NOS4A2(118)

Bing shrank. His hands crept toward his ears.

“Do not cover your ears and pretend you cannot hear me. You have been an utter disaster.”

Bing’s face wrinkled. His eyes shut. He began, hideously, to cry. “I could just shoot myself!” he cried.

“Oh, that is a lot of foolishness,” Manx said. “Anyway, you would most likely miss and put the bullet in me.”

Wayne laughed.

He surprised all of them, including himself. It had been like sneezing, a completely involuntary reaction. Manx and Bing looked into the backseat at him. Bing’s eyes streamed, his fat, ugly face distorted with misery. Manx, though—Manx watched Wayne with a kind of wondering amusement.

“You shut up!” Bing screamed. “Don’t you laugh at me! I’ll cut your face off! I’ll get my scissors and cut you all to pieces!”

Manx had the silver hammer in his hand, and he thumped it into Bing’s chest, pushing him back at his door.

“Hush,” Manx said. “Any child will laugh at the antics of a clown. It is perfectly natural.”

For a moment it flashed into Wayne’s mind how funny it would be if Manx had poked the hammer into Bing’s face and busted his nose. In his mind Bing’s nose popped like a water balloon filled with red Kool-Aid, an image so hilarious he almost laughed again.

A part of Wayne, a very distant, quiet part, wondered how he could find anything funny. Maybe he was still muddled up from the gas that Bing Partridge had sprayed at him. He had slept all night but did not feel rested. He felt ill and drained and warm. Warm most of all: He was boiling in his own skin, wished for a cool shower, a cool dip in the lake, a cool mouthful of snow.

Manx glanced sidelong at Wayne one more time and winked. Wayne flinched, his stomach doing a slow cartwheel.

This man is poison, he thought, and then said it to himself again, only in reverse. Poison is man this. And, having composed this odd, stilted, backward phrase, Wayne felt oddly, curiously better about himself, although he couldn’t have said exactly why.

“If you are feeling domestic, you could make a rasher of bacon for the growing young man. I am sure he would like that.”

Bing lowered his head and wept.

“Go on,” Manx said. “Go and be the crybaby in your kitchen where I don’t have to listen to it. I will deal with you soon enough.”

Bing let himself out and closed the door and walked past the car toward the driveway. As he went by the rear windows, he cast a hating look at Wayne. Wayne had never seen anyone look at him that way, like they genuinely wished to kill him, to strangle him to death. It was funny. Wayne almost burst out laughing again.

Wayne exhaled, slowly, unsteadily, did not want to be thinking any of the things he was thinking. Someone had unscrewed a jar of black moths, and they were fluttering around wildly inside his head now, a whirl of ideas: fun ideas. Fun like a broken nose or a man shooting himself in the head.

“I prefer to drive at night,” Charlie Manx said. “I am a night person at heart. Everything that is good in the day is even better in the night. A merry-go-round, a Ferris wheel, a kiss from a girl. Everything. Besides. When I turned eighty-five, the sunlight began to bother my eyes. Do you need to go winkie-wee?”

“You mean . . . go pee?”

“Or make chocolate cake?” Manx asked.

Wayne laughed again—a sharp, loud bark—then clapped a hand over his mouth as if he could swallow it back.

Manx watched him with bright, fascinated, unblinking eyes. Wayne did not think he had seen him blink once in all the time they had been together.

“What are you doing to me?” Wayne asked.

“I am driving you away from all the things that ever made you unhappy,” Manx said. “And when we get where we are going, you will have left your sadness behind. Come. There’s a bathroom here in the garage.”

He got out from behind the wheel, and in the same moment the door on Wayne’s right unlocked itself, the lock popping up with such a loud bang that Wayne flinched.

Wayne had been planning to run as soon as he had his feet under him, but the air was damp and hot and burdensome. It stuck to him, or maybe he was stuck to it, like a fly caught on flypaper. He got just one step, and then Manx had a hand on the back of his neck. His grip was not painful or rough, but it was firm. He effortlessly turned Wayne around, away from the open garage door.

Wayne’s gaze caught and held on the rows of battered green tanks, and he frowned. SEVOFLURANE.

Manx followed Wayne’s stare, and one corner of his mouth lifted in a knowing smile. “Mr. Partridge has a job with the custodial staff of a chemical plant three miles from here. Sevoflurane is a narcotic and anesthetic, much in demand by dentists. In my day the dentist would anesthetize his patients—even children—with brandy, but sevoflurane is considered far more humane and effective. Sometimes tanks are reported damaged, and Bing takes them out of commission. Sometimes they are not as damaged as they appear.”

Manx steered Wayne toward a flight of stairs that led to the second floor of the garage. Beneath the steps was a partly open door.

“Can I bend your ear for a moment, Wayne?” Manx asked.

Wayne pictured Manx grabbing his left ear and wrenching it until Wayne screamed and fell to his knees. Some awful, submerged part of himself also found this funny; at the same time, the skin on the back of his neck beneath Manx’s gaunt hand went crawly and strange.