by Joe Hill
Don’t give up on happiness.
You need both. I had both.
Love you kid—your father
Vic read it while sitting against the dead man and was careful not to cry on it.
After a time she swiped at her face with the backs of her hands. She looked up the stairs. The thought of how she had come down them produced a brief but intense sensation of dizziness. It amazed her that she had gone down them and lived. She had come down a lot quicker than she was going to go up. The left knee was throbbing furiously now, stabs of white pain shooting from it in rhythm with her pulse.
She thought she had all the time in the world to make it up the stairs, but halfway to the top the phone began to ring again. Vic hesitated, listening to the brash clang of hammer on bell. Then she began to hop, clutching the handrail and hardly touching her left foot to the floor. I’m a little Dutch girl, dressed in blue. Here are the things I like to do, sang a piping little-girl voice in her mind, chanting a hopscotch song that Vic had not thought of in decades.
She reached the top step and went through the door into blinding, overpowering sunlight. The world was so bright it made her woozy. The phone rang again, going off for the third or fourth time. Pretty soon whoever was calling would quit.
Vic grabbed for the black phone, hanging from the wall just to the right of the basement door. She held the doorframe in her left hand, realized only absently that she was still holding the note from Nathan Demeter. She put the receiver to her ear.
“My Lord, Bing,” said Charlie Manx. “Where have you been? I have been calling and calling. I was beginning to worry you had done something rash. It is not the end of the world, you know, that you are not coming with me. There may be another time, and meanwhile there are many things you can do for me. For starters you can fill me in on the latest news about our good friend Ms. McQueen. I heard a news report a while ago that she rode away from her little cottage in New Hampshire and vanished. Has there been any word of her since? What do you think she’s been up to?”
Vic swallowed air, exhaled slowly.
“Oh, she’s been all kinds of busy,” Vic said. “Most recently she’s been helping Bing redecorate his basement. I felt like it needed some color down there, so I painted the walls with the motherfucker.”
MANX WAS SILENT JUST LONG ENOUGH FOR VIC TO WONDER IF HE HAD hung up. She was about to say his name, find out if he was still there, when he spoke again.
“Good gravy,” he said again. “Do you mean to tell me poor Bing is dead? I am sorry to hear it. We parted on unhappy terms. I feel bad about that now. He was, in many ways, a child. He did some awful things, I suppose, but you cannot blame him! He did not know any better!”
“Shut up about him. You listen to me. I want my son back, and I’m coming to get him, Manx. I’m coming, and you don’t want to be with him when I find him. Pull over. Wherever you are, pull over. Let my boy out at the side of the road, unhurt. Tell him to wait for me and that Mom will be there before he knows it. Do that and you don’t have to worry about me looking for you. I’ll let you slide. We’ll call it even.” She didn’t know if she meant it, but it sounded good.
“How did you get to Bing Partridge’s, Victoria? That is what I want to know. Was it like in Colorado that time? Did you go there on your bridge?”
“Is Wayne hurt? Is he all right? I want to talk to him. Put him on.”
“People in hell want ice water. You answer my questions and we’ll see if I answer yours. Tell me how you got to Bing’s and I will see what I can do.”
Vic trembled furiously, the beginnings of shock settling in. “You tell me first if he’s alive. God help you if he isn’t. If he isn’t, Manx, if he isn’t, what I did to Bing is nothing compared to what I’ll do to you.”
“He is well. He is a perfect little ray of sunshine! You get that, and that’s all you get for now. Tell me how you arrived at Bing’s. Was it on your motorbike? It was a bicycle in Colorado. But I suppose you have a new ride now. And did your new ride take you to your bridge? Answer me and I’ll let you speak to him.”
She tried to decide what to say, but no lie would come to mind, and she wasn’t sure it would change a damn thing if he knew. “Yeah. I crossed the bridge, and it took me here.”
“So,” Manx said. “You’ve got yourself a mean set of wheels. You’ve got a bike with an extra gear, is that it? But it didn’t take you to me. It took you to the House of Sleep. Now, I think there is a reason for that. I’ve got a ride with a few extra gears in it myself, and I know something about how they work. These things do have their quirks.” He paused, then said, “You told me to pull over and leave your son by the side of the road. You said you would be there before he knows it. The bridge can only take you to a fixed point, is that it? That would make sense. It’s a bridge, after all. The two ends have to rest on something, even if it is just resting on two fixed ideas.”
“My son,” she said. “My son. I want to hear his voice. You promised.”
“Fair is fair,” Charlie Manx said. “Here he is, Vic. Here is the little man himself.”
Shoot the Moon Fireworks, Illinois
IN THE DUSTY BRIGHT OF EARLY AFTERNOON, MR. MANX SWUNG THE Wraith off the road and into the dooryard of a fireworks warehouse. The place advertised itself with a sign that showed an engorged and furious moon with a rocket jammed in one eye, bleeding fire. Wayne laughed just to see it, laughed and squeezed his moon ornament.
The shop was a single long building with a wooden hitching post out front for horses. It came to Wayne then that they were back out west, where he had lived most of his life. Places up north had hitching posts out front sometimes, if they wanted to look rustic, but when you got out west, you sometimes saw piles of dry horseshit not far from posts like that; that was how you knew you were back in cowboy country. Although a lot of cowboys rode ATVs and listened to Eminem these days.
“Are there horses in Christmasland?” Wayne asked.
“Reindeer,” Manx said. “Tame white reindeer.”
“You can ride them?”
“You can feed them right out of your hand!”
“What do they eat?”
“Whatever you offer them. Hay. Sugar. Apples. They are not fussy eaters.”
“And they’re all white?”
“Yes. You do not see them very often, because they are so hard to pick out against the snow. There is always snow in Christmasland.”
“We could paint them!” Wayne exclaimed, excited by the thought. “Then they would be easier to see.” He had been having a lot of exciting thoughts lately.
“Yes,” Manx said. “That sounds like fun.”
“Paint them red. Red reindeer. As red as fire trucks.”
“That would be festive.”
Wayne smiled at the thought of it, of a tame reindeer patiently standing in place while he ran a paint roller over it, coloring him a bright candy-apple red. He ran his tongue over his prickly new teeth, mulling the possibilities. He thought when he got to Christmasland, he would drill a hole in his old teeth, put a string through them, and wear them as a necklace.
Manx leaned to the glove compartment and opened it and removed Wayne’s phone. He had been using it off and on all morning. He was, Wayne knew, calling Bing Partridge and not getting an answer. Mr. Manx never left a message.
Wayne looked out the window. A man was coming out of the fireworks place with a bag in one arm. He held the hand of a blond-haired little girl skipping along beside him. It would be funny to paint a little girl bright red. To take her clothes off and hold her down and paint her wriggling, tight little body. To paint all of her. To paint her right, you would want to shave off all that hair of hers. Wayne wondered what a person could do with a bag full of blond hair. There had to be something fun you could do with it.
“My Lord, Bing,” Mr. Manx said. “Where have you been?” Opening his door and climbing out of the car to stand in the lot.
The girl and her father climbed into his pickup, and the truck backed out a
cross the gravel. Wayne waved. The little girl saw him and waved back. Wow, she had great hair. You could make a rope four feet long out of all that smooth, golden hair. You could make a silky golden noose and hang her with it. That was a wild idea! Wayne wondered if anyone had ever been hanged with their own hair.
Manx was on the phone for a while in the parking lot. He paced, and his boots raised chalk clouds in the white dust.
The lock popped up on the door behind the driver’s seat. Manx opened it and leaned in.
“Wayne? Do you remember yesterday I said if you were good, you could talk to your mother? I would hate for you to think Charlie Manx doesn’t know how to keep his word! Here she is. She would like to hear how you are doing.”
Wayne took the phone.
“Mom?” he said. “Mom, it’s me. How are you?”
There was hiss and crackle, and then he heard his mother’s voice, choked with emotion. “Wayne.”
“I’m here. Can you hear me?”
“Wayne,” she said again. “Wayne. Are you okay?”
“Yeah!” he said. “We stopped for fireworks. Mr. Manx is buying me some sparklers and maybe a bottle rocket. Are you all right? You sound like you’re crying.”
“I miss you. Mama needs you back, Wayne. I need you back, and I’m coming to get you.”
“Oh. Okay,” he said. “I lost a tooth. A few teeth, actually! Mom, I love you! Everything is okay. I’m okay. We’re having fun!”
“Wayne. You’re not okay. He’s doing something to you. He’s getting in your head. You have to stop him. You have to fight him. He’s not a good man.”
Wayne felt a nervous flutter in his stomach. He moved his tongue over his new, bristling, hooklike teeth. “He’s buying me fireworks,” he said sullenly. He had been thinking about fireworks all morning, about punching holes in the night with rockets, setting the sky on fire. He wished it were possible to light clouds on fire. That would be a sight! Burning rafts of clouds falling from the sky, gushing black smoke as they went down.
“He killed Hooper, Wayne,” she said, and it was like being slapped in the face. Wayne flinched. “Hooper died fighting for you. You have to fight.”
Hooper. It felt as if he had not thought of Hooper in years. He remembered him now, though, his great sad, searching eyes staring out of his grizzled yeti face. Wayne remembered bad breath, warm silky fur, stupid cheer . . . and how he had died. He had chomped the Gasmask Man in the ankle, and then Mr. Manx—then Mr. Manx—
“Mom,” he said suddenly. “I think I’m sick, Mom. I think I’m all poisoned inside.”
“Oh, baby,” she said. She was crying again. “Oh, baby, you hold on. Hold on to yourself. I am coming.”
Wayne’s eyes stung, and for a moment the world blurred and doubled. It surprised him, to feel close to tears. He did not really feel sad after all; it was more like the memory of sadness.
Tell her something she can use, he thought. Then he thought it again, but slowly this time, and backward: Use. Something. Tell.
“I saw Gran’ma Lindy,” he blurted suddenly. “In a dream. She talked all scrambled up, but she was trying to say something about fighting him. Only it’s hard. It’s like trying to lift a boulder with a spoon.”
“Whatever she said, just do it,” his mother said. “Try.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I will. Mom. Mom, something else,” he said, his voice quickening with a sudden urgency. “He’s taking us to see—”
But Manx reached into the back of the car and snapped the phone out of Wayne’s hand. His long, scrawny face was flushed, and Wayne thought there was a vexed look in his eyes, as if he had lost a hand of cards he’d expected to win.
“Well, that is enough chitchat,” Mr. Manx said, in a cheery voice that did not match the glare in his eyes, and he slammed the door in Wayne’s face.
As soon as the door was closed, it was as if an electrical current had been cut. Wayne slumped back into the leather cushions, feeling tired, his neck stiff and his temples throbbing. He was upset, he realized. His mother’s voice, the sound of her crying, the memory of Hooper biting and dying, worried him and gave him a nervous tummy.
I am poisoned, he thought. Poisoned am I. He touched his front pocket, feeling the lump made by all the teeth he had lost, and he thought of radiation poisoning. I am being irradiated, he thought next. “Irradiated” was a fun word, a word that brought to mind giant ants in black-and-white movies, the kinds of films he used to watch with his father.
He wondered what would happen to ants in a microwave. He supposed they would just fry; it didn’t seem likely they would grow. But you couldn’t know without trying it! He stroked his little moon ornament, imagining ants popping like corn. There had been a vague notion in the back of his mind—something about trying to think in reverse—but he couldn’t hold on to it. It wasn’t fun.
By the time Manx got back into the car, Wayne was smiling again. He wasn’t sure how long it had been, but Manx had finished his phone call and gone into Shoot the Moon Fireworks. He had a slender brown paper bag, and poking out of the top of the bag was a long green tube in a single cellophane package. The labels on the side of the tube identified it as an AVALANCHE OF STARS—THE PERFECT ENDING TO THE PERFECT NIGHT!
Manx looked over the front seat at Wayne, his eyes protruding a little from his head, his lips stretched in a disappointed grimace.
“I have bought you sparklers and a rocket,” Manx said. “Whether we will use either of them is another question. I am sure you were about to tell your mother we are on our way to see Miss Maggie Leigh. That would’ve been spoiling my fun. I am not sure why I should go out of my way to provide you with a good time when you seem set on denying me my small pleasures.”
Wayne said, “I have a terrible headache.”
Manx shook his head furiously and slammed the door and tore out of the dusty lot, throwing a cloud of brown smoke. He was in a sulk for two or three miles, but not far from the Iowa border a fat hedgehog tried to waddle across the road, and the Wraith struck it with a loud thud. The sound was so noisy and unexpected that Wayne couldn’t help himself and yelped with laughter. Manx looked back and gave him a warm, begrudging smile, then put on the radio, and the two of them sang along to “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” and everything was better.
The House of Sleep
MOM, SOMETHING ELSE. HE’S TAKING US TO SEE—” WAYNE SAID, but then there was a clatter, a thunk, and the loud thud of a slamming door.
“Well, that is enough chitchat,” Manx said, in his sunny, carnival barker’s voice. “The good little man has been through a lot lately. I wouldn’t like him to become overwrought!”
Vic wept. She put a fist against the kitchen counter and swayed, crying into the phone.
The child she had heard on the other end of the line spoke in Wayne’s voice . . . but was not Wayne. Not exactly. There had been a dreamy, spacey disconnect—not only from the situation but from the serious, self-contained child he had always been. He had only finally sounded like himself at the very end, after she reminded him about Hooper. Then, for a moment, he seemed confused and afraid, but himself. He sounded drugged, too, like a person just resurfacing from deep anesthesia.
The car was anesthetizing him in some way. Anesthetizing him while it drained him of his essential Wayneness, leaving behind only a happy, thoughtless thing. A vampire, she guessed, like Brad McCauley, the cold little boy who had tried to kill her at the cottage above Gunbarrel all those years ago. There was a line of reasoning there that she could not bear to follow, that she had to turn away from or she might start to scream.
“Are you all right, Victoria? Should I call back another time?”
“You’re killing him,” she said. “He’s dying.”
“He’s never been more alive! He’s a fine boy. We get along like Butch and Sundance! You can trust me to treat him well. You have my promise, in fact, that I will not hurt him. I have never hurt any child. Not that anyone would know it after all the lies you told about
me. I have lived my entire life in the service of children, but you were happy to tell everyone what a great kiddie fiddler I am. I would be within my rights, you know, to do terrible things to your son. I would only be living up to the tall tales you told about me. I hate to fall short of the myth. But I don’t have it in me to be vicious to children.” He paused, then added, “Adults, however, are a different story.”
“Let him go. Please let him go. This isn’t about him. You know it isn’t about him. You want to get even with me. I understand. Park somewhere. Just park and wait. I’ll use my bridge. I’ll find you. We can trade. You can let him out of the car, and I’ll get in, and you can do whatever you like to me.”
“You would have a lot of making up to do. You told the whole world that I sexually assaulted you. I feel bad that I stand accused of something I never had the pleasure to try.”
“You want that? Would that make you happy?”
“If I raped you? Goodness no! I am just being spleeny. I do not understand such depravity. I am aware that many women enjoy a brisk whack on the backside during the sexual act and to be called degrading names, but that is merely a bit of sport. To take a woman against her wishes? I don’t think so! You may not believe it, but I have daughters of my own. I will tell you, though, sometimes I think that you and I got off on the wrong foot! I am sorry about that. We never had a chance to get to know each other. I bet you would have liked me if we had met under other circumstances!”
“Holy shit,” she said.
“It is not so unbelievable! I have been married twice and have rarely been without female companionship. Someone found something to like.”
“What are you saying? You want to fucking date?”
He whistled. “Your mouth! You could make a stevedore blush! Considering how your first date with Bing Partridge went, I suppose it would be better for my long-term health if we just settle for talking. Come to think of it, our first couple of encounters weren’t terribly romantic. You wear a man down, Victoria.” He laughed again. “You’ve cut me, lied about me, and sent me to jail. You’re worse than my first wife. Still . . . you’ve got something that keeps a man coming back for more! You do keep a boy thinking!”