Forever Odd (24 page)

CHAPTER 60

T
HE RATAPLAN OF NIGHT RAIN AGAINST THE windows…Wafting in from the kitchen, the delicious aroma of a pot roast taking its time in the oven…

In his living room, Little Ozzie fills his huge armchair to overflowing.

The warm light of the Tiffany lamps, the jewel tones of the Persian carpet, the art and artifacts reflect his good taste.

On the table beside his chair is a bottle of fine Cabernet, a plate of cheeses, a cup of fried walnuts, which serve as a testament to his genteel quest for self-destruction.

I sit on the sofa and watch him enjoy the book for a while before I say
You’re always reading Saul Bellow and Hemingway and Joseph Conrad.

He does not permit himself to be interrupted in the middle of a paragraph.

I bet you’d like to write something more ambitious than stories about a bulimic detective.

Ozzie sighs and samples the cheese, eyes fixed on the page.

You’re so talented, I’m sure you could write whatever you want. I wonder if you’ve ever tried.

He sets the book aside and picks up his wine.

Oh,
I say, surprised.
I see how it is.

Ozzie savors the wine and, still holding the glass, stares into the middle distance, not at anything in this room.

Sir, I wish you could hear me say this. You were a dear friend to me. I’m so glad you made me write the story of me and Stormy and what happened to her.

After another taste of wine, he opens the book and returns to his reading.

I might have gone mad if you hadn’t made me write it. And if I hadn’t written it, for sure I would never have had any peace.

Terrible Chester, as glorious as ever, enters from the kitchen and stands staring at me.

If things had worked out, I’d have written about all this with Danny, too, and given you a second manuscript. You would have liked it less than the first, but maybe a little.

Chester visits with me as never he has before, sits at my feet.

Sir, when they come to tell you about me, please don’t eat a whole ham in one night, don’t deep-fry a block of cheese.

I reach down to stroke Terrible Chester, and he seems to like my touch.

What you could do for me, sir, is just once write a story of the kind you’d most enjoy writing. If you’ll do that for me, I’ll have given back the gift that you gave me, and that would make me happy.

I rise from the sofa.

Sir, you’re a dear, fat, wise, fat, generous, honorable, caring, wonderfully fat man, and I wouldn’t have you any other way
.

TERRI STAMBAUGH SITS in her apartment kitchen above the Pico Mundo Grille, drinking strong coffee and paging slowly through an album of photographs.

Looking over her shoulder, I see snapshots of her with Kelsey, the husband she lost to cancer.

On her music system, Elvis sings “I Forgot to Remember to Forget.”

I put my hands on her shoulders. She does not react, of course.

She gave me so much—encouragement, a job at sixteen, the skills of a first-rate fry cook, counsel—and all I gave her in return was my friendship, which doesn’t seem enough.

I wish I could spook her with a supernatural moment. Make the hands spin on the Elvis wall clock. Send that ceramic Elvis dancing across the kitchen counter.

Later, when they came to tell her, she would know it had been me, fooling with her, saying good-bye. Then she would know I was all right, and knowing I was all right, she would be all right, too.

But I don’t have the anger to be a poltergeist. Not even enough to make the face of Elvis appear in the condensation on her kitchen window.

_______

CHIEF WYATT PORTER and his wife, Karla, are having dinner in their kitchen.

She is a good cook, and he is a good eater. He claims this is what holds their marriage together.

She says what holds their marriage together is that she feels too damn sorry for him to ask for a divorce.

What really holds their marriage together are mutual respect of an awesome depth, a shared sense of humor, faith that they were brought together by a force greater than themselves, and a love so unwavering and pure that it is sacred.

This is how I like to believe Stormy and I would have been if we could have gotten married and lived together as long as the chief and Karla: so perfect for each other that spaghetti and a salad in the kitchen on a rainy night, just the two of them, is more satisfying and more gladdening to the heart than dinner at the finest restaurant in Paris.

I sit at the table with them, uninvited. I am embarrassed to be eavesdropping on their simple yet enrapturing conversation, but this will be the only time that it ever happens. I will not linger. I will move on.

After a while, his cell phone rings.

“I hope that’s Odd,” he says.

She puts down her fork, wipes her hands on a napkin as she says, “If something’s wrong with Oddie, I want to come.”

“Hello,” says the chief. “Bill Burton?”

Bill owns the Blue Moon Cafe.

The chief frowns. “Yes, Bill. Of course. Odd Thomas? What about him?”

As if with a presentiment, Karla pushes her chair away from the table and gets to her feet.

The chief says, “We’ll be right there.”

Rising from the table as he does, I say,
Sir, the dead do talk, after all. But the living don’t listen.

CHAPTER 61

H
ERE IS THE CENTRAL MYSTERY: HOW I GOT from the portcullis-style gate in the flood tunnel to the kitchen door of the Blue Moon Cafe, a journey of which I have no slightest recollection.

I do believe that I died. The visits I paid to Ozzie, to Terri, and to the Porters in their kitchen were not figments of a dream.

Later, when I shared my story with them, my description of what each of them was doing when I visited comports perfectly with their separate recollections of their evenings.

Bill Burton says I arrived battered and bedraggled at the back door of his restaurant, asking him to call Chief Porter. By then the rain had stopped, and I was so filthy that he set a chair outside for me and fetched a bottle of beer, which in his opinion, I needed.

I don’t recall that part. The first thing that I remember is being in the chair, drinking Heineken, while Bill examined the wound in my chest.

“Shallow,” he said. “Hardly more than a scratch. The bleeding’s stopped on its own.”

“He was dying when he took that swipe at me,” I said. “There wasn’t any force behind it.”

Maybe that was true. Or maybe it was the explanation that I needed to tell myself.

Soon a Pico Mundo Police Department cruiser came along the alley, without siren or flashing lights, and parked behind the cafe.

Chief Porter and Karla got out of the car and came to me.

“I’m sorry you didn’t get to finish the spaghetti,” I said.

They exchanged a puzzled look.

“Oddie,” said Karla, “your ear’s torn up. What’s all the blood on your T-shirt? Wyatt, he needs an ambulance.”

“I’m all right,” I assured her. “I was dead, but someone didn’t want me to be, so I’m back.”

To Bill Burton, Wyatt said, “How many beers has he had?”

“That’s the first one here,” Bill said.

“Wyatt,” Karla declared,
“he needs an ambulance.”

“I don’t really,” I said. “But Danny’s in bad shape, and we might need a couple paramedics to carry him down all those stairs.”

While Karla brought another chair out of the restaurant, put it next to mine, sat down, and fussed over me, Wyatt used the police-band radio to order an ambulance.

When he returned, I said, “Sir, you know what’s wrong with humanity?”

“Plenty,” he said.

“The greatest gift we were given is our free will, and we keep misusing it.”

“Don’t worry yourself about that now,” Karla advised me.

“You know what’s wrong with nature,” I asked her, “with all its poison plants, predatory animals, earthquakes, and floods?”

“You’re upsetting yourself, sweetie.”

“When we envied, when we killed for what we envied, we fell. And when we fell, we broke the whole shebang, nature, too.”

A kitchen worker whom I knew, who had worked part time at the Grille, Manuel Nuñez, arrived with a fresh beer.

“I don’t think he should have that,” Karla worried.

Taking the beer from him, I said, “Manuel, how’re you doing?”

“Looks like better than you.”

“I was just dead for a while, that’s all. Manuel, do you know what’s wrong with cosmic time, as we know it, which steals everything from us?”

“Isn’t it ‘spring forward, fall back’?” Manuel asked, thinking that we were talking about Daylight Savings Time.

“When we fell and broke,” I said, “we broke nature, too, and when we broke nature, we broke time.”

“Is that from
Star Trek?
” Manuel asked.

“Probably. But it’s true.”

“I liked that show. It helped me learn English.”

“You speak it well,” I told him.

“I had a brogue for a while because I got so into Scotty’s character,” Manuel said.

“Once, there were no predators, no prey. Only harmony. There were no quakes, no storms, everything in balance. In the beginning, time was all at once and forever—no past, present, and future, no death. We broke it all.”

Chief Porter tried to take the fresh Heineken from me.

I held on to it. “Sir, do you know what sucks the worst about the human condition?”

Bill Burton said, “Taxes.”

“It’s even worse than that,” I told him.

Manuel said, “Gasoline costs too much, and low mortgage rates are
gone.
”

“What sucks the worst is…this world was a gift to us, and we broke it, and part of the deal is that if we want things right, we have to fix it ourselves. But we can’t. We try, but we can’t.”

I started to cry. The tears surprised me. I thought I was done with tears for the duration.

Manuel put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Maybe we can fix it, Odd. You know? Maybe.”

I shook my head. “No. We’re broken. A broken thing can’t fix itself.”

“Maybe it can,” Karla said, putting a hand on my other shoulder.

I sat there, just a faucet. All snot and tears. Embarrassed but not enough to get my act together.

“Son,” said Chief Porter, “it’s not your job alone, you know.”

“I know.”

“So the broken world’s not all on your shoulders.”

“Lucky for the world.”

The chief crouched beside me. “I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t say that at all.”

“Or me,” Karla agreed.

“I’m a mess,” I apologized.

Karla said, “Me too.”

“I could use a beer,” Manuel said.

“You’re working,” Bill Burton reminded him. Then he said, “Get me one, too.”

To the chief, I said, “There’re two dead at the Panamint and two more in the flood-control tunnel.”

“You just tell me what,” he said, “and we’ll handle it.”

“What had to be done…it was so bad. Real bad. But the hard thing is…”

Karla gave me a wad of tissues.

The chief said, “What’s the hard thing, son?”

“The hard thing is, I was dead, too, but somebody didn’t want me to be, so I’m back.”

“Yes. You said before.”

My chest swelled. My throat thickened. I could hardly breathe. “Chief, I was
this
close to Stormy,
this
close to service.”

He cupped my wet face in his hands and made me look at him. “Nothing before its time, son. Everything in its own time, to its own schedule.”

“I guess so.”

“You know that’s true.”

“This was a very hard day, sir. I had to do…terrible things. Things no one should have to live with.”

Karla whispered, “Oh, God, Oddie. Oh, sweetie, don’t.” To her husband, she said plaintively, “Wyatt?”

“Son, you can’t fix a broken thing by breaking another part of it. You understand me?”

I nodded. I did understand. But understanding doesn’t always help.

“Giving up—that would be breaking another part of yourself.”

“Perseverance,” I said.

“That’s right.”

At the end of the block, with flashing emergency beacons but without a siren, the ambulance turned into the alley.

“I think Danny had some broken bones but was trying not to let me know,” I told the chief.

“We’ll get him. We’ll handle him like glass, son.”

“He doesn’t know about his dad.”

“All right.”

“That’s going to be so hard, sir. Telling him. Very hard.”

“I’ll tell him, son. Leave that to me.”

“No, sir. I’d be grateful if you’re there with me, but I have to tell him. He’s going to think it’s all his fault. He’s going to be devastated. He’s going to need to lean, sir.”

“He can lean on you.”

“I hope so, sir.”

“He can lean hard on you, son. Who could he lean on any harder?”

And so we went to the Panamint, where Death had gone to gamble and had, as always, won.

CHAPTER 62

W
ITH FOUR POLICE CRUISERS, ONE AMBULANCE, a county-morgue wagon, three crime-scene specialists, two paramedics, six cops, one chief, and one Karla, I returned to the Panamint.

I felt whipped, but not exhausted to the point of collapse, as I had felt earlier. Being dead for a while had refreshed me.

When we pried open the elevator doors on the twelfth floor, Danny was glad to see us. He had eaten neither of the coconut-raisin power bars, and he insisted on returning them to me.

He had drunk the water I left with him, but not because he had been thirsty. “After all the shotgun fire,” he said, “I really needed the bottles to pee in.”

Karla went with Danny in the ambulance to the hospital. Later, in a room at County General, she, instead of the chief, stayed with me when I told Danny about his dad. The wives of Spartans are the secret pillars of the world.

In the dark and ashy vastness of the burned-out second floor, we found Datura’s remains. The mountain lion had gone.

As I expected, her malignant spirit had not lingered. Her will was no longer hers to wield, her freedom surrendered to a demanding collector.

In the living room of the twelfth-floor suite, blood spray and buckshot proved that I’d wounded Robert. On the balcony lay a loosely tied shoe, which apparently had been pulled off his foot when he had stumbled backward across the metal track of the sliding doors.

Immediately below that balcony, in the parking lot, we found his pistol and his other shoe, as if he no longer needed the former and had taken off the latter to be able to travel with an even step.

Such a long fall onto a hard surface would have left him lying in a lake of blood. But the storm had washed the pavement clean.

The consensus was that Datura and Andre had moved the body to a dry place.

I did not share that opinion. Datura and Andre had been guarding the stairs. They would have had neither the time nor the inclination to treat their dead with dignity.

I looked up from the shoe and surveyed the Mojave night beyond the grounds of the hotel, wondering what need—or hope—and what power had compelled him.

Perhaps one day a hiker will find mummified remains dressed in black but shoeless, in the fetal position, inside a den from which foxes had been evicted to provide a refuge to a man who wished to rest in peace beyond the reach of his demanding goddess.

The disappearance of Robert prepared me for the failure of the authorities to recover the bodies of Andre and the snaky man.

Near the end of the flood-control system, the portcullis-style gates, twisted and sagging, were found open. Beyond, a falls cascaded into a cavern, the first of many caverns that formed an archipelago of subterranean seas bound all around by land, a realm that was largely unexplored and too treacherous to justify a search for bodies.

The consensus held that the water, possessed of fearsome power and prevented by a choking mass of debris from flowing easily through the gates, had torqued the steel, had bent the huge hinges, had broken the lock.

Although that scenario did not satisfy me, I had no desire to pursue an independent investigation.

In the interest of self-education, however, which Ozzie Boone is always pleased to see me undertake, I researched the meaning of some words previously unknown to me.

Mundunugu
appears in similar forms in different languages of East Africa. A
mundunugu
is a witch doctor.

Voodooists believe that the human spirit has two parts.

The first is the
gros bon ange,
the “big good angel,” the life force that all beings share, that animates them. The
gros bon ange
enters the body at conception and, upon the death of the body, returns at once to God, from whom it originated.

The second is the
ti bon ange,
the “little good angel.” This is the essence of the person, the portrait of the individual, the sum of his life’s choices, actions, and beliefs.

At death, because sometimes it wanders and delays in its journey to its eternal home, the
ti bon ange
is vulnerable to a
bokor,
which is a voodoo priest who deals in black rather than in white magic. He can capture the
ti bon ange,
bottle it, and keep it for many uses.

They say that a skilled
bokor,
with well-cast spells, can even steal the
ti bon ange
from a living person.

To steal the
ti bon ange
of another
bokor
or of a
mundunugu
would be considered a singular accomplishment among the mad-cow set.

Cheval
is French for “horse.”

To a voodooist, a
cheval
is a corpse, taken always when fresh from a morgue or acquired by whatever means, into which he installs a
ti bon ange.

The former corpse, alive again, is animated by the
ti bon ange,
which perhaps yearns for Heaven—or even for Hell—but is under the iron control of the
bokor.

I draw no conclusions from the meaning of these exotic words. I define them here only for
your
education.

As I said earlier, I’m a man of reason, yet I have supernatural perceptions. Daily I walk a high wire. I survive by finding the sweet spot between reason and unreason, between the rational and the irrational.

The unthinking embrace of irrationality is literally madness. But embracing rationality while denying the existence of
any
mystery to life and its meaning—that is no less a form of madness than is eager devotion to unreason.

One appeal of both the life of a fry cook and that of a tire-installation technician is that during a busy work day, you have no time to dwell on these things.