“I was on my way back from Bay Minette,” he said, fingering his brace. “I decided to drive in the day because I was almost run off the road the last time by a truck hauling chickens.” He smiled in a way that only people in neck braces can. “It was eleven in the morning and I was going down highway 98 at sixty-five miles an hour, not far out from Mobile, when an old woman in a ’67 Ford Galaxy pulled out in front of me. She had a face like a dried apricot. Her mouth was open. She had these big moronic eyes.” He laughed, as if it were not only a distant but also a fond memory. “My foot never made the brake pedal. I didn’t even have time to think about dying.” He licked his lips. “Just before we collided — I saw the next world.”
“No,” I said.
He grinned at me. “I saw it, babe.” He wiped at the air in circles with the heel of his hand. “You were right.”
“I was?”
He was so tranquil and glowing it was unsettling. I’d known many people who’d gone through religious transformations, usually because their lives were out of control. This experience seemed genuine.
“What happened to the old lady?” I asked
He laughed. “Our cars were totaled. I mean we’re both just sitting there with steering wheels in our hands and the rest of what we rode in on in pieces a mile down the road. Neither of us was wearing a seatbelt. Neither of us was hurt. You should’ve seen her expression.” He squeaked in absurd delight.
“She must’ve been Catholic,” I said.
He squeaked again, grabbing his stomach. “Easy on me, babe.”
“You got a little whiplash.”
“Yeah, and some bruised ribs and a scratch on my arm. But that’s it!” He held up the arm. “It was a miracle.”
“How’d you get home?”
“I took the bus. I was in the hospital three days. Am I dreaming, Eddie?”
“How would I know?”
“Am I a ghost? Are we ghosts, Eddie?”
“Would my hair be cut like this if we were?”
“I keep thinking about the next world.”
“What’s it like?”
“It was the first time I ever felt loved.” Despite the brace, he kept tipping his head, as if he could hear the music of that world where he’d felt for the first time loved. “I didn’t want to come back until I saw my old man standing down at the end there with a golf club. He hated golf.” He laughed until his eyes were wet.
“Did you see your life flash before your eyes?”
“Thank God, no!”
“And you didn’t have any insurance?”
He waved his hand at me with a wince as he had to quell the habit of flipping aside his hair. “It doesn’t matter. None of that shit I worried about all my life matters.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” he said, wondrously. “I keep thinking about those goddamn little sparrows flying into the orange tree in your window. All my life that was me, a little sparrow flying over and over into a goddamn window. I’m done with that now.” A giggle like a hiccup erupted from his throat.
“What about your business?”
He threw down his hand. “Take it if you want it. I don’t ever want to see another piece of mail from Japan again.”
“Tell me something. I’ve got to know.”
“What is it? Anything, man.”
“About the Tijuana prostitutes.”
“The what?”
“The missing prostitutes whose bones were found in the incinerator at La Zona Basura.”
He stared at me a while incredulously. “What are you talking about?”
“I couldn’t help but notice the articles that you’d clipped for your killer scrapbook.”
“Yeah?”
“And the burn marks up your door. I saw the same markings on another truck that pulled away from the incinerator at the dump in Tijuana.”
“Yeah, I go there all the time, babe,” he said, lifting his palms. “It’s free, man. They charge you to burn your trash at the landfill here.”
“Right, of course, right. Just thought maybe . . .”
“Thought maybe what? That I was killing them?”
“Why else would you snip the articles?”
“I thought it was you, babe.”
33.Mister Jang-Jingler (Dance)
HEAD ON MY ARMS ON THE CUSHIONED BAR AT MOBY DICK’S, Tuesday afternoon, just me and Soo and a couple of men down the way dressed like Jackie Kennedy, both wearing blood-spattered double-breasted pink Chanel wool jackets and matching pillbox hats. The news was on the big TV up in the corner. They were running the Tijuana prostitute story again with alternating shots of bordellos and the big chimney at La Zona Basura. A few moments later Dr. Horace Jangler, my old bogus psychiatrist, was standing in front of a weather map indicating a low-pressure system with the sweep of his hand.
“Can you turn that up, Soo?” I said.
“Weather never change here,” she grumbled, turning up the volume with the remote.
“I know that guy. How long has he been the Channel Eight weatherman?”
“All look same to me,” she said with a shrug. “You want one more?”
“Yeah, can I use your phone?”
She placed the telephone and a directory on top of the bar. I looked up the number of Channel Eight.
“He can’t come to the phone now,” was the reply when I asked if I could talk to the weatherman.
“Will you leave him a message?”
“Of course.”
“Tell him Willie Wihooley wants to see him.”
“Wihooley.”
“Yeah.” I spelled it for her. “Tell him I’m at Moby Dick’s. Tell him it’s urgent. I’ll wait for him.”
“Moby Dick’s?”
“Yeah, it’s a bar, in Del Mar.”
“Okay.”
I replaced the receiver and turned to the door as if Jangler might have the power to instantly materialize. It was an hour and a half before he strolled through the whale’s mouth, still wearing his weatherman suit. He was larger than I recalled and his gray locks were shorn. He moved briskly with an emphatic gunslinger swing of the shoulders.
“By golly, Willie Wihooley, it’s good to see you,” he said, grinning broadly and extending a hand. We had an enthusiastic handshake.
“Dr. Jangler,”
