Chapter 6
There was nothing but bad weather for a month: rain and clouds and wind out of the northeast, high tides and storm surf on the south coast. Professor Latzarel haunted the coves along the Palos Verdes Peninsula, waiting for a low tide, plumbing the depths of big pools with a thousand-foot line. Word had come from Roycroft Squires. The launching of the diving bell was impossible. Not to be thought of. They’d have to postpone it.
In mid-December the Santa Ana winds began to blow again, the weather hotted up, and the sea calmed. Anticipating a three-day blow, Uncle Edward and Professor Latzarel decided to wait another few days to launch the diving bell, until Saturday, perhaps. If the wind lasted longer they’d launch on Sunday.
Early Thursday afternoon, Giles, Jim, and Oscar Pallcheck walked along Colorado Boulevard in the wind. An occasional tumbleweed, loosed from the foothills or from some vacant lot, came rolling across the road, mashing its way under the bumper of a moving car and disintegrating in a scattering of twigs. The air smelled hot and dry, like wind that had blown across a rocky desert floor. If it were three months earlier, the charged air and the blowing dust would have been a distraction, an irritation, but in early December the wind was an Indian summer, blown in late at night from the east, almost a holiday.
Gill and Jim were set on finding Christmas gifts. It was a perfect excuse to rout through the old bookstores and junky curiosity shops that fronted Colorado. Oscar hadn’t, it seemed, any concern for Christmas, or for bookstores or junk no matter how curious. He laughed into obscurity a series of stuffed salamanders that Jim considered buying for Uncle Edward. There were a dozen of the things pinned to a board and labeled. Aside from a couple of missing feet and a ball of wadding shoving through the ruined eye of a spotted newt, the collection was in tiptop shape. Oscar became fascinated with an unidentifiable metal contraption hung with flexible tubing that he insisted was a nasal irrigator. Then he insisted that a cream pitcher — a ceramic duck through whose beak would pour a river of milk — was also a nasal irrigator. Jim’s salamanders became nasal irrigators themselves very quickly, as did the owner of the shop, a pinched little man with two enormous hearing aids and assorted missing teeth, who not only wouldn’t sell the salamanders to Jim at any price, but who chased the three of them back out into the wind, shouting a final curse as Oscar performed what was meant to be a ridiculing dance on the sidewalk in front of the shop.
The incident primed Oscar up fairly thoroughly, and he announced that they’d spend the afternoon “playing for points,” a pastime in which one of them would challenge another to commit an act of daring in return for a specified number of points. It was a game that Oscar invariably won, unshackled as he was by any sense of morality or guilt:
‘He insisted that his performance at the curiosity shop was worth three points for openers, and neither Gill nor Jim complained. Jim netted two for himself by sliding in through the open door of the K-Y Pool Hall and shouting “Rack ‘em up” in an embarrassed voice before ducking back out onto the sidewalk. Oscar offered six points to Giles to simply walk into the Eagle Rock Public Library and flare his nostrils, very calmly and deliberately, for the space of a full minute in front of Mr. Robb, the feared and glowering reference librarian. He and Jim would keep time on the big wall clock over Mr. Robb’s head. Giles refused and wouldn’t be bullied into it. He earned a grudging point, however, by agreeing to buy Oscar a boysenberry milkshake at Pete’s Blue Chip hamburger stand, and it was then, as the three of them angled across the parking lot of a van and storage yard, that Jim became aware of the desultory jingling of a bell somewhere out on the boulevard.
John Pinion’s truck slowly turned the corner and hove to at the curb. Giles was impassive. Jim knew that whatever transpired, he wouldn’t leave Giles alone with Pinion — not this time; not if he could help it. Oscar assumed Pinion to be an authentic ice cream man as he climbed down out of the cab, and saw in Pinion’s pink face a naivete he could play on like a fiddle.
Chewing a monumental wad of gum, Oscar accosted Pinion with something that sounded like, “Watchasay?” Pinion laughed and smiled in a fatherly way, shoving out his ubiquitous hand. Oscar reached for it, then snatched his own away an instant before making contact. “I don’t connect with sewer pipes,” he announced, breaking into immediate laughter and winking at Jim, who hastened to wink back. Giles was silent. Pinion laughed to show he could take a joke. “Call that a shirt?” asked Oscar, nodding his head toward Pinion’s ice cream outfit.
Pinion couldn’t respond. He smiled more broadly and decided to take the offensive — an unfortunate decision, as it turned out. He sucked in his stomach, shoving vital organs and fat up toward his chest — to show fads physique off to better advantage perhaps — and affected an informal tone, entirely unlike his usual mock-English performance, no doubt supposing that Oscar would find him a sort of kindred spirit.
“How old do you think I am?” he asked, winking at Giles and Jim. “Come on now, an honest guess. What do you say, forty?”
He was nearer sixty; anyone could see that. But he astounded Jim by bending forward and launching himself into a spectacular handstand. Odd change and a penknife clattered out of his pockets onto the sidewalk. Jim could see, across the street, a line of half a dozen faces watching Pinion’s antics from within Pete’s Blue Chip.
Pinion stood just so for the space of thirty long seconds before reversing the process and leaping upright. His pink face had gone scarlet, and he puffed like a steam engine. Jim was struck with the uncanny certainty that the lot of them were being inescapably drawn into some criminal lunacy. Pinion plucked his knife from the sidewalk but let the scattered change lie. He wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand.
“Well what do you say,” he asked Oscar. “Have you ever seen anyone as fit as me? No you haven’t. I’m a polar explorer. The polar explorer. That’s who I am.”
Oscar leered at Jim, determined not to let Pinion out-wink him. He spat the great gob of wrinkled gum into the street and said, “What do you figure, boys, ninety or a hunnerd?” Oscar winked again at Jim to alert him that the situation was under control. With a growing sense of dread, Jim did his best to be in on the gag. He winked back. Pinion seemed to be fueled by the winks.
“Well, a hundred is it?” He began bouncing and jabbing out into the air as if punching phantoms. “Son,” he said impressively, puffing away there for Oscar’s benefit, “I was the champ of Arkansas. I used to fight ‘em all. It didn’t matter who they were.” He jabbed and ducked and feinted his way through the lie. Jim, anyway, was certain it was a lie. He’d never heard anything about Pinion’s being a boxer, even in his youth. He determined that it was simply Pinion’s monumental ego that wouldn’t allow him to be bested in an exchange with Oscar. He was using psychology, no doubt — appealing to Oscar’s obvious sense of brutality.
Oscar, in fine form, bounced once or twice in the style of the Champ of Arkansas, throwing an imaginary windmill punch and eyeballing Gill and Jim. It was just the sort of thing Oscar lived for and that Jim feared. Gill, Jim could see, was fading.
Pinion pressed the issue. “Ever hear of O’Riley the Irish Miller?”
“Sure,” Oscar lied, “who hasn’t?”
“Well it was me who taught him to fight. I was in the gym every day, over in east L.A. O’Riley went on to whip Stud Pritchard at the Olympic. Took him apart. I was in O’Riley’s corner, and it was just like I taught him. For three rounds it was N a little of this …” and Pinion threw three quick left jabs.