intention. And my first whole thought was to tell Misha. My second whole thought was that I couldn’t. Misha was gone.
“Dan Crandall,” he answered, wiping sweat with a thumb knuckle from bushy dark brown eyebrows that didn’t match either his auburn mustache or the wiry mouse-tan hair he wore long and pulled back in a ponytail with one of those neon-pink elastic bands little girls purchase at drugstores. He had left the pink plastic ball attached to the elastic band.
“I’m Beatrice Crandall’s brother. She’s confessed to killing a man and freezing him like leftover pot roast. She didn’t do it.”
“The body in the freezer over on State Road Three,” I said.
He didn’t look old enough to have a sixty-one-year-old sister, but these things happen. An aging couple with grown children discovers one day that the wife is barfing every morning. Plans for the Winnebago are canceled. Additional life insurance is taken out. My guess was that little Danny Crandall had been just such a golden-years surprise to parents whose daughter, Muffin, was already pushing thirty when he was born.
“Yeah, the body in the freezer.”
“Why did she confess if she didn’t do it?”
The sun had already dried my grown-out, top-bleached brown shag to the consistency of hay, and Brontë was panting. We don’t just stand around in the heat out here, especially those of us covered with black fur. Or wool shirts.
“How would I know?” He sighed and gazed at the sky like a man who has just missed a plane. “Women.”
In that single word was the entire thesis of my 732-page dissertation. An admission of boredom, hostility, and paralyzing despair. Like many men, Dan Crandall did not like or understand women, including a sister who had recently confessed to murder. But the dumb fascination with which he’d first observed my naked female body in the pool signaled the fact that he had not escaped the usual male primate wiring either. Still, it was clear that the gross biology of Dan Crandall had been socialized to acceptable lines. He had come to help this much older sister with whom he had not shared a childhood and probably barely knew, recognizing the bond of clan. The significance of this was not lost on me.
Until I quit teaching at San Gabriel University a year ago in order to consult with shopping mall designers, I insisted that my Intro to Social Psych 301 students understand this—that the clan bond was the first step out of preconscious, instinctual soup for every species. Including, I told them, that species which pulls weeds for twenty years in blazing hot strawberry fields so that its young may study social psychology at San Gabriel University. And the bond of clan is each individual’s last defense against the slide back into brute muck. While it is primitive and flawed and not to be worshiped, it must at all costs be respected.
I was still searching for a way to respect my clan bond with David, whom I loathed as much as I loved Misha. And both were, for very different reasons, totally inaccessible. There was, as The Book of Common Prayer so bluntly puts it, no health in me. Nothing but black holes, head to toe. Until a short man who looked like Yosemite Sam climbed my fence, knew a poem, and hated his sister for being a woman but showed up anyway because she was family.
“Strip and get in the pool,” I told Dan Crandall, observing a desert etiquette which demands the sharing of water. Any water. “It’ll take me about ten minutes to make a pitcher of lemonade. Have your pants on when I get back.”
In the kitchenette of the motel office I turned on some music to drown the air-conditioner whine, and squeezed lemons into a gallon plastic pitcher as Brontë lapped bottled water from a red ceramic mixing bowl. One of the several reasons I was able to buy an entire motel for the price of a single DKNY outfit is that the Wren’s Gulch Inn has no piped-in water. That is, the pipes are there, but they’re empty. And they’ll stay that way until the settlement of a dispute initiated by the four remaining Indians on a tiny reservation everybody had forgotten existed until the Indians opposed a plan which would have extended water utilities to Wren’s Gulch through a few feet of reservation property. The youngest of the Indians is seventy-eight, but his lawyer is only twenty-nine. In the desert, people understand the value of simply waiting.
Meanwhile, I had the water for the pool trucked in at enormous expense, and every week another truck arrives to refill my modest water tank, also at enormous expense. The Indians could do nothing about the buried power and phone lines the owner, Cameron Wrenner, ran two miles in here from the main line on the road before abandoning the motel project to whatever fate his attorneys could arrange. It could scarcely have mattered to Wrenner, whose empire of used-car dealerships had made him one of the richest men in Southern California. It isn’t possible to live here without a car, and Wrenner’s ruddy face, topped by a white cowboy hat, smiles down from billboard ads from here to the Nevada border. Anyway, Wren’s Gulch, as the locals named this fiasco, has lights, music, wi-fi and electronic gadgets that allow me to chat with other weirdos all over the world whenever I feel like it, which isn’t often.
“Coming out!” I yelled through the blue Mylar film I’d painstakingly glued to the office picture window after the sun ate leprous patches out of the original cheap carpet in less than three months. After that I installed a sand-colored indoor-outdoor nylon Berber in the office and the first unit, which serves as my bedroom. Then I plastered up this blue stuff which is supposed to filter ultraviolet rays and keep the sun from burning away the molecules which comprise carpets, drapes, and upholstery. The effect is like living in a furnished aquarium.
Dan Crandall was hopping around beside the pool, trying to pull gray knit boxer shorts over a penis that looked tired in its nest of jet black pubic hair. It occurred to me that nothing growing naturally on Dan Crandall matched.
There’s an interesting study which suggests that women who have not been sexually assaulted score higher on tests of empathy for men after seeing pictures of naked men doing ordinary things like talking on the phone or grocery shopping. In interviews the women often admit to finding flaccid penises rather cute. Sort of like demitasse spoons or those little carved wooden fork sets from import stores that everybody gets as a wedding present from an aunt who wears jangling bracelets. Nobody ever knows what to do with these forks. And I’m one of those women who find penises cute despite the fact that the great love of my life is a woman. Or was. It had been two years since I had any definitive evidence that Misha Deland was still alive.
“I’m entirely tied up right now with a marketing research project, and I have no experience whatever in the legal-criminal field,” I lied, setting the tray on a cable spool I found at a dump and painted bright blue to match the chaise cushions. “Your trip out here has been a waste of time.”
Crandall failed one test when he poured himself a tumbler of lemonade while leaving mine empty, but passed the next with flair.
“The so-so lawyer I hired bills around a hundred-fifty an hour,” he said while wringing water out of his ponytail onto my foot. “I can pay you the same up to ten, maybe fifteen thousand.”
“Expenses?”
“Within reason. You’ll have to clear with me first.”
“What is it you think I can do?”
His dark blue eyes regarded me with the same interest people lavish on old movie tickets found in jacket pockets.
“Save my damn sister’s ass,” he said.
Miles beyond the baking sky a black-silver grid flashed for a nanosecond and then wasn’t there, had never been there. Its ten billion dillion bars and lines and filaments, each crossing each at curving right angles, was only a fairy tale.
