I looked at the speedometer—
—100—
—and then Christopher looked at me, at the hole in the roof, the one in the floor, and the gun in my hand, and said: "What'd you do that for?"—
—except the way that he said it, all softly and childlike and innocent, made me hear it as Let go of my Eggo; You got your chocolate in my peanut butter; Let's have Mikey try it, he hates everything, and because I heard that way, I did the only thing I could think of, the only thing that seemed right and normal and appropriate—
—I started laughing.
And couldn't stop.
No matter how much I tried, I could not stop with the yuks and the giggles and the hardee-dee-har-har-hars; couldn't get control of the chuckles and the hoots; I doubled-up with the snickers and snorts, then tripled-up with the cackles, and by the time the chortles and guffaws came into it, I think I was actually beginning to implode; I howled with laugher; I quaked with mirth; I became almost transcendent with the sillies; I went through so many different types of laughter I accidentally invented new ones as the giddy violence of it spread fiery pain down my throat and flooded my eyes with tears and pulled all the oxygen from my lungs: I snuckled, I chorkled—I even guffortled—and now I was hearing lines from an unwritten Dr. Seuss book: "Little Markie Sieber laughed himself to death/He snickered and he snortled until his very last breath/People claim he yiggled, perhaps even chorkled/He most definitely higgled before he at last guffortled…." It was so great—we were about to die in a fiery crash of shattered glass and twisted metal and mangled bodies and I was laughing my ass off. I slammed a hand against my ribs because my heart was trying to sneak out like the coward it was but I wasn't having that, no. My stomach was ripping into bloody shreds under my skin and my lungs were shriveling up and I didn't care; Little Markie Sieber would laugh himself to death and that was fine by me.
I don't know how long it took before the storm fizzled out, but when it was done I found myself half on the floor, half in my seat, kneeling face-first like a drunk heaving into a toilet, and everything inside my body was throbbing with pain.
Then this voice started to penetrate the thick haze in my skull, it was saying something about finished and done and holes and—
—I looked up at Christopher; he was sitting half-turned in his seat, looking down at me, arms crossed over the steering wheel, fingers drumming away. The bus wasn't shaking to pieces any longer. There wasn't going to be any spectacular Götterdammerung-ing on this road this morning—at least, not by us. When had we stopped moving, anyway? I looked around—insomuch as my eyes could focus—and saw that we'd pulled over into the emergency lane. Morning traffic was getting slightly heavier now. No one looked at us.
I wiped my eyes and grinned up Christopher.
"Are you finished?" he asked.
"Why'd… why'd you… why'd you stop?" I pulled myself back into my seat, leaning my head back and holding my chest, gasping for air.
He waited until I was settled before answering. "Oh, all kinds of reasons—it felt like this goddamn thing was about to crack apart… I think I hit a rabbit… the CD ended and it was time to change the tunes… but I suppose the biggest reason was that… well, gosh, my curiosity just got the best of me and I had to find out which part of the story you found SO FUCKING FUNNY!"
His first punch broke my nose; his second one cracked a rib; he was getting ready to deliver a third when I pulled back my legs and kicked out squarely at the center of his chest, slamming him back against his door, then threw open my own door and stumbled out, losing my balance and falling back-first against the bus, and then Christopher came over my seat and grabbed at my shirt collar but I pulled away, hearing the material rip, and staggered toward the far end, and the next punch came so fast and hard that I was spun back against the bus before I had a chance to block his blow, and as I tried righting myself into a defensive position the second punch landed twice as hard as the last one, right in my stomach, and I doubled over, and the next punch crashed against the side of my mouth, bloodying it instantly and snapping me straight up; I tried to cover but the blows kept landing deep into my stomach and against the side of my head, then again to my head, again to my stomach and I was gasping because now the pain and the bleeding were getting very hard, blood streaming down from my mouth to my shirt and what saved me from being pummeled into unconsciousness right then and there was that I threw the most half-assed doofus-janitor hook and it landed but didn't seem to do any good and now here came a punch toward my eyes and I managed to lower my head in time for the blow to land on the top of my head and I thought I heard a couple of Christopher's knuckles pop ("You and that hard head of yours," Tanya always said) and that was good, that was great, but not great enough to stop his punches from triphammering into my stomach again.
I could feel myself starting to black out, so I shook myself and lunged forward, punching Christopher in the neck and grabbing the back of his head so I could yank it forward and punch his eyes but it was slippery going because his eyes were wet but whether it was from tears or blood I couldn't tell and didn't care, by that time Christopher had regained his balance and was slamming me back against the bus as he launched into another attack.
But not so fierce this time.
I covered myself as best I could, taking the blows on the top of my head or on the sides of my arms until there were almost no more because Christopher was nearly punched out but that was too little too late, my eyes were starting to roll back into my head, I had to do something unexpected, something vicious, so I fell against him, grabbing him in a bear hug while trying to get my brain working again, and now Christopher's punches were weakening, almost no problem at all—
—then my knees began to buckle.
Christopher, his chest heaving, pushed me back toward the trailer, threw a roundhouse that went wild, landing against my ear and spinning me along the length of the Airstream, off-balance more than hurt this time, and when I faced him again I saw he was going for another roundhouse but this one you could see coming from a mile away in slow-motion like something in a Peckinpah movie, and I knew I should have been able to duck it but my brain and body were not just then on speaking terms because the punch landed, landed hard, exploding against my jaw. I fell back helpless as Christopher staggered toward me, slamming me in the ribs as best he could and there was no doubt in my mind that this wasn't him, he just hadn't been taking his medication—that's what I told myself, to make it seem like a noble thing I was doing here, getting my ass kicked and telling myself the reason I wasn't fighting back was because this wasn't really his fault—then I decided that was bullshit and swung out and caught him in his good jaw and he staggered back, took a breath, and struck me again.
Another punch to the mouth.
I countered with a sharp elbow-jab to the throat.
Another punch to the stomach.
I countered with a hard heel to the instep.
Another blow to the mouth.
Again my eyes started to roll back.
Christopher made his hand into a fist and his arm into a club and pulled back far and hard and I just had this sneaking suspicion that this next blow was going to ram my jawbone up into my brain—
—then I saw, of all things, Denise's face, the way she'd looked sitting in the truck stop and craning to get to the straw in the glass of orange juice, and I saw the fear and sadness and confusion there, and remembered how the rest of them had looked when the masks were off and decided there was no way in hell I was going to spend the next four hours repairing Christopher's makeup after this—