NOS4A2(95)

He slammed the hammer into the small of her back, and it was like catching a baseball bat in the kidneys, and she screamed through clenched teeth. Her insides felt smashed, jellied.

No armor there. None of the other times had been like that. Another blow like that one and she would need crutches to get to her feet. Another blow like that one and she would be pissing blood.

“You will not be riding your bike to the bar either, or to the pharmacy to get the medicine you take for your crazy head. Oh, I know all about you, Victoria McQueen, Miss Liar Liar, Pants on Fire. I know what a sorry drunk you are and what an unfit mother and that you have been to the laughing house. I know you had your son out of wedlock, which of course is quite usual for whores such as yourself. To think we live in a world where one such as you is allowed to have a child. Well! Your boy is with me now. You stole my children away from me with your lies, and now I claim yours from you.”

Vic’s insides knotted. It was as bad as being struck again. She was afraid she might throw up in her helmet. Her right hand was pressed hard against her side, into the sick, bunched feeling in her abdomen. Her fingers traced the outline of something in her coat pocket. A crescent-sickle shape.

Manx bent over her. When he spoke again, his voice was gentle.

“Your son is with me, and you will never have him back. I don’t expect you to believe this, Victoria, but he is better off with me. I will bring him more happiness than you ever could. In Christmasland, I promise you, he will never be unhappy again. If you had a single grateful bone in your body, you would thank me.” He prodded her with the hammer and leaned closer. “Come now, Victoria. Say it. Say thank you.”

She pushed her right hand into her pocket. Her fingers closed around the wrench that was shaped like a knife. Her thumb felt the ridges of the stamp that said TRIUMPH.

Now. Now is the moment. Make it count, her father told her.

Lou kissed her on the temple, his lips brushing her softly.

Vic shoved herself up. Her back spasmed, a sick flexing in the muscle, almost intense enough to cause her to stagger, but she did not even allow herself to grunt in pain.

She saw him in a blur. He was tall in a way she associated with fun-house mirrors: rail-thin legs and arms that went on forever. He had great, fixed, staring eyes, and for the second time in the space of minutes she thought of fish. He looked like a mounted fish. All his upper teeth bit down into his lower lip, giving him an expression of comic, ignorant bafflement. It was incomprehensible that her entire life had been a carousel of unhappiness, drinking, failed promises, and loneliness, all turning around and around a single afternoon encounter with this man.

She jerked the wrench out of her pocket. It snagged on fabric, and for one terrible instant it almost dropped out of her fingers. She held on, pulled it loose, and slashed it at his eyes. The blow went a little high. The sharp tip of the wrench caught him above the left temple and tore open a four-inch flap of his curiously soggy, loose skin. She felt it grinding raggedly across bone.

“Thank you,” she said.

Manx clapped one gaunt hand to his forehead. His expression suggested a man who has been struck by a sudden, dismaying thought. He staggered back from her. One heel slipped in the grass. She stabbed at his throat with the wrench, but he was already out of reach, falling across the hood of his Wraith.

“Mom, oh, Mom!” Wayne screamed from somewhere.

Vic’s legs were loose and unstable beneath her. She didn’t think about it. She went after him. Now that she was up and on her feet, she could see he was an old, old man. He looked like he belonged in a nursing home, a blanket over his knees, a Metamucil shake in one hand. She could take him. Pin him to the hood and stab him in the f*cking eyes with her pointy little wrench.

She was almost on top of him when he came up with the silver hammer in his right hand. He gave it a big, swooping swing—she heard it whistle musically in the air—and caught her in the side of her helmet, hard enough to snap her around a hundred eighty degrees and drop her to one knee. She heard cymbals clash in her skull, just like a cartoon sound effect. He looked eighty going on a thousand, but there was a limber, easy strength in his swing that suggested the power of a gangly teenager. Glassy chips of motorcycle helmet fell into the grass. If she had not been wearing it, her skull would’ve been sticking out of her brain in a mess of red splinters.

“Oh!” Charlie Manx was screaming. “Oh, my Lord, I have been sliced open like a side of beef! Bang! Bang!”

Vic got up too quickly. The late afternoon darkened around her as the blood rushed from her head. She heard a car door slam.

She reeled around, holding her head—the helmet—between her hands, trying to stop the dreadful reverberations resounding within it. The world was jittering just a little, as if she sat on her idling motorcycle again.

Manx was still collapsed across the hood of the car. His harrowed, stupid face shone with blood. But there was another man now, standing at the back end of the car. Or at least it had the shape of a man. It had the head, though, of a giant insect from some 1950s black-and-white movie, a rubbery monster-movie head with a grotesque bristling mouth and glassy blank eyes.

The insect man had a gun. Vic watched it float up and stared into the black barrel, a surprisingly tiny hole, not much bigger than a human iris.

“Bang, bang,” the insect man said.





The Yard


WHEN BING SAW MR. MANX SPRAWL ACROSS THE HOOD OF THE car, he felt it as a kind of physical jolt, a sensation of recoil. He had felt much the same thing travel up his arm the day he had fired the nail gun into his father’s temple, only this was a slam of recoil into the very center of his being. Mr. Manx, the Good Man, was stabbed in the face, and the bitch was coming at him. The bitch meant to kill him, a thought as unimaginable, as horrible, as the sun itself blinking out. The bitch was coming, and Mr. Manx needed him.