Manx- Smashing Ornaments

  WAYNE WASN’T OKAY, AND HE KNEW IT. KIDS WHO WERE OKAY DID NOT answer phone calls from children who had to be dead. Kids who were okay didn’t dream dreams like his. But neither of these things—not the phone calls or the dreams—was the clearest indicator that he was Not Okay. No. What really marked him out as Not Okay was the way he felt when he saw a photo of a plane crash: charged, jolted by excitement and guilt, as if he were looking at pornography.

  He had been out driving with his father the week before and had seen a chipmunk run in front of a car and get squashed, and he had barked with sudden surprised laughter. His father had snapped his head around and looked at Wayne with hollow-eyed wonder, had pursed his lips to speak but then said nothing—silenced perhaps by the ill look of shock and unhappiness on Wayne’s face. Wayne didn’t want to think it was funny, a little chipmunk zigging when it should’ve zagged, getting wiped out by someone’s Goodyear. That was the kind of thing that made Charlie Manx laugh. He just couldn’t help himself.

  There was the time he saw a thing about genocide in the Sudan on YouTube and had discovered a smile on his own face.

  There was a story about a little girl being kidnapped in Salt Lake City, a pretty twelve-year-old blond girl with a shy smile. Wayne had watched the news report in a state of rapt excitement, envying her.

  There was his recurring sense that he had three extra sets of teeth, hidden somewhere behind the roof of his mouth. He ran his tongue around and around his mouth and imagined he could feel them, a series of little ridges right under the flesh. He knew now that he had only imagined losing his ordinary boy teeth, had hallucinated this under the influence of the sevoflurane, just as he had hallucinated Christmasland (lies!). But his memory of those other teeth was more real, more vivid, than the stuff of his everyday life: school, trips to the therapist, meals with his dad and Tabitha Hutter.
...

  Lou found a glitter-spackled silver ornament, a globe as big as a softball, tossed it in the air, and swung the hammer like a baseball bat. The glittery sphere exploded in a pretty spray of opalescent glass and copper wire.

  Wayne stood close to the truck, watching. Behind him, through the loud roar of the static, he heard a children’s choir singing a Christmas song. They sang about the faithful. Their voices were far away but clear and sweet.

  Lou crushed a ceramic Christmas tree and a china plum sprinkled with gold glitter and several tin snowflakes. He began to sweat and removed his flannel coat.

  “Lou,” Tabitha said again, standing at the top of the embankment. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because one of these is his,” Lou said, and nodded at Wayne. “Vic brought most of him back, but I want the rest.”
...

  Wayne smashed angels with trumpets, angels with harps, angels with hands folded in prayer. He smashed Santa, and all his reindeer, and all his elves. At first he laughed. Then, after a while, it wasn’t as funny. After a while his teeth began to ache. His face felt hot, then cold, then so cold it burned, icy-hot. He didn’t know why, didn’t give it much in the way of conscious thought.

  He was raising a blue chunk of shale to smash a ceramic lamb when he saw movement at the upper edge of his vision and lifted his head and spied a girl standing by the ruin of the Sleigh House. She wore a filthy nightgown—it had been white once but now was mostly rust-colored from smears of dried blood—and her hair was in tangles. Her pale
pretty face was stricken, and she was crying silently. Her feet were bloody.

  “Pomoshch,” she whispered. The sound of it was almost lost in the whistling wind. “Pomoshch.” Wayne had never heard the Russian word for “help” before but understood well enough what she was saying.
...

  A boy came out of the brush behind Marta, a black-haired boy of ten, wearing the dirty blue-and-red uniform of a Beefeater. Brad McCauley’s eyes were stricken, wondering, and terrified all at once; he cast a sidelong glance at Marta, and his chest began to hitch with sobs.

  Wayne swayed on his heels, staring at the two of them. Brad had been wearing his Beefeater outfit in his dream last night. Wayne felt light-headed, like sitting down, but the next time he rocked back on his heels—he was close to falling over—his father caught him from behind, set one massive hand on Wayne’s shoulder. Those hands didn’t quite go with his New Lou body, made his large, gawky frame look that much more badly put together.

  “Hey, Wayne,” Lou said. “Hey. You c’n wipe your face on my shirt if you want.”

  “What?” Wayne asked.

  “You’re crying, kiddo,” Lou said. He held out his other hand. In it were ceramic shards: pieces of a smashed moon. “You’ve been crying for a while now. I guess this one was yours, huh?”

  Wayne felt his shoulders jerk in a convulsive shrug. He tried to answer but couldn’t force any sound from his tight throat. The tears on his cheeks burned in the cold wind, and his self-control gave way, and he buried his face in his father’s stomach, missing for a moment the old Lou, with his comforting, bearish mass.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, his voice choked, strange. He moved his tongue around his mouth but could not feel his secret teeth anymore—a thought that set off such an explosion of relief he had to hang on to his father to keep from falling down. “I’m sorry. Dad. Oh, Dad. I’m sorry.” His breath coming in short, jolting sobs.

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know. Crying. I got snot on you.”

  Lou said, “No one has to apologize for tears, dude.”

- Come All Ye Faithful: Gunbarrel