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shadow flowing liquidly through shadows, as though I were the fabled
Phantom, escaped from the labyrinth underneath the opera house, now on
wheels and hell-bent on terror! the world above ground.
Being able to entertain such a flamboyantly romantic image of myself in
the immediate aftermath of murder doesn't speak well of me. In my
defense, I can only say that by recasting these events as a grand
adventure, with me in a dashing role, I was desperately trying to quell
my fear and, more desperately still, struggling to suppress the
memories of the shooting. I also needed to suppress the ghastly images
of the burning body that my active imagination generated like an
endless series of pop-up spooks leaping from the black walls of a
funhouse.
Anyway, this shaky effort to romanticize the event lasted only until I
reached the alleyway behind the Grand Theater, half a block south of
Ocean Avenue, where a grime-encrusted security lamp made the fog appear
to be brown and polluted. There, I swung off my bike, let it clatter
to the pavement, leaned into a Dumpster, and brought up what little I
had not digested of my midnight dinner with Bobby Halloway.
I had murdered a man.
Unquestionably, the victim had deserved to die. And sooner or later,
relying on one excuse or another, Lewis Stevenson would have killed me,
regardless of his coconspirators' inclination to grant special
dispensation to me; arguably, I acted in self-defense. And to save
Orson's life.
Nevertheless, I'd killed a human being; even these qualifying
circumstances didn't alter the moral essence of the act. His vacant
eyes, black with death, haunted me. His mouth, open in a silent
scream, his bloodied teeth. Sights are readily recalled from memory;
recollections of sounds and tastes and tactile sensations are far less
easily evoked; and it is virtually impossible to experience a scent
merely by willing it to rise from memory. Yet earlier I'd recalled the
fragrance of my mother's shampoo, and now the metallic odor of
Stevenson's fresh blood lingered so pungently that it kept me hanging
on to the Dumpster as if I were at the railing of a yawing ship.
In fact, I was shaken not solely by having killed him but by having
destroyed the corpse and all evidence with brisk efficiency and
self-possession. Apparently I had a talent for the criminal life. I
felt as though some of the darkness in which I'd lived for twenty-eight
years had seeped into me and had coalesced in a previously unknown
chamber of my heart.
Purged but feeling no better for it, I boarded the bicycle again and
led Orson through a series of byways to Caldecott's Shell at the corner
of San Rafael Avenue and Palm Street. The service station was
closed.
The only light inside came from a blue-neon wall clock in the sales
office, and the only light outside was at the soft-drink vending
machine.
I bought a can of Pepsi to cleanse the sour taste from my mouth. At
the pump island, I opened the water faucet partway and waited while
Orson drank his fill.
"What an awesomely lucky dog You are to have such a thoughtful master,"
I said. "Always tending to your thirst, your hunger, your grooming.
Always ready to kill anyone who lifts a finger against You."
The searching look that he turned on me was disconcerting even in the
gloom. Then he licked my hand.
"Gratitude acknowledged," I said.
He lapped at the running water again, finished, and shook his dripping
snout.
Shutting off the faucet, I said, "Where did Mom get You?"
He met my eyes again.
"What secret was my mother keeping?"
His gaze was unwavering. He knew the answers to my questions. He just
wasn't talking.
Carl, I suppose God really might be loafing around in St. Bernadette's
Church, playing air guitar with a companion band of angels, or games of
mental chess. He might be there in a dimension that we can't quite
see, drawing blueprints for new universes in which such problems as
hatred and ignorance and cancer and athlete's-foot fungus will have
been eliminated in the planning stage. He might be drifting high above
the polished-oak pews, as if in a swimming pool filled with clouds of
spicy incense and humble prayer instead of water, silently bumping into
the columns and the corners of the cathedral ceiling as He dreamily
meditates, waiting for parishioners in need to come to Him with
problems to be solved.
This night, however, I felt sure God was keeping His distance from the
rectory adjoining the church, which gave me the creeps when I cycled
past it. The architecture of the two-story stone house-like that of
the church itself-was modified Norman, with enough of the French edge
abraded to make it fit more comfortably in the softer climate of
California. The overlapping black-slate tiles of the steep roof, wet
with fog, were as armor-thick as the scales on the beetled brow of a
dragon, and beyond the blank black eyes of window glass-including an
oculus on each side of the front doorlay a soulless realm. The rectory
had never appeared forbidding to me before, and I knew that I now
viewed it with uneasiness only because of the scene I had witnessed
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