There Must Be Some Mistake (23 page)

TWO WEEKS
had passed since the commotion about Chantal, and nothing had changed, but, like always, the interest came in waves, and the last week had been low tide, which was fine by me. I left a couple more calls for Chantal, called the restaurant, too, but got nothing. Morgan was back up in Houston for her classes; Jilly was back and forth. The neighborhood seemed to have absorbed Peterson's death and Parker's death, not to mention the assorted additional deaths and discomforts in the neighborhood, so there was a lull going on for which we were all grateful, though I suspect everyone was still giving some thought to all and sundry. But we were, for the moment, the living, and the living only pay lip service to death, unless it's very close. In the family, a parent or a lover, maybe a pet or a dear old friend. So it was a quiet midsummer week at Forgetful Bay. The weather had gone cool for Texas summers, lots of storms and fronts pushing through, which kept things bearable in the afternoons and did that magic with the light that makes everything look a whole lot better than it does in the pounding sun. People were in a good mood. I saw Bernadette and the neighbors chatting in the road at sunset, other folks passed by walking dogs of various descriptions, usually one large dog and one small dog was how they rolled, and people waved, nodded, said hello as they passed or if I saw them on my occasional walks. The neighbors had been watering a lot earlier in June but now, with the rain coming and going, there was no need.

One night about one I decided to get out and get something to eat, a hamburger or chicken sandwich, something drive-through, which was the only thing open at that hour anyway, and I didn't turn my nose up at a McDonald's burger or whatever in any case. I didn't want another homemade sandwich, and getting a little fresh night air was a bonus. We'd had a shower earlier in the evening, so the streets were still wet, glistening with that slow-drying shine, and there was a lot of that on the car windows, too, as I left the house. I took a tour down by Chantal's condo to see if there were any lights, and there weren't, so I turned around and came back past Bruce and Roberta's place. He was in the garage, it looked like, no doubt working on his perpetual machine. He'd sent me a link to the website of the guy in Utah he was working with, a site that was called Never Ending Power, LLC, and it looked to me like it was phony as a two-dollar bill, but I hadn't said that to Bruce. I rolled past my condo and noticed, a couple places later, that the gay couple with the Virgin Mary statue that I'd taken a picture of on the ice chest, and which had since been placed in a very prominent position in the front flower bed, complete with tiny sun-driven lights illuminating it, was no longer alone there in the yard in front of their condo. Now they'd added a much larger, maybe four-foot-tall statue of Saint Joseph or Saint Francis or some other saint unknown to me, standing smack in the middle of their driveway, back up against the siding between the two parking spaces under the left and right halves of the building. My first reaction was like, crap, more junky stuff in the neighborhood, but an instant later I started smiling about it, thinking how really crazy it was to put religious statues around your property, it was so cracked it seemed almost magical. And so I decided to make another circle of the Forgetful development, to come by that house again, but also to see what other people had in their yards. Normally I paid not too much attention to neighbors' houses, so I was suddenly aware that I really didn't know what people were doing in the neighborhood, yardwise. I decided to take a tour all the way around the crooked little street that circled our properties. By this time I was nearing the north entrance and it was half past one and the car tires were making that sticky sound they do on wet pavement, and the air smelled like rain and seawater, all mixed up, so I drove past the entrance and on around for the hell of it, just to enjoy the smell and the sound and the air out there near the bay. The lights on the highway outside the property, and all the commercial crap that lined the highway, were lit up as always, making the Forgetful Bay Condos look like a lonely little roadside settlement. There were more lights along the edge of the bay, and a few out in the darkness of the bay, and all of them were blistered by the water on the windshield, though I could see them clearly out the side windows that were rolled down. I drove by the Parkers' place and noticed that they had a statue, small and hard to see, at the edge of the driveway, and then at the late Oscar Peterson's condo there was a large concrete angel in the side yard, I mean a serious-sized angel, maybe five feet tall, with great wings and everything, and then Chantal's where there was nothing much except a garbage can that had been kicked around in the driveway, and then at Bernadette's there was a set of yard gnomes and a black fountain with running water in front of the entrance to her place. At Jean Darling's there was a dog statue I'd never noticed before, looked like an almost life-size Labrador retriever standing guard in her yard, and as I kept going around the cottages, I saw more statues—behind one of the cottages two women in flowing concrete robes at the edge of a little pier on Smoky Lake, one with a bird on her outstretched arm, the other holding a snake. I also saw various pieces of pottery, jars and jugs of different kinds and sizes, planters, one elf, a giant peppermint candy cane that I figured to have been left over from some Christmas, and, as I got back around by Bruce and Roberta's I passed their house and mine, and the one next to me where Ng had lived, which was still packed with Mercedes automobiles, though not his, of course, and then I slowed to a crawl as I passed the Virgin Mary condo again and took a hard look at the new statue, which was in shadow and looked like it was dark to begin with, and it was the size of a seven- or eight-year-old kid, and I guessed, this time around, that it was Saint Francis, given the way the guy was standing, with his arms out, like welcoming the birds, and I started grinning again and thought maybe I ought to get me a statue or two to lively up the place. I mean, I liked the idea of people who went ahead and put statues of saints in their yards or driveways or behind their houses. I mean, why not? Where's the harm in a little blind faith, a little hope in the face of the grotesque spectacle of ordinary life in this century? I loved the impulse. It was enchanting. I drove all the way to McDonald's grinning about it, the bay air blowing herky-jerky through the car, the sky really dark with those white shadowy clouds roaming around. I was really happy about these people and this place; I was giddy as I splashed into the McDonald's lot and pulled up to the order screen.

AT ABOUT
four that morning I was out on the back deck watching the night, reading things on the iPad, using Flipboard and the other aggregator, I forget the name—oh, Zite. They were carrying news from all the usual organs—the
Times, Washington Post, Slate,
the
Guardian,
BuzzFeed, BBC, NPR, Mashable,
Chicago Tribune,
Politico, AP, Al Jazeera English,
Forbes,
the Verge,
Pinball, LA Times, Globe and Mail, Zip & Fiddle,
and so on and on in the new world. I read the junk that showed up. Stock stuff, world news, Palestine, Syria, politics, celebrity crap, movies, Mac news, a
Times
piece on Mandy Patinkin, puff, but everybody loves Mandy Patinkin. Whatever. Apple didn't look like the evergreen anymore. What's her face, Miley, had startled everybody again with some performance; a guy somewhere, a kidnapper, had been found dead in his cell; should we or shouldn't we bomb somewhere; were the Republicans being horsey in the House; what was the deal with Michael Douglas and what's her face—the stuff that drains out of the gaping Internet wound endlessly. I sent an e-mail to the real estate guy in Destin saying I wanted to come back and look at condos again, thinking maybe it wasn't such a bad idea to get out of Texas for a while, maybe permanently. Jilly was up for it, so I figured we'd go over there and we'd set up house, though I wasn't sure what the rules and regulations would be. I could imagine it being a pretty good setup, whatever the rules were. I was in the back of the house, on the small deck off the master bedroom, and the moon had moved over the top of the house and was slanting down into the western sky, a full moon on the Forgetful Bay grounds, and on me, sitting there on the deck. There were some lizards out there, crawling on the walls, geckos, which I looked up on
Wikipedia
because of their transparency and found this footnote, quoted here in its entirety.

Which was a poem to me, and interesting, too, because we had a fair number of geckos crawling around, most of them the clear pinky kind, sort of, and the way they moved was a constant amazement. More than that, I was sure Monsanto had at least four dozen people tucked away in some Area 51 equivalent working on geckos, trying to figure how they could improve all of us with that gecko adhesion system and its high pulloff-force-to-preload ratio.

Meanwhile both Jilly and Morgan were sound asleep inside, comfortably sawing wood and looking forward to tomorrow, when we were going on a field trip to Texas City to tour the Great Fertilizer Disaster Museum on the site of the worst US industrial accident and largest nonnuclear explosion in history, which took place in April 1947, killing between six hundred and nine hundred people and wounding thousands. The numbers are disputed because many of the victims simply vanished in the blast that blew the four-thousand-pound anchor off one of the ships in the harbor there a full two miles away, where it remains to this day.

I was pretty happy about the change in the arrangement with Jilly, or the prospect of it, and touched by the approvals of Diane and Morgan. I had been comfortable with the way things were, all things considered, but this new acknowledged thing was, well, it was something I guess I'd hoped for but kept quiet about, figuring it would probably not happen. You hang out with people and you get really attached to them, and you sometimes get too attached, and things go haywire, and unless the people are, or become, family, more often than not you lose the connection—that richness, that warmth and closeness, that feeling that you're with them in a keenly personal way that will outlast the normal friendships and connections. That sounds more schematic than I mean it to be, but I had lost some people I'd rather not have lost that way, so I was pleased that both of these women, my daughter and my—what?—my friend, partner, maybe,
inamorata,
were resting comfortably in my house, maybe our house. I knew Morgan would leave eventually, live her own life, and I was glad for her but regretted the distance it would likely put between us. She would always be with me in one way or another, however literally separated we became. Jilly, on the other hand, seemed to be signing up for the duration, which was a remarkable lifesaver, so much so that it made me want to say a prayer of thanks to whatever omnipotent intergalactic energy resource put this whole shazam together in the first place.

I was lounging on the deck there thinking my own thoughts, reflecting on events, thinking of Chantal and Tinker roaming the countryside again, maybe together in Tinker's copped Cadillac, flying across the desert of Arizona maybe, top down, headed for Flagstaff, the Grand Canyon, or parts west, Vegas, LA, who knew. Somewhere to disappear, take up new identities, new friends, new lovers, always testing them carefully before admitting them into the inner circle, and even then keeping them at arm's length in case things turned nasty or inquisitive or threatening in any of the ways they were both accustomed to things going bad. It was ironic that Chantal would ask me if I'd ever known anyone who had killed someone after telling me she had. Maybe that was a test, too. To see if and how I could handle it, and I guess I did all right, at least for a time. I also knew I'd failed longer term, that Chantal, or both she and her daughter, had read me correctly as being a little less brave than was essential to play in their game, to travel their roads. Some people are too dangerous. And they knew I was out of my league as soon as I knew it, or maybe before. And they never said a word about it, never pushed it in my face, or made me feel bad about it, but instead just vanished. I loved the idea of people vanishing. Some of those who vanished were no doubt ripped from lives they loved, and I felt for them and wished a speedy return to what was lost. But for the others, the ones who left by choice, who wanted to disappear, I had only envy at their good fortune of having taken the step into the new world. Every time I walked out of Walmart and looked at the big board of missing persons I got this chill of excitement for those who had voluntarily left, who had fled whatever arrangement they found themselves in, preferring the prospect of a fresh start, a new identity, a new life, a new place in the world, with all new people and all new things, a pristine and unknown landscape, a daily life the fabric of which would be immaculate and unknown.

So as the moon slid across the sky, inched across and down, I heard an engine off in the distance, a drone-like sound, a small plane, and not one of the new ones, either, an old prop plane, and I scanned the western sky for it and at first found nothing, though the sound kept coming, becoming clearer, and also louder. I got up and went out to the railing so that I could scan a larger slice of the sky to the west, as well as north and south. Finally I located blinking lights on an airplane to the south and some distance west of us, as if following the Gulf Freeway north from Galveston up to Houston. It was still some good distance away and appeared against the black sky only as twinkling lights. I sat down again and resumed watching the moon, which was gold by now, maybe sixty degrees off the horizon, occasionally obscured by streamers of clouds slipping across its face. I went inside to get a fresh bottle of beer and when I returned the airplane engine was louder, a steady drone that warbled a bit, like it was hitting my ears at two different times or something, like a car or maybe motorcycle engine struggling a little going up a steep hill. Then, suddenly, the engine cut out entirely. The silence was shocking, the absence of the sound louder than the presence of it had been. I got up and looked south again trying to locate the plane and saw the lights bobbing up and down, as if the plane were rocking. Then the engine kicked over, started roaring, and it seemed that the lights brightened, but that could have been a trick of vision. It was close and low by now, still to the south but much closer to the coast, well off where the freeway was. I started to get my chair and pull it to the rail, thinking I would prop my feet on the rail and watch the moon and the passing airplane, but as I turned to fetch the chair the droning engine cut out again, and when I turned back around I could not find the aircraft in the night sky. I kept scanning the southwestern sky but still couldn't see anything, only the endless black of the night, the tiny stars way off in the distance, and the moon, which looked almost as if it were drifting, and the clouds standing still as it slid behind them. There was a guy down in one of the outlying marinas to the north who seemed to be loading up a boat for some early morning fishing. I suddenly got the plane's engine drone again and, barely behind that, the thumps of the heavy coolers this guy dropped onto the boat's deck. Maybe I saw those more than heard them. The plane's engine was cutting in and out, and the noise was aggravated and booming as it started and quit. When I turned back to the southwestern sky there was nothing but engine noise, growing louder, and then, suddenly, deafening, and then I caught the glint of moonlight hitting the fuselage, for a second, and it was strangely close then, the engine noise was like a hot rod, somebody in a dragster in the neighbor's drive blipping the throttle, and the plane looked like it had crossed over toward us from the Gulf Freeway, and it was almost sailing in wind, not flying like any plane would fly but wobbling back and forth, and dipping up and down like a kite, wings racking back and forth. I was up and turning to go inside to get Jilly and Morgan, but the plane was way too close and out of control, the wind shrieking, the motor hammering, and then it was right in front of me, full size, blocks away coming out of the night sky, shooting toward me at astonishing speed. I knew I'd never make the door. I stayed perfectly still, stared as the thing roared toward me and the house and the neighborhood. I was almost certain that it would recover at the last minute and miss us all.