A Curious Affair

by Melanie Jackson

  “Did Irv have any family?” I asked. It seemed a natural question. When someone died you were supposed to contact their kin. “Is there someone we should call?”

  “There’s a nephew, I think,” Molly said at last, after she and Dell had exchanged a look. “Gordon or Jordon. But I’m not sure where he is. Last I heard he was living in Lodi…or maybe it was Fresno.”

  Great. I finally had a lead: Gordon or Jordon, who might still be living in Lodi. Or Fresno. There would only be…what, hundreds—thousands—of names to sort through?

  Or maybe I would kindly tell the sheriff about this and make him look into it. After all, he’d asked me about it the night before. And this would give me an excuse to talk to him and find out why he was keeping Irv’s death so quiet.

  I found that I was looking forward to seeing the sheriff again.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A cat is a lion in a jungle of small bushes.

  —Indian saying

  Special elections were coming in June and our local political scene is surprisingly byzantine, so, bad weather or not, Mayor Nolan Vickers was out pressing flesh and kissing bundled-up babies. Our mayor is impressive in his own way. He has a weight lifter’s body, a too-pink shiny face and a lot of teeth he purchased after he sold off the family demolition, truck rental, and self-defense businesses. He always makes me think of that line from Shakespeare about how a man can smile and smile but still be a villain. Not that Nolan was a villain exactly, but he had a black belt in local politics, flexible morals, only a moderate IQ and a long memory for slights, so it didn’t do to cross him unless the cause was important. Some people liked this—many of them women who found him attractive and strong, a happenstance I have always construed as proof that God has a bent sense of humor. I think there is also probably a master plan for Nolan that holds a third divorce, hypertension and at least one heart attack.

  He had supposedly been a friend of Cal’s when they were on the city council. Then Cal hadn’t agreed with him about blocking construction of a skate park for kids, then about closing the county hospital, and things changed after that. Cal was suddenly labeled as a knee-jerk liberal and Nolan worked hard to get rid of him.

  Nolan failed the first time. Cal had good friends who forgave him his political leanings since it was for the children.

  Our town used to be staunchly Republican, but the war in Iraq poured some political Visine over the county and a few Democrats managed to get into office, where they worked uneasily. Not everyone went true blue, though. In fact, few did. At heart this town still belongs to the Grand Old Party. The county is an odd mix, though, and that’s where things get tricky. Many of the smog-eating refugees from Silicon Valley were already Green, and others outside the mainstream joined them as the evidence proving global warming mounted. Which meant we had lovely organic produce at our farmers’ markets, a growing Green Party that actually hung up posters at election time (printed on recycled biodegradable paper), and fewer liberal votes to back our few brave Democratic candidates. This meant that those who were blue and wanted to stay in office had to be fiscally responsible in our conservative town. The skate park matter was finessed by getting everything donated by local businesses and having someone give the city the land. But the battle over whether to close the county hospital had raged for a decade. It was the spendthrift Hattfields versus the heartless McCoys, and those attending the public meetings semi-joked about sending for the National Guard to keep the peace every time it came up on the agenda. People were actually searched at the door for weapons.

  Admittedly, the hospital was a money pit, a black hole in the bud get, a blot on the council family fiscal escutcheon. But, Cal argued, until there was universal health care for everyone in the county, the indigent needed somewhere to go other than the new for-profit hospital that, for a case of pneumonia or a broken leg, charged the uninsured roughly their entire yearly incomes. Cal had wrestled with this problem for months and tried for compromise and creative funding. But when push had finally come to shove and they had to vote yea or nay, he’d finally come down on the side of compassion rather than profit. Nolan didn’t agree, and set about once again blackening his name. This time he was more successful and the hospital closed. Cal was feeling truly ill by then and gave in without a great fight. He forgave Nolan. I didn’t. Cal got his treatments at the new hospital that had lots of high-tech and very little care.

  It was because of this past that I kept my eyes turned away as I passed on the other side of the street. It meant bypassing the French bakery, but I had a bad feeling that if word got back to Nolan that I was insisting the town drug dealer was murdered—and maybe even got the story in the paper—that I would move to the top of his unpopular list. Of course, he’d probably find out what I thought eventually, one way or another. His brother-in-law ran a company called Good Riddance C.S. Clean Up and Septic. The tourists thought the black-and-red van parked outside the gaudy pink tin-roofed Victorian at the corner of Polk and Jackson cleaned out clogged sump pumps and the like—and Hinkley did do that, if the pump happened to be clogged with body parts. The C.S. in Good Riddance stood for crime scene. Hinkley was the man you called if Uncle Toby emptied a shotgun into his head and got his brain matter all over your authentic nineteenth-century paneling and fine Persian rugs. Or if you wanted to get a bloodstain from a triple homicide out of the rough wood flooring in a cabin. And if you didn’t call him, he would call you. He was worse than an ambulance chaser. Whoever inherited Irv’s cabin would need Hinkley’s kind of help—along with a lot of contractors to get it up to code—unless Tyler was right and the city just tore it down.

  Not that I was afraid of Nolan, exactly. But I was cautious. I still had to be careful around him. Anger came at odd moments and the words or rage would rush out of my mouth, hurling themselves at people—like Nolan, who hadn’t visited Cal even once when he was dying—in a most unattractive form of emotional projectile vomiting. It made me seem, well…crazy. And I wouldn’t put it past Nolan to try and have me committed if I made him angry enough. He probably wouldn’t succeed, but it would be a Pyrrhic victory if I bankrupted myself fighting this battle.

  I was walking quickly but, prompted by my stomach, I paused to read the daily slate of fare on the sidewalk outside Blend It. They were offering a Sunrise smoothie (mixed citrus), Old Faithful (lemon ice), and a Prune Typhoon that I heard from previous victims could cause an actually tsunami of the bowels. Shuddering, I backed away until I reached the door of Den of Thebes, our import shop that stocks some very questionable treasures from the Middle and Far East.

  Something nudged me from behind, impeding my flight from the home of blended frozen fruit. I turned, already knowing who and what it was that had me hemmed in. There was only one person in town who regularly rear-ended me.

  “Hi, Pinky. Nice flowers,” I added, nodding at the bicycle basket lashed to her walker. She had decorated it herself with a mix of silk and plastic flowers recovered from trash cans and the Dumpster behind the Best of Times thrift shop. Pinky, so called because of her love of the color, was wearing a hot pink and lime satin jogging suit with high-top sneakers that had once been white but were now rusty brown. The bright colors were a bit lurid but I had to smile anyway. Pinky’s obvious happiness demanded it. She has fairly advanced dementia, but rather than succumbing to the usual fear and anger that afflicts its victims, Pinky’s mental deterioration has left her in a state of almost perpetual joyfulness. She probably belonged in a home for the permanently befuddled, but her kids refused to confine her or curtail her wandering. In any other place this would have been dangerous, but our town had sort of made her into a mascot, and people were generally good about looking out for her.

  Pinky thought—God only knows why, perhaps because she once caught me talking to a cat hidden up in a tree—that I was a friendly alien visiting from another world, and she was waiting patiently for the day when my spaceship arrived so that she could go for an intergalactic outing. I was—sort of�
�sorry that I didn’t have a spaceship for her. Talking to aliens was at least something people had heard of around here, where there are frequent UFO sightings. Witness the calls to the sheriff’s office the night before and Tyler’s laid-back reaction to them.

  Pinky had also been a friend of Irv’s. I wondered briefly if I should tell her what had happened to him.

  “The sun is out. I can see everything,” she said, beaming happily.

  “The sun is out, but I’m still in the dark,” I muttered, trying to match her smile but failing. Those muscles had atrophied. I also realized how much I missed the days of emotional equilibrium when the universe made sense, when I knew exactly what could and could not be. I needed to find that again if I was ever to know peace of mind. And if that meant that cats actually could talk to me…well then, so be it. There were more things in heaven and earth and all that. But I had to know if cats actually were talking to me, or if I was—well, if I was like Pinky.

  “Have you seen Irv?” she asked, as though guessing the direction of my thoughts. “I haven’t talked to him in a week.” With Pinky everything was a week—last Christmas, next Memorial Day, even her fourth birthday.

  “Not today,” I said, after deciding not to tell her about Irv being dead. It wasn’t my job to spread the unhappy news when clearly the sheriff preferred to keep it quiet, and I wouldn’t have volunteered anyway. I have learned firsthand that grief actually steals oxygen from the body. Little by little, it deflates those who are stricken with it, sucking the life right out of them. Pinky would probably forget the unhappy news almost immediately. Then again, maybe she wouldn’t, and I wasn’t going to be the one who ruined Pinky’s sunny day.

  A pickup truck rumbled by, the tarmac shivering from both the vibration of the overpowered engine and the rap music pouring from its stereo. Blend It’s slate shuddered for a moment and then fell over in a sludge puddle. This was the downside to having a highway pass right through town.

  I picked the slate up and then sighed. The sign was smudged and dripping now, but I didn’t have the time or inclination to fix it—though I wanted very much to jerk the driver out of his vehicle and dump him in the same puddle. I settled for flipping him the bird. I don’t like that the gesture comes so naturally to me. Rage was one of the reasons Cal and I decided to move. I was afraid that my middle finger was going to get stuck in an upthrust position if we stayed in the Bay Area. As it is, the muscles are still far too developed in the middle finger of my left hand.

  Waving good-bye to a puzzled Pinky, I started back up the hill at a brisk stomp as I pretended I was smashing the truck driver’s head with my heels. One of the other main reasons Cal and I fled the Silicon Valley was noise pollution and what I can only call a new age of bad manners. The urban din was everywhere down there, the noisy masses not even realizing they offended with their painful music, poured over other commuters who were also stuck in daily gridlocked traffic that happened every morning between six and ten A.M. and every evening from four to seven. Or eight. Or nine. But they did offend, and these otherwise courteous people, who worried about using politically correct language and avoiding bad breath that might bother their co-workers, turned life into an aural arms race between stereos and car engines, horns and cursing: Rush Limbaugh turned up to drown out Britney Spears, who was in turn nudged up another notch so the vegeterian liberal with the preteen in the hybrid car didn’t have to listen to the conservative steak-eater in the urban assault vehicle. Rap topped opera until a stand-and-deliver tenor proved that he, boosted by the right electronic equipment, could outsing anyone. The air was fouled with daily commuter aggravation set to digitized syncopation.

  Nor could you escape the sound by going to work on foot or bicycle, even supposing the distance to the job was not a bar, which it was in nearly every case. There were millions of people shouting into their cell phones night and day, or just shouting because it was their new “normal” volume level. Shouting at their children, their spouses, their pets, in voices too loud for the shared walls of apartments or even the new “luxury” homes built less than ten feet apart from one another where bathrooms were made of marble but you could still hear your neighbor flush.

  Cal and I had done a decade in that endless din and then opted out. The Silicon Valley was no place for two writers, two lovers of quiet, even if one wrote mainly about computers and the software that ran them. It pissed me off that the noise pollution from the outside was beginning to invade my world. I feared being forced out of it and having nowhere to go.

  Being opposed to a lot of so-called progress, it probably goes without saying that I don’t have a cell phone. In fact, I keep only one phone in the house now that Cal is gone, and I usually let the answering machine take care of it. This is an act of defiance against the discourteous world that exists outside my little hill in Irish Camp, where ill-mannered but well-meaning people want me to live as an obedient hound to be found at the end of an electronic leash any time they want a last-minute article, a babysitter, or an ear to moan into. This electronic distancing of friends and loved ones is something I do, in spite of the presentiment that I will someday regret not having push-button help close by. In the back of my mind I have always thought that I would bend this rule if I were ever forced into a walker or had a heart attack. Or perhaps when my sibling’s larvae have pupated into actual human beings that don’t need to be constantly overseen by their aunt when my brother and his wife want a little ski-weekend getaway. Then again, maybe not. It’s that old dog learning new tricks thing, and I felt older than Ole Blue. More frustrated, too.

  I reluctantly decided it was time to get the car out of the garage and expand my search area for clues. It would be unpleasant, since I dislike being near other cars almost as much as phones, but I had two very compelling reasons for wanting to find Irv’s murderer. One, I didn’t like the idea of sharing our mountain with a killer. It seemed, at the very least, to be imprudent. And two—which was the more important reason—I needed to prove to myself that I wasn’t mad. Because believe me, the idea had crossed my mind more than once that I might be crazier than a shithouse rat. I’ve done some research and hearing cats talk to you is not a standard neurological condition brought on by lightning strikes. It is, however, rather common in schizophrenics and serial killers like the Son of Sam.

  Gritting my teeth—literally—I backed our forest-green Subaru out of the garage and up our driveway, which had a slope like the north face of the Eiger. Triumph over our driveway was never a foregone conclusion in the winter months; ice could easily defeat even the all-wheel drive. That morning, however, the god who looks after fools and people who choose to live on mountains was looking out for me. I made it out of the driveway and onto the road without hitting another car or Abby’s moss-covered retaining wall that was already short a few stones from aggressive reversing out of my driveway.

  I glanced at my watch. The sheriff wouldn’t be on duty yet since he had worked the night shift. That meant I would have to follow other potential leads.

  It took nearly ten minutes to get out past the high school, which had been constructed before the advent of the automobile and the need for streets wide enough for two cars to pass abreast. I trickled out of the old town with the other desperate winter shut-ins who were running low on toilet paper and orange juice and wanted to restock at the grocery store before the next storm hit. I had my window cracked open and could smell the delightful odor of greasy sausage and eggs. I don’t do fast food; I find it to be the culinary equivalent of elevator music. But that didn’t stop me from enjoying the smell as I passed the Tin Roof drive-in.

  Have you ever noticed that small towns—and cities, too—are organisms? Some, like Irish Camp, are single-celled; some are more complicated. Some are robust and some are delicate. But we have in common one thing: a need to live, even thrive, in our given environment, which we generally prefer remains unchanged.

  Our little hamlet is not pretty, though the downtown area strives for qu
aint. What we really are is sinewy and hardened, and we know how to survive. That means a certain amount of compromise. Modern life and its conveniences haven’t completely passed us by—we aren’t that lucky. We have our monster trucks and, at the very base of the mountain, there are a few chain-stores and more fast-food places. They are there for the tourists who go into withdrawal if kept from cheap hamburgers and tacos for more than twenty-four hours. The locals—one of which I now considered myself to be—wince every time we pass these places. I would actually drive miles out of my way to avoid them and the reminders they brought of previous life in the city.

  Unless I needed a new ink cartridge for my printer, that is. Then I would conduct commerce with the great Satan. Or if I was headed up the hill on the only road into Sublime—population twenty-seven—because there was only one road up that part of the mountain. I hadn’t been up there much since Cal died, and I traveled there slowly on that day, doing no more than a cowardly forty miles per hour, both because the roads might still have ice on them and because I was venturing into a place where Cal’s shade might linger.

  As I have mentioned before, our part of the world is populated with some strange signs. This bit of forgotten interstate’s no different. My favorite: this section of road is maintained by the literary hitchhikers guild. Of course, I’ve never seen any hitchhikers along here, literary or otherwise—a sheer rock wall on one side of the narrow two-lane road and a steep cliff on the other discourages all but the most suicidal of people—but I must say that the thoroughfare is always very tidy. Perhaps they use a blower slung out of a car window.

  There were two other businesses with odd signs prominently displayed in Sublime: DON’S SNOW PLOWS AND 8 FLAVORS OF ICE CREAM!!!! CLEAN RESTROOMS!!! AND CAN TANK R US SEPTIC AND SEWER—LAUNDRY, CAR WASH, BAIT AND TACKLE. I was planning on going to both if necessary, since I was looking for an old gold mine that Crystal had shown me last summer, but hadn’t a clue where to start searching. The old vein was supposedly played out, and it sounded like it was good for nothing but hiding illegal stills, even more illegal pot patches and possibly a meth lab or two. But Irv had liked to hike up there, in fair weather and foul, and I was running out of things to investigate in town.