Brother Odd

Page 20

“Yes. And so are James Dean, David Letterman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Wendell Willkie.”
“Cole Porter, he was perhaps the greatest American songwriter of the century, sir.”
“Yes, I agree.”
“‘Night and Day,’ ‘Anything Goes,’ ‘In the Still of the Night,’ ‘I Get a Kick Out of You,’ ‘You’re the Top.’ He wrote the Indiana state song, too.”
Romanovich said, “The state song is ‘On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away’ and if Cole Porter heard you crediting it to him, he would no doubt claw his way out of the grave, track you down, and exact a terrible vengeance.”
“Oh. Then I guess I was misinformed.”
He raised his attention from the cake long enough to give me an ironic look heavy enough to weight down a feather in a high wind. “I doubt that you are ever misinformed, Mr. Thomas.”
“No, sir, you’re wrong. I’m the first to admit I don’t know anything about anything — except that I’m something of a nut about all things Indiana.”
“Approximately what time this morning did this Hoosiermania overcome you?”
Man, he was good at this.
“Not this morning, sir,” I lied. “All my life, as long as I can remember.”
“Maybe you were a Hoosier in a previous life.”
“Maybe I was James Dean.”
“I am certain you were not James Dean.”
“Why do you say that, sir?”
“Such an intense craving for adoration and such a capacity for rudeness as Mr. Dean exhibited could not possibly have been expunged so entirely from just one incarnation to the next.”
I thought about that statement from a few different angles. “Sir, I have nothing against the late Mr. Dean, but I don’t see any way to interpret that except as a compliment.”
Glowering, Rodion Romanovich said, “You complimented my cake decorations, did you not? Well, now we are even.”
CHAPTER 29
CARRYING MY JACKET, WHICH I HAD RETRIEVED from the rack in the reception lounge, I went down to the basement, grateful that there were no real catacombs full of moldering corpses. With my luck, one of them would have been Cole Porter.
Those brothers who had wished to be interred on the grounds of the abbey are buried in a shady plot on the perimeter of the forest. It is a peaceful little cemetery. The spirits of those at rest there have all moved on from this world.
I have spent pleasant hours among those headstones, with only Boo for company. He likes to watch the squirrels and rabbits while I stroke his neck and scratch his ears. Sometimes he gambols after them, but they are not frightened by him; even in the days when he was sharp of tooth, he was never a killer.
As if my thoughts had summoned him, I found Boo waiting for me when I turned out of the east-west hallway into the north-south.
“Hey, boy, what’re you doing down here?”
Tail wagging, he approached, settled on the floor, and rolled onto his back, all four paws in the air.
Receiving such an invitation, only the hard-hearted and the uselessly busy can refuse. All that is wanted is affection, while all that is offered is everything, symbolized in the defenseless posture of the exposed tummy.
Dogs invite us not only to share their joy but also to live in the moment, where we are neither proceeding from nor moving toward, where the enchantment of the past and future cannot distract us, where a freedom from practical desire and a cessation of our usual ceaseless action allows us to recognize the truth of our existence, the reality of our world and purpose — if we dare.
I gave Boo only a two-minute belly rub and then continued with the usual ceaseless action, not because urgent tasks awaited me, but because, as a wise man once wrote, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” and I am too human.
The large garage had the feel of a bunker, concrete above and below and on all sides. The fluorescent ceiling fixtures shed a hard light, but they were too widely spaced to dispel every shadow.
Seven vehicles were housed here: four compact sedans, a beefy pickup, two extended SUVs jacked up on big tires with snow chains.
A ramp ascended to a large roll-up door, beyond which the wind howled.
Mounted on a wall was a key box. Inside, fourteen sets of keys, two for each vehicle, hung from seven pegs. Above each peg, a label provided the license number of the vehicle, and a tag on each set of keys carried the same number.
No danger of Chernobyls here.
I pulled on my jacket, got behind the wheel of one of the SUVs, started the engine, and let it idle just long enough to figure how to raise and lower the plow with the simple controls.
When I stepped out of the truck, Boo was there. He looked up, cocked his head, pricked his ears, and seemed to say, What’s wrong with your nose, buddy? Don’t you smell the same trouble I smell?
He trotted away, glanced back, saw that I was following, and led me out of the garage, into the northwest hall once more.
This wasn’t Lassie, and I didn’t expect to find anything as easy to deal with as Timmy down a well or Timmy trapped in a burning barn.
Boo stopped in front of a closed door, at the same point in the corridor at which he had offered me the opportunity to rub his tummy.
Perhaps he had originally encouraged me to pause at that point to give my fabled intuition a chance to operate. I had been caught in the wheels of compulsion, however, bent on getting to the garage, my mind occupied with thoughts of the trip ahead, able to pause briefly but unable to see and feel.
I felt something now, all right. A subtle but persistent pull, as if I were a fisherman, my line cast out into the deep, some catch hooked on the farther end.
Boo went into the suspect room. After a hesitation, I followed, leaving the door open behind me because in situations like this, when psychic magnetism draws me, I cannot be certain I’m the fisherman and not the fish with the hook in its mouth.
We were in a boiler room, full of the hiss of flame rings and the rumble of pumps. Four large, high-efficiency boilers produced the hot water that traveled ceaselessly through pipes in the walls of the building, to the scores of fan-coil units that heated the many rooms.
Here, too, were chillers that produced supercooled water, which also circulated through the school and convent, providing cool air when a room grew too warm.
On three walls were sophisticated air monitors, which would trigger alarms in every farther corner of the big building and shut off the incoming gas line that fired the boilers if they detected the merest trace of free propane in the room. This was supposed to be an absolute guarantee against an explosion.
Absolute guarantee.
Foolproof. The unsinkable Titanic.
The uncrashable Hindenburg. Peace in our time.
Human beings not only can’t bear too much reality, we flee from reality when someone doesn’t force us close enough to the fire to feel the heat on our faces.
None of the three air monitors indicated the presence of rogue molecules of propane.
I had to depend upon the monitors because propane is colorless and odorless. If I relied on my senses to detect a leak, I would not know a problem existed until I found myself passing out for lack of oxygen or until everything went boom.
Each monitor box was locked and featured a pressed-metal seal bearing the date of the most recent inspection by the service company responsible for their reliable function. I examined every lock and every seal and discovered no indications of tampering.
Boo had gone to the corner of the room farthest from the door. I found myself drawn there, too.
In its circulation through the building, the supercooled water absorbs heat. It then travels to a large underground vault near the eastern woods, where a cooling tower converts the unwanted heat to steam and blows it into the air to dissipate; thereafter, the water returns to the chillers in this room to be cooled again.
Four eight-inch-diameter PVC pipes disappeared through the wall, near the ceiling, close to the corner where Boo and I had been drawn.
Boo sniffed at a four-foot-square stainless-steel panel set six inches off the floor, and I dropped to my knees before it.
Beside the panel was a light switch. I clicked it, but nothing happened — unless I’d turned lights on in some space beyond the wall.
The access panel was fixed to the concrete wall with four bolts. On a nearby hook hung a tool with which the bolts could be extracted.
After removing the bolts, I set aside the panel and peered into the hole where Boo had already gone. Past the butt-end and tucked tail of the big white dog, I saw a lighted tunnel.
Unafraid of dog farts, but fearful about what else might lie ahead, I crawled through the opening.
Once I had cleared the two-foot width of the poured-in-place concrete wall, I was able to stand. Before me lay a rectangular passageway seven feet high and five feet wide.
The four pipes were suspended side by side from the ceiling and were grouped on the left half of the tunnel. Small center-set lights revealed the pipes dwindling as if to eternity.
Along the floor, on the left, were runs of separated copper pipes, steel pipes, and flexible conduits. They probably carried water, propane, and electrical wires.
Here and there, white patterns of calcification stained the walls, but the place wasn’t damp. It had a clean smell of concrete and lime.
Except for the faint rushing noise of water flowing through the pipes overhead, the passageway lay silent.
I consulted my wristwatch. In thirty-four minutes, I would need to be in the garage to meet the Hoosier’s Hoosier.
With purpose, Boo trotted forward, and I followed with no clear purpose at all.
I proceeded as silently as possible in ski boots, and when my shiny quilted thermal jacket whistled as I moved my arms, I took it off and left it behind. Boo made no sound whatsoever.
A boy and his dog are the best of all companions, celebrated in songs and books and movies. When the boy is in the grip of a psychic compulsion, however, and when the dog is fearless, the chance that all will turn out well is about as likely as a Scorsese gangster movie ending in sweetness, light, and the happy singing of cherubic children.
CHAPTER 30
I DISLIKE SUBTERRANEAN PASSAGEWAYS. I ONCE died in such a place. At least I’m pretty sure I died, and was dead for a while, and even haunted a few of my friends, though they didn’t know I was with them in a spook state.
If I didn’t die, something stranger than death happened to me.
I wrote about the experience in my second manuscript, but writing about it didn’t help me to understand it.
At intervals of forty or fifty feet, air monitors were mounted on the right hand wall. I found no signs of tampering.
If the passageway led to the cooling-tower vault, as I was sure that it must, then it would be about four hundred feet long.
Twice I thought I heard something behind me. When I looked over my shoulder, nothing loomed.
The third time, I refused to succumb to the urge to glance back. Irrational fear feeds on itself and grows. You must deny it.
The trick is to be able to differentiate irrational fear from justifiable fear. If you squelch justifiable fear and soldier on, dauntless and determined, that’s when Santa Claus will squeeze down the chimney, after all, and add your peepee to his collection.
Boo and I had gone two hundred feet when another passageway opened on the right. This one sloped uphill and curved out of sight.
Four additional PVC pipes were suspended from the ceiling of the intersecting corridor. They turned the corner into our passageway and paralleled the first set of pipes, heading toward the cooling tower.
The second serviceway must have originated in the new abbey.
Instead of bringing the brothers back to the school in the two SUVs, risking attack by whatever might be waiting in the blizzard, we could lead them along this easier route.
I needed to explore the new passageway, though not immediately.
Boo had proceeded toward the cooling tower. Although the dog would not be of help when I was attacked by the creeping thing behind me, I felt better when we kept together, and I hurried after him.
In my mind’s eye, the creature at my back had three necks but only two heads. The body was human, but the heads were those of coyotes. It wanted to plant my head on its center neck.
You might wonder where such a baroque irrational fear could have come from. After all, as you know, I’m droll, but I’m not grotesque.
A casual friend of mine in Pico Mundo, a fiftyish Panamint Indian who calls himself Tommy Cloudwalker, told me of an encounter he had with such a three-headed creature.
Tommy had gone hiking and camping in the Mojave, when winter’s tarnished-silver sun, the Ancient Squaw, had relented to spring’s golden sun, the Young Bride, but before summer’s fierce platinum sun, the Ugly Wife, could with her sharp tongue sear the desert so cruelly that a sweat of scorpions and beetles would be wrung from the sand in a desperate search for better shade and a drop of water.
Maybe Tommy’s names for the seasonal suns arise from the legends of his tribe. Maybe he just makes them up. I’m not sure if Tommy is partly genuine or entirely a master of hokum.
In the center of his forehead is a stylized image of a hawk two inches wide and one inch high. Tommy says the hawk is a birthmark.
Truck Boheen, a one-legged former biker and tattooist who lives in a rusting trailer on the edge of Pico Mundo, says he applied the hawk to Tommy’s forehead twenty-five years ago, for fifty bucks.
Reason tips the scale toward Truck’s version. The problem is, Truck also claims that the most recent five presidents of the United States have come secretly to his trailer in the dead of night to receive his tattoos. I might believe one or two, but not five.
Anyway, Tommy was sitting in the Mojave on a spring night, the sky winking with the Wise Eyes of Ancestors — or stars, if scientists are correct — when the creature with three heads appeared on the farther side of the campfire.
The human head never said a word, but the flanking coyote heads spoke English. They debated each other about whether Tommy’s head was more desirable than the head already occupying the neck between them.
Coyote One liked Tommy’s head, especially the proud nose.
Coyote Two was insulting; he said Tommy was “more Italian than Indian.”
Being something of a shaman, Tommy recognized that this creature was an unusual manifestation of the Trickster, a spirit common to the folklore of many Indian nations. As an offering, he produced three cigarettes of whatever he was smoking, and these were accepted.
With solemn satisfaction, the three heads smoked in silence. After tossing the butts in the campfire, the creature departed, allowing Tommy to keep his head.
Two words might explain Tommy’s story: peyote buttons.
The following day, however, after resuming his hike, Tommy came across the headless corpse of another hiker. The driver’s license in the guy’s wallet identified him as Curtis Hobart.