NOS4A2(80)

“Oh, boy,” Bing whispered, rocking. Automatically, he began to recite again: “There was a Gasmask Man, and he had a little gun. And his bullets were made of lead, lead—”

“That’s not how it goes,” said a small, piping voice from behind him.

Bing turned his head and saw a little blond-headed girl on a pink bicycle, with training wheels. She had drifted down from the barbecue at the end of the street. Adult laughter carried in the warm, humid evening.

“My dad read me that one,” she said. “There was a little man, and he had a little gun. He shoots a duck, right? Who is the Gasmask Man?”

“Oooh,” Bing said to her. “He’s nice. Everybody loves him.”

“Well, I don’t love him.”

“You would if you got to know him.”

She shrugged, turned her bike in a wide circle, and started back down the street. Bing watched her go, then returned to the de Zoets’, clutching the article about Demeter, which was printed on stationery from some library in Iowa.

Bing was sitting in front of the TV with the de Zoets an hour later when Mr. Manx came out, fully dressed, in his silk shirt and tails and narrow-toed boots. His starved, cadaverous face had an unhealthy sheen to it in the flickering blue shadows.

“Bing,” Manx said, “I thought I told you to put Mr. and Mrs. de Zoet in the spare room!”

“Well,” Bing said, “they aren’t hurting anyone.”

“No. Of course they’re not hurting anyone. They’re dead! But that’s no reason to have them underfoot either! For goodness’ sake, why are you sitting out here with them?”

Bing stared for the longest time. Mr. Manx was the smartest, most observant, thinkingest person Bing had ever met, but sometimes he didn’t understand the simplest things.

“Better than no company at all,” he said.





Boston


LOU AND THE KID HAD A ROOM ON THE TOP FLOOR OF THE LOGAN Airport Hilton—one night cost as much as Lou made in a week, money he didn’t have, but f*ck it, that was the easiest kind to spend—and they weren’t in bed that night until after Letterman. It was going on 1:00 A.M., and Lou thought for sure that Wayne had to be asleep, so he wasn’t ready for it when the kid spoke up, voice loud in the darkness. He said just nine words, but it was enough to make Lou’s heart jump into his throat and jam there, like a mouthful of food that wouldn’t go down.

“This guy, Charlie Manx,” Wayne said. “Is he a big deal?”

Lou thumped his fist between his big man boobs, and his heart dropped back where it belonged. Lou and his heart weren’t on such great terms. His heart got so tired when he had to walk up stairs. He and Wayne had marched all over Harvard Square and the waterfront that evening, and twice he had needed to pause to get his wind back.

He was telling himself that it was because he wasn’t used to being at sea level, that his lungs and heart were adapted for the mountain air. But Lou was no dummy. He had not meant to get so fat. It had happened to his father, too. The guy spent the last six years of his life buzzing around the supermarket in one of those little golf carts for people who were too fat to stand. Lou would rather take a chain saw to his layers of fat than climb into one of those f*cking supermarket scooters.

“Did Mom say something about him?” Lou asked.

Wayne sighed and was briefly silent: time enough for Lou to realize he had answered the kid’s question without meaning to.

“No,” Wayne said at last.

“So where did you hear about him?” Lou asked.

“There was a woman at Mom’s house today. Maggie someone. She wanted to talk about Charlie Manx, and Mom got really mad. I thought Mom was going to kick her ass.”

“Oh,” Lou said, wondering who Maggie someone had been and how she had gotten on Vic’s case.

“He went to jail for killing a guy, didn’t he?”

“This Maggie woman who came to see your mother? Did she say Manx killed a guy?”

Wayne sighed again. He rolled over in his bed to look at his father. His eyes glittered like ink spots in the dark.

“If I tell you how I know what Manx did, am I going to get in trouble?” he asked.

“Not with me,” Lou said. “Did you Google him or something?”

Wayne’s eyes widened, and Lou could see he hadn’t even thought of Googling Charlie Manx. He would now, though. Lou wanted to slam the heel of his hand into his forehead. Way to go, Carmody. Way to f*cking go. Fat and stupid.

“The woman left a folder with some newspaper articles in it. I kind of read them. I don’t think Mom would’ve wanted me to. You aren’t going to tell her, are you?”

“What articles?”

“About how he died.”

Lou nodded, thought he was beginning to get it.

Manx had died not three days after Vic’s mother had passed away. Lou had heard about it the day it happened, on the radio. Vic had been out of rehab only five months and had spent the spring watching her mother waste away, and Lou had not wanted to say anything, was afraid that it would kick the legs out from under her. He had meant to tell her, but the opportunity never presented itself, and then, at a certain point, it became impossible to bring it up. He had waited too long.

Maggie someone must’ve found out that Vic was the girl who got away from Charlie Manx. The only child to escape him. Maybe Maggie someone was a journalist, maybe she was a true-crime author working on a book. She had come by for a comment, and Vic had given her one: something definitely unprintable and probably gynecological.