"Oh!" he said. He fell back in the chair and stared at the ceiling as if his brain had pushed the hold button on reality.

"That's right, Aaron," Sam said after a moment. "The IRS." With that Sam moved to the office door. "Take your time, Aaron. Think about it. Talk it over with your buddy Spagnola; he can probably give you the current exchange rate of cigarettes for sodomy in prison."

Aaron slowly broke his stare on the ceiling and turned to watch Sam walk out.

In the outer office Julia looked up from applying lacquer to her nails to see Sam grinning, his hand still on the doorknob.

"What's with all the 'ohs, Sam?" Julia asked. "It sounded like you guys were having sex or something."

"Something like that," Sam said, his grin widening. "Hey, watch this." He opened the door quickly and stuck his head back in Aaron's office. "Hey, Aaron! IRS!" he said. Then he pulled the door shut, muffling Aaron's scream of pain.

"What was that?" Julia asked.

"That," Sam said, "was my teacher giving me the grade on my final exam."

"I don't get it."

"You will, honey. I don't have time to explain right now. I've got a date."

Sam left the office walking light and smiling, feeling strangely as if the pieces of his life, rather than fitting back together, were jingling in his pocket like sleigh bells warning Christmas.

CHAPTER 15

Like God's Own Chocolate I'd Lick Her Shadow Off A Hot Sidewalk

Santa Barbara

In spite of the fact that he was losing his home and his business, and was precariously close to having his greatest secret discovered by the police because of an Indian god, Sam was not the least bit worried. Not with the prospect of an evening with Calliope to occupy his thoughts. No, for once Sam Hunter was voting the eager ticket over the anxious, taking anticipation over dread.

Calliope lived upstairs in a cheese-mold-green cinder-block duplex that stood in a row of a dozen identical structures where the last of Santa Barbara's working middle class were making their descent into poverty. Calliope's Datsun was parked in the driveway next to a rusy VW station wagon and an ominous-looking Harley-Davidson chopper with a naked blond woman airbrushed on the gas tank. Sam paused by the Harley before mounting the stairs. The airbrushed woman looked familiar, but before he could get a closer look Calliope appeared on the deck above him.

"Hi," she said. She was barefoot, wearing a white muslin dress loosely laced in the front. A wreath of gardenia was woven into her hair. "You're just in time, we need your help. Come on up."

Sam took the stairs two at a time and stopped on the landing, where Calliope was wrestling with the latch on a rickety screen-door frame that was devoid of screening but had redwood lattice nailed across its lower half, presumably to keep out the really large insects. "I'm having trouble with the dinner," she said. "I hope you can fix it."

The screen door finally let loose with the jattering noise one associates with the impact of Elmer Fudd's face on a rake handle. Calliope led Sam into a kitchen done in the Fabulous Fifties motif of mint enamel over pink linoleum. A haze of foul-smelling smoke hung about the ceiling, and through it Sam could make out the figure of a half-naked man sitting in the lotus position on the counter, drinking from a quart bottle of beer.

"That's Yiffer," Calliope said over her shoulder as she headed to the stove. "He's with Nina."

Yiffer vaulted off the counter, on one arm, fully eight feet across the kitchen to land lightly on his feet in front of Sam, where he engaged a complex handshake that left Sam feeling as if his fingers had been braided together. "Dude," Yiffer said, shaking out his wild tangle of straw-colored hair as if the word had been stuck there.

Feeling like a chameleon that has been dropped into a coffee can and is risking hemorrhage by trying to turn silver, Sam searched for the appropriate greeting and ended up echoing, "Dude."

In jeans, a sport shirt, and boating moccasins with no socks, Sam felt grossly overdressed next to Yiffer, who wore only a pair of orange surf shorts and layer upon layer of tan muscle.

"Calliope biffed the grub, dude," Yiffer said.

Sam joined Calliope at the stove, where she was frantically biffing the grub. "I can't get the spaghetti to cook," she said, plunging a wooden spoon into a large saucepan from which the smoke was emanating. "The instructions said to boil for eight minutes, but as soon as it starts to boil the smoke comes out."

Sam waved the smoke from the pan. "Aren't you supposed to cook the noodles separately?"

"Not in the sauce?"

Sam shook his head.

"Whoops," Calliope said. "I'm not a very good cook. Sorry."

"Well, maybe we can salvage something." Sam removed the pan from the heat and peered in at the bubbling black magma. "Then again, maybe starting over would be a good idea."

He put the pan in the sink, where a trail of ants was invading a used bowl of cereal. Sam turned on the water and started to swivel the faucet to wash the intruders away when Calliope grabbed his hand.

"No," she said. "They're okay."

"They'll get into your food," Sam said.

"I know. They've always been here. I call them my kitchen pals."

"Kitchen pals?" Sam tried to adjust his thinking. She was right — you couldn't just wash your kitchen pals down the drain like they were ants. He felt like he'd been saved from committing genocide. "So, I guess we should start some more spaghetti?"

"She only bought one box, dude," Yiffer said.

"I guess we can eat salad and bread," Calliope said. "Excuse me." She kissed Sam on the cheek and walked out of the kitchen while he stared at the ghost of her bottom through the thin dress.

"So, what do you do?" Yiffer asked with a toss of his head.

"I'm an insurance broker. And you?"

"I surf."

"And?"

"And what?" Yiffer said.

Sam thought he could hear the sound of the ocean whistling through Yiffer's ears as if through a seashell. "Never mind," he said. He was distracted by the sound of a baby screaming in the next room.

"That's Grubb," Yiffer said. "Sounds like he's pissed off."

Unable to see the second b, Sam was confused. "I thought grub was biffed?"

"No, Grubb is Calliope's rug-rat. Go on in and meet him. Nina's in there with J. Nigel Yiffworth, Esquire." Yiffer beamed with pride. "He's mine."

"Your attorney?"

"My son," Yiffer said indignantly.

"Oh," Sam said. He resisted the urge to sit down on the floor and wait for his confusion to clear. Instead he walked into the living room, where he found Calliope sitting on an ancient sofa next to an attractive brunette who was breastfeeding an infant. The sofa was lumpy enough to have had a body sewed into it; stuffing spilled out of the arms where the victim had tried to escape. On the floor nearby, a somewhat older child was slung inside of a blue plastic donut on wheels, which he was gaily ramming into everything in the room. Sam gasped as the child ran a wheel up over his bare ankle on a kamikaze rush to destroy the coffee table.

Calliope said, "Sam, this is Nina." Nina looked up and smiled. "And J. Nigel Yiffworth, Esquire." Nina pulled the baby from her breast long enough to puppet-master a nod of greeting from it, which Sam missed for some reason. "And that," Calliope continued, pointing to the drunk driver in the blue donut, "that's Grubb."

"Your son?" Sam asked.

She nodded. "He's just learning to walk."

"Interesting name."

"I named him after Jane Goodall's son. She let him grow up with baboons — very natural. I was going to name him Buddha, but I was afraid that when he got older if someone met him on the road they might kill him."