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It hurt, but not as much as it probably should’ve. She wasn’t sure if the whiskey had muted the pain or if she had been on the Lou Carmody diet for too long and was now carrying a bit of extra padding back there. She worried she had dropped the bottle and broken it, but no, it was right there in her hand, safe and sound. She took a swallow. It tasted of the oak cask and sweet annihilation.
She struggled back to her feet, and another phone rang, in another shop, a darkened coffeehouse. The phone in the bookstore was still ringing, too. Then another went off, somewhere on the second floor of a building over to her right. And a fourth and a fifth. In the apartments above her. Both sides of the street, up and down the lane.
The night filled with a choir of phones. It was like frogs in the spring, an alien harmony of croaks and chirrups and whistles. It was like bells ringing on Christmas morning.
“Go the f*ck away!” she screamed, and threw the bottle at her own reflection in a store window across the street.
The plate glass exploded. All the phones stopped ringing at the same time, revelers shocked into quiet by a gunshot.
A half beat later, a security alarm went off inside the store, an electronic wang-dang-doodle and a flashing silver light. The silver light silhouetted the wares on display in the window: bicycles.
The night caught and held in place for one lush, gentle moment.
The bicycle in the window was (of course) a Raleigh, white and simple. Vic swayed. The sensation of being threatened shut itself off as quickly as if someone had flipped a switch.
She crossed the road to the bike shop, and by the time she was crunching across the broken glass, she had her plan worked out. She would steal the bicycle and ride it out of town. She would ride it out to Dakota Ridge, into the pines and the night, would ride until she found the Shortaway.
The Shorter Way Bridge would take her right over the walls of the Supermax prison and on into the hospital ward that held Charlie Manx. That would be a hell of a sight, a thirty-one-year-old in her underwear, gliding along on a ten-speed through the long-term-care ward of a maximum-security lockup at two in the morning. She pictured herself sailing through the dark, between convicts sleeping in their beds. She’d ride right up to Manx, put the kickstand down, yank the pillow out from under his head, and suffocate the filthy man-burner. That would end the calls from Christmasland forever. She knew it would.
Vic reached through the broken glass and picked the Raleigh up and carried it out to the road. She heard the first distant wail of a siren, a yearning, agonized sound that carried a long way in the warm, damp night.
She was surprised. The alarm had only gone off half a minute ago. She didn’t think the cops would respond so quickly.
But the siren she heard wasn’t cops. It was a fire truck, heading toward her town house, although by the time it arrived, there was not much left to save.
The cop cars showed up a few minutes later.
Brandenburg, Kentucky
HE SAVED THE HARDEST PART FOR LAST: IN MAY 2012, NATHAN Demeter hauled the engine out of the Wraith with a chain fall and spent two days rebuilding it, cleaning pushrods, and replacing the head bolts with parts ordered from a specialty shop in England. The engine was a big 4,257-cc straight-six, and sitting on his worktable it looked like some vast mechanical heart—which was what it was, he supposed. So many of man’s inventions—the syringe, the sword, the pen, the gun—were metaphorical cocks, but the internal combustion engine had to have been dreamt up by a man who had looked upon the human heart.
“Be cheaper to rent a limo,” Michelle said. “And you wouldn’t get your hands dirty.”
“If you think I’ve got a problem with getting my hands dirty,” he said, “then you weren’t paying much attention the last eighteen years.”
“Something to do with your nervous energy, I guess,” she said.
“Who’s nervous?” he asked, but she just smiled and kissed him.
Sometimes, after he had been working on the car for a few hours, he would find himself stretched across the front seat, one leg hanging out the open door and a beer in hand, playing it back in his head: the afternoons when they went low-riding in the west field, his daughter behind the wheel and the weeds slapping the sides of the Wraith.
She had passed her driver’s test on her first try, just sixteen years old. Eighteen now, and she had her own car, a sporty little Jetta, was planning to drive it all the way to Dartmouth after she graduated. The thought of her out on the road by herself—checking into shabby motels and being checked out by the man behind the cash register, by the truckers in the hotel bar—made him antsy, revved him up with nervous energy.
Michelle liked to do the wash, and he liked to let her, because when he came across her underwear in the dryer, colorful lace from Victoria’s Secret, he began to worry about things like unwanted pregnancy and venereal disease. He had known how to talk to her about cars. He had liked watching her figure out how to work the clutch, how to steer true. He had felt like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird then. He didn’t know how to talk to her about men or sex and was unsettled by his sense that she didn’t need his advice on these matters anyway.
“Who’s nervous?” he asked the empty garage one night, and toasted his shadow.
Six days before the big dance, he put the engine back in the Wraith and closed the hood and stood back to consider his work, a sculptor studying the nude that had once been a block of marble. A cold season of banged knuckles and oil under his fingernails and rust flakes falling in his eyes: sacred time, important to him in the way transcribing a holy text was important to a monk in a monastery. He had cared to get it right and it showed.