Ricochet Joe

9 MADE STUPID BY LOVE

Portia had said that Joe should let his intuition guide him. Unfortunately, intuition wasn’t like a Corvette or even a secondhand Honda; you couldn’t just get into it and start it up and cruise to where a parasite from another universe was living inside someone.

For want of a better plan, Joe retraced the route that earlier he and Portia had followed from Patsy’s Pool Hall to the Montclairs’ house. Hoping to detect the special residual vibe of his evil quarry, he touched parked cars, lampposts, crosswalk-control buttons, benches in the park, trash-can lids, the handrails flanking a set of steps leading out of the park. He picked up and fingered various items that people had discarded, because the parasite seemed likely to be the type who littered.

As the day waned, the sky recomposed itself until it appeared Wagnerian, the clouds such a bleak gray and so curdled and woven through with veins of black and in general so operatic that they were the perfect stage sky for a performance of Götterdämmerung, foretelling the end of all things.

In his too-large borrowed sport coat, with the pistol heavy against his left side, his innocent heart sometimes thumping loudly in his ears and sometimes as silent as if it had ceased functioning, Joe moved through his hometown as if he had come upon it for the first time, all things new and strange and forbidding.

They said that Seeker had given him not just the skills but also the confidence to do what needed to be done. Indeed, he strode the neighborhoods with self-assurance, afraid but fortified with courage that prevented him from being crippled by his fear.

But the heart is deceitful above all things. Theologians agreed on that issue, as did most philosophers, and if such a view of the human condition hadn’t been widely held, there would have been less Shakespeare to celebrate and no TV dramas whatsoever. For all his confidence and newfound courage, now that he was alone, beyond the immediate influence of the lovely Portia, Joe began to be troubled by the haste with which he had progressed from being an ordinary litter-collecting volunteer in Central Park to a believer in creatures from other universes and a stalker of cosmic evil.

True, amazing things had happened since that morning. He did not doubt his sanity or wonder if he might have been subjected to hallucinations after being secretly drugged. The events of the past several hours had been as real as they had been fantastic. Without Portia at his side, however, without her delightfully distracting presence, which in a delicious way sort of clouded his thinking, Joe’s mind seemed to clear. He began to consider whether the very real events of the day might have a different explanation from the one that she had given him. Although the story of Seeker and Parasite was a wild narrative, it felt true, and as he rambled around Little City, he could not find a contradiction in anything she’d told him.

Yet… something that Grandma Dulcie often said now echoed in his memory: Men are often made stupid by love. She meant that a woman’s charms could distract men from truths that the charms might cloak, that men could fall in love with love as easily as could any woman.

Grandma had a cruder aphorism related to the first: Men too often think with their little head instead of their big one. Joe was embarrassed to hear those words even in the privacy of his mind, and guilt rose in him that he would associate such a thought with the kind and virtuous Portia.

Yet…

Still he roamed the town, pressing one hand or the other to everything with which the person who hosted Parasite might have made contact, as if he had gone blind and must make his way by touch alone.

Twilight could not marry day to night with the densely clotted sky intervening in the ceremony. The gray and shadowed afternoon became night, seemingly between one breath and another, and the lights of Little City brought faux warmth to the cool evening air. The street lamps and the strings of tiny bulbs wound through tree branches and the luminous shop windows in the quainter districts created a festive air for tourists and residents alike.

At the malt shop, when Joe patted the resin head of Lucky Duck, a psychic residue of perfect evil shuddered through his hand and up his arm. The vibe of the parasite centipeded through the chambers of his heart, as if it might turn those pulsing tissues to ice, and Joe nearly dropped to his knees. He snatched his hand back, however, and whispered, “Button,” and was on the hunt.