Blvd. of Blood

Book 1, chapters 16–17

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

(The story so far: Colin Lang, respectable actuary at Radcliffe Worth Partners, has purchased a rifle and plenty of ammunition. There are still about four months until April, when he plans to use them.)

16.

Right before Christmas, like a miracle, Colin found what he needed at a Target. He’d been there shopping for a bicycle—window shopping really, since he wasn’t going to buy anything until the post-Christmas sales. He wore his gloves, just in case, as he walked through the store, but this was not so unusual late in the year. On his way out he passed, by chance, an endcap: Great Gifts for Dad!!

“Why,” he said, perhaps out loud, “do they even make these any more?” But there between the novelty painted tie and the smokeless indoor grill was a plastic spring-loaded VHS tape holder. Colin was about to buy three or five, but then decided this would be suspicious, so he bought one.

“Fathers, am I right?” he said to the clerk. He paid, just in case, cash.

Once at home, in his basement, coat off but gloves on, he unboxed the tape holder. It was a simple device, just two flat plastic plates, translucent and powder blue, connected by three plastic rods. The pates were pressed close together by spring action, but you could pull them apart easily, and set a tape between them. The three rods would make a sort of cradle for the tape, and then the whole contraption could sit on a shelf. Since VHS tapes stood up on a shelf easily on their own, it seemed like a worthless device for the average dad—not to say an anachronism by a good decade or two—but it offered a solution for Colin.

He set seven magazines in the tape holder, which was as many as he could fit. The spring held the magazines tightly in place. He pulled one magazine out, and all six others came out with it, clattering across the cement floor. He packed them in again, and tried removing one magazine by tipping it forward and then snapping it out quickly. This worked better; one magazine came out, and the spring contracted to hold the other six. After a few more trials he found he could reliably remove a magazine by first adjusting it into place—bent forward so it was almost perpendicular to the other magazines—and then snapping it free.

He practiced late into the night. He was beginning to master a technique of flicking the top of the magazine, so it would rotate into the correct position, and he could grab it loose in one motion. It got easier the shorter the tape holder grew—the fewer magazines that were in it, that is—so that pulling one free when there were only two or three magazines left was a simple matter.

The last lone piece, though, was hard. He tried holding the magazine and flicking his wrist so that the tape holder shot off, leaving the magazine in his hand. The cheap plastic holder flew across the basement landing with a crack against the hard floor before skidding away into the shadows. He heard a second crack as it hit the wall.

Colin was up in a shot. He raced over to the wall, but his body blocked the light and he couldn’t see what shape the tape holder was in. When he stepped to one side, only then could he confirm that the tape holder was in one piece. He brought it into the light, and there on the powder blue sides was a crisscross of cracks.

He smeared super glue all over the side and went to bed. Get a few hours of sleep before work. It was only the Christmas party, after all.

But on the way to work he put on nose putty, a fake mustache, and a wad of padding under his upper lip that gave him a permanent sneer. Back (and not for the last time) to Target, just as it opened. He put the spare tape holder in his trunk and removed his disguise at a red light. He wasn’t even dressed like himself, so that was one thing. It was a Christmas party, and he had on a horrible sweater his mother had made him.

17.

Carol Wernick had been working at Radcliffe Worth Partners for a little less than six months. She’d grown up only twenty miles from Cottinend, and had thought that moving back to the area after four years at Amherst College would have given her a support network of friends she could fall into; but her network, dispersed for college, had not reformed. No one else had come home to stay. One lived in Poughkeepsie, now, the rest in the New York City area, and only Carol had ended up half a mile from her childhood home, working, in the years before Radcliffe Worth, for IBM.

Carol had never made friends easily, and all that time at the IBM actuarial department she’d been studying for her exams instead of socializing. By the time exams were done, she had acquired a reputation for being aloof or square—she wasn’t sure which—and the people she saw every day were stuck as mere acquaintances. Her parents were her only social outlet—this was square, to be sure, but she’d been forced into it. She started looking for another job not because she didn’t like it at IBM but just because she thought being the “new girl” somewhere might help her be social.

Her plan had been to get a job in the City, or even Albany, but Radcliffe Worth in Cottinend had made an offer, and they were only two towns over. Technically she didn’t even have to pack up her house and move (although she did, just to get a better commute and make it feel like a fresh start).

The first few months at her new job she’d tried to be friendly to everyone, but she began to think the problem wasn’t that she wasn’t the “new girl.” The problem was her. She’d been unfun for so long it was too late to be fun.

Sitting at her desk, trying to decide if she should put on lipstick for a mere office party, she made a promise to herself. “I am going to let my hair down. I am going to be fun, and I am going to have fun at this party. If I have to get drunk, I will get drunk.” Carol’s hair was too short to literally be let down, but she knew what she meant.

There were problems with her plan. The primary problem was that no one (she assumed) had ever had fun at an office Christmas party. There might be games. She had a small present of chocolates wrapped up for what had originally been called a Yankee swap before someone (who? how?) had decided the word Yankee might be offensive (how? to whom?) and was now called a white elephant swap. She dreaded participating in a white elephant swap. It had been so long since she had received a gift from a non-family member that she wasn’t sure she could ape the correct facial expressions while unwrapping one.

The break room stank of the oppressive loneliness of fake conviviality. Bartholomew Parnel, who had the cubicle across from hers, was loudly complaining, “Why is it that a worthless elephant has to be a white elephant? Does that sound right to you?” Carol swerved away from him. Ahead of her was Colin Lang.

Carol had never before spoken to Colin Lang, but he seemed like a natural choice to approach. Before the November beard she’d barely noticed him, but that bout of celebrity made him someone everyone knew. Talking to someone she didn’t know was the whole point of this exercise, but difficult; talking to someone everyone knew was halfway there. With the ridiculous beard off, Carol thought, he even looked handsome in a way.

“I don’t think I’ve been to a party like this since college,” she said, after standing next to Colin for a moment.

“Can’t say I really partied in college,” he answered. “My high school days got it all out of my system.”

“You were wild in high school?”

“I’m not proud of it,” Colin said, watching her face from the corners of his eyes, “but my junior year I stole a cop car.”

(Continued here)