Trick of the Light

by Rob Thurman

  Kimano, Zeke, Griffin, Solomon, the Light . . . they were all things beyond me at the moment, but not this. I grinned and whistled. There was a skittering of paws and a dog just as brown as its owner came speeding out of the kitchen, half a hot dog still hanging from his mouth. Brown, yes. Lank like the girl, no. He was round like a beach ball.

  Wary blue eyes turned clear in an instant and she scooped up the homely hound. It snarfed the last of the meat and licked her face enthusiastically. “Koko.” She didn’t care about her own name, but the dog . . . the dog had a name. She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment as she hugged him and when they opened again, they were just as wary as in the beginning. “How much?”

  “This one’s pro bono,” I said, grinning back at the dog. Two of a kind we were. We saw life and hot dogs and seized the day. Carpe diem. Carpe canis. Beef canis. Pork canis. Kosher canis. As long as it had mustard and relish, we were good. Right, doggy? The tongue lolled at me in what I was sure was agreement.

  The girl’s forehead wrinkled at the pro bono and I elaborated, “Free.”

  “Nothing is free,” she said with prompt suspicion.

  “Just come by next weekend and clean out the alley and we’ll call it even.” I finished my tea. “And come by any afternoon and my bar guy Leo will feed Koko. I like dogs.” I leaned across the table and tickled Koko’s belly.

  “What about people?” She lowered her head and the brown hair spilled forward, hiding her face.

  “People I can take or leave.” I moved to the dog’s chin and it kicked its back legs ecstatically. “But Leo is a softy. If he likes you, he might even feed you too.”

  She snorted. “Find my dog for nothing. Free food. You’re a sucker.”

  I laughed. No one . . . no one, not in my entire life, had called me a sucker. “Leo will like you all right. He’ll feed you breakfast, lunch, and dinner if you want. It’ll be greasy, but it’ll be food.” I jerked a thumb. “Go out the back through the kitchen. If you happen to see any food lying around, help yourself.”

  She hesitated. “Aren’t you going to even ask my name?”

  “You don’t know your name. When you figure out what it is, then you can tell me,” I said with a yawn. “And it’s not Alone. That’s no kind of name for anyone. So think on it.”

  She vanished almost as quickly as Solomon had, but I doubt he’d taken a loaf of bread and an industrial-sized package of cheese with him. Too bad. He might have found that tastier than eating souls.

  The rest of the day I spent napping and popping one more pain pill. They give you weird dreams, those pills. Bright colors, drifting like the wind. I saw Kimano again, but always out of reach. Always moving away. Always leaving me behind. The same as ever they were, only in brighter colors . . . more real, and if I had been just a little faster, I could’ve touched him. Touched his skin. Turned him to see the laughter in his eyes.

  Later that night I flushed the rest of the pills down the toilet. Numb my back and claw my heart; it wasn’t a good exchange.

  Not at all.

  Chapter 6

  The next morning I went hiking—that would be “hiking” with quotes around it and a good amount of subtext. Leo didn’t want to go with me—he said the limp, shuffle, drag of my hiking boots was giving him flashbacks. I wasn’t sure if those flashbacks were to the last Mummy movie he’d seen or some previous work he’d had at a nursing home as an orderly. Grumbling and bitching aside, he came along in the end. He also brought snacks and a cooler. At least he was good for something, I told him.

  “You’ll be begging for that something one day,” he challenged, “and I might not give it to you. Ever think of that, ‘boss’?”

  We swapped glances, both responded “Nah,” with a grin, and I started the car. He shrugged and propped his cowboy-booted feet out the window; it was the only way he’d fit in my little racing bug of a car even with the top down. “But there’s no denying you’ve always liked the bad boys. Robin, for example, he couldn’t keep it in his pants if an alligator was undoing the zipper.”

  “Oh, come on. You’re exaggerating.” He wasn’t. “And the donkey thing. That was a complete lie.” I was hoping. “Total urban legend.” I turned on a country music station. I didn’t like country music really, but lately the women singers were stomping the hell out of their cheating, lying, no-good men. Blowing up their trucks, setting their houses on fire . . . righteous vengeance. Maybe I should sign up for Eden House. And, lo, we shall smite the sinner with good old country girl ingenuity—all we need are boots and lighter fluid. “And you’re one to talk. You dated that one with the boob job five years ago.” I steadied the wheel with both knees while I held out my hands about two feet in front of me. “They were bigger than the Himalayas. I swear I saw a goat grazing in there, and its shepherd probably suffocated on her perfume.” I dated the bad. Leo dated the bimbos.

  He snorted. “Wake me up when we get there.”

  In Vegas there are two places: your destination and then the circles of Hell called construction you have to pass through to get there. This time they’d been doing construction under the Spaghetti Bowl, the intersection of I-15 and U.S. 95, for more than a month. Every time I passed through it, I used it as an educational experience to watch the pearification of a man’s ass and to practice the curse words of every language I knew, which, considering how much I’d traveled in my youth, were more than a few. Some days it was entertaining if I didn’t have anyplace better to be. Some days, as I watched an entire line of men sit on a guard-rail and do nothing but swig Gatorade and work on their tans instead of the pavement, it got old.

  Today it was old. Very, very old.

  Until it wasn’t.

  I finally wove my way inch by inch through the orange barrels, and had just snailed my way beneath the shadow of the overpass when the squeal was first heard. Failing brakes, the heart-banging crumple-crunch of metal against asphalt, and in my rearview mirror, the truck tumbling over the side. Its cab’s front wheels caught at the last minute and out of the back catapulted hundreds of cans of red paint. They hit the asphalt, popped their tops, and geysered the scarlet fluid high in the air . . . into a sudden gust of wind that pushed the flood of it sideways. Every still-unmoving, gaping-mouthed “worker” out there was coated in it.

  Now wasn’t that lucky?

  I put on my brakes and turned for a better look. “Ha!” said the truck driver who’d scrambled to safety. He was pointing down at the workers on the road beneath the overpass. “Take that, you lazy-ass motherfuckers. Next time you hear brakes, I bet you get off that fat ass just like that.” He went on ranting as road worker arms were flung out, dripping red, and blank-eyed bodies shambled through a river of red paint. It was pretty as any picture in those fancy art galleries you’d find in the casinos. I tucked the mental picture away for later savoring as I stepped on the gas again, still watching it all in the mirror until it faded from sight.

  Blood from the sky. Who knew laziness would trigger the Apocalypse?

  Which put me in the mood for some old, cheesy eighties, heavy metal music, and I listened to that all the way up to the caver’s hovel. When I stopped the car in a cloud of dust, Leo yawned, lifted his hat, and grunted, “I feel very, very angry and in the need of hair spray and a pentacle-studded leather codpiece. Your doing?”

  I ignored him and pointed out the shack. “That’s where his body was. I think our best bet is to go into town”—a couple of more shacks and a few mobile homes—“and check out his friends when they come down for supplies.” Today was the day everyone stocked up and caught up. I found that out with a little earlier investigation. But there would be one—one who wouldn’t show up. That would be the one we’d have to go tracking. Jeb had told Hun; he would’ve told someone else. Hun couldn’t be counted as anyone’s best friend and closest and only confidante.

  “Too bad your last girlfriend isn’t here. The Amazon. She could’ve piggybacked us into the mountains.” I started the car back toward town. />
  “She wasn’t an Amazon. She was a nice girl,” he said with a calm that was possibly more annoying than the Amazon had been.

  “She was six foot five if she was an inch. She could’ve taken off that belly ring, put it around my neck, and led me about like one of those little yappy dogs.” All right, maybe she’d only been six foot one, but she had been taller than she deserved and her stiletto stripper shoes made her even taller.

  “Funny you should say that.” His lips curved. “You’re not the first.”

  I narrowed my eyes behind dark sunglasses. “She did not.”

  “Said you’d be her first shiksa-poo. She could get one for all her friends. They’d be the toast of the temple.”

  I narrowed my eyes further and a brown finger wagged once. “Nuh uh, little girl.” He emphasized “little,” the bastard. “That’s not how it works. We don’t screen one another’s hookups or dates. No retaliation, no matter how low our opinion, remember? Which means you can’t fill her car with mating tarantulas . . . again.”

  “Fine. Fine,” I said irritably as we pulled into town. We talked to the dusty locals, who knew all of Jeb the aver ’s friends. Turned out Jeb even had a last name: McVann. “One-sixteenth Indian, he was,” said one old guy who’d been around long enough for that term to go from politically correct, to incorrect, to back again without any idea things had ever changed. “Get the old sot drunk and he’d go on and on so much, you’d think he’d been the one to stick the arrow in Custer’s dick at Little Bighorn himself.”

  He, one Artie Beaver, served me another canned lemonade at his trailer/refreshment stand. “Yeah, he was all about the land and saving your home. I told him if the Indians had saved their home, fifteen-sixteenths of his ass’d be back in Scotland drinking warm beer and wearing a kilt.” He shrugged. Artie was a big guy, happy and helpful, but he didn’t know much more than that. He knew Jeb was dead and that his friends would be down today to say a few words, restock, and head back up. And for a few dollars he’d point them out for me. I handed over the money willingly. Artie was working hard entertaining me. He deserved to be paid.

  “Guess he just wanted roots.” He carefully swiped at my rickety plastic table. If he’d wiped too hard, it probably would’ve collapsed under the attention. It was older than Methuselah and cheaper than a bleached-blond, teenage pop star. “We all want roots, right?”

  But sometimes only the ones we pick. Still, that might have been why Jeb found the Light. He believed in saving and protecting. No better person around here to have found it. Leo and I sat and watched as the day dragged on. It was comfortable. I didn’t miss the summer heat. I enjoyed it when it was there and I enjoyed the cooler temperatures when it was gone. Mama had taught us that. Appreciate what you can’t change, and change what you can’t appreciate. She was as tough as the mountains around us and filled to the brim with common sense. I liked to think she’d passed that on to me, but she’d also said more than once that I wasn’t half as clever as I thought I was. Considering what I thought of myself, that still made me pretty damn clever. That attitude had gotten me more than a swat or two when I was younger. I’d learned to temper my self-belief in my quick wits with a dash of caution. It wasn’t enough. A swat to my ass was still waiting for me at every family reunion. I yawned, stretched my legs out, and let Leo be my eyes for a while. I didn’t nap, but I let the world slide gently out of focus.

  “How’s your back?” Leo asked.

  “Well, I’m off it, unlike your Amazonian ex, so that’s something,” I retorted, resting a shoulder against the iron pole holding up the canopy.

  “This is ridiculous. If you would just . . . ,” he started.

  “No.”

  He sighed and passed over two Tylenol, a far stretch from what my back really needed, but it would have to do. “Once, my brother lied and told my father, this was after he and I stopped speaking, that I was spending time with you. . . .” He shook his head, the black braid undulating along his back. “I heard that the old bastard laughed so long and hard that he choked on his venison and passed out at the table.”

  Our families were familiar with one another, to say the least, and we followed the same general ideological path, had the same long lineage. What my family knew of the world, Leo’s knew equally as well. We hadn’t grown up next door, hardly anything that mundane with the travel blood so strong in me and mine, but we passed their way now and again. Leo’s family had what Jeb had wanted: roots. Leo could follow his family back as long as I could, an oral history that put the most convoluted and far-reaching of family trees to shame. Back to the mammoths and beyond wouldn’t be an exaggeration. A historian would be foaming at the mouth to talk to him. Of all of his family, though, only Leo was a wanderer now. When you’re kicked out of house and home, you don’t have much choice.

  “Did he think I would be a little much for you?” I rested my sunglasses in my hair.

  “More than that. He thought you’d be the death of me.” He pulled off his hat and waved it at a raven far overhead. “And I’m not so sure he would be wrong.”

  “Chicken,” I teased. “Oh, come on. Where’s the harm? Lots of twosomes do just fine. Friends or lovers, and living it up.” I toasted him with the can of lemonade.

  “Like Butch and Sundance?” he said knowingly. “Thelma and Louise? Romeo and Juliet? Nitroglycerin and a pogo stick?”

  “Don’t be so dramatic,” I tsked as I finished the flat lemon drink. “And I think the wake has started. Let’s go see who didn’t show up.”

  About six people were there, including the truck molester. We mixed and mingled. I’d dressed down. Leo looked like he looked. We had “good folk” written all over us. After some talking, we discovered the only friend of Jeb’s missing was John Wilbur. I’d wriggled directions to the guy’s place out of Artie. Normally, he wouldn’t have, but I was playing cute and feisty for all I was worth and Leo was dessert from the looks of him. Charisma, Leo and I had it in spades when we wanted. Demons weren’t the only ones who could bring out the flash, and even Artie couldn’t stand against it. “You’d make great con men,” he’d grumbled as we took off.

  Isn’t it great when your calling and your work are the same?

  It was dark by the time we reached John Wilbur’s short, squat mobile home. There was a bright generator light flooding the place and the sand around it. In that sand someone had literally drawn the line. And it surrounded the trailer in a circle twice as brilliant as the generator light. My sunglasses were in the glove compartment, although I wished I had them back as I shaded my eyes for a better look. Flakes—minute flakes of glass or crystal made up the circle, and the fact they glowed almost as bright as the sun said one thing and one thing only.

  The Light. They came from the Light.

  Leo mirrored my frown. “Someone knows something.”

  There was the faintest of sounds behind us. A whisper of sand. A rustle of cloth against cloth.

  “Our Mr. Wilbur is clever . . . for a human.” The tone was so bored. So very “have been there and had a stained-glass window designed in my image.” So “Why oh why must I suffer the indignity of discoursing with the unfaithful and the sinning?” I turned and considered shooting the angel dead center in his chest. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d shot one. But I knew if I did, he would bleed a ray of luminous white light for a few seconds; then he would be whole again. It would be all for nothing. While the angel I had once shot had deserved it, I wasn’t sure this one did simply for being annoyingly superior and in the right place at the right time—when I wished he weren’t.

  “Look at this. Temptation in the desert, but it’s not the devil this time—only a parakeet with delusions of grandeur.” I kept the gun aimed at him. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure you could kill an angel. Then again, maybe the same would hold for them as held for demons. If you could keep their bodies anchored on Earth and blow out their brains . . . After all, as Solomon had said, he was an angel too—simply a fallen one. Seemed what
would work for one, destruction-wise, would work for the other. I’d never had the need to put it to the test. Yet. But if he got between me and the Light, that might change.

  And where did angels and demons go when they “died”? Because it was death, at least for a demon. They didn’t go back down to Hell for a little detention and pop up again later. At least, I’d never seen one that had. Once the brain was gone, it was gone for good. What then? Per their doctrine, there was no place higher to step up to for the angels and no lower for the demons, right?

  Curious.

  So was death really and truly death for them? The nothingness of nonexistence?

  Maybe I’d ask this one. “Hey,” I started, until a familiar elbow impacted my side. Leo. He knew exactly what I was thinking. He usually did.

  “Sorry.” I gave in, not graciously, but I did give in. A great woman had once said, The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. That did describe me down to the molecular level, but, sadly, there was a time and place. This was not it. I nudged my thoughts back to the more important matter at hand: the Light.

  The angel that was here to fetch it was a man in the same way that demons are men. Although, to give credit, demons were women too. Same MO. Female demons were just as drop-dead gorgeous as the males, sweating unbelievable sex appeal, the eye of a hurricane of pheromones—the whole nine yards. Demons were equal-opportunity salespeople. We’ll take your soul, male, female; bring whatever you have and we’ll be whatever you want. But now that I thought about it, the few angels I’d seen had always been male. It made me a little sorry that I hadn’t shot this one after all. Sexist pigeon.

  Instead, I asked, “What do you want here?” I knew very well what he wanted. “Never mind,” I dismissed him. “Whatever it is, you’re not getting it. Take a hike, or a flight, and don’t look back. Turning into a pillar of salt would be the least of your concerns.”