Odd Hours

THIRTY-ONE

AS IF COMING OUT OF A TRANCE, I ROSE FROM the drain grating and turned, expecting a squad car and a couple of officers with hard smiles and harder truncheons.

Instead, before me stood a 1959 Cadillac Sedan DeVille that could have rolled off the showroom floor an hour previously. Massive, black, loaded with chrome detail, featuring big tail fins, it looked suitable for either interstate or interstellar travel.

The driver peered at me through the front passenger window, which she had put down. She appeared to be half again as old as the car, a heavyset, blue-eyed, pink-cheeked lady with a huge church-choir bosom. She wore white gloves and a little gray hat with a yellow band and yellow feathers.

“You all right, child?” she asked.

I leaned down to the open window. “Yes, ma’am.”

“You lose somethin’ through the grating?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I lied because I had no idea what had happened-or had almost happened. “But it wasn’t anything important.”

She cocked her head, studied me for a moment, and said, “It wasn’t unimportant, neither. You seem like a boy needs a friend.”

Below the nearby lightning-bolt grate, the storm drain remained dark.

“What happened to your lip?” the woman asked.

“A disagreement over singers. Rod Stewart or Sinatra.”

“Sinatra,” she said.

“That was my position, ma’am.” I glanced at a pawnshop, then at the mannequins in used clothing. “The fog has me confused. I don’t recognize this part of town.”

“Where you goin’?”

“To the harbor.”

“I’m goin’ that way,” she said. “Give you a lift?”

“You shouldn’t pick up strangers, ma’am.”

“Folks I know all have cars. Most won’t walk to the end of the block to see a parade of elephants. I don’t pick up strangers, who am I gonna pick up?”

I got in the car, closed the door, and said, “I was almost trampled by an elephant once.”

Putting up the power window, she said, “They go mad sometimes. Just like people. Though they don’t tend to shoot up classrooms and leave crazy videos behind.”

“This wasn’t the elephant’s fault,” I said. “A bad man injected Jumbo with drugs to enrage him, then locked the two of us in a barn.”

“I’ve known bad men in my time,” she said, “but none that ever schemed to do homicide by elephant. Why do they always have to name them Jumbo?”

“A sad lack of imagination in the circus, ma’am.”

She took her foot off the brake, and the car drifted forward. “Name’s Birdena Hopkins. Folks just call me Birdie. What do folks call you?”

“Harry. Harry Lime.”

“A nice clean name. Crisp. Conjures nice thoughts. Pleased to meet you, Harry Lime.”

“Thank you, Birdie. Likewise.”

On both sides of the street, the shops appeared to recede into the fog, as though they were ships outbound from Magic Beach to even stranger shores.

“You from around here?” Birdie asked.

“Visiting, ma’am. Thought I might stay. Not so sure now.”

“Not a bad town,” she said. “Though way too many tourists come for the spring harvest festival.”

“They harvest something in the spring around here?”

“No. Used to be two festivals, they combined them into one. Now each spring at plantin’ time, they celebrate the harvest to come in the autumn.”

“I didn’t think this was farm country.”

“It’s not. What we do is we celebrate the concept of harvest, whatever that means. Town’s always been run by an inbred bunch of fools, our foundin’ families.”

The buildings had sailed beyond sight. Here and there, a blush of neon remained, but those signs were incoherent now, the glass words having shattered into meaningless syllables of nebulous color.

Birdie said, “What’s your line of work, Harry?”

“Fry cook, ma’am.”

“Fell in love with a fry cook once. Beans Burnet, short-order wizard. A dream, that man.”

“We fry cooks tend to be romantic.”

“In Beans’s case, not enough. He loved his pancakes and home fries more than women. Worked all the time.”

“In his defense, Birdie, it’s an enchanting occupation. You can lose yourself in it.”

“Sure liked the way he smelled.”

“Beef fat and bacon grease,” I said.

She sighed. “Fried onions and green peppers. You don’t measure up to Beans in smell, Harry.”

“I’ve had a different kind of job the past month, ma’am. I’ll be back at the griddle eventually. I sure do miss it.”

“Then came Fred, my life mate, and I forgot all about fry cooks. No offense.”

Birdie changed streets at a shrouded intersection of which I had been unaware until she pulled the steering wheel to the right.

Having been engineered to isolate the driver from the roughness of the pavement, the big sedan rode like a boat. Sloshing tides of fog enhanced the perception that, with wheels retracted, the Cadillac wallowed along Venetian canals.

Although Birdie Hopkins drove below the speed limit, we were moving too fast for the dismal visibility.

“Ma’am, should we really be driving blind?”

“You might be ridin’ blind, child, but I’m drivin’ with sunny-day confidence. Been cruisin’ this town almost sixty years. Never had an accident. Weather like this, we have the streets to ourselves, so they’re even safer. When the sick and sufferin’ need me, I don’t say they gotta wait till mornin’ comes or till the rain stops.”

“Are you a nurse, ma’am?”

“Never had time for school. Me and Fred were in garbage.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Collection, I mean. Started with two trucks and no fear our hands might get dirty. Ended with a fleet, sole contractor for six towns along the coast. Garbage is like sunrise-never stops comin’.”

“So true.”

“You can get rich doin’ work others won’t. Garbage was gold.”

“A lot of times,” I said, “when a restaurant’s really busy, there’s a lot of stress being a fry cook.”

“Don’t doubt that for a second.”

“I’ve thought about switching into tire sales or shoes. Is the garbage business stressful?”

“Sometimes for management. For a route driver, it’s so the same day after day, it gets to be like meditation.”

“Like meditation, yet you’re providing a good service. Sounds real nice.”

“Fred died seven years ago, I sold out two years later. You want, child, I can still open doors in the garbage world.”

“That’s generous, ma’am. I might take you up on that one day.”

“You’d be a good route driver. Can’t look down on the job and be any good. I can tell you don’t look down on anyone.”

“That’s kind of you to say. The reason I wondered if you were a nurse is, before garbage, you mentioned the sick and suffering.”

As if receiving directions beamed from a MapQuest satellite to her brain, Birdie turned left into a billowing white wall, and the Cadillac wallowed into a new canal.

She glanced at me, turned her attention to the invisible street, reached one hand up to adjust her feathered hat, glanced at me again, pulled to the curb, and put the car in park.

“Harry, somethin’ about you is too different. I can’t do this the usual way. Feel like I should get right to it, say I didn’t come to you by chance.”

“You didn’t?”

She left the engine running but switched off the headlights.

Fathoms of fog pressed upon the car, so it seemed as though we rested on the floor of a sea.

“You were a twinge before you were a face,” Birdie said. “For all I knew, you’d be another Nancy with cancer or like a Bodi Booker makin’ hot cocoa for suicide.”

She waited for me to reply, so at last I said, “Ma’am, I think maybe the fog got in my head, because I can’t see any sense in what you just told me.”

“What I think,” she said, “you’re in worse trouble than just a Swithin flat busted from bad romance.”