Blvd. of Blood

Book 4, chapters 1–3

(Upcoming appearances: June 1, 12–5, Skullastic Book Fair, American Legion Post 16, Shelton CT | July 15, 6–7:30, author talk, Hagaman Library, East Haven CT)

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

(The story so far: It’s April 10. Showtime.)

Book IV: One Long Night

“’Tis easier watching a night or two than to sit up a whole year together.”
•Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress II (1684).

1.

On April 10, a little after nine P.M., Colin Lang parked not at but near the all-night diner on Ridgemont. The street had, running along it, overflow parking spots that never got used, and Colin just pulled into one of those. If anyone asked he could say he was headed to the diner; it was hardly absurd for a diner patron to park here. He slipped his wallet out of his pocket, and the shoehorn fell out. He had been supposed to move the shoehorn to the glove compartment immediately upon entering the car! Colin cursed himself for making this error, but more for trying to improvise. He should have left the shoehorn at home! It was a stupid mistake, and he promised himself he would make no more of them. He opened the glove compartment and tucked the shoehorn in the back behind the registration. Then he put the wallet in as well, closer to the front, and closed the glove compartment.

That was a momentary hiccup. With the wallet put away everything was back on track.

Colin exited the car and locked it with the key, which was quieter than hitting the (beep beep) lock button. He walked past the diner. Then he kept walking along Ridgemont Road. The sidewalk disappeared, and he walked on the grassy margin. It felt weird not to have a watch, or phone, or any way to know the time. Still there was no need to hurry. Nothing relied on a precise schedule, at least not yet.

He didn’t look like Colin Lang trudging along that deserted street, of course. The wig and the mustache; the nose putty and the cheek cotton. He had on a baseball cap he’d bought way back in November. It was a nondescript dark blue with a mesh back. He wore gloves and a windbreaker. The cotton scarf end dangled from the jacket pocket. Something like a clunky bracelet ringed his wrist. The night was mild. There was a little moon, which was frankly a miracle in Cottinend, when the sky was usually too overcast for the sun, let alone the moon, to be seen. A car key was in his pants pocket, and a post-it and a wadded black garbage bag, and nothing else.

An occasional car zoomed by, its headlights dazzling in the dark night. Unlike the Shopping District—designated as such by a series of twee signs built by the Rotarians—with its broad sidewalks bright lights and zebra crossings, the stores on Ridgemont Road were for drivers only. Colin walked past dark and empty lots. Sometimes he walked on the grass and sometimes he walked in the gutter. He walked for twenty minutes.

Ridgemont Rest had a short driveway with bushes and a flanking ornamental two-foot high brick wall, ringed by flood lights. Colin turned in, walking behind the flood lights. His feet crunched softly on the wood chips. The parking lot was much less well lit, a light-sink between the illuminated main building and the flood lights at the entrance. No one came or left the campus this late at night. Everyone was asleep, and the night nurses were probably playing poker. He stopped at a decorative border and picked up a rock the size of a cantaloupe.

Colin Lang had not hotwired a car in three decades, but you never forget. He’d already returned to riding a bicycle. The only catch was that he needed an older car, one without the fancy computerized ignition. One unlike his own car. And here was a lot full of them.

The rock he wrapped in the scarf. He took the clunky bracelet off—it proved to be a roll of packing tape, the one he’d picked up at the Rite Aid in Ithaca. He stood next to an old beige station wagon—he didn’t know much about cars, but it had to be from the 1980s. There was even a faded, half scraped-free Mondale bumper sticker: ndale/raro it read.

And this was the moment. Until now his only crime was the possession of an illegally modified illegal weapon. That was bad, but it was understandable. He could sell it to the judge: a fear for his life, encroaching lawlessness. He wouldn’t lose his job over that one.

But once he put the rock through the window—no, once he put the packing tape on the window, everything would be different. Getting caught with packing tape on the widow would be hard to explain.

He pulled out a clear strip of packing tape. It made a zetz noise. He had no way to cut it, but he was prepared: He crouched and started breathing heavily through his mouth with his upper lip curled back. When his mouth was good and dry—no saliva, no DNA—he used his eye tooth to nick the tape, and took a strip off, then two, then three, four. Crisscrossed like an asterisk on the driver’s side window, barely reflecting the slight moonlight, the tape strips made a target where they overlapped.

And, after all, he could run, and it was hard to imagine a security guard or a passerby chasing him down, in the pitch blackness. After all. Colin hefted the rock in the scarf. It was all very hard to explain.

Two minutes later, Colin had the car in neutral and he was pushing it towards the exit. The overhead light had only gone on for moment, when he opened the door, before he turned it off manually. One gloved hand on the window frame, one on the steering wheel—be careful not to hit the horn! He was very careful not to hit the horn. Once he judged himself close enough to the road, he opened the door and spent too many moments, a frightening number of moments, fiddling under the dash in his gloves, before the engine sparked to life.

The scarf and the shattered window, its shards stuck together with packing tape, sat on the passenger seat. At the first light he pulled the trash bag from his pocket, and slipped them both in, followed by the roll of packing tape. The rock he’d carefully set down where it had been, at the margin of the lawn.

2.

Carol had watched as the garage door opened and Colin’s car pulled out. She should have stayed in her car, shouldn’t she, to follow him when he drove away. She had no experience planning a stakeout!

But it wasn’t Colin at the wheel. It was woman. Aha! So it was a woman after all. A blonde woman with a pageboy and a…

…and a mustache…

…and the blonde woman was Colin.

Oh my God, Carol thought. He’s a transvestite!

She got up and walked to her car. She didn’t know what to feel that wouldn’t also be offensive in some way.

3.

Since Bernie had started the morning of the tenth in a state of vibrating anticipation, every hour that passed since dawn had just been another metaphorical cup of coffee. Jangled is what his nerves did. When was this supposed to start? The scrap on the fridge just read: “apr 10” with no time stamp or anything.

He had called out from work, pretending he was sick. “I have really bad diarrhea and I think I saw blood and bits of hair in it,” he’d told his boss. He went into a lot more crazy detail. Mr. Prishtine told him to just stay at home.

But what was there to do at home? The first thing was to dump all the garbage from the toter into the back yard. Then he rolled the toter to the front of the driveway. So that was done.

Next he had a few nervous beers, and then too many nervous beers, and then he passed out. When he woke up in the afternoon, he was afraid that his drunken stupor had made him miss Theodore Anderson’s visit, and he resolved not to drink any more that day. He said this into the mirror, out loud, as he’d seen people do in movies, and as he looked himself in the eye and made his vow, he noticed that his hands were opening another beer. This would never do. He poured the beer down the toilet. Afterwards, he poured all his other beers down the toilet, seventeen of them. He went to see if he had any weed to put down the toilet, but he had so little he thought he might as well eat it. Then he got worried this was the wrong thing to do, so he tried to make himself throw up, unsuccessfully. He lay on the couch and wished he had some beer. He wished he had not deleted his Twitter account, but he was too scared to go open a new one.

He tried playing videogames, but he just died, again and again, too quickly for it to be fun or even distracting. He was already distracted. Finally he put on the TV, but he couldn’t watch it. The commercial jingles played

The best food in all New York
Is Bagels-on-a-Fork!

and they brought no solace. He sat on the staircase, halfway up, where he could look directly out the semicircular windows of the front door. He watched the driveway that no one came down.

No one came down and he watched and watched and was nevertheless taken entirely by surprise when the doorbell rang.

(Continued here.)