Brother Odd

ONCE died in such a place. At least I'm pretty sure I died, and was dead for a while, and even haunted a few of my friends, though they didn't know I was with them in a spook state.
        If I didn't die, something stranger than death happened to me. I wrote about the experience in my second manuscript, but writing about it didn't help me to understand it.
        At intervals of forty or fifty feet, air monitors were mounted on the right hand wall. I found no signs of tampering.
        If the passageway led to the cooling-tower vault, as I was sure that it must, then it would be about four hundred feet long.
        Twice I thought I heard something behind me. When I looked over my shoulder, nothing loomed.
        The third time, I refused to succumb to the urge to glance back. Irrational fear feeds on itself and grows. You must deny it.
        The trick is to be able to differentiate irrational fear from justifiable fear. If you squelch justifiable fear and soldier on, dauntless and determined, that's when Santa Claus will squeeze down the chimney, after all, and add your peepee to his collection.
        Boo and I had gone two hundred feet when another passageway opened on the right. This one sloped uphill and curved out of sight.
        Four additional PVC pipes were suspended from the ceiling of the intersecting corridor. They turned the corner into our passageway and paralleled the first set of pipes, heading toward the cooling tower.
        The second serviceway must have originated in the new abbey.
        Instead of bringing the brothers back to the school in the two SUVs, risking attack by whatever might be waiting in the blizzard, we could lead them along this easier route.
        I needed to explore the new passageway, though not immediately.
        Boo had proceeded toward the cooling tower. Although the dog would not be of help when I was attacked by the creeping thing behind me, I felt better when we kept together, and I hurried after him.
        In my mind's eye, the creature at my back had three necks but only two heads. The body was human, but the heads were those of coyotes. It wanted to plant my head on its center neck.
        You might wonder where such a baroque irrational fear could have come from. After all, as you know, I'm droll, but I'm not grotesque.
        A casual friend of mine in Pico Mundo, a fiftyish Panamint Indian who calls himself Tommy Cloudwalker, told me of an encounter he had with such a three-headed creature.
        Tommy had gone hiking and camping in the Mojave, when winter's tarnished-silver sun, the Ancient Squaw, had relented to spring's golden sun, the Young Bride, but before summer's fierce platinum sun, the Ugly Wife, could with her sharp tongue sear the desert so cruelly that a sweat of scorpions and beetles would be wrung from the sand in a desperate search for better shade and a drop of water.
        Maybe Tommy's names for the seasonal suns arise from the legends of his tribe. Maybe he just makes them up. I'm not sure if Tommy is partly genuine or entirely a master of hokum.
        In the center of his forehead is a stylized image of a hawk two inches wide and one inch high. Tommy says the hawk is a birthmark.
        Truck Boheen, a one-legged former biker and tattooist who lives in a rusting trailer on the edge of Pico Mundo, says he applied the hawk to Tommy's forehead twenty-five years ago, for fifty bucks.
        Reason tips the scale toward Truck's version. The problem is, Truck also claims that the most recent five presidents of the United States have come secretly to his trailer in the dead of night to receive his tattoos. I might believe one or two, but not five.
        Anyway, Tommy was sitting in the Mojave on a spring night, the sky winking with the Wise Eyes of Ancestors-or stars, if scientists are correct-when the creature with three heads appeared on the farther side of the campfire.
        The human head never said a word, but the flanking coyote heads spoke English. They debated each other about whether Tommy's head was more desirable than the head already occupying the neck between them.
        Coyote One liked Tommy's head, especially the proud nose.
        Coyote Two was insulting; he said Tommy was "more Italian than Indian."
        Being something of a shaman, Tommy recognized that this creature was an unusual manifestation of the Trickster, a spirit common to the folklore of many Indian nations.