Saint Odd
I didn’t find the word rarely as comforting as the word never.
In the corridor beyond the closed door, the voices of the three cultists had faded completely away. Their silence didn’t mean that they had given up their search for me and had gone back to their usual activities, like strangling babies and torturing kittens. No offense intended to the satanists who might be reading this, but I have found that those who worship the devil tend to be sneaky, more deceitful by far than your average Methodist—and proud of it. They might still be in the mall basement or garage, standing silently in the darkness, waiting for me to show myself, whereupon my life would be worth spit, and in fact less than spit.
Some people believe that a vampire bat is attracted by the smell of blood, that you have to be bleeding, even if from a tiny puncture or a scratch, before the little beasts will be drawn to you in a feeding frenzy. That is not true. Instinctively, bats know that any creature that sweats also bleeds. If a molecule or two of sweat, floating on the air, found its way into the folds of their nostrils, they would twitch their whiskers and bare their razor-edged teeth and lick their thin lips and, in the current situation, be pleased by the realization that someone had ordered takeout and it had been delivered.
I was perspiring.
Something crawled off my shirt and onto my throat and explored the contours of my Adam’s apple. Over the years, after numerous shocks and horrific encounters, my nerves had become as steady as solid-state circuitry. I figured one of the beetles that had been eating the dead bats in the dung pile had found its way up my body, too light to have been felt through my clothes. Instead of shrieking like Little Miss Muffet, I reached up to my throat and captured the insect in my fist.
Because of the ick factor, I didn’t want to crush the bug. But when I attempted to throw it back toward the dung pile from which it had come, the vicious little thing stuck to my hand with the tenacity of a tick.
Ozzie Boone had written a novel in which the villain threw one of his victims, an IRS agent, into a pit seething with carnivorous beetles. In spite of the tax man’s flailing, stomping, and desperate attempts to climb out of that hellhole, the voracious swarm killed him in six minutes and stripped his bones of every last scrap of flesh in three hours and ten minutes, not as rapidly as piranhas might have done the job, but impressive nonetheless.
Sometimes I wished that my mentor had been Danielle Steel.
I opened my right hand, in which the beetle had gotten a death grip on my palm, made a catapult of the forefinger and thumb of my left hand, and flung the noxious little bugger back into the reeking darkness.
I hadn’t heard a sound from the three cultists in a few minutes, and as I listened intently to the occasional bat rearrange its wings around itself as though adjusting its blanket, I wondered if the castaway beetle had been an outlier, more adventurous than others of its kind. Or even now were numerous others exploring my shoes and climbing the legs of my jeans?
If I have machinelike steady-state nerves, I unfortunately also have the imagination of an acutely sensitive, hyperactive four-year-old on a sugar high, a four-year-old with an understanding of death equal to that of a war veteran.
Although I felt certain I would die here in Pico Mundo within days, I told myself that the fatal moment had not yet arrived, and that it was not my fate to be beetled to death. I would have been reassured if I hadn’t lied to myself often in the past.
I was about to bolt from beetles real and imagined, from bats sleeping or not, when I heard a door slam in some far region of the basement, and I concluded that the cultists must still be searching for me.
I had not seen their faces. Although I knew their first names, they were anonymous. A strange thought disturbed me: If they should kill me, and if we met eventually in some place beyond the grave, they would know me, but I would not know them.
Given more time to recall what I had learned about bats from Ozzie Boone, I remembered that a minimum thirty percent of any colony would reliably be infected with rabies.
Darkness so perfect it made my eyes ache, the fetid air so thick that the stink became also a foul taste, the whispery sounds of the carnivorous beetles feeding on the tiny carcasses of rabies-infected bats, the occasional ruffle of wings as members of the colony stirred in their sleep, the expectation that they would abruptly take flight and prove Ozzie wrong regarding their affinity for human hair: In that poisonous atmosphere, I became more disoriented minute by grim minute. Decomposing dung releases sulfurous gas, deadly in sufficient concentration, and if not ultimately lethal here, at least capable of making me lightheaded, even delirious. I grew convinced that a time would soon come when, like an astronaut in zero gravity, I would have no sense of up or down. If I dropped the flashlight, I just knew I wouldn’t be able to locate it, and when I attempted to escape this room, the door wouldn’t be where I expected to find it.
Alarmed by what I do not know, the entire colony erupted from the overhead grid of rods from which they hung, and they broke into what seemed to be chaotic flight, though according to Ozzie, there was always orderliness in bat formations, each individual aware of its assigned position.
At once I slid down against the concrete wall until I was squatting, trying to stay well below their flight path, the multitude of shrill voices giving rise to gooseflesh on my gooseflesh. Their squeaking is why people think of them as flying rodents, and although they really aren’t rodents, I felt as if I were in some whacked-out low-budget movie about a rat storm.
Their wings beat fourteen times a second, another bit of trivia, courtesy of Ozzie. Although none of them brushed against me as they whirled around the room, I felt the wind of their passage, which stirred even more intense odors from the air as surely as a chef’s ladle would stir more appealing aromas from a soup pot.
However they might have exited, they didn’t leave by the door. The flutter of their wings inspired sympathetic vibrations deep in my ears, so that I shivered uncontrollably until their numbers had significantly diminished. Then the last were gone, silence fell upon the room in their wake, and I rose to my full height, shaken and nauseated.
When the bats erupted out of the mall by whatever route, they would quickly realize that dawn was coming. The day world was not theirs, and the moment that their alarm subsided and instinct guided them once more, they would return. Perhaps in the next minute or two. Agitated. Bats were capable of anger. Especially vampire bats. The males frequently fought. I didn’t want to hang around to find out if they would ignore me or instead focus on me as the primary object of their rage.
The door featured a lever handle that worked with a minimum of noise. I opened it, wincing at the faint creak of the hinges, and faced a service corridor as pitch-black as the room behind me.
For a moment, I listened to the eerie quiet, cocking my head to the left, to the right. If Wolfgang, Jonathan, and Selene were still lurking in the immediate vicinity, they should have heard the exodus of the bats, even through the closed door, should have switched on their flashlights and found me when I was betrayed by the hinges.
I stepped across the threshold and eased the door shut behind me. By comparison to the wretched stink I’d just escaped, the air here smelled so sweet that I wanted to draw great noisy breaths, but in the interest of avoiding a bullet in the head, I refrained. After listening for another half minute, I clicked on my light.
Solid-state nerve circuitry didn’t serve me well, because I jumped when, from behind, a hand gripped my shoulder. I turned and found Rob Norwich, my recent spirit guide, no longer glowing, but with his face again blown away.
Eight
ROB NORWICH’S EYELESS SOCKETS, FRAGMENTARY nose, lipless mouth, broken facial bones, and other elements of bloody ruin were, as far as I was concerned, not conducive to conversation, whether in that gloomy mall basement or in a sunny park.
“Sir,” I whispered, “you have to stop coming up behind me. And I’d be grateful if you kept your face on.”
The ravaged countenance faded, and the gentle features of the English teacher replaced it. His expression said, Sorry.
“Are those three still here somewhere—Wolfgang, Jonathan, and Selene?”
He shook his head.
“They’ve left the mall?”
He nodded.
“Sorry I didn’t follow you to the other department store, sir, but going there wasn’t the right thing.”
He nodded again.
Having a conversation with a dead guy can be duller than you might think. Only someone in love with his own voice could be routinely enchanted by the experience.
Usually, lingering spirits come to me because, whether they realize it or not, they want me to talk them into moving on from this world. A couple of them have even been celebrities who were loath to leave this realm where they had been loved by so many. I have written about Mr. Presley and Mr. Sinatra in other volumes of this memoir, both of whom had been thornier problems for me than I imagined a former English teacher would be.
“Is there something I can do for you, Mr. Norwich?”
He shrugged.
“You’re afraid to cross over to the Other Side. Is that it, sir?”
He held one hand out, palm down, and rocked it back and forth, a gesture of equivocation. Maybe he was afraid to cross over, maybe he wasn’t. He didn’t want to commit himself to an opinion. He was dead, but he wanted to keep his options open. Although he’d been an English teacher, he was acting like a lawyer.
“Sir, your wife and daughter are already over there. Do you believe that?”
He nodded.
“Don’t you want to join them?”
He nodded. Then he held out both hands, palms up, and raised his eyebrows as if inquiring about something.
“You’re wondering what it’s like over there?”
He nodded vigorously.
“Well, not having been there, sir, I can’t describe it. But my girlfriend, Stormy Llewellyn, she believed this life is the first of three. She called it boot camp. She said we’re here just to prepare ourselves for a second life of service in some great adventure beyond our imagination. She thought it might be like The Lord of the Rings but with more magic, more danger, worse things than Orcs, maybe with no elves, though she had nothing against elves, maybe like Tolkien with a noir edge, something that would have roles for Bogart and Mitchum if it were a movie. And John Wayne, for sure.”
Mr. Norwich just stared at me.
It was my turn to shrug. “I’m not saying that’s what it’s like, sir. It’s just Stormy’s theory. Like Purgatory, see, but a lot more colorful than we usually think of it. Anyway, whatever the second life is like, once we get to our third and eternal life, then it’s all very sweet, you know, lovely and wondrous and perfect and happy-making.”
He cocked his head and regarded me as he might have a student who had failed to read an assignment and was trying to fake his way through a discussion of Milton’s Paradise Lost.
“Just take the leap, sir. What have you got to lose—other than the misery of ghosting around in this life where you don’t belong anymore?”
Mr. Norwich shook his head—no, I had not convinced him—and he dematerialized, there one moment but gone the next.
I hate it when they do that. I find it rude. You’d think he could have at least waved bye-bye or patted me on the head.
In the nearby suburban bat cave, the colony returned with a demonic symphony of squeaking and the beating of many wings, angry to have been spooked from their roosts.
“Okay, an omen … meaning what?” I asked.
But the closed door said nothing more to me than had the mute spirit of the English teacher.
With my flashlight, I found my way out of the service corridor, onto the subterranean loading dock, down to the employee garage, and to the violated door, where I had left the pillowcase containing my burglary tools.
Outside, the May sun had mostly risen. The cloudless sky was sapphire-blue in the west, lighter blue overhead, coral-pink in the east, reminiscent of an old Wurlitzer jukebox.
At the top of the ramp down which eighteen-wheelers had once driven daily, I stopped to examine my shirt and jeans, my shoes, expecting liberal splatters of bat dung. To my surprise, I appeared both to have escaped bombardment and to have avoided stepping in anything disgusting. Hesitantly, I combed one hand through my hair, but by some miracle, I had also escaped the indignity of a poo shampoo.
Nevertheless, I needed a shower, and I wanted one more than I needed it. But not yet.
Wary that one of the cultists might have been posted to watch for me, feeling dangerously exposed, I crossed what seemed like a hundred acres of blacktop to the exit. Earlier, I had used the bolt cutter to sever the chain that held shut the gate to the fenced parking lot.
I had left the motorcycle in a nearby residential neighborhood of modest homes shaded by massive old ficus trees. No one was abroad at that hour, except for one rangy coyote slinking down the center of the street, reluctant to give up the night’s hunt, looking left and right, hoping to find a house cat for breakfast or perhaps even a small child who had disobeyed his mother and had come outside alone.
Somehow the driver of the Escalade, who had tried to run me down the night before, had known that I would be traveling on the state route, straddling a Big Dog Bulldog Bagger; therefore, it made sense that the other cultists also might be looking for the bike. I didn’t have a master-of-disguise kit and didn’t intend to prowl Pico Mundo incognito; however, calling attention to myself didn’t make sense, either. Later that morning, I would need to ditch the Big Dog and find other transportation, but first I had an appointment to keep and no other wheels to get there.
After stowing the pillowcase and tools in one of the saddlebags, I put on my helmet and goggles. I pulled away from the curb and headed toward the coyote. It backed off but wasn’t intimidated. As I drove past the beast, it followed me with a yellow-eyed stare of predatory calculation, sharp teeth revealed in a sneer of contempt.
Nine
FORMED BY THE CONSTRUCTION OF A DAM, MALO Suerte Lake was immediately east of Pico Mundo, a large deep body of water with a marina and sandy beaches along the north shore. Associated with one of those beaches, a grassy park offered picnic areas shaded by phoenix palms and by the spreading branches of massive live oaks.
The park had long been popular in warm weather, which was most of the year in Maravilla County, but as it offered no campground, I had never before seen anyone there laying out a picnic breakfast less than an hour after dawn. Ozzie Boone had draped a white cloth over one of the concrete-slab picnic tables designed and anchored to foil thieves. On the cloth he had arranged several chafing dishes warmed by Sterno.
I drove past him, past the Cadillac that had been customized to accommodate his bulk and weight, and parked the Big Dog out of sight behind an oak. I hadn’t seen him in a few months, since he had picked me up at St. Bartholomew’s Abbey in the Sierra Nevada, where I had for a while lived in the guesthouse, hoping to find peace and quiet among the monks, finding instead a kind of darkness new to me.
As a writer, Ozzie served as my mentor. As a man, he had long been a surrogate father, which I had often needed. My real father had no idea how to fill that role. He’d never shown any desire to do so.
“Dear Odd,” he said, enfolding me in a bear hug, “the last time I saw you, I feared you’d lost weight, and now I’m certain of it. You’re a shadow of your former self.”
“No, sir. I still weigh the same. Maybe I appear smaller to you because you’ve gotten still larger.”
“I am a svelte four hundred thirty-five pounds, and if I can stick to my diet, I hope to be four hundred fifty by September.”
“I worry about you,” I said.
“Yes, you are quite the worrier for one of such tender years. But if obesity were the worst that any of us had to worry about, the world would be an idyllic place. You’ve probably noticed that it isn’t.”
“Yes, sir. I’ve noticed.”
In a bucket of ice were a carton of orange juice and two of chocolate milk. He had also brought two large thermoses of coffee. He offered those beverages to me, and at my request he poured coffee, black.
The mug was large and thick, emblazoned with the words PICO MUNDO GRILLE and the logo of that diner, where I had once worked. I figured that the mug might be intended not only as a welcome-back gesture but also as a subtle suggestion that I return to my old job and put down roots and cease roaming in search of what only home could offer.
When I looked up, I saw that he had been watching me as I stared at the mug. He said, “This is where you belong, Oddie. With those who love you most.”
“Sir, you’ve not only gained weight since I saw you last, you’ve also become psychic.”
“One doesn’t need to be psychic to read your mind, Oddie. In spite of all your complications, you are wonderfully transparent.”
“I guess I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“As it was intended.” He picked up a tall glass of chocolate milk, savoring two long swallows before putting it down and dabbing at his faux mustache with a paper napkin. “When you called, you were as mysterious as a character in one of my novels. You were so discreet, you might as well have been talking in code. Why couldn’t we have breakfast in my kitchen?”
“I didn’t want to endanger you, sir. Are you sure you weren’t followed here?”
He sighed. “If I had been followed here, dear boy, I wouldn’t be here. What trouble has found you this time?”
“The same trouble, sir. Cultists like those who shot up the mall back then.”
Ozzie writes noir fiction, and in spite of his rotundity, he thinks of himself as someone who can be a tough guy when the need arises. He does indeed have impressive forearms and considerable courage. But unshed tears rose in his eyes when I mentioned the mall shooting, because he wasn’t only my surrogate father; to some extent, he had also fulfilled that role for Stormy, who had been orphaned as a child.
“They’ve come in from out of town,” I continued. “They want to make what happened here two summers ago seem like nothing.”
“In a sense, it was nothing,” Ozzie said, tears still standing in his eyes. “Everything barbarians do is nothing, no matter how loudly they insist it’s something.”
The coffee had cooled just enough that I could sip it. “Sir, I don’t know how many of them are here to do this thing. I don’t know their faces, and I only know three first names. I’m afraid it’s happening sooner than later, too fast for me to get a handle on it.”
He finished the glass of chocolate milk and put it down on the white tablecloth and placed the heels of his plump hands over his eyes, rubbing gently, as though he hadn’t slept in a long time and was weary, but of course he was blotting the tears and pressing them back.
I said, “I had a set-to with others of their cult over in Nevada not long ago, and it didn’t end well for them. They’d like to kill me, and I can’t pretend there wouldn’t be an up side to that, but I’d rather stop them first.”
Lowering his hands from his face, Ozzie said, “Anything happens to you, there’s no up side, son. Not for me. There’s only so much eating a man can do to keep the world at bay before he loses all taste for food.”
Rarely am I at a loss for words, but I didn’t know what to say to that. I covered my speechlessness with a few sips of coffee.
Ozzie reached for the open carton of milk wedged in the bucket of ice, but then decided not to pour any more for himself just yet.
He said, “I imagine that through all your adventures, you still held fast to it.”
I knew what he meant. “Yes, sir.” I put down the mug, took out my wallet, and produced the card from the fortune-telling machine.
His hand trembled as he held the little pasteboard prediction. He appeared to read it more than once, as though hoping the simple statement might be modified before his eyes. YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER. But of course the words did not change. Considering the source of the promise and the importance of it, I was confident that it would not be broken and in fact that it would be kept sooner than later—as long as I did not fail to do what I had been called home to accomplish.
As I took the card from him and returned it to my wallet, I said, “Whatever happens next, what most concerns me is that none of my friends should die because of me. If I let that happen … I won’t have earned what I’ve been promised.”
We turned together toward the sound of a car on the lane that wound through the park. A police cruiser approached and pulled off the pavement to stop half on the graveled shoulder and half on the grass, in the oak shadows, behind Ozzie’s Cadillac.
Wyatt Porter, chief of police in Pico Mundo, got out of the car, closed the door, and for a moment stood looking at us across the roof of the vehicle. I had been fortunate enough to have two surrogate fathers when I’d lived in Pico Mundo, and they were both joining me for breakfast in the park. I hadn’t seen the chief since I’d left town about nine months earlier. The last thing he’d said to me was, “I don’t know what we’ll do without you, son.” What we had both done was keep on keeping on, which is all any of us can do. He looked good for a man who had once been shot in the chest and left for dead, and I was happier than I can say to see how well he appeared to be.
He rounded the car and came to us. I found myself smiling, but the chief did not smile. He nodded at Ozzie, and then he stopped in front of me and said, “Do you believe in dreams, Oddie?”
The chief—and very few others—knew about my paranormal talents. He and I had worked together on a number of cases over the years, though he had always concealed my contributions and spared me from being made a media sensation.
“Dreams?” I said. “Some are just the mind playing games with itself, and they’re not to be taken seriously. But I don’t think that’s the kind you mean.”
“I had this same one three times in the past week, before you called, and I’m not given to reruns of dreams.”
As if to forestall what Chief Porter would say next, Ozzie asked him if he wanted juice or milk, or coffee.
Instead of answering that question, the chief said to me, “Three times before you called, I dreamed you were coming home.”
“And here I am.”
He shook his head. With basset eyes and bloodhound jowls, the chief’s face was proof of gravity’s effect. He looked as solemn as time itself when he said, “What I dreamed is that you came home in a coffin.”
Ten
THE FIVE CHAFING DISHES CONTAINED SCRAMBLED eggs with black olives and cilantro, ham layered with sautéed onion slices, home fries, seasoned and buttered rice that smelled like popcorn, and in the last one, tamales stuffed with shredded beef and cheese. A bowl of strawberries rested in a larger bowl of cracked ice, and beside the fruit stood a bowl of brown sugar with a serving spoon. Butter and jellies had been provided, too, and a basket of rolls, some sweet and cinnamony, some plain.
At the linen-mantled table, we sat together on concrete benches, on thick cushions upholstered in vinyl and supplied by our immense and immensely hospitable host. Ozzie sat at the very end of the slab, while Wyatt Porter and I sat across from each other. We ate and talked. At first, all the conversation was about amusing incidents in the history of Pico Mundo, moments we had shared; though humor marked those memories, they were also colored lightly by melancholy.