“I thought fire was supposed to be lethal,” I said. Through the window, I heard a premature cricket chirp by way of announcing its presence to a hungry starling.
“Then you haven’t understood me at all,” Wilton Hoxley said. “You disappoint me. Well, life is just a succession of disappointments. What we mean, conventionally speaking, by growing up is just the process of adjusting to disappointment.”
“I’m not all that disappointed,” I said.
He laughed, a sound like a gate slipping its latch. “Is that so? Are you happy about where you are in your life?”
I wasn’t. “I can handle it.”
“Are you happy,” he asked, “about whom Eleanor is sleeping with tonight?”
I tossed the coffee over my shoulder and onto my clean floor. “Are you happy about whom Mommy is sleeping with tonight?”
I could hear the friction of lips over gums. “There’s no question that you’re bright,” he said. “You were always bright. Such a bright boy, such a golden boy.”
“I had two feet,” I said nastily. “And while we’re at it, come and get me.”
“Now you’re trying to insult me,” Wilton Hoxley said. “That makes me suspicious, even though we’re old friends. Old friends should be able to talk. You know, it amazes me that you didn’t realize that we were friends. After all, we had Eleanor in common.”
“Eleanor was never common enough for you,” I said, and closed my eyes.
“A little cheap,” he said. “But then you’re a nonentity, a footnote.” Schultz’s unwritten paper flashed before my eyes in its full unpublished glory. “You don’t understand, do you? They’re playing with you, just as I am. I can play with you until the cat comes home, and you won’t figure it out, and Eleanor will still land in my lap. If I want her. Of course, I don’t want her.”
“You wanted her before,” I said. “My, my, Wilton, the lies you told.” He didn’t say anything. “The lies you told to Mommy.”
He hung up.
I was wetter than I’d been after my shower, but I barely felt it. I took my copy of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and put it on the back of the couch, trained Billy’s semi at it, and blew it into satisfying smithereens. Feeling marginally more secure, I toted the gun into the kitchen and poured more coffee. Anything that could put commas into Dreiser could put a few well-placed full stops into Wilton Hoxley.
At five the phone rang again. I decided, for once, not to obey. It rang twenty-seven times before falling silent. I sat on the couch, hoping it wasn’t a wrong number. I still wanted him on the other end of the phone. When it stopped, I called Schultz and gave him a progress report.
“Get out of there,” he said.
“Skip it. He’s getting crazy.”
“Simeon,” Schultz said. It might have been the first time he ever called me by my first name. “Simeon, speaking from a purely professional standpoint and evaluating him within the peripheries of any generally agreed clinical criteria, he’s already crazy. He’s been as loose as a bucket of moths for years.”
“I think you should get off the line,” I said. “He might be calling.”
“He’ll call at six,” Schultz said. “Not before. You’re going to stay in touch, right?”
“As long as the promise holds. I talk to you, and it ends there.”
“You’re the one who’s crazy,” Schultz said, hanging up.
It rang again precisely at six, and this time I picked it up.
“Why should I want Eleanor?” Wilton Hoxley said as though there’d been no interruption. “Eleanor, as beautiful as she is, is just a woman.”
“Whoa, Wilton,” I said. “Good for you. How come you never graduated?”
“And what’s a woman?” he continued. “A vertical storage system, and a temporary storage system at that. Their insides gurgle like coal running downhill. Ever put your ear up against Eleanor’s stomach? Gurgle, gurgle. Peristalsis at work. Women eat innocence, nice, photosynthetic plants that make sugar out of sunshine, and they eat dumb animals who think that people love them until they get their jugular veins cut as the first long step toward the table. Pigs are treated well, Simeon. You’ve obviously never spent any time around pigs.”
“I’m rectifying that now.”
“You can’t insult me. You’re not important enough. Pigs, as I was saying, are very intelligent, they learn to love the carnivore who tosses them their slops, they follow him around from place to place. To them, we’re gods. To us, they’re pork. The most beautiful woman in the world is just a mechanism for turning innocence into shit. The prima ballerina, dancing around on those torturous little shoes the French invented, looking lighter than air, is gurgling inside, turning some light-footed pig—have you ever seen how a pig walks on those tiny little hooves?—into shit. Sleeping Beauty, Odette the swan, they get offstage, the tutu comes down, and some poor dumb animal or some inoffending head of lettuce comes out, headed for the sewer. Women are a self-procreating system for turning the world into shit.”
“Right,” I said, gripping the semi with my knees, “and what do men live on?”
“Men,” he said, with real scorn this time. “Skip it. We want women to be different, don’t we? Don’t you want Eleanor to be different? And they’re not. That’s the tragedy of the world, and the ancient gods knew it. Women are just like we are. Remember Pandora?”
“Vaguely.”
“You persist in disappointing me. Pandora, say the Greeks, was the first woman. Another of Hephaestus’ masterworks, created to torment mankind throughout eternity.”
“Why would Hephaestus want to torment mankind?”
“Well, I’m really taken aback. I thought you were many things, but I never thought you were ignorant.”
“So sue me,” I said.
“You got the fennel, I believe, on several occasions.”
“I can buy fennel in the supermarket. Not that I use a lot of it.”
“I’m sure, Simeon, that you understood the fennel. Please say you understood the fennel. One can take only so much disillusionment in one dose.”
“How do you know I’m not tracing this call?”
“Because you’re alone. Because you wouldn’t think it was fair. Because there’s been no one at your house except that cretinous teenager who checked your mail and brought you that useless gun.”
“It’ll punch holes in you,” I said, suddenly doubting that it would.
“You have to aim it at me first. And you won’t get a chance. Pandora,” he said.
“Listen, Wilton,” I said, sweating buckets. “Stick Pandora in your ear. If she’s too big, find someplace she’ll fit.” I hung up.
I wiped my forehead on the way to the refrigerator for a bottle of Singha. At the moment I reached for the phone to call Schultz, it rang.
“You’re making me break the rules again,” Wilton Hoxley said, and there was a nervous edge to his voice. “You already know how dangerous that is.”
“You’re scaring me to death,” I said, hoping it sounded like a lie.
“If I’m not,” he said, “something is seriously wrong with you. About Pandora.”
“Oh, stuff Pandora.”
“Please stop disappointing me. You said to my mother that you knew who I am, but not why I am. Is that more or less accurate?”
“More,” I said, wiping my forehead with my sleeve and pulling the bandage away. The blood started immediately, and I held the cold bottle of Singha against the cut.
“Well, then, sit tight and listen. Have you got the gun with you?”
“I’m using it to keep my back straight.”
“Get your shirts starched.” Wilton Hoxley barked a laugh. “Listen, insect. After Prometheus took fire to earth in a stalk of fennel—”
“The fennel was painfully obvious,” I said.
“Obvious? Please. Was that why you had to go see that old fart Blinkins?”
“Blinkins and I are old friends,” I said, warding off a sudden desire to cross m
yself.
“Of course you are. We all love Blinkins. Do you like the Greeks?”
“As Greeks go.” I was regretting the fact that I’d spurned Schultz’s offer of protection.
“Then you’ll like this,” he said. “Pandora was Zeus’ revenge against Prometheus’ treachery. She was the first woman, remember? After Prometheus gave fire back to human beings—who were all apparently men at that point—”
“Sounds like a world you would have liked.”
“You can’t goad me,” he said. “Listen. Prometheus had a stupid brother—”
“Epimetheus,” I said.
“Bully for you. And Epimetheus was living, with a lot of other males, on the corrupt earth. Zeus commanded Hephaestus, who could do anything over the fire in his forge, to create Pandora. Then, just to cover his bets, he told Hephaestus’ wife …” He faltered.
“Aphrodite,” I said. “A beauty married to a clubfoot.”
“Hera was Hephaestus’ mother,” he said. It was the first thing he hadn’t meant to say.
“Chucked him out of heaven,” I said.
“All the way to the glittering sea,” Wilton Hoxley said. “But he got back—”
“Which is more than you’ve managed to do.” The semi was still cold between my knees. My cut had stopped bleeding, so I drank some beer.
“You’re boring me,” Hoxley said flatly. “I’m way beyond baiting.”
“What’s next, Wilton? You got a new mission?”
“My mission at the moment is to explain to you about Pandora. Aphrodite made her irresistible, like a tailor cutting a coat for a dandy. And she went to earth, this girl, this ancestor of Eleanor’s, and she attached herself, as she was meant to do, to stupid Epimetheus.”
“And she brought her box with her.”
“Oh, good, you are sentient. And the box contained all the evils that the gods could conceive to plague mankind, and she, with feminine curiosity, opened it. The only good thing in it, the spirit Hope, was trapped inside when Pandora, terrified by the things she had let loose upon the world, snapped the lid shut. Typical woman,” he said. “Too little, too late, like all of them. And you think I still want Eleanor? Although I’ll admit that it would be interesting to see her burn.”
“What’s next?” I asked out of sheer desperation.
“Oh, Simeon,” Wilton Hoxley said, “out of all the people in the world, I would have thought you could have figured out what’s next. You know my history. If you can’t work it out, what’s the use of faith in this world? I simply cannot tell you how disappointed I am. Why should Eleanor, why should anybody, trust you with her life when you’re such a stumblefoot?”
“But wait,” I said. He disconnected.
part four
INFERNO
I have slain my own dragon.
—Serial murderer Dennis Nilsen
18
Happiness Hills
This is what it said:
127.
The letters were black and even, set in type. They occupied maybe a square inch of paper that must once have been the upper right-hand corner of a left-facing page. There was nothing else.
The cheery canary-yellow envelope was tiny, the kind little kids get birthday cards in. It had arrived in the regular mail, and my name and address were in blue ballpoint in a normal, everyday handwriting, a small and precise handwriting but nothing as inhumanly rigid as the square, tightrope-straight gold calligraphy of the first notes.
I might have dismissed it, except for the return address on the envelope’s back flap. It said: From the forge of Hephaestus.
“One twenty-seven,” Schultz said over the phone. He lit up.
“Page one twenty-seven,” I corrected him.
“Yeah,” Schultz said. “Put it in the mailbox. We’ll call the Topanga P.O. And tell them we’ll be by to pick it up after they collect it. We’ll analyze it six ways from Sunday.” Then he started to cough.
“You really ought to quit,” I said. “Your prognosis is terrible.”
“Look who’s talking,” he said.
There’s not a lot you can do to get ready for someone who’s promised to burn you to death, but in the two days between my telephone conversation with Wilton Hoxley and the arrival of the three-number note, I’d done everything I could think of, mainly to keep moving. Sometimes even a futile gesture can be reassuring.
I’d started on Friday morning, the morning after the call.
“Six eight-gallon plastic buckets,” said the checker at the Fernwood Market, ringing them up. “Twenty-four— can that be right, twenty-four?—cotton towels, two, um, sixteen-foot garden hoses, four of whatever these are called, at two-twenty-nine apiece.” I didn’t know what they were called either, but they were short lengths of metal tubing with spiral threads at both ends. She dropped them into the bag. “Two nozzles?”
“I’ve got two hoses,” I explained.
“Piano wire?” she said, holding up a spool.
“It’s a jazz piano. Always wants to get wired.”
“And seven sets of wind chimes,” she said, putting them onto the counter with an unmelodious clatter. “All those bells,” she said. “Let’s hope you’re a sound sleeper.”
“Let’s hope I’m not,” I said.
I coasted Alice into the Valley, where I bought an extralarge sweat suit. Last stop was a Thrifty Drug Store, all overbright white fluorescent lights and underpaid brown help. The help sold me three of those thin plastic raincoats that meteorological paranoids fold up and carry in their pockets. All the way home I hummed complacently.
But halfway up the driveway, toting my haul in two huge cardboard paper-towel cartons with Bravo Corrigan trotting along at my heels and offering moral support, I got mad. If I hadn’t had to behave as though I were living under a mad scientist’s microscope, I could have carried the things up a few at a time, like a normal suburban American, over the space of an hour or so; instead, I’d needed cartons so he couldn’t see my surprises, pathetic as they were. I dumped the junk where I stood and clambered up to the phone to call Schultz’s number of the moment.
“Where’s he living, damn it?” I demanded.
“Nowhere.” Schultz sounded hoarse, but there was no way to tell whether it was from nerves or nicotine. “He’s underground.”
“You’re checking hotels?”
“And motels, and rooming houses. Literally every cop in this city has his picture. And it’s just jerking off, Simeon, and you know it. It could take weeks.”
“Has he bought a new Mazda?”
“Nein. We’re plugged into the DMV. All Mazda sales are being filtered out and fed back to us. There’s a lag of a couple of days from the sheer volume of the data, but so far—say, up to forty-eight hours ago—nothing.”
I thought. “Maybe an RV. Something mobile. Does Mazda make an RV?”
“RVs,” Schultz sighed. “Okay, we’ll get the RV transfers, too. I don’t think Mazda makes an RV, but he may not need a Mazda any more. That may have nothing to do with his new mission. He may be a new god by now.”
“Something mobile,” I said. It sounded right. “Something he could sleep in. It would solve all his problems. He could move around, plan whatever the hell the new mission is, not have to check in anywhere at night.”
The line was silent for a moment. “An RV would be pretty big,” Schultz said.
“So?”
“He saw the kid checking your mailbox. After he torched the Mazda.”
“Whooee,” I said.
“Can’t be that many spots where you can park an RV,” Schultz said. “Can there?”
“Check the RVs, okay?”
“Sure. Same forty-eight-hour lag, though.”
“Norbert,” I said. “You’re a brick.”
Before exploring Schultz’s idea, I went out and lugged the cartons the rest of the way into the house. Bravo Corrigan had gone to sleep in the shade. The sun’s heat sat on my shoulders like a fat, feverish kid. Thumb-sized bu
mblebees droned drunkenly through still air. A big one had decided to give up and rub its legs around in the dust. I stepped over it enviously, staggering along beneath the weight of the boxes.
The junk got dumped, like junk, in the center of the living room. I went into the bedroom to get my hawk-watching binoculars, a nice pair of lightweight Nikons that Eleanor had given me for my thirty-fifth birthday as a subtle way of contradicting my conviction that I was growing farsighted in my old age.
I closed the curtains to let the house cool, or at least stop heating up, for a few minutes. Then I moved methodically around the house, opening each curtain only a couple of inches and surveying the hills opposite.
The house perches very precariously on a ragged, triangular point of land that is almost the highest in the canyon. Rising behind it is a sheer cliff of decomposed granite that stretches twenty-five or twenty-six feet to the peak of the mountain. There is no way up to the peak except to leave the road and claw your way up through the rattlesnakes and chaparral, an unpleasant fifteen-minute hike highlighted by scratched arms and legs, branches in the eye, and worse. I’d done it, out of pigheaded curiosity, when I first rented the place. In front of the house and on both sides is nothing but air.
Half a mile through the air to the north is a tough-looking gang of scrub-covered granitic mounds, not quite mountains, that shoulder their way roughly northwest, toward the Pacific. They have not yet been developed, which makes them an endangered species. A raw interlocking system of dusty red firebreaks runs up and down them. To the south, three quarters of a mile away, is a long, high landslide-prone ridge, sharper than fur bristling on a mad dog’s spine, which some optimistic realtor had named Happiness Hills Homes. The mountains in front and west of the house are almost five miles away, and beyond them the ocean wrinkles and smooths itself in the sun.
Seen through the binoculars, between four inches of open curtain, the firebreaks in the granite mounds to the north looked suicidally precipitous. Up the gentlest-sloping of them, though, ran an unsurfaced dirt road for heavy equipment that would easily accommodate traffic in two directions: a possible. The mountains in front of the house were just too damn far away for him to have seen anything, unless he had the Hubble Space Telescope and he’d managed to fix the mirrors.
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