Life Expectancy

the acetylene torch, Honker cut open the sealed perimeter of the steel door.
        Smiling, shaking his head, Punchinello dropped to one knee in front of Lorrie and me. "You're really Jimmy Tock?"
        "James," I said.
        "Son of Rudy Tock."
        "That's right."
        "My father says Rudy Tock saved his life."
        I said, "Dad might be surprised to hear that."
        "Well, Rudy Tock is a modest man as well as a man of courage,"
        Punchinello declared. "But when that phony nurse, with a poisoned dagger in her fist, was sneaking up behind the great Konrad Beezo, my father, he would have been a goner if your dad hadn't shot her dead."
        As I sat in stupefaction, Lorrie said, "I hadn't heard this part."
        To me, Punchinello said, "You haven't told her?"
        "He's just as modest as his father," Lorrie told Punchinello.
        As the smell of hot steel and molten welding compound spread through the room, Lorrie said, "What about the phony nurse?"
        Settling all the way to the floor, cross-legged in front of us, Punchinello said, "She was dispatched to the hospital to murder the great Konrad Beezo, my mother, and me."
        "Who dispatched her?" Lorrie wondered.
        Even in the shadows, I could see a fever of hatred flare in his remarkable eyes as he said through clenched teeth: "Virgilio Vivacemente."
        Under the pressurized circumstances, I heard his reply-which he delivered with more sibilants than the words actually contained-as just an ear-pleasing series of meaningless syllables.
        Apparently Lorrie made no more of it than I did because she said,
        "Gesundheit."
        "The hateful aerialists," he said acidly. "The world-famous Flying Vivacementes. Trapeze artists, high-wire walkers, overpaid prima donnas. The most arrogant, most pompous, most conceited, most overrated of them all is Virgilio, the paterfamilias, my mother's father. Virgilio Vivacemente, swine of swines."
        "Now, now," Lorrie said, "that's not a nice thing to say about your grandfather."
        This admonition triggered a rush of rejection from Punchinello: "I deny his right to be my grandfather, I refuse him, renounce him, I repudiate that old preening pile of crap!"
        "That sounds terribly final," Lorrie said. "Personally, I'd pretty much always give a grandparent one more chance."
        Leaning toward her, eager to explain, Punchinello said, "When my mother married my father, her family was shocked, furious. That a Flying Vivacemente should marry a clown! To them, aerialists are not merely the royalty of the circus but demigods, while clowns are to them a lower life-form, the scum of the big top."
        "Maybe if clowns were less angry," Lorrie said, "other circus people would like them more."
        He seemed not to hear her, so determined was he to make the case against his mother's family.
        "When Mother married the great Konrad Beezo, the aerialists first shunned her, then scorned her, then disinherited and disowned her.
        Because she married for love, married a man they considered to be beneath her class, she was not their daughter anymore, she was dirt to them!"
        "So," Lorrie said, "let me get this straight. They were all in the same circus, your mom living on the clown end of the encampment with your father, the Vivacemente family living in the upper-class neighborhood, on the road together but apart. The tension must have been uncomfortable."
        "You can't know! Every performance, the Vivacementes prayed to Jesus that the great Beezo would break his spine and be paralyzed for life when he was shot out of a cannon, and every performance my father prayed to Jesus that their entire family would fall as one from their high trapezes and die horribly on impact with the center ring."
        Glancing at me, Lorrie said, "Wouldn't you like to have seen Jesus's face when he read their e-mail?"
        Breathless with the momentum of his story, Punchinello said, "On the night that I was born here in Snow Village, Virgilio hired an assassin who came to the hospital disguised as a nurse."
        "He would know where to find an assassin-for-hire on a moment's notice?" she asked.
        Punchinello's voice wavered between the most caustic hatred and abject fear: "Virgilio Vivacemente, that animated sewage that calls itself a man… he is connected, he sits at the center of a web of evil. He plucks a strand,