The Storm Giants (10 page)

At one point he dreamt of making love to the receptionist
, and Doctor Dauffenbach’s smiling face arose to supplant hers. Everett awoke with a choking gasp, to the thunder of the storm giants’ laughter.

Their
laughter faded as sleep fled, not to return that night. It was the first time he’d heard their voices since he encountered them as a child in Hayward.

The day came for
Everett’s next appointment. Walking up the steps to Dr. D’s office, he was met at the door by the receptionist, who was just locking up. Everett was both excited and frightened to see her without Doctor D around. There would be no more appointments, this cold blonde goddess said. Her husband Doctor Dauffenbach had died the night before.

Even at the time
Everett wondered about the age difference between old Dr. D and this much younger trophy wife of a receptionist, but other facts bubbled up to prevent dwelling upon it. Soon enough came the whispers of suicide, of how Doctor D was found in his den with a gun in his mouth and his brains painted on the wallpaper behind his shattered head. Then came the news that he’d taken the coward’s way out one step ahead of the Israelis, who were closing in on him to discuss certain of his activities during WW2.

D
ead Doctor D’s photo was on the front pages of all the Bay Area papers, and a top news story for every local TV station. There were reports of how Doctor D had been a Nazi. Of how bad a boy he’d been in the Camps, and of the sham life he built for himself in Amerika before the walls toppled in on him.

Whenever h
e saw a photo of Doctor Dauffenbach, Everett’s tongue would probe one or another of the teeth he’d worked on. And years later as an adult, watching ‘Marathon Man’ on TV, Everett wondered what all the excitement was about when Laurence Olivier had his little fun with Dustin Hoffman – Hoffman’s character was a man after all, and Everett had beaten his dentist as a boy.

Of course, a
t the time of that last canceled appointment of course Everett knew none of this. All that he knew was that Doctor D had lost the game, and Everett had outlasted him.

Everett
laughed in the receptionist's porcelain doll face. In memory he seemed to see a frank interest in her eyes that he rebuffed without knowing at the time, never realizing the narrowness of his escape. He never saw her again after that until she ambushed him at Bambi’s death bed. What would have happened if he hadn’t turned from her that day and run away?

For he did run
, down the office steps and along the sidewalk, skipping and capering like a much younger boy. People in passing cars yelled rude comments at his victory dance but he ignored the taunts, allowed feelings full vent and uncaring for once at the risk this exposure of self entailed.

Doctor D had fallen.
Everett was triumphant!

His
heart was a fortress now, seamless and unassailable. Nothing could hurt anymore, nor anyone touch. And in the years to come, Everett would have the old butcher's unintentional gift to rely upon: Pain and fear would forever be something that happened far, far away to someone else.

Chapter 21
: The Orbit of his Infection

After recounting the
(expurgated) tale of Dr. Dauffenbach, Everett mapped the locations of his cached money stashes. Kerri should have paid rapt attention to his very important words. But his mouth had become no more than a moving hole expelling modulated pulses of air.

Brother Rick
and Everett commenced a meaningless exchange wherein they took turns jabbering nonsense at each other. Their words grew closer to understandable as the ice water drained from her head, and everything became as normal as it was likely to get.

Death
, she thought as he placed the sawed off shotgun in her hands. She stared down at the stubby little killer. Death surrounds us on all sides.

J
ust the sound of this Widow’s voice at the door had made Kerri cringe in her bed. It was just as horrible to hear the predatory rapport between her and Everett, like two estranged relatives discussing an inheritance dispute.

“Where
you going, daddy?” Raymond asked. “Can I come? Do I get a gun like Uncle Rick?”

“No
,” Everett answered. “I need you to help your uncle and make sure Mom is safe.”

Raymond
commenced staring at Kerri as if he wouldn’t take his eyes off her until Everett returned.

“It’s going to be all right
, Kerri,” Everett said. “Everything’s going to be better than right.”

He trudged up t
he access road to the highway, with each step getting more into character. Letting despair and defeat infuse his body posture and gait. Kerri barely recognized him from behind. He looked like any other homeless piece of human waste, without resources or future.

He stopped once at a
curve in the road and turned to favor the property with a sweeping gaze. He looked past Kerri at the house and its panorama, then at her and Raymond. His eyes glowed at them like the open door of a furnace.

And then he was gone.

Kerri went inside to her easel, which held the promise of taking her mind away from all this. She took down at the painting she’d been working on, replacing it with a fresh canvas.

“I’m hungry
,” Raymond said. “Where’s daddy going? Will he be back before Santa?”

She stroked his
head and rummaged something for him from the fridge, but her eyes were drawn to her virginal new canvas the whole time.

Rick said
something outside on the porch, attempting comfort or strategic advice. She ignored his words as distractions, and found herself considering surprisingly amoral ways to shut him up.

Was she becoming like
Everett? She couldn’t allow that. How could she be there for him or for Raymond if she fell into the same harshness he lived in?

Still
, the impact of Everett’s furtive inaccessibility weighed heavily on her and Raymond. Everett was some kind of tuning fork, giving off a vibration she and Raymond oriented themselves toward without even knowing. They orbited Everett, and his blankness infected them.

She turned
on the Bose, pretending Everett’s brand of numbness was any kind of shield – for today she’d chosen Spice 1, and the plangent Oaktown chaos of ‘Dirty Bay’ seemed a perfect backdrop.

R
unning her fingers along the coarse weave of the canvas, she considered just what kind of background wash to use. This wouldn’t be one of her abstracts. She’d make this one photorealistic as possible, so nobody could pretend they didn’t understand what she meant.

She
picked up her charcoal and prepared to sketch in fury, letting the shadows leak from her onto the canvas. This would be her most disturbing piece. The collectors down in San Francisco would pay through the nose for it. If she survived to complete it, that is.

Her charcoal
was poised to touch the canvas when she put it down. She walked out the door, sat down next to Raymond on the stoop, and put her arm around his shoulders. They looked up towards the highway where Everett had disappeared.

Part Three:

Chapter 22: An Uncomfortable Ride

As harvest season was
fast approaching, Everett slid into the midst of a pack of trimmers awaiting work south of Garberville. The trimmers all had bonsai clippers dangling from chains around their neck as job applications, and growers would occasionally stop and pick up a carload.

Everett
’s first hitch was easy. A grower from out Whitethorn way, heading north to Eureka so he could spend his illicit cash somewhere larger than a gas station convenience store. After that a retired couple in a Winnebago took pity on Everett’s forlorn appearance and let him deadhead with them across treacherous SR-299, rated as one of the worst stretches of highway in the Nation.

Highway
299 was 150 miles of hilly asphalt. Besides the steep winding curves of the road itself, much of it was one big dead zone. No cell phone reception for most of it, and no services at all for large stretches between Arcata and Redding. There were five or six tiny speed bump towns along the way, many with only a couple dozen residents.

Just before Willow Creek
they had to stop for an hour while a road crew blasted and bulldozed a major rock slide. The piled up traffic waited in line in front of a bored Caltrans worker holding a traffic sign for about $30 an hour.

Tired of repaying the couple
for the ride by pretending normalcy, Everett hopped out to stretch his legs and have a smoke. Strolling down the long line of waiting cars, his mind examined his current predicament and what was waiting for him in Amicus. He finished the coffin nail as he reached the end of the cars, let it drop and stamped it out. He turned back towards where the Winnebago idled in line, bulking among all the smaller autos like a whale among minnows.

As
he reached the Winnebago there was a rumbling dynamite blast up ahead. It sounded like the storm giants saying hello, and his racing mind became enmeshed in whys and wherefores, ways and means.

He
felt eyes. The wife belonging to the RV stood in the open door of the Winnebago, goggling down at him. Everett’s mask had slipped while he was thinking thoughts. He’d just been standing with one foot on the bottom step staring into space, for how long he couldn’t tell.

Laura
, he reminded himself. The female half of the RV couple’s name was Laura. He forced a smile for her, looking as close to human as he could imitate. After a long few seconds she smiled back.

But
Laura didn’t talk to him much for the rest of the ride, nor look at him. Her husband Ron caught her vibes in the telepathy reached by long married couples, and the final leg of 299 was tense.

As it was wildfire season
, ragged banners of smoke scudded toward them over the hills east of Whiskeytown. The sky overhead was a sullen crimson as they started down off the last summit. Hairpins and blind curves descending 1500 feet in eight short miles, the kind of balls out roller coaster decline that makes any big rig trucker’s sphincter pucker. Ron had to slow the bus length Winnebago to as low as 5 MPH on some of the curves.

As they drove back
, forth and down, burnt areas stretched to the foreshortened horizons on both sides of them. The charred ground looked dead like the moon, and blackened toothpick remnants of once living plant life dotted the ashen expanses. The sun was an oblate spheroid suspended in the red sky, obscured by the scarlet smoke concealing it to the point that old Sol looked like a weird alien gas giant in a sci-fi movie, instead of our nearest star.

Everett
gave up his futile effort to allay their fears and sat in the comfort of blankness, hands folded idle in his lap as he stared at the floor. The couple pretended to ignore him after that, but it was obvious they wondered if Everett was going to make them star in their own episode of Unsolved Mysteries.

Cha
pter 23: Loafers & Averted Gazes

T
he Winnebago passed a succession of dairy pastures outside of Amicus proper, all of them crowded with fat brainless milk cows. At the outskirts of town a bluff surmounted by an Indian casino loomed to the left of the highway.

To the right was
an old brick building in front of a low marshy area, with a sign on the roof reading ‘Amicus Cheese Factory – C’mon in and cut some.’ Behind it was more pastureland, sloping down into a soggy flood plain.

Ron and Laura showed
Everett the curb at the town limits. They were visibly relieved when he exited the Winnebago without incident.

It was sunse
t, and the sky darkened as Everett strolled past a one room schoolhouse and a couple dilapidated churches. After a volunteer firefighter’s pavilion the through pass narrowed to a boulevard. The main street was named Broadway. Old fashioned parking spaces slanted to either side. Only a few vehicles scattered down the street.

Amicus had
seen better times. As night fell, a few scattered street lights flickered to life. The burg had the sad look of any deteriorating town communally aware that its best days were behind it, and the future would be a downward spiral of disappointment.

Farm kids tend
to gravitate to the bright lights and hard vices of the big city as soon as they’re of an age to pull up stakes and escape the nonstop labor of life on a homestead. A look at the hangers about confirmed who did the bulk of the farm labor in Amicus these days. Most of the vehicles Everett saw were big trucks with quad rear tires and garish mud flaps with chrome naked women on them. The kind of neo cowboy look favored by transplanted Mexican campesinos.

The
Hispanic owners lounged around their pimped out trucks, proud of the rides their under the table farm work had earned them. These Mexicans were Citizens as bourgeois as any gringo, law abiding worker bees whether they’d been brought across the border by coyotes or not.

Just how many of them were legal? W
hat kind of reaction would go down if he shouted ‘La Migra,’ at the top of his lungs? But Everett was here to be incognito, not to make waves.

There didn’t seem to be enough
businesses in operation to justify a downtown. Half the store fronts were closed. Some with white washed windows, others with sheets of plywood over where the plate glass had been smashed out.

A few places were
still open: a grocery store and a meat market, a bakery and a realty office. On the left side of Broadway was a feed store with a creamery co-operative office next door, intended to market local dairy products to the bottomless maw of the American supermarket system.

On
Everett’s side of Broadway was an art deco theater with marquee and movie posters in Spanish. Next door was a bar, the black hole of its open door emitting plaintive old school mariachi.

The Mexicans huddled by the tavern
entrance, talking amongst themselves in Spanish, watching Everett pass with flat incurious glances. ‘You’re just another huero drifter,’ their dismissive looks seemed to say – no one of consequence.

Everett
did his best to reinforce their assumptions, huddling like any other stumblebum loser walking the earth. He was comforted they bought into his disguise.

On the
next corner a liquor store did booming business. The group of grim men loafing about outside suckled at their brown paper bags more from bored desperation than anything else. The drinkers looked too tired to represent whatever passed for the Life in this burg. Everett locked eyes with any that met his gaze as he walked by, then looked away before his polite acknowledgment of their individual existence could be taken for challenge.

N
one of them attempted to game. None of them flashed gang signs or such. Everett wasn’t here to interact with the likes of them anyways.

The people he was
here to see lived around the corner from the liquor store. He turned onto the next side street, walked far enough away from the store that none of the loafers would think he wanted to strike up a conversation, and leaned against the wall with hands in pockets.

The target
destination was on the dead end of the street, past where the sidewalk ended. The photos hadn’t done justice to the three-story Victorian behind the spike topped fence, which waded knee deep through its surrounding overgrowth.

Most of t
he house’s lights were on. The exterior was draped in multi colored Christmas lights in acknowledgement of the holiday season. Illumination spilled from the windows. The Christmas display lit up a big detached garage, once the old coach house from the days when this Victorian was home to some robber baron and his entourage of servants. Beyond were also several other sheds and out buildings of varying size.

Even with the in
terior lights combating the darkness he couldn’t see that much, partly because of distance, partly because of the trees and unkempt shrubbery obscuring the field of view. If this were Kerri’s house, Everett could have lost himself for weeks landscaping and manicuring that yard.

B
ut it wasn’t hers, of course. Phil lived here, the man that the Widow had sent Everett to recover her gold from and – incidentally – kill.

A
fter studying the dossier, it was fifty-fifty whether Phil would hide the Widow’s gold far away from himself. Maybe he’d keep it close enough to keep tabs and gloat over it like a fairy tale miser. Everett tended toward the latter view. The house and the property were so chock full of potential hiding places, you’d need a wrecking ball and a backhoe to do a search any justice.

Why didn’t the Widow
just torture the location of the gold out of this Phil? It was doubtful that her hesitance was due to moral compunctions.

Why
had she pegged Everett for this, and not just used her own people? Why didn’t she just kick in the door and do a smash and grab?

Everett
shoulder bumped erect away from the wall. The drinkers were still stationed at the liquor store when he crossed the street kitty corner in front of them.

“Hey
,” one of the liquor store posse said, in an aggressive voice slurred by drinkage. He mistook Everett’s avoidance path for timidity.

Everett
stopped in the middle of the street and rotated to face them. The one who’d called out was in front of the others, taking dog pack lead over the curs he stood with. His buddies all had their stubby little antennae out, waiting to see which way things were going to swing and hoping for a show.

Everett
looked in the guy’s eyes for a bit. The guy got very interested in his bottle, and made a big production of swilling at it as he turned and stared in fascination toward the other side of Broadway. Everett glanced over that way, but all he saw was a vacant lot – as good a parking spot for an averted gaze as any he supposed.