“You deserve to know,” he told her at last. “I’ll do what I can.”
She nodded, and started asking him about the radio show, so he entertained her with anecdotes until the food came. He didn’t mention Elvis. It wasn’t nice to make fun of the dead, only of the living. But maybe Elvis was a little of both.
The food was hot, heavy, and delicious.
“I’m amazed that tourists eat up this old-style Polish stuff,” Matt commented after sampling the beets and dumplings.
“Ethnic is in. Speaking Polish actually comes in handy here. Too bad you and your cousins never learned anything but silly phrases.”
“We wanted to be mistaken for a more upscale group than the Poles,” Matt said. “The Irish.”
“Those Irish! They’ve got Chicago in their back pockets, that’s for sure, but they had a rougher time than the Poles a couple generations earlier. I imagine you worked with a lot of Irish priests.”
“That I did,” Matt said in a faint brogue, “and nuns too.”
“Now, that’s another thing! The nuns are literally dying out. Sometimes I don’t recognize this world.”
“And sometimes,” Matt reminded her gently, “we should be glad we don’t.”
She winced slightly as she nodded. They would never discuss her disastrous marriage with Cliff Effinger. Unlike the mixed feelings Matt still had about his childhood house, his feelings toward Effinger had evaporated after his successful search for the man. He had been like a devil who could be exorcized.
A house, though, being inanimate—being transcendent, as places always are—was an anonymous witness to the past with all its pain and survival. It was a shell you left behind as you moved on, and with it a record of how you’d grown.
He’d ask Krys, privately, to take some photos of the place.
Their plates were already cleared away when his mother looked up, beaming.
“Just in time for dessert! Krys!” She half stood to wave.
Matt felt a foreign pang, astounded to recognize it as a flutter of jealousy, a usually alien emotion.
Krys, his just-twenty cousin, came charging across the restaurant, booted to the knee, skirted to mid-thigh, her bare knees windburned in between, her spiky punk haircut grown out to shoulder-brushing Botticelli Venus tendrils, and her cheeks flushed with cold and probably a post-class beer or two.
Trailing her was loping young guy with hair half-shaved and half-moussed, wearing weathered jeans, a battered black leather jacket and a plaid flannel shirt so out it was in.
“Sit down,” his mother half ordered, half invited, like the hostess she was. “Doesn’t Matt look good?” So much for him looking tired.
“Yeah.” Krys flashed him a nod of intense recognition. “This is Zeke. He’s a sculpture major.”
“What do you sculpt, Zeke?” his mother asked politely. “I’ve been doing some clay models and it’s really fun.”
“Body parts. Out of rusted automobile pieces. It’s a statement.”
“You mean…auto body parts?” She was trying to comprehend.
“Naw. Body parts. Like hands. Hips. Boobs.”
Matt’s mother glanced quickly at Krys. Whose body parts, she wanted to ask, but knew better not to.
Probably his girlfriend’s, Mother, Matt wanted to answer the unspoken speculation. It’s a stage.
Krys was rearranging her silverware after shrugging out of a heavy wool jacket. “Your mother’s been taking some adult-ed art classes, and she’s really good.”
“I’m not surprised,” Matt said.
“Are you taking the drawing-from-life class, Mira?” Krys asked.
“Not this semester,” his mother answered blushing at the idea of sketching nude models. “I don’t have time with the new job.”
Zeke looked up at Matt from the menus a waiter had delivered to all four of them. “Krys says you used to be a priest. Like a Catholic priest. You sure don’t look like it.”
Matt detected a smidge of antagonism. “Sorry about that. Maybe I should get some bifocals or something.”
“No, man. I mean, wasn’t it heavy telling people what to do?”
“Priests don’t tell anyone what to do. They just try to ask more pointed questions about life, God, the universe and all that than we ordinarily do.”
Krys hissed her impatience. “Cruise for calories, Zeke. They have some wild desserts here. Matt wasn’t that kind of know-it-all priest, anyway.”
“How do you know?” he asked.
“I just do.” Her eyes fell to the menu. “I’m going to have the plum dumplings. Anyone want to share?”
Zeke made a discreet retching sound. His mother raised her eyebrows, then frowned across the room. “One of my best customers just came in. I’d better seat him personally. Matt, order me a sherbet, please.”
Stingers and sherbet? His mother was evolving all right.
Matt watched her rise and head for a steel-gray-haired man in a cashmere camel-hair coat.
Zeke announced, “I gotta split for the little boys’s room,” then lurched up and off.
“Have we been…deserted?,” Matt asked Krys.
She looked at him, blinked, then laughed. “‘Deserted’? Did you say it! Zeke can be such a dork, but he’s all right, really.”
“Glad to hear it, but I didn’t need to know it.”
“Not interested in my boyfriends? I’m crushed.”
“You don’t look crushable.”
In fact, Krys looked just like his mother. Like a new woman since Christmas. Only she was a new young woman.
He watched his mother guide her charge to a table for one against the wall. Was she flirting with the old geezer?
“She’s doing fine,” Krys said suddenly. “Took to the new job like Cinderella to a glass slipper. Mira was like some new kid at school, all awkward and apologizing, but I’ve got her thinking like a Chicago girl now.”
“I bet you have.” Matt put his attention where she wanted it: on her. “You seem a lot happier than at Christmas. Can I credit the avant-garde Zeke?”
“Oh, he’s okay, really. Underneath it all. Young guys aren’t worth much these days, but they’re all I have at my age.”
“They grow out of it.”
“That’s why I put in the time. Besides, I need an ally against my family, and you’re not here.”
“I was only here for a couple of days before.”
“Seemed longer.” She smiled at him, fairly tremulously for a Chicago girl. He glimpsed the pressured teenager from Christmas ready to commit crushes with an older cousin she’d never seen before. She’d been unhappy about her family not allowing her to go to art school in California, but settling for art school in Chicago had done her good, despite Zeke, and in Matt’s absence, she’d taken his mother under her wing.
They were good for each other, the older and younger woman. Matt suddenly understood that spasm of jealousy. Krys was having the kind of almost-adult relationship with his mother that he never would have. Or maybe he would someday, thanks to Krys. So get over it.
“You’ve done so much for my mother, Krys. Thanks.”
“Oh, she needed some prodding to get out of the old ruts. And it’s not for charity. She backs me up with my folks about art school.”
“And about Zeke?”
“No. Nobody would back me up about Zeke.”
“Then I will.”
“You that eager to get rid of me?”
“I don’t think I ever had you.”
“Oh, yes, you did.” She tossed her tangled locks. “But I was an impressionable kid then. Thanks for being nice to me, though.”
“Not hard. So do you think…Mira will go for the life drawing class?”
“Maybe. In a couple of years. She’s got quite a flair for color and line. You should see if you’ve inherited an artistic streak.”
“Not me.”
She glanced at his jacket. “Maybe the girlfriend who picked out your jacket is the artist.”
“Maybe.”
Krys’s fingers flicked across his sleeve. “Nice. She is still your girlfriend?”
“Friend.”
“Still?”
“Still.” He felt the hesitation flicker over his face. Dare he be friends with anyone, any woman, with Kitty O’Connor hovering in the wings? And was he right to feel safe here? What about Temple back in Vegas? Kitty the Cutter might be angry he’d slipped her leash. She might decide to teach him a lesson, and no one was nearer at hand for that than Temple….
Krys’s smile was probing, hopeful. “You don’t look so sure.”
He threw lame excuses, flailing to get back in the here and now. “I work midnights. I travel a lot. Hard to keep up friendships.”
“Poor guy. If you’re ever in Chicago on short notice—”
“I’ll let my mother know. That new apartment your idea? Like the job?”
“She needed to escape the family thumb, like me. It’s handy to have a chaperon sometimes, you know?”
He nodded.
“And sometimes not.” Krys nodded toward the end of the room.
His mother and Zeke had intersected on their way back to the table. His mother was obviously asking Zeke a few too many questions.
“Looks like you two will look out for each other.”
“Yeah. It’s cool. She’s not my mother, and she’s not my generation. But in some ways, she’s almost my age. It’s like she didn’t live twenty years of her life. I’m dragging her kicking and screaming back into her twenties.”
Matt smiled. Mira and Zeke were bearing down on them, and Mira was dusting off the shoulders of Zeke’s carefully battered jacket.
Chapter 27
Cousins Under the Skin
A long, long time later, the vehicle jolts its last jolt and comes to a stop.
This hurls us hitchhikers against assorted meat patties, but by then we are not feeling much.
I force myself to my feet (apparently my toes have chilled to the point of numbness) and stumble over to rouse the Yorkies.
“Up and at ’em, bowheads! We need to be lurking near the doors so we can scram when we have to.”
“Scram?” cries Golda’s faint, squeaky voice from behind a leg of lamb. “I can barely stagger.”
“There will not be time enough for me to do another emergency airlift on you two. If we don’t get out fast enough, we will either be smashed in the doors or tossed to the carnivores. Which route of doom you prefer depends on if you like your bones ground up fast or slow.”
They shudder in tandem, making their silky hair shimmy like a go-go dancer’s fringe. But they crawl gamely over the meat mountains and we all huddle behind a side of beef.
“When I say go, just go. Do not look down, do not look back. Just jump and run. Pretend Midnight Louise is on your tail.”
“She is not so bad,” Groucho objects in his best falsetto growl.
“Okay. Pretend…the Medellin cartel is on your tail.” These are drug sniffers in training, after all.
“We are on their tail,” Golda sniffs grandly.
For pipsqueaks, this pair must have nothing but nerve under that hair.
The latch squeaks and then turns.
Daylight tears a widening rent in the darkness that hides our presence.
The stack of steaks by the opposite door vanishes. We hear thumps and bangs, and men grousing.
“Now,” I say, sticking the tip of a shiv into each little form.
Squealing like mice, the pair squirt out of the door. I am right behind them, but somehow I end up hitting terra firma first—oof!—and they land on me. Double oof.
We do not waste time discussing our exit order, but roll and scramble under the truck’s welcome shadow, much as it stinks of gas and oil.
“Did you hear mice?” one man is asking the other, his work boots still for a moment.
While the other guy tells him he’s crazy and hearing things, we belly-crawl to the truck’s front. It is hard to see much but stretches of sand. I prod Golda out for a few seconds of recon. She reports a shaded area with a roof at three o’clock low.
Gee, that makes me miss my old man, Three O’Clock Louie, who is basking in the sun of Lake Mead while I am directing a raid on the ranch.
“Make for the shade,” I tell the troops, then head off myself like a black bolt of cold lightning.
There is nothing but open ground in the desert, and a frontal assault is the best—heck, the only—approach.
Two gray bolts of lightning speed after me. Those canine shrimps can really move their pins when they have to.
We are reunited again in a dimness that gives us a cloak of invisibility.
“Looks like we made it unnoticed,” Groucho notes, pausing to scratch at a sand flea that has managed to leap aboard despite our velocity. Some species are impervious to every trick and they are usually parasites.
I must agree. The two men are still unloading hunks of meat and any tracks our daring dash across the tundra may have left are being scrubbed away by a constant riffle of desert wind.
I pause to tidy my whiskers and straighten my cravat.
It is a good thing, because a long, low growl behind us that sets the floor beneath us vibrating announces that we do not have company, but that we are company. And maybe even dinner.
Chapter 28
K as in Karrot Stick
The Big Town felt a planet away.
Matt, hauling his down jacket over his arm, unlocked his apartment and breathed in the air-conditioned oxygen with relief.
Weather-clogged traffic, slush, raw winds, rain, bad memories.
Who needed it?
He dumped his duffel bag and the mail from the downstairs mailbox on a living-room cube table. First thing, he went to check his answering machine in the bedroom, his latest purchase before this out-of-town trip.
The next thing he knew, he’d own a cell phone and computer.
Well, he had the money for it now. Seven thousand dollars for a two-day trip, and a chance to get together with his mother. Sometimes life was too generous.
The machine’s red light was blinking, but Matt didn’t have the energy to sit down and take notes, which was what his schedule required nowadays.
Back in the living room, he noticed that one of his pieces of mail had somehow landed on the matching empty cube table.
This was a small padded mailer, exactly like the fateful one in which he had gotten the tape from what would become his on-air home, WCOO, “talk radio with heart.”
He still didn’t have a letter opener. Maybe he needed to get a small desk to sit by the door. Where to buy such a thing? Temple would know. He could call her, ask her.
The thought of contacting Temple always gave him a queasy push-pull in his gut, part guilty pleasure, part pure guilt. No. Be a big boy. He didn’t need a spirit guide for every step of his life, even the small interior-decorating ones.
He fetched a table knife from the kitchen and opened the lone mailer first, out of sentimentality and weird expectation. What life-altering surprise would this one hold? He supposed lottery winners who still bought tickets often felt that way.
An irregular lump deformed this package, but too small to be a cassette. A single die, maybe? Key chain? Some Strip joint gambling promotion?
A small golden object tumbled into his palm. A sculpture? A snake biting its own tail. He recognized the motif. The worm Ouroboros, ancient symbol of eternity; destruction and renewal. A single potent image of the cycle of creation: it begets, weds, impregnates, and slays itself, like nature. Over and over.
In centuries past, worms, snakes, and dragons all intertwined into a quasi-fantastic, quasi-religious symbolism. You had St. George and the dragon. The worm Ouroboros. The serpent in the Garden of Eden. The new religion chasing the tail of established superstition and biting it. He took the object to the French doors. Now he needed—yes, needed!—a magnifying glass. Who did he think he was, Sherlock Holmes? Why be a piker? A whole brass desk set fo
r his yet-unbought new desk: letter opener, magnifying glass, stamp holder…
He squinted at the bantam-size chicken scratchings inside the snake. A K as in karat. But was it a 12-, 14-, or 18-K item? All he could tell was that it was purportedly real gold. And some Greek letters:
He picked up the envelope to study its exterior. His name hand printed on the outside. No return address.
Finally, he pushed his fingers into the small envelop until he pulled out a plum. An ordinary Post-it note. Its adhesive edge had clung to the bubble-pack lining the envelope.
Green rollerball ink slanted across the pink rectangular surface.
“Wear me!” Underlined.
He lifted the snake to the light. Well crafted, but weird.
Wear? How? Why?
As he stared at it, his blood slowed, then chilled. The room’s temperature hadn’t budged, but he felt as reptilian as a hibernating rattler himself.
This was a worm Ouroboros, all right, but it was also a ring.
The last ring he had worn had been the simple gold wedding band of a Catholic priest, a symbol of his commitment to celibacy, of his marriage to the Church. He hesitated, but he had to know: he jammed the ring onto a finger—the middle finger on his right hand.
It fit perfectly.
Wear me.
An order from…he knew who.
Drink me.
And Alice had shrunk.
Matt stared at Kitty O’Connor’s ring. At the order that came with it.
Wear me.
Or else.
And if he did, he’d shrink too.
Just like Alice.
He went to the bedroom to call Temple after all.
“You want Max?” she asked, incredulous, after two minutes of the usual banalities with which he had prefaced his request.
“I need to talk to him, or maybe vice versa. Can you ask him to get in touch with me?”
“Sure. I can ask.”
“That’s all that I ask.”
“There’s nothing you want to tell me?”
“I…had a good time in Chicago. Saw my mother.”
“Oh. I didn’t know you were gone.”
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