She clucked her tongue. “Not good. Now there’s just the chin beard and the choice of mustaches.”
“I’m done with disguises, ma’am. They won’t fool this guy.”
Across the wide highway, through the valley, over the tiered foothills, and up the rough slopes of the San Gabriel Mountains, vast ragged shadows suddenly flew northward, although the clear sky revealed no cause for them. In all my troubled life, I had never seen anything like these swift shades, as if aircraft as large as football fields—and larger—passed low overhead in jet-speed squadrons.
I almost exclaimed about them, but then I realized that Mrs. Fischer was unaware of this spectacle. She leaned forward over the steering wheel, squinting to keep the distant ProStar+ in sight among other eighteen-wheelers that might at any moment change lanes and screen her from it. Even if focused intently on the truck, she would have been aware of the racing shadows if she had been capable of seeing them. Evidently, they weren’t real shadows but perhaps were instead portents of some threat, visible only to me.
The many densely populated communities encircling us were more oppressive than ever, huddled, hivelike. In the stroboscopic flicker of light, the impossible shadows seemed not only to race over the landscape but also to flail at it, and the buildings and all the artifacts of mankind appeared to twitch and shiver much as the trees shuddered in the rising wind.
For me and for a moment, present and future became one, the latter floating on the former, sensed more than seen, presenting itself as feelings and metaphors rather than as a detailed vision of what was to come in the days and years ahead. Claustrophobia wound around me, tighter and tighter, as if it were grave cloth and I were being mummified. For all that great cities had to offer, they were nonetheless mazes of streets. Mazes could thwart and trap. Broad, open freeways offered freedom only until clogged with traffic—or barricaded. Any neighborhood, rich or poor, was potentially a ghetto, every ghetto easily converted to a prison, every prison a potential death camp. To both sides of the highway, the residences and offices and retail outlets seemed at one moment to be burnt-out and boarded-up, but an instant later they appeared to be bunkers and battlements arrayed not against a common enemy but each against the other in a war of all versus all. Now I felt the shadows that flailed the land, as though they were accompanied by shock waves, and the flickers of sunlight were almost bright enough to blind. In addition to the broad freeway along which vehicles raced at high speed, I was also aware of these same concrete arteries in a state of sclerosis, perhaps hours or weeks or years from now, commuters halted bumper-to-bumper. As insubstantial as figments of a dream yet terrifying, an angry mob invaded my vague premonition, a faceless horde bringing grim detail to the vision, metastasizing along the lanes of stalled cars and trucks, smashing windows, tearing open doors, dragging motorists and passengers onto the pavement, blades glinting, guns firing, boots stomping terrified faces. Blood.
I might have lost consciousness for a few seconds, because when I opened my eyes, the landscape was no longer darkened by fast-moving and inexplicable shadows. The surrounding communities were neither in ruins nor fortified against conflict, traffic sped along the freeway, and Mrs. Fischer sounded worried when she said, “Oddie, what’s wrong? Do you hear me? Oddie?”
“Yes, ma’am, I hear you.”
The images from the premonition faded, but I still had a sense of being in the path of malevolent, implacable forces. That wasn’t an unusual feeling for me, but this time the threat felt imminent.
“Are you all right?” Mrs. Fischer asked.
“Sort of. Yeah. I’m fine. Just a little thing there for a moment. What’s up?”
“I think we’ve lost him.” She drove as fast as ever, switching lanes with bravado, passing between a pair of eighteen-wheelers that bracketed us like cliffs, searching for the one that got away. “There were suddenly so many trucks and I thought I still had a lock on him, but then I realized it was a different rig.”
State Route 134 had become Interstate 210. The highway signs promised exits for Azusa and Covina.
The dark clouds massed in the south were dramatically closer than before, and I suspected that I had been unconscious for minutes rather than seconds.
“Ma’am, you better get all the way over to the right. Take the next exit.”
“Do you know where he’s gone? How can you know where he’s gone?”
“I have a hunch.”
Working the car toward the right lane, Mrs. Fischer said, “A hunch? A hunch isn’t worth spit.”
“Well, this one is, ma’am. It’s worth spit and then some.”
“Your hunches usually pay off, do they?”
“I learn by going where I have to go,” I said, determined not to explain psychic magnetism.
She didn’t slow down much for the exit ramp.
I said, “Left at the bottom.”
Because no traffic approached on the intersecting surface street, she didn’t obey the stop sign.
“Come to think of it,” she said, “how did you know he would be at that truck stop earlier?”
As we went through an underpass beneath the freeway, we politely pretended not to see the obscene spray-painted graffiti, which was colorful but, as usual, unimaginative. I suspect that those who see equal merit in graffiti and the work of Rembrandt might be wrong.
I said, “Trucker at a truck stop. It seemed logical.”
“That’s all it was? Just logic?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You’re dancing around the truth, child. You told me it was only all right to lie to evil.”
“And you said you might be evil.”
“Might be. I didn’t say I was.”
“Please turn left in two blocks, ma’am.”
“Fact is, I’m not evil.”
The effect of the premonition had diminished enough to allow me to smile. “First you said you might be evil, now you say you’re not. I better tread carefully with you.”
We passed through a once prosperous retail area where a third of the businesses were gone, many of them restaurants, and the remaining shops and services had a tattered look that suggested they were week-to-week enterprises. Some days lately, it seemed that everything was a week-to-week enterprise, including the country and the world.
A traffic signal turned green to accommodate us, and I said, “After the intersection, pull to the curb.”
Mrs. Fischer braked to a stop in front of a thrift shop operated by the Salvation Army.
I said, “I’ll be going the rest of the way alone, on foot.”
“Is that really wise?”
/> “I’m not sure anything I do is wise, ma’am, but I’ve stayed alive a lot longer than I ever expected.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I’m grateful that you came along, and I’m thankful for your help. But I don’t want you to be hurt because of me. You need to get on with your life while I get on with trying to understand mine.”
After her many years of living, perhaps even from her childhood, Mrs. Fischer’s eyes were the sky reflected in the sea, eternity mirrored in the everlasting waters. Even if she had not given voice to the next thing that she said, meeting her gaze, I would have known that the secrets to which she often alluded were real and profound and no less strange than my own. She said, “Something big is coming, Oddie. Something so very big that the world will change. I know you feel it, too.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“How long have you felt it?”
“Almost all my life. But more so lately.”
“Much more so lately,” she agreed. “Child, do you know where truly great courage comes from, the kind of courage that will never back down?”
I said, “Faith.”
“And love,” she said. “Faith is a kind of love, you know. Love of what is unseen but certain. Love makes us strong and brave.”
I thought of Stormy and how the loss of her had tempered my steel. “Yes.”
“Heath and I never had children. I believe that I wasn’t given any children because I needed to save all that love for a time late in my life when I would need it to give me courage.”
Suddenly the rising wind rose faster, buffeted the limousine, and conjured a dust devil full of leaves and litter that whirled up from the gutter and followed a drunkard’s path down the center of the street.
She said, “You see, many years ago, three times I had the same vivid dream about a motherless, fatherless boy who was nevertheless not an orphan. Are you without a mother and father, Oddie?”
“They’re still alive, ma’am, but they were never a mother and father to me. I’ve been on my own since I was sixteen.”
“When I saw you standing beside the Coast Highway, I recognized you from the dream, though you are not a boy any longer.”