The Family Fang: A Novel by Kevin Wilson

boy. He would relax and his body would heal itself and the Fangs, all three of them, would have, according to his mother, “so much damn fun.”
    O n the bus to St. Louis, a man with a ukulele stood in the aisle and offered to play requests. Someone shouted out, “Freebird,” and the man sat back down, visibly angered. Buster carefully made his way down the aisle to the bathroom. After several unsuccessful attempts to shut the door, he finally gave up and simply stared at the tiny, nearly opaque mirror. His face was grotesque. Despite all preparations for his disfigurement, he had not expected such spectacular swelling this far removed from the incident. One half of his face was nearly purple with bruising, strips of skin missing and scabbing over, everything twice the size that it should be, except for his eye, which was vise-grip closed and five times the size that it should be. The scar on his lip was less of a star and more of a wishbone or, more accurately, a horseshoe. Stars, horseshoes, wishbones. His scar was nothing but lucky symbols. Using the tube of antibiotic ointment, which would soon need to be expensively refilled, he dabbed the medicine on his cuts, which took some time and effort. When he was finished, Buster smiled at his reflection and saw that this made things worse. He returned to his seat, the aisles around him completely empty, everyone on the bus giving him a three-seat buffer in all directions. This was a kind of life he understood, a three-seat buffer whether he wanted it or not, time to think, whether he wanted to or not, traveling down the highway to someplace new, whether he wanted to or not.
    O nce he had arrived in St. Louis, Buster wandered up and down the terminal for a few hours, walked into a diner, ordered another milkshake, and dabbed at his misaligned face with a moist towelette. “You don’t mind me asking?” said a woman in the booth next to his, pointing at his face. Buster was about to answer when he felt something twitch in his brain, the long-dormant synapses that were programmed to lie without provocation, to create something better than what had come before. “I was doing a daredevil show over in Kentucky,” he answered. “I rode a barrel over a waterfall but somebody had drilled some holes in it before the stunt and it began to sink before it even got close to the falls.” The woman shook her head and slid into his own booth, leaving her food untouched. “That’s awful,” she said. Buster nodded and then continued. “Fighting for air, I finally went over the edge of the falls and the barrel busted open on some rocks and I got battered around in the churning water. By the time they pulled me out, half a mile down the river, everyone assumed I was dead.”
    “I’m Janie Cooper,” she said, holding out her hand.
    “Lance Reckless,” he answered, trying not to smile, now knowing what his face looked like to other people.
    “You say that someone drilled holes in the barrel?” she asked.
    He took a long, dramatic sip from his milkshake. He had decided he would live on milkshakes from here on out. “Foul play,” he answered. “I’m sure of it. A daredevil’s life is full of danger, Janie, and not always for the reasons you’d suspect.”
    She took out a pen and paper from her purse and wrote down her phone number. “Are you in St. Louis long?” she asked.
    “Just for the day,” he answered.
    “Well,” she said, placing the scrap of paper in his hand, “call me tonight if you end up sticking around.”
    She walked back to her table and Buster took such a long sip of his milkshake that he felt his head begin to ache from the effort.
    Not ten minutes later, Mr. and Mrs. Fang stumbled into the bus station’s diner. Mrs. Fang was wearing a sling around her plastered arm, her head awkwardly bandaged. Mr. Fang had two black eyes, his nostrils plugged with blood-crusted gauze, his body hobbled and bent. “Buster,” they cried in unison. “We asked around