Deeply Odd(26)

“Yes, ma’am, I hear you.”

The images from the premonition faded, but I still had a sense of being in the path of malevolent, implacable forces. That wasn’t an unusual feeling for me, but this time the threat felt imminent.

“Are you all right?” Mrs. Fischer asked.

“Sort of. Yeah. I’m fine. Just a little thing there for a moment. What’s up?”

“I think we’ve lost him.” She drove as fast as ever, switching lanes with bravado, passing between a pair of eighteen-wheelers that bracketed us like cliffs, searching for the one that got away. “There were suddenly so many trucks and I thought I still had a lock on him, but then I realized it was a different rig.”

State Route 134 had become Interstate 210. The highway signs promised exits for Azusa and Covina.

The dark clouds massed in the south were dramatically closer than before, and I suspected that I had been unconscious for minutes rather than seconds.

“Ma’am, you better get all the way over to the right. Take the next exit.”

“Do you know where he’s gone? How can you know where he’s gone?”

“I have a hunch.”

Working the car toward the right lane, Mrs. Fischer said, “A hunch? A hunch isn’t worth spit.”

“Well, this one is, ma’am. It’s worth spit and then some.”

“Your hunches usually pay off, do they?”

“I learn by going where I have to go,” I said, determined not to explain psychic magnetism.

She didn’t slow down much for the exit ramp.

I said, “Left at the bottom.”

Because no traffic approached on the intersecting surface street, she didn’t obey the stop sign.

“Come to think of it,” she said, “how did you know he would be at that truck stop earlier?”

As we went through an underpass beneath the freeway, we politely pretended not to see the obscene spray-painted graffiti, which was colorful but, as usual, unimaginative. I suspect that those who see equal merit in graffiti and the work of Rembrandt might be wrong.

I said, “Trucker at a truck stop. It seemed logical.”

“That’s all it was? Just logic?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You’re dancing around the truth, child. You told me it was only all right to lie to evil.”

“And you said you might be evil.”

“Might be. I didn’t say I was.”

“Please turn left in two blocks, ma’am.”

“Fact is, I’m not evil.”

The effect of the premonition had diminished enough to allow me to smile. “First you said you might be evil, now you say you’re not. I better tread carefully with you.”

We passed through a once prosperous retail area where a third of the businesses were gone, many of them restaurants, and the remaining shops and services had a tattered look that suggested they were week-to-week enterprises. Some days lately, it seemed that everything was a week-to-week enterprise, including the country and the world.

A traffic signal turned green to accommodate us, and I said, “After the intersection, pull to the curb.”

Mrs. Fischer braked to a stop in front of a thrift shop operated by the Salvation Army.

I said, “I’ll be going the rest of the way alone, on foot.”

“Is that really wise?”

“I’m not sure anything I do is wise, ma’am, but I’ve stayed alive a lot longer than I ever expected.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I’m grateful that you came along, and I’m thankful for your help. But I don’t want you to be hurt because of me. You need to get on with your life while I get on with trying to understand mine.”

After her many years of living, perhaps even from her childhood, Mrs. Fischer’s eyes were the sky reflected in the sea, eternity mirrored in the everlasting waters. Even if she had not given voice to the next thing that she said, meeting her gaze, I would have known that the secrets to which she often alluded were real and profound and no less strange than my own. She said, “Something big is coming, Oddie. Something so very big that the world will change. I know you feel it, too.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“How long have you felt it?”

“Almost all my life. But more so lately.”

“Much more so lately,” she agreed. “Child, do you know where truly great courage comes from, the kind of courage that will never back down?”

I said, “Faith.”

“And love,” she said. “Faith is a kind of love, you know. Love of what is unseen but certain. Love makes us strong and brave.”

I thought of Stormy and how the loss of her had tempered my steel. “Yes.”