Blvd. of Blood

Book 1, chapters 12–15

Continued from here. Table of contents for ease of navigation here.

(The story so far: Colin Lang grows a beard and continues to plan something mysterious and horrible; Bernie Feldman knows only that he has some part to play in it on April 10; also, he has always hated Alan Jancewicz.)

12.

Delia Jancewicz frogmarched Alan, her only son, to the car. He would be upset if they were late, even by a minute, but he also refused to hurry. He took his time tying his shoes; he took his time buttoning and rebuttoning his jacket. Years ago Delia could just pick him up and bodily set him in the car, but Alan was now twenty-eight. She marched him along, holding both his elbows behind his back—somewhat gently with the hand that held the keys. She had pushed the keys into his flesh once, quite by accident, and the deep impression the teeth left on his upper arm had turned blue and lasted for days.

Alan only slowly pulled one foot and then the other deliberately into the car. But his eye, Delia could tell, was on the time. They had to pass the mailbox while the dashboard clock read 10:15. Alan didn’t throw his tantrums much any more, but he could sulk, and a good sulk could ruin the day through dinnertime.

Delia always backed into the driveway when she came home so that they could exit driving forward. It was so much easier to pull into the street driving forward, and Alan seemed to prefer it, too. She passed the mailbox, yes, at quarter after, and they headed on their usual route.

“2013 Mazda MX-5,” said Alan, visibly relaxing into his seat. They were on time. “2015 Honda Accord.”

The constant patter could get on her nerves some days, but usually Delia valued this little routine. Alan was so mercurial most of the time, and small things set him off; but on their ride, she knew exactly what might trigger him: tardiness, too-light traffic, cardinals.

Alan, Delia knew, hated cardinals. As they drove past the park he kept his eyes away from its greenery, and across his mother, out the driver’s side window. This is where the cars were, anyway. In his youth, Alan used to write down the cars he saw, but this proved time consuming. He tired preparing checklists, but flipping through all the pages took even more time than jotting anything down. He seemed to have mellowed with age, satisfied now just to acknowledge the plenty, the myriad of cars that zoomed by. It was the pleasure of mastery; he named models of cars Delia had never even heard of. Or at least he did sometimes; their routine ensured that they passed few strange cars. There were not a lot of out-of-towners in Cottinend. The same Grand Cherokees and Lexises repeated again and again.

But that day, Alan said something different that started Delia from her reverie. “What was that?” Delia asked him.

“I said, ‘He was smiling again.’ It’s been weeks; he’s always smiling. He never smiled.”

“Who, honey?” Delia asked.

And a look came over Alan’s face that Delia might have called cagey if she could have been more certain or her angle of view. Her eyes were primarily on the road, of course.

“The 1983 Mercury Zephyr,” Alan answered.

13.

People kept saying to Bernie, “What’s wrong with you?” People had always said that to Bernie, sometimes in a friendly fashion, after he’d told a dirty joke, but usually angrily, after he’d screwed something up. But now it seemed more or less like an honest question.

Bernie just smiled and nodded and kept his mouth shut.

At times it seemed like he’d dreamed the whole encounter—the well-dressed stranger with hair severely parted. Theodore. But then he’d look at the piece of paper he’d stuck to the refrigerator. April 10.

“Hey, Nardo!” Stone yelled when he was getting a beer from the fridge. Jason Stone used to come over to play Bernie’s Xbox and steal his beer. “What happens April 10?”

“Got a date,” Bernie said cautiously from the couch.

By the time Stone had walked back into the living room the beer can was empty. He was already turning around to the kitchen again. “It’s still my turn,” he said. “And seriously, what’s in April? Parole hearing? AIDS test?”

All Bernie had to do was tell one person about his—what was it? glorious destiny. Stone’s jaw would hit the floor. Stone’s head would spin around. He’d never make fun of Bernie Feldstein again.

But instead Bernie just started laughing a long, relatively fake, contemptuous laugh.

“What’s wrong with you?” asked Stone.

14.

Colin drove to his mother’s assisted-living retirement community for Thanksgiving. He took Blande Boulevard to I-81, although the holiday traffic was anomalous enough that he did not treat the trip as providing data.

Sunset Grove served Thanksgiving dinner in a large dining room. The waiters were dressed as pilgrims, the waitresses as Wampanoags. The patrons and their guests dressed formally, or at least in a jacket and tie. Colin simply wore work clothes.

“You look like a bum,” his mother said, patting, too vigorously to be comfortable, his hirsute cheek.

“I know,” said Colin.

On November 29 he dropped a thousand-dollar donation at the Movember Foundation website. It was by far the largest charitable donation he had ever made, and probably the only one he had made without someone, a coworker or cub scout, asking him for it. On November 30 he shaved his beard.

15.

Bernie’s parents were both dead—that’s how he had his own house, by squatting and then inheritance—and his brother was all the way in Hawaii, but his mother’s sister and her husband lived two towns over. On Thanksgiving he headed there, missing like an absent lover his daily drive on Blande Boulevard. Even weekends, now, he hated—he so longed for the trip down Blande, the momentary glimpse of that bulbous freak Jancewicz, soon to die. To miss it on a Thursday, a weekday, was depressing enough, but that Thursday, to make it worse, he also had to see Aunt Janice and Uncle Stan. If his cousins were there, he’d just turn around and go home.

His cousins were there—they lived nearby, of course—and yet Bernie did not go home. Stan Jr. and Maggie were treating him differently, right off the bat.

“Have you been working out, Bernard?” Stan Jr. asked. If he didn’t ask it exactly, he implied it.

Everyone else was wearing a polo shirt or a sweater and Bernie was wearing a long-sleeved T with a photorealistic skull on it—perhaps a snake was slithering out of the eye socket, and perhaps this shirt, or one like it, had been a source of contention at previous family gatherings. But now Bernie perceived that he was in the right. Everyone else, with their twee outfits and eggnog-colored pants, had overdressed for the occasion.

“Did you lose weight?” asked Maggie.

Bernie played the strong silent type. He figured that just telling them the truth would shatter their worlds and their minds, irrevocably. Better to let them notice it gradually—his glorious destiny, his vast power.

“Because you look different.”

Bernie ate heartily and got up to make coffee—everyone else in the Fine household drank tea, but they kept a can of instant for guests, and Bernie didn’t even wait to be asked. He just got up and went to the kitchen. As the kettle reached a boil he thought about how his life had changed, and how it would just keep getting better. After April 10, the respect he received would blossom like (he actually thought this up) the flowers of spring.

When it came time to pour the hot water into the mug—the Fine’s kettle must have been shaped differently from the one he had at home, and in canting his wrist to pour, the searing-hot metal of the kettle’s side touched his forearm. Bernie’s first instinct—half-accomplished—was to pull away, but then he thought twice. He let the kettle rest against his forearm, against the hairless fleshy part right above the elbow. It didn’t even hurt that much, really, not someone like Bernie. Could a normal man do this?

He came back into the dining room proudly carrying a coffee mug with a red blistering arm, the skin already starting to slough off.

“Bernard! What happened to you?”

Stan Jr. shook his head. “He always was retarded.”

(Continued here)