“It’s a theme show tonight,” she said.
“Theme?”
“Haven’t you been listening?”
“Busy. What theme?”
“‘Night of the Living Dead,’” she said.
“Stylin’.”
“Thanks. What’s happening?”
“Who’s your engineer this shift?”
“Doogie.”
Doogie Sassman is a panoramically tattooed Harley-Davidson fanatic who weighs more than three hundred pounds, twenty-five of which are accounted for by his untamed blond hair and lush silky beard. In spite of having a neck as wide as a pier caisson and a belly on which an entire family of sea gulls could gather to groom themselves, Doogie is a babe magnet who has dated some of the most beautiful women ever to walk the beaches between San Francisco and San Diego. Although he’s a good guy, with enough bearish charm to star in a Disney cartoon, Doogie’s solid success with stunningly gorgeous wahines — who are not normally won over by personality alone — is, Bobby says, one of the greatest mysteries of all time, right up there with what wiped out the dinosaurs and why tornadoes always zero in on trailer parks.
I said, “Can you go canned for a couple of hours and let Doogie run the show from his control panel?”
“You want a quickie?”
“With you, I want a forever.”
“Mr. Romance,” she said sarcastically but with secret delight.
“We’ve got a friend needs hand-holding big time.”
Sasha’s tone grew somber. “What now?”
I couldn’t lay out the situation in plain words, because of the possibility that the call was being monitored. In Moonlight Bay we live in a police state so artfully imposed that it is virtually invisible. If they were listening, I didn’t want to tip them to the fact that Sasha would be going to Lilly Wing’s house, because they might decide to stop her before she got there. Lilly desperately needed support. If Sasha dropped in by surprise, maybe by the back door, the cops would discover that she could stick like a five-barbed fishhook.
“Do you know…” I thought I saw movement in the street, but when I squinted through the bungalow window, I decided I’d seen only a moonshadow, perhaps caused by the tail of a cloud brushing across one cheek of the lunar face. “Do you know thirteen ways?”
“Thirteen ways?”
“The blackbird thing,” I said, wiping at the glass again with the Kleenex. My breath had left a faint condensation.
“Blackbird. Sure.”
We were talking about Wallace Stevens’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”
My father worried about how I, limited by XP, would make it in the world without family, so he bequeathed to me a house without a mortgage and the proceeds of a huge life insurance policy. But he had given me another comforting legacy, too: a love of modern poetry. Because Sasha had acquired this passion from me, we could confound eavesdroppers as Bobby and I had done by using surfer lingo.
“There’s a word you expect him to use,” I said, referring to Stevens, “but it never appears.”
“Ah,” she said, and I knew she was following me.
A lesser poet writing thirteen stanzas relating to a blackbird would surely use the word
“You realize who I mean?” I asked.
“Yes.” She knew that Lilly Wing — once Lilly Travis — had been the first woman I had loved and the first to break my heart.
Sasha is the second woman I have loved in the most profound sense of the word, and she swears that she will never break my heart. I believe her. She never lies.
Sasha has also assured me that if I ever cheat on her, she’ll use her Black & Decker power drill to put a half-inch bit
I have seen the drill. The bits — an extensive set — that go with it are kept in a plastic case. On the steel shank of the half-inch auger bit, using red nail polish, she has painted my name:
She doesn’t have to worry. If I ever broke her heart, I would drill my own chest and save her the trouble of having to wash her hands afterward.
Call me Mr. Romance.
“What’s the hand-holding about?” Sasha asked.
“You’ll find out when you get there.”
“Any message?” she asked.
“Hope. That’s the message. There’s still hope.”
I wasn’t as confident as I sounded. There might be no truth in the message I’d just sent to Lilly. I’m not proud of the fact that, unlike Sasha, I sometimes lie.
“Where are you?” Sasha asked.
“Dead Town.”
“Damn.”
“Well, you asked.”
“Always in trouble.”
“My motto.”
I didn’t dare tell her about Orson, not even indirectly, using poetry code. My voice might crack, revealing the intensity of my anguish, which I was striving mightily to contain. If she thought he was in serious jeopardy, she would insist on coming to Wyvern to search for him.
She would have been a big help. I’d recently been surprised to discover Sasha possessed self-defense skills and weapons expertise that weren’t taught in any disc-jockey school. Though she didn’t look like an Amazon, she could do battle like one. She was, however, an even better friend than fighter, and Lilly Wing needed Sasha’s sympathy and compassion more than I needed backup.
“Chris, you know what your problem is?”
“Too good-looking?”
“Yeah, right,” she said sarcastically.
“Too smart?”
“Your problem is reckless caring.”
“Then I better ask my doctor for some who-gives-a-damn pills.”
“I love you for it, Snowman, but it’s going to get you killed.”
“This is for a friend,” I reminded her, meaning Lilly Wing. “Anyway, I’ll be all right. Bobby’s coming.”
“Ah. Then I’ll start working on your eulogy.”
“I’ll tell him you said that.”
“The Two Stooges.”
“Let me guess — we’re Curly and Larry.”
“Right. Neither of you is smart enough to be Moe.”
“Love you, Goodall.”
“Love you, Snowman.”
I switched off the phone and was about to turn away from the window, when I saw movement in the street again. This time it wasn’t merely the shadow of a cloud gliding across a corner of the moon.
This time I saw monkeys.
I clipped the phone to my belt, freeing both hands.
The monkeys were not in a barrel and not in a pack. The correct word for monkeys traveling in a group is not
Recently, I have learned a great deal about monkeys, not only the term troop. For the same reason, if I were
