I hefted the wood in my hand to make sure I had the balance right, and waited. Footsteps again. The shadow passed across the door again, and I threw myself against it and lurched across the threshold, the piece of wood lifted high above my head.
Roxanne, wearing my heavy woolen bathrobe, whirled and shrieked like the heroine in a forties horror flick. Then she registered who I was, lowered her hand from her mouth, and said, "Simeon, how nice. You've brought in some firewood."
Half an hour later, with wine warming our insides and wet wood sputtering in the stove, we fell asleep.
I woke up even more reluctantly than usual and stumbled to the bathroom. Roxanne, once again, was long gone, but the smell of coffee permeated the house. The rain had apparently stopped, and sun streamed improbably through the windows.
Since hot water in Topanga takes approximately the same time to arrive as the Ice Age did in Europe, I turned the shower on and snapped the door shut before I took a stance at the washbasin to scrape what tasted like several past lifetimes off my teeth. My toothbrush seemed too heavy to lift. When I looked at my face in the mirror, rabid foam dripped from my chin. I couldn't bear to look at myself, so I shaved from memory and stepped into the shower.
The water was exactly body temperature. Uncannily body temperature. Feeling vaguely uneasy, I began to scrub. I looked down and saw the streams running off my body turning a brownish-red rust color. Then the water stopped altogether and I looked up.
Blood gouted out through the shower head. Dark, thick, precisely body temperature, it poured forth, splashing off my shoulders and splattering the shower tiles in crimson Rorschach patterns. I leapt back, and it squished beneath my bare feet.
I heard my scream echo wildly. I tried to push the shower door open. It was stuck. I threw a shoulder, streaming with blood, against it. Nothing.
Someone was outside, holding it closed.
I hammered against it. It didn't give. The blood stopped flowing. Against all my better judgment I looked to see why. White worms, thin, pallid, not really white but a sickly pale gray, squeezed themselves through the holes in the shower head and began to dangle down toward me. I grabbed at the edge of the shower door and hurled myself into it. It opened an inch and then slammed shut again and I found myself looking down, staring transfixed at what had caught in the door.
Long blond hair.
Angel Ellspeth's hair.
The worms touched my shoulder.
The odor of death filled the shower.
The worms grasped me more tightly, their gaping mouths opening wide, gripping my shoulder, pulling me up, up toward the shower head.
"Simeon," they said in a girlish voice.
I tried to shake myself free. They hung fast. I closed my eyes.
"Simeon," they said. "Something stinks."
I opened my eyes, swallowed, and looked at Roxanne.
"It's really bad," she said, looking down at me. She was wrapped in my robe. "Are you awake, or what?"
"I'm awake," I said. I was also sweating. "What in God's name is it?"
"Well," she said in the gray light of a rainy morning, "I'm no expert, but my guess is that something's dead."
Chapter 15
It took two toots from the truck's horn to tell me he'd arrived. I hoisted my steaming coffee mug, wrapped my leaky raincoat around my bare and unsteaming body, and headed down the driveway. Roxanne was gone but the rain was still with us.
About an hour before, at Roxanne's urging and jacked up by three cups of her coffee, I'd gone reluctantly down to check out the smell. If Roxanne hadn't been watching from the top of the driveway I'd have yielded to nausea and gone back up the hill to tell her a lie. She was watching, though, and I had a sacred masculine tradition of stupidity to uphold.
If the smell had been music it would have been Mahler. There was a rich, overripe majesty to it that actually made it difficult to tell whether it was getting stronger or weaker. Looking for its source was like trying to spot a candle after being blinded by a flashbulb. With every synapse in my nervous system screaming retreat in a hysterical falsetto, I forced myself into the bushes above the driveway.
And there it was, about five feet up the hill, a shapeless blob of blond fur: someone's beloved Fluffy the Cat. Around what once had been its neck was a pink collar that had been described to me in heartrending detail, making me surer than I wanted to be that it was, to be precise, Mrs. Yount's Fluffy the Cat. I didn't think she'd want her back. So I'd discreetly heaved the coffee and most of last night's hamburger onto the wet earth, feeling protected by the bushes from Roxanne's prying eyes. Then, bathed in chill sweat, I'd clambered back up the driveway with a ghastly semblance of jauntiness to figure out what to do.
Coyotes team up to take cats. One of them had probably chased poor old Fluffy into the underbrush and directly into a circle of teeth and claws. Cats must taste terrible, because they hadn't bothered to eat her. Fluffy had been deteriorating for about ten days while Mrs. Yount waited for me to turn something up, and I drove up and down the canyon tacking Xeroxes to phone poles. If I could have written them in coyote I might have gotten an answer. Or at least a long, echoing, moonlit horse-laugh.
Once I was safe inside the house, I'd called the city out of sheer desperation and been referred to the county. The county had given me another number to call, and someone at that number had given me another number. I was running out of space on my doodle pad by the time I found myself talking to the right person.
That person's job was to dispatch other people to pick up dead animals.
When the horn toots summoned me, I slogged back down in the drizzle to see a tall young black man in a yellow rubber slicker standing in front of a long white truck. His expression was as bright as a sunny day, cheerier than an orange Life-Saver in a packet full of limes. He balanced a shovel upright like an urban graffito based loosely on American Gothic.
"Say what," he said by way of salutation. "So where she be?"
I took a protective pull off my coffee cup and pointed vaguely toward the bushes, stifling a petticoat impulse to hold my nose. He nodded, slogged up the hill, and started in. First, though, he paused and looked back at me.
"No snakes in here, is they?" He sounded serious.
"None," I lied, without even thinking about it. "I've lived here five years and never seen one." I'd killed three with a hoe, right about there.
"I don't shine to snakes," he said. "Somethin' wrong when you can kill the front half and the back still lash around. Even when they all the way dead, I use the long shovel. The way long shovel. Sometimes, if they dead in the road and they ain't nobody watchin', I just run the truck over them four, five times to mash them into the asphalt. Then I jus' pretend they the dotted line and go home."
"No problem. You're safe as milk," I said, wondering who at the county I could call to get him picked up if a rattler bit him. "Just follow your nose."
The brush closed behind him and I repressed a twinge of guilt and tried to think about something else. Anything else. "Wo," he said, unseen. "She be real ripe." I heard some scuffling in the brush and the handle of his shovel emerged once or twice. "Heeere, kitty, kitty," he said. I concentrated on feeling inadequate.
He came out backward with something blond and unrecognizable lolling off the end of the shovel. An explosion of odor rolled toward me. The black man extended the shovel to the left and faced all the way right, toward me. "I done developed this walk all by myse'f," he said. "Looks funny, but she works. Tell me if I gone hit a tree." Arms left, head right, he marched down the hill.