NOS4A2 A Novel

Christopher McQueen’s House


VIC LEFT THE TRIUMPH BY THE TREES, ON A SLIGHT RISE ABOVE HER father’s house. When she stood up from the bike, the world lurched. She had a sensation of being a small figure in a glass snow globe, being tilted this way and that by an insensitive toddler.

She started down the slope and was surprised to find she could not walk in a straight line. If a cop pulled her over, she doubted she could pass a basic sobriety test, never mind that she had not had a drop to drink. Then it occurred to her that if a cop pulled her over, he would probably cuff her and give her a couple of swats with the nightstick while he was at it.

Her father’s shape was joined at the back door by that of a big, broad-chested man with an immense stomach and a neck thicker than his shaved head. Lou. She could’ve picked him out of a crowd from five hundred feet away. Two of the three guys who had loved her in her life, watching her make her unsteady way down the hill; the only one missing was Wayne.

Men, she thought, were one of the world’s few sure comforts, like a fire on a cold October night, like cocoa, like broken-in slippers. Their clumsy affections, their bristly faces, and their willingness to do what needed to be done—cook an omelet, change lightbulbs, make with hugging—sometimes almost made being a woman fun.

She wished she were not so aware of the vast gulf between what the men in her life thought she was worth and her actual value. She had, it seemed to her, always asked and expected too much and given too little. She seemed almost to have a perverse impulse to make anyone who cared about her regret it, to find the thing that would most appall those people and then do that until they had to run away as a matter of self-preservation.

Her left eye felt like a great screw, slowly turning, twisting tighter and tighter in her eyesocket.

For a dozen steps, her left knee refused to bend. Then, halfway across the backyard, it folded without warning and she dropped down onto it. It felt as if Manx were smashing it with his hammer.

Her father and Lou came spilling out the door, hurrying toward her. She waved a hand in a gesture that seemed to mean, Don’t worry about it, I’m cool. She found, however, that she could not stand back up. Now that she was down on one knee, the leg would not unfold.

Her father looped one arm around her waist. He pressed his other hand against her cheek.

“You’re burning up,” he said. “Jesus, woman. Let’s get you inside.”

He took one arm and Lou took the other, and they hauled her to her feet. She turned her head against Lou for a moment and inhaled deeply. His round, grizzled face was wan, greasy with damp, beads of rainwater all over his bald skull. Not for the first time in her life, she thought he had missed his century and his country: He would’ve made a fine Little John and would’ve been perfectly at ease fishing in Sherwood Forest.

I would be so happy for you, she thought, if you found someone worth loving, Lou Carmody.

Her father was on her other side, his arm around her waist. In the dark, well away from his little log house, he was the same man he had been when she was a kid—the man who’d joked with her while he put Band-Aids on her scrapes and who took her for rides on the back of his Harley. But as he stepped into the light spilling from the open back door, she saw a man with white hair and a face made gaunt with age. He had a regrettable mustache and leathery skin—the skin of a lifelong smoker—with deep lines etched into his cheeks. His jeans were loose and baggy on his nonexistent ass and pipe-cleaner legs.

“What’s that p-ssy tickler doing on your face, Dad?” she asked.

He shot her a surprised sidelong look, then shook his head. Opened his mouth and closed it. Shook his head again.

Neither Lou nor her father wanted to let go of her, and so they had to turn sideways to shuffle in through the door. Chris went first and helped her over the doorsill.

They paused in a back hallway, a washer and dryer on one side, some pantry shelves on the other. Her father looked at her again.

“Oh, Vic,” he said. “What in God’s name’s been done to you?” And he shocked her by bursting into tears.

It was noisy, choked, unpretty crying that shook his thin shoulders. He cried with his mouth open so she could see his metal fillings in the back of his teeth. She felt a little like crying herself, could not believe she looked any worse than he did. It seemed to her she had last seen him only a while ago—it felt like last week—and he had been fit, limber, and ready, with calm, pale eyes that suggested he wouldn’t run from anything. Although he had run. And so what? She had not done any better herself. By many measures she had probably done worse.

“You should see the other guy,” she said.

Her father made a choked sound halfway between a sob and a laugh.

Lou looked back out through the screen door. The night beyond smelled of mosquitoes—an odor a bit like stripped wire, a bit like rain.

“We heard a noise,” Lou said. “Like a bang.”

“I thought it was a backfire. Or a gun going off,” her father said. Tears streamed down his leathery cheeks, hung gemlike in his bushy, tobacco-stained mustache. All he needed was a gold star on his chest and a pair of Colt revolvers.

“Was that your bridge?” Lou asked. His voice soft and gentle with wonder. “Did you just come across?”

“Yes,” she said. “I just came across.”

They helped her into the small kitchen. Just one light was on, a smoked-glass dish hanging over the table. The room was as tidy as a show kitchen, the only sign that anyone lived here the smooshed filters in the amber ashtray and the haze of cigarette smoke in the air. And the ANFO.

The ANFO was on the table in an unzipped school backpack, a mass of twenty-kilo sacks. The plastic was slippery and white, covered in warning labels. They were packed tight and smooth. Each was about the size of a loaf of bread. Vic knew without lifting them that they would be heavy, like picking up bags of unmixed concrete.

They eased her into a cherrywood chair. She stretched out her left leg. She was conscious of an oily sweat on her cheeks and forehead that could not be wiped away. The light over the table was too bright. Being near it was like someone gently forcing a sharpened pencil back through her left eye and into her brain.

“Can we turn that off?” she asked.

Lou found the switch, flipped it, and the room was dark. Somewhere down a hall, another lamp was on, casting a brownish glow. She didn’t mind that one so much.

Outside, the night throbbed with peepers, a sound that made Vic think of a great electrical generator, humming in pulses.

“I made it go away,” she said. “The bridge. So no one could follow me across it. That’s . . . that’s why I’m warm. I’ve been across it a few times in the last two days. It makes me a little feverish. It’s okay, though. It’s nothing.”

Lou sank into a chair across from her. The wood creaked. He looked ridiculous, sitting at the little wooden table, like a bear in a tutu.

Her father leaned against the kitchen counter, his arms crossed over his slender, sunken chest. The darkness, she thought, was a relief to them both. Here they were both shadows, and he could be himself again, the man who sat in her bedroom when she was sick and told her stories about places he had gone on his motorcycle, scrapes he’d been in. She could be the person she was when they shared the same house, a girl she liked very much, missed very much, and with whom she had little in common.

“You used to get like this when you were small,” her father said, his thoughts perhaps running along the same course. “You’d come in from riding around town on your bike, usually with something in one hand. A lost doll. A lost bracelet. And you’d be a little warm and telling lies. Your mom and I used to talk about it all the time. About where you went. We thought maybe you had light fingers, that you were . . . ah, borrowing things, then bringing them back when people noticed they were gone.”

“You didn’t think that,” she said. “You didn’t think I was out stealing.”

“No. I guess that one was mostly your mother’s theory.”

“What was your theory?”

“That you were using your bike like a dowsing rod. You know about dowsing rods? Old-timers in these parts would get a piece of yew or hazel and wave it around looking for water. Sounds crazy, but where I grew up, you didn’t dig a well without talking to a dowser first.”

“You’re not too far off. You remember the Shorter Way?”

He lowered his head in thought. In profile he looked almost exactly like the man he had been at thirty.

“Covered bridge,” he said. “You and the other kids used to dare each other to cross it. Thing gave me fits. Looked ready to fall into the river. They took it down—1985?”

“’86. Except it never really came down for me. When I needed to find something, I could ride out into the woods and it would reappear, and I could go across it to whatever was missing. As a kid I used my Raleigh. Remember the Tuff Burner you got me for my birthday?”

“It was too big for you,” he said.

“I grew into it. Like you said I would.” She paused, then nodded back in the direction of the screen door. “Now I’ve got my Triumph out there. Next time I go across the Shorter Way Bridge, it’ll be to meet Charlie Manx. He’s the one who has Wayne.”

Her father did not reply. His head remained bowed.

“For what it’s worth, Mr. McQueen,” Lou said, “I believe every crazy-ass word of this.”

“You just came across it? Just now?” her father asked. “This bridge of yours?”

“Three minutes ago I was in Iowa. Seeing a woman who knows—knew—about Manx.”

Lou frowned, heard Vic putting Maggie in past tense, but she went on before he could interrupt and ask a question she couldn’t bear to answer.

“You don’t have to take it on faith. Once you tell me how to use the ANFO, I’ll make the bridge reappear, so I can be on my way. You’ll see it. It’s bigger than your house. Remember Snuffleupagus on Sesame Street?”

“Big Bird’s imaginary friend?” her father asked, and she could sense him smiling in the dark.

“The bridge isn’t like that. It isn’t some make-believe thing only I can see. If you absolutely had to see it, I could bring it back right now, but . . . but I’d rather not until it’s time to go.” She reached, unconsciously, to rub at the cheekbone below her left eye. “It’s getting to be like a bomb going off in my head.”

“You’re not riding off right now anyway,” he said. “You just got here. Look at you. You’re in no shape. You need rest. A doctor, probably.”

“I’ve had all the rest I need, and if I head to a hospital, any doctor I see is going to prescribe a pair of handcuffs and a trip to the lockup. The feds think—I don’t know what they think. That I killed Wayne, maybe. Or that I’m into something illegal and he was snatched to teach me a lesson. They don’t believe me about Charlie Manx. I can’t blame them. Manx died. A doctor even performed a partial autopsy on him. I sound like a f*cking nutjob.” She caught herself, eyed him in the dark. “How come you believe me?”

“Because you’re my girl,” he said.

He said it so plainly and gently that she couldn’t help hating him, felt a sudden, unexpected sickness rising in her breast. She had to look away. Had to take a deep breath to keep her voice from shuddering with emotion.

“You left me, Dad. You didn’t just leave Mom. You left us. I was in trouble, and you took off.”

He said, “By the time I knew it was a mistake, it was too late to come back. That’s usually how it is. I asked your mom to take me back, and she said no, and she was right to.”

“You still could’ve stayed close. I could’ve come to your place on weekends. We could’ve spent time together. I wanted you there.”

“I was ashamed. I didn’t want you to look at the girl I was with. The first time I saw you two together was the first time I realized I didn’t belong with her.” He waited a moment, then said, “I can’t say I was happy with your mother. I can’t say I enjoyed almost twenty years of being judged by her and always found wanting.”

“Did you let her know that with the back of your hand a couple times, Dad?” she said, her voice curdled with disgust.

“I did,” he said. “In my drinking days. I asked her to forgive me before she died, and she did. That’s something, although I don’t forgive myself for it. I’d tell you I’d give anything to take it all back, but I don’t believe that kind of line is worth much.”

“When did she forgive you?”

“Every time we talked. I talked to her every day in the last six months. She’d call when you went to AA meetings. To joke around. To tell me about how you were doing. What you were drawing. What Wayne was up to. How you and Lou were managing. She’d e-mail me photos of Wayne.” He stared at her in the dark for a moment and said, “I don’t expect you to forgive me. I made some choices that are unforgivable. The worst things you think about me—they’re all true. But I love you and always have, and if I can do anything to help you now, I will.”

She put her head down, almost between her knees. She felt winded and light-headed. The darkness around her seemed to swell and recede like a kind of liquid, like the surface of a black lake.

“I won’t try and justify my life to you. It can’t be justified,” he said. “I did a few good things, but I never got carried away with myself.”

She couldn’t help herself. She laughed. It hurt her sides and felt a little like retching, but when she lifted her head, she found she could look at him.

“Yeah. Me neither,” she said. “I did a few good things, but I never got carried away. Mostly I was best at blowing shit up. Just like you.”

“Speaking of blowing shit up,” Lou said. “What are we doing with this?” He gestured toward the backpack filled with ANFO.

He had a paper tag looped around his exposed wrist. Vic stared at it. He saw her looking, and he blushed and tucked it into the sleeve of his flannel coat.

Lou went on. “This is explosive, right? How safe is it for you to be smoking in here around it?”

Her father inhaled deeply on his cigarette, then leaned in between them and deliberately put the butt out in the ashtray next to the backpack.

“Safe enough, long as you don’t drop it into a campfire or something. The detonators are in that bag hanging offa Vic’s chair.” Vic glanced around and saw a shopping bag strung over one post of the chair back. “Any one of those sacks of ANFO would be ideal for blowing up the federal building of your choice. Which is hopefully not what you’re planning on.”

“No,” Vic said. “Charlie Manx is headed to a place called Christmasland. It’s this little kingdom he’s got set up for himself where he thinks no one can touch him. I’m going to meet him there and take Wayne back, and I’m going to blast his place into the dirt while I’m at it. Crazy f*ck wants every day to be like Christmas, but I’ll give him the f*cking Fourth of July.”





Outside


EVERY TIME TABITHA HUTTER SETTLED AND WENT STILL, THE MOSQUITOES returned, whining at one ear or the other. Brushing her cheek, she startled two of them, sweeping them off her and into the night. If Hutter had to work a stakeout, she preferred the car, liked air-conditioning and her iPad.

It was a matter of principle not to complain. She would die of blood loss first, sucked dry by the fracking little vampires. She especially wasn’t going to grumble about it in front of Daltry, who squatted down with the others and then sat there like a statue, a smirk on his mouth and his eyelids half closed. When a mosquito settled on his temple, she slapped it and left a bloody smudge on his skin. He jerked but then nodded his appreciation.

“They love you,” he said to her. “The mosquitoes. They love all that tender lady flesh, gently marinated in grad school. You probably taste like veal.”

There were three others at the surveillance post in the woods, including Chitra, all of them dressed in lightweight black rain shells over tactical body armor. One agent held the sonic dish—a black gun with a mouth like a megaphone and a coiled black telephone cord stretching to the receiver in his ear.

Hutter leaned forward, tapped his shoulder, whispered, “Are you getting anything out of that?”

The man with the listening device shook his head. “I hope they’re getting something at the other position. I don’t hear anything except white noise. It’s been nothing but static ever since that little burst of thunder.”

“It wasn’t thunder,” Daltry said. “It didn’t sound anything like thunder.”

The guy shrugged.

The house was a one-story log cabin with a pickup parked out front. A single dim lamp was on in a front sitting room. One of the shades was halfway up, and Hutter could see a television (turned off), a couch, a hunting print on the wall. Some girlie white lace curtains hung in another front window, indicating a bedroom. There couldn’t be much else in there: a kitchen in back, a bathroom, maybe a second bedroom, although that would be pushing it. So that meant Carmody and Christopher McQueen were in the back of the house.

“Is it possible they’re whispering?” Hutter asked. “And your equipment isn’t sensitive enough to pick them up?”

“When this is working, it’s about sensitive enough to pick up loud thoughts,” said the man with the earpiece. “The problem is that it’s too sensitive. It caught a blast of something it couldn’t handle and maybe blew a capacitor.”

Chitra rooted in a gym bag and came up with a can of Deep Woods OFF.

“Thank you,” Hutter said, taking it from her. She glanced at Daltry. “You want?”

They rose together so she could spray him down.

Standing, she could see a bit of the slope behind the house rising toward the tree line. Two squares of warm, amber-hued light spread out across the grass, light from the windows at the rear of the house.

She squeezed the button, sprayed white mist over Daltry. He shut his eyes.

“You know what I think that big slamming sound was?” he said. “That fat bastard keeling over. Thanks, that’s enough.” She stopped spraying. He opened his eyes. “You going to be okay if he drops dead?”

“He didn’t have to run,” she said.

“You didn’t have to let him.” Daltry grinned when he said it. “You enabled the poor boy.”

Hutter felt an urge, clear and simple, to spray OFF into Daltry’s eyes.

And there it was, the source of her discomfort, her restlessness. Louis Carmody seemed too trusting, too good-humored, too worried about his boy, too kind to his ex to have had anything to do with Wayne’s disappearance. He was, Hutter thought, an innocent, but she had hung him out there anyway, to see where he’d lead her, and never mind he could drop from a stroke at any time. If the big man stroked out, was that on her head? She supposed it was.

“We needed to see what he’d do. Remember. This isn’t about his well-being. It’s about the boy’s.”

Daltry said, “You know why I like you, Hutter? Really like you? You’re a bigger son of a bitch than I am.”

Hutter thought, not for the first time, that she hated a lot of cops. Ugly, mean drunks who believed the worst of everyone.

She shut her eyes and misted OFF over her head and face and neck. When she opened her eyes and exhaled, to blow away the poison, she saw that the lights in the back of the house had gone out, had vanished from the lawn. She wouldn’t have noticed it if she were crouching down.

Hutter shifted her gaze to the front room. She could see the hall leading to the back of the house, but no one came down it. She glanced at the front bedroom, waited for someone to turn a light on there. No one did.

Daltry hunkered down with the others, but she remained standing. After a minute he craned his head back to look at her.

“Are you pretending to be a tree?”

“Who do we have watching the rear of the house?” she asked.

The second state trooper, a guy who had until now not spoken, looked back at her. His face was pale and freckled, and with his ginger hair he somewhat resembled Conan O’Brien.

“No one. But there’s nothing back there. Miles of woods, no trail. Even if they made us, they wouldn’t run that—”

Hutter was already stalking away, hands stretched out in front of her to protect her face from branches.

Chitra caught up to her in four steps. She had to hustle to keep up, her handcuffs jangling on her belt.

“You are concerned?” she asked.

Behind her she heard a branch snap, heard shoes crunching in the deadfall. That would be Daltry, following in no particular hurry. He was as bad as the mosquitoes; she needed a spray to repel him.

“No,” Hutter said. “You had a position. There was no reason not to hold it. If they leave, they’ll go out the front door. That’s completely reasonable.”

“So . . . ?”

“I’m puzzled.”

“About . . . ?”

“Why they’re sitting in the dark. They shut the lights off back here, but they didn’t come into the front of the house. So that means they’re sitting in the back of the house with the lights off. Doesn’t that seem peculiar?”

On her next step, her foot sank into cold, brackish water, three inches deep. She grabbed the slender trunk of a birch sapling to steady herself. In another yard Hutter was in up to her knees. The water didn’t look any different from the ground, a black surface carpeted in leaves and branches.

As Daltry came up along beside them, he plunged into the water up to his thighs, staggered, nearly fell.

“We could use a light,” Chitra said.

“Or a snorkel,” Daltry said.

“No light,” Hutter said. “And you can go back if you don’t like getting wet.”

“What? And miss all the fun? I’d rather drown.”

“Don’t get our hopes up,” Hutter told him.