NOS4A2(50)

Charlie Manx took another step back from the burning, writhing soldier and was hit from behind by one of the other customers, a skinny old man in suspenders. The two of them went down together. Lou Carmody leaped over them both, pulling off his jacket to throw it on Tom Priest’s flaming body.

The driver’s-side window abruptly went down, releasing Alan Warner, who dropped to the blacktop, half under the car. The Rolls thumped as it passed over him.

Sam Cleary, the store owner who looked like Popeye, rushed past Vic, holding a fire extinguisher.

Lou Carmody was hollering something, swinging his jacket into Tom Priest, beating at him. It was like he was swatting a stack of burning newspaper; big black flakes of ash drifted through the air. It was only later that Vic understood those were flakes of charbroiled skin.

The toddler in Cady’s arms slapped a chubby hand against the storefront window. “Hot! Hot Waddy!” Cady seemed to suddenly realize that her child could see everything and turned on her heel and carried him across the room, away from the window, sobbing as she fled.

The Rolls trundled another twenty feet before coming to a stop with the bumper against a telephone pole. Flames painted the whole back end, and if there was a child in the trunk, he would’ve been suffocated or burned to death, but there was no child in the trunk. There was a purse belonging to a woman named Cynthia McCauley, who had disappeared three days before from JFK Airport, along with her son Brad, but neither Brad nor Cynthia was ever seen again. No one could explain the thumping noise that had seemed to come from the rear of the car—like the window rolling up or the door flying open and smashing into Tom Priest, it seemed almost that the car had acted with a mind of its own.

Sam Cleary reached the two old men fighting on the ground and used the fire extinguisher for the first time, bringing it down two-handed to hit Charlie Manx in the face. He would use it for the second time on Tom Priest, not thirty seconds later, by which time Tom was well dead.

Not to mention well done.





INTERLUDE:

THE SPIRIT OF ECSTASY

2000–2012





Gunbarrel, Colorado


THE FIRST TIME VIC MCQUEEN TOOK A LONG-DISTANCE CALL FROM Christmasland, she was an unwed mother, living with her boyfriend in a double-wide, and it was snowing in Colorado.

She had lived in New England her whole life, and she thought she knew about snow, but it was different in the Rockies. The storms were different. She thought of the blizzards in the Rockies as blue weather. The snow came down fast and hard and steady, and there was something blue about the light, so it was as if she were trapped in a secret world under a glacier: a winterplace where it was eternally Christmas Eve.

Vic would walk outside in her moccasins and one of Lou’s enormous T-shirts (which she could wear like nightgowns) to stand in the blue dimness and listen to the snow fall. It hissed in the branches of the pines like static, like white noise. She would stand there breathing in the sweet smell of woodsmoke and pines, trying to figure out how in the hell she had wound up with sore tits and no job, two thousand miles from home.

The best she could work out, she was there on a mission of vengeance. She had returned to Colorado, after graduating from Haverhill High, to attend art school. She wanted to go to art school because her mother was dead set against it and her father refused to pay for it. Other choices her mother couldn’t bear and her father didn’t want to know about: Vic smoking pot, skipping class to go skiing, making out with girls, shacking up with the fat delinquent who had rescued her from Charlie Manx, getting pregnant without bothering to get married. Linda had always said she wouldn’t have anything to do with a baby born out of wedlock, so Vic had not invited her after the birth, and when Linda offered to come, Vic said she’d rather that she didn’t. She had not even bothered to send her father a picture of the baby.

She still remembered how good it felt to look into Lou Carmody’s face, over coffees in a yuppie café in Boulder, and to say, bluntly and pleasantly, “So I guess I should f*ck you for saving my life, huh? Least I can do. Do you want to finish your coffee, or should we just split now?”

After their first time, Lou admitted he had never slept with a girl before, his face glowing dark red, from both his exertions and his embarrassment. Still a virgin in his early twenties: Who said there was no wonder left in the world?

Sometimes she resented Louis, for not being satisfied with sex alone. He had to love her, too. He wanted talk as much as he wanted sex, maybe more; he wanted to do things for her, buy her things, get tattoos together, go on trips. Sometimes she resented herself, for letting him corner her into being his friend. It seemed to her she had planned to be stronger: to simply f*ck him a time or two—to show him she was a girl who knew how to appreciate a guy—then drop him and get herself an alternative girlfriend, someone with a pink streak in her hair and a few beads in her tongue. The problem with that plan was, she liked guys better than girls, and she liked Lou better than most guys; he smelled good and he moved slow and he was roughly as difficult to anger as a character from the Hundred Acre Wood. Soft as a character from the Hundred Acre Wood, too. It irritated her that she liked to touch him and lean against him. Her body was constantly working against her, toward its own unhelpful ends.

Lou worked out of a garage he had opened with some cash given to him by his parents, and they lived in the trailer in back, two miles outside of Gunbarrel, a thousand miles from anything. Vic didn’t have a car and probably spent a hundred and sixty hours a week at home. The house smelled of piss-soaked diapers and engine parts, and the sink was always full.