NOS4A2(87)

“I don’t know how we’re going to get this crap off us,” he said.

“We got a lake,” she said, tossing her hair and gesturing toward it with her head. “Tell you what. If you beat me to the float, we can have breakfast at Greenbough Diner.”

“What do you get if you beat me?”

“The pleasure of proving that the old woman can still thrash a little piker.”

“What’s a piker?”

“It’s a—”

But he was off and running, grabbing his shirt, snapping it off over his head, flinging it in Hooper’s face. Wayne’s legs and arms pumped fast and smooth, bare feet slashing through the burning-bright dew in the high grass.

Then she was sailing past him, sticking her tongue out as she reached his side. They hit the dock at the same time. Their bare feet smacked on the boards.

Halfway to the end, she reached out and put her hand on Wayne’s shoulder and shoved, and he heard her laughing at him as he lurched drunkenly off balance, his arms pedaling in the air. He hit the water and sank into murky green. He heard the low, deep bloosh of her diving off the end of the dock a moment later.

He flailed, came up spitting and hauling ass for the float, twenty feet offshore. It was a big platform of splintery gray boards floating on rusty oil drums; the thing looked like an environmental hazard. Hooper woofed furiously from the dock behind them. Hooper disapproved of merrymaking in general, unless he was the one making it.

Wayne was most of the way to the float when he realized he was alone in the lake. The water was a black sheet of glass. His mother was nowhere to be seen, anywhere, in any direction.

“Mom?” he called. Not afraid. “Mom?”

“You lose,” she said, her voice deep, hollow, echoing.

He dived, held his breath, paddled underwater, came up under the float.

She was there, in the darkness, her face glistening with water, her hair shining. She grinned at him when he came up beside her.

“Look,” she said. “Lost treasure.”

She pointed at a trembling spiderweb, at least two feet wide, decorated with a thousand gleaming beads of silver and opal and diamond.

“Can we still go to breakfast?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Got to. Victory over a piker is a lot of things, but it isn’t very filling.”





Gravel Driveway


HIS MOTHER WORKED ON THE BIKE ALL AFTERNOON.

The sky was the color of a migraine. Thunder sounded once. It was a boom-and-bang, like a heavy truck going over an iron bridge. Wayne waited for rain.

None came.

“Do you ever wish you had adopted a Harley-Davidson instead of having a kid?” he asked her.

“Would’ve been cheaper to feed,” she said. “Hand me that rag.”

He handed it to her.

She wiped her hands and fitted the leather seat over a brand-new battery and threw her leg over the saddle. In her cutoff jeans and oversize black motorcycle boots, tattoos scrawled on her arms and legs, she looked like no one anyone would call “Mom.”

She turned the key and hit the run switch. The Cyclops opened its eye.

She put one heel on the kickstart, lifted herself up, slammed her weight down. The bike wheezed.

“Gesundheit,” Wayne said.

Vic rose and came down hard again. The engine exhaled, blew dust and leaves out the pipes. Wayne didn’t like the way she threw all her weight down on the kickstart. He was afraid something would shatter. Not necessarily the bike.

“Come on,” she said in a low voice. “We both know why the kid found you, so let’s get on with it.”

She hit the kickstart again, and then again, and her hair fell into her face. The starter rattled, and the engine produced a faint, brief, rumbling fart.

“It’s okay if it doesn’t work,” Wayne said. Suddenly he didn’t like any of this. Suddenly it seemed like crazy business—the sort of crazy business he had not seen from his mom since he was a small boy. “Get it later, right?”

She ignored him. She raised herself up and set her boot squarely on the kickstart.

“Let’s go find, you bitch,” she said, and stomped. “Talk to me.”

The engine ba-boomed. Dirty blue smoke shot from the pipes. Wayne almost fell off the fence post he was sitting on. Hooper ducked, then barked in fright.

His mother gave it throttle, and the engine roared. It was frightening, the noise of it. Exciting, too.

“IT RUNS!” he hollered.

She nodded.

“WHAT’S IT SAYING?” he yelled.

She frowned at him.

“YOU TOLD IT TO TALK TO YOU. WHAT’S IT SAYING? I DON’T SPEAK MOTORCYCLE LANGUAGE.”

“OH,” she said. “HI-YO, SILVER.”


“LET ME GET MY HELMET!” WAYNE YELLED.

“YOU’RE NOT COMING.”

Each of them screaming to be heard over the sound of the engine battering the air.

“WHY NOT?”

“IT’S NOT SAFE YET. I’M NOT GOING FAR. BE BACK IN FIVE MINUTES.”

“WAIT!” Wayne shouted, and held up one finger, then turned and ran for the house.

The sun was a cold white point, shining through the low piles of clouds.

She wanted to move. The need to be on the road was a kind of maddening itch, as hard to leave alone as a mosquito bite. She wanted to get on the highway, see what she could make the bike do. What she could find.