Planet Willie
by Josh Shoemake
www.joshshoemake.com
An Opium Book
www.opiumbooks.com
Planet Willie
Copyright © 2013 by Josh Shoemake
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from the author.
ISBN-13: 978-1490334431
ISBN-10: 1490334432
Opium Books
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E-mail: [email protected]
Twitter: @opiumbooks
“In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.”
- George Bernard Shaw
1
In my earthly experience, when you see her across that crowded room, you’re better off just heading right over and hitting her with a little Mister Friedrich Nietzsche, as in when nothing matters, everything is permitted, specifically you and me. As in this blonde I’m contemplating in the Rancho Notorious who’s got me feeling philosophical. I give her a little look quite popular among the ladies that goes by the name of the Duke of Love. Sort of raise an eyebrow, stroke the chin a bit, and let her draw her own conclusions, which if experience has taught me anything will tend towards Italian palazzos and horse rides through the family acres. This combined with a little philosophy will generally get her pining, but the lady in question just looks off towards the jukebox and rolls those pretty blue eyes clear to Tokyo and back. So I buy her a drink on my tab, she wants another, and soon enough we’re hunched over the facilities in the ladies restroom trying to keep that blonde hair out of her face as it all comes back up again. Then there’s a vague memory of me driving her around to her sister’s house, where she’s crashing for the night, and I do mean crashing, and her saying to me, “This is so my life,” which are more or less my thoughts exactly when I wake the next morning in the backseat of my truck with a hangover the size of Japan, assuming you go ahead and count all of Asia.
The good news, I’m thinking as a hyperactive early bird pecks at the windshield, is that after being abandoned for three months out behind the dumpsters of the Rancho Notorious, the old truck still responds to my sensitive touch. The bad news is that I can’t seem to learn that you don’t spend more than four seconds in the Notorious if you can help it, particularly when you consider that it was beside the sloping pool table of that fine establishment where some misguided stranger put a bullet through the back of my pretty head – four years, eight months, and fifteen days ago. I may as well get this out of the way since you’ll likely be wondering. So the other bad news? I’m dead. Fortunately there’s more good news too, in that some of your steelier angels, a category that may honestly include only me, will zip down every once and a while to inhabit the bodies that were woefully lost to them, specifically those detectives in the Paradise Police Department, Lost Souls Division. We are an elite unit of highly bored individuals. We sit around decorating clouds until some urgent prayer comes into the switchboard, and then if you’re lucky and have miraculously avoided offending the delicate sensibilities of one of the higher-ups, Saint Chief Mahoney might send you down to investigate.
“We got another one down in South Texas, Willie,” he growled as I stepped into his office, which I guess was only yesterday. Saint Chief’s been in a bad mood ever since he smoked his last cigar twenty years ago and proceeded to kick the bucket. “Belinda’s obviously the better detective, but I’ve already got her down in San Antonio chasing that repentant alcoholic, so I got no choice. You’re going down.”
“Your confidence in me is a daily inspiration, Saint Chief,” I said. “I can say with almost total sincerity that you make me want to be a better angel.”
“Cut the crap, Lee. The supplicant’s name is Harry Shore. Elder at Saint Pete’s in Galveston. They just named the new Sunday School wing after him, and no, I’m not commenting on that. Apparently his daughter has lost her way. Of the seven deadlies, principally greed and lust. The prayer came in a few days ago, urgent. So you just go down, find her, and put her back on the straight and narrow, and then we pull you right out. No doodling, for Chrissake. I’m warning you.”
“Understood, Saint Chief,” I replied with a crisp little salute. My heart would have been pounding with excitement if I’d had an actual beating heart, but then mister I’d feel that heart beating soon enough. It was about time. I’d been on a cloud for a while after an unexpectedly complex case involving an obstreperous Biloxi chorus girl with an unseemly boot fetish, and I couldn’t wait to get back in action, especially on my home turf, where I might also get a little closer to unraveling the mystery of what misguided soul could have possibly seen fit to put a bullet in me. Also, the name of this Shore was ringing some distant earthly bell. Hell, I was already doing a little steely detecting from the clouds.
“What’s my cover?” I asked, which is the first question you ask, since as far as anybody really knows, we don’t exist. You can’t exactly tell them straight out you’re an angel, although don’t think I haven’t tried on probably too many occasions, with mixed results in the romance department. Unfortunately they don’t give you superpowers to make the ladies reconsider.
“He’s been given a sign to call a detective. We’re keeping it just that simple this time in the hopes that you won’t screw another one up. No doodling, Lee, or you won’t see another chance for eternity. Now get out of here before I change my mind. We incarnate you in an hour.”
On most jobs I like to take on an earthly persona that allows me to flex a few dramatic muscles, but detective suited me just fine, since I’d done a little moonlighting as one in my breathing days and knew the lines. So I skipped right out of there before Saint Chief could reconsider the wisdom of setting me loose on the planet. Figured I might get in a little siesta since incarnation tends to be exhausting and I had every intention of commencing investigations as soon as my feet were back on solid ground, specifically with a cogitative little drink or three. You probably don’t need to be told that there’s no bourbon in heaven. What’s more astonishing to me is that with all the recent advances in modern technology, they still haven’t figured out a better way to do these incarnations. With all the people they’ve got sitting around doing absolutely nothing, you’d think they’d put a few of the brighter ones on the problem. Angels are generally lazy, however, and they are without a doubt the most bureaucratic crowd I’ve ever encountered, particularly over in logistics. They’re still using a system they put into place about the time I was born back in 1966, and this system only allows them to incarnate you in the place you left your mortal body, which means I only tend to get cases in South Texas, and which also explains why I keep finding myself in the Rancho Notorious. Fortunately you also appear wearing the clothes in which you said adios, which explains the hand-tooled boots.
God knows it’s all pretty frustrating for us detectives, but to be perfectly honest, God doesn’t know. Don’t get me wrong: I love God. Let me just say that right up front. He means well, and he’s never been anything but a perfect gentleman to me, but his all-knowingness apparently doesn’t extend to his inner circle, who are the biggest band of con artists, crooks, loafs, and liars you’ve ever met. Suffice it to say that I’m more or less a hallelujah incarnate whenever they let me out.
So I’m getting reacquainted with the pleasures of ham and eggs over at Luby’s diner when the pay phone starts ringing over by the pinball machine, and I know it’s for me. I take a deep breath and poke a finger to my forehead to see if my reacquired skull is still wrapped around my reacquired brain. You’d like to think there’s a hair of the dog for this level of hangover, but I’d need all the 101 Dalm
atians plus that lady they run around with to make this one right. Fortunately grace under pressure may as well be tattooed on my hindquarters, so I steel the body and stride over to pick up the phone. Luby sees me bopping along and gives me a little wink, if I’m not mistaken, which I slip into my mental case file for further investigation once I’ve dealt with this elder.
Honestly there’s more on my mind than Luby as I walk across that diner floor. Four years, eight months, and fifteen days ago somebody wanted me dead, and nobody around here realizes that his bullet did the trick. Sure, they know about the shooting, but then I vanished, and they just figured I’d holed up somewhere to nurse the wounds. Now I just disappear a little more often than I used to, for longer periods of time – nothing too unusual in that when you consider it’s yours truly. Needless to say, the police never caught the guy. All I remember is a pink paisley shirt out the corner of my eye just before I felt the pain. So it’s always a little nerve-racking walking around my hometown again. I’m always keeping an eye out for pink paisley or suspicious men, because you’ve got to figure that if he wanted me dead almost five years ago, he probably wants me doubly dead today. “What happens if a detective gets shot in the course of an investigation?” I once asked Saint Chief back in the early days. “Is there like some other heaven for angels misfortunate enough to get themselves killed twice.”
“We pull you out,” Saint Chief answered with a smirk. “You’re off the case, that’s all. Don’t get shot.” Which honestly may be the only piece of sound advice I’ve ever gotten from Saint Chief.
At the pay phone the caller introduces himself as Harry Shore, and he wants the detective. I’m standing there thinking I should get a little office for the duration of the case, maybe a perky secretary who makes the coffee just right, but he’s telling me he wants me over at the house in Galveston immediately, which unfortunately won’t exactly give me time to interview perky candidates. I tell him I can be there in about forty-five minutes and hang up, wondering how I’ll break it to Luby.
Harry Shore. That name’s still distantly ringing as I freshen up in the toilet. I’m having a look at the whole earthly ensemble in the broken mirror above the sink, and although gorgeous may be too strong a word this time of morning, you can’t deny the charm. Pretty good for a dead man approaching fifty, although I think it’s only fair to count the years lived, so I tend to put it at forty six. Hell, pretty good even for Mister Cary Grant, although the suit, as slick as it is, could use a bit of attention. Full head of dark hair, though, lent a certain elegance by some touches of gray. Tough face – damn, that’s a tough face. Quite a package overall – big and smooth as a Cadillac, horsepower coming out my ears. Unfortunately I myself am driving a used truck, and used is putting it mildly, but she does manage to get up to almost fifty five out on Las Colinas Boulevard, which I take as a good sign for the day to come. Cruising along at fifty-three, you can just about leave that hangover in the dust.
The Gulf of Mexico comes into sight, and that’s when it finally hits me: Harry Shore. About five years back, due to unforeseen circumstances, which tend to be the kind of circumstances I encounter, I found myself cleaning his Olympic swimming pool under the employ of a crew of Mexican landscapers. Supplementing the income, so to speak. I’d been vacuuming the bottom and skimming leaves all morning while the foreman edged around it for the sheer pleasure of watching me fish out grass. By lunchtime I was feeling so ornery I figured I’d take me a swim, and when I surfaced I was unemployed. Cause and effect. Anyway, this Harry Shore had been sitting out on the porch supervising operations like a marine commander and saw the whole scene unfold. He was about seventy, with grey hair trimmed to his scalp, a hard face that could express without moving his displeasure with a weed, and the torso of a boxer bulging out of a black t-shirt. Also, he was in a wheelchair, his legs no bigger around than sticks.
I remember the foreman was real pleased to inform Mister Shore how I was fired and now officially trespassing. Shore looked over from the porch with his hard, weed-hating eyes and boomed out some scripture: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Then he waved me over in my dripping underwear for a glass of lemonade and proceeded to ask if maybe we’d met somewhere before.
This was around the time I’d been doing some private investigation, principally of my ex-wife Caroline and the Galveston contractor she’d married, which more or less meant watching their house from my truck and wondering what she could possibly see in a dud like him. She’d said she wanted a life, and that Richard could give her one, but I failed to see how I’d given her anything but unvarnished life times about a million. What I guess she really wanted was the varnish. It was eating at me then, and sometimes it still eats at me now, so don’t imagine that heaven lets you forget. No, brother, you just brood for eternity on the ones who got away, such that sometimes I can’t imagine hell could be any worse.
Honestly I don’t know what I was hoping for out there on the streets of those toney neighborhoods, actually not so far from Shore’s place. Partly I didn’t exactly have any other cases to distract me at the time, so Caroline was the mystery I was hoping to solve, doing more or less what I did on any case: sitting around in a truck or a bar somewhere waiting for something to happen, waiting for some slight change in the atmosphere that would tell me what I needed to know. It’s like that Japanese Noh theater I once saw on a television program. These Japanese men dress up like women, paint their faces white and stand for hours like statues in front of packed crowds. Then every once in a while one of these guys will turn up his wrist, or maybe blink, and the crowd, man, they’re just devastated.
High drama. That’s my style. I spend my days waiting for Japanese men in dresses to blink, because it’s the blink that gets me too, just like those packed houses in Kyoto or wherever. And these days when I get involved in a case, saving the soul itself honestly never proves too interesting in the end. It’s the little details that intrigue, so to speak. The details are where God is, as many wise thinkers have said, and I wholly share the sentiment, even if that’s obviously not where he is at all.
Mister Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great Austrian philosopher, sums up my feelings on detecting even better. In my last years on earth I became a fan of philosophy, and I try to squeeze in a bit of self-improvement whenever I’m down, since of course nobody has need for books up in heaven. Anyway, the Wondrous Witt has this example that I like about a bug in a box. He imagines that everybody in the world has their own little box, and that everybody has a bug in his box. Nobody can see into anybody else’s box, so when people say, “I have a bug in my box,” they could be talking about ants or spiders, or even a candlestick or a chocolate éclair. People can spend whole lifetimes talking about the bug in their box, and other people can talk back saying, “Yeah, I agree, my bug’s just like that,” or, “You’re crazy, mister, and you clearly don’t understand a thing about bugs.” Or people can say, “Your bug is a lowdown, no-good bug,” while other ones say, “Bugs just don’t have the same sense of morals anymore.” And odds are, they’re talking about totally different things, and I mean extremely different things. So that’s my job too, other than watching Japanese men in dresses. The way I see it, a soul is a complex apparatus influenced by many mysterious factors, and so when you’re on a case, your job is to get the bugs of everybody involved out of their boxes. Then when people talk about bugs, they’ll know exactly what they’re talking about. Maybe everybody understands each other a little better after that.
In any case, five years ago I’d realized that I had never had any idea what was in my ex-wife’s box, but as Harry Shore sat there in his wheelchair sizing me up in my dripping underwear, he had an idea of what was in mine. “Aren’t you that fella who was married to Caroline Susan?”
I nodded and took a sip of lemonade. The punch line here, as far as I’m concerned, is that Richard’s last name is actually Susan.
“I’ve heard about you. Unbelievable what yo
u put that woman through. Can’t imagine what a pretty Christian girl like that saw in you in the first place. To tell you the truth, can’t imagine what she sees in Richard either, and I sit on a few committees with him at the church.” At this I did a little more sipping in my underwear, feeling more or less like high nobility for refraining from mentioning that this pretty Christian girl, who from what I’d heard was now attending three services a week, had once been the hottest piece in all of South Texas.
“I guess she loves him,” I said real cool.
“Him and his money,” Shore said with a dry laugh. “And I can’t say that I blame her.” Which was about all I needed to hear that day, so I put on my boots and left with the bitter taste of lemons in my mouth.
Now up above the coast the Gulf of Mexico, where Harry Shore still lives, the seagulls are diving like kamikazes to see what they can find for breakfast. The wind is up, and I can hear waves crashing on the beach in the distance as I pull into the driveway. The house is a single-story ranch, well-suited for a man in a wheelchair. Split-levels, I believe they’re called, and Shore’s house has got more levels than you’d want to count.
I ring at the front door, Shore opens it quick and attempts to break my hand by shaking it. That’s his right hand. In his left he’s got one of those foam grip-builders and is murdering it with every tick of the grandfather clock there in the entryway. He’s dressed in black as he was five years ago and looks into me with sharp blue eyes, like he’s trying to see if I’ve got what it takes. After a moment or two he apparently finds what he wants. Sex appeal, simple charm – it’s hard to put it into words. Shore shifts his eyes down to my belly and asks when I last did anything resembling a sit-up. I tell him I try to get in fifty daily, he tells me that’s not cutting it. I refrain from mentioning that since you’ve got no use for a body up in heaven, you admittedly tend to let it go, and I make a mental note to do a few calisthenics at the first opportunity, maybe a bit of concentrated deep breathing for the general circulation.
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