“You broke my fucking leg in three places,” Charles said. “You broke my heart—”
“Charles—”
“And you should know, I think about killing you. I think about stringing you up by your ungrateful little neck, and — and leaving you for dead.” He swallowed loudly. It sounded like a rock dropped in a pond. Tears stormed his red eyes. One actually threw itself over the wall, sliding down his face. “Like you did to her.”
“Fuck, Charles—”
“Stop.”
“She’s not worth it.”
“Yeah, man. She’s a terrible kisser.”
There was a silence, and then Jade sizzled with laugher.
“She is?” Charles instantly stopped crying. He sniffed and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
“The worst. She’s like kissin’ tuna.”
“Tuna?”
“Maybe it was sardines. Shrimp. I don’t remember. I tried to block it from my mind.”
I couldn’t breathe. Blood was flooding into my face, as if he hadn’t spoken, but kicked me in the face. And I knew it was one of those devastating moments in Life when one had to address one’s congress, pull The Jimmy Stuart. I had to show them they were not dealing with a wounded, fearful nation, but an awakened giant. Yet I couldn’t retaliate with any old cruise missile. It would have to be a Little Boy, a Fat Man, a gigantic head of cauliflower (bystanders would later claim they saw a second sun) with scorched bodies, the chalky taste of atomic fission in the pilots’ mouths. Afterward I might feel regret, probably think the inevitable, “My God, what have I done?” but that never stopped anyone.
Dad had a small black book he kept on his bedside table, Words of a Glowworm (Punch, 1978), which he turned to at night, when he was tired and craved something sweet the way some women craved dark chocolate. It was a book of the most powerful quotations in the world. I knew most of them. “History is a set of lies generally agreed upon,” Napoleon said. “Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way,” said General George Patton. “On stage I make love to twenty-five thousand people and then I go home alone,” moaned Janis Joplin, bleary of eye and disheveled of hair. “Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company,” said Mark Twain.
I stared at Milton. He couldn’t look at me, but pressed against the trunk of that tree, as if he wished it would eat him.
“‘We are all worms,’” I said carefully, “‘but I do believe I am a glowworm.’”
“What?” asked Jade.
I turned and began to walk away.
“What was that?”
“That’s what you call taking a moment.”
“Did you see her? She’s totally possessed.”
“Find an exorcist!” Charles shouted, and laughed, a sound like poured gold coins, and the trees bore the sound up with their perfect acoustics and made it float in the air.
When I reached the parking lot, I encountered Mr. Moats walking to his car with textbooks under his arm. He looked startled when he saw me coming out of the trees, as if he thought I was the ghost of El Greco.
“Blue van Meer?” he called out uncertainly, but I didn’t smile or speak to him.
I’d already started to run.
The Nocturnal Conspiracy
It was one of the biggest scandals of Life, to learn the cruelest thing someone could say to you was that you were a terrible kisser.
One would think it’d be worse to be a Traitor, Hypocrite, Bitch, Whore or any other foul person, worse even to be a Way-out-there, a Welcome Mat, a Was-Girl, a Weasel. I suspect one would even fare better with “bad in bed,” because everyone has an off day, a day when his/her mind hitchhikes on each and every thought that cruises by, and even champion racehorses such as Couldn’t Be Happier, who won both the Derby and the Preakness in 1971, could suddenly come in dead last, as he did at the Belmont Stakes. But to be a terrible kisser — to be tuna—was the worst of all, because it meant you were without passion, and to be without passion, well, you might as well be dead.
I walked home (4.1 miles), replaying that humiliating remark again and again in my head (in slo-mo, so I could mentally draw agonizing little circles around my every instance of fumbling, holding, intentional grounding and personal foul). In my room, I broke down into one of those headachy weeps one would think would be reserved for the death of a family member, for terminal illness, the end of the world. I cried into my clammy pillowcase for over an hour, the darkness swelling in the room, the night slinking up and crouching in the windows. Our house, the elaborate, empty 24 Armor Street, seemed to wait for me, wait like bats for darkness, an orchestra for a conductor, waiting for me to calm myself, to proceed.
Stuffy of head and crimson of eye, I rolled off my bed, wandered downstairs, played the message from Dad about dinner with Arnie Sanderson, removed from the fridge the Stonerose Bakery chocolate cake Dad had brought home the other day (part of the Van Meer Brighten Up Blue Initiative) and, grabbing a fork, carried it up to my room.
“We’re tucking you in tonight with breaking news,” sang the imaginary Cherry Jeffries of my head. “It took not the police force, not the National Guard, Park Rangers, K-9, the FBI, CIA, Pentagon, not preachers, clairvoyants, palm readers, dream catchers, superheroes, Martians, not even a trip to Lourdes, but simply a brave, local area teen to solve the murder of Hannah Louise Schneider, age forty-four, whose death had been erroneously declared a suicide by the Sluder County Sheriff’s Department just last week. A gifted senior at the St. Gallway School in Stockton, Miss Blue van Meer, who happens to have an I.Q. that will knock your pants off, 175, flew in the face of adversity from teachers, students, and fathers alike when she deciphered a range of nearly imperceptible clues leading her to the woman’s killer, now in police custody and awaiting trial. Dubbed the Schoolgirl Sam Spade, Miss Van Meer has not only been a regular on the talk-show circuit, from Oprah and Leno to the Today show and The View, also gracing the cover of this month’s Rolling Stone, but she’s also been invited to the White House to dine with the President, who, despite her tender age of sixteen, asked her to serve as a U.S. Ambassador on a thirty-two-country Goodwill Tour promoting peace and world freedom. All of this prior to her matriculation at Harvard this fall. Christ. Isn’t that something else, Norvel? Norvel?”
“Oh. Uh, yes.”
“It just goes to show you that this world isn’t falling apart too bad. Because there are real heroes out there and dreams really do come true.”
I had no choice but to do what Chief Inspector Curry did when facing a dead end in one of his investigations, as he did on p. 512 of Conceit of a Unicorn (Lavelle, 1901), when “every door remains bolted and every casement firmly latched, concealing the wickedness at which we, my esteemed Horace, may only fitfully turn our discouraged minds to, much as the lean mongrel wandering our city of slate and stone, poking through rubbish, fraught for a careless scrap of mutton dropped by an unwary merchant or solicitor on his journey home. Yet, there is hope! For remember, my dear lad, the starving dog misses naught! When in doubt, return to the victim! He will light your way.”
I pulled out a neon pink five-by-seven note card and wrote out a list of Hannah’s friends, the few names I knew. There was the late Smoke Harvey and his family who lived in Findley, West Virginia, and the man from the animal shelter, Richard Something, who lived on the llama farm, and Eva Brewster, Doc, the other men from Cottonwood (though I wasn’t sure one could classify them as friends, more acquaintances).