He wasn’t a handsome kid, though others thought he would grow into it. He had the makings. Curly red hair that was garish now but would darken to reddish-brown if he lived into his twenties, good bones, a splash of freckles, blue eyes. Those eyes were his best point, and certainly the thing that Anna Marie Hellinger, who was in his English class, thought made him look brooding and mysterious. She wasn’t wrong. Mike knew a thing or two about brooding. He did it well, he did it often, and he had reason.
When Mike was still in diapers, his father, Big John Sweeney, had gone sailing through the guardrail up on Shandy’s Curve and had been cooked in his car at the bottom of the ravine. Before grass had started to grow on Big John’s grave, Mike’s mom, Lois, had let local mechanic Vic Wingate move in, and shortly after that they were married. Though Mike was never aware of it, this was a major town scandal. Big John was well liked and there was always a little suspicion surrounding the crash—the official report was that he had fallen asleep at the worst possible place on Route A-32, but the expression “Oh, horseshit!” was thrown in the face of almost anyone who said that, especially if it was said over beers at the Harvestman Inn, where Sweeney’s friends still hung. Suspicion even fell briefly on Vic Wingate, but that was something folks kept to themselves, even at the Harvestman, because Vic was not the kind of guy you made comments about, not unless you wanted to eat puréed food through a wired jaw. Vic Wingate, you see, was a hitter.
Vic was forty-seven years old and except for his eyes—he had the cold and patient eyes of an old crocodile—he could have passed for a fit thirty-five. He was rawboned and flat-bellied, with arms and shoulders that held a promise of quick and ugly power though not bulky muscles like Tow-Truck Eddie, nor the sculpted physique of Terry Wolfe, the town’s charismatic and handsome mayor. Vic Wingate had wrestler’s muscles and boxer’s hands. Vic was battlefield tough and would take a bad hit just to land a crippling blow, though very few hits ever got past him. Vic chose his fights with care, he hit first and hardest, and knew where to hit. Since Mike was four Vic had used him to practice the art of hitting, flicking out with apparent laziness to knock Mike sprawling, or rapping him hard enough on the top of the head to drop him to his knees. If Mike had a dime for every time he’d felt Vic’s hand he could have saved all the struggling farms in the borough of Pine Deep.
Until last night, all of those blows—blows beyond counting—had been slaps. Hard, yes, painful, yes, but open-handed. Now all that had changed. Last night Mike, at the ripe old age of fourteen-going-on-never-grow-up, had graduated to the fist.
It had started after Mike had been late delivering the last of his newspapers and had been hurrying home along the darkened stretch of A-32 when a monstrous wrecker had come barreling down the road and had very nearly run him down. To save himself from being ground to roadkill under the twenty-four-inch wheels, Mike had swung his bicycle off the road with an agility and speed that was a surprise to him even while it was happening. The wrecker had missed him by inches and Mike had gone ass-over-heels into a pumpkin patch, cracking a rib, bruising his skin, and banging his head. It wasn’t the most graceful landing, but it was a landing, and you know what they say about landings you walk away from.
By the time Mike had peeled himself up from the ground and struggled his wheezing way to the road, the wrecker had gone and Mike was even further behind Vic’s curfew. He’d been picked up (actually, almost run down again) by Malcolm Crow, the guy who owned the store where he bought his comics and model kits, and had tooled around with him for a while, winding up all the way out at the Haunted Hayride. Crow had called his friend, Mayor Wolfe, who had in turn called Vic to come pick him up. Vic drove out to get him and when Mike had opened his mouth to greet Vic, his stepfather had silenced him with a punch to the stomach that was so hard—so shockingly hard—that Mike thought that his guts were being smashed against his spine. Then Vic grabbed him by the hair and the back of his belt and had flung him into the car and driven home. That alone would have been bad enough, but once they were inside the door, Vic had really gone to work on him. That first blow to the stomach was followed by an encore of punches to just about every part of Mike that Vic could reach. He beat him from the front hallway all the way into the kitchen and when Mike was tucked into a corner Vic had dragged him out into the open and continued beating him.
It was right about that point where something very odd had happened to Mike, and in the space of a heartbeat Mike felt everything change. It was as if he just stepped outside of his body and stood apart, indifferent to the blows that rained down on him, separated from the pain and terror as surely as he was separated from the flesh and nerve endings that were under assault. It was the weirdest feeling in his life. He was aware of an actual physical shift as his consciousness lifted and moved to another place, just a few feet away, watching Vic as he grunted and sweated and hit. He watched Vic and saw the man’s muscles bunch and roll, saw his hands move up and down, saw him shift to put power behind each blow. It was fascinating, like watching a machine on an assembly line, and he found that he could study it with a total lack of emotional involvement. The hands rose and snapped down, sometimes as slaps, sometimes as punches, and as he watched, Mike saw something else, too. He saw Vic’s face grow steadily more red, saw sweat burst from his pores, saw his hands redden with tissue damage each time a blow struck one of Mike’s elbows or his forehead, saw the labored heave of his chest as the beating took its toll on Vic. Mike saw Vic, the forty-seven-year-old man, not Vic the indestructible machine.
As revelations went, it was a monster. All night long Mike worked it out. Vic was forty-seven. Mike was fourteen. If he lived—if—then in ten years he would be twenty-four and Vic would be fifty-seven. Vic was getting older and from now on he wouldn’t be getting stronger; Mike, on the other hand, would. Though Mike often doubted that he would really live to be twenty-four, knowing that he could outlive and outlast Vic was enough. Of course, the thought that he might die was an equal comfort, because Vic couldn’t do much to him then, either. The key was that if he lived long enough, he would outlast Vic Wingate. One day Mike would be a fully grown adult man and Vic would be—old. All Mike had to do was endure. Vic was human. It was Mike’s version of a win-win scenario.
That was the first part of the revelation and it wasn’t until dawn this morning that Mike had gotten the second wave of the revelation, which was equally comforting but in an entirely different way. Or, perhaps it was comforting to an entirely different part of Mike Sweeney—for, truth to tell, there were a lot of different parts to that boy.
At dawn he’d gotten up and had staggered on wobbly legs into the bathroom to piss blood. He didn’t bother to turn the light on. There was a faint dawn glow coming in through the frosted glass of his bathroom window, but he knew the smell. Uric acid mixed with copper. It wasn’t the first time he’d pissed blood strong enough to smell it. Vic was a treat to live with. He finished urinating, washed his hands, and as he turned to go back to bed he rubbed his hand across his stomach, probing at the mound of the massive hematoma that had blossomed from Vic’s punch. It was gone. His probing fingers pushed into the pale skin of his belly and found no hard swelling at all. He stopped in the doorway and pressed harder. Ah, yes, it was there, but smaller, deeper. An older pain, like a wound that was going away.