Saint Odd (10 page)

When, as an aspect of my sixth sense, I had a dream that struck me as predictive, its meaning was sometimes clear, sometimes more difficult to interpret. For that reason, among others, my paranormal abilities seemed to be both a gift and a curse.

A flood caused by the purposeful destruction of the dam would cause serious destruction, and dozens—perhaps scores—might die. But I couldn’t conceive of any circumstances in which the drowning deaths could mount into the hundreds and thousands.

Consequently, perhaps the nightmare had been in part symbolic, its full meaning accessible only after some analysis. A flood, yes, but something else, too, a second and simultaneous catastrophic event that multiplied the effect of a dam failure.

Such as?

Such as …

More Scotch would not inspire an answer. I needed more time to think. And a better brain with which to do the thinking.

When I ventured downstairs a few minutes before five o’clock the knotty pine table in the kitchen had been set for dinner. Mrs. Bullock was pouring iced tea into three tall glasses as I arrived, as though she must be psychic herself and therefore anticipated the precise moment of my appearance.

“You look all the way rested, fresh, and ready for anythin’ short of Judgment Day,” she declared. “But where’s the gun my Deke give you?”

“I didn’t think I needed to bring it to dinner, ma’am.”

“Young man, you need to bring it everywhere your feet take you. Mrs. Fischer says you’re a fella’s got more common sense than any hundred folks picked random from the phone book.”

Edie Fischer, who had taken me as her protégé and had assisted me in the rescue of the kidnapped children in Nevada, seemed to be the primary benefactor if not also the leader of the clandestine organization that maintained this safe house and, apparently, a vast network of committed followers and secret facilities. She was eighty-six years old, with the physique of a bird, sometimes enigmatic to the point of being incomprehensible, but
she was wealthy enough and wise enough and courageous enough to have earned my respect.

“Unless you mean to make a fool and liar of Edie, the sweetest woman this side of forever,” said Mrs. Bullock, “then you best hie yourself up to your room and quick fetch that pistol.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

As I turned to leave, she said, “And not just the gun, but them spare magazines come with it.”

“Be right back,” I assured her.

Two minutes later, when I returned with the Glock and the extra magazines, the back door opened, and Mr. Bullock stepped into the kitchen, carrying a shotgun. He saw my weapon and smiled broadly.

“Good to see you put your silly don’t-like-’em behind you and come down packin’ the way you should.”

His wife said, “He come down defenseless as a fawn, so I sent him up to get himself right.”

Mr. Bullock’s smile faded to a look of disappointment. “This here’s a war we’re in, young fella, even if it’s so secret most folks don’t never have a clue about it.”

“Yes, sir. I know. I’m sorry. I won’t forget the rules again. Where should I put it?”

Mrs. Bullock indicated the pistols beside two of the plates on the table. “Quick to hand is best.”

As I put the Glock and spare magazines beside the third plate, I said, “Something sure smells good.”

She said, “My grandma’s best-ever meatloaf in cilantro-tomato gravy, with just a tetch of inspired fiddlin’ by yours truly, plus all the trimmin’s.” To her husband, she said, “Seein’ as you’re alive, must’ve been a false alarm like you thought.”

“Dang coyote,” he said as he went to a broom closet tucked into a corner of the kitchen cabinetry. “Slinkin’ around, maybe hopin’ for one of the chickens we don’t even raise, set off a motion detector.”

Indicating the sunlight at the windows, she said, “Early for one of their kind bein’ on the hunt.”

Instead of brooms, the broom closet contained a gun rack with another shotgun. Mr. Bullock racked his 12-gauge beside the first weapon and hung his hat on a peg in there.

“It was a bonier specimen than usual, maybe too hungry to wait out the sun.”

He washed his hands as his wife served dinner family style: the meatloaf on a platter, half of it sliced; butter-rich mashed potatoes mounded in a bowl; different vegetables in each of four other serving dishes; two gravy boats to ensure no waiting; a basket of pull-apart rolls.

When we were seated, Mr. Bullock said a brief grace, and Mrs. Bullock said, “Amen,” and we ate like longshoremen who’d just worked grueling overtime on the docks. Everything was delicious.

Watching me eat, Mr. Bullock said, “Maybelle, this here young fella seems to think your cookin’s more out of this world than our astronaut did.”

“Everything’s delicious, ma’am, it’s perfect.”

“High praise comin’ from such a renowned fry cook. I’m flattered.”

I said, “Why did the astronaut need a new identity?”

They glanced at each other, and she raised her eyebrows, and he shrugged, and she said, “Edie adores him, Deke. She don’t
mistake a demon for a saint. And you know what he done … back then, the mall.”

To me, Deke Bullock said, “The astronaut fella seen somethin’ up there, he couldn’t for the life of him keep shut up about.”

“Up there?” I asked.

Mrs. Bullock pointed at the ceiling. “Space.”

Her husband said, “He was up there doin’ science or somethin’ on the space station awhile. The thing happened, and the astronaut was told he never seen what he knew dang well he’d seen.”

Mrs. Bullock said, “So when he gets back, he goes and tells some people he thinks they should know the truth, but they’re the wrong ones to tell. Next thing, they’re all chasin’ him.”

“Who?”

“CIA,” Mr. Bullock said.

Mrs. Bullock said, “FBI, too.”

“IRS,” Mr. Bullock added.

“Occupational Safety and Health Administration.”

“Social Security Administration.”

“Library of Congress and heaven only knows who else,” Mrs. Bullock said.

I considered all of that for a moment, and then I asked, “How did he find his way to you?”

“Never did,” Mr. Bullock said. “Edie Fischer found him how she finds so many. She took him someplace for a new face, then brung him here, so we could paper him up with a new name.”

I took a second slice of meatloaf. “What did he see up there?”

Neither of them replied.

“I mean, up there in space,” I said. “What did he see up there in space?”

Mrs. Bullock had gone pale. “Better we don’t say.”

“Not a bit of good can come of sayin’,” her husband agreed.

“It’s not we don’t trust you, Oddie,” she assured me.

Mr. Bullock looked grim. “It’s just you don’t never want it in your head. I mean, the thing that happened up there.”

“Once it’s in your head, there’s no gettin’ it out, what the astronaut described.” Mrs. Bullock shuddered. “Them images,” she said in a tone of voice in which she might have said,
Oh, the horror
.

“Them images,” Mr. Bullock agreed, having gone whiter than the mashed potatoes.

Mrs. Bullock said, “Them images keep comin’ back on you when you least expect, and your blood runs ice-cold.”

“Ice-cold,” her husband agreed, and nodded solemnly.

The woman nodded solemnly, too.

The three of us sat there nodding until Mr. Bullock suddenly turned his head to look at the window above the sink, as if he’d heard something that unsettled him.

Maybelle’s right hand went to the pistol beside her plate, and she turned in her chair to look at the same window. “Deke?”

“Probably nothing,” he said.

I was facing the window that interested them. I didn’t see anything alarming. I didn’t hear anything, either.

After they had been staring at the window for the better part of a minute, Mr. Bullock said, “I’m just jumpy.”

“You sure?” Maybelle asked.

“As sure as a fella can ever be in a world where every dang place you set foot, there’s a trap door waitin’ to be sprung.”

He returned to his dinner, but he ate with his left hand so that he could keep the right one on his pistol.

After we finished the meal in silence, Maybelle looked at me and broke into a smile as radiant as the one Donna Reed turned on Jimmy Stewart in the last scene of
It’s a Wonderful Life
. “Oddie, time for your favorite peach pie!”

Mrs. Bullock seemed to be of good cheer again, but her husband regarded the window with a frown, as though he doubted that we would live long enough to enjoy dessert.

Mr. Bullock provided me with a shoulder holster that held both the Glock and the spare magazines. In front of a free-standing full-length mirror in my room, I shrugged into the rig and adjusted it while he stood watching and nodding approvingly.

He owned two sport coats, two more than I did: a black one for funerals and a powder-blue one for what he referred to as “warm-weather dress-up occasions.” He had worn the latter only once when, in 110-degree desert heat, a friend had held a memorial service for a beloved house cat. Although the blue number went with my white T-shirt, jeans, and white sneakers, the pastel shade of it made me feel a little bit like a dandy.

“Nothin’ matters,” he said, “but what it fits you loose enough to hide that there gun you’re packin’. You got yourself the phone?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The little flashlight I give you?”

“It’s on the dresser.”

“Supposin’ you end up in some hugger-mugger where you got to have yourself a pencil light ’bout as bad as an innocent man in the
electric chair wants a last-minute go-free call from the governor, but it’s not in your pocket ’cause it’s there on the dresser?”

He retrieved the little flashlight and handed it to me, and I tucked it into an inside coat pocket. He asked if I had enough money, and I assured him that I did, and he told me to be careful, and I said that I would. He tugged on the lapels of the sport coat and smoothed the shoulders, and I felt as if I were being sent off on my first date.

In the kitchen, Mrs. Bullock insisted on hugging me and kissing me on the cheek before I left, a rather different send-off from any that James Bond ever got from his handlers at MI6.

Outside, in the last hour of light, Deke Bullock used a remote control to open one of the garage doors on the converted stable. I had said that I wanted an inconspicuous set of wheels. Of the two vehicles in that stall, he gave me the keys to a fifteen-year-old Ford Explorer that was dinged, scraped, and in need of being washed.

“She looks like a worn-out old spavined mare, don’t she? But under the hood, she’s a spirited filly.”

“I’m just going to ride around town, see what there is to see, feel it out. I don’t expect I’ll have to outrun a hot pursuit.”

He nodded and patted me on one shoulder. “Let’s hope it don’t come to that. But just when a man expects he’s earned the littlest bit of milk and honey, the world throws a load of horseshit at him.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, sir.”

“Now, say you find yourself comin’ back here after midnight. Then you call the number I give you earlier, so I can get out of bed and open the door for you, instead of shootin’ you dead. Tell me you got the number memorized?”

“Yes, sir. But I don’t want to disturb you folks.”

“You couldn’t if you tried, son. The missus don’t sleep at all anymore, and I don’t need but an hour a night.”

“Because you’re fully smoothed out and blue?” I asked.

When I’d first met Edie Fischer, she had claimed that she never slept anymore. In time, I had learned that she was telling the truth, though I still didn’t understand
why
she didn’t need sleep or what was meant by “fully smooth and blue.” She promised that understanding would come to me in time. When you’re given a life as bizarre as mine, you tend to be accepting of other people’s strangeness and eccentricities.

“Maybelle,” he said, “she’s smooth and blue all through, but I got me a ways to go yet. Now, you be careful out there, son. Don’t be expectin’ milk and honey, and maybe then you’ll get yourself some.”

He watched me drive out of the converted stable and through the tunnel formed by the velvet ashes.

As I turned right on the state highway and headed into Pico Mundo, I felt not merely that I was coming home after a long time away, but also felt, stronger than ever, that I had a rendezvous with destiny somewhere in those streets, the destiny that had been promised to me by a carnival fortune-telling machine called Gypsy Mummy.

To the east, the sky had turned from blue to bishop’s purple, with the gloss of satin. Like a juggled orange coming slowly down, the westering sun swelled as it settled toward the horizon, soon to be a blood orange.

West of the historic district, the first neighborhood I cruised was Jack Flats, which fifty years earlier had been called Jack Rabbit Flats. The area had undergone decline when, during city
government’s crusade to greatly ramp up the quaintness of the downtown streets, non-quaint enterprises like muffler shops and tire stores and pawn shops were forced to relocate to Jack Flats. More recently, the area had begun to undergo gentrification.

I can’t say what vibe I was searching for, but I didn’t feel it in Jack Flats. I drove out of there as the swollen sun balanced on the horizon, pouring red light through the town. Stucco walls glowed carnelian and every window glimmered like a jewel. Shadows lay long and black, silhouetted trees were as dark as masses of rising smoke, and the windshields of the passing traffic reflected a fiercely fiery sky, as though every driver must be on a journey to Armageddon.

If one kind of hell or another would soon come to this town, there should have been at least a bodach or two slinking along the streets, unseen by all but me, seeking out those soon to be dead, to savor the smell of them as they ripened toward their fate, to thrill at the imminence of their death by stroking them with hands and licking them with tongues that they could never feel. But not one of those featureless, shadowy connoisseurs of violence was in evidence.

Without consciously making my way to Marigold Lane, I found myself on that familiar street, in a neighborhood where Victorian houses seemed to have been transported, entire blocks at a time, out of the eastern cities from which many of Pico Mundo’s oldest families had migrated during the early decades of the twentieth century.