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“Hello Missy,” he said, lookin’ at me, proportionating me.

“The name’s Chloé,” I said. “Pleased to meetcha.” I was keeping up the civilities, because maybe someday this ghoul would be my father-in-law. Didn’t hold out my hand, though. Give me some credit. Anyway Oscar had my other hand.

But what Oscar did, was, being brave, he just had my fingers in his and took me, like we were the cool kids, down the hall and out the front door, Oscar saying nothing. I guess he didn’t want to start a fight exactly at that moment.

“Don’t you come into this house again unless I invite you,” the Bat said. “I don’t want that stuff going on here. There’ll be trouble I can’t be responsible for. Real bad trouble.” I heard his ineffectual voice fading, a mean-streak voice floating in the air, rising up to the atmosphere, and because nothing in the universe is ever lost, heading out to the galaxies, and I thought: Jeez, what a bad ambassador for Earth that guy is!

Short fathers can be so weird. There must be something about short-fathering that makes men so crazy. If you’re middle-sized or tall you’re usually okay as a father. Otherwise, it’s mysteriously unreal for everybody and inexplicable, in addition.

We got into Oscar’s junk car, this old AMC Matador, with doors that sang when you opened them. I loved that sound and feel I should mention it.

“That son-of-a-bitch,” Oscar said. “I’m gonna kill him.”

“You could try to never see him again,” I said.

Oscar put his head down on the steering wheel. This old car, I loved it, and I wanted to cheer Oscar up but couldn’t think of how.

“It’s ’cause of him,” Oscar said, “I was sort of a junkie for a while. How I got my start.”

“Wow,” I said. “I can see that.”

“I don’t want to talk about it though.” He started the ignition and the engine magically turned over. “Chloé,” he said, “we gotta make some money. We just gotta set ourselves up. I’m gonna kill him otherwise. Who’s this Janey person, this video woman?”

So I explained to him about it, one more time. When I finished explaining, he nodded. I figured that was the go-ahead.

Charlie, now you know. Now you know how we got ourselves into show business.

NINE

SOMETIMES I FEEL as if my life is a murder mystery, only I haven’t been murdered yet, and I don’t plan on being murdered at all, of course. But it’s puzzling — my life, I mean — the way a murder mystery is puzzling, with something missing or dead out there where everyone can see it — what happened to Bradley W. Smith — only I don’t know what it is, just this intimation of violence. I need a detective who could snoop around in my life and then tell me the solution to the mystery that I have yet to define, and the crime that created it.

For example: every morning, driving Turbo, my car, on the fifteen-minute commute to Jitters, I go around three curves. On two of these curves someone has planted little white wooden crosses to memorialize sudden vehicular deaths, and next to each cross, a display of artificial flowers. Artificial flowers! Petunias, these are, and violets, probably. Weeks pass, and they don’t fade. I wait for them to droop as in a natural cycle. But they are stubbornly unalive and therefore unwilting, so they must be plastic, with machine-made blues and yellows and whites. Imagine that: plastic-flower sorrow. It’s not ennobling. The quality of the grief has a discount aura, like a relic tossed haphazardly into a bin. I just mark it down and store it away every morning. I notice these things for my own protection.

It’s a short drive that I have to do, each dawn of the working week, and there are few signs of violence on it except for these crosses. I watch for minute changes in the landscape. I steer a straight line past the reddish-yellow-brick high school, ease my way around one of the fatal curves, and there’s the Tiny Tot Drop-in Day Care Center, its sign decorated with pseudofestive balloons and a teddy bear waving an American flag, followed by a few acres of scrubby farmland with two FOR LEASE signs planted