NOS4A2(12)

He rolled the sheet out of the typewriter and read it over, lips moving. The effort of concentration had left his lumpy, potato-shaped body humid with sweat. It seemed to him that he had stated the facts about himself with clarity and authority. He worried that it was a mistake to mention “youthful indiscretions” or “sad family trouble” but in the end decided they would probably find out about his parents whether he said anything or not and that it was better to be coolly up-front about it than look like he was hiding something. It was all a long time ago, and in the years since he had been released from the Youth Center—a.k.a. the Bin—he had been a model worker, had not missed a single day at NorChemPharm.

He folded the letter, then looked in the front closet for an envelope. He found instead a box of unused Christmas cards. A boy and a girl, in fuzzy long underwear, were peeking around a corner, staring in wide-eyed wonder at Santy Claus, standing in the gloom before their Christmas tree. The seat of the girl’s pajamas was partly unbuttoned to show one plump cheek of her ass. John Partridge had sometimes said that Bing couldn’t pour water out of a boot with instructions written on the heel, and maybe it was true, but he still knew a good thing when he saw it. This letter was slipped into a Christmas card and the card into an envelope decorated with holly leaves and shiny cranberries.

Before he put it into the mailbox at the end of the street, he kissed it, as a priest might bend his head and kiss the Bible.


THE NEXT DAY HE WAS WAITING BY THE MAILBOX AT TWO-THIRTY WHEN the mailman proceeded up the street in his funny little white truck. The foil flowers in Bing’s front yard spun lazily, making a barely audible whir.

“Bing,” the mailman said. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

“Night shift,” Bing said.

“Is a war starting?” the mailman said, nodding at Bing’s clothes.

Bing had on his mustard-colored fatigues, what he wore when he wanted to feel lucky.

“If there is, I’ll be ready for it,” Bing told him.

There was nothing from Christmasland. But of course how could there be? He had only sent his card the day before.


THERE WAS NOTHING THE NEXT DAY EITHER.


OR THE DAY AFTER.


ON MONDAY HE WAS SURE SOMETHING WOULD COME AND WAS OUT on his front step a half hour before the postman’s usual time. Black and ugly thunderheads towered over the crest of the hill, behind the steeple of the New American Faith Tabernacle. Muffled thunder detonated two miles away and eighteen thousand feet up. It was not a noise so much as a vibration, one that went to Bing’s core, that shook his bones in their sediment of fat. His foil flowers spun hysterically, sounding for all the world like a pack of kids on bicycles, racing downhill and out of control.

The rumbles and crashes made Bing profoundly uneasy. It had been unbearably hot and thundery the day the nail gun went off (that was how he thought of it—not as the day he shot his father but as the day the gun went off). His father had felt the barrel pressing against his left temple and looked sidelong at Bing, standing over him. He took a sip of his beer and smacked his lips and said, “I’d be scared if I thought you had the balls.”

After he pulled the trigger, Bing sat with the old man and listened to the rain rattle off the roof of the garage, while John Partridge sprawled on the floor, one foot twitching and a urine stain spreading across the front of his pants. Bing had sat until his mother entered the garage and began to scream. Then it had been her turn—although not for the nail gun.

Now Bing stood in his yard and watched the clouds mount up in the sky over the church at the top of the hill, where his mother had worked all the last days of her life . . . the church he had attended faithfully, every Sunday, since before he could even walk or speak. One of his first words had been “looya!”—which was the closest he could come to pronouncing “hallelujah.” His mother had called him Looya for years after.

No one worshipped there now. Pastor Mitchell had run off with the funds and a married woman, and the property had been seized by the bank. On Sunday mornings the only penitents in the New American Faith Tabernacle were the pigeons that lived in the rafters. The place frightened Bing a little now—its emptiness frightened him. He imagined that it despised him for abandoning it and abandoning God, that sometimes it leaned forward off its foundations to glare at him with its stained-glass eyes. There were days—days like this—when the woods were full of the lunatic shrilling of summer insects and the air wobbled with liquid heat, and that church seemed to loom.

Thunder hammered at the afternoon.

“Rain, rain, go away,” Bing whispered to himself. “Come again some other day.”

The first warm drop of rain spattered against his forehead. Other drops followed, burning bright in the sunshine that slanted in from the yawning blue sky to the west. It felt almost as hot as a spray of blood.

The mail was late, and by the time it came, Bing was soaking wet and huddling under the shingle overhang at his front door. He ran through the downpour for the box. As he reached it, a twig of lightning stroked out of the clouds and fell with a crash somewhere behind the church. Bing shrieked as the world flashed bluewhiteblue, sure he was about to be lanced through, was about to burn alive, touched by the finger of God for giving his father the nail gun and for what he had done afterward to his mother on the kitchen floor.

There was a bill from the utility company and a flyer announcing a new mattress store and nothing else.