At a small—and need it be said, quaint—shop selling glass and ceramic art, the window featured a display of hand-sculpted, fired, and hand-painted ceramic mice, not rats, of considerable cuteness, in all manner of costumes and scenes. Joe saw a man’s handprint on the window glass, and he knew that he should place his hand atop it, though the large print looked oily and unclean. On contact, he declared, “Shit!” and hurried onward.
The mice had not been rats, and they hadn’t even been flesh-and-blood mice, but Joe nevertheless dreaded that the filth he would soon be compelled to touch would prove to be the real thing.
At the corner, he pivoted ninety degrees while hardly slowing down, then ran a quarter of a block to a free community parking lot and sprinted among the vehicles until he discovered an elderly woman who had been knocked to the ground. A fierce man bent over her, struggling to wrench her purse from her hands, which he managed to do just as Joe arrived, breathless.
With his litter stick, Joe did not hesitate to prick the assailant’s hand.
The thief cried out—“Shit!”—and dropped the purse.
Although Joe Mandel possessed an admirable sense of civic duty, he fulfilled it largely through Volunteers for a Better Future, as well as by never littering, by never parking in red zones, and by paying his library fines promptly and without complaint. He had never considered becoming a vigilante in search of criminals to obstruct. Now that he found himself in exactly that situation, he didn’t much like being there.
His average height and average build and pleasant face and winsome smile did not seem adequate in a confrontation with a purse snatcher who was maybe six feet one, a hundred ninety pounds, with big hands. Under an oily mass of slicked-back hair, the criminal had a brutish face, rum on his breath, and murder in his eyes.
Where the big knife came from, Joe couldn’t say. The guy seemed to pluck it out of thin air, though it must have been in one pocket or another. After all, if he had been a good enough magician to make switchblade knives appear from nowhere, he would not have needed to knock down old ladies to get drinking money.
“You piss me off, pretty boy,” declared the purse snatcher.
Joe said, “Sorry, but I had to.”
“Know what I do to people who piss me off?”
“I can sort of imagine.”
“I cut their guts out.”
Joe seriously doubted that the creep cut out the intestines of everyone who pissed him off, because he looked like a guy who would be pissed off at someone every half hour. No one could get away with public disembowelments more than, say, two or three times.
Nevertheless, Joe broke into a sweat when the thug lurched forward with a knife that appeared to have been lovingly stropped to razor sharpness. He danced backward and poked at his adversary with the litter stick, acutely aware that he was inadequately armed.
The purse snatcher laughed and feinted left, feinted right, easing closer. But he choked on his laugh and staggered backward when another litter stick flew through the air and stuck in the hollow of his throat. He dropped his switchblade and pulled the nail-tipped spear out of himself and threw it down and ran off, gagging, spitting.
The lovely Portia stepped past Joe, kicked the switchblade into a nearby storm drain, and said to the elderly woman, “Are you all right, Mrs. Cortland?”
As the senior citizen got to her feet, she said, “Yes, dear. I think he was just a common criminal.”
“I think so, too, coming at you in public like that. But you better be careful.” Portia put one hand on Joe’s shoulder. “By the way, this is Joe Mandel. Joe, this is Ida Cortland.”
“Thank you for being so brave, young man,” Mrs. Cortland said.
He blushed. “I wasn’t, really. I just sort of like got caught up in the moment.”
To Portia, Ida Cortland said, “I’ll call in a description of that purse-grabbing bastard, so the chief can try to find him and determine if he’s as common as he seems.”
3
ICE CREAM AND PAINFUL LOSS
The city council and the many business owners of Little City, recognizing that the world was growing darker and more dysfunctional every year, had worked together to provide anxious tourists with a destination that reminded them of a much earlier era. Therefore, on the main street, under the jacaranda trees and the palm trees, along the cobblestone sidewalk, among the quaint shops and the genteel galleries and the wondrous little cafés, there was even a malt shop with a 1950s decor and waitresses wearing white uniforms and pink hats and pink shoes. To even the most critical eye, every detail of the establishment appeared historically correct—except that there were no ashtrays on the tables.
Both Joe and Portia would have chased their adventure with a more fortifying beverage if they had been of drinking age, but as they were both eighteen, they settled for a back booth in the malt shop, ordering a chocolate-ice-cream soda for him and a cherry-ice-cream soda for her.
“So nothing like that ever happened to you before?” she asked.
“Did I look like I knew what I was doing?”
“I wish I could say yes.”
The experience seemed almost like something that he had dreamed, and he was surprised that it hadn’t left him more badly shaken. In fact, a curious sense of well-being had settled over him the moment that the purse snatcher had run off, as if he’d been given antianxiety medication.
“I must have looked crazed.”
“Man, you were like some pinball ricocheting from flipper to buzzer to bell.”
Joe liked the way that Portia stirred her drink to make the ice cream melt faster, how she scooped the creamy foam off the top of the soda, how she ate it with the slightest smacking of her lips.
He said, “Why on earth did you follow me through all of that?”
“Who wants to spend Saturday stabbing litter?”
“Volunteers for a Better Future,” he said.
“I didn’t volunteer. I was dragooned.”
“Dragooned by whom?”
“Who the hell says whom anymore?”
“I might be a writer someday.”
“Oh, I hope not. You seem so nice.”
Joe watched her drawing the pink cherry-flavored slush through her straw. Her lips puckered precisely, and her cheeks dimpled with the suction, and her throat pulsed with each swallow. Joe was not mechanically inclined. Working on car engines and that kind of thing held no appeal for him. But he was riveted by the mechanical process of Portia consuming the cherry-ice-cream soda.
“What’s wrong with writers?” he asked.
“A lot of them hate the world and want to change it, build Utopia.”
“I don’t.”
“Good. Because utopias always turn out to be one version of hell or another.”
“I just want to tell good stories. Or write advertising copy.”
“I am dazzled by your commitment to literature. So what was it that happened to you out there? Are we talking psychic phenomena? Are you some kind of mutant?”
“I’m not one of the X-Men.”
“You’re no Wolverine, for sure. But you’re something.”
“No, not me.” Again his equanimity surprised him. “It was just a two-headed-calf thing.”
“Are you going to drink your ice-cream soda, or just have erotic fantasies while you watch me drink mine?”
“I could be happy either way,” he said, but he turned his attention to his soda.
Portia propped one elbow on the table, rested her chin in the palm of her hand, watched him for a moment, and said, “You do that pretty well yourself.”
He said, “Who dragooned you into volunteering?”