The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror Page 11

  "Traitor!" Molly said from over a pan of noodles she was layering into a pan with sauce, meat, and cheese. She had sauce on her hands up to her elbows and looked like she'd been engaged in some very messy surgery. The back door out of the kitchen had slammed shut as he came in.

  "Where's Lena?" Theo said.

  "She went out the back. Why, are you afraid she'll reveal your secret?"

  Theo shrugged and approached his wife, his arms out to the side in a "gimme a break" gesture. Why was it that when she was angry her teeth looked really sharp? He never noticed that any other time. "Mol, I was just doing it so I could get you something for Christmas — I didn't mean to —»

  "Oh, I don't care about that — you're investigating Lena. My friend Lena. You just went to her house like she's a criminal or something. It's the radiation, isn't it?"

  "There's evidence, Molly. And it's not that I got high. I found fruit-bat hairs in Dale's truck and her boyfriend has a fruit bat. And the little Barker kid said — " Theo heard a car start up outside. "I should talk to her."

  "Lena wouldn't hurt anyone. She brought me cheese for Christmas, for Christ's sake. She's a pacifist."

  "I know that, Molly. I'm not saying that she hurt anyone, but I need to find out —»

  "Besides, some fuckers just need killing!"

  "Did she tell you —»

  "I think it's the pot that makes you reveal your mutant self." She had a lasagna noodle in her hand and was waving it at him. It sort of looked like she was shaking a living creature, but then, he was still a little buzzed.

  "Molly, what are you talking about, 'my mutant self'? Are you taking your meds?"

  "How dare you accuse me of being crazy. That's worse than if you asked me if it was my time of the month, which it isn't, by the way. But I can't believe that you'd imply that I need to be medicated. You mutant bastard!" She flung the noodle at him and he ducked.

  "You do need to be medicated, you crazy bitch!" Theo didn't deal well with violence, even in the form of soggy semolina, but after the initial outburst, he immediately lost the will to fight. "I'm sorry, I don't know what I was thinking. Let's just —»

  "Fine!" Molly said. She wiped her hands on a dish towel, then tossed it at him. In dodging it, he felt like he was moving in blurred bullet time in the Matrix, but in truth he was just a tall guy who was a little baked and the towel would have missed him anyway. Molly stomped through the little house, into their bedroom, and dropped to the floor on the far side of the bed.

  "Molly, you okay?"

  She came up holding a package the size of a shoe box wrapped in Christmas paper with a few dust bunnies clinging to it. She held it out to him. "Here. Take it and go. I don't want to see you, traitor. Go."

  Theo was stunned. Was she leaving him? Asking him to leave her? How had this gone so wrong so fast?

  "I don't want to go. I'm having a really bad day, Molly. I came home hoping to find a little sympathy."

  "Yeah? Okay. Here you go. Aw, poor stoned Theo, I'm so sorry that you have to investigate my best friend the day before Christmas Eve when you could be out playing in an illegal pot patch that looks like the jungle plateau of the gibbon people." She held out his present and he took it.

  What the hell was she talking about? "So it is about the victory garden?"

  "Open it," she said.

  She didn't say a word more. She put a hand on her hip and fixed him with that "I am so going to kick your ass or fuck your brains out" look that excited and terrified him, as he wasn't always sure which way she would go with it, only that she was going to get satisfaction one way or the other and he was going to be sore the next day because of it. It was a Warrior Babe look, and he realized fully, then, that she was having an episode. She probably really was off her meds. This had to be handled just right.

  He backed away a few steps and tore the paper off the package. Inside was a white box with the silver seal of a very exclusive local glassblower, and inside that, wrapped in blue tissue, was the most beautiful bong he'd ever seen. It was like something out of the Art Nouveau era, only fashioned from modern materials, blue-green dichromatic glass with ornate silver branches running through it that gave it the appearance of walking through a forest as he turned it in his hand. The bowl and handle, which fit his hand perfectly, appeared to be cast of solid silver with the same organic tree-branch design seeming to leap right out of the glass. This had to have been made just for him, with his tastes in mind. He felt himself tearing up and blinked back the tears. "It's beautiful."

  "Uh-huh," Molly said. "So you can see it's not your garden that bothers me. It's just you."

  "Molly, I only want to talk to Lena. Her boyfriend threatened to blackmail me. I was only growing —»

  "Take it and go," Molly said.

  "Honey, you need to call Dr. Val, maybe see if she'll see you —»

  "Get out, goddammit. You don't tell me to see the shrink. Get out!"

  It was no use. Not now, anyway. Her voice had hit the Warrior Babe frenzy pitch — he recognized it from the times he'd taken her to the county hospital before they'd become involved as lovers. When she'd just been the town's crazy lady. She'd lose it if he pressed her any more. "Fine. I'll go. But I'll call you, okay?"

  She just gave him that look.

  "It's Christmas…" One last try maybe.

  The look.

  "Fine. Your present is on the top shelf in the closet. Merry Christmas."

  He dug some underwear and socks out of the drawer, grabbed a few shirts out of the closet, and headed out the front door. She slammed it hard enough behind him to break one of the windows. The glass hitting the sidewalk sounded like a summary of his whole life.

  Chapter 11

  A SLUG TRAIL OF GOOD CHEER

  He might have been made of polished mahogany except that when he moved, he moved like liquid. The stage lights reflected green and red off his bald head as he swayed on the stool and teased the strings of a blond Stratocaster with the severed neck of a beer bottle. His name was Catfish Jefferson, and he was seventy, or eighty, or one hundred years old, and not unlike Roberto the fruit bat, he wore sunglasses indoors. Catfish was a bluesman, and on the night before the night before Christmas, he was singing up a forlorn twelve-bar blues fog in the Head of the Slug saloon.

  Caught my baby boning Santa,

  Underneath the mistletoe (Lawd have mercy).

  Caught my baby boning Santa,

  Underneath the mistletoe.

  Used to be my Christmas angel,

  Now she just a Christmas ho.

  "I hear dat!" shouted Gabe Fenton. "Sho-nufF, sho-nuff. True dat, my brutha."

  Theophilus Crowe looked at his friend, just one in a whole line of awkward, heartbroken men at the bar, rocking almost in rhythm to the beat, and shook his head. "Could you possibly be any whiter?" Theo asked.

  "I gots the blues up in me," Gabe said. "She sho-nuff did me wrong."

  Gabe had been drinking. Theo, while not quite sober, had not.

  (He had shared a toothpick-thin spliff of Big Sur polio weed with Catfish Jefferson between sets, the two of them standing in the back parking lot of the Slug, trying to coax fire out of a disposable lighter in a forty-knot wind.)

  "Didn't think you muthafuckas had weather here," Catfish croaked, having sucked the joint so far down that the ember looked like the burning eye of a demon staring out of a cave of dark finger and lip. (The calluses on the tips of his fingers were impervious to the heat.)

  "El Niño," Theo said, letting loose a blast of smoke.

  "Say what?"

  "It's a warm ocean current in the Pacific. Comes up the coast every ten years or so. Screws up the fishing, brings torrential rains, storms. They think we might be having an El Niño this year."

  "When will they know?" The bluesman had put on his leather fedora and was holding it fast against the wind.

  "Usually after everything floods, the wine crop is ruined, and a lot of cliffside houses slide into the ocean."

>   "And dat because the water too warm?"

  "Right."

  "No wonder the whole country hate your ass," said Catfish. "Let's go inside fo' my narrow ass gets blowed back to Clarksville."

  "It's not that bad," said Theo. "I think it'll blow over."

  * * *

  Winter denial — Theo did it, most Californians did it — they assumed that because the weather was nice most of the time, it would be nice all of the time, and so, in the midst of a rainstorm, you'd find people outdoors without an umbrella, or when nights dipped into the thirties, you'd still see someone dip-pumping his gas in surfer shorts and a tank top. So even as the National Weather Service was telling the Central Coast to batten down the hatches, as they were about to get the storm of the decade, and even though winds were gusting to fifty knots a full day before the storm made landfall, the people of Pine Cove carried on with their holiday routine like nothing out of the ordinary could happen to them.

  Winter denial: therein lay the key to California Schadenfreude — the secret joy that the rest of the country feels at the misfortune of California. The country said: "Look at them, with their fitness and their tans, their beaches and their movie stars, their Silicon Valley and silicone breasts, their orange bridge and their palm trees. God, I hate those smug, sunshiny bastards!" Because if you're up to your navel in a snowdrift in Ohio, nothing warms your heart like the sight of California on fire. If you're shoveling silt out of your basement in the Fargo flood zone, nothing brightens your day like watching a Malibu mansion tumbling down a cliff into the sea. And if a tornado just peppered the land around your Oklahoma town with random trailer trash and redneck nuggets, then you can find a quantum of solace in the fact that the earth actually opened up in the San Fernando Valley and swallowed a whole caravan of commuting SUVs.

  Mavis Sand even indulged in a little California Schadenfreude, and she was a Californian born and raised. Secretly, she wished for and enjoyed the forest fires every year. Not so much because she liked watching the state burn down, but because for Mavis's money, there was nothing better than watching a burly man in rubber handling a hefty hose, and during the fires, there were plenty of those on the news.

  "Fruitcake?" Mavis said, offering a suspicious slice on a dessert plate to Gabe Fenton, who was drunkenly trying to convince Theo Crowe that he had a genetic predisposition toward the blues, using some impressively large words that no one but he understood, and periodically asking if he could get an «amen» and "five up high," which, as it turned out, he could not.

  What he could get was fruitcake.

  "Mercy, mercy, my momma done made a fruitcake look just like that," Gabe howled. "Lawd rest her soul."

  Gabe reached for the plate, but Theo intercepted it and held it out of the biologist's reach.

  "First," Theo said, "your mother was an anthro professor and never baked a thing in her life, and second, she is not dead, and third, you are an atheist."

  "Can I get an amen?!" Gabe countered.

  Theo raised an eyebrow of accusation toward Mavis.

  "I thought we talked about no fruitcake this year."

  The prior Christmas, Mavis's fruitcake had put two people into detox. She'd sworn that it would be the last year.

  Mavis shrugged. "This cake's nearly a virgin. There's only a quart of rum and barely a handful of Vicodin."

  "Let's not," Theo said, handing the plate back.

  "Fine," Mavis said. "But get your buddy off his blues jag. He's embarrassing me. And I once blew a burro in a nightclub and wasn't embarrassed, so that's saying something."

  "Jeez, Mavis," Theo said, trying to shake the picture from his mind.

  "What? I didn't have my glasses on. I thought he was a hirsute insurance salesman with talent."

  "I'd better get him home," Theo said, nudging Gabe, who had turned his attention to a young woman on his right who was wearing a low-cut red sweater and had been moving from stool to stool all night long, waiting for someone to talk to her.

  "Hi," Gabe said to the woman's cleavage. "I'm not involved in the human experience and I have no redeeming qualities as a man."

  "Me either," said Tucker Case, from the stool on the other side of the red-sweater woman. "Do people keep telling you that you're a psychopath, too? I hate that."

  * * *

  Tucker Case, under several layers of glibness and guile, was actually quite broken up over his breakup with Lena Marquez. It wasn't so much that she had become a part of his life in the two days he had known her, but that she had begun to represent hope. And as the Buddha said: "Hope is merely another face of desire. And desire is a motherfucker." He'd gone out seeking human company to help dilute the disappointment. In another time, he'd have picked up the first woman he encountered, but his man-slut days had left him lonelier than ever, and he would not tread that lubricious path again.

  "So," Tuck said to Gabe, "did you just get dumped?"

  "She led me on," Gabe said. "She tore my guts out. Evil, thy name is woman!"

  "Don't talk to him," Theo said, taking Gabe by the shoulder and unsuccessfully trying to pull him off his bar stool. "This guy's no good."

  The young woman sitting between Tuck and Gabe looked from one to the other, then to Theo, then at her breasts, then at the men, as if to say, Are you guys blind? I've been sitting here all night, with these, and you're going to ignore me.

  Tucker Case was ignoring her — well, except for inspecting her sweater cakes as he talked to Gabe and Theo. "Look, Constable, maybe we got off on the wrong foot —»

  "Wrong foot?" Theo's voice almost broke. As upset as he appeared, he appeared to be talking to the woman in the red sweater's breasts, rather than to Tucker Case, who was only a foot beyond them. "You threatened me."

  "He did?" said Gabe, angling for a better look down the red sweater. "That's harsh, buddy. Theo just got thrown out of the house."

  "Can you believe guys our age can still fall so hard?" Tuck said to Theo, looking up from the cleavage to convey his sincerity. He felt bad about blackmailing Theo, but, much like helping Lena hide the body, sometimes certain unpleasantries needed to be done, and being a pilot and a man of action, he did them.

  "What are you talking about?" Theo asked.

  "Well, Lena and I have parted ways, Constable. Shortly after you and I spoke this morning."

  "Really?" Now Theo looked up from the woolly mounds of intrigue.

  "Really," Tuck said. "And I'm sorry things happened the way they did."

  "That doesn't really change anything, does it?"

  "Would it make a difference if I told you that I absolutely did not harm this alleged Dale Pearson, and neither did Lena?"

  "I don't think he was alleged," said Gabe, slurring at the breasts. "I'm pretty sure he was confirmed Dale Pearson."

  "Whatever," said Tuck. "Would that change anything? Would you believe that?"

  Theo didn't speak right away but appeared to be waiting for an answer from the decolletage oracle. When he looked up at Tuck again he said, "Yeah, I believe you."

  Tuck nearly aspirated the ginger ale he was drinking. When he stopped sputtering he said, "Wow, you suck as a lawman, Theo. You can't just believe a strange guy who tells you something in a bar." Tuck wasn't accustomed to being believed by anyone, so to have someone take him at face value…

  "Hey, hey, hey," said Gabe. "That's uncalled for —»

  "Well, fuck you guys!" said the woman in the red sweater. She jumped up from her stool and snatched her keys off the bar. "I am a person, too, you know? And these are not speakerphones," she said, grabbing her breasts underneath and shaking them at the offenders, her keys jingling cheerfully as she did, completely defusing the effect of her anger.

  "Oh — my — God," said Gabe.

  "You can't just ignore a person like that! Besides, you're all too old and you're losers and I'd rather be alone on Christmas than spend five minutes with any of you horn dogs!" And with that she threw some cash on the bar, turned, and stormed out of the bar.
>
  Because they were men, Theo, Tuck, and Gabe watched her ass as she walked away.

  "Too old?" Tuck said. "She was what, twenty-seven, twenty-eight?"

  "Yeah," Theo said. "Late twenties, maybe early thirties. I didn't think we were ignoring her."

  Mavis Sand took the money off the bar and shook her head. "You were all paying her proper attention. Woman's got some issues when she's jealous of her own parts."

  "I was thinking about icebergs," said Gabe. "About how only ten percent of them show above the surface, yet below lies the really dangerous part. Oh, no, I got the blues on me again." His head hit the bar and bounced.

  Tuck looked to Theo. "You want some help getting him to the car?"

  "He's a very smart guy," said Theo. "He has a couple of Ph.D.s."

  "Okay. Do you want some help getting the doctor to the car?"

  Theo was trying to get a shoulder under Gabe's arm, but given that he was nearly a foot taller than his friend, things weren't working very well.

  "Theo," Mavis barked. "Don't be such a friggin' wanker. Let the man help you."

  After three unsuccessful attempts at hefting the bag of sand that was Gabe Fenton, Theo nodded to Tuck. They each took an arm and walked/dragged the biologist toward the back door.

  "If he hurls I'm aiming him at you," Theo said.

  "Lena loved these shoes," said Tuck. "But you do what you feel like you need to."

  "I have no sex appeal, a rum-pa-pa-pum," sang Gabe Fenton, in spirit with the season. "My social skills are nil, a rum-pa-pa-pum."

  "Did that actually rhyme?" asked Tuck.

  "He's a bright guy," said Theo.

  Mavis creaked ahead of them and held the door. "So, I'll see you pathetic losers at the Lonesome Christmas party, right?"