The black guy vaults a totaled Toyota and crosses all four northbound lanes in a tight zigzag like someone’s shooting at him. A phlegm-yellow Corvette narrowly misses him, swerving to clip the scalpel-shaped prow of the ski boat, making it skip and spin like a Ouija board planchette.
The black guy shouts, I’m all the way live and rounds the curtain wall to the exit just as a white Bronco—toothpaste graffiti on the windows screaming SANTANA DISTRICT ALL-STAR CHAMPS!—comes barreling down the offramp to pick him for a new hood ornament, dragging him several hundred yards before he drops under the front wheels.
If Pike was asked to pick, when he got in the van this morning, which of the roadside cleanup crew would be the morning’s sole survivor, he would have picked anyone but himself.
A silver Lexus on the southbound side slews to a sideways stop, then reverses into the wall. Slams it into Drive to smash into the median, then back into Reverse. . .
A minute stretches out and finally falls and he hears no sirens. An old orange Toyota Land Cruiser screeches to a stop just past the offramp. A guy who looks like a young cop or a fireman on his day off gets out, taking out his phone. Pike tries to tell him not to, but his breath comes like broken glass and all he can do is cough.
A red Porsche slaloms through the wreckage and speeds on over the hill honking its horn. And then, like a musical interlude in his headache. . .
A siren—
The off-duty cop waves down the highway patrol car, but it never slows down. Pancakes the guy and carries him off over the hill, where the siren abruptly stops.
Pike staggers across the northbound lanes in the ensuing gap. The headache pulses behind his eye now like a liquid, living thing, tired of hiding. He reels along the wall towards the offramp, but then veers towards the embankment. He falls down but crawls up the slope on all fours, up through the ice plant and ivy to the top of the slope against the fence.
•
Pike looks for a place to sit down. And right at the top of the offramp like a mirage, he sees the bench.
Coral pink concrete with shells and marbles and other shiny things embedded in the cement. He sinks onto the bench, rolling onto his left cheek to avoid sitting in the cold sticky mess in the seat of his pants, oblivious to cars smashing and people weeping crawling from cars and getting hit, holding his brains in with both hands.
A young woman with two broken arms whimpers and tries to get her baby out of a car seat. A man with blood streaming from multiple scalp wounds squirms out of his overturned Mirage and staggers up the road screaming, I’m sorry I’m sorry mommy daddy I’m so—
And then, all is quiet, almost. With the right kind of ears, you might find it almost peaceful. . .
It’s crooked, wobbly, handmade. Surrounded by flowers in urns and vases and wrapped in pink cellophane. Stuffed animals, pink and pale blue and creamy yellow, fur matted with dust and rain and ankle-deep in roadside offerings—napkins, candy, condoms, cigarette butts. A framed Olan Mills 8X10 studio portrait of a four-year old girl, giggling up at God, hugging the stuffing out of a pink horse worn out and loved half to death. Bumper stickers on the wall and on the ground, over the faces of stuffed animals and on pictures of her stuck into the grid of the chainlink fence.
TEXTING KILLS
HANG UP AND DRIVE!
Scorched ozone and rotten flowers on fire and green teeth and everyone you love is dead and he could taste them in his tears and it was all his fault and STOP IT STOP IT SORRY PLEASE STOP
Carved into the lopsided base of the bench between his feet, right where he’s about to puke: IN LOVING MEMORY.
Pike gets up and he’s been sitting on her name, spelled out in shells and imprints of flowers and leaves.
He backs away from it and climbs the fence. He falls into a backyard, at the foot of a grove of steel palm trees. When he looks up at them, it’s like staring into the K-hole or a total solar eclipse.
It’s the source of the screaming.
Cellular relays cunningly disguised as palm trees. In their dubious shade, a strip of sorry prefab two-bedroom houses backed up against the freeway. This one has a big antenna thing behind it, like a box kite twice as tall as the house.
The ham radio antenna has cables running up to the phony palm trees. The sliding glass door stands open just enough for the smells of burnt TV dinners and slow death to waft out on the damp breeze from inside.
Pike crosses the brown, overgrown lawn, stumbling over a rusty tricycle hidden in the weeds. More toys, sun-bleached and brittle, clutter the porch. He steps over them and pushes the door open.
He bangs his head into the doorjamb, eyes crushed shut. He bangs his head again and again before he realizes he’s not doing it. It’s the sound, like animals in a slaughterhouse. He can’t even hear it, and it’s deafening. Sometimes, he’s sure he can hear songs in his head, like on his shitty dental college fillings. It’s not like he’s playing them in his head, he can’t remember songs for shit. But sometimes, when it’s quiet and he doesn’t have to think, he hears music like his head is a speaker cone, and he cries for wanting to climb up into that place where the radio waves live. If that was what being dead was like, he’d throw himself in front of the next car to pass by.
It has to stop.
He bites his hand until it stops shaking.
Pike goes inside.
Cheap particle-board furniture with rent-to-own stickers on everything. A big old floor-cabinet TV in the corner of the living room shows cartoons with the sound turned down. Beyond the living room, one doorway goes to a kitchen, the other to two bedrooms and a bathroom. The bedroom stinks like piss and blankets are hung over the curtains to make it like a cave, to hold in the stink of the dead woman on the bed.
Pike rummages through the mess of prescription meds on the nightstand and finds a couple painkillers. The sour stick-woman with the plastic bag over her head and apple sauce laced with cyanide obscuring her face, Pike figures, was named Sylvia Robles.
Then he goes to where the vibration is coming from. Like swimming upstream, he pushes against waves of pain, biting down so hard a filling in one of his molars cracks. The sudden frigid injection jerks him out of his fugue. He was looking for a way out anyway, but now—
The garage is hot like a furnace. Computers, scanners, scramblers and digital ham radio gear piled up on a shop bench stutter and blink, but though he can feel every tic and twitch of static, the room is silent but for the dull whir of fans.
“Big accident.” Pike tells the man in the chair. “You got any aspirin?”
He sits in a swaybacked lawnchair at the bench, head tilted back in contemplation of the portrait on the wall, the same as the one at her roadside shrine. The garage is dark, so Pike doesn’t notice the mess on the ceiling until it drips on him.
He must’ve put the cheap .22 automatic in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Most of his face is gone. A pair of headphones cling to his head at a jaunty angle. The vibrations are coming from those headphones, from all this shit. He looks around for something to smash it all.
Books and magazines on cellular networks, neurology, psychopharmacology, almost thick enough to use as weapons. Curled clippings on the walls scream about CELLPHONE USE AND BRAIN CANCER, CELLULAR PSYCHOSIS and a bunch of pieces on THE GRIEF TRIGGER: GAMING THE ELECTROCHEMICAL TEMPORARY INSANITY OF EMOTIONAL TRAUMA.
He picks up a crowbar and goes to smash something when he notices the gun pointing at him.
The man in the chair chokes and coughs and half-clotted blood spurts from his demolished sinuses and the empty socket of his left eye. The bullet must’ve fragmented inside his face and come out in chunks without finding his brain.
Pike lowers the crowbar, takes a step back. “That your little girl?”
The man in the chair nods, tries to say something.
“What was she doing out on the freeway?”
His finger jitters on the trigger.
“I never had nobody,” Pike says. “But you sure showed them.
Everybody knows what it feels like, now.”
Speech comes out as a spray of blood and spit. The gun shakes in his face and he sees that the man isn’t pointing it at him. He’s offering it to him.
“Oh, no way, I can’t. . .” His hands up, he’s thinking of kicking the man out of his chair or just ducking and running. “Please, don’t ask me to. . .”
But there is in that glassy gleam of that one remaining eye, the last ember of what it was like to have someone, that wounds him more deeply than the blitzkrieg of fake grief and guilt of having lost what he never had.
“OK,” Pike says, “give me the fuckin’ thing.”
A sickening, slurping sigh, and the man holds it out by the trigger guard, barrel tilted to the poured concrete floor.
Pike pinches it behind the barrel like he’s picking up a viper, wary of it squirming round in his hand to shoot him. He looks down at it and says, “I’m sorry. . .”
And he puts it down.
“But it’s not that easy.”
Shaking with muted, ruined weeping, the man tries to stand up, trying to beg, to threaten and scare Pike.
“I’m not, I can’t. . .” Pike says, but he kneels before the man. “You gotta see. . .”
The man shakes his head, stumbling, clawing through ozone-charged air to get to his gun.
Pike catches him and the man sinks into him, shaking and choking up blood onto his chest. “It’s OK, man, it’s. . . whatever it is. You got anything to drink?”
The front door smashes in and the whole house resounds with the thunder of boots and grunted orders. Thank God, Pike thinks for the first time ever, the cops are finally here.
“Relax,” Pike murmurs. “Everybody knows how you feel, now.”
The tactical submachine gun rounds go through him and Mr. Robles and the wall of the garage and all the pictures of Alma Robles.
Robles is still alive when Pike dies, that inside-out, one-eyed face on top of his sagging, then twisting into a grimace of defiant resolve, just before he whips the headphones off his head and rips the plug out of its socket in the amplifier, and the last thing Pike hears is the sound that turned dozens of hapless motorists into suicidal furies on this ordinary Sunday morning.
Alma laughing, Alma crying, at the moment of her birth.
It sounds like angels.
AT THE RIDING SCHOOL
“Come quick,” she said, in a voice so leaden each word took a year off my life. “Bring the black bag. . . There’s been an accident.”
The call woke me up, and I knocked over a water bottle getting out of bed. For an instant, the glimmer of my ex-husband’s terrified countenance flashed through my murky thoughts. Shaking his horrible visage off, I realized that the cabin was freezing, then I began to worry about what really mattered: getting to Madame fast enough. . .
I had only been in town six months, struggling to make a name for myself when Madame Dioskilos had called the first time. I had already heard that she owned a large barn and twenty-four horses, but that she was a rather difficult client, and stingy. She and her charges did all the routine medical work, and she’d had the same blacksmith since opening the Academy.
I found her to be demanding, but fair; I kept her secrets, and she—so far—kept mine.
I was all packed before I woke Tonio. He had only been with me for a few months, and I was afraid of spooking him, but he got dressed and helped me load the truck, then climbed in with his sketchpad and box of colored pencils. I told him only that we were going to see a sick animal. A ward of the state for almost all of his ten years, he was well trained to follow directions. I knew Madame Dioskilos would become irate about the boy—no men were allowed on the estate after dark, unless sent for—but I was more worried about him waking up alone in an empty house.
Anyway, it was time, if this was what I thought it was, for Madame to see—
I brought my special kit bag, though I doubted if it would do any good. She would have the only sure cure loaded and propped beside the stable door, like always.
We didn’t pass any cars going through town to the coast road. My windshield was frosted over, and it was freakishly cold for Big Sur, even in winter. The lights were out at the Yogic Retreat at the end of Main Street and the few streetlamps lit only coronas of sleet, but I had to keep myself from driving too fast. The road spilled out of the trees and clove to the sheer cliffs over the Pacific, surfing the uneasy edge of the land for sixty unlit white-knuckle miles. The state hadn’t replaced the guardrail where the last car had gone over, only a week before. Nearly ten years prior, I’d learned, Greta Spivak, a local vet who’d worked for Madame Dioskilos before me, drove over the edge during a winter storm. They found no body in the truck, and it was blithely assumed that the sharks got her before she could drown.
Tonio fell asleep, rocked by the swaying, serpentine highway. I turned the radio on as loud as I dared to keep myself from thinking.
Only four other emergencies had called me up to Madame Dioskilos’s house after dark in the whole seven years that I had worked for her. That first time, she had explained our situation: she had found me out, and we both understood that her leverage meant that I could be trusted with what I must do.
There are many veterinarians between Big Sur and Monterey who would have done the work and had no qualms about it—bitter, middle-aged divorcees; born-again pagans; misanthropic bull-dykes. . . but, they were all too clean for her. Just as I needed her, she needed someone like me.
The entrance to her estate is nestled in one of the box canyons that the highway wanders into, seeking an escape from the sea, only to veer away in a panicky hairpin turn. The gate itself is formidable, shrouded in veils of coastal live oak and laurels, wrought-iron barbs ten feet high, a press conference’s worth of cameras fixed on the road.
I always paused to look at the sculpture in the grove, just outside the gate. Most thought it was a modern piece, the angular severity shaming the mathematical fascism of the Italian Futurists; but the sculpture was symptomatic of Madame Dioskilos herself: so easy to completely misread. Like her, it came from the Cyclades Islands, and was a forgotten relic before Athens had erected its first temple.
It depicted a lithe blade of a human figure—somehow, undeniably a girl—riding the back of a rampant chimerical beast Madame told the curious was a centaur, though its hindquarters seemed to be broken off and lost to posterity. It might have been Nessus’s abduction of Alcmene, the bride of Hercules, but when you got to know Madame Dioskilos, you figured it out. The centaur was not broken, and it wasn’t a centaur, and the myth depicted was not in any storybooks.
The gates were swinging open as I turned up the drive, braking cagily on the slippery driveway, one arm out to brace Tonio. They’d let me adopt him with no problems, glad to empty a bed at the struggling group home in Oakland where we met. Though they did a thorough background check, the authorities never found any red flags in the short, happy life of Ruth Wyeth. Of course, they hadn’t dug half as diligently as she had. . .
Artemisia Dioskilos, Madame’s mother, was a fiery vamp and celebrated equestrian from a tiny Greek island. She married an ancient Italian Count who died in WWI, then fled to California with his wealth and title. The Countess ran a riding school in the Hollywood hills until 1926, when she retreated from society under a shameful cloud and purchased an estate on the Central Coast of California to raise her only daughter, Scylla. No inquiry was ever made into the identity of the child’s father.
Alone on the estate with her mother and servants, the young Scylla Dioskilos must have pined for friends as a child. When her mother died in 1960, she went back to the Old Country to live for three years. When she returned, Scylla opened a new private school.
For forty years now, she’d run the Delos Academy, and if there were occasional problems with the state, no one had ever raised an eyebrow. She boarded no more than twelve children at a time, taught them to read, do sums, and shoot arrows at deer from the back of a horse. She could hav
e charged ten thousand a semester to the snots in Carmel and gotten it, but she didn’t need money, and she avoided publicity like the plague.
She selected abandoned and orphaned girls from Bay Area cities, and she didn’t discriminate by race, so they tried to stuff kids into the trunk of her Rolls Royce as she drove away. They were all smart, strong little girls; the rest she could make over.
A certified teacher educated the girls, who had only each other for society. Most stayed through puberty, and came out fearless, aglow with eerie confidence and destined for bright futures. The whole West Coast was peppered with Madame’s prodigies; a sorority that had helped girls obtain scholarships and entry into ivy-league schools, interviews with Fortune 500 companies, and even temporary financial assistance once they graduated university. Counted among the Delos alumni were many powerful women: one of San Francisco’s most successful defense attorneys; a sitting Assemblywoman in Sacramento; even a U.S. junior Senator. They also help keep the secret. Madame Dioskilos wanted no awards, no media attention; most people in town didn’t even know about the riding school.
I rolled up the drive and past the whitewashed Cretan villa with its showcase equestrian stables, over the ridge at the top of the canyon and around the front of the austere pine-log hunting lodge. The garage was locked down, motion-detector lights and security cameras triggering each other. Seeing no lights on, I drove on down into a stand of oaks, where I knew she would be, in the other stables. . .
I parked under the awning and told Tonio to stay in the truck. I gave him my cell phone and told him what to do if it rang, then got out and stumbled through the dark to the golden glow of a lantern over the stable door.
Only the oldest girls at the school came anywhere near here, the ones who had been initiated into what Madame called “the Mysteries.” I didn’t pretend to know what she meant, but I sensed what lay at the root of her fanaticism.
I pushed open the stable door and stepped into Mediterranean heat and the awesome stink of Madame Dioskilos’s steeds.
Strategies Against Nature Page 2
