There was more, but it was mainly Schultz and Stang and another expert brought in from God knows where. I reacted like a good monkey whenever I was cued. Eleanor left before it ended, as arranged, accompanied back to whatever hotel she’d been packed away in by her squadron of bodyguards. If the Incinerator decided to turn off his TV set early and show up outside the studio, I didn’t want him tagging along after her.
She’d blown me a kiss as she left.
I’d managed to be civilized, but inside I was in a towering rage, and it was all directed toward myself. I’d looked at the content of the letters and not at their form. I’d been so full of comparative religion, so full of myself, that I’d been staring into the wrong rearview mirror. He was back there, all right, but he wasn’t in the region of the map I’d been staring at.
Try as I would, I couldn’t bring the face back.
Whoever it belonged to, he was back there somewhere, buried in volumes of notes, possibly notes I’d long discarded, from years and years of college, years I’d spent wasting time in a system I understood, postponing the day I’d have to step out into a system I didn’t understand. Back then, at twenty-five, I hadn’t been able to figure out how they, whoever they are, assign you grades in real life. I still hadn’t found out.
The show ended with a round of insincere congratulations. I shrugged off Schultz’s questions and headed for the parking lot. Breathing in the heady atmosphere of downtown L.A. in the late afternoon, I stood next to Alice for a good ten minutes, thinking and giving the Incinerator, assuming that he was still watching and that he was still interested, time to make sure I was alone. Then, for want of anything better to do, I went to see a movie.
I never see movies, and I didn’t see much of this one. I stared up at large guns and screaming tires and myriad violations of Newton’s laws, and improbable heroism, and searched the baggage of my memory. Whatever had sent that worm crawling up my spine when Dr. Cowan had said whatever she’d said, when I’d first heard it, it hadn’t been important. It had been nothing.
When I realized I was hungry, I left.
The theater, I saw with some surprise as I emerged from it, was on Hollywood Boulevard, not far from the studio where Velez Caputo taped her show, and even closer to the Red Dog. For a long moment, jostled by freaks, tourists, and drug dealers, I thought about going into the Red Dog to see if Al the Red was terrorizing the natives. Too early, I decided, and anyway, he was with Eleanor. And, of course, we weren’t speaking.
At the Gold Jug Coffee Shop, once a center of the underage hooker trade, my waitress stared at me until I wondered whether my nose was bleeding. When she refilled my coffee cup, she poured some into my lap.
“Okay,” I said, “what is it?”
She was young, no older than eighteen, and uselessly, even harmfully, pretty.
“You’re him,” she said, brushing the coffee ineffectually off my lap. It felt good, anyway. “Aren’t you?”
“I’m certainly him,” I said. “But which him?”
“The one on TV,” she said. “The one who’s going to get burned.”
“I’m not,” I said, “and could I have the check?”
“You’re not?” The coffeepot tilted dangerously in my direction.
“I’m the him on TV,” I said. “But I’m not the him who’s going to get burned.”
No one behind me on the way home. No one behind me as I turned left off the Pacific Coast Highway and headed up Topanga Canyon Boulevard. I pulled over half the way up. Nine cars, headlights beaming merrily into the night, passed me before I departed my patch of chaparral by the side of the road and headed the rest of the way up the long hill.
At the Fernwood Market, I stopped again, partly to check for a tail and partly to fill a more pressing need. I was out of beer. The Fernwood stocked Singha just for me, in recognition of my status as a regular customer and a reliable prealcoholic. The “pre” was my estimate.
Once home, I patted Alice on the rear fender, opened the empty mailbox, and hiked up the driveway toting the beer. Here, away from the glare of L.A., stars fired off sparks above me. “Nice to see you,” I said to them halfway up. “I was afraid you’d moved.” The beer was heavy, so I took the rest of the driveway at an unaccustomed lope and turned the lock in the one and only door, the one that opens directly into the kitchen.
When I turned on the light, he was standing there.
I jumped back and hauled the door closed. The bag full of beer landed at my feet with the sound of shattering glass.
The cops had taken my gun after I decked Hammond. Holding the door closed with one hand and listening for movement inside the house, I reached down very slowly and fumbled around inside the wet paper bag. I sliced my index finger on something sharp before I managed to grasp a broken bottle by its neck.
I hoisted it in my hand, jagged points forward and waited. I counted to one hundred. Not a sound.
I let go of the door, kicked it in, and jumped through it, bottle extended.
In the center of the kitchen, my own raincoat, stuffed full of newspapers, dangled from a string. A balloon bloomed above the neck. On top of the balloon, a blond wig squatted. A hot breeze made an entrance through the open door, and the ghostly assemblage did a graceful pirouette on the end of its string.
I was so furious, furious at my fear, that I pushed the shards of the bottle into the face drawn on the balloon. It exploded, and the wig floated to the kitchen floor like a large blond spider. Blood dripped from my finger onto the floor, making bright splashes around the wig like berries on a Christmas wreath.
All four burners on the gas stove were flaring merrily away, little campfires of blue. I kicked my raincoat aside and turned them off. The raincoat was swinging back and forth like a hanged man as I shut down the gas jets.
“You sadistic shithead,” I said to the air. I licked my finger. Then I smelled the gasoline.
I turned as though someone had tapped me on the shoulder. Heat rose in waves against my back, and I kicked the oven door shut and felt behind me for the large, greasy knob that turned it off.
“Are you here?” I demanded. “Well, you got me.”
No one answered me. A gust of wind made the walls of the shack rattle. The raincoat did a little jig. I grabbed paper towels off the roll and wrapped them around my finger.
“Got me good,” I continued, stepping silently forward. “Got me with my own raincoat.”
The smell of gasoline was stronger in the living room. “Got your little squirter?” I asked the darkness on the other side of the door leading to my bedroom. “I thought this was supposed to be a conversation.” I still had the broken beer bottle in my right hand, the hand festooned with paper towels.
Still nothing.
“You should do something about that B.O.,” I said, edging toward the door to the bedroom. “You smell like a diesel.” There were only the four rooms upstairs, the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom, and the bedroom. Both the bathroom and the bedroom were on the other side of the door I was facing. The door was ajar. “Downstairs,” was a euphemism I used for an empty room that could be reached only by going back outside and clambering down the hill on a suicidal goat path that led to its one and only door. I almost never used it.
Anyway, the smell of gasoline was up here.
“I’ve got a surprise for you, too,” I said, clutching the bottle more tightly as I stepped through the door and flicked on the light.
The fumes of gasoline rose and hovered above my sodden bed. It had been soaked all the way to the mattress.
I had checked the empty bathroom and peeled back the tatty curtain on the shower stall, a place where mildew gathered to plot its way up the food chain, before I realized that I’d seen a rectangle of white placed dead center on the bed. After I’d satisfied myself that the shower contained nothing that I hadn’t already regarded, with serious misgivings, on earlier occasions, I went out and down the hill into the breath of a mummifying wind and opened the door to the spare room. A cloud of gasoline fumes struck my nostrils.
Something whimpered.
I hit the light switch and found myself staring at a bearskin rug. A sodden bearskin rug. A rush of fury hit me so strongly that it literally blinded me: The room went black. Clutching the doorframe for support, I heard a familiar thumping sound, and as my sight cleared, I saw that the rug was wagging the tip of its tail.
“Bravo,” I said in a voice thick with relief.
He lifted his head and looked at me briefly, then looked away. Shame plastered his ears to his wet skull. I went to him and ruffled his soaking fur. He hung his head even lower. Good dogs have a tremendous sense of duty.
“Good boy,” I said. “It’s okay. He charmed you, didn’t he?” Bravo looked up at me again and then shoved his
