“If I hear it again, I don’t care who did what. You’ll both get the yardstick,” her mother would say, standing in the doorway with a spatula in her hand. She liked a yardstick because it had an efficient and democratic feel to it—both offenders could be attended to with a single whistling swat. It didn’t hurt, although Joan nevertheless became frantic and had to be chased down and dragged back, pleading for mercy like she was being taken to the gallows. Her sister would bend stoically over the sofa and just before the moment of impact move forward so that the yardstick hit the other person first. She told this tidbit to Joan when they were in their thirties.

Let the yardstick work for you.

She touched him again with the shovel. Nothing.

A credit card as a door key, a hollow pen as a tracheostomy tube, a self-locking trash tie as a handcuff. Or using an already employed tool in an off-label way—a fence post as a sundial, a flag as a weather vane, a drinking fountain as a urinal. Or even better, turning a regular tool into a meta-tool—a crowbar to kill a crow, for instance.

Oh! Oh! Oh!

He’d never hurried along a bird, but he could see how somebody might. His head felt different now, huge and hollow, like a fragile eggshell that all the yolk has been blown out of, forced through a tiny pinhole, turning his head into a big white dome with an echo. In school once a teacher had used a pencil to lift a human skull, inserting it into the eye socket and then turning it while pointing out its various features. The front, the side, the back, and all the while the skull nodding slightly, balanced on the pink-eraser end of a no. 2. He had felt an illicit jolt right at the moment the pencil disappeared into the eyehole; the deep, almost shuddering pleasure of it. In Voluptate Mors. Maybe three or four times it had happened over the years, his disreputable life appearing unexpectedly in the middle of his reputable one, like a harlot coming forward to slip her arm through the parson’s.

He was wedged somewhere, one shoulder wrenched up under him, the big hollow dome of his head resting against something hard. Wherever this was, it felt like he was filling the space completely, as oversize and momentous as Paul Bunyan. All he needed was his ax.

Joan and her best friend, age fifteen, standing alongside a hot blacktop road in bikinis and sandals, hitchhiking home from Linden Lake; a GTO pulling over and picking them up, the two guys leaning forward obligingly to let them into the back seat.