NOS4A2(10)
And she did the same with all the other times.
Because there were other times, other trips on her Raleigh across a bridge that wasn’t there, to find something that had been lost.
There was the time her friend Willa Lords lost Mr. Pentack, her good-luck corduroy penguin. Willa’s parents cleaned out her room one day while Willa was sleeping over at Vic’s house, and Willa believed that Mr. Pentack had been chucked into the garbage along with her Tinker Bell mobile and the Lite-Brite board that didn’t work anymore. Willa was inconsolable, so torn up she couldn’t go to school the next day—or the day after.
But Vic made it better. It turned out that Willa had brought Mr. Pentack along for the sleepover. Vic found it under her bed, among the dust bunnies and forgotten socks. Tragedy averted.
Vic certainly didn’t believe she found Mr. Pentack by climbing on her Raleigh and riding through the Pittman Street Woods to the place where the Shorter Way Bridge had once stood. She did not believe the bridge was waiting there or that she had seen writing on the wall, in green spray paint: FENWAY BOWLING →. She did not believe the bridge had been filled with a roar of static and that mystery lights flashed and raced beyond its pine walls.
She had an image in her mind of riding out of the Shorter Way and into a darkened bowling alley, empty at seven in the morning. The covered bridge was, absurdly, sticking right through the wall and opened into the lanes themselves. Vic knew the place. She had gone to a birthday party there two weeks before; Willa had been there, too. The pine flooring was shiny, greased with something, and Vic’s bike squirted across it like butter in a hot pan. She went down and banged her elbow. Mr. Pentack was in a lost-and-found basket behind the counter, under the shelves of bowling shoes.
This was all just a story she told herself the night after she discovered Mr. Pentack under her bed. She was sick that night, hot and clammy, with the dry heaves, and her dreams were vivid and unnatural.
The scrape on her elbow healed in a couple days.
When she was ten, she found her father’s wallet between the cushions in the couch, not on a construction site in Attleboro. Her left eye throbbed for days after she found the wallet, as if someone had punched her.
When she was eleven, the de Zoets, who lived across the street, lost their cat. The cat, Taylor, was a scrawny old thing, white with black patches. He had gone out just before a summer cloudburst and not returned. Mrs. de Zoet walked up and down the street the next morning, chirping like a bird, mewling Taylor’s name. Mr. de Zoet, a scarecrow of a man who wore bow ties and suspenders, stood in the yard with his rake, not raking anything, a kind of hopelessness in his pale eyes.
Vic particularly liked Mr. de Zoet, a man with a funny accent like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s, who had a miniature battlefield in his office. Mr. de Zoet smelled like fresh-brewed coffee and pipesmoke and let Vic paint his little plastic infantrymen. Vic liked Taylor the cat, too. When he purred, he made a rusty clackety-clack in his chest, like a machine with old gears, trundling to noisy life.
No one ever saw Taylor again . . . although Vic told herself a story about riding across the Shorter Way Bridge and finding the poor old thing matted with blood and swarming with flies, in the wet weeds, by the side of the highway. It had dragged itself out of the street after a car ran over its back. The Brat could still see the bloodstains on the blacktop.
Vic began to hate the sound of static.
SPICY MENACE
1990
Sugarcreek, Pennsylvania
THE AD WAS ON ONE OF THE LAST PAGES OF SPICY MENACE, THE August 1949 issue, the cover of which depicted a screaming nude frozen in a block of ice (She gave him the cold shoulder . . . so he gave her the big chill!). It was just a single column, below a much larger advertisement for Adola Brassieres (Oomphasize your figure!). Bing Partridge noticed it only after a long, considering look at the lady in the Adola ad, a woman with pale, creamy mommy tits, supported by a bra with cone-shaped cups and a metallic sheen. Her eyes were closed, and her lips were parted slightly, so she looked like she was asleep and dreaming sweet dreams, and Bing had been imagining waking her with a kiss.
“Bing and Adola, sitting in a tree,” Bing crooned, “F-U-C-K-I-N-Geeee.”
Bing was in his quiet place in the basement, with his pants down and his ass on the dusty concrete. His free hand was more or less where you would imagine it, but he was not particularly busy yet. He had been grazing his way through the issue, looking for the best parts, when he found it, a small block of print, in the lower left corner of the page. A snowman in a top hat gestured with one crooked arm at a line of type, framed by snowflakes.
Bing liked the ads in the back of the pulps: ads for tin lockers filled with toy soldiers (Re-create the thrill of Verdun!), ads for vintage World War II equipment (Bayonets! Rifles! Gasmasks!), ads for books that would tell you how to make women want you (Teach Her to Say, “I LOVE YOU!!”). He often clipped out order forms and sent in pocket change or grimy dollar bills, in an attempt to acquire ant farms and metal detectors. He wanted, with all his heart, to Amaze His Friends! and Astonish His Relatives!—and never mind that his friends were the three feebs who worked under him in the janitorial crew at NorChemPharm and that his only direct relatives had returned to the soil, in the cemetery behind the New American Faith Tabernacle. Bing had never once considered that his father’s collection of soft-core pulps—mildewing in a cardboard box down in Bing’s quiet room—were older than he was and that most of the corporations he was sending money to had long since ceased to exist.