The Four Last Things

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Because it would complicate things. We've got days of talking to do before we sleep together again, if we ever do. Anyway, you've always got Roxy.”

  “Roxanne,” I said. “You know her name, so why pretend to get it wrong?”

  “Little heavier than you usually like them, isn't she?”

  “It doesn't matter,” I said offensively. “I'm usually on top.”

  “That must be novel,” she said.

  There was no way to win.

  At her place, she waited for a moment for the rain to subside. When it didn't, she opened the passenger door anyway. “You're not coming in?”

  “For what?”

  “Okay,” she said. “See you tomorrow.” There was a moment of silence. Then she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “Don't be a lunk,” she said. “Anyway, you've got a long drive.” The instant she got out of the car, the rain stopped. It started again as she closed the front door behind her.

  To get from Santa Monica to Topanga Canyon without going up the Pacific Coast Highway you have to track east, all the way into the San Fernando Valley, and then head north until you can pick up Topanga, turn left, and go most of the way west again. It's a meandering, basically U-shaped route, all freeways and blue-white light at night, a charmless drive under the best of circumstances. In a downpour, it always reminds me of Shelly Berman's famous definition of flying: hours of boredom relieved by moments of stark terror.

  Between the yawns and the occasional red accident flares, I thought about Eleanor. We'd met at UCLA, where I was pursuing one of my long string of semi-useless degrees in lieu of doing anything better. She was the most wastefully beautiful human being I'd ever seen in my life, attractive way beyond the demands of natural selection. Two weeks after she moved in she had me kicking a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit that I'd thought was as permanent as a tattoo. A week later, to my infinite surprise, I was running along next to her on San Vicente Boulevard: wheezy, labored quarter-miles at first, then miles, then l0K's, finally marathons.

  In spite of the fact that she couldn't get me to stop drinking beer, the pounds began to fall away. I'd been a shamefaced, sedentary 237 pounds when we met; six months later I weighed 175, and I was stopping to look for my reflection in store windows on Westwood Boulevard. It wasn't vanity; I just couldn't find myself. Until I learned to recognize my new silhouette, I'd had an eerie feeling that I was invisible on the street.

  My blood pressure, which had been higher than the federal deficit, plummeted to textbook normal and stayed there. Several cups of nicotine-based goop gradually cleared from my lungs. I no longer woke up each morning to the sound of my respiratory system squeaking.

  And then a cocaine-fried subhuman made a natural mistake, considering the state of his consciousness, and threw an inoffensive young woman named Jennie Chu off the top of one of the UCLA dormitories. Jennie Chu had been one of Eleanor's closest friends, a shy math student, gymnast, and part-time classical pianist from Taiwan who had never really mastered American English and who'd had the misfortune to wear eyeglasses that resembled those worn by the woman the coke freak had really intended to kill. The doctors said she had died instantly, but, as Eleanor said at the time, “What's instantly? It must have taken her a month to hit the ground.”

  A few days later I delivered the man who killed Jennie Chu to the LAPD with both his elbows broken, and I had found a career. I had learned that I enjoyed righting wrongs. I had also learned that, under the right circumstances, I enjoyed breaking someone's elbows. I'd been keeping tabs on the latter discovery in the two years since. I'd broken a couple of hands, hands that belonged to a man who'd come up with an interesting new use for pliers, but no elbows.

  Topanga Canyon Boulevard stretched uphill in front of me, empty and wet. As empty, I thought, with several drams of self-pity, as the house I lived in, the house I'd shared with Eleanor until I'd fooled around one too many times and she'd stopped telling me it was okay and packed up and moved to Venice.

  It's so easy to break things that it seems like it should be easier to put them back together. Once, when I was a kid, I was showing one of my mother's prize Irish crystal vases to a pretty classmate, feeding her wide-eyed awe by making up stories about the craftsmen who cut every facet by hand and died prematurely from inhaling glass. In my eagerness to get to the punch line, I dropped the vase. It broke into only three pieces, but I spent the entire afternoon sitting on the floor with a tube of glue, and the cracks were the first thing my mother saw when she got home that evening. The lesson didn't take. I'd broken a lot of things since.

  Alice sputtered resentfully when I cut the engine at the bottom of the driveway. The rain drummed giant fingers on the thin Detroit tin of Alice's roof. It was like sitting in a big beer can.

  Rain stopped for Eleanor, but I was too much of a realist to expect it to stop for me. I opened the door and hunched over, reducing the surface area vulnerable to the wet.

  The smell hit me even before I got out of the car. It rolled at me out of the sagebrush, a concentration of corruption so vile that it should have been incandescent, like swamp gas. Its source, whatever it was, was dead beyond the resurrection dreams of even the most fervent born-again Christian. I forgot the rain altogether and clawed my way up the muddy driveway. At the top of the hill I realized that I'd been holding my breath and drew several shuddering breaths of clean, rainwashed air. Against my better judgment I raised my arm to my nose and sniffed my sleeve. The smell had impregnated the cloth.

  Then I noticed that the kitchen light was on.

  I hadn't left it on.

  One of the design quirks of the shack I rent from Mrs. Yount is that there are absolutely no windows you can look through from the outside. They're all about eight feet above ground level. That's charming when you want privacy, which I usually did. Now, standing in the downpour, I considered the drawbacks. The one that immediately occurred to me was sudden death.

  The house is heated by a wood-burning stove, and a wood-burning stove requires a woodpile. I went to the woodpile and selected a sodden piece of oak, about the length of my arm and just slender enough to wrap my hand around. The rain had become an ally: it muffled the sound of my approach. Even the sucking sounds I made as I pulled my shoes out of the mud were probably inaudible to anyone inside.

  A foot at a time, I reached the door. I stood in front of it for what seemed like an hour. Just as I was about to convince myself that I had left the kitchen light on, I heard footsteps on the wooden floor inside. A shadow passed in front of the opaque glass in the door, heading for the kitchen.

  I hefted the wood in my hand to make sure I had the balance right, and waited. Footsteps again. The shadow passed across the door again, and I threw myself against it and lurched across the threshold, the piece of wood lifted high above my head.

  Roxanne, wearing my heavy woolen bathrobe, whirled and shrieked like the heroine in a forties horror flick. Then she registered who I was, lowered her hand from her mouth, and said, “Simeon, how nice. You've brought in some firewood.”

  Half an hour later, with wine warming our insides and wet wood sputtering in the stove, we fell asleep.

  I woke up even more reluctantly than usual and stumbled to the bathroom. Roxanne, once again, was long gone, but the smell of coffee permeated the house. The rain had apparently stopped, and sun streamed improbably through the windows.

  Since hot water in Topanga takes approximately the same time to arrive as the Ice Age did in Europe, I turned the shower on and snapped the door shut before I took a stance at the washbasin to scrape what tasted like several past lifetimes off my teeth. My toothbrush seemed too heavy to lift. When I looked at my face in the mirror, rabid foam dripped from my chin. I couldn't bear to look at myself, so I shaved from memory and stepped into the shower.

  The water was exactly body temperature. Uncannily body temperature. Feeling vaguely uneasy, I began to scrub. I looked down and saw the streams running off my body turning a brownish-red rust colo
r. Then the water stopped altogether and I looked up.

  Blood gouted out through the shower head. Dark, thick, precisely body temperature, it poured forth, splashing off my shoulders and splattering the shower tiles in crimson Rorschach patterns. I leapt back, and it squished beneath my bare feet.

  I heard my scream echo wildly. I tried to push the shower door open. It was stuck. I threw a shoulder, streaming with blood, against it. Nothing.

  Someone was outside, holding it closed.

  I hammered against it. It didn't give. The blood stopped flowing. Against all my better judgment I looked to see why. White worms, thin, pallid, not really white but a sickly pale gray, squeezed themselves through the holes in the shower head and began to dangle down toward me. I grabbed at the edge of the shower door and hurled myself into it. It opened an inch and then slammed shut again and I found myself looking down, staring transfixed at what had caught in the door.

  Long blond hair.

  Angel Ellspeth's hair.

  The worms touched my shoulder.

  The odor of death filled the shower.

  The worms grasped me more tightly, their gaping mouths opening wide, gripping my shoulder, pulling me up, up toward the shower head.

  “Simeon,” they said in a girlish voice.

  I tried to shake myself free. They hung fast. I closed my eyes.

  “Simeon,” they said. “Something stinks.”

  I opened my eyes, swallowed, and looked at Roxanne.

  “It's really bad,” she said, looking down at me. She was wrapped in my robe. “Are you awake, or what?”

  “I'm awake,” I said. I was also sweating. “What in God's name is it?”

  “Well,” she said in the gray light of a rainy morning, “I'm no expert, but my guess is that something's dead.”

  Chapter 15

  It took two toots from the truck's horn to tell me he'd arrived. I hoisted my steaming coffee mug, wrapped my leaky raincoat around my bare and unsteaming body, and headed down the driveway. Roxanne was gone but the rain was still with us.

  About an hour before, at Roxanne's urging and jacked up by three cups of her coffee, I'd gone reluctantly down to check out the smell. If Roxanne hadn't been watching from the top of the driveway I'd have yielded to nausea and gone back up the hill to tell her a lie. She was watching, though, and I had a sacred masculine tradition of stupidity to uphold.

  If the smell had been music it would have been Mahler. There was a rich, overripe majesty to it that actually made it difficult to tell whether it was getting stronger or weaker. Looking for its source was like trying to spot a candle after being blinded by a flashbulb. With every synapse in my nervous system screaming retreat in a hysterical falsetto, I forced myself into the bushes above the driveway.

  And there it was, about five feet up the hill, a shapeless blob of blond fur: someone's beloved Fluffy the Cat. Around what once had been its neck was a pink collar that had been described to me in heartrending detail, making me surer than I wanted to be that it was, to be precise, Mrs. Yount's Fluffy the Cat. I didn't think she'd want her back. So I'd discreetly heaved the coffee and most of last night's hamburger onto the wet earth, feeling protected by the bushes from Roxanne's prying eyes. Then, bathed in chill sweat, I'd clambered back up the driveway with a ghastly semblance of jauntiness to figure out what to do.

  Coyotes team up to take cats. One of them had probably chased poor old Fluffy into the underbrush and directly into a circle of teeth and claws. Cats must taste terrible, because they hadn't bothered to eat her. Fluffy had been deteriorating for about ten days while Mrs. Yount waited for me to turn something up, and I drove up and down the canyon tacking Xeroxes to phone poles. If I could have written them in coyote I might have gotten an answer. Or at least a long, echoing, moonlit horse-laugh.

  Once I was safe inside the house, I'd called the city out of sheer desperation and been referred to the county. The county had given me another number to call, and someone at that number had given me another number. I was running out of space on my doodle pad by the time I found myself talking to the right person.

  That person's job was to dispatch other people to pick up dead animals.

  When the horn toots summoned me, I slogged back down in the drizzle to see a tall young black man in a yellow rubber slicker standing in front of a long white truck. His expression was as bright as a sunny day, cheerier than an orange Life-Saver in a packet full of limes. He balanced a shovel upright like an urban graffito based loosely on American Gothic.

  “Say what,” he said by way of salutation. “So where she be?”

  I took a protective pull off my coffee cup and pointed vaguely toward the bushes, stifling a petticoat impulse to hold my nose. He nodded, slogged up the hill, and started in. First, though, he paused and looked back at me.

  “No snakes in here, is they?” He sounded serious.

  “None,” I lied, without even thinking about it. “I've lived here five years and never seen one.” I'd killed three with a hoe, right about there.

  “I don't shine to snakes,” he said. “Somethin’ wrong when you can kill the front half and the back still lash around. Even when they all the way dead, I use the long shovel. The way long shovel. Sometimes, if they dead in the road and they ain't nobody watchin’, I just run the truck over them four, five times to mash them into the asphalt. Then I jus’ pretend they the dotted line and go home.”

  “No problem. You're safe as milk,” I said, wondering who at the county I could call to get him picked up if a rattler bit him. “Just follow your nose.”

  The brush closed behind him and I repressed a twinge of guilt and tried to think about something else. Anything else. “Wo,” he said, unseen. “She be real ripe.” I heard some scuffling in the brush and the handle of his shovel emerged once or twice. “Heeere, kitty, kitty,” he said. I concentrated on feeling inadequate.

  He came out backward with something blond and unrecognizable lolling off the end of the shovel. An explosion of odor rolled toward me. The black man extended the shovel to the left and faced all the way right, toward me. “I done developed this walk all by myse'f,” he said. “Looks funny, but she works. Tell me if I gone hit a tree.” Arms left, head right, he marched down the hill.

  “You do this all day long?” I said after the cat was safely stowed in the bowels of the truck.

  He wiped the shovel on some dead grass while he considered the question. “This ain't doodlysquat,” he said at last. “Later, right before dinner, I got to unload the truck.”

  I looked for a tree to sag against. “No,” I said. “Say it isn't so.”

  “Four dollar thirty-fi' an hour,” he said, grinning. “And unloading them ain't the half of it.”

  “What in the world,” I said, against my better judgment, “could you mean?”

  “Well, they's a problem. See, sometime they get mixed up. Out come ol' Fluffy there and she got Fido's head. Then I got to sort them out. Like a jigsaw puzzle, you know? ‘Cept in 3-D and Smellovision.”

  My pulse pounded forcefully in my ears a couple of times before sanity prevailed. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Why do you have to sort them out?”

  His smile widened. “For burial. We take ‘em over to the Permanent Pet Playground, Inc., y' know? Fussy outfit. These fuzzy babies going to be frisking around for eternity, they got to have the right heads and tails. Otherwise they going to be fightin’ with theyself. I mean, wo. What gone happen when that big bugle blow in the sky, huh? How all these good folk seized up by the Rapture gone recognize they pets when they pets look like they been put together by a committee?”

  I looked at him for a long moment. His face was as innocent as a Girl Scout cookie. “I'm not sure,” I said, “but I think you're full of shit.” He gazed at me genially. “You want a cup of coffee?”

  “Is the pope a polack?” He stashed the shovel carefully in the truck and followed me up the driveway.

  I closed the door behind him and poured out the last of Rox
anne's hour-old brew. He'd taken the slicker off to reveal an immaculate white uniform with the name dexter stitched into the pocket. It was hand-stitched, individual stitches leapfrogging each other over the pocket's surface. It looked like he'd stitched the pocket closed. He sat at what passed for a breakfast counter, sipped the coffee, and made a face.

  ”Wo, hot. But it taste good. Center slice from the loaf of life, y' know?” He blew on the chipped mug and surveyed the living room. “I know every man's home supposed to be his castle,” he said, “but you pushing it, don't you think?”

  “You don't like it?”

  “Sure,” he said, “it's real sweet. I was just trying to figure if I'd rather live in it or under it.”

  “That's because you haven't been under it.”

  “Ain't nothin’ there I haven't picked up.”

  “How do you do it?” I drained the dregs in my cup. “And, while we're on it, why?”

  He had a knack of making his eyes glimmer, and he glimmered them at me then. “You got a live boss?” he asked.

  I thought. “Not at the moment.”

  “That's what I like,” he said, “man who don't pick his words.”

  “Okay, sorry. I usually do.”

  “Me, I'll take a dead client anytime, huh? ‘Stead of a live boss, I mean. Ol' Fluffy, y' know, she smell terrible, she done kiss the odor of sanctity good-bye for keeps, and she ain't no thicker'n a milkshake. But she ain't gone tell me what to do.”

  “You mean you do this of your own free will?” I asked disbelievingly.

  “Free will?” he said. “That's quaint, y' know? I ain't heard no one say that since college.”

  “College,” I said.

  “Yeah. This philosophy professor. Must have weighed three hundred pounds on a good day, when he been skippin’ potatoes, y' know? Man was fat. Always talkin’ about determinism. Everything come from somethin’ else, right? So if this clown know that, how come he's so fat? And, wo, could he smoke. If he know everything come from somethin’ else, how come he don't know cancer comes from smokin’ cigarettes? Enough to put you off education.”