was, after all, the evil incarnation of Death that I had taken him to be.
The lake of blacktop glistened with so much stored heat that it appeared to have no more surface tension than water, and yet the Explorer cruised across it without leaving wake or wimple.
Even in the absence of bodachs, I continued to trail my quarry. My shift at the Grille was done. The rest of the afternoon as well as the evening lay ahead. No one is more restless than a short-order cook at loose ends.
CAMP’S END IS NOT A TOWN IN ITSELF BUT a neighborhood of Pico Mundo that is the living memory of hard times even when the rest of our community is experiencing an economic boom. More lawns are dead than not, and some are gravel. Most of the small houses need new stucco, fresh paint, and a truce with termites.
Shacks were built here in the late 1800s, when prospectors with more dreams than common sense were drawn to the area by silver and rumors of silver. They discovered rich veins of the latter.
Over time, as the prospectors became legend and could not be found anymore in the flesh, the weathered shacks were replaced by cottages, shingled bungalows, and casitas with barrel-tile roofs.
In Camp’s End, however, renovation turned to ruin faster than elsewhere. Generation after generation, the neighborhood retained its essential character, an air not so much of defeat as of weary patience: the sag, the peel, the rust, the bleak and blanched but never quite hopeless spirit of a precinct in purgatory.
Hard luck seemed to seep out of the ground itself, as though the devil’s rooms in Hades were directly beneath these streets, his sleeping loft so near the surface that his fetid breath, expelled with every snore, percolated through the soil.
Fungus Man’s destination was a pale-yellow stucco casita with a faded blue front door. The carport leaned precipitously, as if the weight of sunshine alone might collapse it.
I parked across the street from the house, in front of an empty lot full of parched jimson weed and brambles as intricately woven as a dreamcatcher. They had caught only crumpled papers, empty beer cans, and what appeared to be a tattered pair of men’s boxer shorts.
As I put down the car windows and switched off the engine, I watched Fungus Man carry his ice cream and other packages into the house. He entered by a side door in the carport shadows.
Summer afternoons in Pico Mundo are long and blistering, with little hope of wind and none of rain. Although my wristwatch and the car clock agreed on 4:48, hours of searing sunshine remained ahead.
The morning weather forecast had called for a high of 110 degrees, by no means a record for the Mojave. I suspected that this prediction had been exceeded.
When cool-climate relatives and friends are astonished to hear such temperatures, Pico Mundians put a chamber-of-commerce spin on our meteorology, noting that the humidity is a mere fifteen or twenty percent. Our average summer day, they insist, isn’t like a sweltering steam bath but like a refreshing sauna.
Even in the shade of a huge old Indian laurel with roots no doubt deep enough to tap the Styx, I couldn’t pretend that I was being coddled in a sauna. I felt like a child who had wandered into the gingerbread house of a Black Forest witch and had been popped into her oven with the control at SLOW BAKE.
Occasionally a car passed, but no pedestrians appeared.
No children were at play. No homeowner ventured forth to putter in a withered garden.
One dog slumped past, head low, tongue lolling, as if it were stubbornly tracking the mirage of a cat.
Soon my body provided the humidity that the air lacked, until I sat in a puddle of sweat.
I could have started the Mustang and switched on the air conditioning, but I didn’t want to waste Terri’s gasoline or overheat the engine. Besides, as any desert denizen knows, repeated heating and cooling may temper some metals, but it softens the human mind.
After forty minutes, Fungus Man reappeared. He locked the side door of the house, which suggested that no one remained at home, and got behind the wheel of his dust-shrouded Explorer.
I slid down in my seat, below the window, listening as the SUV drove past and left a trail of sound that dwindled into silence.
Crossing to the pale-yellow house, I didn’t worry unduly about being watched from any of the sun-silvered windows along the street. Living in Camp’s End inspired alienation rather than the community spirit needed to form a Neighborhood Watch committee.
Instead of going to the blue front door and making a greater spectacle of myself, I sought the shadows of the carport and knocked on the side door that Fungus Man had used. No one answered.
If the door had featured a deadbolt lock, I would have had to force a window. Confronted by a mere latch bolt, I was confident that, like other young Americans, I had been so well educated by TV cop dramas that I could slip easily into the house.
To simplify my life, I keep no bank accounts and pay only cash; therefore, I have no credit cards. California had thoughtfully issued to me a laminated driver’s license stiff enough to loid the lock.
As I’d anticipated, the kitchen wasn’t a shrine either to Martha Stewart decor or to cleanliness. The place couldn’t be fairly called a pig stye, either; it was just plagued by a general disarray, with here and there an offering of crumbs to ants if they wished to visit.
A faint but unpleasant smell laced the well-cooled air. I could not identify the source, and at first I thought that it must be the singular fragrance of Fungus Man, for he appeared to be one who would issue strange and noxious odors if not also deadly spoors.
I didn’t know what I sought here, but I expected to recognize it when I saw it. Something had drawn the bodachs to this man, and I had followed in their wake with the hope of discovering a clue to the reason for their interest.
After I circled the kitchen, trying but failing to find meaning in a mug half filled with cold coffee, in a browning banana peel left on a cutting board, in the unwashed dishes in the sink, and in the ordinary contents of drawers and cupboards, I realized that the air was not just cool but inexplicably chilly. For the most part, the sweat on my exposed skin had dried. On the nape of my neck, it felt as though it had turned to ice.
The pervasive chill was inexplicable because even in the Mojave, where air conditioning was essential, a house as old and as humble as this rarely had central cooling. Window-mounted units, each serving a single chamber, were a viable alternative to the costly retrofitting of a dwelling that didn’t merit the expense.
The kitchen had no such window units.
Often in a home like this, the residents held the heat at bay only at night and only in the bedroom. Sleep might otherwise be difficult. Even in this small house, however, an air conditioner in the bedroom would not be able to cool the entire structure. Certainly it could not have made an icebox of the kitchen.
Besides, window-mounted units were noisy: the chug and hum of the compressor, the rattle of the fan. I heard none of that here.
As I stood, head cocked, listening, the house waited in silence. On consideration, I suddenly found this stillness to be unnatural.
My shoes should have teased noise from the cracked linoleum, from floorboards loosened by time, heat, and shrinking aridity. Yet when I moved, I had the stealth of a cat on pillows.
In retrospect, I realized that the drawers and the cupboard doors had opened and closed with only the softest whisper, as though constructed with frictionless slides and hinges.
When I moved toward the open doorway between the kitchen and the next room, the cold air seemed to thicken, further muffling the transmission of sound.
The sparsely furnished living room proved to be as dreary and as marked by disorder as the kitchen. Old battered paperbacks,