NOS4A2 A Novel

INTERLUDE:

THE SPIRIT OF ECSTASY

2000–2012





Gunbarrel, Colorado


THE FIRST TIME VIC MCQUEEN TOOK A LONG-DISTANCE CALL FROM Christmasland, she was an unwed mother, living with her boyfriend in a double-wide, and it was snowing in Colorado.

She had lived in New England her whole life, and she thought she knew about snow, but it was different in the Rockies. The storms were different. She thought of the blizzards in the Rockies as blue weather. The snow came down fast and hard and steady, and there was something blue about the light, so it was as if she were trapped in a secret world under a glacier: a winterplace where it was eternally Christmas Eve.

Vic would walk outside in her moccasins and one of Lou’s enormous T-shirts (which she could wear like nightgowns) to stand in the blue dimness and listen to the snow fall. It hissed in the branches of the pines like static, like white noise. She would stand there breathing in the sweet smell of woodsmoke and pines, trying to figure out how in the hell she had wound up with sore tits and no job, two thousand miles from home.

The best she could work out, she was there on a mission of vengeance. She had returned to Colorado, after graduating from Haverhill High, to attend art school. She wanted to go to art school because her mother was dead set against it and her father refused to pay for it. Other choices her mother couldn’t bear and her father didn’t want to know about: Vic smoking pot, skipping class to go skiing, making out with girls, shacking up with the fat delinquent who had rescued her from Charlie Manx, getting pregnant without bothering to get married. Linda had always said she wouldn’t have anything to do with a baby born out of wedlock, so Vic had not invited her after the birth, and when Linda offered to come, Vic said she’d rather that she didn’t. She had not even bothered to send her father a picture of the baby.

She still remembered how good it felt to look into Lou Carmody’s face, over coffees in a yuppie café in Boulder, and to say, bluntly and pleasantly, “So I guess I should f*ck you for saving my life, huh? Least I can do. Do you want to finish your coffee, or should we just split now?”

After their first time, Lou admitted he had never slept with a girl before, his face glowing dark red, from both his exertions and his embarrassment. Still a virgin in his early twenties: Who said there was no wonder left in the world?

Sometimes she resented Louis, for not being satisfied with sex alone. He had to love her, too. He wanted talk as much as he wanted sex, maybe more; he wanted to do things for her, buy her things, get tattoos together, go on trips. Sometimes she resented herself, for letting him corner her into being his friend. It seemed to her she had planned to be stronger: to simply f*ck him a time or two—to show him she was a girl who knew how to appreciate a guy—then drop him and get herself an alternative girlfriend, someone with a pink streak in her hair and a few beads in her tongue. The problem with that plan was, she liked guys better than girls, and she liked Lou better than most guys; he smelled good and he moved slow and he was roughly as difficult to anger as a character from the Hundred Acre Wood. Soft as a character from the Hundred Acre Wood, too. It irritated her that she liked to touch him and lean against him. Her body was constantly working against her, toward its own unhelpful ends.

Lou worked out of a garage he had opened with some cash given to him by his parents, and they lived in the trailer in back, two miles outside of Gunbarrel, a thousand miles from anything. Vic didn’t have a car and probably spent a hundred and sixty hours a week at home. The house smelled of piss-soaked diapers and engine parts, and the sink was always full.

In retrospect Vic was only surprised she didn’t go crazy sooner. She was surprised that more young mothers didn’t lose it. When your tits had become canteens and the soundtrack of your life was hysterical tears and mad laughter, how could anyone expect you to remain sane?

She had a single occasional escape hatch. Whenever it snowed, she left Wayne with Lou, borrowed the tow truck, and said she was going into town for an espresso and a magazine. It was something to tell them. Vic didn’t want to let them in on the truth. What she was actually going to do felt like a curiously private, possibly even shameful, personal matter.

So it happened one day, all of them trapped inside together: Wayne was banging on a toy xylophone with a spoon, Lou was burning pancakes, the TV was blaring Dora the f*cking Explorer. Vic let herself into the yard for a smoke. It was blue outside, and the snow fell hissing in the trees, and by the time she had smoked her American Spirit down far enough to burn her fingers, she knew she needed a ride in the tow.

She borrowed the keys from Lou, put on a Colorado Avalanche hoodie, and crossed to the garage, locked up on that frozen blue Sunday morning. Inside, it smelled of metal and spilled oil, an odor very like blood. Wayne had that smell on him, all the time, and she hated it. The boy, Bruce Wayne Carmody—Bruce to his paternal grandparents, Wayne to Vic, and The Bat to Lou—spent most of the day cooing to himself in the safe enclosure of a tire meant for a monster truck. It was what they had instead of a playpen. Her baby’s father was a man who owned only two pairs of underwear and had a tattoo of the Joker on his hip. It was something, going over all the things that had led her to this place of high rock, endless snows, and hopelessness. She could not quite work out how she had found her way here. She used to be so good at finding the place she wanted to go.

In the garage she paused, one foot on the running board of the truck. Lou had picked up a job, painting a motorcycle for a pal. He had just finished putting a coat of dull black primer on the gas tank. The gas tank looked like a weapon now, like a bomb.

On the floor, beside the bike, was a sheet of transfer paper with a flaming skull on it and the words HARD CORE written below. Vic took one glance at what Lou had painted on the transfer paper and knew he was going to f*ck up the job. And it was a curious thing: Something about the crudity of his illustration, its obvious failings, made her feel almost ill with love for him. Ill—and guilty. Even then some part of her already knew she was going to leave him someday. Even then some part of her felt that Lou—Lou and Wayne both—deserved better than Vic McQueen.

The highway switchbacked for two miles down to Gunbarrel, where there were coffeehouses, candle shops, and a spa that did cream-cheese facials. But Vic got less than halfway there before turning off the highway onto a dirt side road that dropped through the pines into deep lumber country.

She flicked on the headlights and buried the gas pedal. It felt like plunging off a cliff. It felt like suicide.

The big Ford crashed through brush, banged through ruts, tipped over ledges. She drove at unsafe speeds, slewing around corners and throwing snow and rocks.

She was looking for something. Vic stared intently into the headlights, which cut a hole in the falling snow, a white passageway. The snow flurried past, as if she were driving through a tunnel of static.

Vic felt that it was close, the Shorter Way Bridge, waiting just beyond the farthest reach of the headlights. She felt it was a matter of speed. If she could just go fast enough, she could force it back into existence, leap off the rutted logging road and onto the old boards of the bridge. But she never dared push the truck beyond the speed at which she could control it, and she never reached the Shorter Way.

Maybe if she had her bike back. Maybe if it were summer.

Maybe if she were not stupid enough to have had a baby. She hated that she’d had the baby. Now she was f*cked. She loved Wayne too much to press the pedal to the floor and go flying into the darkness.

She’d thought love had something to do with happiness, but it turned out they were not even vaguely related. Love was closer to a need, no different from the need to eat, to breathe. When Wayne fell asleep, his hot cheek against her naked breast, his lips smelling sweetly of the milk from her own body, she felt as if she was the one who had been fed.

Maybe she could not bring forth the bridge because there was nothing left to find. Maybe she had found everything the world had to offer her: a notion very like despair.

It was no good being a mother. She wanted to start a website, a public-awareness campaign, a newsletter, to get the word out that if you were a woman and you had a child, you lost everything, you would be held hostage by love: a terrorist who would only be satisfied when you surrendered your entire future.

The lumber road dead-ended at a gravel pit, which was where she turned back. As was often the case, she drove back toward the highway with a headache.

No. Not a headache. It wasn’t a pain in her head. It was a pain in her left eye. A slow, soft throb.

She drove back to the garage, singing along to Kurt Cobain. Kurt Cobain understood what it tasted like to lose your magic bridge, the transport to the things you needed. It tasted like a gunbarrel—like Gunbarrel, Colorado, perhaps.

She parked in the garage and sat behind the wheel in the cold, watching her breath smoke. She might’ve sat there forever if the phone hadn’t rung.

It was on the wall, right outside the door to the office Lou never used. It was old enough to have a rotary dial—like the phone in Charlie Manx’s Sleigh House. Its ring was harsh and brassy.

Vic frowned.

The phone was on a separate line from the one in the house. It was comically referred to as “the business line.” No one ever called them on it.

She dropped from the front seat, a good four feet to the concrete floor. She caught the phone on the third ring.

“Carmody’s Car Carma,” she said.

The phone was painfully cold. Her palm, clutching the receiver, made a pale frost halo on the plastic.

There was a hiss, as if the call were coming from a great distance. In the background Vic heard carolers, the sounds of sweet children’s voices. It was a little early for that—mid-November.

A boy said, “Um.”

“Hello? Can I help you?”

“Um. Yes,” the boy said. “I’m Brad. Brad McCauley. I’m calling from Christmasland.”

She recognized the boy’s name but at first she couldn’t place it.

“Brad,” she said. “Can I help you? Where did you say you’re calling from?”

“From Christmasland, silly. You know who I am. I was in the car,” he said. “At Mr. Manx’s house. You remember. We had fun.”

Her chest was icy. It was hard to breathe.

“Oh, f*ck you, kid,” she said. “F*ck you and your sick motherf*cking joke.”

“The reason I’m calling,” he said, “we’re all getting hungry. There hasn’t been anything to eat forever, and what’s the point of having all these teeth if you can’t use them on something?”

“Call back and I’ll put the cops on you, you deranged f*ck,” she said, and banged the phone down in the cradle.

Vic put a hand over her mouth and made a sound somewhere between a sob and a cry of rage. She bent double and shook in the freezing garage.

When she had recovered herself, she straightened, lifted the phone, and calmly called the operator.

“Can you give me the number that just rang this line?” Vic asked. “We were cut off. I want to be reconnected.”

“The line you’re on?”

“Yes. I was cut off just a moment ago.”

“I’m sorry. I have a phone call from Friday afternoon for an 800 number. Do you want me to connect you?”

“A call came in just a moment ago. I want to know who it was.”

There was a silence before the operator replied, a caesura in which Vic could make out the sounds of other operator voices speaking in the background.

“I’m sorry. I don’t have any calls to this line since Friday.”

“Thank you,” Vic said, and hung up.

She was sitting on the floor, beneath the phone, with her arms wrapped around her, when Lou found her.

“You been, like, sitting out here for a while,” he said. “Do you want me to bring you a blanket or a dead tauntaun or something?”

“What’s a tauntaun?”

“Something like a camel. Or maybe a big goat. I don’t think it matters.”

“What’s Wayne doing?”

“He snoozed off. He’s cool. What are you doin’ out here?”

He looked around the dimness, as if he thought there was a chance she might not be alone.

She needed to tell him something, make up some explanation for why she was sitting on the floor in a cold, dark garage, so she nodded at the motorcycle he had primed.

“Thinking about the bike you’re working on.”

He considered her through narrowed eyes. She could tell he didn’t believe her.

But then he looked at the motorcycle and the transfer paper on the floor beside it and said, “I’m worried I’m going to f*ck it up. You think it’ll come out okay?”

“No. I don’t. Sorry.”

He shot her a startled look. “For real?”

She smiled weakly and nodded.

He heaved a great sigh. “Can you tell me what I did wrong?”

“‘Hardcore’ is one word, not two. And your e looks like the number 8. But also, you have to write in reverse. When you stick the transfer paper on and make the copy, ‘hardcore’ is going to be backward.”

“Oh. Oh, shit. Dude. I’m such an idiot.” Lou cast her another hopeful glance. “At least you liked my skull, right?”

“Honestly?”

Lou stared at his feet. “Christ. I was hoping Tony B. would throw me fifty bucks or something for doing a good paint job. If you didn’t stop me, I’d probably have to pay him fifty for ruining his bike. Why am I not good at anything?”

“You’re a good dad.”

“It ain’t rocket science.”

No, Vic thought. It was harder.

“Do you want me to fix it?” she asked.

“You ever painted a bike before?”

“No.”

He nodded. “Well. Okay. If you f*ck it up, we’ll just say I did it. No one will be surprised. But if you kick its ass, we should tell people who really painted it. Might pull in some more jobs.” He gave her another long look, sizing her up. “You sure you’re all right? You aren’t out here pondering dark female thoughts are you?”

“No.”

“You ever think, like, you shouldn’t have quit on therapy? You’ve been through some shit, dude. Maybe you ought to talk about it. About him.”

I just did, she thought. I had a nice little chat with the last kid Charlie Manx kidnapped. He’s some kind of cold vampire now, and he’s in Christmasland, and he wants something to eat.

“I think the talking is done,” she said, and took Lou’s hand when he offered it. “Maybe I’ll just paint instead.”