Short frame, fat tires, three speeds, not exactly built for the fast lane, but my entire life—at least since Wanda left—I’d been training for an escape by bicycle. Ryan hurdled the fallen net and ran across the yard. For a giant, he had tremendous quickness, but he’d never catch me when I got up to speed. Linemen can move like bulls on lightning five or ten yards, but a quarter mile kills them.
Right off, I learned a big difference between stationary bike riding and real bike riding—curbs. Street burn. I yanked up the bike, remounted on the run, and took off down a cart path that passed through a fence and onto Starmount Golf Course. If I had to, I could hide in a sand trap or water hazard. Me and the snakes.
Behind me, the fall of footsteps slowed and stopped. I figured Ryan and Sonny had doubled back to the house for instructions. Skip would be out of denial by now and well into vengeance. What could he do? Have me killed? Castrated? I hadn’t broken any laws, that I knew of, so he could hardly swear out a warrant. Something would happen though. Skip Prescott came from the strain of men you couldn’t steal from without consequences. And stolen possessions is the term that strain uses to describe another man stuck in their wives.
Even as I pedaled my heart out, Skip wasn’t my major concern. No punishment he extracted would be as awful as what I would give myself for hurting Gilia. Shit. She was the first non-screwed-up woman to like me in a long, long time, and I’d sabotaged us. Lydia and Maurey would say I destroyed her affection on purpose. “You couldn’t handle the responsibility of accepting love so you crapped the gig.” Maybe they were right.
I followed the cart path across the fairway onto the driving range. Golf balls glowed on the wet grass, like a peculiar sort of molecule model. Kids’ bikes are geared so high you have to pump about 120 revolutions a minute to get anywhere, which on a short frame means your knees rush toward your face like pistons. It’s remarkably tiring. Barefoot and in boxer shorts, it would be a long ride home in the rain.
I crossed behind the dry pool, pro shop, and restaurant and had just entered the main parking lot when a car came flying down the street and whipping into the driveway. Ryan’s beefy arm pointed at me from the passenger side. For an instant I was frozen, a deer in headlights, then I jerked the bike into a U-turn-on-a-dime and pedaled like a maniac.
The car came forward much quicker than I moved away. I rode close to the restaurant wall, Sonny jumped the curb and kept straight at me, apparently planning to smash me and Bobby’s bike against the building. I zipped around the kitchen onto a short driveway leading down, away from the club. At the end of the driveway, two Dempsey Dumpsters sat side by side with maybe a two-foot clearance between them.
A two-foot clearance is what a bicycle has that a car hasn’t. Going full pedal, I shot between the Dumpsters and out the other side. From the rear, I heard Sonny’s tires squeal around the corner followed by the spine-tearing sound of stomped brakes and an iron thunderclap when they slammed into the Dumpsters.
26
From a block away, the jack-o’-lanterns flickered orange like Japanese paper lanterns outlining the shadow of a fairy castle—the Beast’s castle after Beauty taught him how to love and turned him back handsome. It was difficult to convince myself they were real.
I’d been pedaling for several miles, depressed to the core. What had started out fairly simple—meet my fathers—had spun out of control. A week and a half ago I occupied the moral high ground. The men raped my mother and rapists should be held accountable; but instead of holding evil jerks accountable for their sins, I’d run rampant on the innocent families. The wrong people got screwed. Skip would probably divorce Katrina. Gilia had lost her trust, Clark was disillusioned, and the memory that gave Atalanta Williams the courage to go on had been destroyed. And all for what? So I could call a man “Dad”? Genes come from sperm and knowing where the sperm came from doesn’t change who you are. Searching for the source is selfish.
Because I was so absorbed with myself, at first I didn’t realize the apparition down the block was the place I lived. I had the sense of an out-of-proportion birthday cake. Eugene and Shannon had lined every rain gutter and balcony. The ledge around the second floor glittered with orange candles. One of every six or seven lanterns had blown out or burned out, but that still left three hundred glowing pumpkins. It was the most beautiful man- and woman-made thing I’d ever seen.
A knot of people stood in the street, admiring the Manor House. As I rode closer, details became clear on individual pumpkin faces. They’d done the roof in Gilia’s heads with the triangle eyes and diamond noses. Down lower, more visible, Shannon’s surrealistic faces gave an unsettling gargoyle look to the house. I searched for my van Gogh, but couldn’t see him.
A woman in the crowd said, “What’s he doing?”
“I think it’s a costume,” a man said. “Part of the show.”
Up till then I’d been so focused on jack-o’-lanterns I hadn’t noticed the figure on the porch. Dressed in black, he seemed to be filling a bucket with water from a hose. As I watched, he put on a black glove and unscrewed the bulb from the porch light, then he pulled off the glove and put it in his jacket pocket.
I said, “Clark, you idiot.”
The woman who’d spoken first said, “You know that boy? Is he part of the show?”
I dropped Bobby’s bicycle on the grass and walked across the yard toward Clark and the house. Behind me, someone said, “That’s not a costume, it’s underwear.”
Clark peered across the lawn. “Don’t come any closer, Mr. Callahan.” Since last night’s botch job, he’d done some homework. An orange extension cord ran from the plug under the light socket to the bucket, where he’d stripped the last six inches of wire and wrapped it around the handle.
“Clark, what in hell are you doing this time?”
His forehead rippled. “You laughed at me. You said only an idiot tries to kill himself with electricity.”
“I meant breathing fumes from an electric motor.”
“No one takes me seriously.”
“I take you seriously, Clark. So does your father.”
“No, you don’t. You all think I’m a clown.”
“You don’t have to die to prove your emotions are real.”
He balanced a foot on the bucket. “The world is an awful place, Mr. Callahan. I’ll never fit in here.”
Clark stuck his foot in the water and his finger in the light socket.
I rammed him as hard as I could with my shoulder. The momentum broke Clark free from the charge but not before I caught a stiff zap. I landed on my left side on the concrete porch and slid into a column. When I looked back, Clark lay on his face in the spreading water from the dumped bucket.
Clark was dead weight as I rolled him over on his back. His face had gone slack and gray. Both eyes were nearly closed, but not quite—twin egg-white slits showed in the folds. I felt his neck for a pulse but couldn’t find one, so I doubled up my fist and belted him in the chest. The body didn’t jerk or anything, was like hitting a sack of potatoes. I put my ear to his heart and held my own breath, listening. Nothing.
From the street someone called, “Is he all right?”
I grabbed hair and pulled Clark’s head back like they teach you in the artificial respiration films in high school. In the films, the victim’s mouth falls open and the savior goes to work, but in my case, Clark’s jaw locked. First I tried prying it open with my thumb, then I slapped him hard. No good.