sion of the same effect...

Pokaż mi serce nie opętane zwodniczymi marzeniami, a pokażę ci człowieka szczęśliwego.

This is intolerable, and he need not, in fact can-
not, endure it.
“Yeah,” he says. “Let’s have some straightening out here. Let’s have
some understanding.”
He rises from the chair, and a sound from what seems to be the cen-
ter of French Landing speeds him along. It is the wail of police sirens, at
least two, maybe three. Burny doesn’t know for sure, but he supposes
that Jack Sawyer has discovered the body of his friend Henry, only
Henry was less than perfectly dead and managed to say that he had rec-
ognized his killer’s voice. So Jack called the cop shop and here we are.
His next step brings him to the front of the desk. He glances at the
papers on the desk and instantly grasps their meaning.
“Cooking the books, hey? You aren’t just an asswipe, you’re a sneaky
little numbers juggler.”
In an amazingly small number of seconds, Chipper Maxton’s face
registers a tremendous range of feeling states. Ire, surprise, confusion,
wounded pride, anger, and disbelief chase across the landscape of his
features as Burnside reaches back and produces the hedge clippers. In
the office, they seem larger and more aggressive than they did in Henry
Leyden’s living room.
To Chipper, the blades look as long as scythes. And when Chipper
tears his eyes away from them and raises them to the old man standing
before him, he sees a face more demonic than human. Burnside’s eyes
gleam red, and his lips curl away from appalling, glistening teeth like
shards of broken mirrors.
“Back off, buddy,” Chipper squeaks. “The police are practically in
the lobby.”
“I ain’t deaf.” Burny rams one blade into Chipper’s mouth and closes
the clippers on his sweaty cheek. Blood shoots across the desk, and
Chipper’s eyes expand. Burny yanks on the clippers, and several teeth
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and a portion of Chipper’s tongue fly from the yawning wound. He
pushes himself upright and leans forward to grab the blades. Burnside
steps back and lops off half of Chipper’s right hand.
“Damn, that’s sharp,” he says.
Then Maxton comes reeling around the side of the desk, spraying
blood in all directions and bellowing like a moose. Burny dodges away,
dodges back, and punches the blades into the bulge of the blue button-
down shirt over Chipper’s belly. When he tugs them out, Chipper sags,
groans, drops to his knees. Blood pours out of him as if from an over-
turned jug. He falls forward on his elbows. There is no fun left in Chip-
per Maxton; he shakes his head and mutters something that is a plea to
be left alone. A bloodshot, oxlike eye revolves toward Charles Burnside
and silently expresses an oddly impersonal desire for mercy.
“Mother of Mercy,” Burny says, “is this the end of Rico?” What a
laugh—he hasn’t thought of that movie in years. Chuckling at his own
wit, he leans over, positions the blades on either side of Chipper’s neck,
and nearly succeeds in cutting off his head.
The sirens turn blaring on to Queen Street. Soon policemen will be
running up the walk; soon they will burst into the lobby. Burnside drops
the clippers onto Chipper’s broad back and regrets that he does not have
the time to piss on his body or take a dump on his head, but Mr. Mun-
shun is grumbling about dime, dime, dime.
“I ain’t stupid, you don’t have to tell me,” Burny says.
He pads out of the office and through Miss Vilas’s cubicle. When he
moves out into the lobby, he can see the flashing light bars on the tops
of two police cars rolling down the far side of the hedge. They come to
a halt not far from where he first put his hand around Tyler Marshall’s
slender boy-neck. Burny scoots along a little faster. When he reaches the
beginning of the Daisy corridor, two baby-faced policemen burst
through the opening in the hedge.
Down the hallway, Butch Yerxa is standing up and rubbing his face.
He stares at Burnside and says, “What happened?”
“Get out there,” Burny says. “Take ’em to the office. Maxton’s hurt.”
“Hurt?” Incapable of movement, Butch is gaping at Burnside’s
bloody clothes and dripping hands.
“Go!”
Butch stumbles forward, and the two young policemen charge in
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B L A C K H O U S E
through the big glass door, from which Rebecca Vilas’s poster has been
removed. “The office!” Butch yells, pointing to his right. “The boss is
hurt!”
While Yerxa indicates the office door by jabbing his hand at the wall,
Charles Burnside scuttles past him. A moment later, he has entered the
Daisy wing men’s room and is hotfooting it toward one of the stalls.
And what of Jack Sawyer? We already know. That is, we know he fell
asleep in a receptive place between the edge of a cornfield and a hill on
the western side of Norway Valley. We know that his body grew lighter,
less substantial, cloudy. That it grew vague and translucent. We can sup-
pose that before his body attained transparency, Jack entered a certain
nourishing dream. And in that dream, we may suppose, a sky of robin’s-
egg blue suggests an infinity of space to the inhabitants of a handsome
residential property on Roxbury Drive, Beverly Hills, wherein Jacky is
six, six, six, or twelve, twelve, twelve, or both at the same time, and
Daddy played cool changes on his horn, horn, horn. (“Darn That
Dream,” Henry Shake could tell you, is the last song on Daddy Plays the
Horn, by Dexter Gordon—a daddy-o if there ever was.) In that dream,
everyone went on a journey and no one went anywhere else, and a trav-
eling boy captured a most marvelous prize, and Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer
captured a bumblebee in a glass. Smiling, she carried it to the swinging
doors and launched it into the upper air. So the bumblebee traveled far
and away to Faraway, and as it journeyed worlds upon worlds on their