Odd Hours

THIRTY-TWO

BIRDIE HOPKINS TOOK OFF HER WHITE GLOVES. She slipped one over the gearshift knob and one over the turn-signal lever, so that the Cadillac seemed to be waving at me.

“Seventy-eight years old, still a hot flash now and then. But it’s not the slowest change of life in history. Been done with all that long ago. Has something to do with the twinges.”

From the large purse that stood on the seat between us, Birdie withdrew a Japanese fan, unfolded it, and fanned her plump face.

“Fred died, it started.”

“Seven years ago,” I said.

“Love somebody from when you’re nineteen, one day he’s the same as ever, next day dead. So many tears, they seem to wash somethin’ out of you, they leave this emptiness.”

“Loss is the hardest thing,” I said. “But it’s also the teacher that’s the most difficult to ignore.”

Her fanning hand went still. She regarded me with an expression that I took to be surprised agreement.

Because Birdie seemed to expect me to elucidate, I fumbled out what I thought she might want to say herself: “Grief can destroy you-or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. Or you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn’t allow yourself to consider the sacredness of it. But when it’s over and you’re alone, you begin to see it wasn’t just a movie and a dinner together, not just watching sunsets together, not just scrubbing a floor or washing dishes together or worrying over a high electric bill. It was everything, it was the why of life, every event and precious moment of it. The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can’t get off your knees for a long time, you’re driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss. And the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life.”

After a moment, she fanned her face again, and closed her eyes.

I gazed through the windshield at the desolation of fog, which might have been the waste and void from the time before time, when mankind did not exist or any beast, when there was only darkness on the face of the deep.

Birdie said, “What you said. All of it. Same for me. So one day my emptiness was filled. First twinge came. Tuesday afternoon in May, it was. Not a physical twinge. Just a feelin’, like why don’t I drive one of the old garbage-collection routes. Wound up at Nancy Coleman’s place, former employee of ours. Husband left her a year earlier. Four hours before I show up, she gets a cancer diagnosis. Scared, alone. That year, I drove her to chemo, doctors’ appointments, shoppin’ for a wig, spent so much time together, more laughin’ than either of us would have thought at the start.”

She closed the fan and returned it to her purse.

“Another time, I need to drive, wind up at Bodi Booker’s house. Insurance agent, lifelong bachelor. Says he’s busy, I talk my way in. He’s makin’ hot chocolate. So we start talkin’ Fred. He and my Fred were bowlin’-team buddies, went fishin’ like the son Fred and I never could have. Half an hour, he tells me the hot cocoa was to wash down a bottle of pills, to kill himself. Year later, Nancy Coleman doesn’t have cancer anymore, she has Bodi, they married.”

She retrieved her white gloves and worked her hands into them.

“What about Swithin busted from bad romance?” I asked.

“Swithin Murdoch. Good man, made a fool of himself over this girl. Leanna cleaned out his bank accounts, took a powder. Swithin almost lost his house, business, the works. I made a loan, he paid it back. So why you, Harry Lime?”

“I think something bad would have happened to me at that storm drain if you hadn’t showed up.”

“Bad like what?”

Although her journey since Fred had shown her that under the apparent chaos of life lies a strange order, the truth of me would be more than she could absorb in the time that it would take her to drive the rest of the way to the harbor.

“I don’t know, ma’am. Just a feeling I have.”

She switched on the headlights and shifted the car out of park.

“For true, you don’t know?”

Whatever event had been pending at the storm-drain grate, it had been related to the peculiar behavior of the coyotes and to the porch swing that had swung itself. I did not understand what linked those three experiences, nor what power or purpose lay behind them, so I could answer honestly.

“For true,” I assured her. “How far to the harbor?”

Piloting the Cadillac back into the fog-flooded street, she said, “Three minutes, four.”

My wristwatch and her car clock agreed-9:59.

After a silence, Birdie said, “What’s so different about you, child?”

“I don’t know, ma’am. Maybe…because I spent seven months as a guest at a monastery. The serenity of the monks kind of rubbed off on me.”

“Nothin’ rubbed off. Your difference is all yours.”

Anything I could say would be a lie or an evasion, and because she had somehow saved me, I did not want to lie to her more than necessary.

Birdie said, “You sometimes sense somethin’ big is comin’?”

“Big like what?”

“So big the world changes.”

“Watching the news too much can make you crazy,” I advised.

“Don’t mean the kind of bushwa newsmen jabber. Not war or plague, not water gives you cancer or here comes a new ice age.”

“Then what kind of bushwa?” I asked.

“Some kind nobody would ever expect.”

I thought of the absolute whiteout through which the golden retriever and I had traveled, but if that had been not just weather but also a premonition, I did not know the meaning of it.

“I can’t have done right by you yet,” she said.

“I appreciate the ride.”

“Wasn’t twinged out of my cozy home just to be a taxi. What you need, child?”

“Nothing, ma’am. I’m good.”

“Place to stay?”

“Comes with my job. Nice ocean-view room.”

“Lawyer?”

“Have nothing against them, but I don’t need one.”

“Got a bad feelin’ for you.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“Some need you’ve got. I feel it.”

Considering Hoss Shackett and Utgard Rolf and the kind of men who would be aligned with them, I had a long list of things I needed, starting with a platoon of Marines.

“Money?” she asked.

“No, ma’am.”

Solemnly, quietly, she said, “Gun?”

I hesitated before I replied. “I don’t like guns.”

“Might not like them, but you need one.”

Sensing that I had said too much, I said no more.

“It’s in the purse,” she told me.

I looked at her, but she kept her attention on the street, where the headlights seemed to bake the batter of fog into a solid cake.

“Why would you have a gun?” I asked.

“Old lady in an ugly time-she has to take precautions.”

“You bought it legally?”

“I look like Clyde’s Bonnie to you?”

“No, ma’am. I just mean, anything I did with it would be traced back to you.”

“A few days, I report it stolen.”

“What if I rob a bank with it?”

“You won’t.”

“You can’t be sure. You hardly know me.”

“Child, have you been listenin’ to me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What was it with Nancy Coleman?”

“Well…she had cancer.”

“What was it with Bodi Booker?”

“Planning suicide.”

“Swithin Murdoch?”

“Flat busted from bad romance.”

“I could name more. None needed help robbin’ a bank. Just good people in trouble. You think I’ve gone to the dark side?”

“Not for a minute.”

“You’re good people in trouble. I trust you.”

“This is more than trust,” I said.

“It might be. Look in the purse.”

The weapon was a pistol. I examined it.

“No safeties,” she said. “Double action. Ten rounds in the magazine. You know how to use such a thing?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m no Bonnie’s Clyde, but I won’t shoot my foot, either.”

I thought of Annamaria saying that she didn’t work, that people gave her a free place to live and even money when she needed it.

Now a gun came to me when I most needed one.

Something more was happening in Magic Beach than just a plot to smuggle nuclear weapons into the country and my attempt to thwart it.

This place was the still point of the turning world, and this night was the still point between the past and the future. I felt monumental forces gathering that I either could not comprehend or was afraid to contemplate.

My cursed life, my blessed life, my struggles with grievous loss and my striving toward wonder had often seemed to me to be the random path of a flippered pinball, from post to post and bell to bell and gate to gate, rolling wherever I might be knocked.

Instead, all the while, from childhood, I had been moving toward Magic Beach and toward a moment when, with full free will, I would either take upon myself a tremendous burden-or turn away from it. I did not know what the burden might prove to be, but I could feel the weight of it descending, and my moment of decision drawing near.

All things in their time.

Birdie Hopkins pulled the Cadillac to the curb and stopped once more.

Pointing, she said, “Harbor’s one block that way. Maybe you’d rather walk the last part to…whatever it is.”

“I’ll use the gun only to defend myself.”

“Thought different, I wouldn’t give it.”

“Or an innocent life.”

“Hush now. It’s like you said.”

“What did I say?”

“This is more than trust.”

The fog, the night, the future pressed at the windows.

“One more thing I might need.”

“Just say.”

“Do you have a cell phone?”

She took it from the purse, and I accepted it.

“When you’re safe,” she said, “will you let me know?”

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you for everything.”

I started to open the door, then hesitated.

Unshed tears stood in Birdie’s eyes.

“Ma’am, I shined you on about something earlier. What you feel coming isn’t from watching the news too much.”

She bit her lower lip.

I said, “Something big is coming. I sense it, too. I think I’ve sensed it all my life.”

“What? Child, what is it?”

“I don’t know. So big the world changes-but like you said, some kind of change nobody would ever expect.”

“Sometimes I’m so afraid, mostly in the night, and Fred not here to talk me through to a quiet heart.”

“You don’t ever need to be afraid, Birdie Hopkins. Not a woman like you.”

She reached out to me. I held her hand.

“Keep safe,” she said.

When she was ready to let go of my hand, I got out of the sedan and closed the door. I slid her cell phone into a pocket of my jeans, and I tucked the pistol in the waistband so that the sweatshirt would cover it.

As I walked to the corner, crossed the intersection, and headed toward the harbor, the big engine of the Cadillac idled in the night until I went too far to hear it anymore.