hesitation tell you where he was on that date and what he was doing.
I, on the other hand, am more familiar with his activities since his death.
Without referencing Helen’s ticket on the rail, I stretched an order of eggs, which means that I added a third egg to our usual serving of two. Then I wrecked ’em: scrambled them.
A “Porky sitting” is fried ham. A pig sits on its ham. It lies on its abdomen, which is the source of bacon, so “one Porky lying” would have called for a rasher with the eggs.
“Cardiac shingles” is an order of toast with extra butter.
Hash browns are merely hash browns. Not every word we speak during the day is diner lingo, just as not every short-order cook sees dead people.
I saw only the living in the Pico Mundo Grille during that Tuesday shift. You can always spot the dead in a diner because the dead don’t eat.
Toward the end of the breakfast rush, Chief Wyatt Porter came in. He sat alone in a booth.
As usual, he washed down a tablet of Pepcid AC with a glass of low-fat moo juice before he ordered the mess of eggs and the home fries that he’d mentioned earlier. His complexion was as milky gray as carbolic-acid solution.
The chief smiled thinly at me and nodded. I raised my spatula in reply.
Although eventually I might trade hash-slinging for tire sales, I’ll never contemplate a career in law enforcement. It’s stomach-corroding work, and thankless.
Besides, I’m spooked by guns.
Half the booths and all but two of the counter stools had been vacated by the time a bodach came into the diner.
Their kind don’t appear to be able to walk through walls as do the dead like Penny Kallisto. Instead they slip through any crevice or crack, or keyhole.
This one seeped through the thread-thin gap between the glass door and the metal jamb. Like an undulant ribbon of smoke, as insubstantial as fumes but not translucent, ink-black, the bodach entered.
Standing rather than slinking on all fours, fluid in shape and without discernible features, yet suggestive of something half man and half canine, this unwanted customer slouched silently from the front to the back of the diner, unseen by all but me.
It seemed to turn its head toward each of our patrons as it glided along the aisle between the counter stools and the booths, hesitating in a few instances, as though certain people were of greater interest to it than were others. Although it possessed no discernible facial features, a portion of its silhouette appeared headlike, with a suggestion of a dog’s muzzle.
Eventually this creature returned from the back of the diner and stood on the public side of the counter, eyeless but surely watching me as I worked at the short-order station.
Pretending to be unaware of my observer, I focused more intently on the grille and griddle than was necessary now that the breakfast rush had largely passed. From time to time, when I looked up, I never glanced at the bodach but at the customers, at Helen serving with her signature slap-slap-slap, at our other waitress—sweet Bertie Orbic, round in name and fact—at the big windows and the well-baked street beyond, where jacaranda trees cast shadows too lacy to cool and where heat snakes were charmed off the blacktop not by flute music but by the silent sizzle of the sun.
As on this occasion, bodachs sometimes take a special interest in me. I don’t know why.
I don’t think they realize that I am aware of them. If they knew that I can see their kind, I might be in danger.
Considering that bodachs seem to have no more substance than do shadows, I’m not sure how they could harm me. I’m in no hurry to find out.
The current specimen, apparently fascinated by the rituals of short-order cookery, lost interest in me only when a customer of peculiar demeanor entered the restaurant.
In a desert summer that had toasted every resident of Pico Mundo, this newcomer remained as pale as bread dough. Across his skull spread short, sour-yellow hair furrier than a yeasty mold.
He sat at the counter, not far from the short-order station. Turning his stool left and right, left and right, as might a fidgety child, he gazed at the griddle, at the milkshake mixers and the soft-drink dispensers, appearing to be slightly bewildered and amused.
Having lost interest in me, the bodach crowded the new arrival and focused intently on him. If this inky entity’s head was in fact a head, then its head cocked left, cocked right, as though it were puzzling over the smiley man. If the snout-shaped portion was in fact a snout, then the shade sniffed with wolfish interest.
From the service side of the counter, Bertie Orbic greeted the newcomer. “Honey, what can I do you for?”
Managing to smile and talk at the same time, he spoke so softly that I couldn’t hear what he said. Bertie looked surprised, but then she began to scribble on her order pad.
Magnified by round, wire-framed lenses, the customer’s eyes disturbed me. His smoky gray gaze floated across me as a shadow across a woodland pool, registering no more awareness of me than the shadow has of the water.
The soft features of his wan face brought to mind pale mushrooms that I once glimpsed in a dark dank corner of a basement, and mealy puffballs clustered in moist mounds of forest mast.
Busy with his mess of eggs, Chief Porter appeared to be no more aware of Fungus Man than he was of the observing bodach. Evidently, his intuition did not tell him that this new customer warranted special attention or concern.
I, however, found Fungus Man worrisome—in part but not entirely because the bodach remained fascinated by him.
Although, in a sense, I commune with the dead, I don’t also have premonitions—except sometimes while fast asleep and dreaming. Awake, I am as vulnerable to mortal surprises as anyone is. My death might be delivered through the barrel of a terrorist’s gun or by a falling stone cornice in an earthquake, and I would not suspect the danger until I heard the crack of the fatal shot or felt the earth leap violently beneath my feet.
My wariness of this man came from suspicion based not on reason, either, but on crude instinct. Anyone who smiled this relentlessly was a simpleton—or a deceiver with something to hide.
Those smoke-gray eyes appeared to be bemused and no more than half-focused, but I saw no stupidity in them. Indeed, I thought that I detected a cunningly veiled watchfulness, like that of a stone-still snake feigning prestrike indifference to a juicy mouse.
Clipping the ticket to the rail, Bertie Orbic relayed his order: “Two cows, make ’em cry, give ’em blankets, and mate ’em with pigs.”
Two hamburgers with onions, cheese, and bacon.
In her sweet clear voice, which sounds like it belongs in a ten-year-old girl destined for a scholarship to Juilliard, she continued: “Double spuds twice in Hell.”
Two orders of French fries made extra crispy.
She said: “Burn two British, send ’em to Philly for fish.”
Two English muffins with cream cheese and lox.
She wasn’t finished: “Clean up the kitchen, plus midnight whistleberries with zeppelins.”
An order of hash, and an order of black beans with sausages.
I said, “Should I fire this or wait till his friends join him?”
“Fire it,” Bertie replied. “This is for one. A skinny boy like you wouldn’t understand.”
“What’s he want first?”
“Whatever you want to make.”
Fungus Man smiled dreamily at a salt shaker, which he turned around and around on the counter in front of him, as if the white crystalline contents fascinated and mystified him.
Although the guy didn’t have