by Joe Hill
Mr. Manx would know what to do—but he was asleep. He had been asleep for more than a day now, was resting in Sigmund de Zoet’s bedroom. When he was awake, he was his good old self—good old Mr. Manx!—but when he nodded off, it sometimes seemed he would never wake again. He said he would be better when he was on his way to Christmasland, and Bing knew that it was true—but he had never seen Mr. Manx so old, and when he slept, it was like seeing him dead.
And what if Bing forced the boy into the house? Bing was not sure he could wake Mr. Manx when he was like he was. How long could they hide here before Victoria McQueen was out in the street screaming for her child, before the cops were going door-to-door? It was the wrong place and the wrong time. Mr. Manx had made it clear they were only to watch for now, and even Bing, who was not the sharpest pencil in the desk, could see why. This sleepy street was not sleepy enough, and they would only get one pass at the whore with her whore tattoos and her lying whore mouth. Mr. Manx had made no threats, but Bing knew how much this mattered to him and understood what the penalty would be if he fucked it up: Mr. Manx would never take Bing to Christmasland. Never never never never never.
The boy climbed the first step. And the second.
“I wish I may, I wish I might, first star I see tonight,” Bing whispered, and shut his eyes and readied himself to act. “Have the wish I wish tonight: Go the fuck away, you little bastard. We’re not ready.”
He swallowed rubber-tasting air and cocked the hammer on the big pistol.
And then someone was in the street, shouting for the boy, shouting: “No! Wayne, no!”
Bing’s nerve endings throbbed, and the gun came dangerously close to slipping out of his sweaty hand. A big silver boat of a car rolled down the road, spokes of sunshine flashing off the rims. It pulled to a halt directly in front of Victoria McQueen’s house. The window was down, and the driver hung one flabby arm out, waving it at the kid.
“Yo!” he shouted again. “Yo, Wayne!”
“Yo,” not “no.” Bing was in such a state of nervous tension that he had heard him wrong.
“What’s up, dude?” yelled the fat man.
“Dad!” the child yelled. He forgot all about climbing the steps and knocking on the door, turned and ran down the path, his fucking pet bear galloping alongside.
Bing seemed to go boneless; his legs were wobbly with relief. He sank forward, resting his forehead against the door, and shut his eyes.
When he opened them and looked through the spyhole, the child was in his father’s arms. The driver was morbidly obese, a big man with a shaved head and telephone-pole legs. That had to be Louis Carmody, the father. Bing had read up about the family online, had a general sense of who was who but had never seen a picture of the man. He was amazed. He could not imagine Carmody and McQueen having sex—the fat beast would split her in two. Bing wasn’t exactly buff, but he’d look like a fucking track star next to Carmody.
He wondered what hold the man had on her to have induced her to have sex with him. Perhaps they had come to financial terms. Bing had looked the woman over at length and would not be surprised. All those tattoos. A woman could get any tattoo she liked, but they all said the same thing. They were a sign reading AVAILABLE FOR RENT.
The breeze caught the papers the boy had been looking at, and they drifted under the fat man’s car. When Carmody set his child back on the ground, the boy looked around for them and spotted them but didn’t get down on all fours to retrieve them. Those papers worried Bing. They meant something. They were important.
A scarred, scrawny, junkie-looking lady had brought those papers and tried to force them on McQueen. Bing had watched the whole thing from behind the curtain in the front room. Victoria McQueen didn’t like the junkie lady. She yelled at her and made ugly faces. She threw the papers back at her. Their voices had carried, not well but well enough for Bing to hear one of them say “Manx.” Bing had wanted to wake Mr. Manx up, but you couldn’t wake him up when he was like he was.
Because he isn’t really asleep, Bing thought, then shoved the unhappy notion aside.
He had been in the bedroom once to look at Mr. Manx, lying on top of the sheets wearing nothing but boxer shorts. A great Y was cut into his chest and held shut with coarse black thread. It was partially healed but seeped pus and pink blood, was a glistening canyon in his flesh. Bing had stood listening for minutes but did not hear him breathe once. Mr. Manx’s mouth lolled open, exuding the slightly cloying, slightly chemical odor of formaldehyde. His eyes were open, too, dull, empty, staring at the ceiling. Bing had crept close to touch the old man’s hand, and it had been cold and stiff, as cold and stiff as that of any corpse, and Bing had been gripped with the sickening certainty that Mr. Manx was gone, but then Manx’s eyes had moved, just slightly, turning to fix on Bing, to stare at him without recognition, and Bing had retreated.
Now that the crisis was past, Bing let his shaky, weak legs carry him back to the living room. He stripped off his gasmask and sat down with Mr. and Mrs. de Zoet to watch TV with them, needed some time to recover himself. He held old Mrs. de Zoet’s hand.
He watched game shows and now and then checked the street, keeping an eye on the McQueen place. A little before seven, he heard voices and a door banged shut. He returned to the front door and watched from the spyhole. The sky was a pale shade of nectarine, and the boy and his grotesquely fat father were wandering across the yard to the rent-a-car.
“We’re at the hotel if you need us,” Carmody called to Victoria McQueen, who stood on the steps of the house.
Bing didn’t like the idea of the boy leaving with the father. The boy and the woman belonged together. Manx wanted them both—and so did Bing. The boy was for Manx, but the woman was Bing’s treat, someone he could have some fun with in the House of Sleep. Just looking at her thin, bare legs made his mouth dry. One last bit of fun in the House of Sleep, and then it was on to Christmasland with Mr. Manx, on to Christmasland forever and ever.
But no, there was no reason to get in a sweat. Bing had looked at all the mail in Victoria McQueen’s mailbox and had found a bill for a day camp in New Hampshire. The kid was registered there through August. It was true, Bing was probably a few clowns short of the full circus, but he didn’t think anyone was going to sign their kid up for a camp that cost eight hundred dollars a week and then just decide to blow it off. Tomorrow was the Fourth of July. The father was probably just here to see the child for the holiday.
The father and the son drove away, leaving behind the unholy ghost of Victoria McQueen. The papers under the car—the ones that Bing wanted so badly to see—were grabbed by the Buick’s slipstream and tumbled after it.
Victoria McQueen was leaving, too. She went back into the house but left the door open, and three minutes later she came out with her car keys in one hand and sacks for the grocery store in the other.
Bing watched her until she was gone and then watched the street some more and finally let himself out. The sun had gone down, leaving an irradiated orange haze on the horizon. A few stars burned holes through the darkness above.
“There was a Gasmask Man, and he had a little gun,” Bing sang to himself softly, what he did when he was nervous. “And his bullets were made of lead, lead, lead. He went to the brook, and shot Vic McQueen, right through the middle of her head, head, head.”
He walked up and down along the curb but could find only a single sheet of paper, crumpled and stained.
Whatever he was expecting, it wasn’t a photocopy of a news story about the man from Kentucky who had arrived at Bing’s house two months ago in the Wraith, two days ahead of Mr. Manx himself. Mr. Manx had turned up, pale, starved-looking, bright-eyed, and bloody in a Trans Am with zebra-print upholstery and a big silver hammer propped next to him on the passenger seat. By then Bing already had the plates back on the Wraith and NOS4A2 was ready to roll.
The Kentucky man, Nathan Demeter, had spent quite a while in the little basement room in the House of Sleep before going o
n his way. Bing preferred girls, but Nathan Demeter knew just what to do with his mouth, and by the time Bing was done with him, they’d had many long, meaningful, manly talks of love.
It appalled Bing to see Nathan Demeter again, in a photo accompanying an article titled “Boeing Engineer Vanishes.” It made his tummy hurt. He could not for the life of him imagine why the junkie woman had come to Victoria McQueen with such a thing.
“Oh, boy,” Bing whispered, rocking. Automatically, he began to recite again: “There was a Gasmask Man, and he had a little gun. And his bullets were made of lead, lead—”
“That’s not how it goes,” said a small, piping voice from behind him.
Bing turned his head and saw a little blond-headed girl on a pink bicycle, with training wheels. She had drifted down from the barbecue at the end of the street. Adult laughter carried in the warm, humid evening.
“My dad read me that one,” she said. “There was a little man, and he had a little gun. He shoots a duck, right? Who is the Gasmask Man?”
“Oooh,” Bing said to her. “He’s nice. Everybody loves him.”
“Well, I don’t love him.”
“You would if you got to know him.”
She shrugged, turned her bike in a wide circle, and started back down the street. Bing watched her go, then returned to the de Zoets’, clutching the article about Demeter, which was printed on stationery from some library in Iowa.
Bing was sitting in front of the TV with the de Zoets an hour later when Mr. Manx came out, fully dressed, in his silk shirt and tails and narrow-toed boots. His starved, cadaverous face had an unhealthy sheen to it in the flickering blue shadows.
“Bing,” Manx said, “I thought I told you to put Mr. and Mrs. de Zoet in the spare room!”
“Well,” Bing said, “they aren’t hurting anyone.”
“No. Of course they’re not hurting anyone. They’re dead! But that’s no reason to have them underfoot either! For goodness’ sake, why are you sitting out here with them?”
Bing stared for the longest time. Mr. Manx was the smartest, most observant, thinkingest person Bing had ever met, but sometimes he didn’t understand the simplest things.
“Better than no company at all,” he said.
Boston
LOU AND THE KID HAD A ROOM ON THE TOP FLOOR OF THE LOGAN Airport Hilton—one night cost as much as Lou made in a week, money he didn’t have, but fuck it, that was the easiest kind to spend—and they weren’t in bed that night until after Letterman. It was going on 1:00 A.M., and Lou thought for sure that Wayne had to be asleep, so he wasn’t ready for it when the kid spoke up, voice loud in the darkness. He said just nine words, but it was enough to make Lou’s heart jump into his throat and jam there, like a mouthful of food that wouldn’t go down.
“This guy, Charlie Manx,” Wayne said. “Is he a big deal?”
Lou thumped his fist between his big man boobs, and his heart dropped back where it belonged. Lou and his heart weren’t on such great terms. His heart got so tired when he had to walk up stairs. He and Wayne had marched all over Harvard Square and the waterfront that evening, and twice he had needed to pause to get his wind back.
He was telling himself that it was because he wasn’t used to being at sea level, that his lungs and heart were adapted for the mountain air. But Lou was no dummy. He had not meant to get so fat. It had happened to his father, too. The guy spent the last six years of his life buzzing around the supermarket in one of those little golf carts for people who were too fat to stand. Lou would rather take a chain saw to his layers of fat than climb into one of those fucking supermarket scooters.
“Did Mom say something about him?” Lou asked.
Wayne sighed and was briefly silent: time enough for Lou to realize he had answered the kid’s question without meaning to.
“No,” Wayne said at last.
“So where did you hear about him?” Lou asked.
“There was a woman at Mom’s house today. Maggie someone. She wanted to talk about Charlie Manx, and Mom got really mad. I thought Mom was going to kick her ass.”
“Oh,” Lou said, wondering who Maggie someone had been and how she had gotten on Vic’s case.
“He went to jail for killing a guy, didn’t he?”
“This Maggie woman who came to see your mother? Did she say Manx killed a guy?”
Wayne sighed again. He rolled over in his bed to look at his father. His eyes glittered like ink spots in the dark.
“If I tell you how I know what Manx did, am I going to get in trouble?” he asked.
“Not with me,” Lou said. “Did you Google him or something?”
Wayne’s eyes widened, and Lou could see he hadn’t even thought of Googling Charlie Manx. He would now, though. Lou wanted to slam the heel of his hand into his forehead. Way to go, Carmody. Way to fucking go. Fat and stupid.
“The woman left a folder with some newspaper articles in it. I kind of read them. I don’t think Mom would’ve wanted me to. You aren’t going to tell her, are you?”
“What articles?”
“About how he died.”
Lou nodded, thought he was beginning to get it.
Manx had died not three days after Vic’s mother had passed away. Lou had heard about it the day it happened, on the radio. Vic had been out of rehab only five months and had spent the spring watching her mother waste away, and Lou had not wanted to say anything, was afraid that it would kick the legs out from under her. He had meant to tell her, but the opportunity never presented itself, and then, at a certain point, it became impossible to bring it up. He had waited too long.
Maggie someone must’ve found out that Vic was the girl who got away from Charlie Manx. The only child to escape him. Maybe Maggie someone was a journalist, maybe she was a true-crime author working on a book. She had come by for a comment, and Vic had given her one: something definitely unprintable and probably gynecological.
“Manx isn’t worth thinking about. He doesn’t have anything to do with us.”
“But why would someone want to talk to Mom about him?”
“You have to ask your mom on that one,” he said. “I really shouldn’t say anything. If I do, like, I’ll be the one in trouble. You know?”
Because this was the deal, his bargain with Victoria McQueen, the one they had settled on after she knew she was pregnant and decided she wanted to have the baby. She let Lou name the kid; she told Lou she’d live with him; she said she’d take care of the baby and when the baby was sleeping, the two of them could have some fun. She said she would be a wife in all but name. But the boy was to know nothing of Charlie Manx, unless she decided to tell him.
At the time Lou agreed, it all seemed reasonable enough. But he had not anticipated that this arrangement would prevent his son from knowing the single best thing about his own father. That his father had once reached past his fear for a moment of real Captain America heroism. He had pulled a beautiful girl onto the back of his motorcycle and raced her away from a monster. And when the monster caught up to them and set a man on fire, Lou had been the one to put out the flames—admittedly too late to save a life, but his heart had been in the right place and he had acted without any thought to the risk he was taking.
Lou hated to think what his son knew about him instead: that he was a walking fat joke, that he made a mediocre living towing people out of snowbanks and repairing transmissions, that he had not been able to hold on to Vic.
He wished he had another chance. He wished he could rescue someone else and Wayne could be watching. He would’ve been glad to use his big fat body to stop a bullet, as long as Wayne was there to bear witness to it. Then he could bleed out in a haze of glory.
Was there any human urge more pitiful—or more intense—than wanting another chance at something?
His son heaved a sigh, tossed himself onto his back.
“So tell me about your summer,” Lou asked. “What’s the best part so far?”
“No one is in rehab,” Wayne
said.
Beside the Bay
LOU WAS WAITING FOR SOMETHING TO DETONATE—IT WAS COMING, any moment now—when Vic wandered over with her hands shoved down in that army jacket of hers and said, “This chair for me?”
He glanced over at the woman who had never been his wife but who had, incredibly, given him a child and made his life mean something. The idea that he had ever held her hand, or tasted her mouth, or made love to her, even now seemed as unlikely as being bitten by a radioactive spider.
To be fair, she was certifiable. There was no telling who a schizophrenic would drop her pants for.
Wayne was on the stone wall overlooking the harbor with some other kids. The entire hotel had turned out for the fireworks, and people were crammed onto the old red bricks facing the water and the Boston skyline. Some sat in wrought-iron deck chairs. Others drifted around with champagne in flutes. Kids ran around holding sparklers, drawing red scratches against the darkness.
Vic watched her twelve-year-old with a mix of affection and sad longing. Wayne hadn’t noticed her yet, and she didn’t go to him, did nothing to let him know she was there.
“You’re just in time for everything to go boom,” Lou said.
His motorcycle jacket was folded into the empty seat next to him. He grabbed it and put it over his knee, making room for her beside him.
She smiled before she sat—that Vic smile, where only one corner of her mouth turned up, an expression that seemed somehow to suggest regret as much as happiness.
“My father used to do this,” she said. “Light the fireworks for Fourth of July. He put on a good show.”