NOS4A2(138)

“What do you want to do first when we get there?” Mr. Manx asked from the gloom of the front seat. “When we get to Christmasland?”

The possibilities were so exciting it was hard to put them in order. “I’m going in the rock-candy cave to see the Abominable Snowman. No! I’m going to ride in Santa’s Sleigh and save him from the cloud pirates!”

“There is a plan!” Manx said. “Rides first! Games after!”

“What games?”

“The kids have a game called scissors-for-the-drifter, which is the best time you’ve ever had! And then there is stick-the-blind. Son, you have not had fun until you have played stick-the-blind with someone really spry. Look! Over on the right! There is a snow lion biting the head off a snow sheep!”

Wayne turned his whole body to look out the right-hand window, but when he did, his grandmother was in his way.

She was just as he had seen her last. She was brighter than anything in the backseat, as bright as snow in the moonlight. Her eyes were hidden behind silver half-dollars that flashed and gleamed. She had sent him half-dollars for his birthdays but had never come herself, said she didn’t like to fly.

“.sky false a is That,” said Linda McQueen. “.same the not are fun and Love .reverse in go to trying aren’t You .fight to trying aren’t You.”

“What do you mean, the sky is false?” Wayne asked.

She pointed out the window, and Wayne craned his neck and looked up. A moment ago the sky had been whirling with snow. Now, though, it was filled with static—a million billion fine flecks of black and gray and white, buzzing furiously over the mountains. The nerve endings behind Wayne’s eyeballs pulsed at the sight of it. It wasn’t painfully bright—it was actually quite dim—but there was something about the furious motion of it that made it hard to watch. He flinched, shut his eyes, drew back. His grandmother faced him, eyes hidden behind those coins.

“If you wanted to play games with me, you should’ve come to visit me in Colorado,” Wayne said. “We could’ve talked backward as much as you wanted. We didn’t even talk forward when you were alive. I don’t understand why you want to talk now.”

“Who are you speaking with, Wayne?” Manx asked.

“Nobody,” Wayne said, and reached past Linda McQueen, opened the door, and shoved her out.

She weighed nothing. It was easy, like pushing away a bag of sticks. She flipped out of the car and hit the blacktop with a dry thud and shattered with a pretty musical smashing sound, and at that moment Wayne jumped awake in





Indiana


AND TURNED HIS HEAD AND LOOKED OUT THE REAR WINDOW. A bottle had smashed in the road. Powdered glass cobwebbed the asphalt, shards tinkling and rolling. Manx had tossed a bottle of something. Wayne had seen him do this once or twice already. Charlie Manx didn’t seem like the sort of guy inclined to recycle.

When Wayne sat up—digging his knuckles into his eyes—the snowmen were gone. So were the sleeping moon and the mountains and the burning gem of Christmasland in the distance.

He saw high green corn and a honky-tonk with a lurid neon sign depicting a thirty-foot-tall blonde in a short skirt and cowboy boots. When the sign blinked, she kicked a foot, tipped her head back, closed her eyes, and kissed the darkness.

Manx looked at him in the rearview mirror. Wayne felt flushed and muddleheaded from sleeping heavily, and perhaps for that reason it did not startle him to see how young and healthy Manx looked.

His hat was off, and he was as bald as ever, but his scalp was smooth and pink, not white and splotchy. It had, only yesterday, looked like a globe, displaying a map of continents no one in his right mind would ever want to visit: the Isle of Sarcoma, North Liver Spot. Manx’s eyes peered out from beneath sharp, arched eyebrows, the color of hoarfrost. Wayne did not think he had seen him blink once in the days they’d been together. For all he knew, the man had no eyelids.

Yesterday morning he had looked like a walking corpse. Now he looked like he was in his mid-sixties, vital and healthy. But there was a kind of avid stupidity in his eyes—the greedy stupidity of a bird looking at carrion in the road and wondering if it could get some tasty bits without being run down.

“Are you eating me?” Wayne asked.

Manx laughed, a harsh caw. He even sounded like a crow.

“If I have not taken a bite out of you yet, I am not likely to,” Manx said. “I am not sure you would make much of a meal. There is not a lot of meat on you, and what is there is starting to smell a bit gamy. I am holding out for an order of those sweet-potato fries.”

Something was wrong with Wayne. He could feel it. He could not put his finger on what it was. He was achy and sore and feverish, but that might’ve just been from sleeping in the car, and this was something more. The best he could manage was a sense that his reactions to Manx were off. He had almost been surprised into laughter when Manx said the word “gamy.” He had never heard a word like that dropped into conversation before, and it struck him as hilarious. A normal person, though, wouldn’t laugh at his kidnapper’s choice of words.

“But you’re a vampire,” Wayne said. “You’re taking something out of me and putting it into you.”

Manx considered him briefly in the rearview mirror. “The car is making both of us better. It is like one of these vehicles they have now that they call hybrids. Do you know about the hybrids? They run half on gasoline, half on good intentions. But this is the original hybrid! This car runs on gasoline and bad intentions! Thoughts and feelings are just another kind of energy, same as oil. This vintage Rolls-Royce is getting fine mileage out of all your bad feelings and all the things that ever hurt and scared you. I am not speaking poetically. Do you have any scars?”