Brother Odd (17 page)

CHAPTER 34

R
ODION ROMANOVICH ARRIVED IN THE GARAGE wearing a handsome bearskin hat, a white silk neck scarf, a black three-quarter-length lined leather coat with fur collar and fur cuffs, and—no surprise—zippered rubber boots that rose to his knees. He looked as if he had dressed for a horse-drawn sleigh-ride with the czar.

After my experience with the galloping boneyard, I was lying on my back on the floor, staring at the ceiling, trying to calm myself, waiting for my legs to stop trembling and regain some strength.

Standing over me, peering down, he said, “You are a peculiar young man, Mr. Thomas.”

“Yes, sir. I am aware.”

“What are you doing down there?”

“Recovering from a bad scare.”

“What scared you?”

“A sudden recognition of my mortality.”

“Have you not previously realized you are mortal?”

“Yes, sir, I’ve been aware of it for a while. I was just, you know, overcome by a sense of the unknown.”

“What unknown, Mr. Thomas?”

“The great unknown, sir. I’m not a particularly vulnerable person. Little unknowns don’t disconcert me.”

“How does lying on a garage floor console you?”

“The water stains on the ceiling are lovely. They relax me.”

Looking at the concrete overhead, he said, “I find them ugly.”

“No, no. All the soft shadings of gray and black and rust, just a hint of green, gently blending together, all free-form shapes, not anything that looks as defined and rigid as a bone.”

“Bone, did you say?”

“Yes, sir, I did. Is that a bearskin hat, sir?”

“Yes. I know it is not politically correct to wear fur, but I refuse to apologize for it to anyone.”

“Good for you, sir. I’ll bet you killed the bear yourself.”

“Are you an animal activist, Mr. Thomas?”

“I have nothing against animals, but I’m usually too busy to march on their behalf.”

“Then I will tell you that I did, indeed, kill the bear from which this hat was fashioned and from which the fur came for the collar and cuffs of this coat.”

“That isn’t much to have gotten from a whole bear.”

“I have other fur items in my wardrobe, Mr. Thomas. I wonder how you knew that I killed the bear.”

“I mean no offense by this, sir, but in addition to the fur for various garments, you received into yourself something of the spirit of the bear when you killed it.”

From my extreme perspective, his many frown lines looked like terrible dark saber scars. “That sounds New Age and not Catholic.”

“I’m speaking metaphorically, not literally, and with some irony, sir.”

“When I was your age, I did not have the luxury of irony. Will you get up from there?”

“In a minute, sir. Eagle Creek Park, Garfield Park, White River State Park—Indianapolis has some very nice parks, but I didn’t know there were bears in them.”

“As I am sure you realize, I hunted the bear and shot it when I was a young man in Russia.”

“I keep forgetting you’re Russian. Wow, librarians are a tougher bunch in Russia than here, hunting bear and all.”

“Everyone had it tough. It was the Soviet era. But I was not a librarian in Russia.”

“I’m in the middle of a career change myself. What were you in Russia?”

“A mortician.”

“Is that right? You embalmed people and stuff.”

“I prepared people for death, Mr. Thomas.”

“That’s a peculiar way of putting it.”

“Not at all. That’s how we said it in my former country.” He spoke a few words in Russian and then translated: “ ‘I am a mortician. I prepare people for death.’ Now, of course, I am a librarian at the Indiana State Library opposite the Capitol, at one-forty North Senate Avenue.”

I lay in silence for a moment. Then I said, “You’re quite droll, Mr. Romanovich.”

“But I hope not grotesque.”

“I’m still thinking about that.” I pointed to the second SUV. “You’re driving that one. You’ll find the keys tagged with the license number in a wall box over there.”

“Has your meditation on the ceiling stains ameliorated your fear of the great unknown?”

“As much as could be expected, sir. Would you like to take a few minutes to meditate on them?”

“No thank you, Mr. Thomas. The great unknown does not trouble me.” He went to get the keys.

When I rose to my feet, my legs were steadier than they had been recently.

Ozzie Boone, a four-hundred-pound best-selling mystery writer who is my friend and mentor in Pico Mundo, insists that I keep the tone light in these biographical manuscripts. He believes that pessimism is strictly for people who are over-educated and unimaginative. Ozzie counsels me that melancholy is a self-indulgent form of sorrow. By writing in an unrelievedly dark mode, he warns, the writer risks culturing darkness in his heart, becoming the very thing that he decries.

Considering the gruesome death of Brother Timothy, the awful discoveries yet to be revealed in this account, and the grievous losses forthcoming, I doubt that the tone of this narrative would be half as light as it is if Rodion Romanovich had not been part of it. I do not mean that he turned out to be a swell guy. I mean only that he had wit.

These days, all I ask of Fate is that the people she hurls into my life, whether they are evil or good, or morally bipolar, should be amusing to one degree or another. This is a big request to make of busy Fate, who has billions of lives to keep in constant turmoil. Most good people have a sense of humor. The problem is finding smile-inducing evil people, because the evil are mostly humorless, though in the movies they frequently get some of the best lines. With few exceptions, the morally bipolar are too preoccupied with justifying their contradictory behaviors to learn to laugh at themselves, and I’ve noticed they laugh
at
other people more than
with
them.

Burly, fur-hatted, and looking as solemn as a man should who prepares people for death, Rodion Romanovich returned with the keys to the second SUV.

“Mr. Thomas, any scientist will tell you that in nature many systems appear to be chaotic, but when you study them long enough and closely enough, strange order always underlies the appearance of chaos.”

I said, “How about that.”

“The winter storm into which we are going will seem chaotic—the shifting winds and the churning snow and the brightness that obscures more than it reveals—but if you could view it not at the level of a meteorological event, view it instead at the micro scale of fluid and particle and energy flux, you would see a warp and woof suggestive of a well-woven fabric.”

“I left my micro-scale eyeglasses in my room.”

“If you were to view it at the atomic level, the event might seem chaotic again, but proceeding into the subatomic, strange order appears once more, an even more intricate design than warp and woof. Always, beneath every apparent chaos, order waits to be revealed.”

“You haven’t seen my sock drawer.”

“The two of us might seem to be in this place, at this time, only by coincidence, but both an honest scientist and a true man of faith will tell you there are no coincidences.”

I shook my head. “They sure did make you do some pretty deep thinking at that mortician’s school.”

Neither a spot nor a wrinkle marred his clothes, and his rubber boots gleamed like patent leather.

Stoic, seamed, and solid, his face was a mask of perfect order.

He said, “Do not bother to ask for the name of the mortician’s school, Mr. Thomas. I never attended one.”

“This is the first time I’ve known anyone,” I said, “who embalmed without a license.”

His eyes revealed an order even more rigorous than that exemplified by his wardrobe and his face.

He said, “I obtained a license without the need for schooling. I had a natural-born talent for the trade.”

“Some kids are born with perfect pitch, with a genius for math, and you were born knowing how to prepare people for death.”

“That is exactly correct, Mr. Thomas.”

“You must have come from interesting genetic stock.”

“I suspect,” he said, “that your family and mine were equally unconventional.”

“I’ve never met my mother’s sister, Aunt Cymry, but my father says she’s a dangerous mutant they’ve locked away somewhere.”

The Russian shrugged. “I would nevertheless wager heavily on the equivalency of our families. Should I lead the way or follow you?”

If he contained chaos on some level below wardrobe and face and eyes, it must be in his mind. I wondered what kind of strange order might underlie it.

“Sir, I’ve never driven in snow before. I’m not sure how I’ll be able to tell, under all the drifts, exactly where the driveway runs between here and the abbey. I’d have to plow by intuition—though I usually do all right that way.”

“With all due respect, Mr. Thomas, I believe that experience trumps intuition. Russia is a world of snow, and in fact I was born during a blizzard.”

“During a blizzard, in a mortuary?”

“Actually, in a library.”

“Was your mother a librarian?”

“No,” he said. “She was an assassin.”

“An assassin.”

“That is correct.”

“Do you mean
assassin
figuratively or literally, sir?”

“Both, Mr. Thomas. When driving behind me, please remain at a safe distance. Even with four-wheel drive and chains, there is some danger of sliding.”

“I feel like I’ve been sliding all day. I’ll be careful, sir.”

“If you do start to slide, turn the wheel into the direction of the slide. Do not try to pull out of it. And use the brakes gently.” He walked to the other SUV and opened the driver’s door.

Before he climbed behind the wheel, I said, “Sir, lock your doors. And if you see anything unusual in the storm, don’t get out of the truck to have a closer look at it. Keep driving.”

“Unusual? Such as?”

“Oh, you know, anything unusual. Say like a snowman with three heads or someone who looks like she might be my Aunt Cymry.”

Romanovich could peel an apple with his stare.

With a little good-luck wave, I got into my truck, and after a moment, he got into his.

After he drove around me to the foot of the ramp, I pulled in behind him.

He used his remote opener, and at the top of the incline, the big door began to roll up.

Beyond the garage lay a chaos of bleak light, shrieking wind, and a perpetual avalanche of falling snow.

CHAPTER 35

I
N FRONT OF ME, RODION ROMANOVICH DROVE out of the garage into hammers of wind and shatters of snow, and I switched on my headlamps. The drowned daylight required them in this feathered rain.

Even as those beams brought sparkle to the dull white curtains of snow, Elvis materialized in the passenger seat as though I had switched him on, as well.

He was dressed in his navy-frogman scuba suit from
Easy Come, Easy Go,
possibly because he thought I needed a laugh.

The black neoprene hood fitted tightly to his head, covering his hair, his ears, and his forehead to the eyebrows. With his face thus isolated, the sensuous quality of his features was weirdly enhanced, but not to good effect. He looked not like a navy frogman but rather like a sweet little bow-lipped Kewpie doll that some pervert had dressed in a bondage costume.

“Oh, man, that movie,” I said. “With that one, you gave new meaning to the word
ridiculous
.”

He laughed soundlessly, pretended to shoot me with a spear gun, and phased from the scuba suit into the Arabian costume he had worn in
Harum Scarum
.

“You’re right,” I agreed, “that one was even worse.”

When making his music, he had been the essence of cool, but in his movies he was often a self-parody embarrassing to watch. Colonel Parker, his manager, who had picked movie scripts for him, had served Elvis less well than the monk Rasputin had served Czar Nicholas and Alexandra.

I drove out of the garage, stopped, and thumbed the remote to put down the door behind me.

Using the rearview mirror, I watched until the door had closed entirely, prepared to shift into reverse and run down any fugitive from a nightmare that tried to enter the garage.

Apparently calculating the correct path of the driveway by a logical analysis of the topography, Romanovich plowed without error north-by-northwest, exposing blacktop as he ascended in a gentle curve.

Some of the scooped-away snow spilled back onto the pavement in his wake. I lowered my plow until it barely skimmed the blacktop, and cleaned up after him. I remained at the requested safe distance, both out of respect for his experience and because I didn’t want him to report me to his mother, the assassin.

Wind skirled as though a dozen Scottish funerals were under way. Concussive blasts rocked the SUV, and I was grateful that it was an extended model with a lower point of gravity, further anchored by the heavy plow.

The snow was so dry and the blow so relentlessly scolding that nothing stuck to the windshield. I didn’t turn on the wipers.

Scanning the slope ahead, left and right, checking the mirrors, I expected to see one or more of the bone beasts out for a lark in the blizzard. The white torrents foiled vision almost as effectively as a sandstorm in the Mojave, but the stark geometric lines of the creatures, by contrast, ought to draw the eye in this comparatively soft sweep of stormscape.

Except for the SUVs, nothing moved other than what the wind harried. Even a few big trees along the route, pines and firs, were so heavily weighed down by the snow already plastered on them that their boughs barely shivered in deference to the gale.

In the passenger seat, Elvis, having gone blond, had also phased into the work boots, peg-legged jeans, and plaid shirt he had worn in
Kissin’ Cousins
. He played two roles in that one: a dark-haired air-force officer and a yellow-haired hillbilly.

“You don’t see many blond hillbillies in real life,” I said, “especially not with perfect teeth, black eyebrows, and teased hair.”

He pretended to have a buck-toothed overbite and crossed his eyes to try to give the role more of a
Deliverance
edge.

I laughed. “Son, you’ve been going through some changes lately. You were never able to laugh this easily about your bad choices.”

For a moment he seemed to consider what I had said, and then he pointed at me.

“What?”

He grinned and nodded.

“You think I’m funny?”

He nodded again, then shook his head no, as if to say he thought I was funny but that wasn’t what he had meant. He pulled on a serious expression and pointed at me again, then at himself.

If he meant what I thought he did, I was flattered. “The one who taught
me
how to laugh at my foolishness was Stormy.”

He looked at his blond hair in the rearview mirror, shook his head, laughed silently again.

“When you laugh at yourself, you gain perspective. Then you realize that the mistakes you made, as long as they didn’t hurt anyone but yourself—well, you can forgive yourself for those.”

After thinking about that for a moment, he gave me one thumb up as a sign of agreement.

“You know what? Everyone who crosses over to the Other Side, if he didn’t know it before he went, suddenly understands the thousand ways he was a fool in this world. So everyone over there understands everyone over here better than we understand ourselves—and forgives us our foolishness.”

He knew that I meant his beloved mother would greet him with delighted laughter, not with disappointment and certainly not with shame. Tears welled in his eyes.

“Just think about it,” I said.

He bit his lower lip and nodded.

Peripherally, I glimpsed a swift presence in the storm. My heart jumped, and I turned toward the movement, but it was only Boo.

With canine exuberance, he appeared almost to skate up the hill, glorying in the winter spectacle, neither troubled by nor troubling the hostile landscape, a white dog racing through a white world.

After rounding the back of the church, we drove toward the entrance to the guesthouse, where the brothers would meet us.

Elvis had phased from carefully coiffed hillbilly to physician. He wore a white lab coat, and a stethoscope hung around his neck.

“Hey, that’s right. You were in a movie with nuns. You played a doctor.
Change of Habit.
Mary Tyler Moore was a nun. Not immortal cinema, maybe not up there with the Ben Affleck-Jennifer Lopez oeuvre, but not egregiously silly.”

He put his right hand over his heart and made a patting motion to suggest a rapid beat.

“You loved Mary Tyler Moore?” When he nodded, I said, “Everybody loved Mary Tyler Moore. But you were just friends with her in real life, right?”

He nodded. Just friends. He made the patting motion again. Just friends, but he loved her.

Rodion Romanovich braked to a stop in front of the guesthouse entrance.

As I pulled up slowly behind the Russian, Elvis put the ear tips of the stethoscope in his ears and pressed the diaphragm to my chest, as though listening to my heart. His stare was meaningful and colored with sorrow.

I shifted into park, tramped the emergency brake, and said, “Son, don’t you worry about me. You hear? No matter what happens, I’ll be all right. When my day comes, I’ll be even better, but in the meantime, I’ll be all right. You do what you need to do, and don’t you worry about me.”

He kept the stethoscope to my chest.

“You’ve been a blessing to me in a hard time,” I told him, “and nothing would please me more than if I proved to be a blessing to you.”

He put one hand on the back of my neck and squeezed, the way a brother might express himself when he has no adequate words.

I opened the door and got out of the SUV, and the wind was so cold.