1.
That literary allusion is included here not merely to please you, Ozzie. There’s bitter truth in it that resonates with me. My mother had infected my mind with such a potent virus that I had not been able to confess my shameful victimization even to my pillow, but carried it into sleep each night, unpurged.
As for Granny Sugars: I must now wonder whether her peripatetic lifestyle and her frequent absences, combined with her gambling and restless nature, contributed materially to my mother’s psychological problems.
Worse, I cannot avoid considering that my mother’s sickness might not be the result of inadequate nurturing, but might entirely be the consequence of genetics. Perhaps Pearl Sugars suffered from a milder form of the same psychosis, which expressed itself in more appealing ways than did my mother’s.
Mother’s hermetic impulse might have been an inversion of my grandmother’s wanderlust. My mother’s need for financial security, won at the expense of a pregnancy that repulsed her, might be my grandmother’s gambling fever turned inside out.
This would suggest that much—though not all—of what I loved about Granny Sugars was but a different facet of the same mental condition that made my mother such a terror. This disturbs me for reasons I can understand but also for reasons that I suspect will not be clear to me until I’ve lived another twenty years, if I do.
When I was sixteen, Pearl Sugars asked me to come on the road with her. By then, I had become what I am: a seer of the dead with limitations, with responsibilities that I must fulfill. I had no choice but to decline her offer. If circumstances had allowed me to travel with her from game to game, adventure to adventure, the stresses of daily life and constant contact might have revealed a different and less appealing woman from the one I thought I knew.
I must believe that Granny Sugars had the capacity for genuine love that my mother lacks, and must believe that she did indeed love me. If these two things are not true, then my childhood will have been an unrelieved wasteland.
Having failed to banish these troubling thoughts on the drive out of Pico Mundo, I arrived at the Church of the Whispering Comet in a mood that matched the ambience of dead palm trees, sun-blasted landscape, and abandoned buildings on the slide to ruin.
I parked in front of the Quonset hut where the three coyotes had encircled me. They weren’t in evidence.
They are generally night hunters. In the noonday heat, they shelter in cool dark dens.
The dead prostitute, charmer of coyotes, was not to be seen, either. I hoped that she had found her way out of this world, but I doubted that my fumbling counsel and platitudes had convinced her to move on.
From among the items in the bottom of the plastic shopping bag that served as my suitcase, I withdrew the flashlight, the scissors, and the package of foil-wrapped moist towelettes.
In my apartment, when I packed the bag, the towelettes had seemed to be a peculiar inclusion, the scissors even more peculiar. Yet subconsciously I must have known exactly why I would need them.
We are not strangers to ourselves; we only try to be.
When I got out of the car, the fierce heat of the Mojave was matched by its stillness, a nearly perfect silence found perhaps nowhere else but in a dioramic snow scene sealed in Lucite.
My watch revealed that time had not stood still—11:57.
Two desiccated brown phoenix palms cast frond shadows across the dusty ground in front of the Quonset hut, as if paving the way not for me but for an overdue messiah. I had not returned to raise the dead, only to examine him.
When I stepped inside, I felt as if I had cast my lot with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the furnace of Nebuchadnezzar, though this was a heat, laced with an unspeakable scent, from which even an angel could not spare me.
Alkaline-white desert light seared through the portal-style windows, but they were so small and set so wide apart that I still needed the flashlight.
I followed the littered hallway to the fourth door. I went into the pink room, once a den of profitable fornication, now a slow-cook crematorium.
NO CURIOUS PEOPLE OR CARRION EATERS had been here in my absence. The corpse lay where I had left it, one end of the shroud open, one shod foot exposed, otherwise wrapped in the white bed-sheet.
The hot night and the blistering morning had facilitated and accelerated decomposition. The stench was much worse here than in the rest of the hut.
The suffocating heat and the stink had the power of two quick punches to the gut. I backed quickly out of the room, into the hall, simultaneously gasping for a cleaner breath and struggling to repress the urge to vomit.
Although I hadn’t brought the foil-sealed towelettes for this purpose, I ripped open one of them and tore two strips from it. The moistened paper had a lemony fragrance. I rolled the saturated strips into dripping wads and plugged my nostrils with them.
Breathing through my mouth, I couldn’t smell the decomposing corpse. When I reentered the room, I gagged again, anyway.
I could have cut the shoelace that secured the top of the shroud —the one at the foot had broken the previous night—and rolled the body out of its wrapping. The thought of the dead man tumbling across the floor, as if animated again, convinced me to approach the problem with a different solution.
Reluctantly, I knelt at the head of the corpse. I propped the flashlight against it in such a way as to best illuminate my work.
I snipped the shoelace and tossed it aside. The scissors were sharp enough to trim through all three layers of rolled sheeting at once. I cut with patience and care, repulsed by the possibility of gouging the dead man.
As the fabric fell away to both sides of the body, the face came into view first. I realized too late that if I had started from the bottom, I would have had to open the shroud only as far as the neck, to see his wound, and could have avoided this hideous sight.
Time and the ungodly heat had done their nasty work. The face—upside down to me—was bloated, darker than it had been when last I had seen it, and marbled with green. The mouth had sagged open. Thin cataracts of milky fluid had formed over both eyes, although I could still discern the delineation between the whites and irises.
As I reached across the dead man’s face to cut the shroud away from his chest, he licked my wrist.
I cried out in shock and disgust, reared back, and dropped the scissors.
From the cadaver’s sagging mouth exploded a squirming black mass, a creature so strange in this context that I didn’t realize what it must be until it fully extracted itself. On Robertson’s dead face, the thing reared up on its four back legs and raked the air with its forelegs. Tarantula.
Moving too quickly to give it a chance to bite, I backhanded the spider. It tumbled across the floor, sprang to its feet, and scurried into a far corner.
When I picked up the fallen scissors, my hand shook so badly that I gave the air a vigorous trimming before I was able to steady myself.
Concerned
