Death Ray Butterfly

Chapter Three

So where the hell was I? Somebody's going to have to go through this someday and do something about it, put it all in order, or not. What do I care? I'm just doing what they tell me. Seems like it's always been that way. Regulations and rules. Follow the procedures, fill out the paperwork. I spent half my career just staring at a piece of paper with a pencil in my hand. Summarize, they tell you, as if you can take the constellations of events, the coincidence of all those lives colliding at that very point, all of the accidents, alignments and misfortunes that it takes for every little thing that ever happened to happen at all. It astounds you if you have any sense whatsoever.

If that old lady had gone only one mile an hour slower or faster and if that city bus had stalled out only one or two seconds before and if that grocery cart wheel wasn't crooked and bent and if that umbrella, lying in the street, and if that young man had trimmed his sideburns just a hair, and if the sun had come up in the south and the cosmic dust had settled on a different rock ... you can drive yourself crazy thinking about stuff like that.

The boys on the beat never let me forget a word of it. Maybe I'd been in a coma or something for a moment, but once it got around, there I was, reputation and all. Stanley K. Mole, finder of lost souls, of Alma Perdida, the only police inspector in the force to witness the quantum mystery. That's when they started piling all those cases on my desk, beginning and ending with the coldest of the cold, Reyn Tundra.

I never let it bother me. At least I wasn't stuck on traffic duty, like Sergeant Oliver Jamm was after his close encounter with the alien grape. I wasn't pensioned off like Captain Zanzig Neese was after she was caught coddling cadavers in the cooler. I may have gone off my rocker but I got back on pretty quick and I stayed back on that rocker ever since. I take it all with abiding grace if I do say so myself and I do. Say so myself.

They called the cases cold but I called them hard, and I was a hard case myself. Back since I was a kid, is what my dad always said. That boy's a hard case, got a hard head. All because I rode my bike down Ganges Hill without any brakes, just flew off into the hedges at the bottom, put my faith in God. Caught me all right, but scratched the hell out of me too. I still have the lacerations on my chest, been sixty years by now. Me and Smidge McCullers used to do that trick, him on roller skates even, the rickety four wheel kind. One summer we swore to conquer that mountain, limbs be damned, and damned if we didn't. Old Smidge could have used that kind of perseverance later on in life. Never did amount to much, did Smidge. Last time I saw him he was spending time alone, a lot of time, in solitary.

Don't we all? Shoot, here I am walking around the backyard with this dumb old black box in the palm of my hand, getting my sweat all over it and chatting up a storm. Feeling kind of stupid. Like Smidge McCullers. Now that boy was dumb. I remember one time I had to stop him from jumping off the roof of a six story building. Said he could make it, was sure he could, and wanted that twenty five cents I bet him but I took it back. Gave him the damn quarter just to save his life. That's what I call being a friend.