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He went on, pacing the length of the room. His passage disturbed the swallows in the rafters. The sound of their beating wings echoed, a noise like a magician spraying playing cards into the air.

The light that slanted in through the windows was cold and blue, and motes of dust turned within the bars of sunshine, as if the church were the interior of a snow globe just beginning to settle.

Someone—teenagers, homeless—had made an altar in one of the deep-set window frames. Deformed red candles stood in hardened puddles of wax, and set behind the candles were several photographs of Michael Stipe from R.E.M., a scrawny queer with pale hair and pale eyes. Someone had written “LOSING MY RELIGION” on one of the photographs in cherry lipstick. Bing himself felt there had not been a single thing worth listening to in rock music since Abbey Road.

Bing set the card from Mr. Manx and the printout from the Denver Post in the center of this homemade altar and lit a couple candles for the Good Man. He cleared some space on the floor, kicking aside chunks of broken plaster and a dirty pair of panties—little hearts on them, looked like they’d fit a ten-year-old—and got on his knees.

He cleared his throat. In the vast echoing space of the church, it sounded as loud as a gunshot.

A swallow rattled its wings, gliding from one rafter to another.

He could see a line of pigeons leaning forward to stare down at him with their bright, rabies-red eyes. They watched him with fascination.

He shut his eyes and put his hands together and spoke with God.

“Hey, there, God,” Bing said. “It’s Bing, that old dumb thing. Oh, God. Oh, God God God. Please help Mr. Manx. Mr. Manx has the sleepies, bad, and I don’t know what to do, and if he doesn’t get better and come back to me, I’ll never have my trip to Christmasland. I tried my best to do something good with my life. I tried my best to save children and make sure they’d have cocoa and rides and things. It wasn’t easy. No one wanted us to save them. But even when the mommies screamed and called us awful names, even when their children cried and wet themselves, I loved them. I loved those kids, and I loved their mommies, even if they were bad women. And I loved Mr. Manx most of all. Everything he does, he does so other people can be happy. Isn’t that the kindest thing a person can do—spread a little happiness around? Please, God, if we did any good at all, please, help me, give me a sign, tell me what to do. Please, please, please, pl—”

His face was tipped back and his mouth was open when something hot hit his cheek, and he tasted something salty and bitter on his lips. He flinched; it was like someone had cum on him. He swiped at his mouth and looked at his fingers, now coated with a whitish green crud, a sloppy liquid mash. It took a moment to identify it as pigeon shit.

Bing groaned: once, then again. His mouth was full of the salt-crème taste of bird shit. The stuff cupped in his palm looked like diseased phlegm. His moaning rose to a scream and he pitched himself backward, kicking plaster and glass, and put his other hand down on something damp and sticky, with the soft texture of Saran Wrap. He glanced down and discovered he had planted his hand on a soiled condom crawling with ants.

He lifted his hand in horror, in revulsion, and the condom stuck to his fingers, and he flicked his hand once, twice, and it flipped up and landed in his hair. He shrieked. Birds exploded from the rafters.

“What?” he screamed to the church. “What? I came here on my knees! I CAME ON MY KNEES! And you do what? WHAT?”

He grabbed the rubber and yanked, tearing out a fistful of his own wispy gray hair at the same time (when had it all turned gray?). Dust swirled in the light.

Bing Partridge went down the hill in a shambling jog, feeling defiled and ill . . . defiled, ill, and outraged. He reeled like a drunk past the foil flowers in his front yard and banged the door shut behind him.

It was the Gasmask Man who stepped out twenty minutes later, a bottle of lighter fluid in each hand.

Before he lit the place up, he boarded over the holes in the windows so the birds couldn’t get out. He drizzled most of one bottle over the pews and the heaps of broken wood and plaster on the floor: perfect little premade bonfires. The other bottle he emptied on the figure of Jesus, mounted on his cross up in the apse. He looked cold in his little loincloth, so Bing flicked a match and dressed him in a robe of flame. Mary gazed sadly down at this latest indignity inflicted upon her son from a mural above him. Bing tapped two fingers to the mouthpiece of his mask, blew her a kiss.

Give him a chance to grab child number ten with Mr. Manx, Bing thought, and he didn’t care if he had to gas and kill Christ’s own mama to get the little bastard.

Besides. There wasn’t anything the Holy Ghost had done in Mother Mary’s * that Bing couldn’t have done better, if he had three days alone with her in the House of Sleep.





Gunbarrel, Colorado


THE CHILDREN NEVER CALLED WHEN SHE WAS PAINTING.

It was months before Vic understood this consciously, but on some level of her mind that existed beneath reason, she got it almost right away. When she wasn’t painting, when she didn’t have creative work to occupy her, she became aware of a growing physical apprehension, like she was standing beneath a crane that was holding a piano aloft; at any moment she felt that the cables could snap and all that weight could fall upon her with a fatal crash.

So she lined up every job she could get and spent seventy hours a week in the garage listening to Foreigner and airbrushing motorcycles for men with criminal records and offensive racial notions.