“Chief Montclair.”
“The police chief?”
“Well, he’s not an Indian chief. He was upset with me.”
“That’s not good.”
“Oh, he’s been upset with me at least since my first day in elementary school.”
“You got in trouble with the cops when you were just six? How?”
“I stripped off my clothes and ran naked through the school.”
Joe took a break from his ice-cream soda to consider what she had said. In his mind’s eye, she was eighteen in first grade. “Why would you do that?”
“I didn’t want to be there.”
“An extreme strategy.”
“It worked a few times. Then it didn’t. So I bit the bullet for twelve years of tedium—otherwise known as school.”
“I liked school,” he said.
“I’m not stupid, okay? I got top grades. They just make it all so boring. I have a low tolerance for boring.”
“So why did Chief Montclair make you volunteer?”
“Too many speeding tickets. Either I had to volunteer, or he’d take away my driver’s license.”
“He can’t do that. Can he do that?”
She shrugged. “He’s not just the police chief. He’s also my father, and I still live at home.”
“You’re Portia Montclair.”
“Wow, you put it together just like that.”
She returned to her cherry-ice-cream soda, and for a minute or so, they both enjoyed her enjoyment of it.
She said, “You’ll have to meet my dad. He’s a hard-nosed cop, but you’ll like him.”
“Your mom must be very pretty. I mean, well, ’cause you are.”
“I have some pictures of her. She looked way better than me.”
The wrong kind of chill passed through Joe, and he felt that he had been stupid and thoughtless. “I’m sorry. I lost my mother, too. She died of cancer when I was two.”
“Mine’s still out there somewhere, living the good life. She found a rich guy who didn’t want kids as much as she didn’t, and they went off and didn’t have any together.” Portia’s flippancy seemed calculated to deny her pain. “When I was six, she assured me I’d be better off without her, and she went down the front walk with two suitcases and got in a white Mercedes and was driven away by a man I never saw. She sure was right, ’cause when she left, and it was just Dad and me, everything was way better.”
Joe considered his words before letting loose of them. “My grandma Dulcie says we know we’re finally getting a little wisdom when we’re able to see that even loss can be beautiful if it makes us love more the things we haven’t lost.”
After a silence, she said, “What did you mean earlier when you said ‘a two-headed-calf thing’?”
“Whatever happened to me, ricocheting around like that, it won’t happen again. Strange things happen all the time, but they don’t repeat. Like, there was a rain of frogs in this town in Pennsylvania in 1948, but not since. In 1922, in Chico, California, a lot of stones fell from the sky slowly, as if gravity had little effect on them. But never again. Two-headed calves are born, but rarely.”
“I think it’ll happen again,” she said.
“Nope. It’s just a strange little story to tell the great-grandkids when I’m eighty.”
“Great-grandkids? Are you married?”
“No, of course not. I’m only in my first year of college.”
“College, huh? I’m not going to rack up humongous debt just to be twenty-two without a job instead of eighteen without a job.”
“So what’re you doing instead?”
She winked. “I’ll tell you when I know you better.”
The prospect of getting to know each other better pleased Joe, and he smiled even more winsomely than usual.
She said, “Okay, Ricochet Joe, take your mental hands off my imagined body until I give you permission to dream.”
“That’s not what I was thinking about.”
“Yeah, right. Don’t try to tell me you were working on the plot of your great American novel.”
4
ANOTHER TWO-HEADED CALF
When they stepped out of the malt shop, Joe was struck by the beauty of the day. Like sheep soon to be sheared, small woolly clouds grazed the sky. The jacarandas along the street were in early bloom, graced with fairy architectures of dazzling blue blossoms. Sunshine passed through the breeze-quivered branches to gild the cobblestone sidewalk with an intricate lacework of shadow and light.
The smallest details drawn by Nature’s hand had never before compelled his notice so powerfully as they did now. Although Joe was thought by everyone to be most pleasantly ordinary, and he shared that assessment of himself, he was certainly not slow witted, and he knew that the world had abruptly become more vivid for him because Portia Montclair had come into his life.
He wondered if his coming into Portia’s life had made the world more vivid for her. He decided not.
They had left their litter sticks propped against a tree, and no one had taken them to run off and do impromptu trash collection.
Outside the malt shop stood a four-foot-high duck molded from resin and painted. He had white feathers, yellow bill and feet, and he wore a gold jacket as well as a gold yachting cap on which was emblazoned the number seven. This statue might have been mystifying if the business in front of which it stood had not been named the Lucky Duck Malt Shop.
Among longtime residents of Little City, it was a tradition to pat the duck’s head for luck. When Joe did this out of habit, almost without thinking, he said, “Trash can!” Unlike before, he didn’t cry out the words, but whispered them. He sprinted south without retrieving his litter stick or asking Portia if they might get together again so that he could watch her drink an ice-cream soda.
A block later, he found himself at a street-corner trash can with a swing-top lid. When he put his fingers to the lid, which his unknown quarry must have touched when throwing something away, he heard himself whisper, “Button,” whereupon he pivoted, turned the corner, and hurried east another block, where he pressed the button on the crosswalk control.
He failed to wait for DON’T WALK to turn to WALK but murmured, “Blue door!”—and again dashed pell-mell into busy traffic, to the consternation of a new crop of motorists, who angrily serenaded him.
By now, he had gone some distance from the quaint touristy area into a semiquaint commercial neighborhood with such businesses as barrooms and designer-knockoff clothing shops and nightclubs and palm readers and shoe stores. There were districts of Little City that were not even semiquaint, of course, because quaint was expensive to build and could be tiresome in excess, though no area of Thomas Little’s namesake burg was downright blighted or sleazy.
In search of the blue door, Joe flung himself into an alleyway and sprinted past Dumpsters and came to a peacock-blue door that in spite of its cheerful color looked like trouble. He knew where he was: at the back entrance to Patsy’s Pool Hall. He preferred not to open the door, but he was no more in control of himself than was a lemming in a fever of flight, though Joe was alone, whereas lemmings threw themselves off cliffs by the hundreds.
When he seized the handle of the door, he whispered, “Lousy stinkin’ bastards!” and pulled the door open and stepped inside and stood for a moment, breathing hard, trying to quiet himself.
The dimly lighted hallway smelled as if pastrami sandwiches had recently been heated in a microwave. Bathrooms and storerooms to each side. Pool hall directly ahead through another blue door. Music coming from there, voices, the clatter of billiard balls colliding.
If to any extent Joe labored under the illusion that he had been drawn there to play billiards, he was disabused of it when he opened a fire door to his immediate right and proceeded down a set of stairs to the basement. These were not even semiquaint stairs. They were neither adequately lighted nor scrupulously clean. At the bottom lay a foyer with a concrete floor and concrete walls. The foyer offered three doors, none of them blue.