Life Expectancy

and criminals half a world away feel the vibrations and answer them at once. He is a pompous charlatan and a fool… but he is also a venomous centipede, quick and vicious, supremely dangerous. He arranged to have us murdered, while he and his devious family were performing-an airtight alibi."
        This was the story of the night of my birth as reimagined by a drunken lunatic.
        Punchinello had been nurtured on it instead of on mother's milk and love. Having heard the tale a thousand times, having been raised in an atmosphere of paranoid fantasy and hatred, he believed in this absurd history as idol worshippers once believed in the consciousness and divinity of solid-gold calves and slabs of stone.
        "And in the expectant-fathers' lounge," he said, "when the hired killer crept up on my father from behind, Rudy Tock entered at that very moment, saw the fiend, drew his pistol, and shot her before she could carry out Virgilio's orders."
        Poor Lois Hanson, young and dedicated, murdered by a psychotic clown, had been transformed by that same clown from a nurse into a combination Ninja assassin and baby-killing agent of King Herod.
        Patting my knee to snap me out of a trance of astonishment, Lorrie said, "Your dad carried a pistol, did he? I thought he was a simple pastry chef."
        "Back then he was just a baker," I said.
        "Wow. What's he packing now that he's become a pastry chef-a submachine gun?"
        Compelled to tell his woeful tale, Punchinello impatiently pressed on:
        "Saved by Rudy Tock, my father realized that my mother and I, too, were in great danger. He rushed into the maternity ward, located the delivery room, and arrived as the doctor was suffocating me-me, an innocent newborn!"
        "The doctor was a phony, too?" Lorrie asked.
        "No. MacDonald was a real doctor, but he had been corrupted by Vir-gil io Vivacemente, that worm from the bowels of a syphilitic weasel."
        "Weasels can get syphilis?" Lorrie wondered.
        He chose to consider this a rhetorical question, and continued: "Dr.
        MacDonald was paid an enormous sum, a fortune, to make it appear that my mother died in childbirth and that I was stillborn. Virgilio-may he be cast into hell tonight-believed that the oh-so-precious Vivacemente blood had been polluted by the great Konrad Beezo and that my mother and me, being tainted, must be eradicated."
        "What a vile man," Lorrie said as if she actually believed any of this.
        "I told you!" Punchinello cried. "He is lower than a festering canker on Satan's ass."
        "That is low," Lorrie agreed.
        "Konrad Beezo shot Dr. MacDonald as he tried to suffocate me. My mother, my beautiful mother, was already dead."
        "That's some story," I said, for I was concerned that I might be seen as one of Virgilio's minions if I drew attention to any of the numerous absurdities in this Nuthouse Theater version of those long-ago events.
        "But Virgilio Vivacemente, that spawn of a witch's toilet-"
        "Oh, I like that one," Lorrie interrupted.
        "-that animated dog vomit knew how corrupt this town was, how easily he could conceal the truth. He bribed the police, the local journalists.
        The official story is the outrageous concoction of lies reported in the Gazette."
        I managed to sound sympathetic to his version: "Seems like such a transparent concoction when you know the truth."
        He nodded vigorously. "Rudy Tock must have been frustrated to have silence imposed on him all these years."
        "Dad took no money from Virgilio," I hastened to assure him, fearing that he might later take a spin across town to gun down Dad, Mom, and Weena. "Not a penny."
        "No, no, of course he didn't," Punchinello said, and apologized effusively if I had inferred such an accusation. "Konrad Beezo, my father, has impressed on me what a courageous man of integrity Rudy Tock is. I know they must have silenced him in some brutal fashion."
        Understanding Punchinello's psychology well enough to suspect that only wild exaggeration and flamboyant lies had the ring of truth to him, I said, "They beat Dad once a week for years."
        "This evil town."
        "But that alone wouldn't have silenced him," I added. "They threatened to kill my Grandma Rowena if he talked."
        "They beat her, too," said Lorrie.
        Whether she intended to be helpful or mischievous,