From the Corner of His Eye

  “Who told you pigs?” he asked.

  “Mommy.”

  “Ah. Well, Mommy never lies.”

  “Yeah,” Angel said, looking suspiciously at her mother, “but she teases.”

  Celestina smiled distractedly. Since arriving at the hotel an hour ago, she had been openly debating with herself whether to call her parents in Spruce Hills or to wait until later in the afternoon, when she might be able to report not just that she had a fiancé, and not only that she had a fiancé who’d been shot and nearly killed, but also that his condition had been upgraded from critical to serious. As she’d explained to Tom, in addition to worrying them with the news about Cain, she’d be stunning them with the announcement that she was going to marry a white man twice her age. “My folks don’t have one ounce of prejudice between them, but they sure do have firm ideas about what’s appropriate and what’s not.” This would ring the big bell at the top of the White Family Scale of the Inappropriate. Besides, they were preparing for the funeral of a parishioner, and from personal experience, Celestina knew their day would be full. Nevertheless, at ten minutes past eleven, after picking at her breakfast, she finally decided to call them.

  As Celestina settled on the sofa with the phone in her lap, hesitating to dial until she worked up a bit more courage, Angel said to Tom, “So what happened to your face?”

  “Angel!” her mother admonished from across the room. “That’s impolite.”

  “I know. But how can I find out ’less I ask?”

  “You don’t have to find out everything.”

  “I do,” Angel objected.

  “I was run over by a rhinoceros,” Tom revealed.

  Angel blinked at him. “The big ugly animal?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Has mean eyes and a horn thing on its nose?”

  “Exactly the one.”

  Angel grimaced. “I don’t like rhinosharushes.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Why did it run over you?”

  “Because I was in its way.”

  “Why were you in its way?”

  “Because I crossed the street without looking.”

  “I’m not allowed to cross the street alone.”

  “Now you see why?” Tom asked.

  “Are you sad?”

  “Why should I be sad?”

  “’Cause your face looks all mooshed?”

  “Oh, Lord,” Celestina said exasperatedly.

  “It’s all right,” Tom assured her. To Angel, he said, “No, I’m not sad. And you know why?”

  “Why?”

  “See this?” He placed the pepper shaker in front of her on the room-service table and held the salt shaker concealed in his hand.

  “Pepper,” Angel said.

  “But let’s pretend it’s me, okay? So here I am, stepping off the curb without looking both ways—”

  He moved the shaker across the tablecloth, rocking it back and forth to convey that he was strolling without a care in the world.

  “—and wham! the rhinoceros hits me and never so much as stops to apologize—”

  He knocked the pepper shaker on its side, and then with a groan put it upright once more.

  “—and when I get up off the street, my clothes are a mess, and I’ve got this face.”

  “You should sue.”

  “I should,” Tom agreed, “but the point is this…” With the finesse of a magician, he allowed the salt shaker to slip out of the concealment of his palm, and stood it beside the pepper. “This is also me.”

  “No, this is you,” Angel said, tapping one finger on the pepper shaker.

  “Well, you see, that’s the funny thing about all the important choices we make. If we make a really big wrong choice, if we do the really awful wrong thing, we’re given another chance to continue on the right path. So the very moment I stupidly stepped off the curb without looking, I created another world where I did look both ways and saw the rhinoceros coming. And so—”

  Holding a shaker in each hand, Tom walked them forward, causing them to diverge slightly at first, but then moving them along exactly parallel to each other.

  “—though this Tom now has a rhinoceros-smacked face, this other Tom, in his own world, has an ordinary face. Poor him, so ordinary.”

  Leaning close to study the salt shaker, Angel said, “Where’s his world?”

  “Right here with ours. But we can’t see it.”

  She looked around the room. “He’s invisible like the Cheshire cat?”

  “His whole world is as real as ours, but we can’t see it, and people in his world can’t see us. There’re millions and millions of worlds all here in the same place and invisible to one another, where we keep getting chance after chance to live a good life and do the right thing.”

  People like Enoch Cain, of course, never choose between the right and the wrong thing, but between two evils. For themselves, they create world after world of despair. For others, they make worlds of pain.

  “So,” he said, “you see why I’m not sad?”

  Angel raised her attention from the salt shaker to Tom’s face, studied his scars for a moment, and said, “No.”

  “I’m not sad,” Tom said, “because though I have this face here in this world, I know there’s another me—in fact, lots of other Tom Vanadiums—who don’t have this face at all. Somewhere I’m doing just fine, thank you.”

  After thinking it over, the girl said, “I’d be sad. Do you like dogs?”

  “Who doesn’t like dogs?”

  “I want a puppy. Did you ever have a puppy?”

  “When I was a little boy.”

  On the sofa, Celestina finally worked up the courage to dial her parents’ number in Spruce Hills.

  “Do you think dogs can talk?” Angel asked.

  “You know,” Tom said, “I’ve never actually thought about it.”

  “I saw a horse talk on TV.”

  “Well, if a horse can talk, why not a dog?”

  “That’s what I think.”

  Her connection made, Celestina said, “Hi, Mom, it’s me.”

  “What about cats?” Angel asked.

  “Mom?” Celestina said.

  “If dogs, why not cats?”

  “Mom, what’s happening?” Celestina asked, sudden worry in her voice.

  “That’s what I think,” Angel said.

  Tom pushed his chair back from the table, got to his feet, and moved toward Celestina.

  Bolting up from the couch—“Mom, are you there?”—she turned to Tom, her face collapsing in a ghastly expression.

  “I want a talking dog,” Angel said.

  As Tom reached Celestina, she said, “Shots.” She said, “Gunshots.” She held the receiver in one hand and pulled at her hair with the other, as if with the administration of a little pain, she might wake up from this nightmare. She said, “He’s in Oregon.”

  The inimitable Mr. Cain. The wizard of surprises. Master of the unlikely.

  Chapter 76

  “BOILS.”

  In a stolen black Dodge Charger 440 Magnum, Junior Cain shot out of Spruce Hills on as straight a trajectory to Eugene as the winding roads of southern Oregon would allow, staying off Interstate 5, where the policing was more aggressive.

  “Carbuncles, to be precise.”

  During the drive, he alternated between great gales of delighted laughter and racking sobs wrought by pain and self-pity. The voodoo Baptist was dead, the curse broken with the death of he who had cast it. Yet Junior must endure this final devastating plague.

  “A boil is an inflamed, pus-filled hair follicle or pore.”

  On a street a half mile from the airport in Eugene, he sat in the parked Dodge long enough to gingerly unwind the bandages and use a tissue to wipe off the pungent but useless salve he’d purchased at a pharmacy. Although he pressed the Kleenex to his face so gently that the pressure might not have broken the surface tension on a pool of water, the agony of the touch was so great that
he nearly passed out. The rearview mirror revealed clusters of hideous, large, red knobs with glistening yellow heads, and at the sight of himself, he actually did pass out for a minute or two, just long enough to dream that he was a grotesque but misunderstood creature being pursued through a stormy night by crowds of angry villagers with torches and pitchforks, but then the throbbing agony revived him.

  “Carbuncles are interconnected clusters of boils.”

  Wishing he had left the gauze wrappings on his face, but afraid that the airwaves might already be carrying news of the bandaged man who had killed a minister in Spruce Hills, Junior abandoned the Dodge and hurriedly walked back to the private-service terminal, where the pilot from Sacramento waited. At the sight of his passenger, the pilot blanched and said, Allergic reaction to WHAT? And Junior said, Camellias, because Sacramento was the Camellia Capital of the World, and all that he wanted was to get back there, where he’d left his new Ford van and his Sklents and his Zedd collection and everything he needed to live in the future. The pilot couldn’t conceal his intense revulsion, and Junior knew that he would have been stranded if he hadn’t paid the round-trip charter fare in advance.

  “Ordinarily, I’d recommend that you apply hot compresses every two hours to relieve discomfort and to hasten drainage, and I’d send you home with a prescription for an antibiotic.”

  Now, here, lying on a bed in the emergency room of a Sacramento hospital, on a Saturday afternoon only six weeks before the camellia festival, Junior suffered under the care of a resident physician who was so young as to raise the suspicion that he was merely playing doctor.

  “But I’ve never seen a case like this. Usually, boils appear on the back of the neck. And in moist areas like the armpits and the groin. Not so often on the face. And never in a quantity like this. Really, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Of course, you’ve never seen anything like it, you worthless adolescent twit. You’re not old enough to have seen squat, and even if you were older than your own grandfather, you wouldn’t have seen anything like this, Dr. Kildare, because this here is a true case of voodoo Baptist boils, and they don’t come along often!

  “I’m not sure which is more unusual—the site of the eruption, the number of boils, or the size of them.”

  While you’re trying to decide, hand me a knife, and I’ll cut your jugular, you brainless medical-school dropout.

  “I’m going to recommend that you be admitted overnight and that we lance these under hospital conditions. We’ll use a sterile needle on some of them, but a number are so large they’re going to require a surgical knife and possibly the removal of the carbuncle core. This is usually done with a local anesthetic, but in this instance, while I don’t think general anesthesia will be required, we’ll probably want to sedate you—that is, put you in a twilight sleep.”

  I’ll put you in a twilight sleep, you babbling cretin. Where’d you earn your medical degree, you nattering nitwit? Botswana? The Kingdom of Tonga?

  “Did they rush you straight in here or did you arrange all the insurance matters at reception, Mr. Pinchbeck?”

  “Cash,” Junior said. “I’ll pay cash, with whatever amount of deposit is required.”

  “Then I’ll attend to everything right away,” the doctor said, reaching for the privacy curtain that surrounded the ER bed.

  “For the love of God,” Junior pleaded, “can’t you please give me something for the pain?”

  The boy-wonder physician turned to Junior again and assumed an expression of compassion so inauthentic that if he’d been playing a doctor on even the cheesiest daytime soap opera, he’d have been stripped of his actor’s-union card, fired, and possibly horsewhipped on a live television special. “We’ll be doing the procedure this afternoon, so I wouldn’t want to give you anything much for the pain just prior to anesthesia and sedation. But don’t you worry, Mr. Pinchbeck. Once we’ve lanced these boils, when you wake up, ninety percent of the pain will be gone.”

  In abject misery, Junior lay waiting to go under the knife, more eager to be cut than he would have thought possible only a few hours before. The mere promise of this surgery thrilled him more than all the sex that he’d ever enjoyed between the age of thirteen and the Thursday just past.

  The pubescent physician returned with three colleagues, who crowded behind the privacy curtain to proclaim that none of them had ever seen any case remotely like this before. The oldest—a myopic, balding lump—insisted on asking Junior probing questions about his marital status, his family relationships, his dreams, and his self-esteem; the guy proved to be a clinical psychiatrist who speculated openly about the possibility of a psychosomatic component.

  The moron.

  At last: the humiliating backless gown, the precious drugs, even a pretty nurse who seemed to like him, and then oblivion.

  Chapter 77

  MONDAY EVENING, January 15, Paul Damascus arrived at the hotel in San Francisco with Grace White. He had kept watch over her in Spruce Hills for more than two days, sleeping on the floor in the hall outside her room both nights, remaining close by her side when she was in public. They stayed with friends of hers until Harrison’s funeral this morning, then flew south for a reunion of mother and daughter.

  Tom Vanadium liked this man at once. Cop instinct told him that Damascus was honest and reliable. Priestly insight suggested even more impressive qualities.

  “We were about to order dinner from room service,” Tom said, handing a menu to Paul.

  Grace declined food, but Tom ordered for her, anyway, selecting those things that by now he knew Celestina liked, guessing that the mother’s taste had shaped the daughter’s.

  The two bereaved women huddled at one end of the living room, tearful, touching, talking quietly, wondering together if there was any way that each could help the other to fill this sudden, deep, and terrible hole in their lives.

  Celestina had wanted to go to Oregon for the service, but Tom, Max Bellini, the Spruce Hills police, and Wally Lipscomb—to whom, by Sunday, she’d begun talking almost hourly on the telephone—all advised strenuously against making the trip. A man as crazed and as reckless as Enoch Cain, expecting to find her at the funeral home or the cemetery, might not be deterred by a police guard, no matter what its size.

  Angel didn’t join the grieving women, but sat on the floor in front of the television, switching back and forth between Gunsmoke and The Monkees. Too young to be genuinely involved in either show, nevertheless she occasionally made gunfire sounds when Marshal Dillon went into battle or invented her own lyrics to sing along with the Monkees.

  Once, she left the TV and came to Tom, where he sat talking with Paul. “It’s like Gunsmoke and The Monkees are next to each other on the TV, both at the same time. But the Monkees, they can’t see the cowboys—and the cowboys, they can’t see the Monkees.”

  Although to Paul this was no more than childish chatter, Tom knew at once that the girl referred to his explanation for why he wasn’t sad about his damaged face: the salt and pepper shakers representing two Toms, the hit-and-run rhinoceros, the different worlds all in one place. “Yes, Angel. That’s something like what I was talking about.”

  She returned to the television.

  “That’s a special little kid,” Tom said thoughtfully.

  “Really cute,” Paul agreed.

  Cuteness wasn’t the quality Tom had in mind.

  “How’s she taking her grandpa’s death?” Paul asked.

  “Little trouper.”

  Sometimes Angel seemed troubled by what she’d been told about her grandfather, and at those moments she appeared downcast, somber. But she was just three, after all, too young to grasp the permanence of death. She would probably not have been surprised if Harrison White had walked through the door in a little while, during The Man from U.N.C.L.E. or The Lucy Show.

  While they waited for the room-service waiter to arrive, Tom got from Paul a detailed report of Enoch Cain’s attack on the parsonage. He had h
eard most of it from friends in the state-police homicide division, which was assisting the Spruce Hills authorities. But Paul’s account was more vivid. The ferocity of the assault convinced Tom that whatever the killer’s twisted motives might be, Celestina and her mother—and not least of all Angel—were in danger as long as Cain roamed free. Perhaps as long as he lived.

  Dinner arrived, and Tom persuaded Celestina and Grace to come to the table for Angel’s sake, even if they had no appetite. After so much chaos and confusion, the child needed stability and routine wherever they could be provided. Nothing brought a sense of order and normality to a disordered and distressing day more surely than the gathering of family and friends around a dinner table.

  Although, by unspoken agreement, they avoided any talk of loss and death, the mood remained grim. Angel sat in thoughtful silence, pushing her food around her plate rather than eating it. Her demeanor intrigued Tom, and he noticed that it worried her mother, who put a different interpretation on it than he did.

  He slid his plate aside. From a pocket, he withdrew a quarter, which always served him as well with children as with murderers.

  Angel brightened at the sight of the coin turning end-over-end across his knuckles. “I could learn to do that,” she asserted.

  “When your hands are bigger,” Tom agreed, “I’m sure you could. In fact, one day I’ll teach you.”

  Clenching his right hand around the quarter, waving left hand over right, he intoned, “Jingle-jangle, mingle-jingle.” Opening his right hand, he revealed that the coin had vanished.

  Angel cocked her head and studied his left hand, which he had closed while opening his right. She pointed. “It’s there.”

  “I’m afraid you’re wrong.” When Tom opened his left hand, the palm lay as bare as that of a blind beggar in a country of thieves. Meanwhile, his right hand had tightened into a fist again.

  “Where did it go?” Grace asked her granddaughter, making as much effort as she could to lighten the mood for the girl’s sake.

  Regarding Tom’s clenched right hand with suspicion, Angel said, “Not there.”

  “The princess is correct,” he acknowledged, revealing that this hand was still empty. Then he reached to the girl and plucked the quarter from her ear.

  “That’s not magic,” Angel declared.

  “It sure looked like magic to me,” said Celestina.

  “Me too,” Paul agreed.

  Angel was adamant: “Nope. I could learn that. Like dressing myself and saying thank-you.”

  “You could,” Tom agreed.

  With his bent thumb against the crook of his forefinger, he flipped the quarter. Even as the coin snapped off the thumbnail and began to stir the air, Tom flung up both hands, fingers spread to show them empty and to distract. Yet on a second look, the coin was not airborne as it had seemed to be, no longer spinning—wink, wink—before their dazzled eyes. It had vanished as though into the payment slot of an ethereal vending machine that dispensed mystery in return.

  Around the dinner table, the adults applauded, but the tougher audience squinted at the ceiling, toward which she believed the coin had arced, then at the table, where it ought to have fallen among the waterglasses or in her creamed corn. At last she looked at Tom and said, “Not magic.”

  Grace, Celestina, and Paul expressed amusement and amazement at Angel’s critical judgment.

  Undeterred, the girl said, “Not magic. But maybe I can’t learn to do that