Twice, when he knew that I was looking, he used his severed arm as a back scratcher. He clawed between his shoulder blades with the stiff fingers of that detached limb.
As a rule, ghosts are serious about their condition and solemn in their demeanor. They belong on the Other Side but are stuck here, for whatever reasons, and they are impatient to move on.
Once in a while, however, I encounter a spirit with his sense of humor intact. For my amusement, Tom even conspired to pick his nose with the forefinger of his severed arm.
I prefer ghosts to be somber. There’s something about a walking dead man trying to get a laugh that chills me, perhaps because it suggests that even postmortem we have a pathetic need to be liked—as well as the sad capacity to humiliate ourselves.
If Tom Jedd had been in less of a jokey mood, I might have lingered longer at Tire World. His shtick disturbed me, as did his twinkly-eyed smile.
As I walked to Terri’s Mustang, Tom stood at a showroom window, vigorously and clownishly waving good-bye with his severed arm.
I drove across sun-scorched acres of parking lot and found a space for the Mustang near the main entrance to the mall, where workmen were hanging a banner announcing the big annual summer sale that would run Wednesday through Sunday.
Inside this cavernous retail mecca, most of the stores appeared to be only moderately busy, but the Burke & Bailey’s ice-cream parlor drew a crowd.
Stormy Llewellyn has worked at Burke & Bailey’s since she was sixteen. At twenty, she’s the manager. Her plan is to own a shop of her own by the time she’s twenty-four.
If she had gone into astronaut training after high school, she would have a lemonade stand on the moon by now.
According to her, she’s not ambitious, just easily bored and in need of stimulation. I have frequently offered to stimulate her.
She says she’s talking about mental stimulation.
I tell her that, in case she hasn’t noticed, I do have a brain.
She says there’s definitely no brain in my one-eyed snake and that what might be in my big head is still open to debate.
“Why do you think I sometimes call you Pooh?” she once asked.
“Because I’m cuddly?”
“Because Pooh’s head is full of stuffin’.”
Our life together isn’t always a New Wave Abbott & Costello routine. Sometimes she’s Rocky and I’m Bullwinkle.
I went to the counter in Burke & Bailey’s and said, “I need something hot and sweet.”
“We specialize in cold,” Stormy said. “Go sit out there in the promenade and be good. I’ll bring you something.”
Although busy, the parlor offered a few empty tables; however, Stormy prefers not to chat on the premises. She is an object of fascination for some of the other employees, and she doesn’t want to give them fuel for gossip.
I understand precisely how they feel about her. She’s an object of fascination for me, too.
Therefore I stepped out of Burke & Bailey’s, into the public promenade, and sat with the fish.
Retail sales and theater have joined forces in America: Movies are full of product placements, and malls are designed with drama in mind. At one end of Green Moon Mall, a forty-foot waterfall tumbled down a cliff of man-made rocks. From the falls, a stream coursed the length of the building, over a series of diminishing rapids.
At the end of a compulsive-shopping spree, if you realized that you had bankrupted yourself in Nordstroms, you could fling yourself into this water feature and drown.
Outside Burke & Bailey’s, the stream ended in a tropical pond surrounded by palm trees and lush ferns. Great care had been taken to make this vignette look real. Faint recorded bird calls echoed hauntingly through the greenery.
Except for the lack of enormous insects, suffocating humidity, malaria victims groaning in death throes, poisonous vipers as thick as mosquitoes, and rabid jungle cats madly devouring their own feet, you would have sworn you were in the Amazon rainforest.
In the pond swam brightly colored koi. Many were large enough to serve as a hearty dinner. According to the mall publicity, some of these exotic fish were valued as high as four thousand dollars each; tasty or not, they weren’t within everyone’s grocery budget.
I sat on a bench with my back to the koi, unimpressed by their flashy fins and precious scales.
In five minutes, Stormy came out of Burke & Bailey’s with two cones of ice cream. I enjoyed watching her walk toward me.
Her uniform included pink shoes, white socks, a hot-pink skirt, a matching pink-and-white blouse, and a perky pink cap. With her Mediterranean complexion, jet-black hair, and mysterious dark eyes, she looked like a sultry espionage agent who had gone undercover as a hospital candy striper.
Sensing my thoughts, as usual, she sat beside me on the bench and said, “When I have my own shop, the employees won’t have to wear stupid uniforms.”
“I think you look adorable.”
“I look like a goth Gidget.”
Stormy gave one of the cones to me, and for a minute or two we sat in silence, watching shoppers stroll past, enjoying our ice cream.
“Under the hamburger and bacon grease,” she said, “I can still smell the peach shampoo.”
“I’m an olfactory delight.”
“Maybe one day when I have my own shop, we can work together and smell the same.”
“The ice-cream business doesn’t move me. I love to fry.”
“I guess it’s true,” she said.
“What?”
“Opposites attract.”
“Is this the new flavor came in last week?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Cherry chocolate coconut chunk?”
“Coconut cherry chocolate chunk,” she corrected. “You’ve got to get the proper adjective in front of chunk or you’re screwed.”
“I didn’t realize the grammar of the ice-cream industry was so rigid.”
“Describe it your way, and some weasel customers will eat the whole thing and then ask for their money back because there weren’t chunks of coconut in it. And don’t ever call me adorable again. Puppies are adorable.”
“As you were coming toward me, I thought you looked sultry.”
“The smart thing for you would be to stay away from adjectives altogether.”
“Good ice cream,” I said. “Is this the first taste you’ve had?”
“Everyone’s been raving about it. But I didn’t want to rush the experience.”
“Delayed gratification.”
“Yeah, it makes everything sweeter.”
“Wait too long, and what was sweet and creamy can turn sour.”
“Move over Socrates. Odd Thomas takes the podium.”
I know when the thin ice under me has begun to crack. I changed the subject. “Sitting with my back to all those koi creeps me out.”
“You think they’re up to something?” she asked.
“They’re too flashy for fish. I don’t trust them.”
She glanced over her shoulder, at the pond, then turned her attention once more to the ice cream. “They’re just