With one breath, with one flow
You will know synchronicity…
Joy smiled at the oldie but goodie and began to sing along.
A sleep trance, a dream dance,
A shared romance, synchronicity.
A connecting principle, linked to the invisible,
Almost imperceptible, something inexpressible…
She noticed in the distance a man with a suitcase walking along the side of the highway.
“Good luck, buddy,” she said.
As she drew closer a shock of recognition came to her face.
“Oh, no way…”
Joy slowed and squinted for a better look as she passed the man. Good Samaritan guy? She wavered, and then pulled over.
Murphy did not run up. He stopped walking and stood still.
Joy honked and waved to him to get in but Murphy ignored her. She honked again, but Murphy shook his head.
“Idiot,” Joy grumbled. She got out of the car and stomped towards Murphy, cars hurtling past her.
“What are you doing?” Joy scolded. “Don’t you know hitchhiking is illegal here?”
“I’m not hitchhiking. I’m walking.”
“You dummy, you can’t be doing that either. Come on, I’ll give you a lift.”
“But you just said it’s illegal.”
“Huh? Shut up and get in before the cops ticket us both!”
“I can’t.”
“What do you mean you can’t?” She looked around nervously, aware that the highway was well-patrolled. “Come on,” she commanded.
“It’s not safe.”
“What? And walking along the highway at night is? Hurry up. Let’s go.”
“Thank you for your concern, but I’d rather not.”
Joy stared nonplussed at Murphy, taken aback by his irrational stubbornness. In the distance she saw the whirling lights of a highway patrol car.
“Oh great, the cops.”
The police car drifted to the side of the road behind them and slowed to a stop. A highway patrolman got out and approached.
“Now look what you’ve done,” Joy hissed.
“What seems to be the matter here?” said the patrolman. His tone was all business.
“Nothing, Officer,” Joy replied sweetly. “We were just—”
The patrolman interrupted, saying to Murphy, “Hey, buddy, were you hitchhiking?”
“No, Sir. I was—”
“Retrieving his suitcase,” Joy interjected. “My brother accidentally dropped it out of the car and—”
“Dropped it out of the car?” The patrolman repeated, noting the suitcase’s mint condition.
Picking up on the officer’s incredulity, and hoping to divert his suspicions, Joy put her hand to the side of her mouth and said, “My brother is kinda, you know…?”
The patrolman sized up Murphy. “Retarded?”
Joy set her hands on her hips and said indignantly, “We say mentally challenged today, Sir.”
“ID, please.”
“It’s in my purse.”
“I’ll wait.” He turned to Murphy. “You too, sir.”
“I don’t drive. And I don’t have—”
Then his murphometer went off. Murphy spun spasmodically, looking for incoming trouble. “I think we had all better be going now,” he said with urgency. He pointed towards the oncoming traffic.
Joy and the cop turned to look but everything appeared normal, just the usual unending stream of cars and trucks. Joy shrugged to the officer in confirmation of Murphy’s imbecility. “See what I mean?”
They didn’t know that half a mile up the highway, an old pickup truck with a cargo of tied-down furnishings was barreling their way; nor that one of the ropes battening down the load had suddenly worked loose.
Murphy threw Joy over his shoulder, grabbed his suitcase, and made a mad dash for safety.
“Hey you!” shouted the patrolman. The officer was about to lay chase when he heard blaring horns and the frightening sound of squealing brakes and skidding tires.
A moment earlier, an avalanche of junk had gone tumbling from the back of the old pickup truck. A tumult followed as cars swerved recklessly to avoid the bouncing jumble of obstacles.
An out-of-control sports car shot twirling directly for the patrolman, who dove for cover. Another car, a black stretch limousine transporting a cadre of cocaine-snorting celebrities, slammed into the side rear of the police car—bang! The limo spun 360º and halted conked out in the middle of the highway, blocking all on-coming traffic.
Joy, now on her feet, observed with dismay the unfolding havoc. Thinking fast, she grabbed Murphy’s hand, and under the cover of confusion, ran towards her car, dragging Murphy behind her. She ordered him to get in, and then peeled away from the gathering maelstrom.
A safe mile down the highway and clear of debris, Joy said, “Boy, that was close!” The highway traffic was already backing up. She turned to Murphy, who looked very nervous. “Relax. I think we’re okay.”
Murphy ignored her. His attention had turned to the snazzy interior of Joy’s car.
“You act as though you’ve never been in a car before.”
“Not that I can remember, anyway.”
“Get out of here,” Joy snorted.
“I’d like to, really.”
“What is with you?”
“Ma’am?” Murphy said, not understanding her remark.
“And how do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“You’ve saved me three times now.”
Murphy moaned and looked around for wood to tap. The car’s interior was all leather and chrome, and so he settled for a map sticking up from a side pocket in the door. He sent out his senses for incoming trouble. They returned empty-handed. He was grateful and a bit surprised.
“See, you’re doing it again. Is something wrong?”
“Always,” he replied.
“A real pessimist, aren’t you? Come on, is the glass half empty or half full?”
“It depends how thirsty you are, I suppose,” Murphy answered ingenuously.
Joy chuckled. “Touché. So if you’re not a pessimist and you’re not an optimist, then what are you? And don’t say ‘realist’ because everyone thinks they’re a realist, and if everyone were, then we’d all agree on everything, and we most definitely do not.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’m in no position to pronounce judgment on something so mystifying as the ways of the universe. For me, everything is a coincidence.”
“You believe that everything happens by coincidence?”
“No, ma’am. But coincidences happen to everybody. Don’t ask me to explain it because I can’t.”
“Like me meeting you?” she asked.
“Probably…”
“Have you ever read Carl Jung?”
Murphy quoted, “In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.”
Impressed that Murphy would know such a thing, she said, “And you believe that?”
“I have to.”
Joy eyed Murphy thoughtfully, intrigued by the odd stranger. She said with nostalgia in her voice, “I love coincidences. They used to happen to me all the time, you know? When I was young and romantic and believed that anything was possible, I kept a journal devoted solely to coincidences.” She chuckled. “I even had a system for rating them, if you can believe that. Silly ones I gave one star, those that seemed particularly interesting I gave two stars, and those that I felt were really amazing or meaningful, I gave three stars. It was fun.”
She looked at Murphy and smiled, but his eyes were fixed on the road ahead.
Joy turned reflective and added, “But somewhere along the line the coincidences started drying up, and now I rarely seem to have one. But you know what I remember most about that journal?”
Murphy said, “The more you thought about coincidences the more you had.”
“Yes! How did you know? Do you keep such a journal?”
> “No, ma’am. If I did I’d have no time to do anything else.”
Joy squinted at Murphy, uncertain whether he was joking. “You certainly walk to the beat of a different drummer, Mr…?”
“Drummer. Murphy Drummer.” He smiled weakly. “How many stars is that?”
Joy gave him a playful shove. “Get out of here!”
“What do you think I’m trying to do?”
“Make fun of me maybe?”
“I’m Murphy Drummer all right, and you see, you’re not as jaded as you think you are.”
“I never said that,” Joy retorted.
“You said the coincidences dried up, didn’t you?”
“Well, yeah. So?”
“They didn’t. You just stopped believing that they were important.”
Joy turned pensive. “So what are they, coincidences?”
“I don’t know. A little stardust caught. A fallen feather from an angel’s wing. A few notes from the cosmic Aeolian harp. Maybe.”
Joy regarded Murphy with curiosity.
Murphy reached into his pocket and pulled out a white rabbit’s foot key chain. He hung it on the rearview mirror.
“White matches the color of your car,” he said.
Joys stroked its soft pelt, smiled at Murphy, and said, “It didn’t work so well for the rabbit, did it?”
Murphy blanched. “I-I never thought of that.”
Joy laughed. “Don’t worry, I’m sure it’s fake. So tell me, where am I taking you?”
“Right here will be fine.”
“Don’t start with me, Drummer. Where are you going?”
“I’d rather not say, but it’s far from…here.”
“And you were going to walk?”
Murphy shrugged.
“It’s late and you don’t have a place to stay, do you?”
“I don’t mind.”
Joy looked at the rabbit’s foot. Oddly, the trinket had the effect of allaying any apprehension she was feeling about the stranger.
“You can crash at my place tonight,” she said.
“Crash…?”
“I have a nice sofa. Tomorrow I’ll put you on a bus and—”
“I really don’t think—”
“You worry too much, Murphy Drummer, you know that?”
Murphy shook his head. “I worry that I don’t worry nearly enough, ma’am.”
Fool’s Errand
Brock Parker and his partner, Detective Blake Johnson, got out of Johnson’s car, and flashlights in hand, walked towards an alley. Evening fell quickly on the alley, and the low wattage yellow bulbs at the back of the stores were already smearing their flaxen luminescence across its cracked, greasy asphalt.
Johnson was thirty-four and tall, and thanks to four days a week at the gym, he maintained the athletic body of his days as a college baseball slugger. He wore his longish, golden-blond hair parted in the middle, and dressed with the air of someone who spent a good portion of his salary on the cultivation of his image.
“Listen,” Johnson said. “I love Joy more than my own rotten sister, but let’s face it, she can be a bit of a flake, ya know? Is she on her period?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t know?” Johnson said, incredulous. “Parker, you’ve got to keep track of these things. Women aren’t nearly as mysterious as they’re made out to be. Understand a woman’s physiology and you understand their neuroses. In a day or two she’ll be acting like nothin’ happened, trust me.”
“No, this time it’s something else,” Parker said. “I thought maybe it’s because I haven’t made much progress finding a job with another department, but she said that’s not it.”
“She has it good here. Why would she want to leave?”
“I don’t know, the granola in her brains, I guess. She wants a slower pace, more nature, clean air, fewer people. Crap like that. Do you think there could be another guy?”
“Do you have reason to think so?”
“No, but if you ever suspected such a thing, you’d let me know, right?”
“After I kicked his ass,” Johnson said. “But I’m telling you, man, it’s chemistry. Hormones, pheromones, estrogen, testosterone—that’s what makes us tick. Love, romance—all chemical and biological.”
“A real romantic, aren’t you, Johnson?”
“Hey, we’ve been partners for five years. Have you ever known me to pass a weekend without a date? Nuh-uh. I know what buttons women like pushed.”
“Buttons, huh? What do you date, Johnson? Robots? Or maybe Internet avatars? I’ll take your advice after I actually meet one of your dates.”
“Suit yourself,” Johnson said as they arrived at the alley’s entrance.
“All right,” Parker said, returning to the business at hand. “When the perp ran out of the bank, we know he came through here.”
“And the cops didn’t find a damn thing.”
“Including these guys,” Parker said. He passed the beam of his flashlight side to side down the alley where a pack of homeless people were hanging out ten feet from a green, smelly industrial trash container. “They probably scattered at the sound of the sirens. Come on.”
Parker and Johnson proceeded down the alley and approached two homeless guys sitting on the back stoop of one of the businesses that lined the lane. Curled at the feet of one of the men was a little white dog, part terrier, part something, Brock guessed. The dog leaped up and let out two perfunctory yaps.
The detectives flashed their torches onto their badges.
Knowing the routine, the homeless guys stood and began gathering their things, expecting to be shooed away. The owner of the dog picked up a stick with a hobo’s sack at the end.
Parker said to the men, “It’s cool. We just want to ask you a few questions.”
Johnson said, “Yesterday at 3:10 in the afternoon a bank around the corner was robbed.”
One of the homeless men, a short, raw-boned fellow with an unkempt beard and navy tattoos on his forearms said, “Hey, man, you think if we robbed a bank we’d be hanging out in a stinking alley?”
“Relax,” Parker said. “No one is accusing you of anything. We just want to know if you saw anyone running through this alley around that time.”
“What’s in it for us?” asked the man with the dog.
Johnson said, “Make us ask you again and—”
Parker put a calming hand on Johnson’s shoulder and pulled out a bag from his trench coat. He held it up and said, “Donuts.”
Having gotten a whiff of the recently baked donuts the dog started yipping and gamboling around Brock’s feet.
“I saw somethin’,” the dog owner said. He stretched out his arm for the donut bag, but Parker pulled the bag out of reach.
“You’ve got to do better than that, friend.”
“Hold this,” the man said. He handed Parker his hobo stick and then started patting all his pockets, searching for something.
Parker balanced the stick naturally over his shoulder as the little white dog continued to dance at his feet.
Johnson found the sight comical. “Look at you,” he laughed. “Hold on.” He pulled out his iPhone and snapped a picture. He showed it to Parker.
Upon seeing himself with the hobo stick and gamboling white dog, Brock Parker flashed back to The Fool card that the tarot lady had given him. He pulled the card from a pocket in his duster coat and examined it again. The Fool wore a feathered cap and held over his shoulder a stick with satchel as a little white dog frolicked at his feet. In the card, The Fool was about to walk heedlessly off a cliff.
The dog continued to yap and dance in anticipation of a donut.
“Cliff!” ordered the homeless man. “Bad doggy.”
“Cliff?” Parker repeated.
The homeless man found what he was looking for and pulled out a red ski cap. “The guy dropped this,” he said. “Keep it. I think it would look better on you than me anyway.”
The man slapped the cap against his
thigh, releasing a cloud of dust. A feather escaped from the cloud and floated upwards where it hung teasingly before Parker’s nose. The vagrant offered Parker the cap.
Parker, his eye on the hovering feather, absently traded the donuts for the cap.
The man tore open the bag and plunged in his hand. He gave a donut to his homeless pal and another to Cliff the dog.
“What else can you tell us?” Johnson asked.
The second homeless guy said with a full mouth, “Nothin’. The guy was in and out like the wind. Talk to them.” He pointed towards a couple of frightfully uncomely bag ladies who were looking on and ogling the donuts. “I think they got a better look than we did.”
Johnson said to Parker, “Come on,” and headed towards the women.
Parker lingered behind, transfixed by the sight of the two frowsy bag ladies. A shiver of horror and paranoia had overcome him. He remembered the tarot reader’s words: The next single woman you hold converse with will be the woman you marry.
The bag ladies licked their lips in anticipation of the coming donuts, but to Parker’s skittish imagination they were seductively eying him like streetwalkers way past their prime. Parker winced and a wave of heebie-jeebies shimmied down his spine.
Johnson said, “Hope you got more donu—” He turned and saw that Parker hadn’t moved a muscle. “Yo,” he called back. “What’s up? Let’s go.”
Parker said, “You go…push their buttons. I got a few more questions here.” He tossed Johnson another bag of donuts and turned away before Johnson could protest. He casually loitered out of earshot from Johnson, his cell phone at his ear.
“Joy, I know you’re there. I just want to talk, that’s all. Even a word…” He turned to check on Johnson. Johnson was watching him, shaking his head in disappointment. Brock gave him his back. “Please, Joy. You got me worried. Just call me to let me know you’re all right, okay?”
Barbaric Yawp
Joy and Murphy entered Joy’s dark apartment, and with the flick of a switch the room burst into a supernova of light.
Murphy’s Luck Page 6