good life.”
“They excrete in the same water where they eat, and they eat in the semen-clouded water where they fornicate. Fish are disgusting.”
“I never thought so until now,” I said.
“How’d you get out here?”
“Terri’s Mustang.”
“You been missing me?”
“Always. But I’m looking for someone.” I told her about Fungus Man. “This is where my instinct brought me.”
When someone isn’t where I expect to find him, neither at home nor at work, then sometimes I cruise around on my bicycle or in a borrowed car, turning randomly from street to street. Usually in less than half an hour, I cross paths with the one I seek. I need a face or a name for focus, but then I’m better than a bloodhound.
This is a talent for which I have no name. Stormy calls it “psychic magnetism.”
“And here he comes now,” I said, referring to Fungus Man, who ambled along the promenade, following the descending rapids toward the tropical koi pond.
Stormy didn’t have to ask me to point the guy out to her. Among the other shoppers, he was as obvious as a duck in a dog parade.
Although I had nearly finished the ice cream without being chilled, I shivered at the sight of this strange man. He trod the travertine promenade, but my teeth chattered as if he had just walked across my grave.
PALE, PUFFY, HIS WATERY GRAY GAZE floating over store windows, looking almost as bemused as an Alzheimer’s patient who has wandered out of his care facility into a world he no longer recognizes, Fungus Man carried stuffed shopping bags from two department stores.
“What’s that yellow thing on his head?” Stormy asked.
“Hair.”
“I think it’s a crocheted yarmulke.”
“No, it’s hair.”
Fungus Man went into Burke & Bailey’s.
“Are the bodachs still with him?” Stormy asked.
“Not as many as before. Just three.”
“And they’re in my store with him?”
“Yeah. They all went inside.”
“This is bad for business,” she said ominously.
“Why? None of your customers can see them.”
“How could slinky, slithering evil spirits be good for business?” she countered. “Wait here.”
I sat with the fornicating koi at my back and the unfinished ice cream in my right hand. I had lost my appetite.
Through the windows of Burke & Bailey’s, I could see Fungus Man at the counter. He studied the flavor menu, then placed an order.
Stormy herself didn’t serve him but hovered nearby, behind the counter, on some pretense.
I didn’t like her being in there with him. I sensed that she was in danger.
Although experience has taught me to trust my feelings, I did not go inside to stand guard near her. She had asked me to wait on the bench. I had no intention of crossing her. Like most men, I find it mortifying to be ass-kicked by a woman who doesn’t even weigh 110 pounds after Thanksgiving dinner.
If I’d had a lamp and a genie and one wish, I would have wished myself back to Tire World, to the serenity of that showroom with its aisles of soothingly round rubber forms.
I thought of poor Tom Jedd, waving good-bye with his severed arm, and I decided to finish my ice cream, after all. None of us ever knows when he’s approaching the end of his road. Maybe this was the last scoop of coconut cherry chocolate chunk that I’d ever have a chance to eat.
As I finished the final bite, Stormy returned and sat beside me again. “He’s ordered takeout. One quart of maple walnut and one quart of mandarin-orange chocolate.”
“Are the flavors significant?”
“That’s for you to decide. I’m just reporting in. He’s sure one megaweird son of a bitch. I wish you’d just forget about him.”
“You know I can’t.”
“You have a messiah complex, got to save the world.”
“I don’t have a messiah complex. I just have ... this gift. It wouldn’t have been given to me if I wasn’t supposed to use it.”
“Maybe it’s not a gift. Maybe it’s a curse.”
“It’s a gift.” Tapping my head, I said, “I’ve still got the box it came in.”
Fungus Man stepped out of Burke & Bailey’s. In addition to the two department-store bundles, he carried a quilted, insulated bag that contained the ice cream.
He looked right, looked left, and right again, as though not certain from which direction he had arrived here. His vague smile, which seemed to be as permanent as a tattoo, widened briefly, and he nodded as though in cheerful agreement with something that he’d said to himself.
When Fungus Man began to move, heading upstream toward the waterfall, two bodachs accompanied him. For the moment, the third remained in Burke & Bailey’s.
Rising from the bench, I said, “I’ll see you for dinner, Goth Gidget.”
“Try to show up alive,” she said. “Because, remember, I can’t see the dead.”
I left her there, all pink and white and sultry, in the palmy tropics with the scent of amorous koi, and I followed the human mushroom to the main entrance of the mall and then out into sunshine almost sharp enough to peel the corneas off my eyes.
The griddle-hot blacktop seemed but one degree cooler than the molten tar pits that had sucked down dinosaurs in distant millennia. The air flash-dried my lips and brought to me that summer scent of desert towns that is a melange of superheated silica, cactus pollen, mesquite resin, the salts of long-dead seas, and exhaust fumes suspended in the motionless dry air like faint nebulae of mineral particles spiraling through rock crystal.
Fungus Man’s dusty Ford Explorer stood in the row behind mine and four spaces farther west. If my psychic magnetism had been any stronger, we would have been parked bumper to bumper.
He opened the tailgate of the SUV and put in the shopping bags. He had brought a Styrofoam cooler to protect the ice cream, and he snugged both quarts in that insulated hamper.
Earlier, I had forgotten to prop the reflective sun barrier against the windshield in the Mustang. It was folded and tucked between the passenger’s seat and the console. Consequently, the steering wheel had grown too hot to touch.
I started the engine, turned on the air conditioner, and used my rearview and side mirrors to monitor Fungus Man.
Fortunately, his movements were nearly as slow and methodical as the growth of mildew. By the time he backed out of his parking space, I was able to follow him without leaving scraps of blistered skin on the steering wheel.
We had not yet reached the street when I realized that none of the bodachs had accompanied the smiley man when he’d left the mall. None were currently in the Explorer with him, and none loped after it, either.
Earlier, he had departed the Grille with an entourage of at least twenty, which had shrunk to three when he arrived at Burke & Bailey’s. The bodachs are usually devout in their attendance to any man who will be the source of terrible violence, and they do not desert him until the last drop of blood has been spilled.
I