The Everborn Page 9
And she never thought she would end up here, in a two-bit dive of a bar, as a result of a joint effort between her and her famous UFO-freak husband. It made her miss the days when the only real joint effort worth enjoying was when she and a few close college friends would pass around joints and get high off grass and pure speculation. Just because a cloud resembled Steve Reeves to her and whoever tripped out with her lying across a dandelion patch in the good ol’ days a decade ago, didn’t mean she wanted to enlist at NASA so she could one day space-shuttle up to see if she could fuck the damn thing.
Yet here she was, fucking the damn thing right now.
Waiting to see if it would fuck her right back.
She hoped it didn’t.
Partly because she was afraid.
Partly because she was afraid it was fucking her back already, all along.
It never used to be this way; she never thought it would be this way, always thought differently, all along, and already things seemed to have changed and not only so...things suddenly seemed to have been changing for a long, long time.
All along.
Private Investigator. When all she ever wanted to be was to be creative. To paint. To mold pictures. Not to mold pieces of pictures into real—life scenarios of criminal injustices and mysteries for a fee. And despite each and every effort on her part to revive and nurture her personal passions, it was beginning to seem that most of her time had been spent in pursuit of other people’s passions, other people’s obsessions and desperations, with little or no time for her to privately investigate herself.
Around about a decade ago, Melony Lambert’s works of art could have been found displayed on consignment within several privately-owned art gallery chains located throughout Southern and coastal California. And she had not yet had her fill of twenty-something frolic and friction.
Until the friction came when both of her younger brothers went cruising into a broadside collision between their Chevy Nova and an RTD bus on a drunken en route to nowhere smack dab in the center of the Orange and Hollywood Boulevard intersection, in front of tourists, before Mann’s Chinese, splashed and splattered glass and stifled lifelessness on the third page of the Los Angeles Times.
And Melony became an only child from there on out, a free-spirited being with a soul stunned and stunted from a loss she could never prepare for. Her inexperience with a grief of this magnitude left her vulnerable to the clueless black uncertainty of chance and change, the very same uncertainty which finds and seizes us all as its flailing playthings, spinning our blindfolded intentions like tops and then stopping us, leaving us naked and grasping a pinned tail for the donkey’s ass life’s pointed us towards.
At first, all of a sudden, a donkey’s ass was what life seemed to be taking her for. Almost directly after her brothers’ deaths, Melony’s believably faithful boyfriend of two strong years weakened under the pressure of her newfound stress, about-facing the couple on a Valentine’s Day emotional ka-boom when he wouldn’t give in and she wouldn’t put out. Fleshing the matter out, her insistence on canceling his expensively reserved plans for a calm, quiet evening home crowned Melony as Queen of the Stubborn “I’m Spending The Rest of My Life Feeling Sorry For Myself-ers.” Just when Melony had thought she’d won the understanding support of her lover, two bottles of red rosé and straight liqueur became enough to convince his frustrations that a decent lay would at least settle his Valentine’s score.
Relationships which end up looking like that were usually enough to fracture anyone’s abilities to stir up trust in the dustbowl of needing someone, wanting, finding someone. Keeping someone. The whole of Melony’s life, so it was lived, was done so with little depravity and an abundance of openness and acceptance. Then, all at once, as it was with her lover and her relationship with him, every ounce of bliss and meaning and giving collapsed like a straw house under a wolf’s breath.
And all which had come so easily for so long became to her a lie.
The passing of the week of Valentine’s Day was climaxed with the joint funeral of Melony’s two brothers and the high school buddy who shared their fate.
And it was at that funeral where Melony met a man.
Who, by coincidence, albeit far more mercifully so, was an only child, too.
Officially, there within and about the small Long Beach cathedral, Melony Lambert met Maxwell Polito for the first time. Since then, they came to prefer the less detailed story of having met one another on a March day of that year, their match made by Melony’s younger brothers, both of which attended the same university and the same Ancient History class taught by Max, one a student of Max’s the previous semester and the other a student from last Spring. The elder brother had become a favorite of Maxwell’s, and this semester had enrolled afresh into Max’s Human Psyche and Behavior, simply due to Max conveniently being the teacher in a minor curriculum course.
It was the brother’s deaths that brought Max to the funeral, that brought Max to meet Melony, that led Max to eventually exchange sympathies and then phone numbers,, that finally coaxed Max to phone Melony for a coffee date on that often-reminisced March day.
And it was from then, when Melony began to learn that though life may at times seem like a lie, what really matters is not to live it like one, but to live it in truth right the hell back.
Like she had been doing before, all along.
And like she learned to do all over again.
If only she’d left it that way, instead of signing up for a shuttle mission to the clouds for a sky-high straddle with a truth that’d most likely prefer her to lie.
Down.
Below it.
And simply watch and wonder.
And perhaps paint.
***
Melony Polito had to remind herself of the reasons for her arrival at a pit-stop corner bar known insipidly as The Crow Job. The black painted wood cut-out of a sickly, red neon-laced crow intermittently tipped a yellow neon straw hat beside the heralding rooftop Crow Job sign, bringing to Melony’s mind the flock of crows in Disney’s Dumbo singing a twisted variation of seeing an elephant die in there, rather than fly. And by the look of things, more than that.
And the handful of rent-a-pussies dispersed amongst the overflow of parking lot slum mobiles appeared like extras in a John Waters movie lost in the used car lot of a third-world country. But trailing along the rickety wooden railway leading from the outer sidewalk and encasing the double front entrance doors opposite the lively Friday night motor traffic of Stewart Avenue stood a spirited and sizeable line of above-average bar patrons. Above-average, much like Melony herself visiting this dive, or at least above-average looking.
And just like Melony, most likely, a good many of these anxious party-mongers would not dare to risk their necks and wallets around such a place on any night, if not for the wow and the newsworthy spectacle of one of modern day’s most celebrated novelists jammin’ with his own rock n’ roll band at a premiere gig. What hit the public even more was how Ralston Cooper negotiated temporary ownership of the bar just to ensure his own total control over the entire venture.
And contrary to press jargon, this writer’s venture was in Mr. Cooper’s eyes anything but experimental.
This band was going to fly.
And yes, even fly like the Disney crows’ Dumbo.
But Melony was here for more than this. Sure, she had read more than a Cooper book or two. Even still, her interest in Ralston Cooper went to anything truly but his frighteningly entertaining works. Frankly, she was more into King, like the other remaining half of the world.
Here, at The Crow Job, Melony Polito was a private investigator doing her job, not for anyone else this time but for the ambitious investigative efforts of herself and her husband, for blowing the lid wide open on a case shrouded in secrecy and years of pursuit.
Here, at The Crow Job.
Melony hoped she hadn’t gone nuts. She continued towards the entrance, towards the two door attendants, one big
and chunky, one big and tall, and they looked like professional wrestling equivalents of Abbott & Costello keeping alert stances at the head of the line. They checked the opened flaps of wallets drooping like leather and velcro tongues before them and beneath the scrutiny of each of their flashlight beams, each of them nodding, allowing a few to enter, halting the next few with outstretched hands, waiting for the next unconcerned bar regular to escape to a less distressing waterhole, then checking the I.D.’s of the next in the herd.
Melony stifled any exhibition of nervousness and lifted her purse from her side. Still approaching the entrance, she unsnapped the purse and withdrew a glossy I.D. badge almost instantly, confidently prepared for the impending confrontation she was stepping into. Behind her, the sonorous blasts and pulses of a familiar car alarm rang suddenly and disturbingly from the street. If that’s my car, she flashed a thought, and then....
“Excuse me, lady,” Costello stopped her.
“Press,” Melony declared, her badge as her shield to the duo’s dual flashlight glare.
“Diverse Arcanum Newsletter, huh?” Costello minutely examined the pass. “Polito Press.”
“You from a newspaper, lady?” Abbott spoke up.
“I’m from the news, all right....”
“Okay okay lady, I got a lot goin’ on here. Press is to the right of the stage. We have a special place for ‘em. Otherwise, by now, you’ll find yourself in standing room only.”
With that hassle-free entrance, Melony found herself the next second immersed within The Crow Job’s night world. Inside, it was difficult not to exhibit nervousness for one usually as carefully self-guarded as her. It had been quite a season since she’d found herself within an environment so loose and so...so free. It was almost like being single again, particularly so without Max’s presence beside her as in countless stuffy business parties. Here, it was less difficult to stifle nervousness once one took the chance to unwind. And God, did Melony need unwinding.
She had to show her press pass once more, a legitimate one as she and Max indeed published their own Diverse Arcanum Newsletter to worldwide UFO enthusiasts, and the cashier at a wooden cubbyhole counter motioned her on past a clinkety turnstile.
Melony clasped her purse shut and refit its strap over her shoulder. At first, she could move no further than the dawdling Cooper fans before her, the heads of each turning about and eyes roaming, scanning for unoccupied seats and tables without realizing they’d do better conducting their search while moving themselves onward. Some were more enthusiastic than others, Cooper books both hardcover and soft clasped within hands sweaty for celebrity signature. Some bopped their heads and bobbed their bodies to the rhythmic pulsations of rock ballads and top forty riffs of present and yesteryear jukebox jamming. Others crowded about the stage front, beckoning and conversing with the hired hands busying to double-check amps and instruments for the impending spectacle. A few bouncers dispersed periodically to clear the stage front until one of them thought it best to position himself there until the show began. An event clearly unorganized, Melony noted.
She now was allowed room enough to approach a handful of carpeted downward steps until an embracing, necking couple barred her from completing her descent, pitting her momentarily against a polished brass handrail. Turning into it, she found herself face to face with her own full-length image in a wall mirror stretched across the expanse of the sloping side wall.
She had admittedly dressed for the club scene as though she were single, purposely undertaking the outing alone for a low profile’s sake despite the risk of danger. And alone as she was, her chances of intimate chats with those questionably human were undoubtedly at their greatest.
Her Central American heritage graced her with skin naturally dark, yet unobvious enough to be mistaken by some for a tan. Grapevine swirls of black held at bay the lighter and brighter splash of sunset yellow/orange and peach of a summer pullover dress, which clung limply from shoulder strap strings and folded scantily outward above medium breasts which appeared braless. The outfit displayed her figure nearly to the point of flaunting it, yet it was a figure to be flaunted, all the way down to the black nylons stretching downward and into low-heeled shoes. Shoes, which supported the stance of a mid-thirties black-haired professional who carried herself well but scarcely found time enough to be aware of her own beauty.
And sadly, Max scarcely reminded her.
Rarely, anymore.
These days.
Melony Polito was stunned with a self-admiration such as this and so suddenly, and here, in such a public place. Perhaps a big piece of the nervousness pie which plagued and grappled with her will to stifle it found its blame within her own timid self-consciousness in the very way she presented herself tonight.
Or perhaps it was something more, something she was growing all the more recently dissatisfied with, a yearning, a void to be filled, a piece of her soul that once was but now lay flooded with marital and occupational duty, and the desire to find something more.
Something out there.
Something perhaps as close as somewhere in this crowd.
Moving right along and released from the stall of smoochers, Melony made her way onto the Crow Job’s main floor. People with drinks pushed past her, table chairs dodged her path as their occupants rose up or sat down or arched forwards or tipped backwards on rear chair legs. She rounded a lengthy stool-studded bar and overcame the darting trays of barhop traffic, her attentions struggling between the human obstacle course about her, the urgency of her mission to locate the faces of those she’d come for, and to find her own table and sit down.
Press is to the right of the stage....
The stage was opposite the bar. She followed the capillary flow of one-at-a-time commuters until she was in the area to the stage’s confined right, where the round wooden club tables narrowed into two rows back to back. In the center of the back row, she found her empty table. A grey card propped against the bubbly red glass of a candleholder displayed her name above DIVERSE ARCANUM NEWSLETTER, MALIBU, CA. The table was small, surrounded by two lonely chairs of padded wood. She at last sat down and slid her purse onto the tabletop, then relocated her purse to her lap upon seeing how the table space doubled without it.
Every table around her was chocked-full with assumed press agents, or perhaps music industry moguls, each one in every aspect looking no more or less important or enthusiastic or even reckless than anyone else she observed. A short distance away, two barhops separated, one in Melony’s direction. As much as she needed a drink by then, she couldn’t forsake the need to focus on faces. To search for secret souls.
Maxwell had been on a personal assignment in a village on the southwestern border of Brazil two mornings ago when his wife/secretary had contacted him with the news. He was busily researching a case where half the village’s population of children vanished overnight with barely a trace, to emerge twelve days later from the forest unharmed but for surgical punctures on their ankles and behind their left ears.
Children.
Vanishing....
Much like the six-year-old black child whose body was found freshly mutilated last weekend in the alley between The Crow Job and the neighboring apartment complex, the news of which reached Melony through close law enforcement peers who kept in touch with issues of the insolvably unspoken. It was news enough to contact Max, for Max to wash his hands quickly of third-world close encounters struts and to hurry his way back to Southern Cal, for Mel herself to jot down orders and to prepare and plan pinpoint spur-of-the moment itineraries and urgent strategies.
No ordinary homicide could cause such a secretive stir as to involve the likes of Max and Mel, and although Melony herself had made ordinary investigations including homicide her occupational fortè, Maxwell’s unwilling involvement in this particular matter had become the backbone in his search for the unknown years ago, when it all started.
For the body of young Nigel had been declared missing and assumed dead sinc
e his own encounter with the unknown within the bowels of a condemned building in 1968. Maxwell had been there. And so had someone else. And something else.
That someone and something were alive to this day, and had left a trail by which Max himself and later Melony followed, a history of incident and mishap which led to Nigel’s discovery, the discovery of a boy still six years old after three decades, murdered as he was thought to have been, but found as though he’d been murdered that very same day.
And after three decades, three of the beings which came to be involved were now together, whether or not either one knew it, and were now together here. At a two-bit dive called The Crow Job.
And Melony Polito was right there with them.
Not really knowing what she was getting herself into, or how high into the clouds she had flown.
9.
Andrew Erlandson at the Crow Job
For heaven’s sake and all the saints, meet someone....
...tonight may very well be a night of nights....
Andrew Erlandson had ceased wondering what Bari had meant by the time he’d completed his journey to the end of the block and made his way past the flock of Cooper fans and followers and through the front entrance of The Crow Job. He ceased wondering because wondering wouldn’t do him any good and he knew it, when it came to Bari matters. But he also ceased wondering because Bari tended to be right with those trivial prophesies of hers, right on the nail, and he knew that, too.
He’d rather not deal with that right now.
Besides, he had enough to wonder about with the Ralston show and all; if Ralston’s band sucked, Andrew would never hear the end of it, simply because (like it or not) he and the mega-ego mock horror writer were so damn close. There was another matter, too, regarding the completion of Andrew’s latest ghostwritten novel for Ralston....