Hooker sat at the counter of the diner. He ignored the harsh light knifing off the Formica and turned the page. The 1961 Marmon shop manual was turning out to be a better purchase than just the ten cents he had fished out of his jean pocket last summer. The man had wanted a quarter, but after seeing the yellow and blue 1959 Marmon rumbling at the curb, he must have decided Hooker was the one person who might put the book to good use.
With the giant engine for his truck, now nothing more than so much scrap metal, he needed to know more about any new engine he might find. Willie had run an ad in Hemming’s Motor News, but still no phone calls. But then, the most recent edition Hooker had glanced through was dated in the latter part of 1968. Even with all the downtime he was getting, he was far behind in his reading. He also knew many of the other motorheads were just as up to date in their reading as he was.
The thin hand placed an open magazine on top of the manual. Hooker looked up at the soft but worn face of the closest thing he had going as a girlfriend. “I’ve told you before—I don’t read Cosmo.” He smiled warmly as he leaned back to look at her better.
The twenty-six years had worn hard on her, but she carried it more with pride than as yoke. Most men would walk past her on the street, but to Hooker, the quirky smile, the ropey body, and thin arms spoke more about inner strength than just another skinny girl. Her hand waved back a piece of flyaway hair at her ear.
“It’s Vogue, not Cosmo.”
“Same girly magazine.”
“It’s not about the magazine. I was thinking about cutting my hair like that.”
The page had turned over, and the image was of some guy with a girl hiding behind his shoulder. Hooker laughed. “It would make you look more manly than your brother.”
She looked down at the tight hair cut on the guy. She flipped the page, and it got worse with an Afro standing out past the model’s shoulders.
Hooker looked at her with pursed lips, studying her face. “Yeah, that might work…”
She turned a few pages and found a model walking on what Hooker guessed to be a sidewalk in New York City. The dress and coat were hound’s tooth wool, and the hair was cut scooped just below her neck, but not quite onto her shoulders. She planted her finger on the picture and glared at Hooker.
He thought about how short it was cut and how thin her neck was. He didn’t have the heart to tell her the two didn’t match. “I hate short hair. I like the way you have always had it. It doesn’t get in the way. It makes a nice-looking ponytail, and I think it makes your... um... rear end look great.”
“Men.” She swiped the magazine back up and steamed off.
But Hooker watched, and he noted the playful sway of her hips was still there. She had liked that he liked her just the way she was.
Hoping to salvage some honor and tranquility, he offered. “I can bring Willie back in, and you can ask for his opinion.”
Her head appeared over the waitress back station. She glared at him. “I might as well go out and ask your mother.”
Hooker leaned back and thought. Maybe it was about time she “meets the parents.”
“That’s a great idea. How about Sunday dinner out at the house? I’ll pick you up about four.” He knew it was her one day off.
She sidestepped out from the large cabinet. “Are you serious?”
“Sure. You might as well meet the folks. If you want to stay over, you can sleep in your brother’s room.”
She grabbed the pot of coffee and slowly walked down the aisle toward Hooker as she thought. Her forehead worked into a frown. “Johnny has a bedroom out there?” Her one eyebrow arched up as she cocked her head and watched Hooker with the other eye.
“Where did you think he slept for the week... out under the truck? Stella fixed up the spare room the third night.”
She filled his coffee cup and set the carafe on the counter. “But you said it was his room like he was living there.”
Hooker realized he had let slip something that was going to be a slippery slope toward ruining a great surprise. “Well, he’s not dead. He won’t be in the hospital much longer. He will need a place to stay where he can be looked after. And he still owes me nine more days of slavery.”
She slumped into her right hip. Her eyes wandered all over Hooker’s face, looking for even a slight hint of joking. “But why would she do that?”
Hooker couldn’t explain these things. The term family was an alien idea for him, as well as to Candy and her brother. A hard life and being taken advantage of had been the norm to Hooker and to them. To meet someone like Uncle Willie or Stella and Manny was too far out of the realm of possibility to even relate to, or for Hooker to try to explain.
“You’ll have to ask her and make up your own mind about it on Sunday.”
She thought quietly and then walked off to pour coffee for the other two people in the restaurant. Hooker went back to reading about how the power range could be increased by polishing the oil channels in a large diesel engine.
“Okay.” She stood in front of him.
Hooker leaned back with a thin warm smile. His hazel-green eyes danced. “Good.”
“What should I wear?”
He thought of several things at once. The smile probably telegraphed his thoughts. She slumped on to her right hip and closed one eye, giving him a warning look.
“Probably clothes would be a good start.” He smiled with a toothy leer. “But a yellow dress would look good. It would look like you were trying to impress them.” He smiled and then rolled his eyes. “But if you want to get on Stella’s good side, wear some jeans, and be ready to go rooting about in the yard and storage room. She’s setting up the outside canning kitchen.”
Candy frowned. “I thought people canned in their kitchen in the house.”
“Not when you have a dozen people peeling, washing, boiling, cooking, prepping, and bottling a few tons of produce and fruit.”
“Tons?”
“They will put up well over five thousand gallons of food between now and October.”
“In one kitchen? Five thou... What does that even look like?”
“Well, the storage area at the house is six hundred square feet, and the racks go eight feet with room on top for more boxes. Then there is the barn over at the Pederson place, as well as the basement at the church on third....”
“What is all the food for? An army?”
He reached over and patted her hand. “Stella will fill you in on Sunday. And if she likes you, then she will try to shanghai you into forced labor for the rest of the fall.”
She closed her eyes as she raised her eyebrows until they popped her eyes open. “Okay—Sunday.” She walked off to make more coffee.
She peeked back around the cabinet. “Five thousand?”
“Gallons.” Hooker did the math for her. “Twenty-thousand quart-jars.”
The whistle sounded like an incoming bomb. Hooker smiled. His reaction the first year had been much the same. It was a lot of food donated to support any family of a law enforcement worker who was in need. Usually, there was a fireman or two thrown into the mix along the way.
Hooker also knew there would be stacks of pallets of commercially canned goods donated from the farmers and canned gratis by the cannery. Those were held in a commercial warehouse and delivered as needed. Usually, a pallet at a time, or sometimes a truckload spread between the many pantries. It was a lot to grasp the first time around.
He would let Stella describe the non-stop around the clock trucks, and the people and the cooking running from first harvest until almost Halloween. Her telling was a lot more fun. She was a special force of nature, and this was her thing.
Hooker put his finger on the paragraph he was reading. He sensed a body standing in front of him. He looked up and smiled with raised eyebrows.
“I said, I see your uncle loaned you his car. Where are you going tonight... or was it just to come up and see me?” Her voice was playful, but her face showed she really wanted it to be about her.
Hooker leaned back and smiled; the manual forgotten. “All of these months, if I wanted to come up to see you, someone had to schlep me here. Then they would be hanging around.”
“And now the cast is off, so you can drive.”
“Mae still doesn’t have an engine. It’s really driving me nuts. Willie has the transfer case torn apart and is seeing if we can’t somehow make it all work without the double-clutching.” He realized he had just lost her. “It’s the way I have to shift with two levers. He wants to make it faster. I keep telling him I don’t care, but Willie is Willie, and we’re both frustrated we don’t have an engine.”
“Can’t you just go buy one?”
“They stopped making them in the early sixties. So anything we can get will be out of a junkyard somewhere.”
“So you came up to see me and study.”
“Sort of.” He knew eventually, she would know about The Mouse. “I also have to go talk to my sister in a couple of hours.”
“You have a sister?” She leaned in. “And I was going to hear about this… when?”
“Now.” He shied back, hopefully out of hitting range. Her look was pure hard ice.
“Look, it’s complicated.” He thought about how to explain his sister. “You know Peter.” He jammed his thumb at the door and parking lot.
She nodded slowly.
Hooker pointed toward the booth in the back room. “And you know Jerry.”
She nodded.
“Jerry is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich—a little nuts and sweet. The distance from him to Peter is the lunch special with a slice of pie thrown in. To get to my sister, you would have to go to the full sixteen-course Roman orgy, and then some. She is so far out there she scares Peter. Jerry couldn’t even start to understand.”
“And so I wouldn’t have a chance?”
“Candy, of almost everyone I know, you would have the most chance at understanding my sister. Trust me, if there was any way you two could meet, you would.” He left out where they shared a past of foster homes which should have been havens of safety but were hells of rape and torture. “If I could rescue my sister from her life, and bring her into ours, you two would probably find you have a lot more in common than just me.”
She didn’t know where to take her mixed feelings. She looked toward the back of the diner at the other damaged goods frequenting the only all-night haven. It came with a waitress who understood the special and delicate needs of the denizens shuffling through the door. And then, there was the one outside, who she gave a package to every morning as she left before the sun rose.
Hooker watched her in her own special purgatory. He returned to his book, and she wandered off to clean something she had cleaned an hour before. It was her shift. Clean the clean, and mother the motherless, tend to her brood, and deal with the few drunks who could make it to Winchester Boulevard.
Hooker looked down the aisle into the back dining-room. She stood talking to Jerry. The man had worked the docks of Alameda Air Station. He had been an up and coming chief petty officer who would have made master chief.
An airplane crash had ended all of it. A small shard of shrapnel the size of a broom handle had rearranged a section of his brain. Jerry had looked up at the sound of the crash. The shard had hit him head-on and passed through the frontal lobe and all the way down one side.
The man now lived with a person he thought was his daughter. His home address and a contact phone number were always pinned to his shirt. He lived by routines you could set your watch by. Every night he would spend four hours and forty-eight minutes at the diner.
He always had coffee and white toast burned more charcoal black than white. He used half a jar of sugar, six little containers of the mixed berry jam, and three napkins. He left two quarters, one dime, three nickels, and a penny. The four-cent tip was something Candy always cherished.
Hooker always wondered what he would do if the prices went up again.
Jerry was Candy’s special child. Only he was old enough to be her grandfather. Hooker smiled sadly. Candy, Stella, and Dolly—they all had a lot in common.
The clock ticked over to 1:40 a.m. Hooker looked up. The bars would be closing, and he needed to drive several miles. He started to slip a five under the glass to pay for the dinner and pie but walked toward the back instead. He found Candy sitting in one of the booths, her cheek resting on the heel of her hand.
He sat down next to her. She leaned into him. She sighed. He stroked her hair and kissed it. “I do like your hair the way it is.”
They sat there for a few minutes, floating. She turned and looked at him. Her eyes wandered all over his face. She kissed him lightly on the lips. “Go see your sister. I’ll be ready at four on Sunday.”
He slid out of the booth. It was the best moment life was going to give him today.
The night air washed over Hooker as the glass door sucked open. The late-night summer heat left a charred tang to the more dominant odor of rotting vegetation. Hooker stopped at the car door. He listened with his whole body. It was almost two hours after their regular meeting time, but just maybe. “Peter?”
“Not for another half hour or so.”
Hooker turned to see the priest pushing his wheelchair into the parking lot. It still amazed Hooker the man could maneuver the chair with one hand and a hook.
“Father Damian. It’s good to see you again. I thought I had missed you.”
The man rolled to a stop. “Normally, you would have. This morning came early with the call of the wild.” He rolled his eyes and imitated the bad Irish brogue of his fellow priest Father McBride. “Who would ha’ imagined two cats would desecrate the sanctity of it all by screwing noisily under the rectory window?”
Hooker rolled his eyes in mock horror. “Oh, the humanity of such a thing! Shocking. Shocking, I say.”
The two men laughed as the priest turned toward the door. “I may have to eat the whole slice of pie I smell.”
“Have a great night, Damian.”
The man waved the hook over his head as he pulled the door with his hand. Hooker watched the man handle the heavy glass doors with the very fit muscles of the former Special Forces soldier.
The soft breeze rustled through the vegetation at the edge of the lot. But there was no whirlwind of dust and night trash floating across the parking lot.
Hooker opened the car door and sat down. Somehow, it had been just a hollow shell of his usual middle-of-the-night visits to the diner. He laid the book on the floor of the passenger side and turned the key. The big V8 rumbled to life. Hooker nosed the giant of another time out onto the wide boulevard. He gently mashed the pedal, and the growling car surged down the way. The deep bass of the exhaust reverberated off the buildings along the street.
The moon was perhaps a good half hour away from touching the distant tree line. Hooker stood leaning against the front left fender. He knew The Mouse was already here. he could feel it. He made a show of being alone. The driver door was open. His only nod to taking precautions was the sawed-off Remington shotgun cradled in his left arm. The shells were all stacked with thirteen dimes, his variation on the buck-forty dime-load. He had always found the number thirteen to be more lucky than unlucky.
A large shape moved across the night air. The total silence of its flight told Hooker it was a barn owl. He thought about its choice of hunting grounds. He quietly, almost to himself, offered his wishes. “Happy hunting. May your belly be full and your heart strong.”
“Nathanial Hawkins never said that in the book, you know.”
Hooker didn’t flinch. He kept watching where the owl had gone. “I know, but it always sounded so inter-spiritual.”
He turned to face his sister as she sat in the driver’s seat. Her hands were delicately touching the large Bakelite steering wheel, feeling the smooth coolness. “Hello, Mouse.”
She closed her eyes and leaned back into the comfort of the large seat. It almost swallowed her. Hooker thought she had become even smaller and more fragile since he had seen her in the spring. Her skin, always a problem, was now flaking off in thumbprint sized pieces. Her desquamation was getting worse. Even on her face. It looked in the moonlight like she had several eyelids.” She was hugging herself to keep from picking at the skin. Her fine hair and the gauze of her clothing leant to the illusion she was all just the layers of skin floating in the air with no substance—more of a spirit than of something corporeal.
The voice was soft as a gentle summer evening. “You were hurt.”
“Yes.”
“They killed your truck.”
He thought and then nodded. “Yes.”
“Can you fix her?”
“If we can find a new engine.”
“You’re not the same without her.”
Hooker looked out into the night. He knew she was right. He wondered if he would ever be the same again. Near-death can change a person.
Hooker thought of the Marmon—once, the most powerful truck in the five Bay Area counties, now sitting forlornly in the garage. The proud nose turned on end next to the hollow cavity where the giant engine should be. The dark impotent silence of the once-great truck had also changed its owner. For once, Hooker truly felt his mortality.
“They’re not out there.”
“Who?”
“My tribe.”
“You’re alone?”
“I didn’t say who.”
“The blond one... the one that is always crouched by your leg?”
“Dog.” She waved a non-directional hand. “He’s out there, somewhere.”
“He’s not afraid of the mill?”
She chortled. “He’s not afraid of the silver in your shotgun either.”
“It was a precaution.”
“Not from me.”
“No... Not from you.”
“You obviously got my message.”
“Peter gave it to me.”
She rolled her head sideways. Her sigh was almost a whisper to herself. “Peter...”
“What about him, Mouse?”
She slowly rolled her head back and looked blankly at her brother. “You hate my name.”
“Hate is a strong word. I don’t like what it means—a separation between my sister and me. The name is just a name. I just like Clair better… and Sissy even more so.”
Her head rolled. She was quiet. “There is a new killer stalking the night.”
“You told us what would happen next, and it did. There are questions now.”
“Was I part of it?”
“No. We know you weren’t. Nor were any of your tribe.”
“How would you know that?”
“Because he was a busy boy elsewhere. He has been counting coup on his boots, and he’s up to twenty-five now. But we now know he left here and was all over in the Central Valley for the last five or six years.”
“He was here before?”
Hooker frowned. “You didn’t know that?”
“No.”
“Manny, one of the people I live with... would have been his fifth kill, but his partner found him before the killer could carve him up.”
She scooted across the seat and leaned up against the passenger door. “Come sit in here. I want to see your face.” She waved him in with both of her hands. They glowed in the moonlight. It was from the abnormally high concentration of phosphorous in her skin due to a disease she had had since they were children.
Hooker had a brief memory of being in a chair and blanket fort. A ten-year-old girl who he had started calling sister motioned with both of her hands. Come in here. I want to watch your face when we talk. It was the last nice home where they were dumped. He had started calling her Sissy for sister. Clair was the name the adults used.
When the abuse started, the current recipient would become the inside spoon as they comforted each other as they fell asleep, different abuse with different foster homes. But when the talk became serious, they would sit at each end of the inevitable bunk bed so they could see each other’s face.
Hooker laid the shotgun on the back seat. He sat down in the driver’s side and closed the door. He turned and leaned against the door and stretched out into the middle of the car.
“Just like in Riverside.”
She smiled softly that he also remembered a better time. “Yes.”
They sat with their memories. There was no hurry. There was no clock to watch, no radio to answer. The moon started breaking apart as it entered the trees.
“I need your help.”
Hooker looked at her and waited.
“I’m dying.”
He waited.
“When I become weak, they will kill me.”
His heart broke.
“They will kill Dog first. They will make me watch them do it. Afterwards, they will kill me. They will tear me apart, and then eat me for my power. They will crush my bones and suck the warm marrow from inside.”
Hooker strained not to flinch or show any sign.
“I will give you the killer.”
Hooker waited to hear the conditions. There was always a trade.
“I will give you the killer, but you and the police must kill Dog and me. You must do it in a way there is no doubt. They will be watching.”
Hooker couldn’t move.
“You must shoot me with your silver bullets. You must use your shotgun. You must stand in the open where everyone can see you kill me. After you have done this, you and the police will get the killer.”
Hooker moved his hand to stop her from moving.
She rolled forward in a fluid movement as if she had no bones. The Mouse was more a snake. Her hand was cold on his hot face. She kissed his cheek as lightly as a butterfly landing. “Save me, brother. I love you.” She rolled back and was outside the car. “I will come to you here in the dark of the moon. The train moans just past midnight. You have the fortnight.”
And she was gone.