Not Chris anymore. Trashing a guy’s house is dotting the final i and
crossing the final’t in finito.
“Maybe this kidnapper is that guy on the news, ” I said.
“What guy? ”
“Snatches kids. Three, four, five little kids. Burns them all at once.”
“That’s not what’s happening here.”
“How can you be sure? ”
“This is Moonlight Bay.”
“Not all bad guys are bad just because they’re becoming.” He glared at
me, taking my observation personally.
I got to the unfinished business, “Toby’s a great kid. I love him.
I worry about what’s happening. There’s such a terrible risk. But in the
end, Manuel, I hope everything turns out with him like you think it
will. I really do. More than anything.” He hesitated, but then said,
“Stay out of this. I mean it, Snow.” For a moment I watched him walk
away from my vandalized house into a world that was even more broken
than my mother’s china. There were two patrol cars at the curb, and he
got into one of them.
“Come back anytime, ” I said, as if he could hear me. “I’ve still got
drinking glasses you can smash, serving dishes. We’ll have a couple
beers, you can bash the hell out of the TV, or take an ax to the better
pieces of furniture, pee on the carpet if you want. I’ll make a cheese
dip, it’ll be fun, it’ll be festive.” As sullen and gray and dark as the
afternoon was, it nonetheless stung my eyes. I closed the door.
When a loved one dies or as in this case is lost to me for another
reason i invariably make a joke of the pain. Even on the night that my
much-loved father succumbed to cancer, I was doing mental stand-up riffs
about death, coffins, and the ravages of disease. If I drink too deeply
of grief, I’ll find myself in the cups of despair. From despair, I’ll
sink into self-pity so deep that I’ll drown. Self-pity will encourage
too much brooding about whom I’ve lost, what I’ve lost, the limitations
with which I must always live, the restrictions of my strange
night-bound existence … and finally I’ll risk becoming the freak that
childhood bullies called me. It strikes me as blasphemous not to embrace
life, but to embrace it in dark times, I have to find the beauty
concealed in the tragic, beauty which in fact is always there, and which
for me is discovered through humor. You may think me shallow or even
callous for seeking the laughter in loss, the fun in funerals, but we
can honor the dead with laughter and love, which is how we honored them
in life.
God must have meant for us to laugh through our pain, because He stirred
an enormous measure of absurdity into the universe when He mixed the
batter of creation. I’ll admit to being hopeless in many respects, but
as long as I have laughter, I’m not without hope.
I quickly scanned the study to see what damage had been done, switched
off the light, and then followed the same routine at the entrance to the
living room. They had caused less destruction than Beelzebub on a
two-day vacation from Hell, but more than the average poltergeist.
Bobby had already turned off the lights in the dining room. By
candlelight, he was addressing the mess in the kitchen, sweeping
shattered china into a dustpan and emptying the pan into a large garbage
bag.
“You’re very domestic, ” I said, assisting with the cleanup.
“I think I was a housekeeper to royalty in a previous life.”
“What royalty? ”
“Czar Nicholas of Russia.”
“That ended badly.”
“Then I was reincarnated as Betty Grable.”
“The movie star? ”
“The one and only, dude.”
“I loved you in Mother Wore Tights.”
“Gracias. But it’s way good to be male again.” Tying shut the first
garbage bag as Bobby opened another, I said, “I should be pissed off.”
“Why?
Because I’ve had all these fabulous lives, while you’ve just been you?”
“He comes here to kick my ass because he really wants to kick his own.”
“He’d have to be a contortionist.”
“I hate to say this, but he’s a moral contortionist.”