The Impaler

the distance, no, behind him—where is it?

He sits down on the asphalt, his back against something hard—Michelle’s car? He turns around to look and discovers that he is alone on an obsidian ocean—in a rowboat be- neath a stormy sky. He searches for the shore but cannot find it.

No, now there is only the Impaler—up ahead in the distance, seated Indian style on the water and moving away quickly, silently, leaving no trace of wake behind him.

He feels himself sinking, but doesn’t resist. The sky and the ocean are one now, heavy and sinking with him as the curtain of sleep descends—as the Impaler’s wings unfold from his back and lift him high into the air … higher and higher, smaller and smaller until the both of them disappear like smoke into the seamless black.

PART III

INTERSECTING

Chapter 42

Annie Lambert loved her son Edmund more than anything in the world, but sometimes even she couldn’t help pinching his nipple and twisting it until he screamed—when he was a poop head, sure, but especially when he called himself “Eddie.”

His grandfather had been behind that; even went so far as to teach the boy to write E-D-D-I-E in capital letters, hyphens and all, in the dirt when the boy was five years old. Her son’s name was Edmund—Edmund, Edmund, Edmund!

And besides, Edmund knew better, too. He’d been writing his name the right way since he was three years old, and Annie vowed that she would twist little Edmund’s nipple until the boy learned to obey her and only her.

True, Annie Lambert had given her son the name Edmund primarily as a dig at the old man. A private joke with herself, really, and she never thought in a million years that her father would find out Edmund was a character in Shakespeare—let alone a bastard one at that. But Claude Lambert did find out. How? Well, Annie never worked up the courage to ask him.

As with everything else, however, Claude Lambert didn’t get mad or act any different toward his daughter than he had all her life. Quiet, cold, uninterested. No, the old man only got even. As he always did. Through other people.

Yes, teaching her son to write his name E-D-D-I-E was par for the course for old Claude Lambert. Just like the cookie crumbs on the settee in the parlor, the spilled bottle of her mother’s perfume, the blueberry stains on her pillowcase from a stolen pie on Thanksgiving.

When she was about six or seven, Annie Lambert thought a ghost had suddenly moved in with them, and would swear up and down that it wasn’t she who took the lipstick. “It was the ghost, Mama!” she would scream as her mother whipped her naked behind with her cat-o’-nine-tails. And then, when she was a little older, for many years she thought it was her brother James who’d been framing her, and would sometimes hide behind the furniture in an attempt to catch him breaking the handle off a china cup or stealing a piece of her mother’s jewelry.

She never caught him—never caught anybody, for that matter—and often felt as if she were going crazy in that old house—as if the rooms were all crooked and the back of her head was about to crack open. Sometimes she’d hear a high ringing in her ears and she’d bang her head against the wall to make it stop. And a couple of times she got so upset that she took her father’s straight razor and carved the word “NO” into her arm. Things settled down for a few months after that. No little mishaps around the Lambert household for which she got blamed. But then something would happen and the cycle would begin all over again until Annie hurt herself bad enough to make it stop.

Then one day without warning, when she was about twelve or so, everything stopped—the bad things, the blaming, the beatings, the banging her head and the cutting. And only years later— just before Edmund was born—when she saw the nod her father gave her brother when they read the guilty verdict at the trial, did something click inside her head. She couldn’t explain it, even to herself; only that, after all those years, she knew deep down that it had been her father behind the frame game all along.

Annie Lambert never understood why her father didn’t love her, or why he didn’t even like her just a little. But when it came right down to it she had to admit that she didn’t like him much, either. Claude Lambert was older than most of the fathers in Wilson; was a widower of forty with no children when he met Annie’s mother at the bowling alley. She was only twenty-three, and Annie calculated (when she was old enough to do such things) that her mother and father must have tried to have children for about three years before Annie was born. Her mother told Annie flat out when she was nine that her father had wanted a son. Luckily, she said, they’d a quicker time of it with James, who came along a year after Annie. “And that was that,” her mother said.

Over the years, Claude Lambert was never outwardly mean to his daughter. Quite the opposite, he hardly ever spoke to her. And he certainly never laid a hand on her—ex-cept sometimes when he’d been in the cellar too long. On those rare occasions, he’d come into her room late at night, flick on the lights, and calmly tell her to sit up. He’d take her face in his big rough hand and squeeze her cheeks together and stick his fingers in her mouth to feel her teeth as if he were examining a horse. His eyes always looked bulgy and red, and his breath always smelled like licorice, but his fingers always tasted like metal. He’d feel around inside her mouth for a few seconds, then would kiss her on the forehead and wish her good night.

“Bonne nuit, ma cheri,” he’d say. And that was that.

But after Annie’s mother died from the breast cancer, old Claude Lambert was even more remote. Sometimes he would stay out in the field after dark, just sitting on his trac- tor and staring off into the sky. Most often, however, he would just stay down in the cellar, in his workroom boozing or mixing up those stupid experiments. Sometimes, mostly on Friday nights, his old friend Eugene Ralston would join him down there.

Claude Lambert and Eugene Ralston—or “Rally,” as he was called—went way back. They’d known each other since they were boys, had been best men at each other’s weddings, and even stormed the beaches at Normandy together during World War II. Rally had saved her father’s life that day, Claude Lambert insisted. Rally swore it was the other way around; but when James would ask them specifics about what happened, the two men would clam up and say some things were just better left in the past.

Annie had known Eugene “Rally” Ralston all her life, and sometimes thought of him as just another part of the old farmhouse—just like the kitchen sink, or better yet the saggy front porch. Rally was a mechanic, a certified bachelor with no children of his own, and for as long as Annie could remember he would show up on Friday nights after work all dirty and smelling of motor oil. Sometimes, her mother would make Rally clean up in the slop sink in the mudroom. The washer and dryer were in there, too, and she would give him some of her husband’s clothes and tell him he couldn’t set foot in her kitchen until he was clean and his coveralls were in the washer.

Eugene Ralston was a short, pudgy man with thick gray hair plastered so tightly to his head that it reminded Annie of the shiny marble foyer at the library. He was always combing it, and he was always telling jokes—but slowly, and often repeated himself in such a way that the joke wasn’t funny anymore by the end. And when he laughed, no sound came out—just a choppy wheeze that Annie thought sounded like the cartoon character Muttley.

Annie hated how Rally smelled, but when she thought about it, she had to admit that she liked him a lot better than her father. He always asked her about school and if there were any boys who needed their legs broken. And when she and James were little, he would often bring them Hot Wheels cars that he said he got from one of his “connections” at the auto shop. Annie had no interest in the cars, but appreciated that Rally saved the more “girlie- lookin’” ones for her.

Rally always brought flowers for Annie’s mother, too; and sometimes fancy sugar cubes and bags full of stuff that he said he got from one of his connections. This particular connection, Annie learned, was some pharmacist fella who paid him in miscellaneous supplies—all legal, all aboveboard, he used to assure Mrs. Lambert. Annie’s mother would serve them supper and shake her head and say the men were gonna kill themselves with those stupid