me, too, but Manuel couldn’t bring himself to strike me, not after so
many years of friendship, so he wanted to hurt Bobby because that would
hurt me. Maybe some of his wrath was directed at himself, because he had
flushed away his principles, and maybe we were seeing sixteen years of
pent-up anger at God for Carmelita’s dying in childbirth and for Toby’s
being born with Down’s syndrome, and I think-feel-know that some of this
was fury he could not would not, dared not admit feeling toward Toby, dear
Toby, whom he loved desperately but who had so severely limited his
life. After all, there’s a reason they say that love is a two-edged
sword, rather than a two-edged Wiffle bat or a two-edged Fudgsicle,
because love is sharp, it pierces, and love is a needle that sews shut
the holes in our hearts, that mends our souls, but it can also cut, cut
deep, wound, kill.
Manuel was struggling to regain control of himself, aware that we were
all watching him, that he was a spectacle, but he was losing the
struggle. The side of the refrigerator was scarred where he had hammered
the billy club into it, but an assault on an appliance, even a major
appliance, didn’t provide the satisfaction he needed, didn’t relieve the
pressure still building in him. A couple minutes earlier, I had thought
of Bobby as a dry-ice bomb at the critical-evaporation point, but now it
was Manuel who exploded, not at Bobby or at me, but at the glass panels
in the four doors of a display cabinet, bashing each pane with the
baton, and then he tore open one of the doors and, with the stick, swept
out the Royal Worcester china, the Evesham set of which my mother had
been so fond.
Saucers, cups, bread plates, salad plates, a gravy boat, a butter dish,
a sugar-and-cream set crashed onto the countertop and from there to the
floor, porcelain shrapnel pinging off the dishwasher, singing off chair
legs and cabinetry. The microwave oven was next to the display cabinet,
and he hammered the club into it, once, twice, three times, four times,
but the view window was evidently made of Plexiglas or something,
because it didn’t shatter, though the club switched on the oven and
programmed the timer, and if we’d had the foresight to put a bag of
Orville Redenbacher’s finest in the microwave earlier, we could have
enjoyed popcorn by the time Manuel had worked off his rage. He plucked a
steel teapot off the stove and pitched it across the room, grabbed the
toaster and threw it to the floor even as the teapot was still bouncing
around tonk tonk tonkwith the manic energy of a battered icon in a video
game. He kicked the toaster, and it tumbled across the floor, squeaking
as though it were a terrified little dog, trailing its cord like a tail,
and then he was done.
He stood in the center of the kitchen, shoulders slumped, head thrust
forward, eyelids as heavy as if he had just woken from a deep sleep,
mouth slack, breathing heavily. He looked around as though slightly
confused, as though he were a bull wondering where the hell that
infuriating red cape had gone.
Throughout Manuel’s destructive frenzy, I expected to see the demonic
yellow light shimmer through his eyes, but I never caught a glimpse of
it. Now there was smoldering anger in his gaze, and confusion, and a
wrenching sadness, but if he was becoming something less than human, he
wasn’t far enough devolved to exhibit eye shine.
The nameless deputy watched cautiously through eyes as dark as the
windows in an abandoned house, but Frank Feeney’s eyes were brighter
than those of Halloween pumpkins, full of fiery menace. Although this
uncanny glimmer was not constant, coming and going and coming again, the
savagery that it betokened burned as steady as a watch fire.
Feeney was backlit by the dining-room chandelier, and with his face in
shadows, his eyes at times glowed as if the light from the next room
were passing straight through his skull and radiating from his sockets.
I had been afraid that Manuel’s violence would trigger outbursts in the