ever strung together four lines of such insightful and emotionally direct verse.
No one sleeps a wink when I sing this song!
And I’m going to sing it all night long!
Vic wishes she could ride her fucking bike away!
Might as well wish for a ride in Santa’s sleigh!
This song had woken her on her very first evening in the clinic. A woman was singing it somewhere in the lockdown. And she wasn’t just singing it to herself; she was serenading Vic directly.
The crazygirl scream-shouted her song three or four times a night, usually just when Vic was drifting off to sleep. Sometimes the crazygirl got to laughing so hard she couldn’t carry the tune all the way through to the end.
Vic did some screaming, too. She screamed for someone to shut that cunt up. Other people yelled, the whole ward would get to yelling, everyone screaming to be quiet, to let them sleep, to make it stop. Vic screamed herself hoarse, until the orderlies came in to hold her down and put the needle in her arm.
In the day Vic angrily searched the faces of the other patients, looking for signs of guilt and exhaustion. But all of them looked guilty and exhausted. In group-therapy sessions, she listened intently to the others, thinking the midnight singer would give herself away by having a hoarse voice. But they all sounded hoarse, from the difficult nights, the bad coffee, the cigarettes.
Eventually the evening came when Vic stopped hearing from the crazygirl with her crazy song. She thought they had moved her to another wing, finally showing some consideration for the other patients. Vic had been out of the hospital for half a year before she finally recognized the voice, knew who the crazygirl had been.
“Do we own the motorcycle in the garage?” Wayne asked. And then, before she had time to process the question, he said, “What are you singing?”
Vic sat up, rubbing her face. “I don’t know. Nothing.”
Wayne gave her a dark and doubtful look.
He made his way out onto the dock in mincing, effortful steps, Hooper slouching along behind like a tame bear. Wayne carried a big, battered yellow toolbox, clutched the handle in both hands. A third of the way out, he lost his grip, and it dropped with a crash. The dock shook.
“I got the tackle box,” Wayne said.
“That’s not a tackle box.”
“You said look for a brown box.”
“That’s yellow.”
“It’s brown in spots.”
“It’s rusted in spots.”
“Yeah? So? Rust is brown.”
He unbuckled the toolbox, pushed back the lid, frowned at the contents.
“Easy mistake,” she said.
“Is this maybe for fishing?” he asked, and pulled out a curious instrument. It looked like the blade of a dull miniature scythe, small enough to fit in his palm. “It’s shaped like a hook.”
Vic knew what it was, although it had been years since she’d seen one. Then she registered, at last, what Wayne had said when he first walked out onto the dock.
“Let me see that box,” Vic said.
She turned it around to stare in at a collection of flat, rusted wrenches, an air-pressure gauge, and an old key with a rectangular head, the word TRIUMPH stamped into it.
“Where’d you find this?”
“It was on the seat of the old motorcycle. Did the motorcycle come with the house?”
“Show me,” Vic said.
The Carriage House
VIC HAD ONLY BEEN IN THE CARRIAGE HOUSE ONCE, WHEN SHE FIRST looked at the property. She had talked to her mother about cleaning the place out and using it as an artist’s studio. So far, though, her pencils and paints hadn’t made it any farther than the bedroom closet, and the carriage house was as cluttered as the day they had moved in.
It was a long, narrow room, so crowded with junk it was impossible for anyone to walk a straight line to the back wall. There were a few stalls where horses had been kept. Vic loved the smell of the place, a perfume of gasoline, dirt, old dry hay, and wood that had baked and aged for eighty summers.
If Vic were Wayne’s age, she would’ve lived in the rafters, among the pigeons and flying squirrels. That didn’t seem to be Wayne’s thing, though. Wayne didn’t interact with nature. He took pictures of it with his iPhone and then bent over the screen and poked at it. His favorite thing about the lake house was that it had Wi-Fi.
It wasn’t that he wanted to stay indoors. He wanted to stay inside his phone. It was his bridge away from a world where Mom was a crazy alcoholic and Dad was a three-hundred-pound car mechanic who had dropped out of high school and who wore an Iron Man costume to comic-book conventions.
The motorcycle was in the back of the carriage house, a paint-spattered tarp thrown over it but the shape beneath still discernible. Vic spotted it from just inside the doors and wondered how she could’ve missed it the last time she’d stuck her head in here.
But she only wondered for a moment. No one knew better than Vic McQueen how easy it was for an important thing to be lost amid a great deal of visual clutter. The whole place was like a scene she might paint for one of the Search Engine books. Find your way to the motorcycle through the labyrinth of junk—without crossing a trip wire—and escape! Not a bad notion for a scene, really, something to file away for further thought. She couldn’t afford to ignore a single good idea. Could anyone?
Wayne got one corner of the tarp and she got the other, and they flipped it back.
The bike wore a coat of grime and sawdust a quarter inch thick. The handlebars and gauges were veiled in spiderwebs. The headlight hung loose from the socket by its wires. Under the dust the teardrop-shaped gas tank was cranberry and silver, with the word TRIUMPH embossed on it in chrome.
It looked like a motorcycle out of an old biker movie—not a biker film full of bare tits, washed-out color, and Peter Fonda but one of the older, tamer motorcycle films, something in black and white that involved a lot of racing and talk about the Man. Vic loved it already.
Wayne ran a hand over the seat, looked at the gray fuzz on his palm. “Do we get to keep it?”
As if it were a stray cat.
Of course they didn’t get to keep it. It wasn’t theirs. It belonged to the old woman who was renting them the house.
And yet.
And yet Vic felt that in some way it already belonged to her.
“I doubt it even runs,” she said.
“So?” Wayne asked, with the casual certainty of a twelve-year-old. “Fix it. Dad could tell you how.”
“Your dad already told me how.”
For eight years she had tried to be Lou’s girl. It had not always been good, and it had never been easy, but there had been some happy days in the garage, Lou fixing bikes and Vic airbrushing them, Soundgarden on the radio and cold bottles of beer in the fridge. She would crawl around the bikes with him, holding his light and asking questions. He taught her about fuses, brake lines, manifolds. She had liked being with him then and had almost liked being herself.
“So you think we can keep it?” Wayne asked again.
“It belongs to the old dame renting us the house. I could ask if she’d sell.”
“I bet she’ll let us have it,” he said. He wrote the word “OURS” in the dust on the side of the tank. “What kind of old lady is gonna want to haul ass around on a mother like this?”
“The kind standing right next to you,” she said, and reached past him and wiped her palm across the word “OURS.”
Dust fluffed up into a shaft of early-morning sunshine, a flurry of gold flakes.
Below where the word “OURS” had been, Vic wrote “MINE.” Wayne held up his iPhone and took a picture.
Haverhill
EVERY DAY AFTER LUNCH, SIGMUND DE ZOET HAD AN HOUR TO himself to paint his tiny soldiers. It was his favorite hour of the day. He listened to the Berlin Orchestra performing the Frobisher sextet, Cloud Atlas, and painted the Hun in their nineteenth-century helmets and coats with tails and gasmasks. He had a miniature landscape on a six-foot-by-six-foot sheet of plywood that was supposed to represent an acre of Verdun-sur-Meuse: an expanse of blood-soaked mud, burned trees, tangled shrubbery, barbed wire, and bodies.
Sig was proud of his careful brushwork. He painted gold braid on epaulets, microscopic brass buttons on coats, spots of rust on helmets. He felt that when his little men were painted well, they possessed a tension, a suggestion that they might, at any moment, begin to move on their own and charge the French line.
He was working on them the day it finally happened, the day when they finally did begin to move.
He was painting a wounded Hun, the little man grabbing at his chest, his mouth open in silent cry. Sig had a daub of red on the end of the brush, meant to put a splash of it around the German soldier’s fingers, but when he reached out, the Hun backed away.
Sigmund stared, studying the one-inch soldier under the bright glare of the lamp on its articulated arm. He reached with the tip of the brush again, and again the soldier swayed away.
Sig tried a third time—Hold still, you little bastard, he thought—and missed entirely, wasn’t even close, painted a crimson slash across the metal lampshade instead.
And it wasn’t just that one soldier moving anymore. It was all of them. They lurched toward one another, wavering like candle flames.
Sigmund rubbed his hand across his forehead, felt a hot and slimy sweat there. He inhaled deeply and smelled gingerbread cookies.
A stroke, he thought. I am having a stroke. Only he thought it in Dutch, because for the moment English eluded him, and never mind he had spoken English as his first language since he was five.
He reached for the edge of the table, to push himself to his feet—and missed and fell. Sig hit the walnut floor on his right side and felt something snap in his hip. It broke like a dry stick under a German jackboot. The whole house shook with the force of his fall, and he thought—still in Dutch—That will bring Giselle.
“Hulp,” he called. “Ik heb een slag. Nr. Nr.” That didn’t sound right, but he needed a moment to figure out why. Dutch. She wouldn’t understand Dutch. “Giselle! I have fallen down!”
She didn’t come, didn’t respond in any way. He tried to think what she could be doing that she wouldn’t hear him, then wondered if she was outside with the air-conditioning repairman. The repairman, a dumpy little man named Bing something, had turned up in grease-stained overalls to replace a condenser coil as part of a factory recall.
Sig’s head seemed a bit clearer, down here on the floor. When he had been up on the stool, the air had started to seem soupy and slow, overheated, and faintly cloying, what with that sudden smell of gingerbread. Down here, though, it was cooler, and the world seemed inclined to behave. He saw a screwdriver he had been missing for months, nestled among some dust bunnies under the worktable.
His hip was broken. He was sure of that, could feel the fracture in it, like a hot wire embedded under the skin. He thought if he could get up, though, he could use his stool as a makeshift walker to get across the room to the door and out into the hall.
Perhaps he could reach the door and shout for the air-conditioning man. Or to Vic McQueen, across the street. Except: no. Vicki was off in New Hampshire somewhere with that boy of hers. No—if he could get as far as the phone in the kitchen, he would just have to call emergency services and hope Giselle found him before the ambulance pulled in to the driveway. He didn’t want to shock her more than was necessary.
Sig reached up with one gangly arm, got the stool, and struggled to his feet, keeping his weight off the left leg. It hurt anyway. He heard bone click.
“Giselle!” he screamed again, his voice a throaty roar. “Gott dam, Giselle!”