“Direct hit.”
“Does the skull crack?”
“Skull remains intact.”
He sat back now and looked up at the tiled ceiling of our little room. He looked almost happy at the moment, the concentration-camp expression that had decorated his face all morning banished to a far corner of his mind. For a moment, I had allowed him to escape his current reality and flee to that safe harbor that had always protected him before: work.
“The brain’s a funny thing,” he said. “You ever heard of Phineas Gage?”
I indicated that I had not.
“In the mid-1800s, Gage was a construction foreman working on a roadbed for some railroad up North. This involved, of course, blasting away rock to clear a path for the tracks.”
He shifted in his seat as he crossed his legs and folded his hands behind his silver head. The hem of his pants lifted, and I saw that his socks were shiny, too.
“To blast away rock,” he continued, “you poured blasting powder into a hole, stuck a fuse in there, covered it up with sand and then packed the whole works together with this thing called a ‘tamping iron,’ like a ramrod for a musket only much, much bigger. The one Gage was using was over an inch thick and over three feet long. Made, of course, of pure iron.
“He screwed something up. The charge detonated with the tamping iron still rammed in there and it came shooting out like a bullet—right through Gage’s head. Entered his face, passed behind his left eye and busted out the other side of his head. Again: over an inch wide. Three feet long.”
I listened intently.
“Within a few minutes, he was talking again. Within a few minutes after that, he was sitting up. He walked himself—hole in his head, now, clean shot all the way through—over to the cart and sat upright all the way to the doctor. He lived for another twelve years.”
Dr. Wingrove shrugged.
“So what’s a baseball bat strike to the head going to do to your typical brain case? Answer: who knows? But a good whack will probably kill the patient. Gage’s case is so remarkable because it’s an outlier, a fluke, so rare you can’t help but remember it. If it doesn’t kill him, he’s likely to remain unconscious for some time and when he comes to—if he comes to—he’ll experience nausea, vomiting, disorientation…”
He flipped a hand at the ceiling tile.
“…all kinds of fun stuff. Severe head trauma can cause tissue swelling inside the brain case, which doesn’t bode well for a quick recovery. So if your guy takes a bat to the head and gets up thirty seconds later, I’d bet my money on one thing.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“He didn’t get hit that hard. Because the batter wasn’t trying to kill him.”
27.
Pinnix and Ramseur hadn’t tried to kill me that night. They hit me hard enough to put me out, but only for a short period of time. They didn’t stop to make sure I was dead; they gave me a love tap with the bat and moved on.
How long was I out? I asked myself in the car on the way home from work that evening. Rural Alamance County, rushing past the windows of the BMW at 55 miles per hour, didn’t answer me.
It didn’t matter—I didn’t think it did, at least. It did matter, though, that the man who’d swung the bat at my head hadn’t actually tried to kill me. Had he put his heart and soul into it, my head would have shattered like Humpty Dumpty falling off the wall. Dr. Wingrove had said: nausea, disorientation, vomiting. Swelling of the brain. Getting up, loading an assault rifle, stalking the enemy, putting high-powered bullets exactly where they needed to go…
“Not bloody likely,” I growled to the empty air in the passenger seat beside me.
But why? What did the Bald Man want with me?
That’s no man, replied a voice in my head. This one didn’t belong to Bobby or Kate or Allie; I recognized this as my own. I think you know that.
But, again: why me? I understood why he wanted to see me go down so badly now; I’d wasted his two golems when they broke into my house in February. He’d set up this little game where I had a chance to rabbit right on out the basement door, but I hadn’t done it. I’d said fuck these two guys and fuck you—game on, bitch. I hadn’t played the way he thought I would, and now he had to show me who the bitch was, here. I got that. But I didn’t get why he sent golems after me in the first place. What had I ever done to deserve the attention of a demon?
“Who knows why the Devil picks people?” Kate had said on the phone when I’d called her from my cell that afternoon. Bobby was out in the woods near Camp Lejeune, she said, playing war. Bad-asses did that to stay sharp when there’s no enemy in the immediate vicinity for them to kill. “He just does. I don’t know. Maybe he looked at you and saw your house, your career, your wife, your child, and he said: this man is blessed by God. God likes this man, God loves this man; maybe I can’t touch Him, but I can destroy His little pet. And so he picked you.”
And so he picked me.
Dead leaves swirled in my wake as I piloted the BMW up the long driveway and splashed light across the front of my house. The garage door opened to receive us but I didn’t enter right away; instead, I sat in the driveway and tried to survey my palace with the eyes of an outsider. Allie had fallen in love with the porch and the gabled roof the first time she’d ever laid eyes on it, right here in the same spot as my car now sat—albeit in much better lighting conditions. Bigger than the Rock Barn house, I realized. Taller, wider, more square footage, bigger lot. If a house said something about a man, mine said: Kevin Swanson is a rich son of a bitch.
But the true riches lay inside, asleep in beds beneath smooth ceilings trimmed with crown molding. This house, as much as I liked to sit out here and stare at it like it had boobs or something, provided only a stage where the best part of my life played out on a daily basis. In a world packed to the gills with disabled children, drug-addicted children, rotten children, I had Abby. And in the same world, where more than fifty percent of marriages ended in divorce and people who supposedly loved each other lied, cheated and stole, I had Allie. I had married my best friend. This year would mark the point where I’d spent more of my life with her than without her. Maybe the Pinnix and Ramseur thing made no sense, but what had I done to deserve the incredible good fortune that constituted the rest of my life? I hadn’t set foot in church since my father’s funeral. I’d never even had my daughter baptized.
And yet I drove a European sports sedan with clean-smelling leather seats and a motor that purred like a porn star, and I could park it in a house bigger than the one my cardiologist father had raised me in. Whereafter I would go upstairs, undress and lay beside the most beautiful woman in the world—who had so very recently rediscovered the joys of having sex with me on an almost daily basis.
Okay, then. God had blessed me. And that made me a target.
A hard target, though. Six golems later, I still held this castle while the Bald Man raged and frothed at the mouth in his dark little rathole and dirtied his hands with the clay of yet another beast.
Which I would kill. Because I remained, as Bobby said, a hard son of a bitch—a stone cold killer.
“Fuck you, motherfucker,” I mumbled.
I put the BMW in gear and proceeded into the garage.
28.
“You’re an alien,” Bobby said on Saturday, Christmas Eve. He had homebrewed some beer at his house in Jacksonville and he had brought twelve bottles with him to Burlington. A glass of the jet-black brew in one hand, he stood in the hallway with me, observing the wall. The painters had patched over the bullet holes and painted over the bloodstains that I couldn’t scrub away. They used Sherwin Williams paint. I knew this because they’d done it on a weekend, when I was home, and on their lunch break I had gone and stared at the cans. The Sherwin Williams logo showed a can of paint spilling over the Earth above the slogan Cover the World. I had always found that a little eerie before. That day, I found it comforting.