Deeply Odd(27)
“Heath and I never had children. I believe that I wasn’t given any children because I needed to save all that love for a time late in my life when I would need it to give me courage.”
Suddenly the rising wind rose faster, buffeted the limousine, and conjured a dust devil full of leaves and litter that whirled up from the gutter and followed a drunkard’s path down the center of the street.
She said, “You see, many years ago, three times I had the same vivid dream about a motherless, fatherless boy who was nevertheless not an orphan. Are you without a mother and father, Oddie?”
“They’re still alive, ma’am, but they were never a mother and father to me. I’ve been on my own since I was sixteen.”
“When I saw you standing beside the Coast Highway, I recognized you from the dream, though you are not a boy any longer.”
Several pages of a newspaper flocked along the street, faux birds of ill omen, flapping ungainly wings of words.
“What’s the story of your dream?” I asked. “What happens in it?”
“A true and lovely thing. That’s all I’ll say for now. But I will never, as you suggest, get on with my life by leaving you here and driving away. If you must go by foot now and alone, so be it. But I’ll get on with my life by waiting right here until you come back.”
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
She opened her voluminous purse. “Take the gun.”
I thought of the premonition: universal war, all against all. If such a conflict was coming, it wouldn’t happen in the next day or the next week, probably not even in the next year. Maybe it wouldn’t ever happen. The future isn’t set. Our free will creates our future.
Mrs. Fischer plucked the weapon from her purse and pressed it into my hands. “Take, take. I’ve got others.”
As I tucked the pistol in my waistband and under my sweatshirt, I said, “You seem to be prepared for anything.”
“We all better be prepared, child.” Her eyes remained solemn even when she smiled. She reached out and gently pinched my cheek. “Be safe, Oddie. Come home.”
Nine
WHEN I GOT OUT OF THE LIMOUSINE, THE WIND TOSSED my hair and threw dust in my eyes, as if it were a malicious spirit. The day was chilly for Southern California in early March, especially considering that the storm front had come in from the southwest. The sea, which this gruff wind would have bullied into whitecaps, must have been unusually cold. I could faintly smell the distant shore, mostly the astringent scent of iodine given off by certain seaweeds when they are tossed onto the beach to decompose above the tide line.
I walked past the thrift shop to the nearby corner and turned left. The two- and three-story buildings were old, mostly of painted brick with cast-stone Art Deco details in their parapeted roofs and pedimented windows. Phoenix palms lined the street, more stately than the neighborhood in which they flourished.
Instead of consciously choosing a route, I went where psychic magnetism drew me, never sure when I might find myself before a door and know that my quarry waited beyond it, or round a corner and come face-to-face with him, or hear the word dirtbag spoken behind me and turn to discover that my talent for attraction had drawn him to me instead of me to him, his silencer-equipped Sig Sauer in my face—or crotch.
Ahead of me, from high in a wind-tossed phoenix palm, four rats that were remarkably fat for these lean times descended from their fair-weather nest in the thick dry skirt just below the glorious spray of green fronds. Like a precision drill team, they came one behind the other, nose to tail, legs synchronized. At the bottom of the tree, the quartet spilled over the curb, into the gutter, and disappeared through the bars of a drainage grate, as disciplined as any human family in the vast flat Midwest when the tornado sirens wailed and the house had to be abandoned for the storm cellar in the backyard.
Although I know the world is an intricately more complex place than it appears to most people, although I understand in my blood and bones that humanity is a turbulent family aboard an endless train, on an infinite journey to shores that can only dimly be imagined by the living, I don’t see signs and portents everywhere I look. Most often, a haloed moon means nothing more than that reflective volcanic ash has made its way into the stratosphere, and a two-headed goat is only a genetic curiosity. The mommy-porn genre currently sweeping the book industry and the Babylonian excess of most television shows probably fall within the historical norm in our culture’s sleaze index and are not omens of the imminent collapse of civilization, though if I were not so busy, I might start building an ark.
Those four brown rats, however, descending at precisely that moment instead of any other, impressed me as being more than merely rodents on the run from threatening weather. For one thing, at the curb, before slinking into the gutter, each turned its head toward me, its whiteless eyes as glossy as black glass, its scaly tail lashing back and forth twice before it continued out of sight into the drain.