She pulled away slowly and leaned her back against the door. “What am I doing? This is crazy. Deets, you need to know. I’m involved with someone else. He’ll be back in about ten minutes.”
“So invite me for pizza.”
Her mouth turned down. Her eyes now flashed disapproval. “That’s not your psychic ability. You heard me at the window. But this is going all wrong already.”
“What? So I drop by for pizza in the middle of the night. Big deal.”
“No, that’s not what I’m talking about.” She looked across the room. I followed her eyes to the artwork above the couch. My drawing of the half-bull man and the part-human leopardess making love in the forest hung next to her flowered watercolor of the same Minotaur entering a feline-featured woman. The sense of erotic intoxication in the pictures was intensified by their proximity. The passion of one embraced and intertwined with the other. “You know how it can be with us. He’ll sense it.”
“Is that wrong?”
“Don’t talk like that. Don’t turn everything into a big mess like you do. The police have been looking for you. Some creepy FBI guys have been snooping around the store.”
“Maybe I should split.”
“No, you have to tell me about my dad and what happened crossing the mountains. I can guess you’ve got some stories to tell me about Monster Alley or Doctor Steel too.” She closed the door, looked towards the window. “Nuts.”
“Eat your pizza. I’ll sleep in the store. We can talk in the morning.”
“No, I’m not doing anything sneaky. I need to hear how you found my dad. Oh god, this is unbelievable. I’m so deliriously happy to know you survived that jungle.”
“I don’t know this guy you’re with. Does he live here?” I pulled out a cigarette and lit it. “No, skip that. I just meant that I have to be careful about who knows where I am.”
“He’d be cool about that.”
“What if he doesn’t like me being here?”
She shrugged half-heartedly, as if to say he probably wouldn’t. “I can convince him to not say anything.”
I snapped at her, “Oh, yeah, great. I’ll sleep downstairs.”
“Stop that. You’ve been gone a year. With you, I almost got killed, you got Sam pregnant, you were stabbed by your Tweety lover, and there were cops and mental hospitals and your nightmarish obsessions. For the sake of peace, Deets, can’t we just talk about what happened to you and leave us out of it until we have time to sort through our own turmoil?” Her body twitched defensively with a shift of weight from one foot to the other. “He’s just out getting a pizza. He’ll be blown away all freaky when he comes back and you’re here.” She studied the floor, then looked up at me as if to beg me not to bring the violence that trailed after me into her home. “You and Rolly once jammed with him. He’s one of the good guys. We’ve never even had a fight.”
“No fight? With you?”
“Oh, go take a shower. You stink terrible. You’re lucky I even kissed you.”
“You always say stupid things when we disagree.”
“God, two minutes and we’re arguing already. Sorry, I didn’t mean it. It felt good when we kissed. I’m upset and confused.” She pushed at me gently. “Just go take a shower, and give me your clothes. I’ll wash them in the sink.”
“No, I can wash them in the shower.”
“Okay. I’ll get you soap and something to wear.” She ran the tips of her fingers down my arm. “The jacket’s new. Nice. Don’t wear that in there.”
“Teresa?”
“Yes?”
“I didn’t know this was going to happen. I just wanted to tell you how it all came down while I was in Venezuela.”
She smiled, reached for my hand and held it, swinging our grip back and forth, in harmony with the good memories and the love we had for each other.
“Oh, and then there’s this.” I pulled Santa’s check from my pocket, handed it to her.
“What’s this? I don’t understand.” Her mouth opened. Her jaw hung. A crease appeared on her forehead. “Nine thousand dollars. For me?”
“Pretty cool huh? Another mystery. Pizza’s on you.”
Teresa brought up a pair of blue and white striped jeans and a long-sleeved black and green paisley shirt from the store. Dan-the-boyfriend lit up a joint when I came out from the shower and, handing it to me, said, “Welcome back from the dead.”
I recognized Dan as the English guy that had been sniffing around Teresa at Rolly’s farewell party and tried to bury the feeling that I had lost her affections to him after all. Remembering Teresa’s kiss at the door just minutes before helped lessen my jealousy.
We ate, skirting around my troubles while we talked, concentrating mostly on Rolly’s success. Dan had been backstage at the Monterey Pop Festival during Rolly’s performance and said it was like the world stood still while it adjusted to the new sounds that had just been introduced to it.
“He and Hendrix learned to play on some other planet.”
“Ha, ha, far out. You’ve missed so much music over the last six months. I should write you a list of albums you have to hear.” Teresa put on a record of a new group I’d never heard of. “This is Ten Years After. They’ll blow you away.”
“I had a radio for a few weeks in the hospital and heard a lot of new grooves.”
“Dig it.” Dan took a drag on the joint and held it out to pass on to me.
But I was distracted by Teresa smiling at me with a sweetness that I remembered waking up to. The lyrics of a song popped into my mind. I had heard the tune in the warehouse and couldn’t get it out of my head as I walked the city streets the last few weeks.
“You know that song, ‘To Love Somebody’? Who sings it?”
She turned away, a blush spreading across her cheeks. She glanced to see Dan’s reaction. Dan caught her movement. He was still holding the joint out to me, a flicker of irritation darting behind his drooped eyelids.
I saw no reason to hide my feelings, not after almost dying on my quest over Teresa’s mountain. I might cower before demons and run from snakes but not from Teresa or her irksome lover.
Teresa met my eyes. “The Bee Gees. It came out back in the summer.”
“I was probably doing the cha-cha with alligators or something.” I took the joint from Dan. “Stuff’s potent, man.”
Teresa laughed. “Ha, ha, you weren’t dancing with alligators.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
We sat in silence, getting lost in a long guitar lick.
“Far out. I knew you’d flip when you heard that.”
As we smoked and ate, I couldn’t help but notice that Teresa was conscientiously trying to balance her attention evenly between Dan and me.
“Dan played some gigs with John Mayall, just after Eric Clapton left the band.” She handed me a psychedelic album cover.
“Yeah, Cream, far out. Disraeli Gears. It’s going to take a while to catch up on all this incredible music.”
“He was with your favorite band, The Yardbirds.”
“Who? You, Dan?”
“No, no, not me.”
“No. Eric Clapton.” Teresa hid her nervousness with deliberately slow moves, brushing imaginary things from her dress, then playing out a long adjustment of a lash at the outside corner of her eye before fluffing a few curls near her cheeks. “Dan did some studio sessions with The Animals and Herman’s Hermits.”
“Missus Brown, very cool.”
“Dan, did you see Deets’s show last year?”
After a while she tired of trying to direct the flow of conversation or was too stoned to care, and she settled back in my old overstuffed chair. As she relaxed, her sexuality invaded the room, and for a long moment I thought she was thinking the only solution to her predicament was to drag us all into the bedroom.
“So, D
eets, we need to talk.”
I emptied the contents of my backpack onto the floor where I sat. “Dan, I don’t want to sound like a jerk or make you think something funny’s going on, but I’ve got to tell Teresa how I found her dad. I don’t want to tell her the abbreviated version which I would do if, well, if you’re, ah, here. It’s nothing against you, it’s just that Teresa knows things about me that I’m not ready to share with the world.”
“Hey, man, something funny is going on, but it’s cool. I mean, strange things happen. Like, I get the feeling you’re a bit of a wizard, and as curious as I am to hear how you found her dad, I would guess chaps like you have their secrets.”
“It’s just I want to tell her more than what the news has said about how it all came down. I’ll gladly tell you about the trip over the mountains sometime, but not tonight.”
He held his hands up to stop my apologetic demand. “No sweat, man.”
When he settled into the bedroom without another word, Teresa motioned for me to pick up the scattered photos. She disappeared after him, shut the door, and I went through three cigarettes as she talked quietly with Dan.
Teresa reappeared, grabbed a bottle of wine, the photograph of her dad, and stared through me like I was the cause of every trouble she ever had—not with malice, but acceptance. “Let’s go down to the store.” On the landing, with the door shut behind us, she whispered, “I told him I believed you had rare abilities, not just psychic, but the ability to see into other worlds.”
“Did you tell him I had no idea what I was doing?”
“I don’t believe that.”
“What’d he say?”
“Nothing.”
“He seems like a good guy.”
She burst into tears. “He said he hoped I was happy that I had finally found my holy man.”
“The little shit.”
There was now a small, beaten-up sofa in Good Stuff’s back room where Teresa and I had first made love. We settled onto it as she sniffled. She accepted me wiping away her tears, then kissing the tip of her nose. She snuggled her head into my chest. “Tell me what happened.”
“Around the time of your show, Doctor Steel approached Daisy with an offer for me to go earn nine thousand dollars. I figured out that Santa seemed to endorse the trip. I was all messed up over you. And remember Agent Orville? That clown was making me nervous, so I split.”
Over the next few hours, I told her the adventures, mishaps, and terrors leading up to the drunken night with her father. I showed her the rescued jungle-ravaged photos and sketches as they related to the events.
She jumped up and gasped at the Polaroid of Monkey Man riding on Fish Man’s shoulders at the devil dance. “The monkey on the fish, just like the window box.”
“It’s a portal.”
“What?”
“Let me get back to how everything happened. That window box is another episode completely. Probably take another bottle of wine and a couple of joints to tell.”
She laughed at the water-faded picture of me with my vinyl anaconda and tent pole weapon. Tears welled up again in her eyes as she held a picture of Johnny. “Why did he have to die? Why was his murder part of your quest?”
“He did his best everyday to guide and protect me. I’ve asked myself if he knew exactly why I was there and what was going to happen. Before we set out that day, he told me which direction to head in case anything happened to him. Maybe there were things I had to do by myself, and in this weird, screwed-up universe, his death was the way to present that opportunity to me.”
She tucked a picture of Cecilia and me riding horses up close to her heart, curled her legs under her, and said, “I’m glad she lives thousands of miles away. But it’s like your pool game analogy. If you hadn’t gone to visit her, you wouldn’t have found my dad.” And damn if the tears and sniffles didn’t come again.
I reached out for her, but she gently brushed my hand away. “I”m all right. It’s just too overwhelming—you returning and all the mess and joy it’s causing. My dad... And your story is nothing but miraculous. I don’t know why I’m part of it.”
The room disappeared, and we were the only two people that had ever existed.
“Without you, there’s really no me. I still love you.”
“Me too.” She said it brightly, without hesitation. The light from her skin and heart and eyes made the tears that still lingered glisten in a rainbow of color.
“You’re wonderful, y’know.”
“Keep telling me the story.”
The jungle, the jaguar, her father—the realization of who he was and the crazy violent night with him—I told it all. With my words to her, that journey seemed complete.
“But when he wasn’t totaled, he seemed all right?”
“A nice guy with a mountain man’s concerns and toughness, but he lost it with me.”
“I can’t understand why after all you went through to follow a dream, you end up fighting for your life with my drunken father.”
“Everything is now officially without human logic. Maybe you just needed to see that photo, and he had to see yours, no matter what the price.”
“I’m guessing you have a lot more to say about what happened in those mountains. Am I right?”
“You know you are.”
“Let’s go back upstairs. Tell me the rest in the morning.”
Laying on the living room couch, trying to dispel the meaning of every rustle of sheet or creak of the bed from the room where Teresa and Dan slept, I understood that after I finished telling Teresa the story about the Valley of the Monsters, I would have to leave. I lived for reasons unknown, with police from one world and demonic forces from another seeking me. I couldn’t lead any of them to her.
Chapter 7
“Oomph.”
“Remember how we used to close the store down?”
She had just sat on my stomach.
“Whoa, Teresa. I just woke up. You’re going to burst my bladder.”
“You never used to complain.”
I didn’t even wonder where Dan was as I cupped my hand over her breast.
“Uh-uh, no way. You’re still on top of a mountain in the Andes sometime in July. You didn’t get back to New York until September.”
I squeezed gently.
“And there’s nine thousand dollars to talk about. Stop doing that.” She bounced on my stomach. “Go take a wiz. I’ll make breakfast. Dan’s all freaked out. He split, yapping about doing a club tour back in England.”
So we spent the day talking, smoking weed. She told me about a peace march she had gone to where she chanted with Allen Ginsberg while Abbie Hoffman tried to levitate the Pentagon. I shared with her the myriad of miracles that I had witnessed in Monster Valley the best I could remember, telling her of the visitors arriving in the valley by teleportation. I asked her if Clyde had given her my present.
“Oh my god.” She left the room and came back holding out the black sculpted feather. “I wondered if Clyde was tripping. Or maybe you were dead and your spirit had visited him, kind of like your experience with Hank and the panda.”
“Apparently the god tunnels have a gravitational or tributary effect that I traveled. My understanding is Pan was in charge of my jump and brought me back to the valley.”
“A portal to other places and dimensions. Deets, this is the discovery of all time.”
“It’s been around from the beginning of our universe. It’s used by all sorts of creatures. Nando is probably able to jump back to the cavemen days. I really don’t know much about it, just that travelers are tunnel-jumping through the universe, for whatever reasons.”
“What happens next?”
“Any pizza left?”
We philosophized and theorized about gods and creation, time and magic.
“Pan seems to be a s
truggling god. Picked on by more aggressive ones. He likes his music, his pristine land and water, his mushroom feasts. Loves to frolic with the ladies—”
“Frolic? No wonder you and he... Never mind.” Teresa dismissed her thought with a grimace.
“Uh, anyway, everything isn’t always nice and cozy for a simple nature god.”
“I’ve read so much about society’s interpretations of the gods. The writings seem to be on target with Pan. Maybe because he was accessible.”
“As popular as he may have been long ago, he’s relegated to myth now. Odd, how a god can fade. Who knows how that works?”
“Your god in the woods is evil, and my army is bigger. So you better believe in my god now. Of course that’s the way it’s been. The tribal leader wearing the deer antlers as his crown was a terrible sinner. Satan is always portrayed with horns, though more like a goat.” Teresa pulled some books from her bookcase. “Pan is often identified as Satan.”
“Christianity’s big taboo character could just be propaganda in civilization’s war against nature. It’s all religious bullshit. But there is evil out there. I tell you, the really scary thing was that Beelzebub. That was the real deal.”
“Yes, but listen to what I’m getting at. Satan is also known as Lucifer. Lucifer means bringer of light.”
“Ah, illumination?”
“Yes, as in knowledge.” Teresa was excited, flipping through pages. “According to a variety of mythic tales, these ancient gods were always squabbling. Jealousy, different goals, whatever. They used to challenge each other with fights, tricks, and crazy bets. You said Pan was pissed at some other god and decided to spread the knowledge of the gods to everyone he could. So, Pan could be the original bringer of illumination. The other god cried foul.”
“It fits. But it’s really Pan and a time-traveling caveman cultivating mushrooms across the universe.”
“Pan’s still at it. Somehow, you’ve been dragged into an eternal spat.” Teresa’s mouth fell open. “Far out, you helped them spread the forbidden knowledge. Unbelievable. Too bad, I’ve never seen your name in any ancient texts, though. You didn’t get any credit.”
Miracles (The Remarkable Adventures of Deets Parker Book 3) Page 5