“Geek.”
“Decoy.”
Laughing softly, shaking his head, scratching his beard stubble, Bobby said, “You make me sick.”
“Likewise.”
The telephone rang, and Bobby answered it. “Hey, gorgeous, I totally get off on the new format — all Chris Isaak, all the time. Play ‘Dancin’’ for me, okay?” He passed the handset to me. “It’s for you, Nancy.”
I like Sasha’s disc-jockey voice. It’s only subtly different from her real-world voice, marginally deeper and softer and silkier, but the effect is profound. When I hear Sasha the deejay, I want to curl up in bed with her. I want to curl up in bed with her anyway, as often as possible, but when she’s using her radio voice, I want to curl up in bed with her
“This tune ends in about a minute, I’ve got to do some patter between cuts,” she told me, “so I’ll be quick. Somebody came around here at the station a little while ago, trying to get in touch with you. Says it’s life or death.”
“Who?”
“I can’t use the name on the phone. Promised I wouldn’t. When I said you were probably at Bobby’s…this person didn’t want to call you there or come there to see you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why exactly. But…this person was really nervous, Chris.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
It was a line from a poem by Robert Frost.
My dad had instilled in me his passion for poetry. I had infected Sasha.
“Yes,” I said. “I think I know who you mean.”
“Wants to see you as soon as possible. Says it’s life or death. What’s going on, Chris?”
“Big surf coming in Sunday afternoon,” I said.
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I know. Tell you the rest later.”
“Big surf. Can I handle it?”
“Twelve-footers.”
“I think I’ll just Gidget-out and beach party.”
“Love your voice,” I said.
“Smooth as the bay.”
She hung up, and so did I.
Although he had only heard my half of the conversation, Bobby relied on his uncanny intuition to figure out the tone and intent of Sasha’s call. “What’re you walking into?”
“Just Nancy stuff,” I said. “You wouldn’t be interested.”
As Bobby and I led a still-uneasy Orson onto the front porch, the radio in the kitchen began to swing with “Dancin’” by Chris Isaak.
“Sasha is an awesome woman,” Bobby said.
“Unreal,” I agreed.
“You can’t be with her if you’re dead. She’s not that kinky.”
“Point taken.”
“You have your sunglasses?”
I patted my shirt pocket. “Yeah.”
“Did you use some of my sunscreen?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Geek.”
I said, “I’ve been thinking….”
“It’s about time you started.”
“I’ve been working on the new book.”
“Finally got your lazy ass in gear.”
“It’s about friendship.”
“Am I in it?”
“Amazingly, yes.”
“You’re not using my real name, are you?”
“I’m calling you Igor. The thing is…I’m afraid readers might not relate to what I have to say, because you and I — all my friends — we live such different lives.”
Stopping at the head of the porch steps, regarding me with his patented look of scorn, Bobby said, “I thought you had to be smart to write books.”
“It’s not a federal law.”
“Obviously not. Even the literary equivalent of a gyrospaz ought to know that every last one of us leads a different life.”
“Yeah? Maria Cortez leads a different life?”
Maria is Manuel Ramirez’s younger sister, twenty-eight like Bobby and me. She is a beautician, and her husband works as a car mechanic. They have two children, one cat, and a small tract house with a big mortgage.
Bobby said, “She doesn’t live her life in the beauty shop, doing someone’s hair — or in her house, vacuuming the carpet. She lives her life between her ears. There’s a
I was briefly speechless. Then I fingered the sleeve of his parrot-and-palm-frond shirt and said, “I didn’t realize you were such a philosopher.”
He shrugged. “That little gem of wisdom? Hell, that was just something I got in a fortune cookie.”
“Must’ve been a big honker of a cookie.”
“Hey, it was a huge monolith, dude,” he said, giving me a sly smile.
The great wall of moonlit fog loomed half a mile from the shore, no closer or farther away than it had been earlier. The night air was as still as that in the cold-holding room at Mercy Hospital.
As we descended the porch steps, no one shot at us. No one issued that loonlike cry, either.
They were still out there, however, hiding in the dunes or below the crest of the slope that fell to the beach. I could feel their attention like the dangerous energy pending release in the coils of a motionless, strike-poised rattlesnake.
Although Bobby had left his shotgun inside, he was vigilant. Surveying the night as he accompanied me to my bike, he began to reveal more interest in my story than he had admitted earlier: “This monkey Angela mentioned…”
“What about it?”
“What was it like?”
“Monkeylike.”
“Like a chimpanzee, an orangutan, or what?”
Gripping the handlebars of my bicycle and turning it around to walk it through the soft sand, I said, “It was a rhesus monkey. Didn’t I say?”
“How big?”
“She said two feet high, maybe twenty-five pounds.”
Gazing across the dunes, he said, “I’ve seen a couple myself.”
Surprised, leaning the bike against the porch railing again, I said, “Rhesus monkeys? Out here?”
“Some kind of monkeys, about that size.”
