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 pussy 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.
Vic painted flames and guns and naked chicks and grenades and Dixie flags and Nazi flags and Jesus Christ and white tigers and rotting ghouls and more naked chicks. She didn’t think of herself as an artist. Painting kept Christmasland from calling and paid for Pampers. All other considerations were of little importance.
Sometimes, though, the jobs dried up. Sometimes it seemed she had painted every motorcycle in the Rockies and there would never be another gig. When that happened—when she had more than a week or two without painting—she found herself grimly waiting. Readying herself.
Then one day the phone would ring.
It happened in September, on a Tuesday morning, five years after Manx went to jail. Lou had gone out before the sun came up to tow someone out of a ditch, left her with Wayne, who wanted hot dogs for breakfast. All those years smelled of steaming hot dogs and steaming baby shit.
Wayne was parked in front of the tube, and Vic was squirting ketchup into cheap hot-dog rolls when the phone rang.
She stared at the receiver. It was too early for the phone to be ringing, and she already knew who it was, because she had not painted anything in almost a month.
Vic touched the receiver. It was cold.
“Wayne,” she said.
The boy looked up, finger in his mouth, drool down the front of his X-Men T-shirt.
“Do you hear the phone ringing, Wayne?” she asked.
He stared at her blankly, uncomprehendingly for a moment, then shook his head.
It rang again.
“There,” she said. “There, did you hear it? Don’t you hear it ringing?”
“No, Em,” he said, and wagged his head heavily from side to side.
He turned his attention back to the television.
Vic picked up the receiver.
A child—not Brad McCauley, a different child, a girl this time—said, “When is Daddy coming back to Christmasland? What did you do with Daddy?”
“You aren’t real,” Vic said.
In the background she could hear the children caroling.
“Yes I am,” the girl said. A white breath of frozen air seethed through the small holes in the earpiece of the receiver. “We’re just as real as what’s happening in New York this morning. You should see what’s happening in New York. It’s exciting! People are jumping into the sky! It’s exciting, and it’s fun. It’s almost as fun as Christmasland.”
“You aren’t real,” Vic whispered again.
“You told lies about Daddy,” she said. “That was bad. You’re a bad mother. Wayne should be with us. He could play with us all day. We could teach him how to play scissors-for-the-drifter.”
Vic slammed the phone into the cradle. She picked it up and slammed it down once more. Wayne glanced around at her, his eyes wide and alarmed.
She waved a hand at him—never mind—and turned away, struggling not to cry, breath hitching.
The hot dogs boiled over, water jumping out of the pot and spattering into the blue flame of the gas burner. She ignored them, sank down onto the kitchen floor, and covered her eyes. It was an act of will to contain her sobs; she didn’t want to scare Wayne.
“Em!” her boy called, and she looked up, blinking. “Sumfin’ happened to Oscar!”
“Oscar” was his word for Sesame Street. “Sumfin’ happened, an’ Oscar went bye-bye.”
Vic wiped at her streaming eyes, took a shuddering breath, turned off the gas. She walked unsteadily to the television. Sesame Street had gone to a news break. A big jet had hit one of the World Trade Towers in New York City. Black smoke churned into blue, blue sky.
A few weeks later, Vic made space in the closet-size second bedroom, tidied and swept. She moved an easel in there and mounted bristol board on it.
“Whatchu doing?” Lou asked, pushing his head through the door the day after she set herself up.
“Thought I’d draw a picture book,” Vic said. She had the first page sketched in blue pencil, was almost ready to start inking.
Lou peered over her shoulder. “Are you drawing a motorcycle factory?” he asked.
“Close. A robot factory,” she said. “The hero is a robot named Search Engine. On each page he has to work his way through a maze and find some items of importance. Power cells and secret plans and stuff.”
“I think I’m popping a boner for your picture book. Awesome thing to do for Wayne. He’s going to shit.”
Vic nodded. She was happy to let Lou think she was doing it for the kid. She had no illusions, though. She was doing it for herself.
The picture book was better than painting Harleys. It was steady work, and it was there every day.
After she started drawing Search Engine, the phone never rang unless a credit agency was calling.
And after she sold the book, the credit agencies quit calling, too.
Brandenburg, Kentucky
MICHELLE DEMETER WAS TWELVE THE FIRST TIME HER FATHER LET her drive it. A twelve-year-old girl driving a 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith through the high grass in the first days of summer with the windows rolled down and Christmas music playing on the radio. Michelle sang along in a big, happy, braying voice—off-key and off-time. When she did not know the lyrics, she made them up.
Come! All ye faithful! Jiggy and triii-umphant!
Come all ye faithful, sing yay for the Lord!
The car swam through the grass, a black shark slicing through a rippling ocean of yellows and greens. Birds scattered before it, darting into a lemon sky. The wheels banged and thudded in unseen ruts.
Her father, crocked and getting crockeder, sat in the passenger seat fiddling w
ith the tuner, a warm Coors between his legs. Only the tuner didn’t do anything. The radio jumped from band to band, but everything was white noise. The only station that came in at all was distant, crackling, and awash with background hiss and playing that goddamn holiday music.
“Who is playing this shit in the middle of May?” he asked, and burped, enormously and grotesquely.
Michelle giggled in appreciation.
There was no way to turn the radio off or even down. The volume dial spun uselessly, adjusting nothing.
“This car is like your old man,” Nathan said, pulling another Coors out of the six-pack at his feet, popping another top. “A wreck of its former self.”
That was just more of his silly talk. Her father wasn’t doing so bad. He had invented some kind of valve for Boeing, and it had paid for three hundred acres above the Ohio River. They were driving around it now.
The car, on the other hand, really had left its best days behind it. The carpet was gone, and where it belonged was bare, humming metal. There were holes under the pedals, and through them Michelle could see grass whipping by below. The leather on the dash was peeling. One of the back doors didn’t match the others, was unpainted and caked with rust. There was no rear window at all, just a round open hole. No backseat either, and a char mark in the rear compartment, where it looked as if someone had tried to light a campfire once.
The girl worked the clutch and the gas and the brake expertly with her right foot, just as her father had taught her. The front seat was cranked all the way forward, and still she had to sit on a pillow so she could see over the high dash and out the window.
“One of these days I’m going to get around to working on this beast. Roll my sleeves up and bring the old lady all the way back to life. Be a hell of a thing to have it completely restored so you could take it to the prom,” her father said. “When you’re old enough for proms.”
“Yah. Good call. Plenty of room in the backseat to make out,” she said, twisting her neck to look over her shoulder into the rear.
“It’d also be a nice ride to take you to the nunnery in. You keep your eyes on the road, why don’tcha?” Gesturing with his beer can at the rise and fall of the land and the tangles of grass and brush and goldenrod, no road in sight in any direction, the only sign of human existence the distant barn in the rearview mirror and the jet contrails overhead.
She pumped the pedals. They wheezed and gasped.
The only thing Michelle didn’t like about the car was the hood ornament, a creepy silver lady with blind eyes and a flowing gown. She leaned out into the lashing weeds and grinned manically as she was flagellated. That silver lady should’ve been magical and pretty, but the smile on her face ruined it. She had the demented grin of a madwoman who has just pushed a loved one off a ledge and is about to follow him into eternity.
“She’s awful,” Michelle said, lifting her chin in the direction of the hood. “Like a vampire lady.”
“The bloofer lady,” her father said, remembering something he had read once.
“The who? She is not called the bloofer lady.”
“No,” Nathan said. “She’s called the Spirit of Ecstasy. She’s classic. She’s a classic part of a classic car.”
“Ecstasy? Like the drug?” Michelle asked. “Wow. Trippy. They were into that back then?”
“No. Not like the drug. Like fun. She’s a symbol of never-ending fun. I think she’s pretty,” he said, although in fact he thought she looked like one of the Joker’s victims, a rich lady who had died laughing.
“I been driving out to Christmasland, all the livelong day,” Michelle sang softly. For the moment the radio was just a roar of static and whine, and she could sing without competition. “I been driving out to Christmasland, just to ride in Santa’s sleigh!”
“What’s that one? I don’t know it,” her dad said.
“That’s where we’re going,” she said. “To Christmasland. I just decided.”
The sky was trying on a variety of citrus hues. Michelle felt perfectly at peace. She felt she could drive forever.
Her tone was soft with excitement and delight, and when her father glanced at her, there was a dew of sweat on her forehead and her eyes had a faraway look.
“It’s out there, Daddy,” she said. “It’s out there in the mountains. If we kept going, we could be in Christmasland by tonight.”
Nathan Demeter narrowed his eyes and peered out through the dusty window. A vast, pale mountain range towered in the west, with snow-touched peaks higher than the Rockies, a mountain range that had not been there this morning, or even when they set out on this drive, twenty minutes ago.
He looked quickly away, blinking to clear his vision, then looked back—and the mountain range resolved into a looming mass of thunderheads, crowding the western horizon. His heart continued to run a three-legged race in his chest for a few moments longer.
“Too bad you have homework. No Christmasland for you,” he said. Even though it was Saturday and no dad anywhere made his twelve-year-old do algebra on a Saturday. “Time to turn us around, sweetheart. Daddy has things to do.”
He slouched back in his seat and had a sip of beer, but he didn’t want it anymore. He felt the first dull edge of tomorrow’s hangover in his left temple. Judy Garland was tragically wishing everyone a merry little Christmas, and what the fuck was the deejay smoking, playing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” in May?
But the music only lasted until they reached the weedy edge of their property and Michelle laboriously turned the Wraith around to point them back toward home. As the Rolls wheeled in a semicircle, the radio lost what little reception it had and once more became a low roar of white noise, of mad static.
It was 2006 and Nathan Demeter had himself an old junker to fix up, bought in a federal auction, something to play with in his spare time. One of these days he was going to get around to really working on it. One of these days he was going to make the old lady shine.
New York (and Everywhere Else)
HERE IS WHAT THEY SAID ABOUT THE SECOND SEARCH ENGINE BOOK in the New York Times Book Review, Children’s Book section, Sunday, July 8, 2007—the only time any of Vic McQueen’s books were reviewed there.
Search Engine’s Second Gear
By Vic McQueen.
22 pages. HarperCollins Children’s Books. $16.95. (Puzzle/Picture Book; ages 6 to 12)
If M. C. Escher were hired to reimagine Where’s Waldo?, it might look something like Ms. McQueen’s fascinating and deservedly popular Search Engine series. The eponymous hero, Search Engine—a cheerful and childlike robot who resembles a cross between C-3PO and a Harley-Davidson—pursues Mad Möbius Stripp across a series of dizzying impossible constructions and surreal mazes. One confounding puzzle cannot be solved without placing a mirror against the edge of the book; another mind bender requires the children to roll the page up into a tube to make a magical covered bridge; a third must be torn out and folded into an origami motorcycle so Search Engine can continue his pursuit at full throttle. Young readers who complete Search Engine’s Second Gear will find themselves faced with the most terrible puzzle of them all: How long until the next one?!
FCI Englewood, Colorado
NURSE THORNTON DROPPED INTO THE LONG-TERM-CARE WARD A little before eight with a hot bag of blood for Charlie Manx.
Denver, Colorado
THE FIRST SATURDAY IN OCTOBER 2009, LOU TOLD VICTORIA MCQUEEN he was taking the kid and going to his mother’s for a while. For some reason he told her this in a whisper, with the door shut, so Wayne, out in the living room, couldn’t hear them talking. Lou’s round face shone with nervous sweat. He licked his lips a lot while he spoke.
They were in the bedroom together. Lou sat on the edge of the bed, causing the mattress to creak and sag halfway to the floor. It was hard for Vic to get comfortable in the bedroom. She kept looking at the phone on the night table, waiting for it to ring. She had tried to get rid of it a few days ago, had unplugged it and sho
ved it into a bottom drawer, but at some point Lou had discovered it there and plugged it back in.
Lou said some other stuff, about how worried he was, about how everyone was worried. She didn’t catch all of it. Her whole mind was bent toward the phone, watching it, waiting for it to ring. She knew it would. Waiting for it was awful. It angered her that Lou had brought her inside, that they couldn’t have this conversation out on the deck. It shook her faith in him. It was impossible to have a conversation in a room with a phone. It was like having a conversation in a room with a bat hanging from the ceiling. Even if the bat was asleep, how were you supposed to think about anything else or look at anything else? If the phone rang, she would yank it out of the wall and get it out to the deck and throw it over the side. She was tempted not to wait, to just do it now.
She was surprised when Lou said maybe she should go see her mother, too. Vic’s mother was all the way hell and gone back in Massachusetts, and Lou knew they didn’t get on. The only thing that would’ve been more ridiculous was suggesting that Vic go see her father, whom she had not spoken to in years.
“I’d rather go to jail than stay with my mom. Jesus, Lou. Do you know how many phones my mother has in her house?” Vic asked.
Lou gave her a look that was somehow both distraught and weary. It was a look, Vic thought, of surrender.
“If you want to talk—like, about anything—I’ve got my cell on me,” Lou said.
Vic just laughed at that, didn’t bother to tell him she had pulled his cell phone apart and shoved it in the garbage the day before.
He took her in his arms, held her in his bearish embrace. He was a big man, glum about being overweight, but he smelled better than any guy she had ever met. His chest smelled of cedar and motor oil and the outdoors. He smelled like responsibility. For a moment, being held by him, she remembered what it had been like to be happy.