man yelled from atop my fence. “I want to hire you.”
Sullen, he said no more and looked away as I climbed the shallow-end steps and pulled on the shorts and T-shirt I’d tossed on a chaise lounge. Dressing while dripping wet in the presence of strange men is always awkward, and old habits die hard. I remembered the smoke-enshrouded Carter Upchurch as I stashed my panties and bra under a bright blue chaise cushion. In addition to the knowledge that I was a new soul, Carty impressed upon my juvenile brain the concept that men should never see female undergarments except those designed as erotic props. This injunction applied also, Carty noted, to the eyes of my twin brother, David, who is now called “Hammer” and won’t see another brassiere until the Missouri State Parole Board releases him from a razor-wire cage full of people noteworthy for their lack of breasts.
Any clinical psychologist would surmise correctly that David is the reason for my research into human behavior as it breaks down by gender. We’re twins for God’s sake. Same parents, same house, food, church, and school. But David is a public menace and I’m not. Who wouldn’t be curious?
“Hire me to do what?” I inquired after helping Brontë from the pool and instructing her to sit. Competently, she managed the predictable canine flapping and spraying of water from a seated position. The electric snarl became a rumble of small tympani, but her eyes never left the man on the fence.
“A job,” he replied with an economy of presentation I would later understand was simply his style. At the moment it seemed insufficient.
“I guess you didn’t notice the sequence of no trespassing signs, the locked gate across the only access to my property, and the Doberman in the pool,” I pointed out. “If this were a hiring hall you’d have seen a coffee pot and a framed black-and-white glossy of Jimmy Hoffa. Either get the hell out of here or I say a word that frees this dog from the constraints of civilization while I dash inside to get into something more comfortable. Like the shoulder holster hanging on the other side of that door.”
I tipped my head in the general direction of all twelve doors anonymously facing the pool. There was nothing behind nine of them but bare cement floor and unpainted drywall.
“In the holster is a loaded Glock nine millimeter,” I added.
I didn’t mention the old single-shot bolt-action .22 rifle that was also in there somewhere. It was one of a matched set given David and me on our ninth birthday by our father, Father Jake McCarron. An ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, Dad nonetheless had and has a regrettable fondness for things that go bang.
David carried the concept a step further, beginning with convenience stores and ending with a St. Louis bank. The St. Louis Post Dispatch said that during the attempted robbery my brother shot holes in two Tiffany glass panels, a plaster frieze depicting scenes from St. Louis’s early fur trade, and an enormous Made-in-Taiwan vase holding silk frangipani and bleached ostrich feathers. Men, for reasons explained in Ape, are sometimes made uneasy by large floral arrangements.
The man on my fence was being made uneasy by gravity. Baseball-sized biceps were straining to hold what looked like about a hundred and sixty-five pounds at the level of the horizon, while his heavy boots clanged uselessly against the chain link. Men in California, even the bikers and desert rats, do not wear boots like that. Their feet would rot off in a week, drowned in sweat. Men in California also don’t wear wool plaid Pendleton shirts with the sleeves rolled up over waffle-weave long johns. Southern California’s deserts still claim inferno status in late summer, at least during the day. It was becoming clear that Fenceman had dropped in from somewhere north of Seattle, at least. He reminded me of a poem Dad adores and frequently struggles to work into sermons. It’s about Alaska. “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”
“There are strange things done in the midnight sun, by the men who moil for gold,” I yelled at the man atop my fence. “The Arctic trails have their secret tales, that would make your blood run cold . . .”
David and I could recite the entire thing from memory by the time we were five.
“If your name’s Blue McCarron I’ve got to talk to you,” he said, thin lips whitening beneath a handlebar mustache that draped his teeth.
“Who wrote the poem?” I demanded, expecting nothing.
“Robert W. Service. Will you hold that damn dog or not?”
“Get down,” I answered. “Brontë, stay.”
Much nonsense can be made of coincidence that is merely coincidental. But there’s another kind that feels like a typhoon in your bones and lets you imagine that the sky behind your right ear has just opened to reveal a hidden pattern. The hidden pattern. You jerk your head around and it’s already gone. But it was there, and the certainty falls on and through you like a breath, like that first scent of autumn you feel in your soul. That happened to me when the man on my fence named an obscure poet he shouldn’t have known. It was a message.
The improbable circumstances and eerie sense of connection created by his pronunciation of the poet’s name provided a jolt I’d been waiting for. And the world may be divided into two camps—those who know precisely how this works and those for whom such a connection sounds like nonsense. You either get it or you don’t.
“What’s your name?” I asked as he dropped the last three feet from the fence and hit hard, dark blue eyes registering pain. He knew the poem’s author and that meant I really was on the grid again. I was really alive and not just an entity marking time alone in a half-built, bankrupt desert motel until some poisonous snake, earthquake, or disease took my body to the great beige nothing I saw every night in an absence of dreams. I had feared for two years that “I,” whatever that is, had already died. But after he answered my question I could feel again my own movement on the roaring, warp-speed grid of universal 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