Odd Interlude (4 page)

The oppressive mood infecting me since recent events in Magic Beach seems to have lifted. Curiously, nothing restores my common sense and puts me back on the firm ground of reason like a creepy encounter with something apparently supernatural.

In the lighted branches of the trees, the weak breath of the night makes the leaves quiver as if in anticipation of an approaching evil. On the ground around me, trembling patterns of light and shadow create the illusion that the land is unstable underfoot.

In the arc of cottages, no lamps brighten any windows except those in my unit and Annamaria’s, although five other vehicles are parked here. If those guests of the Harmony Corner motor court are sleeping, perhaps a secret reader pages through their memories and seeks … Seeks what? Merely to know them?

The reader—whoever or whatever it might be—wants something more than to know me. As surely as the antelope in the documentary is a few days’ worth of meals to the panther, I am prey, perhaps not to be eaten but in some way to be used.

I look at Boo.

Boo looks at me. Then he looks at Annamaria’s lighted windows.

At Cottage 6, as I rap lightly on the door, it swings
open as though the latch must not have been engaged. I step inside and find her sitting in a chair at a small table.

She has taken an apple from the hamper, peeled and sectioned it. She is sharing the fruit with Raphael. Sitting at attention beside her chair, the golden retriever crunches one of the slices and licks his chops.

Raphael looks at Boo and twitches his tail, happy that there’s no need to share his portion with a ghost dog. All dogs see lingering spirits; they aren’t as self-deluded about the true nature of the world as most people are.

“Has anything unusual happened?” I ask Annamaria.

“Isn’t something unusual always happening?”

“You’ve had no … no visitor of any kind?”

“Just you. Would you like some apple, Oddie?”

“No, ma’am. I think you’re in danger here.”

“Of the many people who want to kill me, none is in Harmony Corner.”

“How can you be sure?”

She shrugs. “No one here knows who I am.”

“
I
don’t even know who you are.”

“You see?” She gives another slice of apple to Raphael.

“I won’t be next door for a while.”

“All right.”

“In case you scream for me.”

She appears amused. “Whyever would I scream? I never have.”

“Never in your whole life?”

“One screams when one is startled or frightened.”

“You said people want to kill you.”

“But I’m not afraid of them. You do what you need to do. I’ll be fine.”

“Maybe you should come with me.”

“Where are you going?” she asks.

“Here and there.”

“I’m already here, and I’ve
been
there.”

I look at Raphael. Raphael looks at Boo. Boo looks at me.

“Ma’am, you asked if I would die for you, and I said yes.”

“That was very sweet of you. But you’re not going to have to die for me tonight. Don’t be in such a hurry.”

I once thought Pico Mundo had more than its share of eccentric folks. Having traveled some, I now know eccentricity is the universal trait of humanity.

“Ma’am, it might be dangerous to sleep.”

“Then I won’t sleep.”

“Should I get you some black coffee from the diner?”

“Why?”

“To help you stay awake.”

“I suppose you sleep when you need to. But you see, young man, I only sleep when I want to.”

“How does that work?”

“Splendidly.”

“Don’t you want to know why it could be dangerous to sleep?”

“Because I might fall out of bed? Oddie, I trust your admonition isn’t frivolous, and I will remain awake. Now go do whatever you have to do.”

“I’m going to snoop around.”

“Then snoop, snoop,” she says, making a shooing motion.

I retreat from her cottage and close the door behind me.

Already Boo is walking toward the diner. I follow him.

He fades away like fog evaporating.

I don’t know where he goes when he dematerializes. Maybe a ghost dog can travel to and from the Other Side as he pleases. I have never studied theology.

For the last day of January along the central coast, the night is mild. And quiet. The air smells faintly, pleasantly, of the sea. Nevertheless, my sense of impending peril is so great that I won’t be surprised if the ground opens under my feet and swallows me.

Big moths caper around the sign on the roof of the diner. Their natural color must be white, because they become entirely blue or red depending on which neon is closer to them. Bats, dark and changeless, circle ceaselessly, feeding on the bright swarm.

I don’t see signs and portents in everything. The voracious yet silent flying rodents chill me, however, and I decide not to stop first at the diner, as had been my intention.

Past the three eighteen-wheelers, at the service station, the Jaguar is gone. The mechanic is sweeping the floor of the garage.

At the open bay door, I say, “Good morning, sir,” as cheerfully as if a gorgeous pink dawn has already painted the sky and choirs of songbirds are celebrating the gift of life.

When he looks up from his work with the push broom, it’s a
Phantom of the Opera
moment. A grisly scar extends from his left ear, across his upper lip, through his lower lip, to the right side of his chin. Whatever the cause of the wound, it appears as if it might have been sewn up not by a doctor but instead by a fisherman using a hook and a length of leader wire.

With no apparent self-consciousness about his appearance, he says, “Hello there, son,” and favors me with a grin that would make Dracula back off. “You’re up even before Wally and Wanda have thought about goin’ to bed.”

“Wally and Wanda?”

“Oh, sorry. Our possums. Some say them two is just big ugly red-eyed rats. But a marsupial isn’t no rat. And ugly is like they say about beauty—it’s in the eye of the beholder. How you feel about possums?”

“Live and let live.”

“I make sure Wally and Wanda get the throwaway food from the diner each and every night. It makes ’em fat. But their life is hard, what with mountain lions and bobcats and packs of coyotes with a taste for possum. Don’t you think possums have a hard life?”

“Well, sir, at least Wally has Wanda and she has Wally.”

Abruptly his blue eyes glimmer with unshed tears and his scarred lips tremble, as if he is nearly undone by the thought of possum love.

He appears to be about forty, though his hair is iron gray. In spite of the horrific scar, he has an avuncular quality suggesting that he’s as good with children as he is kind to animals.

“You’ve gone right to the very heart of it. Wally has Wanda, and Donny has Denise, which makes anythin’ tolerable.”

Stitched on the breast pocket of his uniform shirt is the name DONNY.

He blinks back his tears and says, “What can I do for you, son?”

“I’ve been up awhile, need to stay awake awhile longer. I figure anyplace truckers stop must sell caffeine tablets.”

“I’ve got NoDoz in the gum-and-candy case. Or in the vendin’ machine, there’s high-octane stuff like Red Bull or Mountain Dew, or that new energy drink called Kick-Ass.”

“They really named it Kick-Ass?”

“Aren’t no standards anymore, anywhere, in anythin’. If they thought it would sell better, they’d call the stuff Good Shit. Excuse my language.”

“No problem, sir. I’ll take a package of NoDoz.”

Leading me through the garage to the station office, Donny says, “Our seven-year-old, he learned about sex from some Saturday-mornin’ cartoon show. Out of nowhere one day, Ricky he says he don’t want to be either straight or gay, it’s
all
disgustin’. We unplugged our satellite dish. No standards anymore. Now Ricky he watches all them old Disney and Warner Brothers toons on DVD. You never have to worry if maybe Bugs Bunny is goin’ to get it on with Daffy Duck.”

In addition to the NoDoz, I purchase two candy bars. “Does the vending machine accept dollars or do I need change?”

“It takes bills just fine,” Donny says. “Young as you look, you can’t have been drivin’ a rig long.”

“I’m not a trucker, sir. I’m an out-of-work fry cook.”

Donny follows me outside, where I get a can of Mountain Dew from the vending machine. “My Denise, she’s a fry cook over to the diner. You got yourself your own private language.”

“Who does?”

“You fry cooks.” The two sections of his scar become misaligned when he grins, as if his face is coming apart like a piece of dropped crockery. “Two
cows, make ’em cry, give ’em blankets, and mate ’em with pigs.”

“Diner lingo. That’s a waitress calling out an order for two hamburgers with onions, cheese, and bacon.”

“That stuff tickles me,” he says, and indeed he looks tickled. “Where you been a fry cook—when you had work, I mean?”

“Well, sir, I’ve been bouncing around all over.”

“It must be nice seein’ new places. Haven’t seen no new place in a long time. Sure would like to take Denise somewhere fresh. Just the two of us.” His eyes fill with tears again. He must be the most sentimental auto mechanic on the West Coast. “Just the two of us,” he repeats, and under the tenderness in his voice, which any mention of his wife seems to evoke, I hear a note of desperation.

“I guess with children it’s hard to get away, just you two.”

“There’s never no gettin’ away. No way, no how.”

Maybe I’m imagining more in his eyes than is really there, but I suspect that these latest unshed tears are as bitter as they are salty.

When I wash down a pair of NoDoz with the soda, he says, “You jolt your system like this a lot?”

“Not a lot.”

“You do too much of this, son, you’ll give yourself a for-sure bleedin’ ulcer. Too much caffeine eats away the stomach linin’.”

I tilt my head back and drain the too-sweet soda in a few long swallows.

When I drop the empty can in a nearby trash barrel, Donny says, “What’s your name, boy?”

The voice is the same, but the tone is different. His affability is gone. When I meet his eyes, they’re still blue, but they have a steely quality that I have not seen before, a new directness.

Sometimes an unlikely story can seem too unlikely to be a lie, and therefore it allays suspicion. So I decide on: “Potter. Harry Potter.”

His stare is as sharp as the stylus on a polygraph. “That sounds as real as if you’d said ‘Bond. James Bond.’ ”

“Well, sir, it’s the name I’ve got. I always liked it until the books and movies. About the thousandth time someone asked me if I was really a wizard, I started wishing my name was just about anything else, like Lex Luthor or something.”

Donny’s friendliness and folksy manner have for a moment made Harmony Corner seem almost as benign as Pooh Corner. But now the air smells less of the salty sea than of decaying seaweed, the pump-island glare seems as harsh as the lights of an interrogation room in a police station, and when I look up at the sky, I cannot find Cassiopeia or any constellation that I know, as if Earth has turned away from all that is familiar and comforting.

“So if you’re not a wizard, Harry, what line of work do you claim to be in?”

Not only is his tone different, but also his diction. And he seems to have developed a problem with his short-term memory.

Perhaps he registers my surprise and correctly surmises the cause of it, because he says, “Yeah, I know what you said, but I suspect that’s not the half of it.”

“Sorry, but fry cook is the whole of it, sir. I’m not a guy of many talents.”

His eyes narrow with suspicion. “Eggs—wreck ’em and stretch ’em. Cardiac shingles.”

I translate as before. “Serving three eggs instead of two is stretching them. Wrecking them means scrambling. Cardiac shingles are toast with extra butter.”

With his eyes squinted to slits, Donny reminds me of Clint Eastwood, if Clint Eastwood were eight inches shorter, thirty pounds heavier, less good-looking, with male-pattern baldness, and badly scarred.

He makes a simple statement sound like a threat: “Harmony doesn’t need another short-order cook.”

“I’m not applying for a job, sir.”

“What
are
you doing here, Harry Potter?”

“Seeking the meaning of my life.”

“Maybe your life doesn’t have any meaning.”

“I’m pretty sure it does.”

“Life is meaningless. Every life.”

“Maybe that works for you. It doesn’t work for me.”

He clears his throat with a noise that makes me wonder if he indulges in unconventional personal grooming habits and has a nasty hairball stuck in his esophagus. When he spits, a disgusting wad of mucus splatters the pavement, two inches from my right shoe, which no doubt was his intended target.

“Life is meaningless except in your case. Is that it, Harry? You’re better than the rest of us, huh?”

His face tightens with inexplicable anger. Gentle, sentimental Donny has morphed into Donny the Hun, descendant of Attila, who seems capable of sudden mindless violence.

“Not better, sir. Probably worse than a lot of people. Anyway, it isn’t a matter of better or worse. I’m just different. Sort of like a porpoise, which looks like a fish and swims like a fish but isn’t a fish because it’s a mammal and because no one wants to eat it with a side of chips. Or maybe like a prairie dog, which everyone calls a dog but isn’t really a dog at all. It looks like maybe a chubby squirrel, but it isn’t a squirrel, either, because it lives in tunnels, not in trees, and it hibernates in the winter but it isn’t a bear. A prairie dog wouldn’t say it was better than real dogs or better than squirrels or bears, just different like a porpoise is different, but of course it’s nothing like a porpoise, either. So I think I’ll go back to my cottage and eat my candy bars and think about porpoises and prairie dogs until I can express this analogy more clearly.”

Sometimes, if I pretend to be an airhead and a bit
screwy, I can convince a bad guy that I’m no threat to him and that I’m not worth the waste of time and energy he would have to expend to do bad things to me. On other occasions, my pretense infuriates them. Walking away, I half expect to be clubbed to the ground with a tire iron.