Dean Koontz: Odd Interlude

“Ma’am, it might be dangerous to sleep.”

“Then I won’t sleep.”

“Should I get you some black coffee from the diner?”

“Why?”

“To help you stay awake.”

“I suppose you sleep when you need to. But you see, young man, I only sleep when I want to.”

“How does that work?”

“Splendidly.”

“Don’t you want to know why it could be dangerous to sleep?”

“Because I might fall out of bed? Oddie, I trust your admonition isn’t frivolous, and I will remain awake. Now go do whatever you have to do.”

“I’m going to snoop around.”

“Then snoop, snoop,” she says, making a shooing motion.

I retreat from her cottage and close the door behind me.

Already Boo is walking toward the diner. I follow him.

He fades away like fog evaporating.

I don’t know where he goes when he dematerializes. Maybe a ghost dog can travel to and from the Other Side as he pleases. I have never studied theology.

For the last day of January along the central coast, the night is mild. And quiet. The air smells faintly, pleasantly, of the sea. Nevertheless, my sense of impending peril is so great that I won’t be surprised if the ground opens under my feet and swallows me.

Big moths caper around the sign on the roof of the diner. Their natural color must be white, because they become entirely blue or red depending on which neon is closer to them. Bats, dark and changeless, circle ceaselessly, feeding on the bright swarm.

I don’t see signs and portents in everything. The voracious yet silent flying rodents chill me, however, and I decide not to stop first at the diner, as had been my intention.

Past the three eighteen-wheelers, at the service station, the Jaguar is gone. The mechanic is sweeping the floor of the garage.

At the open bay door, I say, “Good morning, sir,” as cheerfully as if a gorgeous pink dawn has already painted the sky and choirs of songbirds are celebrating the gift of life.

When he looks up from his work with the push broom, it’s a Phantom of the Opera moment. A grisly scar extends from his left ear, across his upper lip, through his lower lip, to the right side of his chin. Whatever the cause of the wound, it appears as if it might have been sewn up not by a doctor but instead by a fisherman using a hook and a length of leader wire.

With no apparent self-consciousness about his appearance, he says, “Hello there, son,” and favors me with a grin that would make Dracula back off. “You’re up even before Wally and Wanda have thought about goin’ to bed.”

“Wally and Wanda?”

“Oh, sorry. Our possums. Some say them two is just big ugly red-eyed rats. But a marsupial isn’t no rat. And ugly is like they say about beauty—it’s in the eye of the beholder. How you feel about possums?”

“Live and let live.”

“I make sure Wally and Wanda get the throw-away food from the diner each and every night. It makes ’em fat. But their life is hard, what with mountain lions and bobcats and packs of coyotes with a taste for possum. Don’t you think possums they have a hard life?”

“Well, sir, at least Wally has Wanda and she has Wally.”

Abruptly his blue eyes glimmer with unshed tears and his scarred lips tremble, as if he is nearly undone by the thought of possum love.

He appears to be about forty, though his hair is iron gray. In spite of the horrific scar, he has an avuncular quality suggesting that he’s as good with children as he is kind to animals.

“You’ve gone right to the very heart of it. Wally has Wanda, and Donny has Denise, which makes anythin’ tolerable.”

Stitched on the breast pocket of his uniform shirt is the name DONNY.

He blinks back his tears and says, “What can I do for you, son?”

“I’ve been up awhile, need to stay awake awhile longer. I figure anyplace truckers stop must sell caffeine tablets.”

“I’ve got NoDoz in the gum-and-candy case. Or in the vendin’ machine, there’s high-octane stuff like Red Bull or Mountain Dew, or that new energy drink called Kick-Ass.”

“They really named it Kick-Ass?”

“Aren’t no standards anymore, anywhere, in anythin’. If they thought it would sell better, they’d call the stuff Good Shit. Excuse my language.”

“No problem, sir. I’ll take a package of NoDoz.”

Leading me through the garage to the station office, Donny says, “Our seven-year-old, he learned about sex from some Saturday-mornin’ cartoon show. Out of nowhere one day, Ricky he says he don’t want to be either straight or gay, it’s all disgustin’. We unplugged our satellite dish. No standards anymore. Now Ricky he watches all them old Disney and Warner Brothers toons on DVD. You never have to worry if maybe Bugs Bunny is goin’ to get it on with Daffy Duck.”

In addition to the NoDoz, I purchase two candy bars. “Does the vending machine accept dollars or do I need change?”

“It takes bills just fine,” Donny says. “Young as you look, you can’t have been drivin’ a rig long.”

“I’m not a trucker, sir. I’m an out-of-work fry cook.”

Donny follows me outside, where I get a can of Mountain Dew from the vending machine. “My Denise, she’s a fry cook over to the diner. You got yourself your own private language.”

“Who does?”

“You fry cooks.” The two sections of his scar become misaligned when he grins, as if his face is coming apart like a piece of dropped crockery. “Two cows, make ’em cry, give ’em blankets, and mate ’em with pigs.”

“Diner lingo. That’s a waitress calling out an order for two hamburgers with onions, cheese, and bacon.”

“That stuff tickles me,” he says, and indeed he looks tickled. “Where you been a fry cook—when you had work, I mean?”

“Well, sir, I’ve been bouncing around all over.”

“It must be nice seein’ new places. Haven’t seen no new place in a long time. Sure would like to take Denise somewhere fresh. Just the two of us.” His eyes fill with tears again. He must be the most sentimental auto mechanic on the West Coast. “Just the two of us,” he repeats, and under the tenderness in his voice, which any mention of his wife seems to evoke, I hear a note of desperation.

“I guess with children it’s hard to get away, just you two.”

“There’s never no gettin’ away. No way, no how.”

Maybe I’m imagining more in his eyes than is really there, but I suspect that these latest unshed tears are as bitter as they are salty.

When I wash down a pair of NoDoz with the soda, he says, “You jolt your system like this a lot?”

“Not a lot.”

“You do too much of this, son, you’ll give yourself a for-sure bleedin’ ulcer. Too much caffeine eats away the stomach linin’.”

I tilt my head back and drain the too-sweet soda in a few long swallows.

When I drop the empty can in a nearby trash barrel, Donny says, “What’s your name, boy?”

The voice is the same, but the tone is different. His affability is gone. When I meet his eyes, they’re still blue, but they have a steely quality that I have not seen before, a new directness.

Sometimes an unlikely story can seem too unlikely to be a lie, and therefore it allays suspicion. So I decide on: “Potter. Harry Potter.”

His stare is as sharp as the stylus on a polygraph. “That sounds as real as if you’d said ‘Bond. James Bond.’”

“Well, sir, it’s the name I’ve got. I always liked it until the books and movies. About the thousandth time someone asked me if I was really a wizard, I started wishing my name was just about anything else, like Lex Luthor or something.”

Donny’s friendliness and folksy manner have for a moment made Harmony Corner seem almost as benign as Pooh Corner. But now the air smells less of the salty sea than of decaying seaweed, the pump-island glare seems as harsh as the lights of an interrogation room in a police station, and when I look up at the sky, I cannot find Cassiopeia or any constellation that I know, as if Earth has turned away from all that is familiar and comforting.