“Unless you mean to make a fool and liar of Edie, the sweetest woman this side of forever,” said Mrs. Bullock, “then you best hie yourself up to your room and quick fetch that pistol.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
As I turned to leave, she said, “And not just the gun, but them spare magazines come with it.”
“Be right back,” I assured her.
Two minutes later, when I returned with the Glock and the extra magazines, the back door opened, and Mr. Bullock stepped into the kitchen, carrying a shotgun. He saw my weapon and smiled broadly.
“Good to see you put your silly don’t-like-’em behind you and come down packin’ the way you should.”
His wife said, “He come down defenseless as a fawn, so I sent him up to get himself right.”
Mr. Bullock’s smile faded to a look of disappointment. “This here’s a war we’re in, young fella, even if it’s so secret most folks don’t never have a clue about it.”
“Yes, sir. I know. I’m sorry. I won’t forget the rules again. Where should I put it?”
Mrs. Bullock indicated the pistols beside two of the plates on the table. “Quick to hand is best.”
As I put the Glock and spare magazines beside the third plate, I said, “Something sure smells good.”
She said, “My grandma’s best-ever meatloaf in cilantro-tomato gravy, with just a tetch of inspired fiddlin’ by yours truly, plus all the trimmin’s.” To her husband, she said, “Seein’ as you’re alive, must’ve been a false alarm like you thought.”
“Dang coyote,” he said as he went to a broom closet tucked into a corner of the kitchen cabinetry. “Slinkin’ around, maybe hopin’ for one of the chickens we don’t even raise, set off a motion detector.”
Indicating the sunlight at the windows, she said, “Early for one of their kind bein’ on the hunt.”
Instead of brooms, the broom closet contained a gun rack with another shotgun. Mr. Bullock racked his 12-gauge beside the first weapon and hung his hat on a peg in there.
“It was a bonier specimen than usual, maybe too hungry to wait out the sun.”
He washed his hands as his wife served dinner family style: the meatloaf on a platter, half of it sliced; butter-rich mashed potatoes mounded in a bowl; different vegetables in each of four other serving dishes; two gravy boats to ensure no waiting; a basket of pull-apart rolls.
When we were seated, Mr. Bullock said a brief grace, and Mrs. Bullock said, “Amen,” and we ate like longshoremen who’d just worked grueling overtime on the docks. Everything was delicious.
Watching me eat, Mr. Bullock said, “Maybelle, this here young fella seems to think your cookin’s more out of this world than our astronaut did.”
“Everything’s delicious, ma’am, it’s perfect.”
“High praise comin’ from such a renowned fry cook. I’m flattered.”
I said, “Why did the astronaut need a new identity?”
They glanced at each other, and she raised her eyebrows, and he shrugged, and she said, “Edie adores him, Deke. She don’t mistake a demon for a saint. And you know what he done … back then, the mall.”
To me, Deke Bullock said, “The astronaut fella seen somethin’ up there, he couldn’t for the life of him keep shut up about.”
“Up there?” I asked.
Mrs. Bullock pointed at the ceiling. “Space.”
Her husband said, “He was up there doin’ science or somethin’ on the space station awhile. The thing happened, and the astronaut was told he never seen what he knew dang well he’d seen.”
Mrs. Bullock said, “So when he gets back, he goes and tells some people he thinks they should know the truth, but they’re the wrong ones to tell. Next thing, they’re all chasin’ him.”
“Who?”
“CIA,” Mr. Bullock said.
Mrs. Bullock said, “FBI, too.”
“IRS,” Mr. Bullock added.
“Occupational Safety and Health Administration.”
“Social Security Administration.”
“Library of Congress and heaven only knows who else,” Mrs. Bullock said.
I considered all of that for a moment, and then I asked, “How did he find his way to you?”
“Never did,” Mr. Bullock said. “Edie Fischer found him how she finds so many. She took him someplace for a new face, then brung him here, so we could paper him up with a new name.”
I took a second slice of meatloaf. “What did he see up there?”
Neither of them replied.
“I mean, up there in space,” I said. “What did he see up there in space?”
Mrs. Bullock had gone pale. “Better we don’t say.”
“Not a bit of good can come of sayin’,” her husband agreed.
“It’s not we don’t trust you, Oddie,” she assured me.
Mr. Bullock looked grim. “It’s just you don’t never want it in your head. I mean, the thing that happened up there.”
“Once it’s in your head, there’s no gettin’ it out, what the astronaut described.” Mrs. Bullock shuddered. “Them images,” she said in a tone of voice in which she might have said, Oh, the horror.
“Them images,” Mr. Bullock agreed, having gone whiter than the mashed potatoes.
Mrs. Bullock said, “Them images keep comin’ back on you when you least expect, and your blood runs ice-cold.”
“Ice-cold,” her husband agreed, and nodded solemnly.
The woman nodded solemnly, too.
The three of us sat there nodding until Mr. Bullock suddenly turned his head to look at the window above the sink, as if he’d heard something that unsettled him.
Maybelle’s right hand went to the pistol beside her plate, and she turned in her chair to look at the same window. “Deke?”
“Probably nothing,” he said.
I was facing the window that interested them. I didn’t see anything alarming. I didn’t hear anything, either.
After they had been staring at the window for the better part of a minute, Mr. Bullock said, “I’m just jumpy.”
“You sure?” Maybelle asked.
“As sure as a fella can ever be in a world where every dang place you set foot, there’s a trap door waitin’ to be sprung.”
He returned to his dinner, but he ate with his left hand so that he could keep the right one on his pistol.
After we finished the meal in silence, Maybelle looked at me and broke into a smile as radiant as the one Donna Reed turned on Jimmy Stewart in the last scene of It’s a Wonderful Life. “Oddie, time for your favorite peach pie!”
Mrs. Bullock seemed to be of good cheer again, but her husband regarded the window with a frown, as though he doubted that we would live long enough to enjoy dessert.
Sixteen
Mr. Bullock provided me with a shoulder holster that held both the Glock and the spare magazines. In front of a free-standing full-length mirror in my room, I shrugged into the rig and adjusted it while he stood watching and nodding approvingly.
He owned two sport coats, two more than I did: a black one for funerals and a powder-blue one for what he referred to as “warm-weather dress-up occasions.” He had worn the latter only once when, in 110-degree desert heat, a friend had held a memorial service for a beloved house cat. Although the blue number went with my white T-shirt, jeans, and white sneakers, the pastel shade of it made me feel a little bit like a dandy.
“Nothin’ matters,” he said, “but what it fits you loose enough to hide that there gun you’re packin’. You got yourself the phone?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The little flashlight I give you?”
“It’s on the dresser.”
“Supposin’ you end up in some hugger-mugger where you got to have yourself a pencil light ’bout as bad as an innocent man in the electric chair wants a last-minute go-free call from the governor, but it’s not in your pocket ’cause it’s there on the dresser?”
He retrieved the little flashlight and handed it to me
, and I tucked it into an inside coat pocket. He asked if I had enough money, and I assured him that I did, and he told me to be careful, and I said that I would. He tugged on the lapels of the sport coat and smoothed the shoulders, and I felt as if I were being sent off on my first date.
In the kitchen, Mrs. Bullock insisted on hugging me and kissing me on the cheek before I left, a rather different send-off from any that James Bond ever got from his handlers at MI6.
Outside, in the last hour of light, Deke Bullock used a remote control to open one of the garage doors on the converted stable. I had said that I wanted an inconspicuous set of wheels. Of the two vehicles in that stall, he gave me the keys to a fifteen-year-old Ford Explorer that was dinged, scraped, and in need of being washed.
“She looks like a worn-out old spavined mare, don’t she? But under the hood, she’s a spirited filly.”
“I’m just going to ride around town, see what there is to see, feel it out. I don’t expect I’ll have to outrun a hot pursuit.”
He nodded and patted me on one shoulder. “Let’s hope it don’t come to that. But just when a man expects he’s earned the littlest bit of milk and honey, the world throws a load of horseshit at him.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, sir.”
“Now, say you find yourself comin’ back here after midnight. Then you call the number I give you earlier, so I can get out of bed and open the door for you, instead of shootin’ you dead. Tell me you got the number memorized?”
“Yes, sir. But I don’t want to disturb you folks.”
“You couldn’t if you tried, son. The missus don’t sleep at all anymore, and I don’t need but an hour a night.”
“Because you’re fully smoothed out and blue?” I asked.
When I’d first met Edie Fischer, she had claimed that she never slept anymore. In time, I had learned that she was telling the truth, though I still didn’t understand why she didn’t need sleep or what was meant by “fully smooth and blue.” She promised that understanding would come to me in time. When you’re given a life as bizarre as mine, you tend to be accepting of other people’s strangeness and eccentricities.
“Maybelle,” he said, “she’s smooth and blue all through, but I got me a ways to go yet. Now, you be careful out there, son. Don’t be expectin’ milk and honey, and maybe then you’ll get yourself some.”
He watched me drive out of the converted stable and through the tunnel formed by the velvet ashes.
As I turned right on the state highway and headed into Pico Mundo, I felt not merely that I was coming home after a long time away, but also felt, stronger than ever, that I had a rendezvous with destiny somewhere in those streets, the destiny that had been promised to me by a carnival fortune-telling machine called Gypsy Mummy.
To the east, the sky had turned from blue to bishop’s purple, with the gloss of satin. Like a juggled orange coming slowly down, the westering sun swelled as it settled toward the horizon, soon to be a blood orange.
West of the historic district, the first neighborhood I cruised was Jack Flats, which fifty years earlier had been called Jack Rabbit Flats. The area had undergone decline when, during city government’s crusade to greatly ramp up the quaintness of the downtown streets, non-quaint enterprises like muffler shops and tire stores and pawn shops were forced to relocate to Jack Flats. More recently, the area had begun to undergo gentrification.
I can’t say what vibe I was searching for, but I didn’t feel it in Jack Flats. I drove out of there as the swollen sun balanced on the horizon, pouring red light through the town. Stucco walls glowed carnelian and every window glimmered like a jewel. Shadows lay long and black, silhouetted trees were as dark as masses of rising smoke, and the windshields of the passing traffic reflected a fiercely fiery sky, as though every driver must be on a journey to Armageddon.
If one kind of hell or another would soon come to this town, there should have been at least a bodach or two slinking along the streets, unseen by all but me, seeking out those soon to be dead, to savor the smell of them as they ripened toward their fate, to thrill at the imminence of their death by stroking them with hands and licking them with tongues that they could never feel. But not one of those featureless, shadowy connoisseurs of violence was in evidence.
Without consciously making my way to Marigold Lane, I found myself on that familiar street, in a neighborhood where Victorian houses seemed to have been transported, entire blocks at a time, out of the eastern cities from which many of Pico Mundo’s oldest families had migrated during the early decades of the twentieth century.
In the still red but fading light, I pulled to the curb in front of the house owned by Rosalia Sanchez. For a few years, when I lived in the small studio apartment above her detached garage, she had been my landlady and my friend.
She would be sixty-five now, with that saintly face worn by so much caring for others, by loss and grief, by waiting patiently for what she would never receive in this life.
Back in 2001, she had awakened one day to the discovery that her much-loved husband, Herman, had died beside her in his sleep and lay there cold and pale, one eye closed and the other open, staring. Later that same year, still in mourning, she had bowed out of a long-planned vacation to New England that she and Herman had intended to take with her three sisters and their families. On the morning of September 11, Rosalia woke to the news that their return flight out of Boston had been hijacked and flown into one of the World Trade Center towers.
Having lost every relative in one year, while she was sleeping, without a child of her own to whom she could turn for solace, Rosalia went a little mad. Intellectually, she knew that they were all dead, but in this case, emotion trumped reason. She would never speak of terrorists or plane crashes, nor would she listen to such talk. She chose to believe instead that as a consequence of some rare natural phenomenon, everyone she loved had turned invisible. She held fast, as well, to the theory that soon this event, like a magnetic field, would be reversed, rendering her loved ones visible again.
Her madness involved no resentment or anger, and she posed no danger either to herself or to others. She continued to keep her house immaculate, to bake her marvelous cakes and cookies as gifts for friends and neighbors, to attend her church, and to be a force for good in her community. And to wait for her family to be returned to visibility.
I never knew whether I was drawn to eccentric people or if they were drawn to me. Either way, my life had been full of them—and they had enriched it. I suspected eccentricity was often if not always a response to pain, a defense mechanism against anguish and torment and sorrow. With a father who played no positive role in my life and with a mother whose behavior often made her a candidate for an asylum, I am sure that I would have been the eccentric I became even if I’d never been gifted or cursed with my sixth sense.
No bodachs were in view along Marigold Lane.
As the last light bled out of the day, less than fully aware of how I had gotten there, I found myself parked across the street from St. Bartholomew’s Church, where Stormy’s uncle, Sean Llewellyn, still served as the priest and rector.
Some of the happiest times that she and I shared were on the open deck of St. Bart’s bell tower, to which we would sometimes climb with a picnic dinner, to dine there among the immense but silenced bells, surrounded by the best view in Pico Mundo. We felt that we were above all strife in that high redoubt, our future together no less enduring than the town we overlooked.
With the approach of night, the tower was up-lit, and a red aircraft warn-off light served as finial at the peak of the belfry roof. As I watched it winking, I recalled how spectacular the sunset had been the last time that Stormy and I had climbed up there with a picnic hamper, on what we could not know would be the final night of her life.
No bodachs crept the front stairs of the church or climbed the walls, or danced in glee upon the bell-tower roof.
Four minutes till seven o’clock. I pulled back into traffic.
&nb
sp; Stormy had lived in one of four apartments in a house three blocks from the Pico Mundo Grille. In my not-so-random drive through town, I next parked across the street from that place.
Orphaned young, supporting herself as a counter girl and then as the manager of an ice-cream shop, she had been poor by almost any definition. She had furnished her humble rooms with items from thrift shops, and yet her apartment had been stylish and comfortable. Old silk-shaded floor lamps with beaded fringes. Upholstered Victorian footstools paired with crude imitations of Stickley-style chairs. Maxfield Parrish prints. Carnival-glass vases. Cheap bronze castings of various breeds of dogs displayed on end tables and windowsills. The eclectic mix shouldn’t have worked, but it did, because she had magic in her and because she could see the magic in everyday things.
I had moved out of my studio apartment above the garage and into Stormy’s place after she died. I lived there for a year, until I left town on my journey of discovery. Her things had been packed away and stored in a room at Ozzie Boone’s house. I could dispose of nothing. Every item she owned, however inexpensive it might be, was to me a treasure, a store of memory and a memento of love unrivaled and undying.
How long I sat there, across the street from the house in which she had lived, I couldn’t be sure. I drove away only when my tremors stopped, only when the world gradually regained its detail and ceased to be just a blur.
Now that night had fully claimed Pico Mundo, I allowed intuition to guide me and cruised to the town square, at the center of which lay Memorial Park with its handsome bronze statue of three soldiers from World War II. Unlike the other streets of the historic district, those four blocks surrounding the park were lined not with flowering jacarandas but with magnificent old phoenix palms with enormous crowns of fronds.
Couples occupied the park benches, cuddling in the light of the three-globe cast-iron lampposts. The many restaurants were open, of course, but also all of the specialty shops, which catered as much to tourists as to locals. People were window-shopping, some of them carrying cones of ice cream as they ambled from shop to shop, some sipping from Starbucks cups, some walking their dogs, some talking and laughing. Although my perception might have been distorted by melancholy, it seemed to me that most of those people were in pairs, the larger percentage of them holding hands, as if they were extras in a movie of high romance, accessorizing a scene for which the director’s purpose might have been to say that life was a parade lived two-by-two, as it had been since before Noah’s fabled ark and as it would be always.