Hymn

by Graham Masterton

  Movingly, the skeleton had been decorated with scores of white ribbons, tied in fluttering bows—tributes from relatives and passing motorists to all the people who had died in it. A single car was parked beside it now, a red open-topped Camaro.

  Lloyd turned off the blacktop and drove slowly across the scrub. He parked not far away from the Camaro and climbed out. White dust blew away from his tyres and the wind whistled softly past his car antenna. He walked toward the bus and stood staring at it, the saddest memorial to death by fire that he had ever seen.

  As he stood there, a young woman came walking around the side of the wreck. She was dark-haired, tall, and she was wearing a short black dress. She came up to him, and said, ‘Hallo, there. Are you a relative?’

  Lloyd shook his head. ‘Just a friend.’

  ‘It was such a tragedy,’ the young woman said. She was wearing wrap-around sunglasses, so that it was difficult for Lloyd to tell what she looked like. But she had high cheekbones and a strong jawline, that well-bred look that distinguishes many of the children of good-looking California parents. She was large-breasted but very narrow-waisted, and she had what a political friend of Lloyd’s had once called congressional committee legs—in other words, they went on and on and you thought they were never going to come to an end.

  She said, abstractedly, ‘I didn’t think I wanted to see it. But in the end I had to. It was like seeing Mike. I didn’t think that I could bear it. But I did, and at least I won’t have nightmares about it, trying to imagine what he looked like, and never knowing.’

  ‘Mike?’ asked Lloyd.

  ‘My husband, Mike Kerwin. I’m Kathleen Kerwin.’

  Lloyd shook hands. ‘Lloyd Denman. I hope you’ll accept my condolences. It must have been a terrible shock.’

  She shrugged, to show her feeling of helplessness. ‘I was working in my shop and two state troopers came in and said that he was dead. I couldn’t understand it. He wasn’t even supposed to be here.’

  ‘He wasn’t?’ asked Lloyd. ‘I had a friend on this bus—well, a friend of my fiancée’s . . . well, a friend of my late fiancée’s. She worked with the San Diego Opera Company. Nobody knew what the hell she was doing out here, either.’

  Kathleen said, ‘They kept saying things on TV, like it’s a suspected Colombian drug massacre. Or it’s a mass suicide pact. But Mike wasn’t into drugs, he was a manager for San Diego Federal. And he was so happy . . . we were going to start a family and everything.’

  Lloyd said, ‘Do you mind if we talk about this? I’ve been trying to do a little detective work on my own, trying to find out what happened. Maybe you can help me.’

  ‘Well, certainly,’ said Kathleen. ‘Are you a private detective or something?’

  ‘Not me. I run a fish restaurant.’

  She almost managed to smile. ‘Do you want to talk now, or later? It’s very hot out here.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I came out here looking for an Indian kid,’ said Lloyd. ‘The newspapers said that he was the only witness to the burning. I was wondering if there was any chance that he could give me some kind of clue who did it.’

  Kathleen looked around, as if she expected to see the Indian boy standing not far away. ‘Didn’t the police talk to him?’

  ‘Oh, sure the police talked to him. But I’m not too sure that the police would have asked him the right questions. It seems to me that there’s more going on here than meets the eye. I mean, this whole thing has some very weird aspects to it. Like your husband, for instance. You know he wasn’t a crack dealer or a potential suicide. Neither was Marianna, the girl from the Opera, not a chance of it. So what were they both doing here, out in the desert, on a bus, getting themselves burned to death?’

  Kathleen said, in a flat voice, ‘The police told me that none of them tried to escape.’

  ‘Well, that’s right, they didn’t. They just sat here and burned.’

  They were silent for a moment. It was eerie out here, on the face of this baking-hot desert, with the wind sighing through the black-charred wreckage of the bus, and fluttering the white ribbons.

  ‘I thought I’d drive up the road a way and see if I can track down that Indian kid,’ said Lloyd. ‘Why don’t you come along, too? He can’t live too far away, he’s blind.’

  Kathleen looked at Lloyd in surprise. ‘But if he’s blind . . .?’

  ‘He didn’t see anything, but he heard something. He may have heard more, if he could only remember it. Whatever, it’s worth a try.’

  ‘All right, then,’ Kathleen agreed. ‘But there’s something I have to do. It won’t take a minute.’

  ‘Sure thing,’ Lloyd told her.

  While Lloyd waited, she went to her car, opened the trunk, and took out a wreath of white silk ribbons and white silk flowers. Across the centre was written the words Michael Kerwin, My Beloved Husband, Now You’ll Never Die. She walked across to the bus, and tied it on to the front. Then she lowered her head for a moment in a silent farewell.

  They drove less than a mile and a half further on before they reached a sharp left-hand turnoff. A sun-faded sign pointed north-westwards for GAS—FOOD—INDIAN R-T-FAX. Lloyd turned and Kathleen, in her Camaro, followed him.

  They followed a range of low sprawling hills, occasionally dipping deep down into the shadows of an arroyo, and then rising up into the sunshine again. After about two more miles, they saw a 76 petrol station in the distance, with a small barn-like building standing next to it, and a ramshackle collection of trailers and pick-up trucks at the back, and a sign saying Trailers 4 Rent. Three windpumps circled overhead, and stray dogs roamed the perimeter.

  As they came closer, they passed a large handpainted signboard which announced Indian Jack’s Genuine Pechanga Souvenirs. Beer—Hot Dogs—Blankets—Beads. Turkwise Jewelre. Video Rental.

  They pulled up outside the barnlike building, the double doors of which were opened wide, and hung around like a roadside shrine with feathered war-bonnets and saddles, and brightly coloured blankets and pipes-of-peace, rope and chaps and all kinds of Indian souvenir junk. A rusted Coca-Cola machine juddered noisily at the side of the doorway, and a little further away, at the end of a long chain, as if to prevent it from hopping off, stood an old-fashioned one-legged bubble-gum machine half-filled with sun-bleached gumballs.

  A pre-teenage boy with dark glasses and black shoulder-length hair was sitting on a rocker in the doorway, smoking a cigarette and listening to Prince on a Sony Walkman. To him, the volume of ‘When Doves Cry’ must have been ear-achingly loud, because Lloyd could hear what the music was while he was still ten feet away.

  ‘I’m looking for a kid called Tony Express,’ said Lloyd.

  The boy pulled a face, without taking off his earphones.

  Kathleen suggested, ‘I don’t think he heard you.’

  Lloyd stepped forward, lifted up the boy’s left earphone, and yelled into his ear, ‘I’m looking for a kid called Tony Express.’

  The boy lifted off his headset and resentfully rubbed his ear. ‘Shit, man, I may be blind but I sure as hell ain’t deaf.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Lloyd told him. ‘You must be Tony Express.’

  ‘What’s it to you if I am?’

  ‘I’ve been looking for you, that’s what.’

  ‘Well, now you’ve found me, man. What do you want?’

  ‘A little help, that’s all.’

  ‘Sure thing. How about some really neat moccasins, all hand-made, or maybe a pipe-tamper made of genuine bone, or a cradleboard? These cradleboards look great, you know, you can fill them with arrangements of dried flowers, and hang them on your kitchen wall. I’ve sold a whole bunch of them to Cannell & Chaffin.’

  ‘Cannell & Chaffin, the interior designers?’ Lloyd looked at Kathleen in amazement. ‘Can you believe this kid?’ he asked her. ‘A young upwardly mobile Pechanga.’

&
nbsp; ‘You got to move with the mood, man,’ Tony Express replied. ‘How about a sundance doll?’

  He groped to one side of his chair and lifted up a long stick decorated with skin and fur and squirrel-tails and beads. On the top of it, a small cross face had been painted.

  ‘What’s that for?’ asked Kathleen.

  ‘It grants you revenge, if you ask it nicely.’

  ‘Who said anything about revenge?’ said Lloyd.

  Tony Express let out a high, cracking laugh. ‘Nobody said nothing about revenge, man. You didn’t have to. You didn’t come here to buy nothing, did you, or else you’d’ve been asking me by now how much my blankets were, or did I take Visa, or coming out with stuff like “Look at that wonderful weather-dance shirt, darling, I could wear it to play golf.”’

  ‘You’ve got a pretty jaundiced view of the world, don’t you?’ Lloyd asked him, immediately regretting the use of the world ‘view’.

  ‘What’s “jaundiced”?’

  ‘Sour, cynical,’ Lloyd told him.

  Tony Express smiled. ‘That’s because I can’t see it, man. I can’t see its colours and I can’t see its false bright faces. I can’t even imagine what a colour is.’

  ‘So what’s all this about revenge?’

  ‘That’s what you should be telling me, man. You’re the one who came here looking for it. You don’t want to buy, so you must want to talk, and who comes all the way out here to Nothing Junction in a fancy foreign car, just to talk to some blind Indian kid about the weather, or how you can’t get good help any more?

  ‘Come on, man, get serious. You came here to talk about the only thing that’s happened here in twenty years, man, that bus burning out, and all those people getting themselves killed.’

  ‘I could be a cop,’ Lloyd suggested.

  ‘Unh-hunh,’ said Tony Express. ‘You’re not a cop because cops don’t drive fancy foreign cars and they don’t wear Geoffrey Beene aftershave, either. So you must be an insurance investigator or a relative of somebody who died. And since you didn’t introduce yourself as soon as you arrived, “Listen, my name’s Dick Head and I represent the Never-Pay Insurance Company Inc.”, I guess you’re a relative. And when somebody gets killed, what do relatives want more than anything else, especially in a Judeo-Christian society? They want revenge. Have a sun-dance doll, thirty-six bucks plus tax.’

  Lloyd shook his head, and said to Kathleen, ‘This guy’s so sharp he’s going to cut himself. How come you know “Judeo-Christian” but you don’t know “jaundiced”?’

  Tony Express tapped his nose with his finger. “’Judeo-Christian” was on television, man. This brave always listens heap good, you understand? And when you listen—when you really listen—you can always tell exactly what’s going down. Nobody can ever pull the wool over your eyes, man, because you ain’t got no eyes to have the wool pulled over. I heard your car engine, man, and that’s a six-cylinder import with overhead cams, and if you’d left it running a little longer I would have told you what it says on your bumper stickers. In fact I can tell you now, it says Save The Whales.’

  ‘Actually it says I Don’t Brake For Smartass Blind Kids,’ Lloyd retorted.

  Tony Express gave him a lopsided grin. ‘All right, man, I’m sorry. I’ve been running off at the mouth again. I do it sometimes. Either I’m silent and moody and don’t talk to nobody for weeks, or else I get this verbal dire-rear. I spend too much time alone, that’s the problem. I guess I’m over-educated, too. I listen to the radio all day and the teevee for most of the night. What else is there to do? My teacher says I’m brilliant but wayward.’

  ‘Are you really twelve years old?’ Lloyd asked him.

  Tony Express nodded. ‘Twelve, going on thirteen.’

  ‘In that case, you’re too young to smoke. Does your father let you smoke?’

  ‘My father’s away on business. Avoiding the cops in other words. My grandfer’s taking care of me, John Dull Knife. He lives in that old Airstream trailer way in the back, by the fence.’

  Lloyd said, ‘Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions about the day the bus burned?’

  ‘No problem, what’s it worth?’

  ‘A sawbuck?’

  ‘No problem.’

  Kathleen had already perched herself on the hitching-rail at the front of the store. Lloyd dragged over a cracker-barrel and sat on that.

  ‘It says in the paper you heard somebody talking while the bus was on fire.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Tony Express agreed. ‘He kept on saying “you knew us, you knew us”.’

  ‘Could it have been that he wasn’t saying “you knew us”, but “Junius”?’

  Tony Express angled his head slightly. ‘Say that again, man.’

  ‘Junius. Junius, like somebody’s name.’

  ‘Again, man.’

  Lloyd repeated it six or seven times. At last Tony Express lifted his small nail-bitten hand as an indication that he should stop.

  ‘Well?’ asked Lloyd.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Tony Express. ‘It was “Junius”. I said “you knew us” because I never heard the name Junius before.’

  ‘You’re certain about that?’ Lloyd asked him.

  ‘Absolutely. I’d swear it on the Bible.’

  ‘Now . . . this could be more difficult,’ said Lloyd. ‘Can you remember if he said anything else? Anything less distinct? Did he sing, maybe? Did he say anything in a foreign language?’

  Tony Express thought about that, and then slowly shook his head. ‘I don’t think so, man. There was so much noise going on when that bus was burning. Crackling, popping. Like sticking your head in a bowl of Rice Krispies.’

  Lloyd sat back in disappointment. ‘So there was nothing at all?’

  ‘Well . . . one thing. But I couldn’t be sure, man. I wouldn’t swear to it.’

  ‘Tell me anyway.’

  ‘After the bus had been burning for quite a while, I thought I heard a sound like a trumpet or something. It was probably the bus, you know, the driver falling on to the horn, or maybe the alarm circuits melting. But that was all.’

  ‘One thing more,’ Lloyd asked him. ‘If you heard the man’s voice again, the one who said Junius, do you think you could identify it? Do you think you could pick it out and say, “yes, that’s the guy.”’

  Tony Express didn’t hesitate. ‘Any time. Any time at all.’

  ‘You seem very confident about that,’ put in Kathleen.

  ‘I’ve got a phonographic memory,’ Tony Express told her. ‘I can remember voices and sounds exactly. My teacher says it’s uncanny. I don’t know what’s supposed to be so uncanny about it, especially since I can’t see. I have this terrific nose for smells, too. You had garlic last night.’

  ‘What?’ said Lloyd.

  ‘Just kidding around, man. But if you can find this dude, I can pick him out.’

  ‘Good,’ Lloyd told him. ‘That’s excellent. Here’s your ten bucks, and here’s another ten, in case it gets lonesome. Do you think I could call you, if I ever manage to find this guy, and ask you to identify his voice?’

  ‘Sure thing. Do you think it was him who torched the bus?’

  ‘I can’t tell for certain, but it’s beginning to look that way. Here . . . here’s my card. It’s a restaurant in La Jolla. I won’t be there most of the time, but if you ask for Waldo, he’ll help you out.’

  ‘Waldo, hunh?’ asked Tony Express, with obvious scepticism. ‘Like in Mr Magoo?’

  ‘That’s right, like in Mr Magoo.’

  ‘You know what Mr Magoo’s problem was, don’t you, man?’ asked Tony Express. ‘He looked and he looked, and he still couldn’t see.’

  Twelve

  Joe North arrived back at his apartment above the Smiling Sashimi restaurant on West Washington Street shortly after seven o’clock. To reac
h his front door, he had to elbow his way through the chattering, unhelpful line of would-be diners who were already out in the street waiting for tables. The Smiling Sashimi was one of the cheapest and most popular Japanese restaurants around Hillcrest, although, after a month-long binge of eating there almost every evening after it had first opened, Joe hardly patronized it at all now.

  Marianna had always made corny jokes about it. ‘You’re too tempura-mental,’ she used to tease him.

  He closed the street door behind him (red-painted, to match the restaurant) and climbed the narrow staircase to the second floor. The lights didn’t work, and he had to feel his way up in darkness, carrying a heavy sack of marketing in the crook of his arm.

  He wasn’t surprised that the lights were out. Joe had sent the name of Mr Puls the landlord to the Guinness Book of World Records as the Meanest Bastard on God’s Earth. Mr Puls believed that if it didn’t specifically state in the rental agreement that the tenant had the right to see where he was going, then he had no legal obligation to supply lightbulbs.

  ‘If you’re shortsighted, do I have to buy you eyeglasses?’ he always shouted.

  Joe groped his way blindly along the landing until he found his front door. He had to set his shopping sack down on his feet while he struggled to find his key, and then to jab it into the lock.

  He sniffed. He thought there was an odd burnt smell on the stairs. He was used to the smell of sukiyaki and chicken teriyaki, and once the whole kitchen downstairs had caught fire. From Joe’s apartment, it had sounded like the sinking of the Musashi at Leyte Gulf, screaming and yelling and doors slamming, and afterwards the building had smelled like scorched bean-curd for weeks.

  But this burnt smell was different. This smell was like overheated radiators, or saunas. A dry smell. Not oily, not smoky. He couldn’t place it. It was like nothing he had ever smelled before.

  He opened his front door and switched on the light. He kicked the door shut behind him. He had lived over the Smiling Sashimi ever since it had been the Siete Mares Mexican restaurant, and he had been deputy assistant scenery painter at Civic Theater. He kept telling himself that he ought to move somewhere classier, somewhere up the coast, but somehow there never seemed to be time. Or money. Even for one studio room, a shower, and a kitchen so small that you had to step into the hallway to open the oven door; he was paying what his mother was paying for a whole three-bedroomed house in Minnesota.