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.
Sixteen
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.
In the still red but fading light, I pulled to the curb in front of the house owned by Rosalia Sanchez. For a few years, when I lived in the small studio apartment above her detached garage, she had been my landlady and my friend.
She would be sixty-five now, with that saintly face worn by so much caring for others, by loss and grief, by waiting patiently for what she would never receive in this life.
Back in 2001, she had awakened one day to the discovery that her much-loved husband, Herman, had died beside her in his sleep and lay there cold and pale, one eye closed and the other open, staring. Later that same year, still in mourning, she had bowed out of a long-planned vacation to New England that she and Herman had intended to take with her three sisters and their families. On the morning of September 11, Rosalia woke to the news that their return flight out of Boston had been hijacked and flown into one of the World Trade Center towers.
Having lost every relative in one year, while she was sleeping, without a child of her own to whom she could turn for solace, Rosalia went a little mad. Intellectually, she knew that they were all dead, but in this case, emotion trumped reason. She would never speak of terrorists or plane crashes, nor would she listen to such talk. She chose to believe instead that as a consequence of some rare natural phenomenon, everyone she loved had turned invisible. She held fast, as well, to the theory that soon this event, like a magnetic field, would be reversed, rendering her loved ones visible again.
Her madness involved no resentment or anger, and she posed no danger either to herself or to others. She continued to keep her house immaculate, to bake her marvelous cakes and cookies as gifts for friends and neighbors, to attend her church, and to be a force for good in her community. And to wait for her family to be returned to visibility.