LITMIR.BIZ

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much time spreading God’s word as she promised Him that she would. She believed that God expected to be conned more often than not and that He would be a good sport about it.

      You can con God and get away with it, Granny said, if you do so with charm and wit. If you live your life with imagination and verve, God will play along just to see what outrageously entertaining thing you’ll do next.

      He’ll also cut you some slack if you’re astonishingly stupid in an amusing fashion. Granny claimed that this explains why uncountable millions of breathtakingly stupid people get along just fine in life.

      Of course, in the process, you must never do harm to others in any serious way, or you’ll cease to amuse Him. Then payment comes due for the promises you didn’t keep.

      In spite of drinking lumberjacks under the table, regularly winning at poker with stone-hearted psychopaths who didn’t like to lose, driving fast cars with utter contempt for the laws of physics (but never while intoxicated), and eating a diet rich in pork fat, Granny Sugars died peacefully in her sleep at the age of seventy-two. They found her with a nearly empty snifter of brandy on the nightstand, a book by her favorite novelist turned to the last page, and a smile on her face.

      Judging by all available evidence, Granny and God understood each other pretty well.

      Pleased to be alive that Tuesday morning, on the dark side of the dawn, I switched on my nightstand lamp and surveyed the chamber that served as my bedroom, living room, kitchen, and dining room. I never get out of bed until I know who, if anyone, is waiting for me.

      If visitors either benign or malevolent had spent part of the night watching me sleep, they had not lingered for a breakfast chat. Sometimes simply getting from bed to bathroom can take the charm out of a new day.

      Only Elvis was there, wearing the lei of orchids, smiling, and pointing one finger at me as if it were a cocked gun.

      Although I enjoy living above this particular two-car garage, and though I find my quarters cozy, Architectural Digest will not be seeking an exclusive photo layout. If one of their glamour scouts saw my place, he’d probably note, with disdain, that the second word in the magazine’s name is not, after all, Indigestion.

      The life-size cardboard figure of Elvis, part of a theater-lobby display promoting Blue Hawaii, was where I’d left it. Occasionally, it moves—or is moved—during the night.

      I showered with peach-scented soap and peach shampoo, which were given to me by Stormy Llewellyn. Her real first name is Bronwen, but she thinks that makes her sound like an elf.

      My real name actually is Odd.

      According to my mother, this is an uncorrected birth-certificate error. Sometimes she says they intended to name me Todd. Other times she says it was Dobb, after a Czechoslovakian uncle.

      My father insists that they always intended to name me Odd, although he won’t tell me why. He notes that I don’t have a Czechoslovakian uncle.

      My mother vigorously asserts the existence of the uncle, though she refuses to explain why I’ve never met either him or her sister, Cymry, to whom he is supposedly married.

      Although my father acknowledges the existence of Cymry, he is adamant that she has never married. He says that she is a freak, but what he means by this I don’t know, for he will say no more.

      My mother becomes infuriated at the suggestion that her sister is any kind of freak. She calls Cymry a gift from God but otherwise remains uncommunicative on the subject.

      I find it easier to live with the name Odd than to contest it. By the time I was old enough to realize that it was an unusual name, I had grown comfortable with it.

      Stormy Llewellyn and I are more than friends. We believe that we are soul mates.

      For one thing, we have a card from a carnival fortune-telling machine that says we’re destined to be together forever.

      We also have matching birthmarks.

      Cards and birthmarks aside, I love her intensely. I would throw myself off a high cliff for her if she asked me to jump. I would, of course, need to understand the reasoning behind her request.

      Fortunately for me, Stormy is not the kind of person to ask such a thing lightly. She expects nothing of others that she herself would not do. In treacherous currents, she is kept steady by a moral anchor the size of a ship.

      She once brooded for an entire day about whether to keep fifty cents that she found in the change-return slot of a pay phone. At last she mailed it to the telephone company.

      Returning to the cliff for a moment, I don’t mean to imply that I’m afraid of Death. I’m just not ready to go out on a date with him.

      Smelling like a peach, as Stormy likes me, not afraid of Death, having eaten a blueberry muffin, saying good-bye to Elvis with the words “Taking care of business” in a lousy imitation of his voice, I set off for work at the Pico Mundo Grille.

      Although the dawn had just broken, it had already flash-fried into a hard yellow yolk on the eastern horizon.

      The town of Pico Mundo is in that part of southern California where you can never forget that in spite of all the water imported by the state aqueduct system, the true condition of the territory is desert. In March we bake. In August, which this was, we broil.

      The ocean lay so far to the west that it was no more real to us than the Sea of Tranquility, that vast dark plain on the face of the moon.

      Occasionally, when excavating for a new subdivision of tract homes on the outskirts of town, developers had struck rich veins of seashells in their deeper diggings. Once upon an ancient age, waves lapped these shores.

      If you put one of those shells to your ear, you will not hear the surf breaking but only a dry mournful wind, as if the shell has forgotten its origins.

      At the foot of the exterior steps that led down from my small apartment, in the early sun, Penny Kallisto waited like a shell on a shore. She wore red sneakers, white shorts, and a sleeveless white blouse.

      Ordinarily, Penny had none of that preadolescent despair to which some kids prove so susceptible these days. She was an ebullient twelve-year-old, outgoing and quick to laugh.

      This morning, however, she looked solemn. Her blue eyes darkened as does the sea under the passage of a cloud.

      I glanced toward the house, fifty feet away, where my landlady, Rosalia Sanchez, would be expecting me at any minute to confirm that she had not disappeared during the night. The sight of herself in a mirror was never sufficient to put her fear to rest.

      Without a word, Penny turned away from the stairs. She walked toward the front of the property.

      Like a pair of looms, using sunshine and their own silhouettes, two enormous California live oaks wove veils of gold and midnight-purple, which they flung across the driveway.

      Penny appeared to shimmer and to darkle as she passed through this intricate lace of light and shade. A black mantilla of shadow dimmed the luster of her blond hair, its elaborate pattern changing as she moved.

      Afraid of losing her, I hurried down the last of the steps and followed the girl. Mrs. Sanchez would have to wait, and worry.

      Penny led me past the house, off the driveway, to a birdbath on the front lawn. Around the base of the pedestal that supported the basin, Rosalia Sanchez had arranged a collection of dozens of the seashells, all shapes and sizes, that had been scooped from the hills of Pico Mundo.

      Penny stooped, selected a specimen about the size of an orange, stood once more, and held it out to me.

      The architecture resembled that of a conch. The rough exterior was brown and white, the polished interior shone pearly pink.

      Cupping her right hand as though she still held the shell, Penny brought it to her ear. She cocked her head to listen, thus indicating what she wanted me to do.

      When I put the shell to my ear, I did not

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