Big Mango (9786167611037) (3 page)

The other envelope had no return address at
all, and Eddie held it up and looked it over curiously.

It was an airmail envelope, one of those
old-fashioned ones with a bright red and blue border and the words
‘Par Avion’ printed in big letters underneath two exotic-looking
stamps. It crossed Eddie’s mind briefly that he hadn’t seen an
envelope like that in a long time, and it even surprised him a
little to see that they still existed.

This one had been addressed by hand. Very
neatly and carefully, someone had printed on it in black ink: MR.
EDWARD DARE, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW, 469 GRANT STREET, SAN FRANCISCO,
CALIFORNIA 94108, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

The envelope wasn’t very heavy and when Eddie
ripped into it he thought at first that it was empty. But then he
turned it up and shook it and a single snapshot slid out, face up,
onto his desk. Eddie bent forward and peered at it.

The photographer had caught a bunch of young
marines in a moment of horsing around with some Asian girls. From
the uniforms and the look of the kids wearing them, Eddie knew the
picture had to date back to the Vietnam War era, but otherwise
nothing about the photo hinted at where or exactly when it had been
taken.

Still, there was one thing about it that got
Eddie’s complete and undivided attention, and that caused him to
pick up the photograph very slowly and then to sit and stare at it
for a long time.

Someone had drawn a bright red circle on the
snapshot using a sharp-pointed pen wielded with considerable force.
The line was angry-looking and etched so deeply into the surface of
the photograph that it had even ripped through the paper completely
in one place, nearly decapitating one of the young marines. Eddie
carefully studied the fresh, open face in the center of the red
circle. The face studied him silently in return, oblivious to the
deep slash yawning just below its chin.

There was no doubt in Eddie’s mind. None at
all. The loopy, slightly lopsided stare he was meeting was his
own.

The violent slashes framing his face added a
deeply unsettling element to Eddie’s surprise at seeing the
photograph. It bothered him, too, he had to honestly admit, that
the young Eddie gazed so guilelessly out of the picture at the
middle-aged Eddie slumped in a cheap chair in a crummy office over
a noodle shop. That was a swipe far subtler than the harsh red
circle but, for all its slyness, it dug into him almost as
deeply.

Eddie fumbled for some sensible explanation
for the photograph, some obvious interpretation that would match
the innocence of his cockeyed young face, but nothing came to him.
But as he sat and thought about it, he began to feel the
unmistakable sensation of a cool breeze on the back of his neck. It
was gentle but persistent, and as Eddie raised his head from the
photograph to take its measure, all in a rush he knew.

Something was coming at him, something
straight out of a cloudy, forgotten corner of his past. He couldn’t
imagine what it was, but of one thing he was absolutely
certain.

Whatever it might be, it was just about to
dump all over him.

EDDIE
wanted to forget about
the snapshot entirely, to tell himself it meant nothing at all. He
wanted to write it off as a prank by someone he hadn’t seen in
years and throw it away. He wanted to do all of that, but he
couldn’t.

In Eddie’s experience, weird things that
happened to him seldom meant nothing. Weird things, he had found,
almost always turned out to mean
something
, frequently
something not too good. Every time he tried to ignore weirdness
until it went away, he eventually found it tattooed onto his butt.
No, Eddie had decided a long time ago, it was always good policy to
take on weirdness before it took him on, to meet it out in the
street before it got inside his house, popped open a Coors, and
made itself at home on his couch.

The problem was, he wasn’t certain how to
apply his policy in this particular case. For the life of him, he
couldn’t work out what the point of the photograph was supposed to
be.

Maybe it was a threat, but he really couldn’t
think of anybody who would want to threaten him at all, much less
in such an obscure way. Certainly none of his clients were the sort
to go in for that kind of subtlety. If any of them had a problem
with him, they were the kind of guys who would come around to his
apartment one night with a hockey stick. But if the photograph
wasn’t a threat, then what the hell was it? A joke?

Eddie stared at the other men in the
photograph and at the women, too, threading them back and forth
through his memory. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t recall
any of their faces. He might even have sworn he didn’t know anybody
in the picture at all, but there he was right in the middle so he
guessed he must have seen them at least that once. Surely no one
would have gone to the trouble of faking such an innocuous picture.
All of which brought him back full circle again to wondering why
anyone would send the picture to him at all, even if it were
real.

The best idea Eddie could come up with
offhand was to show the picture to someone else he had been in the
marines with and see what they made of it. Only one guy came
readily to mind, but he was close by, so Eddie tucked the
photograph into a jacket pocket and headed for the door.

Joshua was on the telephone as Eddie came out
of his office. He put the call on hold and turned his head until
his eyes caught Eddie’s.

“Must be family day for you,” he said.

Eddie was about to say something impatient;
he was already up to his ass in subtlety and couldn’t face any
more. Then Joshua laid it out.

“It’s Kathleen.”

Eddie had given marriage another shot three
or four years after Jennifer left him. Her name had been Kathleen
Strong—not Kathleen Dare, Kathleen Strong—and she had been an
assistant district attorney in Marin County. He always had to stop
and think to work out exactly when they had been married and when
they got divorced, so he seldom bothered. It hadn’t lasted very
long, and thank God they hadn’t had any children. Eddie flinched a
bit every time he realized he was thinking that but, if they had,
Kathleen would probably have hung the unfortunate kid with some
idiotic surname like Strong-Dare, and that was a future too
horrible to wish on any child.

Actually Kathleen had been okay, if a little
strident and overly prone to sneak attacks. At least Eddie had
thought of her that way until the day she announced she had decided
to leave him and move to Alaska. Kathleen failed to mention then
that her motivation was neither a new found love of elk crap nor a
sudden obsession with the NRA, but rather that she was screwing a
federal judge in Fairbanks.

Eddie hadn’t really minded all that much
finding himself single again, actually he hardly noticed any change
in his life at all, and he figured that anybody who ran off to
Fairbanks to sleep with a federal judge probably had enough trouble
already so he didn’t make a fuss when she filed the papers. That
meant the divorce was—what else?—okay.

“She’s calling from Alaska?”

“No, from Tiburon. I gather the judge is
history and she’s back.”

“Oh, Christ.” Eddie thought for a minute.
“You didn’t—”

“No, I said I thought you’d just left.”

Eddie wiggled his eyebrows a couple of times
and then cut Joshua the biggest wink he could and ducked out the
door. That damned picture was already giving him heartburn.
Kathleen would just have to take a number if she wanted to make him
miserable today.

He covered the few blocks down Grant to the
Transamerica Pyramid in a brisk walk, cut through the plaza
underneath it, and turned north on Columbus toward the bay. Maybe
he would get lucky and figure this thing out quickly. This guy he
knew had a way of doing that kind of thing.

Heluska Jones had been the endlessly
good-natured guy in his platoon, the volunteer for whatever might
be going. There was one in every outfit. Lusk always claimed to be
a full-blooded Apache Indian whose name meant ‘great warrior’ until
deeply stoned one night he admitted he actually came from a tribe
called the Winnebagos and that Heluska really translated as
something more like ‘little fairy sent by the gods.’

From then on, of course, Lusk was Winnebago
Jones for life. They would have tried out Little Fairy Jones for a
while, but then they saw the look in his eyes and decided that
fucking with an angry Indian was probably riskier than fucking with
the VC. Anyway, Winnebago Jones had something. You could almost
dance to it.

Winnebago and Eddie rotated back to Camp
Pendleton together in 1975 and were discharged within a few days of
each other. Eddie was hitching up the coast to San Francisco to get
himself into college and, since Winnebago had nowhere to go but
back to the hard scrabble of Northern Arizona, he just tagged
along. As it turned out, Winnebago quickly found the beatnik ghetto
around Columbus Avenue, or it found him, and he was home.

A hippie Indian named Winnebago was just the
thing for San Francisco in the mid-seventies and for a few years he
worked in a bookstore and wrote what he insisted was poetry; but as
a decade slid past and Columbus Avenue turned from a hangout for
aging beats into a tourist attraction, Winnebago just went with the
flow and became a tourist attraction, too. Even now, after more
than twenty years, he could still be found in the same little
bookstore on Columbus, wearing what he thought was an appropriate
costume for a hippie Indian in San Francisco, selling a few books
and a lot of other garbage to tourists.

When Eddie pushed open the door, a bell on
the back tinkled and Winnebago glanced up from a paperback propped
against the cash register. He was wearing a shirt with a beaded
front that he had bought at a garage sale in San Jose because it
reminded him of the one Tonto wore in the Lone Ranger movies, and
his shoulder-length, black hair was tied back off his face with a
red and white beaded headband that said FULL-BLOODED AMERICAN
INDIAN.

Eddie had once tried to tell Winnebago that
he wasn’t supposed to be an Indian anymore; that somebody had gone
and made him a Native American when he wasn’t looking. It had
something to do with preserving the dignity of his race, Eddie
explained, but Winnebago said he didn’t really care too much about
that since he already had all the dignity he could use in San
Francisco anyway. He was an Indian; he had always been an Indian;
and he intended to stay an Indian. That seemed to settle it, and
Eddie never brought the matter up again.

“Hey, Eddie, my man!” Winnebago closed the
book and scraped his stool back. “How long’s it been?”

“Two weeks. I was here two weeks ago
Thursday.”

Winnebago thought about that as he reached
for the pack of unfiltered Camels he always kept at hand.

“Yeah?”

“We walked over to North Beach Pizza.”

Winnebago seemed to strain a moment, trying
to remember as he shook a cigarette from the pack. He gave up
quickly, struck a match and lit the cigarette, exhaling in a long,
steady stream.

“Well, if you say so, Eddie. Can’t remember a
damned thing about it though.”

“You must be getting old, Winnebago.”

Winnebago tapped one finger slowly against
the side of the cash register and considered the proposition. Eddie
waited for him to decide what he thought, but when it became
obvious that it might take a while, Eddie went ahead and fished the
photograph out of his pocket and put it on the counter. Winnebago
took another toke on his cigarette and shifted his weight slightly
on the stool so that he could see it more clearly.

“Hey, that’s you, Eddie! Damn, you look so
young!” Winnebago lifted the picture off the counter and peered at
it. “Why’d you draw that circle around your head?”

“I didn’t. It came that way.”

“Your head? Came that way?”

Winnebago apparently was not having one of
his better days, Eddie reflected.

“No, the picture. The picture came that
way.”

“What do you mean? Where’d it come from?”

Eddie told him.

After he heard the story, Winnebago just
shook his head slowly.

“Ain’t that the weirdest thing, man? Ain’t
that the weirdest?”

“Do you recognize anyone?”

“I recognize you, Eddie.”

Winnebago had times like this, times when all
the foreign substances he had poured and sucked and snorted into
his body over the years held a convention in his brain all at once.
On the other hand, Eddie knew there were also times when Winnebago
was so penetrating and insightful that he scared the hell out of
most people. When the magnetic fields in his brain overlapped just
right, Winnebago sounded like an Old Testament prophet who had
suffered the bizarre misfortune of emerging from reincarnation as a
hippie Indian working in a bookstore in San Francisco.

“No, Winnebago, anyone else. Do you recognize
anyone else in the picture?”

Winnebago looked hard at the snapshot,
tilting it from side to side to study the faces more closely. The
smoke from his Camel formed a little wreath around his head and
caught the light in such a way that it made Eddie think for a
moment of some bizarrely vandalized Renaissance painting.

“Isn’t that guy behind you somebody from our
squad?” Winnebago laid the photograph back on the counter and
twisted it toward Eddie.

“Maybe. You can’t see him well enough to
tell.”

“There’s something about his ears. They look
familiar.”

“You can’t remember we had pizza together two
weeks ago and you recognize the ears on a guy you haven’t seen in
twenty years?”

“Man, I remember every minute of twenty years
ago. Don’t you?”