NOS4A2 A Novel

Indiana


AND TURNED HIS HEAD AND LOOKED OUT THE REAR WINDOW. A bottle had smashed in the road. Powdered glass cobwebbed the asphalt, shards tinkling and rolling. Manx had tossed a bottle of something. Wayne had seen him do this once or twice already. Charlie Manx didn’t seem like the sort of guy inclined to recycle.

When Wayne sat up—digging his knuckles into his eyes—the snowmen were gone. So were the sleeping moon and the mountains and the burning gem of Christmasland in the distance.

He saw high green corn and a honky-tonk with a lurid neon sign depicting a thirty-foot-tall blonde in a short skirt and cowboy boots. When the sign blinked, she kicked a foot, tipped her head back, closed her eyes, and kissed the darkness.

Manx looked at him in the rearview mirror. Wayne felt flushed and muddleheaded from sleeping heavily, and perhaps for that reason it did not startle him to see how young and healthy Manx looked.

His hat was off, and he was as bald as ever, but his scalp was smooth and pink, not white and splotchy. It had, only yesterday, looked like a globe, displaying a map of continents no one in his right mind would ever want to visit: the Isle of Sarcoma, North Liver Spot. Manx’s eyes peered out from beneath sharp, arched eyebrows, the color of hoarfrost. Wayne did not think he had seen him blink once in the days they’d been together. For all he knew, the man had no eyelids.

Yesterday morning he had looked like a walking corpse. Now he looked like he was in his mid-sixties, vital and healthy. But there was a kind of avid stupidity in his eyes—the greedy stupidity of a bird looking at carrion in the road and wondering if it could get some tasty bits without being run down.

“Are you eating me?” Wayne asked.

Manx laughed, a harsh caw. He even sounded like a crow.

“If I have not taken a bite out of you yet, I am not likely to,” Manx said. “I am not sure you would make much of a meal. There is not a lot of meat on you, and what is there is starting to smell a bit gamy. I am holding out for an order of those sweet-potato fries.”

Something was wrong with Wayne. He could feel it. He could not put his finger on what it was. He was achy and sore and feverish, but that might’ve just been from sleeping in the car, and this was something more. The best he could manage was a sense that his reactions to Manx were off. He had almost been surprised into laughter when Manx said the word “gamy.” He had never heard a word like that dropped into conversation before, and it struck him as hilarious. A normal person, though, wouldn’t laugh at his kidnapper’s choice of words.

“But you’re a vampire,” Wayne said. “You’re taking something out of me and putting it into you.”

Manx considered him briefly in the rearview mirror. “The car is making both of us better. It is like one of these vehicles they have now that they call hybrids. Do you know about the hybrids? They run half on gasoline, half on good intentions. But this is the original hybrid! This car runs on gasoline and bad intentions! Thoughts and feelings are just another kind of energy, same as oil. This vintage Rolls-Royce is getting fine mileage out of all your bad feelings and all the things that ever hurt and scared you. I am not speaking poetically. Do you have any scars?”

Wayne said, “I slipped with a putty knife, and it gave me a scar right here.” He held up his right hand, but when he looked at it, he could not find the hairline scar that had always been on the ball of his thumb. It mystified him what could’ve happened to it.

“The road to Christmasland removes all sorrows, eases all pain, and erases all scars. It takes away all the parts of you that weren’t doing you any good, and what it leaves behind is made clean and pure. By the time we arrive at our destination, you will be innocent not only of pain but also of the memory of pain. All your unhappiness is like grime on a window. When the car is done with you, it will be cleared away and you will shine clear. And so will I.”

“Oh,” Wayne said. “What if I wasn’t in the car with you? What if you went to Christmasland alone? Would the car still make you . . . younger? Would it still make you shine?”

“My, you have a lot of questions! I bet you are a straight-A student! No. I cannot get to Christmasland alone. I cannot find the road by myself. Without a passenger the car is just a car. That is the best thing about it! I can be made happy and well only by making others happy and well. The healing road to Christmasland is just for the innocent. The car will not let me hog it all for myself. I have to do good for others if I want good to be done to me. If only the rest of the world worked that way!”

“Is this the healing road to Christmasland?” Wayne asked, peering out the window. “It looks more like I-80.”

“It is Interstate 80 . . . now that you are awake. But just a minute ago, you were dreaming sweet dreams and we were on the St. Nick Parkway, under old Mr. Moon. Don’t you remember? The snowmen and the mountains in the distance?”

Wayne would not have been more jolted if they had hit a deep pothole. He did not like to think that Manx had been in his dream with him. He flashed back, briefly, to a memory of that deranged sky filled with static. Sky false a is that. Wayne knew that Grandma Lindy was trying to tell him something—trying to give him a way to protect himself from what Manx and his car were doing to him—but he didn’t understand her, and it seemed like it would be too much effort to figure it out. Besides, it was a little late for her to start giving him advice. She had not exactly strained herself to tell him anything of use when she was alive, and he suspected her of disliking his father just because Lou was fat.

“When you drift off, we will find it again,” Manx said. “The sooner we get there, the sooner you can ride the Sleighcoaster and play stick-the-blind with my daughters and their friends.”

They were in a trench slicing through a forest of corn. Machines stood over the rows, black girders that arced in the sky like the proscenium above a stage. The thought occurred to Wayne that those machines were sprayers, full of poison. They would drench the corn in a lethal rain to keep it from being eaten by invasive species. Those exact words—“invasive species”—rang through his brain. Later the corn would be lightly washed and people would eat it.

“Does anyone ever leave Christmasland?” Wayne asked.

“Once you get there, you will not want to leave. Everything you could ever want will be right there. There are all the best games. There are all the best rides. There is more cotton candy than you could eat in a hundred years.”

“But could I leave Christmasland? If I wanted to?”

Manx gave him an almost hostile glance in the mirror. “Then again, maybe some teachers felt you were badgering them with all your questions. What were your grades like?”

“Not very good.”

“Well. You will be glad to know there is no school in Christmasland. I hated school myself. I would rather make history than read about it. They like to tell you that learning is an adventure. But that is a lot of hooey. Learning is learning. Adventure is adventure. I think once you know how to add and subtract and can read suitably well, anything else is likely to lead to big ideas and trouble.”

Wayne took this to mean that he would not be able to leave Christmasland. “Do I get some last requests?”

“Look here. You act like you have been sentenced to death. You are not on death row. You will arrive at Christmasland better than ever!”

“But if I’m not coming back, if I have to be in Christmasland forever . . . there are some things I want to do before I get there. Can I have a last meal?”

“What do you mean? Do you think you will not be fed in Christmasland?”

“What if there’s food I want that I can’t get there? Can you get whatever you want to eat in Christmasland?”

“There is cotton candy and cocoa and hot dogs and the candy on a stick that always hurts my teeth. There is everything a child could want.”

“I’d like an ear of corn. A buttered ear of corn,” Wayne said. “And a beer.”

“I am sure it would be no trouble to get you some corn and—What did you say? Root beer? There is good root beer out here in the Midwest. Even better is sarsaparilla.”

“Not root beer. A real beer. I want a Coors Silver Bullet.”

“Why would you want a beer?”

“My dad said I’d get to have one with him on the porch when I was twenty-one. He said I could have one on the Fourth of July and watch the fireworks. I was looking forward to it. I guess that isn’t going to happen now. Also, you said it’s Christmas every day in Christmasland. I guess that means no July Fourth. They aren’t very patriotic in Christmasland. I’d like some sparklers, too. I had sparklers in Boston.”

They went over a long, low bridge. The grooved metal hummed soulfully under the tires. Manx did not speak again until they reached the other side.

“You are full of talk tonight. We have gone a thousand miles, and this is the most I have heard out of you. Let’s see if I have this right. You would like me to buy you a tallboy, an ear of sweet corn, and enough fireworks for your own private Fourth of July. Are you sure there is not anything else you might want? Were you planning to have goose-liver pâté and caviar with your mother when you graduated from high school?”

“I don’t want my own private Fourth of July. I just want some sparklers. And maybe a couple rockets.” He paused, then said, “You told me you owed me one. For killing my dog.”

There followed a period of grim silence.

“I did,” Manx admitted at last. “I had put that out of my mind. I am not proud of it. Would you consider us square if I got you a beer and an ear of corn and some fireworks?”

“No. But I won’t ask for anything else.” He looked out the window and spied the moon. It was a chipped sliver of bone, faceless and remote. Not as good as the Christmasland moon. Everything was better in Christmasland, Wayne supposed. “How did you find out about Christmasland?”

Manx said, “I drove my daughters there. And my first wife.” He paused, then added, “My first wife was a difficult woman. Hard to satisfy. Most redheads are. She had a long list of complaints that she held against me, and she made my own children mistrust me. We had two daughters. Her father gave me money to set me up in business, and I spent it on a car. This car. I thought Cassie—that was my first wife—would be happy when I came home with it. Instead she was impertinent and difficult as always. She said I had wasted the money. I said I was going to be a chauffeur. She said I was going to be a pauper and so were they. She was a scornful woman and abused me in front of the children, which is a thing no man should stand.” Manx flexed his hands on the wheel, his knuckles whitening. “Once my wife threw an oil lamp at my back, and my best coat caught fire. Do you think she ever apologized? Well! Think again. She would make fun of me at Thanksgiving and family get-togethers, pretending she was me and that she had just been set aflame. She would run around gobbling like a turkey and waving her arms, screaming, ‘Put me out, put me out!’ Her sisters always had a good laugh at that. Let me tell you something. The blood of a redheaded woman is three degrees cooler than the blood of a normal woman. This has been established by medical studies.” He gave Wayne a wry look in the rearview. “Of course, the very thing that makes them impossible to live with is what makes it hard for a man to stay away, if you catch my meaning.”

Wayne didn’t but nodded anyway.

Manx said, “Well. All right then. I think we have reached an understanding. I know a place where we can buy fireworks so loud and bright you will be deaf and blind by the time we are done shooting them off! We should get to the Here Library just after dark tomorrow. We can shoot them off there. By the time we are done launching rockets and throwing cherry bombs, people will think the Third World War is under way.” He paused, then added in a sly tone, “Perhaps Ms. Margaret Leigh will join us for the festivities. I wouldn’t mind lighting a fuse under her, just to teach her a thing or two about minding her own beeswax.”

“Why does she matter?” Wayne asked. “Why don’t we just leave her alone?”

A large green moth hit the windshield with a soft, dry smack, made an emerald smear on the glass.

“You are a clever young man, Wayne Carmody,” Manx said. “You read all the stories about her. I am sure if you put your mind to it, you will see why she is of concern to me.”

Back when it was still light, Wayne had flicked through the collection of papers Manx had brought to the car, items Bing had found online that concerned Margaret Leigh. There were a dozen stories in all, telling a single larger story about abandonment, addiction, loneliness . . . and odd, unsettling miracles.

The first piece dated back to the early nineties and had run in the Cedar Rapids Gazette: “Psychic or Lucky Guesser? Local Librarian’s ‘Wild Hunch’ Saves Kids.” It told the story of a man named Hayes Archer who lived in Sacramento. Archer had packed his two sons into his brand-new Cessna and lifted off with them for a moonlight flight along the California coast. His plane wasn’t the only thing that was new. So was his pilot’s license. Forty minutes after heading out, Archer’s single-engine Cessna made several erratic maneuvers, then disappeared from the radar. It was feared he had lost sight of land in a gathering fog and crashed into the sea while trying to find the horizon. The story got some play in the national news, Archer being worth a small fortune.

Margaret Leigh had called the police in California to tell them Archer and his children weren’t dead, hadn’t crashed into the sea. They had made land and gone down in a gorge. She couldn’t give the exact location but felt that the police should search the coast for some point at which it was possible to find salt.

The Cessna was discovered forty feet off the ground, upside down in a redwood tree, in—wait for it—Salt Point State Park. The boys were unharmed. The father had a broken back but was expected to survive. Maggie said her unlikely insight had come to her in a flash while playing Scrabble. The article ran alongside a photograph of the upside-down plane and another of Maggie herself, bent over a Scrabble board at a tournament. The caption below this second photo said, “With Her Lucky Hunches, It’s Too Bad Maggie’s Game of Choice Is Scrabble and Not the Lottery!”

There had been other insights over the years: a child found in a well, information about a man lost at sea while attempting to sail around the world. But they came less and less often, further and further apart. The last, a little article about Maggie helping to locate a runaway, had appeared in 2000. Then there was nothing until 2008, and the articles that followed were not about miracles but something like the opposite.

First there had been a flood in Here, Iowa, a lot of damage, a drowned library. Maggie had nearly drowned herself, trying to rescue books, and been treated for hypothermia. Fund-raisers failed to collect enough money to keep the library open, and the place was shuttered.

In 2009 Maggie had been charged with public endangerment for starting a fire in an abandoned building. She had drug paraphernalia in her possession at the time.

In 2010 she had been arrested and charged with squatting and possession of heroin.

In 2011 she was arrested for solicitation. Maybe Maggie Leigh could predict the future, but her psychic gift had not warned her to stay clear of the undercover cop in the lobby of a Cedar Rapids motel. She got thirty days for it. Later that same year, she was picked up again, but this time her destination was the hospital, not jail; she was suffering from exposure. In that article her “plight” was described as “all too frequent among Iowa’s homeless,” which was how Wayne found out she was living on the street.

“You want to see her because she knew you were coming and she told my mom,” Wayne said finally.

“I need to see her because she knew I was on the road and wanted to make trouble for me,” Manx said. “And if I do not have words with her, I cannot be sure she will not make trouble for me again. This is not the first time I have had to deal with someone of her ilk. I try whenever possible to avoid people like her. They are always nettlesome.”

“People like her . . . You mean other librarians?”

Manx snorted. “You are being coy with me. I am glad to see you recovering your sense of humor. I mean to say there are other people besides me who can access the secret shared worlds of thought.” He reached up and tapped his temple, to show where that world resided. “I have my Wraith, and when I am behind the wheel of this car, I can find my way onto the secret roads that lead to Christmasland. I have known others who could use totems of their own to turn reality inside out. To reshape it like the soft clay it is. There was Craddock McDermott, who claimed that his spirit existed in a favorite suit of his. There is the Walking Backwards Man, who has an awful watch that runs in reverse. You do not want to meet the Walking Backwards Man in a dark alley, child! Or anywhere else! There is the True Knot, who live on the road and are in much the same line of work as myself. I leave them be and they are glad to return the favor. And our Maggie Leigh will have a totem of her own, which she uses to pry and spy. Probably these Scrabble tiles she mentions. Well. She seems to have taken quite an interest in me. I guess if we are driving by, it would only be polite to pay a visit. I would like to meet her and see if I can’t cure her of her curiosity!”

He shook his head and then laughed. That husky-hoarse caw of his was an old man’s laugh. The road to Christmasland could make his body young, but it couldn’t do anything about the way he laughed.

He drove. The dotted yellow line stammered past on the left.

Finally Manx sighed and went on. “I don’t mind telling you, Wayne, almost all of the trouble I’ve ever known started with one woman or another. Margaret Leigh and your mother and my first wife were all cut from the same cloth, and Lord knows there have been plenty more where they came from. Do you know what? All the happiest times in my life were times when I was free of the feminine influence! When I didn’t have to make accommodations. Men spend most of their lives being passed from woman to woman and being pressed into service for them. You cannot imagine the life I have saved you from! Men cannot stop thinking about women. They get thinking about a lady and it is like a hungry man thinking about a rare steak. When you are hungry and you smell a steak on the grill, you get distracted by that tight feeling in your throat and you quit thinking. Women are aware of this. They take advantage of it. They set terms, same as your mother sets terms before you come to dinner. If you don’t clean your room, change your shirt, and wash your hands, you aren’t allowed to sit at the dinner table. Most men figure they are worth something if they can meet the terms a woman sets for them. It provides them with their whole sense of value. But when you take a woman out of the picture, a man can get a little quiet inside. When there’s no one to bargain with, except for yourself and other men, you can figure yourself out. That always feels good.”

“Why didn’t you divorce your first wife?” Wayne asked. “If you didn’t like her?”

“No one did back then. It never even crossed my mind. It crossed my mind to leave. I even did leave a time or two. But I came back.”

“Why?”

“I got hungry for steak.”

Wayne asked, “How long ago was it—when you were first married?”

“Are you asking how old I am?”

“Yes.”

Manx smiled. “I will tell you this: On our first date, Cassie and I went to see a silent movie! It was that long ago!”

“What movie?”

“It was a horror picture from Germany, although the title cards were in English. During the scary parts, Cassie would hide her face against me. We attended the show with her father, and if he had not been there, I believe she would’ve crawled into my lap. She was only sixteen at the time, just a nub of a thing, graceful and considerate and shy. This is the way with many women. In youth they are precious gems of possibility. They shudder with feverish life and desire. When they turn spiteful, it is like a chick molting, shedding the fuzz of youth for darker feathers! Women often give up their early tenderness as a child gives up his baby teeth.”

Wayne nodded and thoughtfully tugged one of his upper teeth out of his mouth. He poked his tongue at the hole where it had been, the blood oozing in a warm trickle. He could feel a new tooth, beginning to protrude where the old one had been, although it felt less like a tooth, more like a small fishing hook.

He put the lost tooth in the pocket of his shorts, with the others. He had lost five teeth in the thirty-six hours he had been in the Wraith. He wasn’t worried about it. He could feel rows and rows of small new teeth coming in.

“Later, you know, my wife accused me of being a vampire, just like you,” Manx said. “She said I was like the fiend in that first movie we saw together, the German picture. She said I was draining the life out of our two daughters, feeding off them. But here it is, so many years later, and my daughters are still going strong, happy and young and full of fun! If I were trying to drain the life out of them, I guess I did a poor job of it. For a few years there, my wife made me so unhappy I was about ready to kill her and me and the children, too, just to be done with it. But now I can look back and laugh. Have a peek at my license plate sometime. I took my wife’s horrid ideas about me and made a joke out of them. That is the way to survive! You have to learn to laugh, Wayne. You have to keep finding ways to have fun! Do you think you can remember that?”

“I think so,” Wayne said.

“This is all right,” Manx told him. “Two guys driving together at night! This is just fine. I don’t mind saying you are better company than that Bing Partridge. At least you do not feel the need to make a foolish song out of everything.” In a shrill, piping voice, Manx sang, “I love you, I love me, I love playing with my winkie-wee!” He shook his head. “I have had a number of long trips with Bing, and each was longer than the last. You cannot imagine what a relief it is to be with someone who is not always singing foolish songs or asking foolish questions.”

“Can we get something to eat soon?” Wayne asked.

Manx slapped the wheel and laughed. “I guess I spoke too quickly—because if that is not a foolish question, it is close to it, young Master Wayne! You were promised some sweet-potato fries, and by God I mean for you to have them. I have brought over a hundred children to Christmasland in the last century, and I have not starved one to death yet.”

The diner of the fabled sweet-potato fries was another twenty minutes west, an installation of chrome and glass set in a parking lot the size of a football field. Sodium-vapor lights on thirty-foot-high steel poles lit the blacktop as bright as day. The lot was crowded with eighteen-wheelers, and through the front windows Wayne could see that every stool along the bar was occupied, as if it were twelve noon and not twelve at night.

The whole country was on the watch for an old man and a child in an antique Rolls-Royce Wraith, but not one person in the diner looked outside and took note of them, and Wayne was not surprised. He had by now accepted that the car could be seen but not noticed. It was like a channel on TV that was broadcasting static—everyone skipped right over it. Manx parked up front, nose-in to the side of the building, and it did not once occur to Wayne to try jumping or screaming or banging on the glass.

“Don’t go anywhere,” Manx said, and winked at Wayne before he climbed out of the car and made his way inside.

Wayne could see through the windscreen and into the diner, and he watched Manx weave through the crowd bunched around the front counter. The TVs above the bar showed cars zooming around a racetrack; then the president behind a podium, waving his finger; then an icy blonde speaking into a microphone while she stood in front of a lake.

Wayne frowned. The lake looked familiar. The picture cut, and suddenly Wayne was looking at the rental house on Winnipesaukee, cop cars parked along the road out front. There in the diner, Manx was watching the TV, too, his head tilted back to see.

The picture cut again, and Wayne saw his mother coming out of the carriage house on the Triumph. She wasn’t wearing a helmet, and her hair whipped behind her, and she rode straight at the camera. The cameraman couldn’t get out of the way in time. His mother sideswiped him as she sped past. The falling camera offered a whirling view of sky, grass, and gravel before hitting the ground.

Charlie Manx walked briskly out of the diner, got behind the wheel, and NOS4A2 glided back onto the road.

His eyes were filmed over, and the corners of his mouth were pinched in a hard, disagreeable frown.

“I guess we’re not going to have those sweet-potato fries,” Wayne said.

But if Charlie Manx heard him, he gave no sign.