Deeply Odd

But I suspected that he drew no attention for some other reason, which eluded me.

The cowboy approached me and stopped on the other side of the wide display bin, which offered four varieties of apples on my side, potatoes and sweet potatoes and leeks on his side. His fixed smile reminded me of a hyena, if a hyena had an excellent oral-health plan and a first-rate dentist.

He said, “You come with me and answer some questions about what happened back there, and I’ll kill you easy. You don’t come, I’ll blow away a couple of these innocent women shopping for groceries, and then I’ll kill you. Want that on your conscience?”

I didn’t think this was a guy who ever bluffed. He did what he wanted to do and moved on.

As crazy as he might be, however, he didn’t want to go to prison or to be shot down by police responding to the outrage that he had just now proposed.

When I didn’t answer him, he drew the silencer-equipped pistol from under his sports coat and shot a cantaloupe on the pile that an elderly woman was examining. Chunks of rind and orange melon flesh flew into the air and spattered the shopper.

She startled backward. “Oh! Oh, goodness!”

Although the cowboy still held the Sig Sauer, when the woman looked around in perplexity, her gaze rested longer on me than on him, and the pistol didn’t seem to register with her. She was bewildered, not afraid.

Apologizing as if from time to time these darn cantaloupes just blew up on people, a produce-department clerk hurried to the elderly woman, showing no interest in the cowboy. The other customers focused on the clerk and the melon-soiled lady.

The trucker’s hyena smile grew wider.

I remembered something that he had said when he threatened to make a eunuch of me in the parking lot: You think I won’t do it right here in the open. But you’d be surprised what people don’t see.

He expected me to run, whereupon he would have to shoot me in the back and forget about the interrogation that he wanted to conduct. But as he might have remembered from our recent encounter in the parking lot, expectations often don’t pan out, and what he did not expect was an assault with high-velocity fruit.

Without taking time for a windup, I snatched a Red Delicious apple off the display in front of me and put a spin on the pitch. It hit him dead-center in the face, he staggered backward, and a second Red Delicious bounced off his forehead as blood streamed from his nose, stunning him so that he reflexively dropped his gun. I had been a pitcher on our high-school baseball team; and I could still put the ball where I wanted it, with wicked speed. Moving fast along the display bin, I plucked up a couple of Granny Smiths, which are hard little green numbers used for baking. The first hit his mouth maybe two seconds after he took the Red Delicious to the head, and the second caught him in the throat, dropping him to the floor, overwhelmed by apples.

Shoppers cried out, staring at me as if I were the deranged man and as though the costumed cowboy with the silencer-equipped pistol were as innocent as a lamb set upon by a rabid wolf.

The produce-department clerk shouted at me, I threw a Granny Smith with no intention of hitting him, he ducked, he popped up, and I threw another Granny Smith. He turned and fled, crying out for help, and all the terrified customers fled after him.

Around the other side of the display bins, the apple-stunned cowboy, bleeding from his nose and from a split lip, was on his hands and knees, reaching for the pistol that he had dropped. He would retrieve it before I could kick it away from him.

I ran from the produce department. Past displays of exotic imported crackers, cookies, and candies. Left into the long back aisle. Past coolers offering cheeses and a bewildering variety of pickles.

Before I got to the fresh-meat display, I slammed through a pair of swinging doors, into an immense stockroom with tall metal shelving units to the left and right.

A couple of stock boys in white aprons looked up from their work as I sprinted through their domain, but they wisely did not pursue me. Now I was the beneficiary of that lunatic-identifying radar that I mentioned earlier. As if desperately fleeing men raced wild-eyed through this place a few times every day, the stock boys continued preparing huge carts full of bagged potato chips and Cheez Doodles for delivery to the selling floor.

Passing a cart on which were stacked open cases of canned goods, I borrowed a two-pound can of baked beans, and then another.

At the back of the stockroom, in line with the door by which I had entered, another metal door led to a loading dock and the service alley. I left it ajar, to indicate where I’d gone, and stood with my back against the building wall, a can of beans in each hand.

Such is the absurd and violent nature of my life, that I am not infrequently reduced to battles involving highly bizarre bad guys and unconventional weapons that Mr. Matt Damon and Mr. Daniel Craig never have to deal with when, always solemn and dignified, they save the world in their movies.

I expected the cowboy to follow me as quickly as he was able. He didn’t seem to be a guy who quit easily, nor did he seem to be one who would proceed with caution. When he plunged through the door, eager not to lose track of me, I would bean him with one can and try to smack the gun out of his hand with the other.

After a minute or so, I began to wonder if I had disabled him more than I’d realized. At about the minute-and-a-half mark, the door opened slowly. One of the stock boys warily peeked out, reeled back in pale-faced fright, as if I were Dr. Hannibal Lecter holding two severed heads, and hurriedly returned to his Cheez Doodles.

I put down the cans, jumped off the loading dock, and sprinted toward the north end of the building.

If the cowboy decided to disengage, I needed to get the license number of his truck. I could make an anonymous call to the highway patrol, accuse him of hauling contraband of one kind or another, and give them an excuse to look in that black trailer.

Although my special intuition told me that he had not yet abducted the children, there would almost certainly be something incriminating in his trailer.

I turned the corner, ran along the north wall, and burst into the parking lot, where sunlight dazzled off a hundred windshields. The truck was gone.

I hurried among the parked cars, slipped between two trees in the row of tall eucalyptuses at the end of the lot, halted on the sidewalk, and looked both ways along the street. No red, black, and sparkly silver ProStar+.

From a distance came a siren.

After crossing the street, I headed south, glancing in shop windows, just a young guy off work, with a day to kill, not at all the kind of hooligan who would terrorize innocent grocery shoppers with a ferocious barrage of fruit.

I made a mental note to mail five dollars to the supermarket to pay for the damaged apples when this business with the cowboy was concluded. I wouldn’t pay for the cantaloupe. I hadn’t shot it. The maniac had shot it.

Yes, I had fled into the market, drawing the maniac after me; therefore, an argument could be made that part of the cost of the cantaloupe might be my responsibility. But the line between moral behavior and narcissistic self-righteousness is thin and difficult to discern. The man who stands before a crowd and proclaims his intention to save the seas is convinced that he is superior to a man who merely picks up his own and other people’s litter on the beach, when in fact the latter is in some small way sure to make the world a better place, while the former is likely to be a monster of vanity whose crusade will lead to unintended destruction.

Not a penny for the damn cantaloupe. If I was wrong and woke up in a chamber in Hell, eternally drowning in the slime and seeds found at a cantaloupe’s core, I would just have to deal with that.

As I followed the sidewalk south, the bright image of the three torched children plagued me. I didn’t know when or where the cowboy trucker intended to burn them, or why. My sixth sense has limits and often frustrates more than serves me.

Do what you must, Annamaria had said. Her words seemed to be not merely advice meant for this moment but also a recognition of the likelihood that, after all, I would not be back long before sunset.

I really needed socks and a new pair of jeans. But given a choice between replenishing wardrobe items and trying my best to prevent children from being cooked alive, the correct course seemed obvious. Hurrying through the village, along a sidewalk dappled with sunshine and oak shadows, I intended to do the right thing. Ironically, in order to do the right thing, I needed to steal a car, and quickly.

Two

THE COWBOY TRUCKER HAD WHEELS, AND I didn’t. He was getting farther away by the minute.

As the siren swelled louder, rotating emergency beacons flashed far to the south, approaching.

Immediately ahead of me, a muscular man with tattooed arms and a pit-bull face sprang out of a Ford Explorer parked at the curb. Leaving the driver’s door open and the engine running, making an urgent keening sound, he ran past the bank in front of which he had left the SUV, raced past two other buildings, and disappeared around the corner, as if perhaps he had a prostate as big as a grapefruit and an urge to pee that sent him rushing pell-mell toward the nearest restroom.

The bank was a sleek contemporary building with big windows. In spite of the tinted glass, I could see two men inside. They were wearing identical President-of-the-United-States masks. They held what appeared to be short-barreled pistol-grip shotguns. I figured the employees and customers must be lying on the floor. Evidently, none of them in there could hear the siren yet.

At once I climbed behind the wheel of the Explorer and closed the door. I put the SUV in gear, pulled into the street, and drove perhaps seventy or eighty yards before the racing police car swept past me on its way to the supermarket.

I have never owned a motor vehicle. If you own one, you must purchase insurance for it, repair it, wash it, wax it, fill the tank with gasoline, scrub bug remains off the windshield, periodically rotate the tires … The demands of a motor vehicle never stop.

Because my sixth sense is a massive complication, I simplify my life every way that I can. I own little, and I have no desire to possess any more than I already do. I would no more buy a car than I would acquire a performing elephant.

In the past, when I had needed wheels, I’d borrowed vehicles from various friends, and I’d always returned them without damage. But I had lived in this town only a month. And because I had been pretty much hiding out and waiting for the call to action that would send me traveling once more, I had not joined a book group or claimed a personal stool in a favorite pub where everybody knew my name.

In this emergency, the only way that I could obtain a suitable vehicle was to steal one. Stealing from thieves seemed less of a crime than taking from honest people. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Providence put this Explorer before me precisely when I needed it, because I wouldn’t want to imply that God collaborated with me in auto theft. But if it wasn’t Providence, it was something.

I circled a block, returned to the main drag, and headed south this time. When I passed the bank, two well-armed presidents were standing on the sidewalk, frantically looking north and south for their getaway wheels. I felt that I should do something to alert the police to the robbery, but running these guys down seemed extreme.

They recognized the Explorer and started into the street. I waved, tramped the accelerator, and was out of shotgun range in about three seconds.

A couple of blocks south of the bank, a decapitated woman was crossing the street. In black high heels and a slinky blue dress, she appeared to be attired for a party, and she held her severed head in the crook of her left arm.

Ordinarily, I would have stopped to comfort her and see if I could do anything to help her move on from this world. But she was already dead, just a spirit now, and those three imperiled children were still alive, so the kids came first.

Rare prophetic dreams and keen intuition are not the primary aspects of my paranormal ability. If those were the only unnatural talents I possessed, I might lead a relatively ordinary life and be able to hold a job more taxing than that of a short-order cook. Say a furniture-store manager or a home-appliances repairman.

Most important and exhausting is my ability to see the spirits of the lingering dead. They are reluctant to leave this world either because they are afraid of what awaits them on the Other Side or because they remain determined to see their murderers brought to justice, or because they love this beautiful world and refuse to let go of it.

The dead don’t talk. At best, they lead me to their killers or, if they weren’t murdered, react to me in ways that allow me to make accurate deductions about them based on what their behavior implies. At worst, they resort to an insistent pantomime that is as annoying as the least-talented street mime who has ever pretended to walk against a nonexistent hurricane wind. In the case of a mime who won’t get out of my face until I give him a dollar, I might respond to his performance with a pantomime of violent vomiting; but that seems disrespectful and even cruel when dealing with the dead.

Generally speaking, these spirits aren’t threatening, but now and then one of them goes poltergeist in anger or frustration. The results can play havoc with your household budget. Trust me, no insurance company on Earth will pay on a claim that an infuriated spirit tore apart your plasma-screen TV and wrecked your family room.

In this instance, the decapitated woman did not turn toward me beseechingly. Usually the lingering dead know that I can see them, and they are drawn to me. This one seemed oblivious of me, and I drove straight through her with no more effect than driving through a swirl of mist.

Suspended on a chain around my neck, under my sweatshirt, the tiny bell began to ring itself again, three silvery bursts of sound like those it had produced shortly before dawn.

The bell had been given to me on the night when Annamaria told me that certain unnamed people wanted to kill her. She had taken the pendant from around her neck, offered it to me, and asked, Will you die for me?

Amazing myself, I had at once said yes.

Now the inexplicable ringing of the bell apparently signified that my next challenge was at hand, that the time had come to move forward in my quest for meaning and purpose.

To the east, several residential streets ran parallel to the village’s main artery, and to the west were Coast Highway underpasses that led to shoreside neighborhoods, but I was compelled to ignore them. I drove directly to the access road that carried me onto the southbound lanes of the Coast Highway, past the town line, with the ocean to my right, the crazier part of California a few hundred miles behind me, the somewhat less crazy part of it still about seventy miles ahead.

The final aspect of my paranormal ability is psychic magnetism. If I need to find someone and don’t know where he is at the moment, I concentrate on his name or picture his face in my mind’s eye, and then I walk or bicycle or drive around at random, until psychic magnetism draws me to him. Usually I find him within half an hour.

Ahead, flanked by parched meadows of pale grass stippled with widely separated live oaks, the highway rose gradually toward a crest. In this sparsely populated stretch of coast, traffic remained light. If the cowboy in the ProStar+ was ahead of me, as intuition insisted, he must be cruising beyond this hill.

The Ford Explorer was a fine machine. Sturdy, easy to handle, it rode almost as smoothly at seventy miles per hour as at sixty, only minimally less well at eighty. I looked forward to seeing how it handled at ninety.

Someone starting my memoirs with this volume might think that I’m a lawless youth, an itinerant fry-cook rebel. But I didn’t steal the car to profit from it, only to get on the trail of the homicidal cowboy trucker before he receded beyond the range of my paranormal perception.

For the same reason, I broke the posted speed limit, which otherwise I would not have done. Probably would not have done. Might not have done. I must admit, the older I get, the more I like speed almost as much as I like hash browns. There’s something mystical about perfect hash browns, something that stirs the soul, and the same is true of speed.

Now, ahead of me, a Honda maintained such a leisurely pace that the guy behind the wheel might have been a Zen Buddhist for whom the act of driving was a disciplined meditation more concerned with enlightenment than with progress.

Intending to pass, I glanced at my side mirror to be sure that the left lane was clear, and I discovered an eighteen-wheeler looming alarmingly close. I hadn’t heard the truck, but now I did, and when I glanced at my rearview mirror, the snarling-shark grille of the ProStar+ seemed to be gnashing its chrome teeth in anticipation of a satisfying bite.

One thing I failed to disclose about psychic magnetism: Once in a while, not often but often enough to make me wonder when I will be sufficiently frazzled to require a Prozac prescription, this strange gift draws my target to me instead of drawing me to my target. This might seem to be a fine distinction of little importance, but it can be a life-or-death issue when a big rig, weighing seventy thousand pounds or more if loaded, driven by a maniac, hurtles into the rear bumper of your stolen Ford Explorer.

Before I could stomp the accelerator to the floor and try to outrun the cowboy, he rammed me hard enough to bounce the Ford off its back tires, tipping it forward for an instant. The steering wheel spun through my hands, I struggled for control, the tailgate window imploded, plastic cracked, metal tore with a banshee shriek, and I could no more regain control than I could vaporize the big rig with a well-chosen magic word.

I spat out a number of well-chosen words, but none of them was magic.

I’m not quite sure of the subsequent physics of the encounter, but somehow the Explorer turned its starboard flank to the ProStar+ and briefly stuttered violently sideways. More windows burst and the SUV noisily cast off pieces of itself, like one of those lizards that can escape by shedding at will the tail that is in the teeth of its attacker. Then, with the indifferent majesty of a freight train rolling on its rails, the big rig rumbled past, and the Ford was forced off the road, across the graveled shoulder. It plunged bow-first down a long, grassy embankment. It ricocheted off a boulder, off an ancient ficus tree, tipped, rolled, and slid on its roof about fifty feet until it came to rest where the shore grass transitioned to sand.

I wondered why the airbag hadn’t deployed. But then I realized that a vehicle belonging to professional criminals might have been modified to make it not only faster and easier to handle but perhaps also to remove from it any features that might hamper them in a slam-bang pursuit with police hot behind them. Besides, they weren’t the type to worry about collision injuries, any more than they would employ a BABY ON BOARD bumper sticker even if they turned from bank robbery to kidnapping.

Happily, the safety harness kept me from harm, although now I hung upside down in the inverted vehicle, with the ocean vista above my head and the blue sky under my blown tires. I might have taken a little while to savor this unusual perspective if I hadn’t smelled gasoline.

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