NOS4A2(140)
They went over a long, low bridge. The grooved metal hummed soulfully under the tires. Manx did not speak again until they reached the other side.
“You are full of talk tonight. We have gone a thousand miles, and this is the most I have heard out of you. Let’s see if I have this right. You would like me to buy you a tallboy, an ear of sweet corn, and enough fireworks for your own private Fourth of July. Are you sure there is not anything else you might want? Were you planning to have goose-liver paté and caviar with your mother when you graduated from high school?”
“I don’t want my own private Fourth of July. I just want some sparklers. And maybe a couple rockets.” He paused, then said, “You told me you owed me one. For killing my dog.”
There followed a period of grim silence.
“I did,” Manx admitted at last. “I had put that out of my mind. I am not proud of it. Would you consider us square if I got you a beer and an ear of corn and some fireworks?”
“No. But I won’t ask for anything else.” He looked out the window and spied the moon. It was a chipped sliver of bone, faceless and remote. Not as good as the Christmasland moon. Everything was better in Christmasland, Wayne supposed. “How did you find out about Christmasland?”
Manx said, “I drove my daughters there. And my first wife.” He paused, then added, “My first wife was a difficult woman. Hard to satisfy. Most redheads are. She had a long list of complaints that she held against me, and she made my own children mistrust me. We had two daughters. Her father gave me money to set me up in business, and I spent it on a car. This car. I thought Cassie—that was my first wife—would be happy when I came home with it. Instead she was impertinent and difficult as always. She said I had wasted the money. I said I was going to be a chauffeur. She said I was going to be a pauper and so were they. She was a scornful woman and abused me in front of the children, which is a thing no man should stand.” Manx flexed his hands on the wheel, his knuckles whitening. “Once my wife threw an oil lamp at my back, and my best coat caught fire. Do you think she ever apologized? Well! Think again. She would make fun of me at Thanksgiving and family get-togethers, pretending she was me and that she had just been set aflame. She would run around gobbling like a turkey and waving her arms, screaming, ‘Put me out, put me out!’ Her sisters always had a good laugh at that. Let me tell you something. The blood of a redheaded woman is three degrees cooler than the blood of a normal woman. This has been established by medical studies.” He gave Wayne a wry look in the rearview. “Of course, the very thing that makes them impossible to live with is what makes it hard for a man to stay away, if you catch my meaning.”
Wayne didn’t but nodded anyway.
Manx said, “Well. All right then. I think we have reached an understanding. I know a place where we can buy fireworks so loud and bright you will be deaf and blind by the time we are done shooting them off! We should get to the Here Library just after dark tomorrow. We can shoot them off there. By the time we are done launching rockets and throwing cherry bombs, people will think the Third World War is under way.” He paused, then added in a sly tone, “Perhaps Ms. Margaret Leigh will join us for the festivities. I wouldn’t mind lighting a fuse under her, just to teach her a thing or two about minding her own beeswax.”
“Why does she matter?” Wayne asked. “Why don’t we just leave her alone?”
A large green moth hit the windshield with a soft, dry smack, made an emerald smear on the glass.
“You are a clever young man, Wayne Carmody,” Manx said. “You read all the stories about her. I am sure if you put your mind to it, you will see why she is of concern to me.”
Back when it was still light, Wayne had flicked through the collection of papers Manx had brought to the car, items Bing had found online that concerned Margaret Leigh. There were a dozen stories in all, telling a single larger story about abandonment, addiction, loneliness . . . and odd, unsettling miracles.
The first piece dated back to the early nineties and had run in the Cedar Rapids Gazette: “Psychic or Lucky Guesser? Local Librarian’s ‘Wild Hunch’ Saves Kids.” It told the story of a man named Hayes Archer who lived in Sacramento. Archer had packed his two sons into his brand-new Cessna and lifted off with them for a moonlight flight along the California coast. His plane wasn’t the only thing that was new. So was his pilot’s license. Forty minutes after heading out, Archer’s single-engine Cessna made several erratic maneuvers, then disappeared from the radar. It was feared he had lost sight of land in a gathering fog and crashed into the sea while trying to find the horizon. The story got some play in the national news, Archer being worth a small fortune.
Margaret Leigh had called the police in California to tell them Archer and his children weren’t dead, hadn’t crashed into the sea. They had made land and gone down in a gorge. She couldn’t give the exact location but felt that the police should search the coast for some point at which it was possible to find salt.
The Cessna was discovered forty feet off the ground, upside down in a redwood tree, in—wait for it—Salt Point State Park. The boys were unharmed. The father had a broken back but was expected to survive. Maggie said her unlikely insight had come to her in a flash while playing Scrabble. The article ran alongside a photograph of the upside-down plane and another of Maggie herself, bent over a Scrabble board at a tournament. The caption below this second photo said, “With Her Lucky Hunches, It’s Too Bad Maggie’s Game of Choice Is Scrabble and Not the Lottery!”