Grist 01 - The Four Last Things (16 page)

The house is heated by a wood-burning stove, and a wood-burning stove requires a woodpile. I went to the woodpile and selected a sodden piece of oak, about the length of my arm and just slender enough to wrap my hand around. The rain had become an ally: it muffled the sound of my approach. Even the sucking sounds I made as I pulled my shoes out of the mud were probably inaudible to anyone inside.

A foot at a time, I reached the door. I stood in front of it for what seemed like an hour. Just as I was about to convince myself that I
had
left the kitchen light on, I heard footsteps on the wooden floor inside. A shadow passed in front of the opaque glass in the door, heading for the kitchen.

I hefted the wood in my hand to make sure I had the balance right, and waited. Footsteps again. The shadow passed across the door again, and I threw myself against it and lurched across the threshold, the piece of wood lifted high above my head.

Roxanne, wearing my heavy woolen bathrobe, whirled and shrieked like the heroine in a forties horror flick. Then she registered who I was, lowered her hand from her mouth, and said, “Simeon, how nice. You’ve brought in some firewood.”

Half an hour later, with wine warming our insides and wet wood sputtering in the stove, we fell asleep.

I woke up even more reluctantly than usual and stumbled to the bathroom. Roxanne, once again, was long gone, but the smell of coffee permeated the house. The rain had apparently stopped, and sun streamed improbably through the windows.

Since hot water in Topanga takes approximately the same time to arrive as the Ice Age did in Europe, I turned the shower on and snapped the door shut before I took a stance at the washbasin to scrape what tasted like several past lifetimes off my teeth. My toothbrush seemed too heavy to lift. When I looked at my face in the mirror, rabid foam dripped from my chin. I couldn’t bear to look at myself, so I shaved from memory and stepped into the shower.

The water was exactly body temperature. Uncannily body temperature. Feeling vaguely uneasy, I began to scrub. I looked down and saw the streams running off my body turning a brownish-red rust color. Then the water stopped altogether and I looked up.

Blood gouted out through the shower head. Dark, thick, precisely body temperature, it poured forth, splashing off my shoulders and splattering the shower tiles in crimson Rorschach patterns. I leapt back, and it squished beneath my bare feet.

I heard my scream echo wildly. I tried to push the shower door open. It was stuck. I threw a shoulder, streaming with blood, against it. Nothing.

Someone was outside, holding it closed.

I hammered against it. It didn’t give. The blood stopped flowing. Against all my better judgment I looked to see why. White worms, thin, pallid, not really white but a sickly pale gray, squeezed themselves through the holes in the shower head and began to dangle down toward me. I grabbed at the edge of the shower door and hurled myself into it. It opened an inch and then slammed shut again and I found myself looking down, staring transfixed at what had caught in the door.

Long blond hair.

Angel Ellspeth’s hair.

The worms touched my shoulder.

The odor of death filled the shower.

The worms grasped me more tightly, their gaping mouths opening wide, gripping my shoulder, pulling me up, up toward the shower head.

“Simeon,” they said in a girlish voice.

I tried to shake myself free. They hung fast. I closed my eyes.

“Simeon,” they said. “Something stinks.”

I opened my eyes, swallowed, and looked at Roxanne.

“It’s really bad,” she said, looking down at me. She was wrapped in my robe. “Are you awake, or what?”

“I’m awake,” I said. I was also sweating. “What in God’s name is it?”

“Well,” she said in the gray light of a rainy morning, “I’m no expert, but my guess is that something’s dead.”

Chapter 15

I
t took two toots from the truck’s horn to tell me he’d arrived. I hoisted my steaming coffee mug, wrapped my leaky raincoat around my bare and unsteaming body, and headed down the driveway. Roxanne was gone but the rain was still with us.

About an hour before, at Roxanne’s urging and jacked up by three cups of her coffee, I’d gone reluctantly down to check out the smell. If Roxanne hadn’t been watching from the top of the driveway I’d have yielded to nausea and gone back up the hill to tell her a lie. She
was
watching, though, and I had a sacred masculine tradition of stupidity to uphold.

If the smell had been music it would have been Mahler. There was a rich, overripe majesty to it that actually made it difficult to tell whether it was getting stronger or weaker. Looking for its source was like trying to spot a candle after being blinded by a flashbulb. With every synapse in my nervous system screaming retreat in a hysterical falsetto, I forced myself into the bushes above the driveway.

And there it was, about five feet up the hill, a shapeless blob of blond fur: someone’s beloved Fluffy the Cat. Around what once had been its neck was a pink collar that had been described to me in heartrending detail, making me surer than I wanted to be that it was, to be precise, Mrs. Yount’s Fluffy the Cat. I didn’t think she’d want her back. So I’d discreetly heaved the coffee and most of last night’s hamburger onto the wet earth, feeling protected by the bushes from Roxanne’s prying eyes. Then, bathed in chill sweat, I’d clambered back up the driveway with a ghastly semblance of jauntiness to figure out what to do.

Coyotes team up to take cats. One of them had probably chased poor old Fluffy into the underbrush and directly into a circle of teeth and claws. Cats must taste terrible, because they hadn’t bothered to eat her. Fluffy had been deteriorating for about ten days while Mrs. Yount waited for me to turn something up, and I drove up and down the canyon tacking Xeroxes to phone poles. If I could have written them in coyote I might have gotten an answer. Or at least a long, echoing, moonlit horse-laugh.

Once I was safe inside the house, I’d called the city out of sheer desperation and been referred to the county. The county had given me another number to call, and someone at that number had given me another number. I was running out of space on my doodle pad by the time I found myself talking to the right person.

That person’s job was to dispatch other people to pick up dead animals.

When the horn toots summoned me, I slogged back down in the drizzle to see a tall young black man in a yellow rubber slicker standing in front of a long white truck. His expression was as bright as a sunny day, cheerier than an orange Life-Saver in a packet full of limes. He balanced a shovel upright like an urban graffito based loosely on American Gothic.

“Say what,” he said by way of salutation. “So where she be?”

I took a protective pull off my coffee cup and pointed vaguely toward the bushes, stifling a petticoat impulse to hold my nose. He nodded, slogged up the hill, and started in. First, though, he paused and looked back at me.

“No snakes in here, is they?” He sounded serious.

“None,” I lied, without even thinking about it. “I’ve lived here five years and never seen one.” I’d killed three with a hoe, right about there.

“I don’t shine to snakes,” he said. “Somethin’ wrong when you can kill the front half and the back still lash around. Even when they all the way dead, I use the long shovel. The
way
long shovel. Sometimes, if they dead in the road and they ain’t nobody watchin’, I just run the truck over them four, five times to mash them into the asphalt. Then I jus’ pretend they the dotted line and go home.”

“No problem. You’re safe as milk,” I said, wondering who at the county I could call to get him picked up if a rattler bit him. “Just follow your nose.”

The brush closed behind him and I repressed a twinge of guilt and tried to think about something else. Anything else. “Wo,” he said, unseen. “She be real ripe.” I heard some scuffling in the brush and the handle of his shovel emerged once or twice. “Heeere, kitty, kitty,” he said. I concentrated on feeling inadequate.

He came out backward with something blond and unrecognizable lolling off the end of the shovel. An explosion of odor rolled toward me. The black man extended the shovel to the left and faced all the way right, toward me. “I done developed this walk all by myse’f,” he said. “Looks funny, but she works. Tell me if I gone hit a tree.” Arms left, head right, he marched down the hill.

“You do this all day long?” I said after the cat was safely stowed in the bowels of the truck.

He wiped the shovel on some dead grass while he considered the question. “This ain’t doodlysquat,” he said at last. “Later, right before dinner, I got to unload the truck.”

I looked for a tree to sag against. “No,” I said. “Say it isn’t so.”

“Four dollar thirty-fi’ an hour,” he said, grinning. “And unloading them ain’t the half of it.”

“What in the world,” I said, against my better judgment, “could you mean?”

“Well, they’s a problem. See, sometime they get mixed up. Out come ol’ Fluffy there and she got Fido’s head. Then I got to sort them out. Like a jigsaw puzzle, you know? ‘Cept in 3-D and Smellovision.”

My pulse pounded forcefully in my ears a couple of times before sanity prevailed. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Why do you have to sort them out?”

His smile widened. “For burial. We take ‘em over to the Permanent Pet Playground, Inc., y’ know? Fussy outfit. These fuzzy babies going to be frisking around for eternity, they got to have the right heads and tails. Otherwise they going to be fightin’ with theyself. I mean, wo. What gone happen when that big bugle blow in the sky, huh? How all these good folk seized up by the Rapture gone recognize they pets when they pets look like they been put together by a committee?”

I looked at him for a long moment. His face was as innocent as a Girl Scout cookie. “I’m not sure,” I said, “but I think you’re full of shit.” He gazed at me genially. “You want a cup of coffee?”

“Is the pope a polack?” He stashed the shovel carefully in the truck and followed me up the driveway.

I closed the door behind him and poured out the last of Roxanne’s hour-old brew. He’d taken the slicker off to reveal an immaculate white uniform with the name
dexter
stitched into the pocket. It was hand-stitched, individual stitches leapfrogging each other over the pocket’s surface. It looked like he’d stitched the pocket closed. He sat at what passed for a breakfast counter, sipped the coffee, and made a face.

”Wo, hot. But it taste good. Center slice from the loaf of life, y’ know?” He blew on the chipped mug and surveyed the living room. “I know every man’s home supposed to be his castle,” he said, “but you pushing it, don’t you think?”

“You don’t like it?”

“Sure,” he said, “it’s real sweet. I was just trying to figure if I’d rather live in it or under it.”

“That’s because you haven’t been under it.”

“Ain’t nothin’ there I haven’t picked up.”

“How do you do it?” I drained the dregs in my cup. “And, while we’re on it, why?”

He had a knack of making his eyes glimmer, and he glimmered them at me then. “You got a live boss?” he asked.

I thought. “Not at the moment.”

“That’s what I like,” he said, “man who don’t pick his words.”

“Okay, sorry. I usually do.”

“Me, I’ll take a dead client anytime, huh? ‘Stead of a live boss, I mean. Ol’ Fluffy, y’ know, she smell terrible, she done kiss the odor of sanctity good-bye for keeps, and she ain’t no thicker’n a milkshake. But she ain’t gone tell me what to do.”

“You mean you do this of your own free will?” I asked disbelievingly.

“Free will?” he said. “That’s quaint, y’ know? I ain’t heard no one say that since college.”

“College,” I said.

“Yeah. This philosophy professor. Must have weighed three hundred pounds on a good day, when he been skippin’ potatoes, y’ know? Man was
fat
. Always talkin’ about determinism. Everything come from somethin’ else, right? So if this clown know that, how come he’s so fat? And, wo, could he smoke. If he know everything come from somethin’ else, how come he don’t know cancer comes from smokin’ cigarettes? Enough to put you off education.”

“Jerry Ryskind,” I said.

”Wo,” he said, sitting bolt upright. “Hey, the Bruins, huh? Fuck USC”

“In spades,” I said, regretting the expression instantly. He saw my expression and laughed.

“Skip it,” he said. “Fuck ‘em in spades and hearts and diamonds too. So you a Bruin too. You know ol’ Jerry.”

“Philosophy 101,” I said. “Many unfiltered cigarettes. Double-breasted suits.”

“Triple-breasted. On the way to quadruple-breasted, last time I seen him. He gain five more pounds, they gone have to put a pleat in the room.”

“I’m Simeon. Simeon Grist.”

“Dexter,” he said, pointing to the pocket. “Dexter Smif. S-m-i-f. This be a terrible house,” he elaborated. “Shame you don’t got none of the advantages.”

“With your college education, how many negatives can you get into a sentence?”

“Five. Six, if I workin’ at it. Hard thing is to stick with the odd numbers. If two negatives is a positive, then four is a double positive. Got to get past the last even number. ‘I ain’t got no idea,’ well, you know and I know that that means I know something. ‘I don’t know nothing nohow,’ right? That leaves some doubt in the mind, don’t it?”

“It don’t,” I said. “Anybody can count to three.”

He slurped at his coffee. “You wrong there. Somebody like you, got all the advantages despite this shit house, you can hit three without standing on tiptoe.”

“So you took philosophy.”

“Minor. It’s a dead man’s game. De hearse before Descartes.”

“What was your major, urban English?”

“The degree’s in poli sci.” He gave me a slow grin. “You want me to talk different?”

“Well,” I said, “if you’ll forgive my saying so, it doesn’t exactly add up. A political-science degree, and you spend your days scraping up dead mammals.”

“ ‘Phibians too,” he said. “Don’t forget the ‘phibians.”

“You have a lot of invigorating political discussions with the dead ‘phibians?”

“You forget the philosphy. This is a good job for a guy with philosphy flowin’ through his veins.”

“Thought you didn’t like snakes.”

“Don’t be gettin’ tricky, now. Any fool that can tell poop from pizza knows snakes ain’t ‘phibians. They riptahls.”

“I’d love to hear you spell that.”

”R-i-p-t-a-h-l-s.” He smiled. “Easy.” he said. “Almost as easy as ‘Smif.’ ”

“No bosses,” I said. “Lots of time to speculate on the implications of mortality.”

“They only one implication I can think of. We all gone to end up in somebody’s truck.”

“The Chariot of the Gods.”

He fished out a pack of cigarettes and lit one, crossed impossibly long legs, and leaned back. “So,” he said, “we talkin’ about my job. What career path brought you to this mansion on the hill?”

“I’m an investigator,” I said. The word “detective” always made me uncomfortable.

“Can’t be insurance. You don’t look like you could get it, much less give it. Can’t be a cop. Cops got to be macho, you know? Your average cop would have picked up ol’ Fluffy out there with his teeth and then flossed with the tendons. You certainly ain’t IRS. Got any more coffee?”

“I’ll make some. It’ll take a while. You don’t have to go anywhere?”

“No bosses, remember? And Fluffy, she ain’t no jug of perfume but she real patient. So I guess that means you in business for yourself.”

I poured water into the top of the coffeemaker and put some beans in the grinder. “I guess it does.”

“Wo, real gourmet. Beans and all. You got a ashtray?”

“Use the floor. The cleaning crew comes in today.”

“They gone bring a wrecking ball?”

“A fire hose. You want it strong?”

“You like the job?”

I thought about it. “Some days.”

“Explain the appeal.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the saucer.

The coffeemaker gurgled three or four times as the water heated. “This is its idea of foreplay,” I said. “In about an hour we’ll have some coffee.”

“Like I said, explain the appeal.”

“Well, once in a while you get a chance to reduce the number of assholes in the world.”

“That’s a losin’ battle. Ain’t never gone to be no asshole shortage. We got oil shortages, grain shortages, coal shortages, every kind of fuckin’ shortage you can think of, but there ain’t no asshole shortage. Assholism is a dominant trait.”

“It’s still nice to take one out.” I gave the coffeepot a useless whack to speed it up.

“You an idealist,” he said. “Me, I’m a realist. You know the difference between an idealist and a realist?”

“No,” I said, “but I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

“The idealist is holdin’ the gun. The realist is on the other end.”

“And where’d you pick up this bit of knowledge?”

“Nice little island name of Grenada. I was a member of the victorious invadin’ force. We fought them on the beaches, we fought them in the streets.”

“One of my favorite wars.”

“Like the man say, democracy in action. ‘Nother exercise in poli sci.”

“So you went to college, went into the forces, and then put all that background to work picking up dead animals.”

“Markin’ time.”

The phone rang. I went to pick it up, and Dexter went over to study the coffeemaker.

“It’s Hammond,” Hammond said.

“Damn,” Dexter said to the coffeemaker, which still hadn’t dripped a drop. “Come on, now.”

“You were right about the Oldfield house,” Hammond said. “They were pros. They even ripped the paper off the back of the mirror in the bedroom.”

“Did they wipe the place?”

“Looks like it. Lots of smears around, hardly one good print, not even many of hers. Also, they left money. There was about three hundred in a flour canister. Canister was open but the money was still there.”