As I pulled into the driveway, I saw that someone had piled some debris in our carport: a litter of papers and a large green-and-brown sack, big as a small man. Only when I parked next to the junk did I realize that the pile covered a man.
At first I assumed it was one of my mother’s clients. Reno had told me that not everyone had heard about my mother’s death and some seekers still waited outside the house, hoping for a spontaneous reading. She said this reproachfully, since I still could not write my mother’s obituary. “Tink of it like you plannin’ for one party,” Reno told me. “Dah obit is one invitation that needs for go out in time so people get chance for get ready: find dah right dress, put on dah right face, buy one perfect flower arrangement. RSVP, li’ dar.”
I slammed the car door as I got out. The body didn’t move, and when I started to think that I had found another dead person, I heard a mumbling, like someone talking in his sleep. I cleared my throat. The mumbling grew loud enough for me to decipher something like, “Helpings of God, I’ll have two scoops.”
Inching closer, I planned to wake this person and tell him my mother had died, when—too late, just when I touched what should have been a shoulder—I smelled fermenting mangoes and unwashed feet, the smell of the Manoa Walker.
I’d smelled him before: once, after grocery shopping with my mother at the Safeway in Manoa Market Place, I made the mistake of meeting his eyes. “You!” he had shouted, rushing toward me. “You!” One of his legs seemed shorter than the other, so that when he ran, his arms swinging, his nut-brown hair swarming around his face and shoulders, he looked like an orangutan. “Read and repent! Read and repent!” the monkey man screeched. “God knows, knows all!”
My mother quickly stuffed my untied hair down the back of my shirt, then stepped between me and the Walker. “Go, Chudang Kaeguri,” she said. “Stink Toad Spirit, go! You cannot claim us. Go!”
The orangutan man reached into his pants and pulled out a handful of brochures. He waved them at my mother’s face. “Too late for you, too late, for you have already been claimed,” he taunted. “God has claimed you. His flesh is your flesh. Do you forget the promise of his blood? And a promise is a promise is a promise. Ha-ha ha ha-ha!” He shoved a dirty brochure into one of the bags in the cart. “Thief!” he shouted as he scooted away toward KC Drive-In. “Help, someone help! Thief! The devil stole my Bible!”
I felt my face burn as people in front of the stores and in the parking lot turned to look at my mother and me. Eyes unfocused, I rushed the cart to the car. “Beccah-chan,” my mother said, tugging me back. “Don’t run. Don’t let him see fear. Those kind will feed on that opening and come back.”
I slowed my pace but pulled my arm away from her. “I’m not afraid. He’s just a crazy bum.”
“Crazy,” my mother said. “But, don’t forget, dangerous. Men who love God like that are angels in disguise. That is a Heavenly Toad in a man suit.”
“Humph,” I scoffed. “That is a little-kid story.” I yanked my hair from my shirt, my fingers combing out the loose strands, which I let fly in the wind.
“Beccah!” my mother yelled as she tried to catch the wisps. “What did I tell you about holding on to what is yours? This is his territory!”
As my mother went on hands and knees on the black asphalt of the parking lot to search for my hairs, I got into the car, where I could hunch over and hide in the back seat.
Later, when I unpacked the groceries, I found the brochure the Manoa Walker had thrown in with the oranges—a tattered advertisement for Instant Checking at Bank of America, with this scrawled on the cover: “A promise is a promise. God is coming for you.”
“Aaagh!” the Manoa Walker yelled when I grabbed onto his leg. Stinking feet wrapped in the remnants of canvas sneakers kicked out from the top of the sleeping bag, like the back legs of a developing tadpole.
I felt a shock charge through my hand and could not loosen my grip. The sleeping bag thumped and banged against me as the Walker cursed and tried to wiggle out backward from his sack, and though I pushed against the struggling man with all my weight, I could not let go. Finally, my palm burning, I fell back, and the Walker emerged, born onto the floor of my mother’s carport, bottom first.
He leaped to his feet, then bent over to touch his leg where I had held it. “My leg is burning,” he whispered, “and it feels so good.” He hopped on one leg and then the other, still gripping the chosen leg, bent double over himself. He stopped, then slowly lifted his head so that our eyes met, and as I stared, his eyes changed from brown to blue. Afterward I told myself that his eyes must have been a hazel that shifted with the light, but the blue I saw was such a vibrant blue, the color found in the ocean of my father’s eyes and God’s.
When the curtain of blue dropped over his brown eyes, for a moment I thought I saw my father’s face shimmering beneath the surface of the Walker’s features. “Daddy,” I murmured before I could catch myself, before I could quiet the need of the little girl studying the fading image of her father’s face.
Then the faces rippled, merged into one, and the Walker straightened, his head pulling taller and taller the body beneath it, until he towered above me as I huddled in the corner of the carport. “You burn with the fires of hell, daughter!” the Manoa Walker growled in a voice as powerful as my father the preacher’s must have been. He marched toward me. “Repent before it is too late and join me. Join your mother.”
I scooted backward. “My mother is dead,” I whispered, a part of me hoping that it was her he was looking for, and that he would leave after he heard the news.
“Jesus was dead!” he yelled. “And he was arisen! So shall your mother and all who have been bathed in the blessed blood of Christ. Whosoever lives and believes will never die, but be Born Again unto the Kingdom of God!”
“No,” I said. “My mother was not Christian. She was…” I stood slowly, my back to the wall, keeping a wary eye on the Walker, trying to find a word to encompass my mother’s beliefs. “She was, uh, Korean,” I blurted.
“She is a lamb in God’s flock,” said the Manoa Walker, “and I’ve come to collect the one stray. Do not forsake me. Do not deny me.” When he took a step closer toward me, I shot my hand out in warning. The palm of my hand, meant to halt just shy of his chest, brushed it so slightly that the flannel of his shirt felt like air on my fingertips. Blue fire crackled between us, and the Walker fell back as if he had been shot. He dropped to the ground, clutching his chest. He curled, forehead to knee, a cooked shrimp shriveling into a C.
And when he stood again, shoulders hunched, with eyes that scuttled in brown and blurry confusion, his head reached only to my shoulder. “Get mac salad wit’ the KC special?” he asked, and then he looked at his sleeping bag, at my oil-spotted carport, at me. “Oh no, it happened again, see it happened. Blue light, spaceship, aliens, microprobed.” He rambled on, muttering as he scrambled to collect his belongings. “Abductions. Enquirer wants to know.” He gathered his belongings into his arms and ran down the driveway, scattering several brochures for credit cards and savings accounts along the way.
I sat in the driveway for a while after he left, nursing my hand, which tingled as if I had plunged it into ice water and was just getting the feeling back. My fingers still hummed as I entered the house. I shook my hand, but instead of dissipating, the tingling grew, vibrating through my arms, my shoulders, into my chest.