The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces (10 page)

Home for the holidays, I discovered there was one exception. There was one restaurant in town in which the food was like the food of the Southwest. I later learned the cook was a member of SSOMFC.

In college (at Arizona State University, where Dennis had done two degrees in computer science) when I worked as a kitchen assistant in a dozen Mexican restaurants over the years, the main cook (usually a woman) would shoulder me aside at the critical moment to put the final touches on the enchilada sauce—surely, I decided, adding the secret ingredient. By careful observation over the years and one major ruse, I learned what the secret ingredient was.

But you won't be learning the ingredient from me. My revealing the fact that there is a secret ingredient and a society to protect it is a very serious matter. I thought I'd made up the secret society to add another layer to my Dieter persona until I got a phone call late one night.

The caller asked to speak to Dieter. I figured this must have something to do with a case, figured I must have talked to someone as Dieter and left the office number, so I told the caller to hang on, went into the washroom and changed and came back and picked up the phone as Dieter. The man identified himself as Señor Equis.

“Dos Equis?”

“What? Look, don't jerk me around, Dieter. I don't speak Spanish.”

Señor Equis told me he represented a “certain organization.” That got my attention. I have had no contact whatever with organized crime, but I've seen the movies, and I didn't want to have guys in organizations noticing me.

I think my voice squeaked when I asked him what I could do for him.

He mentioned a bunch of names, most of which Dieter recognized as Mexican food cooks we'd met during our college days. Señor Equis said that Lisa Mendoza had confessed on her deathbed that a young man had tricked her into revealing the secret ingredient many years before and she had been too ashamed (and frightened) to tell anyone until now.

Dieter remembered Lisa. Her tamales were maybe the best in the world. We were sad to hear she'd died.

“Yeah, yeah,” Señor Equis said. “The point is we need to meet.”

I suggested a popular Mexican food restaurant near one of the big shopping malls—my little test.

I could hear Señor Equis making spitting, gagging, and barfing sounds, so I guessed he might really know something about Mexican food. We finally agreed to meet at a noodle shop on the west side.

So, to make a long story short (and thereby hopefully not reveal anything I shouldn't reveal) Dieter met Señor Equis at the noodle shop, and Señor Equis told him about the Secret Society of Mexican Food Cooks (which we thought we'd made up).

Señor Equis questioned Dieter about the secret ingredient, made him tell the whole story of how he had teased and prodded and finally tricked Lisa Mendoza. Then he had sworn a tearful Dieter in as a member of the society with all the rights and obligations.

My mother had been delighted when she heard the story. Even in those days, she'd been confusing me and Dieter, and if Mexican food were the defining detail for Dieter in her mind, the secret society and the secret ingredient (which she never tired of trying to get out of him) were the spices that fired our conversations.

That afternoon Dieter let go of her hands and leaned down and kissed her cheek. A nurse brought her wheelchair and Dieter helped her into it. He wheeled her out to the courtyard which looked south over rolling hills of deep forest. The building was situated in such a way that you couldn't see the clear-cut to the west. You might be looking at the land the way it looked hundreds of years ago. Okay, you had to ignore the blacktopped road and the line of houses to the east but if you held your head just right …

Dieter receded, and I pushed Mother up to a metal patio table and pulled a chair around for myself and sat down beside her.

“How have you been, Mom?”

“It's so noisy here,” she said.

I listened but could hear only the sounds of birds and insects, cut occasionally by laughter or louder talk from inside. Way back in the background I thought I could hear traffic on Bailey Hill Road. I must have seemed puzzled.

“All that crackling and popping,” she explained.

“Yes,” I said.

“You kids can't imagine.”

You kids would be me and my disguises—or maybe just my disguises these days.

“I've been telling Louisa about the lard,” she said. “I love the way it makes her face go purple when I tell her she's got to start with real lard if she wants to make good enchilada sauce.”

“You can use butter,” I said.

“I know it.” She grinned and winked. “I just like to see her turn purple. ‘Your heart! Your heart!'”

“My heart?”

“No, silly, that's what Louisa says. ‘Think of your heart!'”

“Well,” I said.

“The flour,” she said. “The crushed chilies. The…”

She paused for me to fill in the secret ingredient, but I knew she really didn't expect me to do it. One of our little games.

“Nice try,” I said and patted her hand, and we laughed together.

We spent some time just sitting. I loved the air on the back patio—the crisp forest smell. The place was above any auto or wood stove smog. I bet there would be a good view of the stars whenever there were stars to see (such a rare and special sight in Oregon), but then I realized there would be no one sitting out here at night.

“So what's new?” she asked.

“Sky is working on a murder case,” I said.

“Has he figured it out yet?”

“No.”

“Tell him to look the answer up in
The Big Book of Clues,
” she said.

“I'll do that.”

“I remember the way you all hated to dance,” she said.

The word dance sent a chill down my back, but I'm used to running into it in odd contexts so I pulled myself together. I wondered who she was talking to. In her world had there been six little dancers and Brian, too?

“All that fuss,” she said. “Do a couple of steps for me. I do so miss that.”

“What?”

“I said dance for me.”

As she spoke, I could see that her words no longer matched the movement of her lips. Who knew what she was really saying?

“Here?”

“Why not,” she said. “They expect crazy things from me.”

“But maybe not from me.”

I had to clear my head. This conversation was happening on several levels for me, and it was probably happening on more than one level for her, too. On the one hand we were both talking to ourselves and missing one another altogether, but on some other level I felt we were approaching some defining moment in our relationship.

I could feel some uncontrollable dancing coming on.

“Show your mother that old soft-shoe, Brian.”

Because she suddenly knew who I was, I couldn't help thinking she'd known all along. Calling me by my name took me back, made me see the kitchen table in the old house on Lincoln, Mom in an apron (or maybe that was the Beaver's mom) and me in my gleaming black tap shoes and white shirt and red crepe paper vest with the sparkling green stars. Someone had blown glitter onto the front of my outfit. White foam hat. What was that stuff they used to make your hat? You could bite a piece out of the brim of a hat like that, but you'd get in big trouble if you did.

“Don't just sit there looking so glum,” she said. “Listen to the song in your heart!”

So I got up from the kitchen table and jumped around the room trying to remember the steps Mrs. Fountain had run the twelve of us through last Saturday. Boy, was she ever a tyrant. A woman of one age or another. Her face looked years older than my mom's, but she could have stolen her body from a teenager. She always wore a scarf around her neck, and I figured that was to hide the stitches that held the head and the body together.

My mother clapping time to the tap-along music on the stereo.

Mom driving the station wagon, still whistling—pick up Elsie and Peggy, pick up Ted(dy—he hates that), and Marvin, already bigger than the rest—here a kid, there a kid—maybe half the tap class.

The twelve of us in a line onstage, Marvin in the middle like a mountain peak. Mrs. Fountain in the wings looking like a bird, maybe a vulture. I could just die, Ted said. Yeah, but then she'd eat you. Curtain goes up. We look around blinking like someone's just flipped on the lights and caught us with our pants down.

The crowd rumbles like a huge empty stomach.

Dorky music.

And we dance.

Crazy hail on a tin roof. We're not exactly synchronized.

Every shadow claps anyway. Cheers and whistles.

Ted grows up as he dances and by the time he's a teenager he wanders off shaking his head and grinning sheepishly. Elsie puts on pounds but perseveres. She dances to the left getting older, bigger; she dances back to me getting smaller; we patty cake and click our heels together and she dances away to the left again getting bigger. We repeat that a couple of times, she comes, she goes, but one time she just doesn't come back, and it's just Marvin and me. Then he whaps me a good one on the back of the head and I'm dancing alone on the stage. Grandparents and parents and siblings and friends and well-wishers have all taken up smoking and no one is paying much attention to the stage anymore. Everyone is talking and rattling the ice in their glasses. You've really got to dig in your heels and put on a show to get the attention of a crowd like that, but in most ways I don't care if they're watching—I'm an artist; I dance for myself.

I am large and I am the master of tap. I am small and clumsy. I am large and sweaty and the tangy pine air blows across the patio and cools my face. I can see my mother's face, but I cannot decipher her expression. Her mouth moves but I can't read her lips. I'm afraid she looks frightened.

Then there's a guy on my left who takes my arm, and a guy on my right who takes my other arm. They make soothing sounds as they urge me from the patio and down and down and down the long hallway toward the front door of the nursing home. I've gone too far. Things have gotten out of hand. I wonder how much of that was real. How much of that did I share with my mother and how much of it did I live alone. Once I get wound up like that, I don't stop until I crash. I felt a deep sense of embarrassment. I wondered how my mother would be next “Sunday.” Would she remember? The staff would pretend that nothing had happened. Except for Jennifer, the nurse at the front desk, who would give me a look that said you'd better behave yourself or else!

“I can walk,” I said.

“It's okay, Mr. Dobson,” the guy on my left said. “We'll just help you to your car.”

It was a long walk to the front door. I felt like a fool, but I was too ripped to put up a fight.

“Do you think he can drive?” the guy on my right said.

“I'm okay,” I said. I rolled my shoulders and shook them off. Okay, what really happened was we were outside so they just let me go. I held up my hands and backed away from them. “I'm okay.”

I walked to my jeep. I opened the door and climbed behind the wheel and then looked back at the front of the nursing home. My escorts had gone back inside.

I rested my forehead on the steering wheel and took a couple of deep breaths. Big raindrops splattered against the windshield. Maybe I needed a meeting. Of course, I needed a meeting; I'd needed a meeting for weeks, but I knew I wouldn't make one yet.

How low can you go?

We'll have to let you know.

Apparently I was still on the way down.

eight

I'd lied to the guys in white; I was in no shape to drive, so when the rain let up a little, I left the Cherokee at the Oak Leaves Care Center and hiked down the hill to Eighteenth Avenue where I sat for fifteen minutes in a bus shelter listening to the rain hitting the roof and waiting for a bus to take me back downtown. The only good thing you could have said about me at that time was that at least I wasn't behind the wheel.

The bus driver gave me a nasty look, and nasty looks from bus drivers are not common in Eugene, so I figured I must look pretty much like I felt. I took a seat about half way back in the bus and struggled to get invisible. Maybe I was trying too hard since the driver kept looking up at me in his big mirror.

All that attention made me so nervous I got off maybe ten blocks too soon and had to walk the rest of the way. Once I hit the downtown mall, there were more people about. They slowed me down, and everyone seemed to notice me. There is an opposite for almost everything. The opposite of being invisible is that state where everyone notices you. Everyone you pass looks at you, catalogues your failings, notes your distinguishing features for a potential police line-up. It's like when you get a goofy haircut and everyone you pass looks at your head, smirks, and looks away. I put my hands in my pockets and watched my feet and hurried on down the mall to my office. Slipping into my building was like ducking into a cave. I almost never met anyone in the corridors or elevator and that evening was no different. I got to my door without seeing anyone.

Once inside, I sat down behind my desk and poured myself a big drink, drank it, and poured myself another. The scotch radiated warmth from my belly down to my knees and toes and up to the tops of my ears. I finished the second drink and then stretched out on the couch and closed my eyes. I needed to get away, but I didn't want to drink myself to sleep. My head was spinning a mile a minute (as my mother would have said), and I planned on lying there with my eyes closed pretending to be asleep or passed out until it stopped.

I was still pretending when the door opened and a couple of bumblers came whispering and shushing into the office. I recognized Prudence at once and a moment later I was sure the other one was Yuri. I didn't open my eyes.

“Put it down on the desk,” Prudence whispered.