Dead Man's Song

It was right about that point where something very odd had happened to Mike, and in the space of a heartbeat Mike felt everything change. It was as if he just stepped outside of his body and stood apart, indifferent to the blows that rained down on him, separated from the pain and terror as surely as he was separated from the flesh and nerve endings that were under assault. It was the weirdest feeling in his life. He was aware of an actual physical shift as his consciousness lifted and moved to another place, just a few feet away, watching Vic as he grunted and sweated and hit. He watched Vic and saw the man’s muscles bunch and roll, saw his hands move up and down, saw him shift to put power behind each blow. It was fascinating, like watching a machine on an assembly line, and he found that he could study it with a total lack of emotional involvement. The hands rose and snapped down, sometimes as slaps, sometimes as punches, and as he watched, Mike saw something else, too. He saw Vic’s face grow steadily more red, saw sweat burst from his pores, saw his hands redden with tissue damage each time a blow struck one of Mike’s elbows or his forehead, saw the labored heave of his chest as the beating took its toll on Vic. Mike saw Vic, the forty-seven-year-old man, not Vic the indestructible machine.

As revelations went, it was a monster. All night long Mike worked it out. Vic was forty-seven. Mike was fourteen. If he lived—if—then in ten years he would be twenty-four and Vic would be fifty-seven. Vic was getting older and from now on he wouldn’t be getting stronger; Mike, on the other hand, would. Though Mike often doubted that he would really live to be twenty-four, knowing that he could outlive and outlast Vic was enough. Of course, the thought that he might die was an equal comfort, because Vic couldn’t do much to him then, either. The key was that if he lived long enough, he would outlast Vic Wingate. One day Mike would be a fully grown adult man and Vic would be—old. All Mike had to do was endure. Vic was human. It was Mike’s version of a win-win scenario.

That was the first part of the revelation and it wasn’t until dawn this morning that Mike had gotten the second wave of the revelation, which was equally comforting but in an entirely different way. Or, perhaps it was comforting to an entirely different part of Mike Sweeney—for, truth to tell, there were a lot of different parts to that boy.

At dawn he’d gotten up and had staggered on wobbly legs into the bathroom to piss blood. He didn’t bother to turn the light on. There was a faint dawn glow coming in through the frosted glass of his bathroom window, but he knew the smell. Uric acid mixed with copper. It wasn’t the first time he’d pissed blood strong enough to smell it. Vic was a treat to live with. He finished urinating, washed his hands, and as he turned to go back to bed he rubbed his hand across his stomach, probing at the mound of the massive hematoma that had blossomed from Vic’s punch. It was gone. His probing fingers pushed into the pale skin of his belly and found no hard swelling at all. He stopped in the doorway and pressed harder. Ah, yes, it was there, but smaller, deeper. An older pain, like a wound that was going away.

Mike stopped and turned, reaching out for the light switch, flooding the bathroom with a blue-white glow that made his mirrored image look as pale as a ghost. He closed the door and stood before the full-length mirror on the inside of the door, squinting at his reflection. In pajama bottoms and no shirt, he was a mass of bruises, to be sure, and the ones on his face were the worst. One eye was puffed nearly closed and there were blood crustings under both nostrils, more of it under his left earlobe that had been torn by a punch, and a ridge of knuckle marks on his jaw and lips. He turned and looked at his side, where he’d landed on a pumpkin, and the bruise glowed a fierce purple over the cracked rib. All of that was as it should be, as he expected. Nevertheless the bruise on his stomach, which was the worst of all the injuries, was now nothing more than a faintness of red, like a blush, not even as scarlet as the red from a belly flop into a pool. Last night—not eight hours ago—it had been a swelling mound, a volcano about to blow with a dark purple fist-size core surrounded by every shade of blue and red. Now it was almost gone.