Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat

toolbox or the like – but it had stuck in my mind. It would have been directly under the mattress. A perfect hiding place. I clambered behind the seats and reached down into the shallow water.
    “You look inspired,” said Chompu.
    I found a latch of some description and some rusty knobs.
    “Have you got any tools in that truck of yours, Lieutenant?” I asked. “I think we might have something here.”
    ♦
    “Arny, Arny, not now.”
    My brother was about to set off along the beach in the midday heat rolling his log. It was starting to irk me. It was up there with self-flagellation and cross-carrying. He stopped, sighed and walked over to me along the light brown sand. My brother was a creation, the answer to a problem. He’d been bullied at school due to his sensitive nature and the fact that his brother, four years his senior, wore lipstick to class. Arny spent more time playing with girls than boys so it had been relatively simple for bullies to single him out from the herd. If she’d been around more, my mother would have taught him to negotiate his way out of trouble, taught him the value of a well-placed joke. But he was left to the one-track male logic of Granddad Jah to sort him out. Toughen him up. Teach him to fight. Of course, he didn’t ever learn how to fight but he did bulk up. The deeper his frustration, the harder he hit the weights. He couldn’t punish the boys that were making fun of him so he punished himself. Every barb put another disk on the barbell. And soon the weight room became his sanctuary and his body his barricade.
    And here he was, a mini-Mr. Universe. And the type of people who wanted to meet him saw an incredible hulk of a man. They assumed he ate pigs whole and smashed bricks with his forehead. Men wanted him as a friend because he was incredibly cool to be seen with. And women? Forget it. Once his love emotions were unscrewed there was nothing holding him together at all. Women assumed he was all animal, but in reality Arny was delicate. He was a sort of Grand Palace made of potato crisps. From a distance you saw invulnerability but you just had to lean on him slightly and he crumbled. It took a special kind of person to befriend a contradiction like that.
    Arny and I were close. We’d been inseparable – now we were just close. Since we’d followed Mair down to non-event world we’d been oddly distant. We’d both been too busy locked up in our respective moods.
    “What is it, pee ?” It was nice to hear him call me ‘older sister’.
    “Can you drive me somewhere?”
    “OK.”
    That’s the way it was with Arny. He’d always do what anyone asked whether he was busy or not. He’d never ask why. He’d always assume you had a good reason, otherwise you wouldn’t have asked. In fact I didn’t have a reason at all, not one I could explain. I just felt having Arny around on this trip might provide a distraction. Sometimes you have to follow your instincts. He was reversing the truck out of the carport when Mair came running out of the shop and stood directly behind us. Arny stamped on the brake.
    “Now, what do you two think you’re up to?” she asked, her hands on her waist, John between her feet.
    “Going for a drive,” I said. “Won’t be long.”
    “I suppose you know how old you have to be before you can drive a vehicle on the main road,” she asked.
    “Mair, I’m thirty-two,” Arny told her.
    There was a pause, a brief awakening, then, “Well, then that’s all right, I suppose.”
    She smiled and returned to the shop. We’d been on the road for five minutes when Arny turned to me.
    “That wasn’t a joke, was it?”
    “No.”
    We turned our heads to admire a hedge of glaring yellow golden trumpet. It probably caused a lot of accidents.
    “Do you think she’ll get worse?” he asked.
    “No, not at all,” I lied. “All this fresh air and nature and healthy macrobiotic food and calcium. It’s big city pollution that eats away at people’s sanity. There are ninety-year-olds down here who can recall what they had for breakfast on their sixteenth birthday.”
    Arny drove, focusing on the white lines.
    “That’s because they’ve had the same breakfasts for the past ninety years,” he said.
    I laughed. “You’re right.”
    “We did the right thing.”
    I knew he was talking about following Mair south.
    “Yes, we did. She’ll get better. She just needs something to occupy her mind.”
    “Yeah.”
    We turned at an intersection where