by Dean Koontz
The buildings had sailed beyond sight. Here and there, a blush of neon remained, but those signs were incoherent now, the glass words having shattered into meaningless syllables of nebulous color.
Birdie said, “What’s your line of work, Harry?”
“Fry cook, ma’am.”
“Fell in love with a fry cook once. Beans Burnet, short-order wizard. A dream, that man.”
“We fry cooks tend to be romantic.”
“In Beans’s case, not enough. He loved his pancakes and home fries more than women. Worked all the time.”
“In his defense, Birdie, it’s an enchanting occupation. You can lose yourself in it.”
“Sure liked the way he smelled.”
“Beef fat and bacon grease,” I said.
She sighed. “Fried onions and green peppers. You don’t measure up to Beans in smell, Harry.”
“I’ve had a different kind of job the past month, ma’am. I’ll be back at the griddle eventually. I sure do miss it.”
“Then came Fred, my life mate, and I forgot all about fry cooks. No offense.”
Birdie changed streets at a shrouded intersection of which I had been unaware until she pulled the steering wheel to the right.
Having been engineered to isolate the driver from the roughness of the pavement, the big sedan rode like a boat. Sloshing tides of fog enhanced the perception that, with wheels retracted, the Cadillac wallowed along Venetian canals.
Although Birdie Hopkins drove below the speed limit, we were moving too fast for the dismal visibility.
“Ma’am, should we really be driving blind?”
“You might be ridin’ blind, child, but I’m drivin’ with sunny-day confidence. Been cruisin’ this town almost sixty years. Never had an accident. Weather like this, we have the streets to ourselves, so they’re even safer. When the sick and sufferin’ need me, I don’t say they gotta wait till mornin’ comes or till the rain stops.”
“Are you a nurse, ma’am?”
“Never had time for school. Me and Fred were in garbage.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Collection, I mean. Started with two trucks and no fear our hands might get dirty. Ended with a fleet, sole contractor for six towns along the coast. Garbage is like sunrise—never stops comin’.”
“So true.”
“You can get rich doin’ work others won’t. Garbage was gold.”
“A lot of times,” I said, “when a restaurant’s really busy, there’s a lot of stress being a fry cook.”
“Don’t doubt that for a second.”
“I’ve thought about switching into tire sales or shoes. Is the garbage business stressful?”
“Sometimes for management. For a route driver, it’s so the same day after day, it gets to be like meditation.”
“Like meditation, yet you’re providing a good service. Sounds real nice.”
“Fred died seven years ago, I sold out two years later. You want, child, I can still open doors in the garbage world.”
“That’s generous, ma’am. I might take you up on that one day.”
“You’d be a good route driver. Can’t look down on the job and be any good. I can tell you don’t look down on anyone.”
“That’s kind of you to say. The reason I wondered if you were a nurse is, before garbage, you mentioned the sick and suffering.”
As if receiving directions beamed from a MapQuest satellite to her brain, Birdie turned left into a billowing white wall, and the Cadillac wallowed into a new canal.
She glanced at me, turned her attention to the invisible street, reached one hand up to adjust her feathered hat, glanced at me again, pulled to the curb, and put the car in park.
“Harry, somethin’ about you is too different. I can’t do this the usual way. Feel like I should get right to it, say I didn’t come to you by chance.”
“You didn’t?”
She left the engine running but switched off the headlights.
Fathoms of fog pressed upon the car, so it seemed as though we rested on the floor of a sea.
“You were a twinge before you were a face,” Birdie said. “For all I knew, you’d be another Nancy with cancer or like a Bodi Booker makin’ hot cocoa for suicide.”
She waited for me to reply, so at last I said, “Ma’am, I think maybe the fog got in my head, because I can’t see any sense in what you just told me.”
“What I think,” she said, “you’re in worse trouble than just a Swithin flat busted from bad romance.”
THIRTY-TWO
BIRDIE HOPKINS TOOK OFF HER WHITE GLOVES. She slipped one over the gearshift knob and one over the turn-signal lever, so that the Cadillac seemed to be waving at me.
“Seventy-eight years old, still a hot flash now and then. But it’s not the slowest change of life in history. Been done with all that long ago. Has something to do with the twinges.”
From the large purse that stood on the seat between us, Birdie withdrew a Japanese fan, unfolded it, and fanned her plump face.
“Fred died, it started.”
“Seven years ago,” I said.
“Love somebody from when you’re nineteen, one day he’s the same as ever, next day dead. So many tears, they seem to wash somethin’ out of you, they leave this emptiness.”
“Loss is the hardest thing,” I said. “But it’s also the teacher that’s the most difficult to ignore.”
Her fanning hand went still. She regarded me with an expression that I took to be surprised agreement.
Because Birdie seemed to expect me to elucidate, I fumbled out what I thought she might want to say herself: “Grief can destroy you—or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. Or you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn’t allow yourself to consider the sacredness of it. But when it’s over and you’re alone, you begin to see it wasn’t just a movie and a dinner together, not just watching sunsets together, not just scrubbing a floor or washing dishes together or worrying over a high electric bill. It was everything, it was the why of life, every event and precious moment of it. The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can’t get off your knees for a long time, you’re driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss. And the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life.”
After a moment, she fanned her face again, and closed her eyes.
I gazed through the windshield at the desolation of fog, which might have been the waste and void from the time before time, when mankind did not exist or any beast, when there was only darkness on the face of the deep.
Birdie said, “What you said. All of it. Same for me. So one day my emptiness was filled. First twinge came. Tuesday afternoon in May, it was. Not a physical twinge. Just a feelin’, like why don’t I drive one of the old garbage-collection routes. Wound up at Nancy Coleman’s place, former employee of ours. Husband left her a year earlier. Four hours before I show up, she gets a cancer diagnosis. Scared, alone. That year, I drove her to chemo, doctors’ appointments, shoppin’ for a wig, spent so much time together, more laughin’ than either of us would have thought at the start.”
She closed the fan and returned it to her purse.
“Another time, I need to drive, wind up at Bodi Booker’s house. Insurance agent, lifelong bachelor. Says he’s busy, I talk my way in. He’s makin’ hot chocolate. So we start talkin’ Fred. He and my Fred were bowlin’-team buddies, went fishin’ like the son Fred and I never could have. Half an hour, he tells me the hot cocoa was to wash down a bottle of pills, to kill himself. Year later, Nancy Coleman doesn’t have can
cer anymore, she has Bodi, they married.”
She retrieved her white gloves and worked her hands into them.
“What about Swithin busted from bad romance?” I asked.
“Swithin Murdoch. Good man, made a fool of himself over this girl. Leanna cleaned out his bank accounts, took a powder. Swithin almost lost his house, business, the works. I made a loan, he paid it back. So why you, Harry Lime?”
“I think something bad would have happened to me at that storm drain if you hadn’t showed up.”
“Bad like what?”
Although her journey since Fred had shown her that under the apparent chaos of life lies a strange order, the truth of me would be more than she could absorb in the time that it would take her to drive the rest of the way to the harbor.
“I don’t know, ma’am. Just a feeling I have.”
She switched on the headlights and shifted the car out of park.
“For true, you don’t know?”
Whatever event had been pending at the storm-drain grate, it had been related to the peculiar behavior of the coyotes and to the porch swing that had swung itself. I did not understand what linked those three experiences, nor what power or purpose lay behind them, so I could answer honestly.
“For true,” I assured her. “How far to the harbor?”
Piloting the Cadillac back into the fog-flooded street, she said, “Three minutes, four.”
My wristwatch and her car clock agreed—9:59.
After a silence, Birdie said, “What’s so different about you, child?”
“I don’t know, ma’am. Maybe…because I spent seven months as a guest at a monastery. The serenity of the monks kind of rubbed off on me.”
“Nothin’ rubbed off. Your difference is all yours.”
Anything I could say would be a lie or an evasion, and because she had somehow saved me, I did not want to lie to her more than necessary.
Birdie said, “You sometimes sense somethin’ big is comin’?”
“Big like what?”
“So big the world changes.”
“Watching the news too much can make you crazy,” I advised.
“Don’t mean the kind of bushwa newsmen jabber. Not war or plague, not water gives you cancer or here comes a new ice age.”
“Then what kind of bushwa?” I asked.
“Some kind nobody would ever expect.”
I thought of the absolute whiteout through which the golden retriever and I had traveled, but if that had been not just weather but also a premonition, I did not know the meaning of it.
“I can’t have done right by you yet,” she said.
“I appreciate the ride.”
“Wasn’t twinged out of my cozy home just to be a taxi. What you need, child?”
“Nothing, ma’am. I’m good.”
“Place to stay?”
“Comes with my job. Nice ocean-view room.”
“Lawyer?”
“Have nothing against them, but I don’t need one.”
“Got a bad feelin’ for you.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“Some need you’ve got. I feel it.”
Considering Hoss Shackett and Utgard Rolf and the kind of men who would be aligned with them, I had a long list of things I needed, starting with a platoon of Marines.
“Money?” she asked.
“No, ma’am.”
Solemnly, quietly, she said, “Gun?”
I hesitated before I replied. “I don’t like guns.”
“Might not like them, but you need one.”
Sensing that I had said too much, I said no more.
“It’s in the purse,” she told me.
I looked at her, but she kept her attention on the street, where the headlights seemed to bake the batter of fog into a solid cake.
“Why would you have a gun?” I asked.
“Old lady in an ugly time—she has to take precautions.”
“You bought it legally?”
“I look like Clyde’s Bonnie to you?”
“No, ma’am. I just mean, anything I did with it would be traced back to you.”
“A few days, I report it stolen.”
“What if I rob a bank with it?”
“You won’t.”
“You can’t be sure. You hardly know me.”
“Child, have you been listenin’ to me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What was it with Nancy Coleman?”
“Well…she had cancer.”
“What was it with Bodi Booker?”
“Planning suicide.”
“Swithin Murdoch?”
“Flat busted from bad romance.”
“I could name more. None needed help robbin’ a bank. Just good people in trouble. You think I’ve gone to the dark side?”
“Not for a minute.”
“You’re good people in trouble. I trust you.”
“This is more than trust,” I said.
“It might be. Look in the purse.”
The weapon was a pistol. I examined it.
“No safeties,” she said. “Double action. Ten rounds in the magazine. You know how to use such a thing?”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m no Bonnie’s Clyde, but I won’t shoot my foot, either.”
I thought of Annamaria saying that she didn’t work, that people gave her a free place to live and even money when she needed it.
Now a gun came to me when I most needed one.
Something more was happening in Magic Beach than just a plot to smuggle nuclear weapons into the country and my attempt to thwart it.
This place was the still point of the turning world, and this night was the still point between the past and the future. I felt monumental forces gathering that I either could not comprehend or was afraid to contemplate.
My cursed life, my blessed life, my struggles with grievous loss and my striving toward wonder had often seemed to me to be the random path of a flippered pinball, from post to post and bell to bell and gate to gate, rolling wherever I might be knocked.
Instead, all the while, from childhood, I had been moving toward Magic Beach and toward a moment when, with full free will, I would either take upon myself a tremendous burden—or turn away from it. I did not know what the burden might prove to be, but I could feel the weight of it descending, and my moment of decision drawing near.
All things in their time.
Birdie Hopkins pulled the Cadillac to the curb and stopped once more.
Pointing, she said, “Harbor’s one block that way. Maybe you’d rather walk the last part to…whatever it is.”
“I’ll use the gun only to defend myself.”
“Thought different, I wouldn’t give it.”
“Or an innocent life.”
“Hush now. It’s like you said.”
“What did I say?”
“This is more than trust.”
The fog, the night, the future pressed at the windows.
“One more thing I might need.”
“Just say.”
“Do you have a cell phone?”
She took it from the purse, and I accepted it.
“When you’re safe,” she said, “will you let me know?”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you for everything.”
I started to open the door, then hesitated.
Unshed tears stood in Birdie’s eyes.
“Ma’am, I shined you on about something earlier. What you feel coming isn’t from watching the news too much.”
She bit her lower lip.
I said, “Something big is coming. I sense it, too. I think I’ve sensed it all my life.”
“What? Child, what is it?”
“I don’t know. So big the world changes—but like you said, some kind of change nobody would ever expect.”
“Sometimes I’m so afraid, mostly in the night, and Fred not here to talk me through to a quiet heart.”
“You don’t ever need to be afraid, Birdie Hopkins. Not a woman like you.
”
She reached out to me. I held her hand.
“Keep safe,” she said.
When she was ready to let go of my hand, I got out of the sedan and closed the door. I slid her cell phone into a pocket of my jeans, and I tucked the pistol in the waistband so that the sweatshirt would cover it.
As I walked to the corner, crossed the intersection, and headed toward the harbor, the big engine of the Cadillac idled in the night until I went too far to hear it anymore.
THIRTY-THREE
ALONG THE SOUTHERN HORN OF THE NARROW-MOUTHED bay, toward the seaward end, the vessels in the small commercial-fishing fleet tied up where they could come and go with the least disturbance to the bayside residents and to the noncommercial boat traffic.
Where I stood on the quay, along the crescent shore of the northern horn, I could not see those distant trawlers, seiners, and clippers through the thousand white veils of the night. From their direction, however, once every thirty seconds, came the low mournful bleat of the foghorn out on the southern arm of the harbor-entrance breakwater.
Here in the north, the marina offered protection from the storm surges that, in bad weather, muscled in through the entrance channel. Four hundred slips were occupied by a variety of pleasure craft: small electric-motor bay cruisers, sportfishers with metal lookout towers rising above their bridges, sailing yachts with canvas furled, motor yachts, and racing boats. The largest of these craft were sixty feet, and most were smaller.
As I descended a short flight of stairs from the sea wall to the wharf, I could see only a few of the closest craft through the soup. Even those appeared to be ghost vessels, moored in a dream.
Regularly spaced dock lamps receded into the mist, a necklace of radiant pearls, and under them the wet planks glistened darkly.
I remained alert for the sound of voices, for footsteps, but no one seemed to be out and about in the chilly mist.
Some of the sailing yachts were full-time residences. Their lighted portholes were as golden as scattered coins, faux doubloons that shimmered and, as I walked, paled away into the murk.
Avoiding the dock lamps was easy enough, for the feathered air constrained their reach. I made my way through shadows, my sneakers squishing so faintly on the wet planks that even I could barely hear the noise I made.