8

December 3, evening

Vinnie “Vinegar” Munson was just noticing the feeling in his hands that meant it was getting cold. His fingers felt distant and clumsy. He said, aloud, “Look out, brother, the wind’ll lock handcuffs on your extremities like Officer Rhino.” The lady standing next to him waiting for the light glanced at him, knowing he wasn’t talking to her. That he was just talking. He knew she thought he was “one of those guys.” To all of them, he was “one of those guys,” but to Vinnie Vinegar he was doing exactly what was necessary and right. “It gets routed to New York like lost luggage,” he explained. He wasn’t looking at her, but this time he was talking to her. She didn’t know that, because he was turned away from her and talking in the same voice he’d used before.

Then the light changed to WALK, which made him feel good. It was all’s-right-with-the-world when he crossed the main street— the only big street—of Quiebra’s Old Town, at exactly the moment when the lit-up hieroglyph of a man began happily striding along in that golden-white electric glow that meant Yes! It always bothered him when it changed to the red glowing hand that said, No! Don’t cross! and he was only three-fourths of the way across.

He knew perfectly well that the red hand was there to warn people not to start off crossing the street, because they’d be caught in traffic when the light changed. What, was he retarded that he didn’t know that? He was forty-six years old, and he had read the entire Encyclopedia Americana and understood everything but some of the physics parts, and he certainly wasn’t retarded. But the red hand bothered him. Couldn’t they put up some kind of machine that jumped up and stopped people behind him, so that he didn’t have to look at the red hand saying No!

“The red hand,” he said aloud, “is not meant for you.” He had to tell himself that a few times, till he was past it. He was afraid it would come down and burn his face with a red hand imprint, the way Mom used to slap him, but of course, it never did. His therapist would have said, “You don’t really believe it’s going to do that, you’re just letting some tension go, worrying about it. That’s one of the ways you release tension.”

But he still worried about it.

He got past the red hand, then walked past the boarded-over place that used to be some kind of big butcher shop and still had a sign on it, QUIEBRA’S OWN LAZY AGED MEAT. People made jokes about that sign, jokes his mother called “unsuitable.” There was a silly drawing of a lazy cow on the sign. Mother had explained there’d been some idea that aged meat was tastier, but it made him think of roadkill. Once you started thinking about roadkill, it was hard to stop. He hated thinking about roadkill.

He looked at his watch. It was 5:32. That sequence of numbers irritated him. It implied 5432 but it left out the 4.

At 6:00 he would watch Starbots. He knew it looked childish, watching a cartoon every day, but this was a Japanese cartoon, and it was so beautiful he didn’t understand how anyone could resist watching it. He didn’t like other cartoons. He didn’t like Sponge-Bob, he didn’t like Scooby-Doo. That stuff was childish. He watched Crossfire—without looking directly at the people in the show, but watching it anyway—and he understood every word. It was always about something that was in the papers. You couldn’t say he was stupid. It was just that in Starbots, everyone was a Hyperdroid, even the bad guys, and if they got killed, they vanished in a shower of sparks. They didn’t lie there rotting, picked at by turkey vultures, like the roadkill on Quiebra Valley Road. The streets in the show were of some shiny synthetic stuff. Nothing was dirty or unsymmetrical on Starbots. Even the bad guys were beautiful; they didn’t have warts or wrinkles or snot.

When Zaron and Lania transformed into Starbots, they unfolded with perfect symmetry, like flowers. They made little jokes at each other’s expense, but they didn’t call each other rude names. They were always loyal. They never touched each other, except once in a while one would help the other stand up after a magnetic blast had knocked him down. Vinnie didn’t much like touching people, but he could do it if he had to.

The Starbots Interworld Station was a beautiful place, even with its villains. “How could anyone not want to be there, instead?” he said aloud, as he started across the footbridge over Quiebra Creek. Down below the little wooden bridge, rushes were bending and ducks were coursing in the stream. “Show me a duck and I’ll show you a whole way of loving muddy little bugs,” he said, glancing down. Which was, of course, exactly the case and nothing less.

Vinnie was thinking about Starbots, and how he needed some vinegar to purify his tongue, and hoping there were still some pickles at home, as he hadn’t had any vinegar for more than an hour, and he was toiling up the path that wound between houses and copses of trees to his and Mom’s house, on the crest of the ridge overlooking Quiebra, when he saw the squirrel’s jaws unlock, and something came spinning from its throat.

It had seemed like an ordinary squirrel, furry red-gold—not really the color of the red No! hand, not actually. Ordinary red squirrel color. It ran in that darting, stopping, darting hesitating way the squirrels used, up the trunk of a eucalyptus. Then it stopped at the place where the tree bole opened into branches, and it tilted its head to stare into a mess of leaves that might’ve been a bird’s nest.

That’s when its jaws opened way wider than they should be able to, and the silver darting thing came out of the middle of its throat, and it struck just like a snake at something. He saw that the squirrel wasn’t striking at an egg. It had snapped up a piece of something shiny, maybe the clockworks case of an old wristwatch, without its band. So it must be a crow’s nest, because he knew that crows stole shiny things and put them in their nests. And there was a squirrel with a piece of a watch in its mouth. Then the watch spun around in its mouth so fast it blurred, for a full ten seconds it spun there—and then vanished inside the squirrel. The squirrel’s mouth snapped shut with a spurt of blue sparks.

Then the squirrel seemed to notice Vinnie; to turn a minatory black eye toward him. The eye extended out from its head an inch or two on a little silvery stalk and tilted this way and that. Then the squirrel thing rolled up into a ball, just like a pill bug, and rolled down the trunk, without falling, just like it could stick to the wood, and it rolled off across the sloping ground between the boles of some trees, rustling the dry leaves as it went.

He stared after it. His mouth was open, and he snapped his own mouth shut, afraid that sparks would come out from between his own lips. But they didn’t.

He heard a fluttering sound and looked up to see a blue jay glaring down at him. It was completely silent. It just stared and stared. Without a sound. Which wasn’t normal for blue jays. They were never silent for long. They used up a great deal of energy screeching. He had tried to explain the inefficiency of this to them. This silent blue jay cocked its head—and then he noticed that it hadn’t any legs. It had little metal hooks instead of legs. Its head slowly rotated on its neck all the way around, unscrewing, till a little silvery worm was able to come out from the opening in its neck. The worm in the blue jay pointed its metal tip at him—and the tip quivered really fast like one of those New Year’s Eve paper toys that uncurl and shake themselves at you and make a rude noise.

Then the blue jay rolled itself up like a pill bug, tucking its head between its fish-hook legs, rolled down the tree—and rolled away. It didn’t fly. It rolled.

Home for Vinnie was uphill from here—but he ran home.

When he got home he put on the Beach Boys song “In My Room” like he always did, and he got out his journal. He wrote about the squirrel and the blue jay in his backwards book, still breathing hard as he wrote, but he didn’t tell anybody about it, not even Mom.

He didn’t want them to think he was the kind of person who saw things like that. It was hard enough to get people to be fair.

December 3, night

Cal was sitting with his mom and dad watching TV and wondering why it felt so fucked up. It was what Adair used to call Family TV Night. It was pretty much the last thing they did willingly and happily together. And it usually felt okay. Adair wasn’t here, so tonight it wasn’t the whole family, but that wasn’t the problem.

He thought about Adair insisting something was wrong with Mom and Dad. He’d yelled at her for saying it; maybe he’d yelled at her because it was bothering him, too.

There was something with Mom. Was she pissed off at Dad? She wasn’t laughing at the show, and she kept looking at Dad. She would glance at him, then at the TV, then she’d look at him again. He watched the TV and laughed, right along with the laugh track. He turned and smiled at them warmly from time to time. At least, the smile seemed warm.

So what was bothering her?

Cal wasn’t sure. Yet he almost knew.

For once, it occurred to him to just right out ask her. But you couldn’t ask your parents stuff like that—Why are you acting so weirdly, Mom? At least, not in his family.

A commercial came on; during the commercials he whipped out his Palm Pilot—the expensive one he’d gotten so cheap on eBay— and checked his E-mail. Tapped out a reply to his friend Kabir in Palm Pilot graffiti: Can’t go to mall tonight . . . family shit . . .

The show came back on, with dull inevitability, and he folded up the Palm Pilot. He wished Lacey was here, but she’d moved to a motel.

It was hard to think of her as Aunt Lacey. She seemed more like an older sister. She was pretty cool. She seemed to be ready to deal with whatever came along no matter how screwed up it was. She never got annoyed. Sometimes Lacey seemed puzzled by Mom but never pissed off.

The sitcom wended its predictable way. “What a loser show,” Cal muttered.

“Would you like to change the channel, son?” Dad asked, and he didn’t seem sarcastic about it. He changed to another channel. A talk show with a bunch of women talking about breast implants. “How’s this one, son?” he asked.

Son? “Uh . . .” His dad knew better than to think he’d watch something like that.

So he changed to a WWE show. Wrestlers heaved themselves around the ring. “How about this one?”

“Oh, I don’t—”

He kept flicking through them, too fast to judge, until finally Cal stood up, almost convulsively, and said, “Actually, I’m gonna take a walk.”

He started for the front hall, hesitated in the archway. Felt like he should say something more, but he wasn’t sure what.

Then his dad said, “Sure thing, son,” and turned the TV off. “Certainly,” he added. He got up and went out into the garage. Began rustling around out there. Mom just sat in the chair, gazing toward the TV.

Then she looked toward the garage. Then back at the blank TV. Then at the garage. Then back at the TV. It was freaking Cal out.

He turned to go, and she said suddenly, “Cal?”

Her voice sounded almost strangled. As he turned back to her, he wondered if she had something caught in her throat.

“What?”

“Cal.” She was looking at him, then at the garage. Then at him. Then at the garage again. Then she lifted up her left hand, and she stared at it. And the hand twitched.

He got a twisty feeling and asked, “You okay, Mom? Should I get Dad?”

“Dad? No! No.” She stood up awkwardly, took a step toward him, twisted her head about on her neck as if trying to clear a crick, opened her mouth, and said . . .

Nothing.

She simply stood there, breathing loudly, with her mouth hanging open. Making—he could barely hear it—that faint strangled sound.

Something was seriously wrong with his mom. “Okay, that’s it, Mom! I’m getting Dad!”

“No!”

Cal hurried over to her, reached for her.

She took a step back from him. As if afraid. She made that strangled sound again.

He hesitated. “Something—caught in your throat?”

“Yes. No. Sort of. Maybe. Cal, it took me all this time. It can be fought. It can be—”

Then Dad was there, in the kitchen doorway. He was staring at Mom. His lips were moving.

And Mom suddenly seemed fine. She smiled and said, “Jeez, something caught in my throat, there.”

It seemed to Cal—he wasn’t sure, because he saw it from the corner of his eye—that Dad had mouthed those words silently as Mom had said them. Something caught in my throat.

No. Not possible.

Mom was smiling at him. “Go on, go on your walk, Cal. Certainly. Go right on ahead. We’ll see you later, son.”

Cal looked from one parent to the other, then shook his head in wonder. It was rare for either one of them to call him “son.” Not that they acted like he wasn’t their son. They just didn’t call him that. Calling him that sounded like something from one of those old shows on TV Land.

A feeling rose inarguably up in him that he had to get somewhere far away, as fast as he could—and he didn’t know why.

“Actually, Mom? Can I borrow the truck for a couple of hours?”

“Certainly.” She turned very suddenly and went toward Dad. The two of them went into the garage.

Certainly? Normally she’d have given up the keys only after an argument, especially with Dad watching.

Whatever. This was his chance to get the truck.

He got the keys from the hook on the wall, went out to the curb, and got in the car. He started it—and just sat there.

He tried to think of somewhere to go.

Mason hesitated in the doorway of the kitchen, watching Uncle Ike cleaning his rifle in the living room. He didn’t like to be around Uncle Ike when he was cleaning his gun. Ike was a big guy in a hot-pink bowling shirt and shorts and flip-flops; he had receding red-blond hair and freckles and enormous hands. He’d sit there at the coffee table drinking Bud and cleaning that 30.06, and it just made Mason paranoid because he knew that Uncle Ike had flipped out on Aunt Bonnie, at least once, which is why Aunt Bonnie had gone to her cousin Teresa’s place to live. At least, she said, till Ike went back on antidepressants—or amphetamines.

When he wasn’t on amphetamines he would alternate between glum disinterest, vague friendliness, and manic rages. And here he was cleaning that gun. In movies the hit man cleaned the gun right before he shot someone.

“When you gonna clean this house, you little prick?” Uncle Ike said, ramming a long skinny brush through the bore of the rifle.

Mason looked around. Dirty clothes lay about the floor, which was otherwise papered over with cast-aside old issues of the National Enquirer. The beer cans and pizza boxes had been shoved off the coffee table onto the floor to make room for Uncle Ike’s cleaning kit and the rifle.

The kitchen was worse. The place smelled rank, too, but you mostly smelled that only when you came in. Once you were inside a while you didn’t notice it anymore, unless you got near that big pile of garbage teetering over the trash can.

“We need to get some chicks in here,” Mason said. “Clean this shit up, Uncle Ike.”

“You’re the chick around here,” Uncle Ike said. “You get to earn your way by cleaning the house. You don’t work, you don’t bring any money in. You sell pot to eat on, but you don’t give me any of the money.”

“You said you didn’t want any narco-money.”

“That’s not what I’m fucking talking about. I’m talking about I get my ass to the bowling alley five nights a week to hand out those stinking bowling shoes and hear people whine about the lanes not working, and you’re here watching fucking Friends and Seinfeld reruns on TV.”

“Hey, whoa. I got laid off, okay. I’m gonna get on over at the Square Deal garage.”

“Even those fucking crooks wouldn’t hire you. Now fucking clean the house, you little prick.”

Mason said, “Fuck you, man. I’ll sleep in my van.”

He went out the door, fast but not neglecting to slam it. His plan was to smoke a few bowls, then go to a pay phone—his cell phone had been shut off—call up his young cousin Cal and see if he could get something to eat at his house. Cal and Adair were barely related to him, only by some kind of twice-removed in-law thing he couldn’t remember, but they treated him like a fucking human being, unlike Uncle Ike. That asshole.

He went to the van, hearing Uncle Ike shouting behind him, through the door, something about don’t bother to come back—and stopped by the driver’s side door. A brown and white Ford Expedition was weaving along the street.

“Whoa,” Mason said, fascinated. “He’s got to be all fucked up on something.”

But then he saw that the driver was weaving with a purpose. He was chasing something down the street. A cat, a fat fluffy-white cat too panicked to get out of the road. But there—the cat spotted a wooden gate, darted right up and over to safety. The Expedition slowed down; the driver was a young guy with a scruffy haircut, a dirty uniform of some kind. He glared after the cat. Then he seemed to sense Mason, turned to look at him—and smiled, his whole face transforming.

He rolled down his window and leaned out of the SUV. “Howdy, pardner,” the guy said.

Mason recognized him, then. He was one of those two young marine guards they’d run into down at that site where some kind of military shit had fallen from a plane or something into the water.

“That cat do something to you, dude? Don’t be, like, running cats over. That’s our neighbor’s cat.”

“Oh, I wasn’t really going to hit it. I was just chasing it a little ways.”

“Oh.” Mason was losing interest, but he couldn’t quite look away from the guy’s unblinking regard. “So, uh, hey, where’s your friend?” Mason added, for something to say. “The guy who was with you down there at the bay. The other jar—marine guy.”

“Ah, yes, you were there. I retrieve you now,” the marine said, his smile broadening. “My friend? I’d like to know myself. He didn’t adjust well. He just fell apart. Some do well and some don’t. You know, I think you’d do rather well. You’d just fall right into place.”

“Say what?” This motherfucker, Mason thought, is crazy. He must be, like, AWOL and shit, too. Bad news.

Mason dug around his pocket for his van’s keys, then he saw he’d left them in the van. And the van door was locked. “Shit! I fucking locked my keys in the van!”

He heard a car door open, looked over to see the marine walking toward him. His uniform was missing some buttons, and there were oil stains on the shirt. The guy had left his car running and left it in gear, and it was slowly, very slowly, starting to roll by itself down the street, angling randomly toward the curve.

“Cuz, marine guy, you left your car in gear.”

The marine nodded, smiling, completely unconcerned, and stepped between Mason and the van. He put his hand flat over the lock on the door of Mason’s van, and there was a clicking, a sound of tumblers, and the little black plastic cylinder of the door’s lock switch popped up, all by itself. “There you go,” the marine said.

“Whoa,” Mason said. “How’d you do that?”

“So yo,” the marine said, “you wanta smoke a bowl or something?”

Mason only had a pinch or two left. “You got any? I’m about flat.”

“Sure, I got some. Gung ho, man. Let’s get in the back of your van.”

Mason was on automatic, in a way, after that, not questioning anything, and they were in the back of the van in about twenty seconds, the SUV forgotten. Mason dug his little brass pipe out from under the driver’s seat, turning to see the marine crouched, not offering pot, not reaching for the pipe, just crouched—and opening his mouth really, really wide.

It was impossible to open it that wide.

Mason made a squeaking whimper that sounded funny in his own ears, and recoiled, turned to climb over the driver’s seat, to escape out the front.

He got partway, then something grabbed his ankles and pulled him irresistibly into the back of the van.