Life Expectancy (14 page)

21

I
f an ax had cleaved my leg, the pain could not have been worse than this.

In movies, the hero takes a bullet and keeps on coming, for God, for love of country, for the sake of his woman. A bullet might make him wince, but often it just pisses him off and drives him to even greater heroics.

As I said earlier, since childhood I had thought of myself as having the potential to be a hero if put to the test. Now I realized that I lacked at least one essential requirement for the job: a really high pain threshold.

Screaming, I fell off the curb and onto the pavement, between the van and the Shelby Z. My head rattled the drainage grille, or maybe the grille rattled my head.

I was terrified that he would shoot me in the face—until I realized I had possession of the pistol.

Reaching between his legs, he tried to pull the nail file out of his crotch, but merely touching it caused him to squeal more pitifully than a pig catching sight of the butcher’s blade. Agony knocked him to his knees. Then he went all the way down, onto his side, pulling Lorrie with him.

We lay there screaming, Punchinello and I, like two teenage girls who had just found a severed head in an old Jamie Lee Curtis movie.

I heard Lorrie shouting my name and something about time.

Unable to focus through the pain, undoubtedly slightly delirious, I found myself imagining what she might be saying:

Time waits for no man. Time and the river, how quickly they go by. Time bears away all things.

Even in my condition, I quickly realized that she would not be waxing philosophical at a moment like this. When I recognized the note of urgency in her voice, I also knew the essence of what she must be saying:
Time is running out. The bombs!

The pain in my left leg churned with fiery exuberance, and I was surprised to see that flames weren’t eating through the flesh. I could also feel something bristling in the meat of it, perhaps shattered bones. I could not, however, move it.

How odd to be terrified but at the same time weary to the point of sleepiness. Wracked by pain yet capable of taking a nap. Pillowy now, the pavement. Bedding with a faint fragrance of tar.

This tempting slumber was, of course, the sleep of death, which I recognized and resisted.

Making no attempt to stand, dragging the useless leg after me as if I were Sisyphus and it were my stone, I scaled the towering curb. I crawled to Lorrie.

Lying on his side, one arm behind him, Punchinello remained cuffed to Lorrie. With his free hand, he plucked the nail file out of his crotch—and promptly threw up on himself.

I was gratified by this evidence that he felt worse than I did.

During the past few hours, I had come to believe in the reality of Evil for the first time in my twenty years. I believed suddenly not merely in evil as a necessary antagonist in movies and books—bad guys and boogeymen—not merely in evil as the consequence of parental rejection or parental indulgence or social injustice, but in Evil as a presence alive in the world.

It is a presence that tirelessly romances and beguiles, but it cannot consummate a relationship until invited to do so. Punchinello might have been raised by an evil man, might have been instructed in the linguistics of evil, but ultimately the choice of how to live was his alone.

My gratification at the sight of his suffering might have been unwholesome, corrupting, but I don’t believe that it was itself a small evil. At the time it felt—and even now feels—like righteous satisfaction prompted by this proof that evil has a price to extract from those who embrace it and that resistance to it, while costly, might have a lower cost than acquiescence.

Funny how so much windy philosophy could be inspired by a little puke.

One man’s regurgitation, even if it might give rise in him to some remorse, couldn’t stop the ticking of a single detonator. We must have had at most a minute or two until the works of Cornelius Rutherford Snow fell into ruin nearly as complete as the empire of Ozymandias.

“Gimme,” Lorrie said.

“What?”

“The gun.”

I hadn’t realized I still had the pistol.

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t know which pocket he put the key in.”

We didn’t have time to search the pockets in his pants, coat, and shirt. Considering the vomit, we didn’t have the inclination, either.

I failed to understand what the gun had to do with the handcuff key. I worried that she would hurt herself, so I decided not to give her the pistol.

Then I realized that she had already taken it out of my hand.

“You’ve already taken it out of my hand,” I said, and my voice sounded slurred.

“Better turn your face away,” she warned, “there might be shrapnel.”

“I think I like shrapnel,” I replied, unable to remember what the word meant.

She fumbled with the gun, squinting at it in the dark.

“I don’t think I hurt as much as I used to hurt,” I told her. “Now I’m mostly cold.”

“That’s bad,” she said worriedly.

“I’ve been cold before,” I assured her.

Punchinello groaned, shuddered, and began to upchuck on himself again.

“Have we been drinking?” I wondered.

“Turn your face away,” Lorrie repeated, this time sharply.

“Don’t talk so mean to me. I love you.”

“Yeah, well, we always hurt the one we love,” she said, grabbing a fistful of my hair and
pulling
my face away from the handcuffs.

“That’s sad,” I said, meaning that we always hurt the one we love, and then I discovered I was lying on the sidewalk and must have fallen. “Lummox.”

A gun boomed, and I didn’t realize until later that she’d put the muzzle of the pistol against the links of chain that connected one handcuff to the other, and had freed herself from Punchinello with that shot.

“On your feet,” she urged me. “Come on, come on.”

“I’ll lay here till I’m sober.”

“You’ll lay there till you’re dead.”

“No, that’s too long.”

She cajoled me, she cursed me, she commanded me, pushed and yanked and pulled, and the next thing I knew, I was on my feet, leaning on her, moving between the van and my Shelby Z, into the street, away from the mansion.

“How is your leg?”

“What leg?”

“I mean what about the pain?”

“I think we left him back there on the sidewalk.”

“God, you’re a hulk,” she said.

“I’m a little husky, that’s all.”

“It’s all right, it’s okay. Lean on me. Come on.”

In a voice now as thick as English custard, I said, “Are we going to the park?”

“That’s right.”

“Picnic?”

“That’s right. And we’re late, let’s hurry.”

I peered past Lorrie, toward the sound of an approaching engine. Headlights washed across us. An array of revolving blue and yellow beacons on the roof indicated that it was either a police cruiser or an intergalactic vehicle.

The car slid to a halt, doors flew open, and two men got out about fifteen feet away. One of them said, “What’s going on here?”

“This man is shot,” Lorrie told them. I wondered who she was talking about. Before I could ask she said, “We need an ambulance.”

The cops approached warily. “Where’s the shooter?”

“Over there on the sidewalk. He’s hurt, doesn’t have a gun anymore.” When the officers moved toward Punchinello, Lorrie shouted, “No! Stay back. The building’s going to blow.”

In my condition, her warning was mystifying; it didn’t seem to make sense to the police, either. They hurried toward Punchinello, who lay half revealed in the backwash of the squad-car lights.

With single-minded determination, Lorrie kept me moving toward the park.

“Too cold for a picnic,” I said. “So cold.”

“We’ll build a bonfire. Just
move.
”

My teeth chattered, and words shivered out of me: “Will there be p-p-potato salad?”

“Yes. Plenty of potato salad.”

“The p-p-pickly kind?”

“Yes, that’s right, keep moving.”

“I hate the p-pickly k-k-kind.”

“We have both kinds.”

Another curb almost defeated me. The sidewalk looked soft and inviting.

“It’s too c-c-cold for a picnic,” I said, “and too d-dark.”

An instant later it was also too
noisy.

22

T
he four virtually simultaneous explosions—mansion, bank, courthouse, library—purged confusion from my mind. For a moment I could think too clearly.

As the ground rocked, as the evergreens in the park swayed and shook off dead needles, as the initial blasts gave way to the mad-gods-bowling clatter of stone structures collapsing, I remembered being shot twice and not enjoying it either time.

The pain didn’t return with the memory, and now I was clearheaded enough to understand that being unable to feel my leg
at all
was worse than the fiery agony that I had first endured. The utter lack of feeling suggested that the leg was damaged beyond repair, already dead, amputated, gone.

Exhausted, I stumbled when the ground rocked. Lorrie helped me lower myself to the grass, where I leaned against the trunk of a sycamore, even as the final blasts quaked through the town square.

With the memory of being shot came a nightmare montage of the three murders that Punchinello had committed in front of me. These bloody images were more vivid in recollection than at the time of the killings, perhaps because then I had been so concerned with my own and Lorrie’s survival that I dared not consciously consider the hideous details for fear of being paralyzed by terror.

Sickened, I tried to repress those memories, but they tormented me. All my life, I had been comfortable inside my own head; but now that interior landscape was bloodstained and darkened by an ominous eclipse.

When I wished for the comforting return of the haze to which I had earlier succumbed, it came immediately in a great gray wave—drowning the lights of the police car in the street, then seething through the trees as might rich billows of wind-driven fog, which was curious on a windless night.

Dust.

The turbulent mass proved to be neither fog nor mental haze but thick clouds of fine dust expelled from Cornelius Snow’s mansion as it crashed down from imposing edifice to shattered ruin. Pulverized limestone, powdered brick, crushed plaster: In a thousand scents and flavors, dust rolled over us.

Pale as it approached, the cloud brought darkness when it fell upon us, a gloom deeper than the lightless night itself. I eased away from the sycamore and rolled onto my right side, closing my eyes, pulling my shirt up to mask my nose and mouth against the choking dust.

I reached down with one hand to touch my numb left leg, to reassure myself that it was still there. My hand came away slick with warm blood.

In what seemed but an instant, dust caked the blood and formed a grisly plaster around my hand.

At first I thought that Lorrie must have dropped to the grass beside me, covering her face against the suffocating pall. Then I heard her voice above me and knew that she remained on her feet. She called for an ambulance, coughing, wheezing, ceaselessly shouting for help, help, a man’s been shot.

I wanted to reach for her, pull her down, but I had no strength to raise my arm. A fearsome weakness had overcome me.

The comforting mental haze that I had wished for now returned. Frantic about Lorrie, I no longer wanted this escape, but resistance was impossible.

My thoughts wove an incoherent narrative of hidden doors, candlelit tunnels, dead faces, gunshots, snake handlers, tornadoes, clowns…. Soon I must have been unconscious and dreaming, for I had become an aerialist, walking the high wire, using a long pole for balance, progressing tentatively and precariously toward a platform on which Lorrie waited.

When I glanced behind to see what distance I’d already traveled, I found Punchinello Beezo in pursuit of me. He carried a balancing pole, too, but each end of it terminated in a wickedly sharp blade. He was smiling, confident, and faster than I was. He said, “
I could have been a star, Jimmy Tock. I could have been a star.
”

Occasionally I drifted up from big-top dreams and from secret passageways in my soul, and realized that I was being moved. Carried in a litter. Then strapped on a gurney in a rollicking ambulance.

When I tried to open my eyes but could not, I told myself that they were simply glued shut by dust and tears. I knew this to be a lie, but I took comfort from it, anyway.

Eventually someone said, “The leg can’t be saved.”

I didn’t know if he was a person in a dream or a real doctor, but I responded in a voice that sounded like me if I had been a frog prince: “I need both legs. I’m a storm chaser.”

Thereafter, I sank uncounted fathoms into an abyss where the dreams were too real to be dreams, where mysterious behemoths stood guard over me but always at the periphery of vision, and where the air smelled of cherry tart flambé.

23

S
ix weeks later, Lorrie Lynn Hicks came to dinner.

She looked prettier than
pommes à la Sévillane
. Never at any meal previously had I spent so little time admiring the food on my plate.

Candles in ruby-red, cut-crystal chimneys cast soft trembling geometrics on the silk moiré walls and shimmering amber circles on the coffered mahogany ceiling.

She outshone the candlelight.

Over the appetizer—sesame-baked crab—my father said, “I’ve never known anyone whose mother is a snake handler.”

“A lot of women take it up because it sounds fun,” Lorrie said, “but it’s a lot harder than they think. Eventually they give it up.”

“But surely it’s still fun,” my mother said.

“Oh, yes! Snakes are great. They don’t bark, claw the furniture, and you’ll never have a rodent problem.”

“And you don’t have to walk them,” Mom added.

“Well, you can if you want, but it freaks out the neighbors. Maddy, this crab is fabulous.”

“How does a snake handler make money from it?” Dad wondered.

“Mom has developed three primary revenue streams. She provides a variety of snakes to movie and TV productions. There for a while, it seemed
every
music video used snakes.”

My mother was delighted: “So she rents out the snakes.”

Dad asked, “By the hour, the day, the week?”

“Usually by the day. Even a snake-heavy movie only needs them for maybe four, five days.”

“There isn’t a movie these days that wouldn’t be improved by a lively bunch of snakes,” Grandma Rowena declared. “Especially that last Dustin Hoffman thing.”

“People who rent snakes by the hour,” Lorrie said somberly, “are for the most part not reputable.”

This intrigued me. “I’ve never heard of a disreputable snake-rental company.”

“Oh, they’re around, all right.” Lorrie grimaced. “Very tacky outfits. They rent to individuals by the hour, no questions asked.”

Dad, Mom, and I exchanged baffled looks, but Weena knew the score: “For erotic purposes.”

Dad said, “Yuch,” and Mom said, “Creepy,” and I said, “Grandma, sometimes you scare me.”

Lorrie wanted to make one thing clear: “My mother
never
rents snakes to individuals.”

“When I was a child,” Weena said, “Little Ned Yarnel, the boy next door, was bit by a rattlesnake.”

“A free snake or a rented one?” Dad asked.

“Free. Little Ned didn’t die but he got gangrene. They had to amputate—first a thumb and finger, then everything to the wrist.”

“Jimmy, dear,” Mom said, “I’m so glad we didn’t have to cut your leg off.”

“Me too.”

Dad raised his wineglass. “Let’s drink to our Jimmy not being an amputee.”

After the toast, Weena said, “Little Ned grew up to be the only one-handed bow-and-arrow champion ever to compete in the Olympics.”

Amazed, Lorrie said, “That isn’t possible.”

“Dear girl,” Weena said, “if you think there were lots of one-handed Olympic bow-and-arrow champions, you can’t know much about the sport.”

“Of course, he didn’t win gold,” Dad clarified.

“A silver medal,” Grandma admitted. “But he’d have won the gold if he’d had two eyes.”

Putting down her fork to punctuate her astonishment, Lorrie said, “He was a cyclops?”

“No,” my mother said, “he had two eyes. He just couldn’t see out of one of them.”

“But don’t you need depth perception to be good at something like the bow and arrow?” Lorrie wondered.

Proud of her childhood friend, Weena said, “Little Ned had something better than depth perception. He had spunk. Nothing could keep Little Ned down.”

Picking up her fork again, taking the last morsel of crab from her plate, Lorrie said, “I’m fascinated to know if Little Ned might also have been a dwarf.”

“What a peculiar but somehow charming idea,” my mother said.

“Just peculiar in my book,” Grandma disagreed. “Little Ned was six feet tall by his eleventh birthday, wound up six feet four—a big lug like our Jimmy.”

No matter what my grandmother thinks, I am inches shorter than Little Ned. I probably weigh a lot less than he did, too—except if the comparison is limited to hand weight, in which case I would have a considerable advantage over him.

Comparing my own two legs, my left weighs more than the right by virtue of the two steel plates and the numerous screws that now hold the femur together, plus the single steel plate in the tibia. The leg required considerable vascular surgery, as well, but that didn’t add an ounce.

At dinner there in early November 1994, the wound drains were no longer in place, which improved the way I smelled, but I still wore a fiberglass cast. I sat at the end of the table, stiff leg thrust out to one side, as if I hoped to trip Grandma.

Weena finished her crab, smacked her lips in the flamboyant manner that she believes is a right of anyone her age, and said, “You mentioned your mama makes snake money three ways.”

Lorrie patted her wonderfully full lips on her napkin. “She also milks rattlesnakes.”

Appalled, my dad said, “What kind of supermarket from hell would sell such stuff?”

“We had a cute little milk snake lived with us for a while,” Mom told Lorrie. “His name was Earl, but I always thought Bernard would suit him better.”

“He looked like a Ralph to me,” Grandma Rowena disagreed.

“Earl was a male,” Mom said, “or at least we always assumed so. If he’d been a female, should we have milked him? After all, if you don’t milk a cow, it can end up in terrible distress.”

The evening was off to a splendid start. I hardly had to say anything.

I looked at Dad. He smiled at me. I could tell he was having a wonderful time.

“There’s not actually milk in a milk snake,” Lorrie said. “None in a rattler, either. What my mother milks out of them is venom. She gets a grip behind the head and massages the poison glands. The venom squirts out of the fangs, which are hypodermic in rattlers, and into a collection beaker.”

Because he considers the dining room to be a temple, Dad rarely puts an elbow on the table. He put one on it now, and rested his chin in his hand, as though settling in for a long listen. “So your mother has a rattlesnake ranch.”

“
Ranch
is too grand a word, Rudy. So is
farm,
for that matter. It’s more of a garden with just the one crop.”

My grandmother let out a satisfying belch and said, “Who does she sell this venom to—assassins, or maybe those pygmies with blowguns?”

“Drug companies need it to make antivenin. And it has a few other medical uses.”

“You mentioned a third revenue stream,” my father reminded her.

“My mother’s a real ham,” Lorrie said with affection. “So she takes party bookings. She has this fantastic act with the snakes.”

“Who would book such an act?” my father wondered.

“Who
wouldn’t?
” my mother asked, probably already thinking ahead to their anniversary party and Weena’s birthday.

“Exactly,” Lorrie said. “All kinds of corporate affairs like retirement parties, Christmas parties. Bar mitzvahs, the American Library Association, you name it.”

Mom and Dad removed the appetizer plates. They served bowls of chicken corn soup with cheddar crisps on the side.

“I love corn,” Grandma said, “but it gives me flatulence. I used to care, but I’m not obliged to anymore. The golden years rock.”

Raising a toast not with wine but with his first spoonful of soup, Dad said, “Here’s hoping that bugger won’t weasel out of a trial. Here’s hoping he fries.”

The bugger, of course, was Punchinello Beezo. The following morning, he would attend a preliminary hearing to determine if he was mentally fit to stand trial.

He had gunned down Lionel Davis, Honker, Crinkles, and Byron Metcalf, a longtime leader of the town’s preservation society, whom he had tortured to obtain information about access to the passageways under the town square.

In addition, the explosions had killed two members of a cleaning crew at work in the courthouse and a hobo assessing the treasures of a Dumpster behind the library. Martha Faye Jeeter, an elderly widow living in an apartment in the building next door to the courthouse, had also perished.

Eight is a heavy toll in human life, but considering the extent of the destruction, scores of victims might have been expected. Lives were spared because the explosions were two stories underground, and some of the force vented into the subterranean tunnels. The library, the mansion, and the bank imploded, crashing down into their cellars and subcellars as though brought to ruin by the precise formulations of a demolitions expert.

The courthouse largely imploded, as well, but its bell tower toppled into the building next door, bringing sudden fury into the quiet life of the Widow Jeeter.

Her two cats also were squashed. Some citizens of Snow Village seemed to be angrier about this outrage than about either the human or the architectural losses.

Punchinello had expressed regret that hundreds hadn’t died. He told police that if he could do it all over again, he would add packages of napalm to ensure a firestorm that would devastate many square blocks.

Portions of the street and the park subsided into Cornelius Snow’s secret passageways. My fine black sporty coupe with yellow racing stripes had been swallowed by one of these sinkholes.

Remember when I said that I hadn’t met a young woman whom I could love as much as I loved that seven-year-old Dodge Daytona Shelby Z? Funny thing—I didn’t mourn the loss of it, not for a minute.

Although Lorrie would have looked good in the Shelby Z, she would look even better in a 1986 Pontiac Trans Am, not black but maybe red or silver, a color to match her exuberant spirit. Or a 1988 Chevy Camaro IROC-Z convertible.

My problem, however, was one that any young baker on a bread-and-cake wage could appreciate. There were men in the world who, upon getting one look at her, would buy Lorrie a Rolls-Royce for every day of the week. And not all of them would look like trolls.

“You don’t think they’ll send the bugger to some asylum and let him off the hook?” Dad asked.

“He doesn’t want that himself,” I said. “He’s saying he knew exactly what he was doing, and it was all about revenge.”

“He’s crazy in his way,” Lorrie said. “But he knows right from wrong as sure as I do. Maddy, Rudy—this soup is fantastic even if it causes flatulence.”

Grandma Rowena had a relevant story: “Hector Sanchez, lived over near Bright Falls, killed himself with a fart.”

The rationalist in my father was stirred by Grandma’s assertion. “Weena, that’s just not possible.”

“Hector worked in the hair-oil industry,” Grandma recalled. “He had beautiful hair but not much common sense. This was fifty-six years ago, back in ’38, before the war.”

“Even
then
it wasn’t possible,” Dad declared.

“You weren’t even born yet, Maddy, neither, so don’t tell me what wasn’t possible. I saw it with my own eyes.”

“You’ve never mentioned this before,” Dad said, suspecting a fabrication but not ready to make the accusation. “Jimmy, has she ever mentioned this before?”

“No,” I confirmed. “I remember Grandma telling us about a Harry Ramirez who boiled himself to death, but not this Hector Sanchez.”

“Maddy, do you remember ever hearing this before?”

“No, honey,” my mother admitted, “but what does that prove? I’m sure it just slipped Mother’s mind until now.”

“Seeing a man fart himself to death doesn’t just slip your mind.” To Lorrie, Dad said, “I’m sorry, dear. Our table talk isn’t usually this low.”

“You don’t know what low is until you’re eating canned ravioli while listening to stories about snake cankers and the smell of a tornado that’s sucked up the contents of a sewage-processing plant.”

Impatiently, Grandma said, “Hector Sanchez never slipped my mind. This is just the first time we’ve been in a conversation where the subject came up naturally.”

“What was Hector’s job in the hair-oil industry?” Mom asked.

“If he blew himself up with a fart fifty-six years ago,” Dad said, “who
cares
what he did in hair oil?”

“I’m sure his family cared,” Weena said. “It put food on their table. Anyway, he didn’t blow himself up. That isn’t possible.”

“Case closed,” my father said triumphantly.

“I turned twenty-one, and my husband, Sam, took me to a tavern for the first time. We were in a booth. Hector was on a bar stool. I ordered a Pink Squirrel. Do you like Pink Squirrels, Lorrie?”

Lorrie said yes, and Dad said, “You’re driving me so crazy with this, I’m seeing pink squirrels right now, crawling on the ceiling.”

“Hector was drinking beer with lime slices, sitting just one stool away from this bodybuilder. He had biceps the size of hams and the prettiest tattoo of a snarling bulldog on his arm.”

“Hector or the bodybuilder?” my mother asked.

“Hector didn’t have any tattoos, at least not in any place that was visible. But he had a pet monkey named Pancho.”

My mother said, “Was Pancho also drinking beer?”

“The monkey wasn’t there.”

“Where was he?”

“Home with the family. He wasn’t one of those monkeys that likes running around to gin mills. Pancho was family oriented.”

Mom patted Dad on the shoulder. “That’s my kind of monkey.”

“So Hector, sitting on the bar stool, he cuts a ripe one—”

“At last,” my father said.

“—and the bodybuilder takes offense at the smell. Hector tells him to buzz off, though he doesn’t say
buzz.
”

“How big was this Hector?” Lorrie wondered.

“I’d say about five feet seven, a hundred thirty pounds.”

“He sure could have used the monkey for backup,” Lorrie said.

“So the bodybuilder punches him twice, grabs him by the hair, and smashes his face into the bar three times. Hector falls off the stool, dead, and the bodybuilder orders another boilermaker spiked with two fresh eggs for the protein.”

My father glowed with vindication. “So I was right. Passing gas didn’t kill him. The drunken
bodybuilder
killed him.”

“If he hadn’t farted, he wouldn’t have been killed,” Grandma insisted.