Odd Hours
He kept trying to hit my head again, but he also had to strive to stay upright, so he managed only to strike my shoulders three or four times.
Throughout this assault, the flashlight beam never faltered, but repeatedly slashed the fog, and I was impressed by the manufacturer’s durability standards.
Although we were in a deadly serious struggle, I could not help but see absurdity in the moment. A self-respecting thug ought to have a gun or at least a blackjack. He flailed at me as though he were an eighty-year-old lady with an umbrella responding to an octogenarian beau who had made a rude proposal.
At last I succeeded in toppling him. He dropped the flashlight and fell backward.
I clambered onto him, jamming my right knee where it would make him regret having been born a male.
Most likely he tried to say a bad word, a very bad word, but it came out as a squeal, like an expression of consternation by a cartoon mouse.
Near at hand lay the flashlight. As he tried to throw me off, I snared that formidable weapon.
I do not like violence. I do not wish to be the recipient of violence, and I am loath to perpetrate it.
Nevertheless, I perpetrated a little violence on the beach that night. Three times I hit his head with the flashlight. Although I did not enjoy striking him, I didn’t feel the need to turn myself in to the police, either.
He stopped resisting and I stopped hitting. I could tell by the slow soft whistle of his breathing that he had fallen unconscious.
When all the tension went out of his muscles, I clambered off him and got to my feet just to prove to myself that I could do it.
Dorothy kept singing faintly, and I could hear Toto panting. The twinkling lights behind my eyelids began to spiral faster, as if the tornado was about to lift us out of Kansas and off to Oz.
I returned voluntarily to my knees before I went down against my will. After a moment, I realized that the panting was mine, not that of Dorothy’s dog.
Fortunately, my vertigo subsided before my adversary regained consciousness. Although the flashlight still worked, I didn’t think it could take much more punishment.
The cracked lens cast a thin jagged shadow on his face. But as I peeled back one of his eyelids to be sure that I had not given him a concussion, I could see him well enough to know that I had never seen him before and that I preferred never to see him again.
Eye of newt. Wool-of-bat hair. Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips. A lolling tongue like a fillet of fenny snake. He was not exactly ugly, but he looked peculiar, as if he’d been conjured in a cauldron by Macbeth’s coven of witches.
When he had fallen, a slim cell phone had slid half out of his shirt pocket. If he was in league with the trio at the pier, he might have called them when he heard me swimming ashore.
After rolling him onto his side, I took the wallet from his hip pocket. Supposing he had summoned help moments before I had come ashore, I needed to move on quickly and could not pore through his ID there on the beach. I left his folding money in his shirt pocket with his cell phone, and I took the wallet.
I propped the flashlight on his chest. Because his head was raised on a mound of sand, the bright beam bathed him from chin to hairline.
If something like Godzilla woke in a Pacific abyss and decided to come ashore to flatten our picturesque community, this guy’s face would dissuade it from a rampage, and the scaly beast would return meekly to the peace of the deeps.
With the fog-diffused lights of town to guide me, I slogged across the wide beach.
I did not proceed directly east. Perhaps Flashlight Guy had told the pier crew that he was on the shore due west of some landmark, by which they could find him. If they were coming, I wanted to cut a wide swath around them.
CHAPTER 8
As I angled northeast across the strand, the soft sand sucked at my shoes and made every step a chore.
Wearing wet jeans and T-shirt on the central coast on a January night can test your mettle. Five weeks ago, however, I had been in the Sierra during a blizzard. This felt balmy by comparison.
I wanted a bottle of aspirin and an ice bag. When I touched the throbbing left side of my head, I wondered if I needed stitches. My hair felt sticky with blood. I found a lump the size of half a plum.
When I left the beach, I was at the north end of the shoreside commercial area, where Jacaranda Avenue dead-ended. From there, a mile of oceanfront houses faced the concrete boardwalk all the way to the harbor.
For its ten-block length, Jacaranda Avenue, which ran east from the boardwalk, was lined with ancient podocarpuses. The trees formed a canopy that cooled the street all day and shaded the streetlamps at night. Not one jacaranda grew along its namesake avenue.
Wisteria Lane boasted no wisteria. Palm Drive featured oaks and ficuses. Sterling Heights was the poorest neighborhood, and of all the streets in town, Ocean Avenue lay the farthest from the ocean.
Like most politicians, those in Magic Beach seemed to live in an alternate universe from the one in which real people existed.
Wet, rumpled, my shoes and jeans caked with sand, bleeding, and no doubt wild-eyed, I was grateful that the podocarpuses filtered the lamplight. In conspiracy with the fog, I traveled in shadows along Jacaranda Avenue and turned right on Pepper Tree Way.
Don’t ask.
Three guys were hunting me. With a population of fifteen thousand, Magic Beach was more than a wide place in the highway, but it did not offer a tide of humanity in which I could swim unnoticed.
Furthermore, in my current condition, if an alert policeman spotted me, he would be inclined to stop and chat. He would suspect I had been the target or the perpetrator of violence—or both.
I had no confidence in my ability to convince him that I clubbed myself over the head as punishment for a wrong decision I had made.
I did not want to file a report regarding the gunmen at the pier and the assault at the beach. That would take hours.
Already the three goons would be trying to determine who I was, describing me to people working in the commercial zone near the pier.
They might not get a lead. Having been in town little more than a month, having kept to myself as I waited to discover why I had been drawn there, I had remained a stranger to almost the entire populace.
Even an accurate description of me would not help them much. I am of average height, average weight. I have no distinguishing scars, birthmarks, tattoos, moles, warts, or facial mutations. I do not have a chin beard or yellow eyes. My teeth are not dissolving from meth addiction, but I also do not turn heads as would, say, Tom Cruise.
Except for the paranormal gifts with which I have been burdened, I was born to be a fry cook. Tire salesman. Shoe-store clerk. The guy who puts handbills under windshield wipers in the mall parking lot.
Give me an accurate and detailed description of at least one of the many fry cooks who has whipped up breakfast for you in a diner or coffee shop over the years, one tire salesman or shoe-store clerk who has served you. I know what comes to your mind: nada.
Don’t feel bad. Most fry cooks and tire salesmen and shoe clerks never want to be famous or widely recognized. We just want to get along. We want to live quietly, avoid hurting anyone, avoid being hurt, provide for ourselves and for those we love, and have some fun along the way. We keep the economy humming, and we fight wars when we have to, and we raise families if we get the chance, but we have no desire to see our pictures in the newspaper or to receive medals, and we don’t hope to hear our names as answers to questions on Jeopardy!
We are the water in the river of civilization, and those fellow citizens who desire attention, who ride the boats on the river and wave to admiring crowds along the shore … well, they interest us less than they amuse us. We don’t envy them their prominence. We embrace our anonymity and the quiet that comes with it.
The artist Andy Warhol said that in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes, and he implied that they would hunger for that fame. He was right, but only about the kind of people he knew.
And as for the guys who put handbills under windshield wipers in the shopping-mall parking lot: Man, they have totally got the anonymity thing right; they are as invisible as the wind, as faceless as time.
As I made my way through shadows and fog, along back streets more than main streets, I worried that the yellow-eyed man might have more muscle on his team than just the pair of redheads and Flashlight Guy. Depending on his resources, he could have people searching not just for me but also for Annamaria.
She had known my name. She must know more than that about me. I didn’t think she would willingly give me up to the hulk; but he would break her like a ceramic bank to get at the coins of knowledge that she held.
I didn’t want her to be hurt, especially not because of me. I had to find her before he did.
CHAPTER 9
By an alley I arrived at the back of Hutch Hutchison’s house. A gate beside the garage opened to a walkway that led to a brick patio.
Glazed terra-cotta urns and bowls held red and purple cyclamens, but the bleach of fog and the stain of night left the blooms as colorless as barnacle shells.
On a glass-topped wrought-iron table, I put down my wallet and the one I had taken off the agitated man with the flashlight.
Toe to heel, I pried off my sand-caked sneakers. I stripped off my socks and then my blue jeans, which were crusted with enough sand to fill a large hourglass. With a garden hose, I washed my feet.
Mrs. Nicely came three days a week to clean, as well as to do the laundry and ironing. Her surname suited her even better than my first name suited me, and I did not want to cause her extra work.
The back door was locked. Among the cyclamens in the nearest bowl, in a Ziploc pill bag, Hutch kept a spare key. After retrieving the two wallets, I let myself into the house.
Fragrant with the cinnamony aroma of chocolate-pumpkin cookies that I had baked earlier in the afternoon, brightened only by the golden glow of string lights hidden in the recessed toe kick of the cabinets, the kitchen waited warm and welcoming.
I am no theologian. I would not be surprised, however, if Heaven proved to be a cozy kitchen, where delicious treats appeared in the oven and in the refrigerator whenever you wanted them, and where the cupboards were full of good books.
After blotting my wet feet on the small rug, I snatched a cookie from the plate that stood on the center island, and I headed for the door to the downstairs hall.
I intended to go upstairs with the stealth of a Ninja assassin, quickly shower, dress my head wound if it didn’t need stitches, and put on fresh clothes.
When I was halfway across the kitchen, the swinging door opened. Hutch switched on the overhead lights, stork-walked into the room, and said, “I just saw a tsunami many hundreds of feet high.”
“Really?” I asked. “Just now?”
“It was in a movie.”
“That’s a relief, sir.”
“Uncommonly beautiful.”
“Really?”
“Not the wave, the woman.”
“Woman, sir?”
“Téa Leoni. She was in the movie.”
He stilted to the island and took a cookie from the plate.
“Son, did you know there’s an asteroid on a collision course with the earth?”
“It’s always something,” I said.
“If a large asteroid strikes land”—he took a bite of the cookie—“millions could die.”
“Makes you wish the world was nothing but an ocean.”
“Ah, but if it lands in the ocean, you get a tsunami perhaps a thousand feet high. Millions dead that way, too.”
I said, “Rock and a hard place.”
Smiling, nodding, he said, “Absolutely wonderful.”
“Millions dead, sir?”
“What? No, of course not. The cookie. Quite wonderful.”
“Thank you, sir.” I raised the wrong hand to my mouth and almost bit into the two wallets.
He said, “Soberingly profound.”
“It’s just a cookie, sir,” I said, and took a bite of mine.
“The possibility all of humanity could be exterminated in a single cataclysmic event.”
“That would put a lot of search-and-rescue dogs out of work.”
He lifted his chin, creased his brow, and drew his noble face into the expression of a man always focused on tomorrow. “I was a scientist once.”
“What field of science, sir?”
“Contagious disease.”
Hutch put down his half-eaten cookie, fished a bottle of Purell from a pocket, and squeezed a large dollop of the glistening gel into the cupped palm of his left hand.
“A terrible new strain of pneumonic plague would have wiped out civilization if not for me, Walter Pidgeon, and Marilyn Monroe.”
“I haven’t seen that one, sir.”
“She was marvelous as an unwitting pneumonic-plague carrier.”
His gaze refocused from the future of science and mankind to the glob of germ-killing goop on his palm.
“She certainly had the lungs for the role,” he said.
Vigorously, he rubbed his long-fingered hands together, and the sanitizing gel made squishy sounds.
“Well,” I said, “I was headed up to my room.”
“Did you have a nice walk?”
“Yes, sir. Very nice.”
“A ‘constitutional’ we used to call them.”
“That was before my time.”
“That was before everyone’s time. My God, I am old.”
“Not that old, sir.”
“Compared to a redwood tree, I suppose not.”
I hesitated to leave the kitchen, out of concern that when I started to move, he would notice that I was without shoes and pants.
“Mr. Hutchison—”
“Call me Hutch. Everyone calls me Hutch.”
“Yes, sir. If anyone comes around this evening looking for me, tell them I came back from my walk very agitated, packed my things, and split.”
The gel had evaporated; his hands were germ-free. He picked up his half-eaten cookie.
With dismay, he said, “You’re leaving, son?”
“No, sir. That’s just what you tell them.”
“Will they be officers of the law?”
“No. One might be a big guy with a chin beard.”
“Sounds like a role for George Kennedy.”
“Is he still alive, sir?”
“Why not? I am. He was wonderfully menacing in Mirage with Gregory Peck.”
“If not the chin beard, then maybe a redheaded guy who will or will not have bad teeth. Whoever—tell him I quit without notice, you’re angry with me.”
“I don’t think I could be angry with you, son.”
“Of course you can. You’re an actor.”
His eyes twinkled. He swallowed some cookie. With his teeth just shy of a clench, he said, “You ungrateful little shit.”
“That’s the spirit, sir.”
“You took five hundred in cash out of my dresser drawer, you thieving little bastard.”
“Good. That’s good.”
“I treat you like a son, I love you like a son, and now I see I’m lucky you didn’t slit my throat while I slept, you despicable little worm.”
“Don’t ham it up, sir. Keep it real.”
Hutch looked stricken. “Hammy? Was it really?”
“Maybe that’s too strong a word.”
“I haven’t been before a camera in half a century.”
“You weren’t over the top,” I assured him. “It was just too … fulsome. That’s the word.”
“Fulsome. In other words, less is more.”
“Yes, sir. You’re angry, see, but not furious. You’re a little bitter. But it’s tempered with regret.”
Brooding on my direction, he nodded slowly. “Maybe I had a son I lost in the war, and you reminded me of him.”
“All right.”
“His name was Jamie, he was full of charm, courage, wit. You seemed so like him at first, a young man who rose above the base temptations of this world … but you were just a leech.”
I frowned. “Gee, Mr. Hutchison, a leech …”
“A parasite, just looking for a score.”
“Well, okay, if that works for you.”
“Jamie lost in the war. My precious Corrina dead of cancer.” His voice grew increasingly forlorn, gradually diminishing to a whisper. “So alone for so long, and you … you saw just how to take advantage of my vulnerability. You even stole Corrina’s jewelry, which I’ve kept for thirty years.”
“Are you going to tell them all this, sir?”
“No, no. It’s just my motivation.”
He snared a plate from a cabinet and put two cookies on it.
“Jamie’s father and Corrina’s husband is not the type of old man to turn to booze in his melancholy. He turns to the cookies … which is the only sweet thing he has left from the month that you cynically exploited him.”
I winced. “I’m beginning to feel really bad about myself.”
“Do you think I should put on a cardigan? There’s something about an old man huddled in a tattered cardigan that can be just wonderfully pathetic.”
“Do you have a tattered cardigan?”
“I have a cardigan, and I could tatter it in a minute.”
I studied him as he stood there with the plate of cookies and a big grin.
“Look pathetic for me,” I said.
His grin faded. His lips trembled but then pressed together as if he struggled to contain strong emotion.
He turned his gaze down to the cookies on the plate. When he looked up again, his eyes glistened with unshed tears.
“You don’t need the cardigan,” I said.
“Truly?”
“Truly. You look pathetic enough.”
“That’s a lovely thing to say.”
“You’re welcome, sir.”
“I better get back to the parlor. I’ll find a deliciously sad book to read, so by the time the doorbell rings, I’ll be fully in character.”
“They might not get a lead on me. They might not come here.”
“Don’t be so negative, Odd. They’ll come. I’m sure they will. It’ll be great fun.”
He pushed through the swinging door with the vigor of a younger man. I listened to him walk down the hallway and into the parlor.
Shoeless, pantless, bloody, I scooped some cubes from the icemaker and put them in a OneZip plastic bag. I wrapped a dishtowel around the bag.
Pretending the confidence of a fully dressed man, I walked down the hallway. Passing the open doors to the parlor, I waved to Hutch when, from the solace of his armchair, moored in melancholy, he waved listlessly at me.
CHAPTER 10
My scalp was abraded, not lacerated. In the shower, the hot water and shampoo stung, but I didn’t begin to bleed freely again.
Unwilling to take the time to cautiously towel or blow-dry my hair, I pulled on fresh jeans and a clean T-shirt. I laced my backup pair of sneakers.
The MYSTERY TRAIN sweatshirt had been lost to the sea. A similar thrift-shop purchase featured the word WYVERN across the chest, in gold letters on the dark-blue fabric.
I assumed Wyvern must be the name of a small college. Wearing it did not make me feel any smarter.
As I dressed, Frank Sinatra watched me from the bed. He lay atop the quilted spread, ankles crossed, head propped on pillows, hands behind his head.
The Chairman of the Board was smiling, amused by me. He had a winning smile, but his moods were mercurial.
He was dead, of course. He had died in 1998, at the age of eighty-two.
Lingering spirits look the age they were when death took them. Mr. Sinatra, however, appears whatever age he wishes to be, depending on his mood.
I have known only one other spirit with the power to manifest at any age he chose: the King of Rock ’n’ Roll.
Elvis had kept me company for years. He had been reluctant to move on, for reasons that took me a long while to ascertain.
Only days before Christmas, along a lonely California highway, he had finally found the courage to proceed to the next world. I’d been happy for him then, to see his sorrow lift and his face brighten with anticipation.
Moments after Elvis departed, as Boo and I walked the shoulder of the highway, drawn toward an unknown destination that proved to be Magic Beach, Mr. Sinatra fell in step beside me. He appeared to be in his early thirties that day, fifty years younger than when he died.
Now, lying on the bed, he looked forty or forty-one. He was dressed as he had been in some scenes in High Society, which he had made with Bing Crosby in 1956.
Of all the spirits I have seen, only Elvis and Mr. Sinatra are able to manifest in the garments of their choice. Others haunt me always in whatever they were wearing when they died.
This is one reason I will never attend a costume party dressed as the traditional symbol of the New Year, in nothing but a diaper and a top hat. Welcomed into either Hell or Heaven, I do not want to cross the threshold to the sound of demonic or angelic laughter.
When I had pulled on the Wyvern sweatshirt and was ready to leave, Mr. Sinatra came to me, shoulders forward, head half ducked, dukes raised, and threw a few playful punches at the air in front of my face.
Because he evidently hoped that I would help him move on from this world as I had helped Elvis, I had been reading biographies of him. I did not know as much about him as I knew about the King, but I knew the right thing for this moment.
“Robert Mitchum once said you were the only man he was afraid to fight, though he was half again as big as you.”
The Chairman looked embarrassed and shrugged.
As I picked up the cloth-wrapped bag of ice and held it against the lump on the side of my head, I continued: “Mitchum said he knew he could knock you down, probably more than once, but he also knew you would keep getting up and coming back until one of you was dead.”
Mr. Sinatra gestured as if to say that Mitchum had over-estimated him.
“Sir, here’s the situation. You came to me for help, but you keep resisting it.”
Two weeks ago, he had gone poltergeist on me, with the result that my collection of books about him went twirling around my room.
Spirits cannot directly harm us, not even evil spirits. This is our world, and they have no power over us. Their blows pass through us. Their fingernails and teeth cannot draw blood.
Sufficiently malevolent, however, with bottomless depths of rage to draw upon, they can spin spiritual power into whips of force that lash inanimate objects into motion. Squashed by a refrigerator hurled by a poltergeist, you tend not to take solace in the fact that the blow was indirect, rather than from the ghostly hand itself.
Mr. Sinatra wasn’t evil. He was frustrated by his circumstances and, for whatever reason, fearful about leaving this world—though he would never admit to the fear. As one who had not found organized religion highly credible until later in life, he was now confused about his place in the vertical of sacred order.
The biographies had not ricocheted from wall to wall with violent force, but had instead circled the room like the horses on a carousel. Every time I tried to pluck one of those books from the air, it had eluded me.
“Mr. Mitchum said you’d keep getting up and coming back until one of you was dead,” I repeated. “But in this fight, sir, one of us is already dead.”
His sunny smile grew wintry for a moment, but then thawed away. As dark as his bad moods could be, they were always short seasons.
“There’s no point in you resisting me. No point. All I want to do is help you.”
As was often the case, I could not read those extraordinary blue eyes, but at least they were not bright with hostility.
After a moment, he affectionately pinched my cheek.
He went to the nearest window and turned his back to me, a genuine spirit watching the fog haunt the night with its legions of false ghosts.
I recalled “It Was a Very Good Year,” a song that could be read as the sentimental and boastful recollections of an irredeemable Casanova. The poignant melancholy of his interpretation had elevated those words and that music to art.