24

Chapter 24

That next morning, I skipped out on EcoCares, the decision reached based on a note I found slipped into my screen door as I departed. In the note, the Colonel ordered us all over to his back yard, where he had fashioned a small shrine in the memory of Tikki. He had laid smooth stones in a line from the back door to its location under a Catscrath bush in the corner of the yard and erected one of those small cast concrete angels, propping it up with three slender hackberry sticks. He planted some sort of Asian weed in a circle around the angel, which was missing an arm and a section of its face. A collar was draped over the angel's outstretched arm and the whole thing sprinkled with dog food. It seemed to give off a faint orange glow and had a decidedly powerful yet absurd feel like it was channeling Gabriel Marquez.
The Colonel understood death and was familiar with grief, having experienced a lot of it in Vietnam. After completing a series of chants and pouring a liter of cheap whiskey over the head of the angel, he dismissed us into the sweltering heat of the August morning then went immediately to work repairing his shed and scanning it for LAPD bugs and other spy devices, the presence of which he was certain existed.
The rest of the day passed without anything remarkable occurring. Everyone seemed to disappear. Even Bufford failed to show up for our nightly sitting time. This concerned me a little, but I assumed he just needed some time to put all the pieces of the last few days in their rightful places, if that was possible. I followed through with the ritual anyway until dusk, kicking little pebbles at a cholla a few feet away and littering my front lawn with enough Budweiser cans for the both of us. Then I caught Letterman's monologue on TV and went to bed. There were Indian troops advancing on Pakistan and someone had successfully traversed the North Atlantic naked in a hot air balloon sporting a sign that said:

"Peace begins with you."

end of book II