FIFTY-FOUR

DRIVING FASTER THAN THE LAW ALLOWED TO THE OUTskirts of Pico Mundo, I tried but failed to banish from my mind all thoughts of my mother's mother, Granny Sugars.

My mother and my grandmother exist in widely separated kingdoms of my mind, in sovereign nations of memory that have no trade with each other. Because I loved Pearl Sugars, I had always been loath to think of her in context with her demented daughter.

Considering them together raised terrible questions to which I had long resisted seeking answers.

Pearl Sugars knew that her daughter was mentally unstable, if not unbalanced, and that she had gone off medication at eighteen. She must have known, as well, that pregnancy and the responsibility of child-rearing would stress my fragile mother to the breaking point.

Yet she did not interfere on my behalf.

For one thing, she feared her daughter. I had seen evidence of this on numerous occasions. My mother's abrupt mood swings and hot temper cowed my grandmother even though she was not intimidated by anyone else and would not hesitate to take a swing at a threatening man twice her size,

Besides, Pearl Sugars liked her rootless life too much to settle down and raise a grandchild. Wanderlust, the lure of rich card games in fabled cities-Las Vegas, Reno, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Dallas, San Antonio, New Orleans, Memphis-a need for adventure and excitement kept her away from Pico Mundo more than half the year.

In her defense, Granny Sugars could not have imagined either the intensity or the relentless nature of my mother's cruelty to me. She didn't know about the gun and the threats that shaped my childhood.

As I write this, no one knows except me and my mother. Although Stormy has been told all my other secrets, I withheld this one from even her. Only when Little Ozzie reads this manuscript, which I have written at his insistence, will I have shared entirely what my mother is to me and what I am to her.

Guilt and shame have, until now, kept me silent on this issue. I am old enough, even if just twenty, to know that I have no logical reason to feel either guilt or shame, that I was the victim, not the victimizer. Yet I've been so long marinated in both emotions that they will forever flavor me.

When I give this script to Ozzie, I will burn with humiliation. After he has read it, I will cover my face, abashed, when he speaks of these portions of the narrative.

Infected minds to their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets.

Shakespeare. MacBeth, Act 5, Scene 1.

That literary allusion is included here not merely to please you, Ozzie. There's bitter truth in it that resonates with me. My mother had infected my mind with such a potent virus that I had not been able to confess my shameful victimization even to my pillow, but carried it into sleep each night, unpurged.

As for Granny Sugars: I must now wonder whether her peripatetic lifestyle and her frequent absences, combined with her gambling and restless nature, contributed materially to my mother's psychological problems.

Worse, I cannot avoid considering that my mother's sickness might not be the result of inadequate nurturing, but might entirely be the consequence of genetics. Perhaps Pearl Sugars suffered from a milder form of the same psychosis, which expressed itself in more appealing ways than did my mother's.

Mother's hermetic impulse might have been an inversion of my grandmother's wanderlust. My mother's need for financial security, won at the expense of a pregnancy that repulsed her, might be my grandmother's gambling fever turned inside out.

This would suggest that much-though not all-of what I loved about Granny Sugars was but a different facet of the same mental condition that made my mother such a terror. This disturbs me for reasons I can understand but also for reasons that I suspect will not be clear to me until I've lived another twenty years, if I do.

When I was sixteen, Pearl Sugars asked me to come on the road with her. By then, I had become what I am: a seer of the dead with limitations, with responsibilities that I must fulfill. I had no choice but to decline her offer- If circumstances had allowed me to travel with her from game to game, adventure to adventure, the stresses of daily life and constant contact might have revealed a different and less appealing woman from the one I thought I knew.

I must believe that Granny Sugars had the capacity for genuine love that my mother lacks, and must believe that she did indeed love me. If these two things are not true, then my childhood will have been an unrelieved wasteland.

Having failed to banish these troubling thoughts on the drive out of

Pico Mundo, I arrived at the Church of the Whispering Comet in a mood that matched the ambience of dead palm trees, sun-blasted landscape, and abandoned buildings on the slide to ruin.

I parked in front of the Quonset hut where the three coyotes had encircled me. They weren't in evidence.

They are generally night hunters. In the noonday heat, they shelter in cool dark dens.

The dead prostitute, charmer of coyotes, was not to be seen, either. I hoped that she had found her way out of this world, but I doubted that my fumbling counsel and platitudes had convinced her to move on.

From among the items in the bottom of the plastic shopping bag that served as my suitcase, I withdrew the flashlight, the scissors, and the package of foil-wrapped moist towelettes.

In my apartment, when I packed the bag, the towelettes had seemed to be a peculiar inclusion, the scissors even more peculiar. Yet subconsciously I must have known exactly why I would need them.

We are not strangers to ourselves; we only try to be.

When I got out of the car, the fierce heat of the Mojave was matched by its stillness, a nearly perfect silence found perhaps nowhere else but in a dioramic snow scene sealed in Lucite.

My watch revealed that time had not stood still-11:57.

Two desiccated brown phoenix palms cast frond shadows across the dusty ground in front of the Quonset hut, as if paving the way not for me but for an overdue messiah. I had not returned to raise the dead, only to examine him.

When I stepped inside, I felt as if I had cast my lot with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the furnace of Nebuchadnezzar, though this was a heat, laced with an unspeakable scent, from which even an angel could not spare me.

Alkaline-white desert light seared through the portal-style windows, but they were so small and set so wide apart that I still needed the flashlight.

I followed the littered hallway to the fourth door. I went into the pink room, once a den of profitable fornication, now a slow-cook crematorium.

FIFTY-FIVE

NO CURIOUS PEOPLE OR CARRION EATERS HAD BEEN here in my absence. The corpse lay where I had left it, one end of the shroud open, one shod foot exposed, otherwise wrapped in the white bedsheet.

The hot night and the blistering morning had facilitated and accelerated decomposition. The stench was much worse here than in the rest of the hut.

The suffocating heat and the stink had the power of two quick punches to the gut. I backed quickly out of the room, into the hall, simultaneously gasping for a cleaner breath and struggling to repress the urge to vomit.

Although I hadn't brought the foil-sealed towelettes for this purpose, I ripped open one of them and tore two strips from it. The moistened paper had a lemony fragrance. I rolled the saturated strips into dripping wads and plugged my nostrils with them.

Breathing through my mouth, I couldn't smell the decomposing corpse. When I reentered the room, I gagged again, anyway.

I could have cut the shoelace that secured the top of the shroud- the one at the foot had broken the previous night-and rolled the body out of its wrapping. The thought of the dead man tumbling across the floor, as if animated again, convinced me to approach the problem with a different solution.