I said, “Yes, sir, to an extent it is.”
Chandelle and Gideon kissed Mrs. Fischer’s cheek, and Mrs. Fischer kissed their cheeks, and I kissed Chandelle’s cheek as she kissed mine, and I shook hands with Gideon again.
Carrying their helmets, like figures more suited to a dream than to Barstow, the couple moved toward Ernestine’s. After a few steps, Gideon looked back and said to Mrs. Fischer, “Will we see you in Lonely Possum, come July?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” she assured them.
“And it is for the world,” Chandelle said to me. “I hope we’ll see you there, too.”
“I’m certainly intrigued, ma’am.”
“Call me Chandelle,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.”
They went into the diner.
The Harley-Davidson was an impressive machine. It looked as if it should be quietly purring like a well-fed and contented panther.
Mrs. Fischer got behind the wheel of the limousine.
I, known to the grapevine as her chauffeur, independent and self-reliant, rode shotgun. That’s the way.
Mrs. Fischer unwrapped her mint, popped it into her mouth, and started the car.
As we pulled out of the parking lot, I said, “Better stop for gas, ma’am.”
“One tank’s full and the other nearly so, dear.”
“How can that be? We’ve been on the road a lot today.”
“I believe I told you about One-Ear Bob.”
“You told me a little bit about him.”
“When I finish this mint, maybe I’ll tell you more.”
As we took the entrance ramp to Interstate 15, heading east, I said, “How do you know Gideon and Chandelle?”
“I introduced them to each other.”
“You’re a real matchmaker, ma’am.”
“I enjoy making people happy.”
“Do they live around here?”
“They have a home in Florida, but mostly they’re on the road.”
“They’re always around these parts in March?”
“Oh, no, they don’t have a schedule of any kind. They just go where they feel it’s necessary for them to go.”
“Did you know they were in Barstow?”
“No, dear. It was a pleasant surprise to see them.”
“Sort of like Andy Shephorn pulling us over.”
“Sort of like,” she agreed.
“Gideon has a great voice. Is he a singer? She looks like she might be a dancer.”
“Well, they do all kinds of things, child.”
“All kinds of things?”
“Many, many things. And you can be sure that those two always do the right thing.”
“July in Lonely Possum, huh?”
“It can be fiercely hot, but lovely nonetheless.”
No sooner were we on the interstate than the sky caught fire, and the entire desert seemed to leap in surprise, repeatedly, as it was revealed by reflection and then cast back into darkness and then revealed again. Thunder so furiously concussed the night that it seemed the Mojave might break under the blows and collapse into some cavernous realm over which it had been a bridge for tens of thousands of years.
Raindrops as plump as chandelier crystals rapped the limo and stymied the windshield wipers until Mrs. Fischer turned them up to their highest speed. Soon the droplets diminished to the size of pearls, but the fireworks continued for several minutes and with uncommon violence.
When at last the heavens went dark and quiet, when the storm seemed content now with merely trying to drown us, Mrs. Fischer said, “Quite a display. I hope it didn’t mean anything.”
I half knew what she intended to convey with those words. “I hope it didn’t mean anything, either, ma’am.”
“You still have a fix on him, Oddie?”
“The cowboy. Yes, ma’am. He’s out there. We’ll find him.”
The lightning and thunder had rattled us back into the bleak mood into which we had fallen while speaking with Sandy and Chet at the cash register in Ernestine’s. We rode in silence, brooding.
Mr. Hitchcock kept making cameo appearances in my tangled skeins of thought, the way that he had slyly inserted himself into one scene in each of his movies. I returned, as well, to consideration of rats and coyotes, and to those lines from Eliot. Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past. I had read the poet’s Four Quartets at least a hundred times, and I understood them in spite of their demanding language and concepts. But I suspected that these lines kept running through my mind not because of what they meant within the poem, but because they expressed, with power, a warning about some threat that I intuited but could not consciously define.
Strange how the deepest part of us isn’t able to speak more clearly to the part of us that lives only here in the shallows of the world. The body is entirely physical, the mind partly so and partly not, being both the dense computer circuitry of brain tissue and the ghostly software running in it. But the deepest part of us, the soul, is not physical to any extent whatsoever. Yet the material body and the immaterial soul are inextricably linked this side of death and, so theologians tell us, on the Other Side, as well. On the Other Side, body and soul are supposed to function in perfect harmony. So I guess the problem on this side of death is that when we fell from grace back in the day, the body and soul became like two neighboring countries, still connected by highways and bridges and rivers, but each now speaking a different language from the other. To get through life successfully, body and soul must translate each other correctly more often than not. But in the limo, leaving Barstow, I c
ouldn’t quite interpret that warning from the deepest part of me.
As we rocketed along the rainswept interstate, miraculously not hydroplaning off the pavement and into a stand of cactuses as the laws of physics would seem to have required, Mrs. Fischer said, “Wherever it is these child-stealers are holed up, you can’t go in after them with just that pistol or either of the other two I have with me. You’ve got to weaponize yourself better than that.”
“I don’t much like guns, ma’am.”
“Does it matter whether you like them or not?”
“I guess it doesn’t.”
“You do what you have to do. That’s who you seem to be to me, anyway. You’re one who does what he has to do.”
“Maybe that’s not always what I should do.”
“Don’t double-think yourself so much, child. You had a good dinner of properly fried food, and if you want to live long enough to have another one, you’ve got to weaponize properly.”
The rain fell so hard that, in the headlights, the entire world seemed to be melting. The vaguely phosphorescent landscape shimmered as though every acre of it must be liquefied and in motion, seeking a drain into which to pour itself.
“Ma’am, the closest town of any size where they might sell guns is back in Barstow. And they don’t just let you put your money down and walk out ten minutes later with a bazooka or whatever it is you think I need. There are waiting periods, police checks, all that.”
“That’s certainly true in Barstow and in Vegas, but there’s a lot of territory between the two.”
“A lot of mostly really empty territory.”
“Not as empty as you think, sweetie. And some places out there, nobody bothers much with waiting periods and the like. What we need to do at this particular time in this particular place is take a side trip to Mazie’s and get what you need.”
“Mazie’s? What is Mazie’s?” I asked with some doubt and a little suspicion.
“It’s not a whorehouse, though it might sound like one,” Mrs. Fischer said. “Mazie and her sons, Tracker and Leander, do a bit of this and that, and they do it all well.”