Prodigal Blues (30 page)

"
Huh
?"

He jerked the wheel to the left to avoid hitting the fattest and slowest raccoon known to existence (who'd just decided that the middle of our lane was the absolute best place to stop and lick his unmentionables) but we were going way too fast; every tire squealed; the bus and trailer both lurched sideways; we damn near sideswiped an SUV that was trying to pass—the driver and passenger both gave us the finger while yelling things we couldn't hear and probably wouldn't have appreciated, but right then I didn't give a damn about them or the raccoon or even the bodies back in the trailer—the only thing I cared about was getting Christopher calmed down and some of his medicine into him; it was either that or knock his ass out and take the wheel myself—he was jumping around in his seat like water on a hot griddle, eyes wide, hands shaking even though they gripped the wheel, knuckles white; there wasn't one part of him that wasn't trembling as he jerked the wheel to the right to get back into our lane—we smashed the raccoon anyway, little fellow was probably depressed and better off—and once we were steady and straight again he started to speak, but I reached over and grabbed his wrist and swear that I felt an electrical shock jump off his skin and shoot up into my shoulder.
 
"Christopher, you have to slow down, we're going too fast."

"Too
fast
?
 
You think
this
is fast?
 
This is a Sunday drive with the grandparents, Pretty Boy,
this
is wussy test-drive speed, this is
nothing!
 
You want fast?
 
Sincerely?
 
I'll
give
you fast."
 
He shifted gears and floored the accelerator.
 
I watched as the speedometer climbed past 75, hit 80, got bored in a hurry, and crept toward 85.

"Goddammit,
slow down!
" I had to shout to be heard over the loud metallic groan-grind of the engine behind us.

"What
for?"
shouted back Christopher, twice as loudly.
 
"Thought you were in a
hurry
to get home to the wife, get away from all this.
 
I'm just
trying
to be accommodating, Mark,
trying
to be the good host,
trying
to do the right thing for everyone involved.
 
Rebecca, she fucked Grendel so we could get those keys made,
that
was accommodating; Thomas claimed that he was just goofing around with the Play-
Doh
and the key when Grendel came down and asked us what was it with the stuff on his key, that was
amazingly
accommodating, don't you think, especially since Grendel didn't believe him for one second, said the stuff on his key hadn't been there before and what were we up to, anyway?
 
And Thomas said it wasn't
us
, it was just him, and Grendel, he was
so
disappointed by that and we all just
knew
what that meant,
that
meant a visit to Ravenswood—only this time,
this
time, we
all
had to go down there, and he strapped Thomas onto the table and got out the blowtorch and the bone saw and gave Thomas a little shot so he wouldn't pass out from the pain—Grendel
did not
like it when someone passed out from the pain, really put a
crimp
in his evening—and once he was sure the shot had taken effect—he'd given Thomas just enough to temporarily numb him, not knock him out—then he fired-up the bone saw and the blowtorch and handed the torch to me and he cut off Thomas's right leg and god, God,
God, GOD!
how Thomas screamed and thrashed against the straps but that didn't mean shit to the Big Ugly One, no, screaming only made him work
slower
—and that's just what he did, slowed
waaaaaaay down
with the saw—and Arnold's holding Rebecca so she doesn't try to run over and put a stop to it—I
think
that's what was going on, I couldn't be sure, because suddenly the leg was
off
, just like that, all goo and gristle and Grendel grabbed it from the table and tossed it in the corner and I set to work with the blow torch and Thomas is
still
screaming, still thrashing, and there's
all
this blood and slivers of bone and chunks of muscle slopping around on the table, but I kept at the stump with the torch until the bleeding stopped—it smelled like a barbecue pit down there—then Grendel gave Thomas another shot, pulled out his favorite pistol—the baby I got right here—and he held the business end against Thomas's temple, looked right at me, and said, just as calm as you please:
 
"Cut off the other one or I'll kill him right now and make you fuck the exit hole"—he'd've done it, too, we all knew what he was capable of, so I took the saw and then Rebecca broke loose of Arnold—she grabbed the torch—like you say, she's the nurse, a nurse assists—and I cut off Thomas's other leg and Rebecca cauterized the wound and the whole time we were doing this,
the whole entire time
, Thomas was still conscious—can you believe that?—he's one tough kid—he didn't scream or thrash or
nothing
—he just lay there looking up at Grendel and saying "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'll be good, I will, I promise"—like he
believed
he was being punished for doing something bad, he was crying and his face was all red and sweaty and the
snot—
Christ, the snot was
spilling
out of his nose and down into his mouth and as soon as I had his leg off and looked at his face I understood then like I'd never understood it before—mostly because I'd stopped letting myself think about it:
 
I understood for the very first time that Grendel wasn't human, he was a different species, a
sub-species
, and if you were a good person, if you believed that you were a
decent
person and that it was wrong to hurt other people, that you sh-sh-should treat all people with respect and compassion, then how could you allow yourself to just…to just
stand
there and do nothing?—that's all I'd been doing, just standing by all those years and letting him do what he wanted—fuck, I even helped him, I
helped him
with I-don't-know how many of the other kids, I
stood there
and handed him whatever he asked for and cleaned up afterwards and acted like it was no big deal to me because that's what he wanted, he wanted me to feel nothing, to be like him, and after a while I didn't know if I was doing this because I was trying to protect the family or if there was some part of me, some
sub-species
part that was starting to become
just like
him, and if that was the case, then I'd
allowed
it to happen, I'd opened the door and let it out and I
hated
him for that, I
hated
him so
goddamn much
and now, now here was Thomas, this great little kid, with a gun at his head and he's
apologizing
to this sub-species piece of shit like he understood that he'd been bad and
deserved
to have his legs cut off then something near the base of my neck snapped like a toothpick and I
COULDN'T
FUCKING TAKE IT ANYMORE!
"
 

He made a fist with his right hand and began hitting the steering wheel, the dashboard, the roof above him.
 
"
NO MORE NO MORE NO MORE NO MOOOOOOOOORE!
 
And you know what I did?
 
I took that beautiful bone saw—
God
it was the most perfect thing under heaven there in my hand—and I stepped forward and swung it up in this smooth arc and just
buried
it right in
Grendel's
kneecap, and he screamed and spun around and fired off a shot, but the shot, it went wild—that gave me enough time to cut one of Thomas's straps, and once his hand was free it came up and he
grabbed
Grendel's nuts and started squeezing like a vice, then Arnold snatched one of the Mason jars—it had a uterus in it—and he heaved that thing straight and hard right into the back of Grendel's head and it shattered but the thing is, Grendel still hadn't dropped the gun, so I went for his hand with the saw and he got off another shot that went right through the meat of Rebecca's right shoulder and she dropped the torch and poor Thomas's pants and shirt caught fire because what none of us had noticed was that the jar with the had been filled with alcohol, and when it shattered, most of it had splattered onto Thomas's face and clothes but we couldn't
do anything
right then because Grendel had the gun, so I took the saw and hit his collar and then I stripped a chunk out of his bicep and then rammed it right into the middle of his hand and he threw back his head and screamed and dropped the gun and there was blood all over him, all over me, it was on the floor and all over our shoes—we started slipping around like a couple of dancing partners and when we went down, we hit the concrete hard and it
hurt
—Christ! it hurt—but as soon as we hit he grabbed my throat with his good hand and dug in his nails and tried to crush my windpipe but Rebecca, she had his gun now and she didn't even
bother
aiming, she just pushed it right between his balls and his asshole and blew the whole works all over the floor—Grendel screamed like I'd never heard
anyone
scream, he was spitting blood and foam and I swear to Christ, I'll swear on a stack of Bibles, until the day I die I'll
swear
that his eyes turned into two bright red burning coals right before he shuddered and squittered shit and piss out of what was left down there and then passed out."

We were at 90 and the bus was beginning to shudder and swerve; people looked out in shock as we blasted past them.

"Thomas's face, all those burns on him—it was our fault, we just—Jesus, we just wanted to kill Grendel so much none of us even thought about what was in the jars—and Thomas, he can't pull himself off that table and run for the sink because his other arm and his chest are still strapped down"—

—93…94—

—"Christopher, please, you have to
slow down
, if you don't you're"—

—"so I pull down this piece of tarp that's covering a crate of medical supplies and throw it on top of him and then all three of us are on top of him and patting down the tarp and there's smoke and the smell of burning flesh"—

—"going to kill us, you're going to ram this thing into the side of a truck or"—

—95…96—

—"and Thomas is bucking and shaking and screaming again and… and"—

—"make this fucking bus shake apart or lose control of the wheel and flip us about a thousand times"—

—97—

—"and it's all so… so
unnecessary!
 
Jesus, Mark, there was
no need!
"—

—98—

—"I'm begging you, Christopher, I'm—
LOOK AT ME, WILL YOU?
 
I'm
BEGGING
you to please"—

—"No need for any of it, for things like Grendel to be walking around all safe and sound and sleeping so peacefully like some baby with a fresh soul"—

—99—

—the bus was shaking like some giant iron lizard having a seizure the wheel was rattling right off the column—

—"
SLOW DOWN!
"—

—"while there are kids like Thomas who have to apologize to monsters like it was
them
who'd done the wrong"—

—I reached over and yanked the pistol from him and fired a shot into the roof, then one into the floor between my legs, then turned it on him—"
SLOW DOWN RIGHT NOW OR I'LL SHOOT YOU AND
"—and the sudden absurdity of what I was about to say hit me; if I shot him, he'd let go of the wheel, the bus would spin, the trailer would jackknife, we'd probably do about a dozen somersaults across all three lanes on this side, and there wouldn't be enough left of either of us to identify once the gas tank and ammonium-nitrate went up.

This wasn't a threat I was making; it was the punchline to the dumbest fucking joke never told.

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.