Nos4a2

by Joe Hill

  Lou sat next to her, head lowered, frowning in thought. “What if she comes back? Wayne was pretty freaked.”

  “We’re headed to New Hampshire tomorrow. I don’t think she’s going to find us up there.”

  “You could come to Colorado. You wouldn’t have to stay with me. We wouldn’t have to stay together. I’m not asking for anything. But we could find you a place where you could work on Search Engine. The kid could spend the days with me and the nights with you. We got trees and water in Colorado, too, you know.”

  She sat back in her chair. The sky was low and smoky, the clouds reflecting the lights of the city so that they glowed a dull, dirty shade of pink. In the mountains above Gunbarrel, where Wayne had been conceived, the sky was filled to its depths with stars at night, more stars than you could ever hope to see from sea level. Other worlds were up in those mountains. Other roads.

  “I think I’d like that, Lou,” she said. “He’ll go back to Colorado in September, to go to school. And I’ll come with him—if it’s all right.”

  “Of course it’s all right. Are you out of your mind?”

  For a single instant, long enough for another blossom to fall into her hair, neither of them spoke. Then, at a shared glance, they burst into laughter. Vic laughed so hard, so freely, she had to gasp to get enough air into her lungs.

  “Sorry,” Lou said. “Probably not the best choice of words.”

  Wayne, twenty feet away, turned on the stone wall to peer back at them. He held a single dead sparkler in one hand. A ribbon of black smoke drifted from it. He waved.

  “You go back to Colorado and find me a place,” Vic said to Lou. She waved back at Wayne. “And at the end of August, Wayne will fly back, and I’ll be with him. I’d come right now, but we’ve got the cottage on the lake until the end of August, and he’s still got three more weeks of day camp paid for.”

  “And you’ve got to finish working on the motorcycle,” Lou said.

  “Wayne told you about that?”

  “Didn’t just tell me. He sent me pictures from his phone. Here.” Lou tossed her his jacket.

  The motorcycle jacket was a big, heavy thing, made of some kind of black nylonlike synthetic and with bony plates sewn into it, Teflon armor. She had thought it was the coolest jacket in the world from the first time she put her arms around it, sixteen years before. The front flaps were covered in faded, frayed patches: ROUTE 66, SOUL, a Captain America shield. It smelled like Lou, like home. Trees and sweat and grease and the clean, sweet winds that whistled through the mountain passes.

  “Maybe this will keep you from getting killed,” Lou said. “Wear it.”

  And at that moment the sky above the harbor pulsed with a deep red flash. A rocket detonated in an eardrum-stunning clap. The skies opened and rained white sparks.

  The barrage began.

  I-95

  TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER, VIC DROVE WAYNE AND HOOPER BACK to Lake Winnipesaukee. It rained the whole way, a hard summer downpour that rattled on the road and forced her to keep to under fifty miles an hour.

  She was across the border and into New Hampshire when she realized she had forgotten to refill her prescription for Abilify.

  It required all her concentration to see the road in front of her and stay in her lane. But even if she had been checking the rearview mirror, she would not have noticed the car following at a distance of two hundred yards. At night one set of headlights looks much like any other.

  Lake Winnipesaukee

  WAYNE WOKE IN HIS MOTHER’S BED BEFORE HE WAS READY. SOMETHING had jolted him out of sleep, but he didn’t know what until it came again—a soft thump, thump, thump at the bedroom door.

  His eyes were open, but he didn’t feel awake, a state of mind that would persist throughout the day, so that the things he saw and heard had the talismanic quality of things seen and heard in a dream. Everything that happened seemed hyperreal and freighted with secret meaning.

  He did not remember going to sleep in his mother’s bed but was not surprised to find himself there. She often moved him to her own bed after he nodded off. He accepted that his company was sometimes necessary, like an extra blanket on a cold night. She was not in bed with him now. She almost always rose before him.

  “Hello?” he said, knuckling his eyes.

  The knocking stopped—then started again, in a halting, almost questioning way: Thud? Thud? Thud?

  “Who is that?” Wayne asked.

  The knocking stopped. The bedroom door creaked open a few inches. A shadow rose upon the wall, the profile of a man. Wayne could see the big bent crag of a nose and the high, smooth, Sherlock Holmes curve of Charlie Manx’s forehead.

  He tried to scream. He tried to shout his mother’s name. But the only sound he was able to produce was a funny wheeze, a kind of rattle, like a broken sprocket spinning uselessly in some tired machine.

  In the mug shot, Charles Manx had been staring straight into the camera, his eyes bulging, his crooked upper teeth pressed into his lower lip to give him a look of dim-witted bafflement. Wayne couldn’t know him by his profile, and yet he recognized his shadow in a glance.

  The door inched inward. The thump, thump, thump came again. Wayne struggled to breathe. He wanted to say something—Please! Help!—but the sight of that shadow held him silent, like a hand clamped over his mouth.

  Wayne shut his eyes, snatched a desperate breath of air, and shouted, “Go away!”

  He heard the door ease inward, whining on its hinges. A hand pressed heavily on the edge of the bed, right by his knee. Wayne forced out a thin, whinnying cry, almost inaudible. He opened his eyes and looked—and it was Hooper.

  The big, pale dog stared urgently into Wayne’s face, forepaws on the bed. His damp gaze was unhappy, even stricken.

  Wayne looked past him at the partly open door, but the Manx shadow wasn’t there anymore. On some level Wayne understood it had never been there, that his imagination had stitched together a Manx shape out of meaningless shadow. Another part of him was sure he had seen it, a profile so clear it might’ve been inked on the wall. The door was open wide enough so Wayne could see into the corridor that ran the length of the house. No one was there.

  Yet he was sure he had heard a knock, could not have imagined that. And as he stared down the hall, it came again, thump, thump, and he looked around and saw Hooper beating his short, thick tail against the floor.

  “Hey, boy,” Wayne said, digging into the soft down behind Hooper’s ears. “You scared me, you know. What brings you?”

  Hooper continued to gaze up at him. If someone had asked Wayne to describe the expression on Hooper’s big, ugly face, Wayne would’ve said it looked like he was trying to say he was sorry. But he was probably hungry.

  “I’ll get you something to eat. Is that what you want?”

  Hooper made a noise, a wheezy, gasping sound of refusal, the sound of a toothless gear spinning uselessly, unable to engage.

  Only—no. Wayne had heard that sound before, a few moments ago. He had thought he himself was making it. But the sound wasn’t coming from him, and it wasn’t coming from Hooper. It was outside, somewhere in the early-morning dark.

  And still Hooper stared into Wayne’s face, his eyes pleading and miserable. So sorry, Hooper told him with his eyes. I wanted to be a good dog. I wanted to be your good dog. Wayne heard this thought in his head, as if Hooper were saying it to him, like a talking dog in a comic strip.

  Wayne pushed Hooper aside, got up, and looked out the window into the front yard. It was so dark he could at first see nothing except his own faint reflection on the glass.

  And then the Cyclops opened one dim eye, right on the other side of the window, six feet away.

  The blood surged to Wayne’s heart, and for the second time in the space of three minutes he felt a yell rise into his throat.

  The eye opened, slow and wide, as if the Cyclops were just rousing itself. It glowed a dirty hue located somewhere between orange Tang and urine. Then, before
Wayne could produce a cry, it began to fade, until there was only a burning copper iris glimmering in the darkness. A moment later it went out completely.

  Wayne exhaled unsteadily. A headlight. It was the headlight on the front of the motorcycle.

  His mother rose from beside the bike and swiped her hair back from her face. Seen through the old, rippled glass, she didn’t seem to really be there, was a ghost of herself. She wore a white halter top and old cotton shorts and her tattoos. It was impossible to make out the details of those tattoos in the dark. It looked as if the night itself were adhering to her skin. But then Wayne had always known that his mother was bound to some private darkness.

  Hooper was out there with her, whisking around her legs, water dripping off his fur. He had obviously just come from the lake. It took Wayne a moment to register that Hooper was beside her, which didn’t make sense, because Hooper was standing beside him. Except that when Wayne looked around, he saw he was alone.

  He didn’t think about it long. He was still too tired. Maybe he’d been awoken by a dream dog. Maybe he was going crazy like his mother.

  Wayne pulled on a pair of cutoffs and went out into the predawn cool. His mother worked on the bike, rag in one hand and a funny tool in the other, that special wrench that looked more like a hook or a curved dagger.

  “How’d I get in your bed?” he asked.

  “Bad dream,” she said.

  “I don’t remember having a bad dream.”

  “You weren’t the one having it,” she said.

  Dark birds dashed through the mist that crawled across the surface of the lake.

  “You find the busted sprocket?” Wayne asked.

  “How do you know it’s got a busted sprocket?”

  “I don’t know. Just from how it sounded when you tried to turn it over.”

  “You been spending time out in the garage? Working with your dad?”

  “Sometimes. He says I’m useful because I have little hands. I can reach in and unscrew things he can’t get to. I’m great at taking stuff apart. Not so good at putting stuff together.”

  “Join the club,” she said.

  They worked on the bike. Wayne was not sure how long they were at it, only that by the time they quit, it was hot and the sun was well up above the tree line. They hardly spoke in all the time they worked. That was okay. There was no reason to ruin the greasy, knuckle-scraping effort of fixing the bike with a lot of talk about feelings or Dad or girls.

  At some point Wayne sat back on his heels and looked at his mother. She had grease up to her elbows and on her nose, was bleeding from scrapes on her right hand. Wayne was running steel wool over the rust-flecked tailpipe, and he paused to look at himself. He was as filthy as she was.

  “I don’t know how we’re going to get this crap off us,” he said.

  “We got a lake,” she said, tossing her hair and gesturing toward it with her head. “Tell you what. If you beat me to the float, we can have breakfast at Greenbough Diner.”

  “What do you get if you beat me?”

  “The pleasure of proving that the old woman can still thrash a little piker.”

  “What’s a piker?”

  “It’s a—”

  But he was off and running, grabbing his shirt, snapping it off over his head, flinging it in Hooper’s face. Wayne’s legs and arms pumped fast and smooth, bare feet slashing through the burning-bright dew in the high grass.

  Then she was sailing past him, sticking her tongue out as she reached his side. They hit the dock at the same time. Their bare feet smacked on the boards.

  Halfway to the end, she reached out and put her hand on Wayne’s shoulder and shoved, and he heard her laughing at him as he lurched drunkenly off balance, his arms pedaling in the air. He hit the water and sank into murky green. He heard the low, deep bloosh of her diving off the end of the dock a moment later.

  He flailed, came up spitting and hauling ass for the float, twenty feet offshore. It was a big platform of splintery gray boards floating on rusty oil drums; the thing looked like an environmental hazard. Hooper woofed furiously from the dock behind them. Hooper disapproved of merrymaking in general, unless he was the one making it.

  Wayne was most of the way to the float when he realized he was alone in the lake. The water was a black sheet of glass. His mother was nowhere to be seen, anywhere, in any direction.

  “Mom?” he called. Not afraid. “Mom?”

  “You lose,” she said, her voice deep, hollow, echoing.

  He dived, held his breath, paddled underwater, came up under the float.

  She was there, in the darkness, her face glistening with water, her hair shining. She grinned at him when he came up beside her.

  “Look,” she said. “Lost treasure.”

  She pointed at a trembling spiderweb, at least two feet wide, decorated with a thousand gleaming beads of silver and opal and diamond.

  “Can we still go to breakfast?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Got to. Victory over a piker is a lot of things, but it isn’t very filling.”

  Gravel Driveway

  HIS MOTHER WORKED ON THE BIKE ALL AFTERNOON.

  The sky was the color of a migraine. Thunder sounded once. It was a boom-and-bang, like a heavy truck going over an iron bridge. Wayne waited for rain.

  None came.

  “Do you ever wish you had adopted a Harley-Davidson instead of having a kid?” he asked her.

  “Would’ve been cheaper to feed,” she said. “Hand me that rag.”

  He handed it to her.

  She wiped her hands and fitted the leather seat over a brand-new battery and threw her leg over the saddle. In her cutoff jeans and oversize black motorcycle boots, tattoos scrawled on her arms and legs, she looked like no one anyone would call “Mom.”

  She turned the key and hit the run switch. The Cyclops opened its eye.

  She put one heel on the kickstart, lifted herself up, slammed her weight down. The bike wheezed.

  “Gesundheit,” Wayne said.

  Vic rose and came down hard again. The engine exhaled, blew dust and leaves out the pipes. Wayne didn’t like the way she threw all her weight down on the kickstart. He was afraid something would shatter. Not necessarily the bike.

  “Come on,” she said in a low voice. “We both know why the kid found you, so let’s get on with it.”

  She hit the kickstart again, and then again, and her hair fell into her face. The starter rattled, and the engine produced a faint, brief, rumbling fart.

  “It’s okay if it doesn’t work,” Wayne said. Suddenly he didn’t like any of this. Suddenly it seemed like crazy business—the sort of crazy business he had not seen from his mom since he was a small boy. “Get it later, right?”

  She ignored him. She raised herself up and set her boot squarely on the kickstart.

  “Let’s go find, you bitch,” she said, and stomped. “Talk to me.”

  The engine ba-boomed. Dirty blue smoke shot from the pipes. Wayne almost fell off the fence post he was sitting on. Hooper ducked, then barked in fright.

  His mother gave it throttle, and the engine roared. It was frightening, the noise of it. Exciting, too.

  “IT RUNS!” he hollered.

  She nodded.

  “WHAT’S IT SAYING?” he yelled.

  She frowned at him.

  “YOU TOLD IT TO TALK TO YOU. WHAT’S IT SAYING? I DON’T SPEAK MOTORCYCLE LANGUAGE.”

  “OH,” she said. “HI-YO, SILVER.”

  “LET ME GET MY HELMET!” WAYNE YELLED.

  “YOU’RE NOT COMING.”

  Each of them screaming to be heard over the sound of the engine battering the air.

  “WHY NOT?”

  “IT’S NOT SAFE YET. I’M NOT GOING FAR. BE BACK IN FIVE MINUTES.”

  “WAIT!” Wayne shouted, and held up one finger, then turned and ran for the house.

  The sun was a cold white point, shining through the low piles of clouds.

  She wanted to move. The n
eed to be on the road was a kind of maddening itch, as hard to leave alone as a mosquito bite. She wanted to get on the highway, see what she could make the bike do. What she could find.

  The front door slapped shut. Her son came charging back, carrying a helmet and Lou’s jacket.

  “COME BACK ALIVE, RIGHT?” he called.

  “THAT’S THE PLAN,” she said. And then, as she was putting the jacket on, she said, “I WILL BE RIGHT BACK. DON’T WORRY.”

  He nodded.

  The world vibrated around her from the force of the engine: the trees, the road, the sky, the house, all of it shuddering furiously, in danger of shattering. She had already turned the bike to face the road.

  She punched the helmet down onto her head. She wore the jacket open.

  Right before she let the handbrake out, her son bent down in front of the bike and snatched something out of the dirt.

  “WHAT?” she asked.

  He handed it to her—that wrench that looked like a curved knife, the word TRIUMPH stamped into it. She nodded thanks and pushed it down into the pocket of her shorts.

  “COME BACK,” he said.

  “BE HERE WHEN I DO,” she said.

  Then she put her feet up, dropped it into first, and she was gliding.

  The moment she started moving, everything stopped shaking. The split-tie fence slid away on her right. She leaned as she turned onto the road, and it felt like an airplane banking. It didn’t feel as if she were touching the blacktop at all.

  She shifted into second. The house dropped away behind her. She cast a last glance over her shoulder. Wayne stood in the driveway, waving. Hooper was out in the street, gazing after her with a curiously hopeless stare.

  Vic gave it throttle and shifted into third, and the Triumph lunged, and she had to squeeze the handlebars to keep from falling off. A thought flashed through her mind, the memory of a biker T-shirt she had owned for a while: IF YOU CAN READ THIS, THE BITCH FELL OFF.