NOS4A2(167)

Men, she thought, were one of the world’s few sure comforts, like a fire on a cold October night, like cocoa, like broken-in slippers. Their clumsy affections, their bristly faces, and their willingness to do what needed to be done—cook an omelet, change lightbulbs, make with hugging—sometimes almost made being a woman fun.

She wished she were not so aware of the vast gulf between what the men in her life thought she was worth and her actual value. She had, it seemed to her, always asked and expected too much and given too little. She seemed almost to have a perverse impulse to make anyone who cared about her regret it, to find the thing that would most appall those people and then do that until they had to run away as a matter of self-preservation.

Her left eye felt like a great screw, slowly turning, twisting tighter and tighter in her eyesocket.

For a dozen steps, her left knee refused to bend. Then, halfway across the backyard, it folded without warning and she dropped down onto it. It felt as if Manx were smashing it with his hammer.

Her father and Lou came spilling out the door, hurrying toward her. She waved a hand in a gesture that seemed to mean, Don’t worry about it, I’m cool. She found, however, that she could not stand back up. Now that she was down on one knee, the leg would not unfold.

Her father looped one arm around her waist. He pressed his other hand against her cheek.

“You’re burning up,” he said. “Jesus, woman. Let’s get you inside.”

He took one arm and Lou took the other, and they hauled her to her feet. She turned her head against Lou for a moment and inhaled deeply. His round, grizzled face was wan, greasy with damp, beads of rainwater all over his bald skull. Not for the first time in her life, she thought he had missed his century and his country: He would’ve made a fine Little John and would’ve been perfectly at ease fishing in Sherwood Forest.

I would be so happy for you, she thought, if you found someone worth loving, Lou Carmody.

Her father was on her other side, his arm around her waist. In the dark, well away from his little log house, he was the same man he had been when she was a kid—the man who’d joked with her while he put Band-Aids on her scrapes and who took her for rides on the back of his Harley. But as he stepped into the light spilling from the open back door, she saw a man with white hair and a face made gaunt with age. He had a regrettable mustache and leathery skin—the skin of a lifelong smoker—with deep lines etched into his cheeks. His jeans were loose and baggy on his nonexistent ass and pipe-cleaner legs.

“What’s that * tickler doing on your face, Dad?” she asked.

He shot her a surprised sidelong look, then shook his head. Opened his mouth and closed it. Shook his head again.

Neither Lou nor her father wanted to let go of her, and so they had to turn sideways to shuffle in through the door. Chris went first and helped her over the doorsill.

They paused in a back hallway, a washer and dryer on one side, some pantry shelves on the other. Her father looked at her again.

“Oh, Vic,” he said. “What in God’s name’s been done to you?” And he shocked her by bursting into tears.

It was noisy, choked, unpretty crying that shook his thin shoulders. He cried with his mouth open so she could see his metal fillings in the back of his teeth. She felt a little like crying herself, could not believe she looked any worse than he did. It seemed to her she had last seen him only a while ago—it felt like last week—and he had been fit, limber, and ready, with calm, pale eyes that suggested he wouldn’t run from anything. Although he had run. And so what? She had not done any better herself. By many measures she had probably done worse.

“You should see the other guy,” she said.

Her father made a choked sound halfway between a sob and a laugh.

Lou looked back out through the screen door. The night beyond smelled of mosquitoes—an odor a bit like stripped wire, a bit like rain.

“We heard a noise,” Lou said. “Like a bang.”

“I thought it was a backfire. Or a gun going off,” her father said. Tears streamed down his leathery cheeks, hung gemlike in his bushy, tobacco-stained mustache. All he needed was a gold star on his chest and a pair of Colt revolvers.

“Was that your bridge?” Lou asked. His voice soft and gentle with wonder. “Did you just come across?”

“Yes,” she said. “I just came across.”

They helped her into the small kitchen. Just one light was on, a smoked-glass dish hanging over the table. The room was as tidy as a show kitchen, the only sign that anyone lived here the smooshed filters in the amber ashtray and the haze of cigarette smoke in the air. And the ANFO.

The ANFO was on the table in an unzipped school backpack, a mass of twenty-kilo sacks. The plastic was slippery and white, covered in warning labels. They were packed tight and smooth. Each was about the size of a loaf of bread. Vic knew without lifting them that they would be heavy, like picking up bags of unmixed concrete.

They eased her into a cherrywood chair. She stretched out her left leg. She was conscious of an oily sweat on her cheeks and forehead that could not be wiped away. The light over the table was too bright. Being near it was like someone gently forcing a sharpened pencil back through her left eye and into her brain.

“Can we turn that off?” she asked.

Lou found the switch, flipped it, and the room was dark. Somewhere down a hall, another lamp was on, casting a brownish glow. She didn’t mind that one so much.