The Famous and the Dead

20



Rovanna holed up in the mountains where he didn’t think the cops would look for him, a little village not far from San Diego called Wynola. Rovanna, meet Wynola, he thought. He got a weekly rate on a motel cabin because it was off-season and cold. The owner was in no way curious about him and she accepted his cash and his story of stolen ID. He signed in as Donnie Archibald. That first night he saw the eleven o’clock news story with the Reverend Steve Bagley. Rovanna saw now that it was careless to use his real name inside the church.

His cabin was small and mostly clean. He took in his suitcase, prepacked before the Neighborhood Congregational visit just in case of trouble. He waited until nightfall to bring in the radios, six of them, various shapes and sizes—two powered by nine-volt batteries, three by AC, and the other a hand-crank unit meant for emergencies. All of which he found amusing because they didn’t need external power to be heard.

Now he sat in the darkness with the radios deployed around him and the Love 32 loaded with a full magazine and hidden under a bed pillow. His motel was built up close to the busy road, and there must be some kind of biker rally, he thought, because the Harleys growled and grumbled and roared at all hours, singles and pairs and big convoys of them twenty and thirty at a time. So the voices coming from the radios picked their moments to be heard. They were all soft, reasoning voices, two men and four women today, the opposite of yesterday. Though he only understood the English, the radios spoke several other languages that Rovanna recognized, and others not necessarily of this planet.

Later he walked to the pizza place and sat in the back, spiking his soft drink with vodka from a water bottle he carried in a cloth market bag along with the Love 32. The pizza was excellent. A woman dining alone gave him a hard look as she walked out. She was older than Rovanna but not old, and she wore a heavy black knee-length sweater and black gloves and leggings. Her hair was auburn, touched with gray. Avoiding her eyes, he noted her boots, old-fashioned lace-ups with low heels, something he imagined Belle Starr might wear. The leather looked ancient and worn of color, and could have been suede or finished, he couldn’t tell, though the modern, lug-pattern soles looked new and squeaked on the floor as she went by.

He watched the TV for a while, then went outside into the surprising cold. As always he wore cargo shorts and slip-on sneakers but he did have his hoodie. He walked down the curving mountain highway, past his motel and a saloon and a beauty salon and a restaurant. The trees were high, jailing the quarter moon, and invisible patches of ice waited along the roadside. A pack of motorcycles snarled by. Rovanna followed a dirt road down into a swale surrounded by trees but open in the middle. He stood still for a while in the close darkness and listened. No voices out here. Not one. What a strange thing. He picked his way through the rocks and skidded where the road was steep and found himself locked in by the trees again, trees so high when he looked up he couldn’t see the tops against the black sky. He heard the distant gurgle of running water. Down the slope he stepped and slid as the rocks clattered beneath his feet and the cloth shopping bag knocked against his leg.

Suddenly he found himself standing directly in a stream. The water was vividly cold and his sneakers were instantly soaked through. The water rippled over the stones, sending up bright sounds—chirps and bell-like ringing, and the clear tinkle of glass. He had avoided bodies of water his entire life because he couldn’t swim but now, hearing the water music, he felt no fear. He heard something behind him but when he turned he saw nothing. He put one foot in front of the other and walked into the current. The stones were smooth and extremely slippery. After a few yards he couldn’t feel his toes. Then his feet. He stopped again to experience the voicelessness around him. The stream warbled and the highway was just a faraway hiss. He thought of the Identical Men and what had happened when they attacked him in the church and he felt that he had done the right thing. Stren’s voice joined the stream and highway, a three-part harmony: There is nothing wrong with you, Lonnie. Sometimes friends are all we have. And voices speak to all of us at different times. Listen to them and do what you think is right . . . use this gift to protect yourself and those around you and to advance the ideals you believe in.

He waded farther upstream. His ankles were aching but not unpleasantly, because Rovanna could separate himself from himself at times, just observe. He heard rocks clatter behind him but when he turned, again there was nothing. Then another a voice broke through but it wasn’t a voice he was expecting. He could see the owl hunched black in the sere branches of a cottonwood, and he could see the flat metallic eyes blink when it adjusted its head to better behold him. “Owl. Don’t say anything more. Too much talk on earth. Plainly.” Rovanna sloshed along until he was almost under the owl, then he stopped and looked up. The animal watched him for a long while. Then without warning its wings spread and it rose from the branch as if pulled by strings and disappeared into the blackness. Rovanna saw the feather spiraling down toward him and he caught it and put it in his bag.

Back at the roadside a car was waiting. It was a newer economy car like Rovanna’s, but red. The passenger door stood open and inside Rovanna saw the woman from the pizza place. Her sweater was buttoned up tight, the cowl almost covering her ears. Her auburn hair had a coppery sheen in the weak interior light. “I’m Joan,” she said, her breath fogging. “Get in.”

Rovanna sat close because the car was small. The defroster was set to roar. Before shutting his door he looked at her face, which was grave and prettier than he had first thought. She did not smile. He glanced at her aged boots encrusted with brown dirt, one on the brake and one on the clutch. The car smelled faintly of cherries. He set his market bag on the floorboard and fastened his restraints.

The little car revved high and jumped onto the asphalt and sped up the mountain toward Julian. “Lonnie, you have no chance if you try to do this alone.”

“Do what alone?”

“Survive. In the glove box there’s a book, and your meds from the El Cajon house. Take them out. Put the pills in your pocket and the book on your lap.”

Joan turned on the interior light, and Rovanna found the small leather-bound Bible and his Tramadol and Zoloft and did as she said. He saw the cherry-shaped cardboard air freshener on top of some maps. He looked at the backseats and saw the neatly rolled sleeping bag resting on a bed pillow, a laptop computer, two milk crates overflowing with electronic pads and pods and gadgets and cords and chargers.

She turned off the light. “First, you must take your medications. They work for you. Over time you can teach yourself to live without them. But for now you must take them or your mind will betray you into foolish actions.”

“I left them behind in El Cajon on purpose.”

“That was bad decision-making, Lonnie. Second, do not talk to Stren again. If he shows up, hit him with that Bible. Literally pound him with it. It will repel and sicken him. The Torah and Koran can be used also. Electronic editions are not effective. But, the most important thing you can do is to not stalk Representative Freeman at the Alternative Book Fair in San Diego.”

At the word Freeman, Rovanna flinched inwardly. “How do you know about—”

“I don’t have the time to explain myself to you in a way that you’re ready to understand. But I know you. Believe me, I know you. It really was nice back there on the little stream, wasn’t it? When you stood in that cold water and listened and there were no voices. For a short time, at least.”

“I haven’t experienced that in years—no voices for minutes on end.”

Joan wound out the little four-banger on an uphill run. Rovanna watched the pines sweep past. She came up fast on a couple of belching Harleys, downshifted, and gunned the little car into the oncoming lane, passing them on a blind rise, then veering back into place ahead of them.

“I got a blue Focus,” he said.

“These new economy cars are really something,” said Joan. “The mileage and power and comfort. I put between eighty and one hundred twenty thousand miles a year on cars. This is like my third or fourth one.”

“What do you do for a living?”

“Sales. Look, Rovanna, I can’t take that gun away from you. You know, the machine pistol in the shopping bag at your feet right now. I’m not authorized to take it. But I can tell you this: You are a troubled man now being manipulated by a devil, and the final cost to you will not be the pain you inflict, but the pain that you will receive. It will be utterly unbearable and you will not survive it. Take your meds, read that Bible, and keep it with you always. Most importantly, stay away from Scott Freeman.”

Again Rovanna flinched. It was a physical reaction to the word and the man it identified.

“Do not attend the book fair,” Joan continued. “I implore you to leave that gun with me tonight. Just leave it where it is when you exit my car. If you are not strong enough to do that, then do not attend the book fair for any reason.”

“I’m not going to let some stranger take away my last gun.”

“I didn’t think so.”

With this Joan braked and downshifted, then threw the little coupe into a tire-screeching U-turn that ran them onto the dirt shoulder, then back to the pavement. When they passed the bikers coming up the mountain, Joan honked her horn on the way by. She looked into the rearview and smiled as if she’d really shown them.

She pulled into the motel lot and drove to his cabin. Rovanna looked out where the headlights hit his front door. “Would you like to come in?”

“No, thank you.”

“I want to thank you for helping me.”

“I don’t feel like I’ve done enough.”

“I never feel like I’ve done enough.”

“Bible. Meds. No Stren. No book fair. Pray, Lonnie, pray with all your heart. Start simple, with these seven words: I thank and praise God. Help us. That’s all you need to say.”

“Can I kiss you?”

“Open your door.”

Rovanna unslung his harness and opened his door, then turned to kiss her only to find the sole of her lace-up boot planted in the middle of his chest. She pushed him out of the car so hard he flew halfway to the cabin before hitting the ground butt-first. He felt the strength of five men in her. He crabbed away, momentarily belly up and on all fours, then struggled upright, pissed off. He felt his anger and shame flare and his face flush. He marched forward and braced himself with one hand on the door frame in case she tried anything else and, without taking his eyes off her, he snatched his shopping bag from the floor mat.

“God will bless you if you let him, Lonnie Rovanna. He has spoken to you through me.”

He slammed the car door and didn’t look back. But he did peek out the cabin door half an hour later, just to see if there were tire tracks in the packed dirt where Joan had let him off. Hard to say. So he stepped onto the landing and looked down in the dim porch light and saw what could very well be the neat narrow tracks of an economy car. And he saw a two-orbed impression right where he remembered landing, hard, at least ten feet away from the car tracks. He thought of her astonishing strength and the smell of cherries. An incredible woman. She had known exactly what he was thinking while he stood in the freezing little creek. Still, he knew that he was not sane and that sometimes he saw things that weren’t really there. Then, almost embarrassedly, he turned square to the porch light and looked down at his sweatshirt. There it was, plain to see, the proof he wanted—the dirty outline of her boot on his chest.