CHAPTER 1
AN ODD-SIZED CASKET
It was an odd sized casket, a smallish one that would have been about right for an average nine-year-old boy, but there was no boy inside. The casket was carried by four Kern County Sheriff deputies. There wasn’t room for the usual six pallbearers due to the small size of the casket, and it would have lacked dignity to have six deputies jammed together, shoulder-to-shoulder, crowding around an under-sized coffin—like a clown car, but in reverse. So, the two extra pallbearers tagged along behind the procession, filing past the ranks of a good fifty other deputies standing in rows beside a small open grave. They all wore small black bands on their badges—the traditional sign of respect and mourning for a fallen comrade.
Hertell Daggett watched the memorial service from a respectful distance. He had forgotten to shave that morning and didn’t think it proper to be too close to all that spit and polish and grief with a day’s worth of stubble. He rubbed his cheek, or had it been two days? He couldn’t remember. “What’s today?” He realized they were the first words he had spoken all day.
The deputies didn’t hear him. They didn’t even notice Hertell standing alone on a nearby hilltop watching them from a respectful distance. Even if they had, their professional appraisal would have been simply: adult male, Caucasian, approximately six feet, medium build, light hair, brown eyes, dark pants, light shirt.
But if they’d observed him more closely, they would have seen much more—that his hair wasn’t light at all but actually soot black, merely hiding beneath a layer of Tawney dust. He was wearing Levi’s and a Boy Scout belt and an old, faded Hawaiian shirt. They would have also noticed something about his eyes, the curve of his cheek, and the corners of his mouth that made his face—at least when he was lost in thought, or asleep, or confused, or simply blank—look kind.
He was not what he used to be. He’d once been married, he’d once been a physicist, and he’d once been shot in the head in a celebratory New Year’s Eve accident, or possibly the 4th of July, he could never quite remember. The doctors got most of the bullet out, but a few microscopic specks of copper remained, floating inside his brain, connecting parts that are no longer connected in the rest of us, filaments of species memory going back to the beginning of time. He knew how animals thought and remembered the sounds of dinosaurs, the dry humor of mastodons and the rubbery smell of trilobites. He’d once had a future, but he lived now on the outskirts of Bakersfield, California, a damaged caretaker of a run down, failing pet cemetery.
From his vantage point, Hertell had a good view of the open grave, the approaching casket, and of the bagpiper poised on Whisper Hill, some distance from the gravesite.
The pallbearers completed their mission and joined the ranks in formation as some words were spoken and some guns went off. The lone bagpiper began playing “Amazing Grace.” One of the deputies reached up and put his arm around the shoulder of an adjacent pallbearer and patted it awkwardly. Even from a distance, Hertell could see the man’s shoulders slightly heaving. The grieving deputy was a massive affair and loomed over the other pallbearers. The fallen warrior being so honored was only twenty- eight years old. In dog years. His name was Wiley, and he’d been killed in the line of duty at a meth lab north of Bakersfield.
Hertell watched the ceremony and contemplated his handiwork. All considered, the grave was well formed. Normal cemeteries, for people and so on, generally use a backhoe for such things, but Hertell dug graves by hand with a shovel which wasn’t as precise or symmetrical as ones made with a backhoe, but he felt that hand-wrought graves had a certain old-world charm.
It had taken him most of the morning to dig the hole. The first foot or so had been pretty easy, mainly dry dusty topsoil and an occasional smooth river bottom rock. At about two or three feet, he hit caliche, a reddish clay as hard as concrete. A pick was the only thing to use on that since the shovel would barely nick it. He usually tried to get down to about four or five feet to get out of coyote and coon range—they’d never actually eat the dead pet, but they’d dig it out for sport.
At about four feet, the caliche was particularly hard, and Hertell thought briefly about using the family bulldozer to finish the job. The D6 could make an enormous pit in a matter of minutes, big enough to swallow a freight container. But the image of all those grieving deputies clustered around a tiny, flag-draped casket, engulfed at the bottom of a massive road cut, seemed grossly out of proportion, so Hertell completed the grave by hand shortly before the funeral party arrived.
Hertell would periodically use the D6 to smooth out the dirt road that led from Highway 178 up to the Li’l Pal. The whole area east of the 178 was mudflow and alluvia from the Sierras and hadn’t changed much since late Pleistocene. Hertell remembered the Pleistocene vividly, the smells, the sights, the sounds—Mastodons had a sound very similar to an AME Gospel choir, only louder. He was convinced that was why Gospel music got to people the way it did, because we remembered it way down in our dinosaur brain. What was left of it, and he knew all of those brains were still in there, each brain built on top of an older brain—the man-brain, monkey-brain, the dog, the turtle, the lizard, the snake, all the way back to the beginning of time, back to when we were all just a bunch of amoebas floating around eating each other all day. So even though he’d been shot in the head, he nevertheless considered himself to be very lucky. Not to be alive, there are lots of people alive, but to have those parts of his brain, those prehistoric, primal, Precambrian parts of his brain connected to his reason and his language and his soul, if there was such a thing.
A jet flew high overhead. Hertell looked up and searched the sky and spotted the tiny, shining speck dutifully pulling its contrail across the red sky, and watched it disappear as its sound faded away. He was struck by a thought and looked down at the gravesite. The deputies were all gone now. He didn’t remember them leaving. This had been happening more often lately. He rubbed his cheek. Maybe it had been three days.
He looked out over Li’l Pal Heaven, forty dried-up, burnt-out acres of little dead pets on the outskirts of Bakersfield. Hertell had a wife once. He thought of her often and hoped that she was happy. He had a father too, but his father had taken most of the previous September to die and was buried over near Wiley. He had a mother, much younger than his father, but she had left long ago when Hertell was nine. His dad always insisted that she was dead, but Hertell knew she actually lived up in Sacramento. He had no sisters or brothers or aunts or uncles or cousins. The whole family tree ended on his leafless branch. Like those long extinct Mastodons he remembered so well.
He stood motionless and savored the silence for a moment—no jets flying overhead, no highway noise, no birds or wind, no barking dogs or leaf blowers, just the still air above and the mute hillside below and the blessed silence in between.
And it was during that silence that he first heard it, distant, faint, and just out of reach, but definitely there. It wasn’t the remembered gospel calls of Mastodons this time but something much more recent. He turned his head to listen. It was reedy and elusive, he could almost identify it, but then the wind picked up and carried the sound away.
He told himself it was probably just the copper specks again, tuning him into solar storm or plate tectonics or something like that. He turned and headed toward the house. It was time for a shave.
CHAPTER 2 MISTER FROSTIE
It was the sound that got his attention; only it wasn’t a solar storm this time. Hertell had been clearing the weeds away from the graves over on the dog side of the grounds. He liked to keep the dogs separated from the cats—dogs over on the east, cats over on the west. He’d move the flowers, the tennis balls, the cracked and curled photos and other offerings left by the bereaved pet owners to a safe distance from the graves—usually a whole row at a time—then lay waste to the dingy brown weeds with a two-stroke weed- whacker. He was just returning the flowers and tennis balls to their rightful graves when he heard it. The distant, distorted, music box sound of an ice cream truck.
He climbed to the crest of the dog hills and looked south toward Highway 178. A weather-beaten ice cream truck was making its way up the dirt road toward the cemetery. He could tell by the way it was bouncing that it was time to start up the D6 and smooth out the dirt road again.
The music was getting louder but would occasionally drift in and out as if carried on the breeze. Hertell carried the weedwhacker back toward the house since he knew that was where the ice cream truck would stop.
The house had been built by Hertell’s father specifically for his young bride. It was spacious and airy for the time—a nice little ranch style with all the modern conveniences and a special sewing room just for her. The estate had been much more impressive back then—green grass and fountains and little ponds and trees. But they were long since dead and dried up like the dinosaurs and their beloved swamps—the county changed the zoning from agricultural to mixed commercial-residential, so Hertell couldn’t afford to irrigate anymore. The grass and ponds went first and then the trees. And now all that was left were the graves and the headstones and the weeds to be cleared. Hertell propped up the weed-whacker by the back door of the house as the ice cream truck rolled to a stop.
The driver let the song continue while he finished his cigarette. Hertell was quite familiar with the tune and was glad the driver didn’t stop it in the middle since a sense of foreboding could often color the rest of his day if the song stopped before it had resolved itself.
The tune concluded, and the driver killed the engine before the music box started again. Hertell approached the truck. He smiled and waved at the driver then dutifully stood at the service window on the passenger side of the truck to make his selection. “Whatcha recommend today, Mister Frostie? Drumstick or Fifty-fifty bar?”
Mister Frostie thought for a while then took a long last drag on his cigarette. “Fifty-fifty’s too non-committal, doesn’t know what it wants to be. I’d recommend a lime paleta.” He flicked his cigarette away. “It is what it is.”
They sat on the ground and ate their lime paletas in complete silence in the shade of the ice cream truck. Mister Frostie was slender as a length of rope and of indeterminate age, but definitely older than Hertell. His hair was thick and mostly black with a sprinkling of gray that always reminded Hertell of Harris Tweed. Hertell stared at their feet as they sat in the dirt and reflected on the fact that his legs extended several inches beyond Mister Frostie’s and that although Hertell knew himself to be the taller of the two, Mister Frostie had always projected a larger presence somehow. Perhaps it was his voice.
Hertell finished his Mexican popsicle first and put the stick in his pocket. “Excellent suggestion, very refreshing.”
After a good five minutes of silence Mister Frostie finally said, “Yeah.”
Hertell didn’t care because he knew what Mister Frostie was doing. He could tell by the look on Mister Frostie’s face, he could tell by the way he was breathing that Mister Frostie was somewhere else. He was thinking up a prayer, and Hertell didn’t want to interrupt.
Hertell had never even been in a church himself. His father had only bad things to say about churches and religion in general, at least until the last few weeks of the previous September when he’d had a sudden and extreme change of heart. He said he kept hearing Jesus talking to him at night, telling him not to worry, that he was not lost, that God would find him, and that God doesn’t sweat the little shit. His father found a great deal of comfort in that as he slipped peacefully and silently away. Hertell was convinced that it wasn’t really Jesus but just the sound of the swamp cooler in the blackness of night, and that the same way you can see faces and landscapes in knotty pine paneling, you can hear the whisper of God in the rumble and hiss of white noise.
Mister Frostie got up and stamped the dirt from his boots. It was time to go to work.
Hertell stood at the open back doors of the ice cream truck, looking in as Mister Frostie dug through one of the freezers. Hertell watched him for a moment. “How many you bring today?”
Mister Frostie found what he was looking for under the drumsticks. “Only three, two dogs and maybe a cat.” He pulled out a black garbage bag and handed it to Hertell. “This is the cat. I think. Coulda been a small dog. Kinda hard to tell sometimes.” He moved on to the next freezer and began digging. “I got the dogs in here. I like to keep’m separated.”
Hertell nodded an agreement. “Logical.”
Hertell and Mister Frostie spent the rest of the afternoon digging three small graves in the Lost’n Found section of Li’l Pal, the section furthest up the hill that never received dead pets or their visitors or plastic flowers or tennis balls. It was too steep and inaccessible for the regular graves and was inconveniently located on the far side of an arroyo and required a hike and a climb to reach, but Hertell had established this as the Lost’n Found section because it had a good five or six feet of easy topsoil and substratum before you hit the caliche. Other than Hertell and Mister Frostie, no human foot ever touched the Lost’n Found section. It didn’t need plastic flowers or tennis balls because it had the thickest cover of poppies and other wildflowers in wet years. But it was almost fall now, and the poppies and wildflowers were long gone. Just short patchy mats of brome grass.
Hertell noticed Mister Frostie’s shovel blade was cracked, no doubt from historical campaigns on caliche down in the dog and cat grave sections. Hertell had never bothered to establish bird and fish and lizard and bunny and rodent sections since most people disposed of them in their own unique and typically informal ways.
He held out his shovel to Mister Frostie. “Lemme trade you. That one’s got a cracked blade.” Mister Frostie silently exchanged shovels with Hertell, and they continued digging until three small graves stood open before them.
Hertell solemnly moved from grave to grave, respectfully lowering a single black bag into each. He then stood opposite Mister Frostie and bowed his head in reverence but kept his eyes open so he could watch.
Mister Frostie stood silent and still for a moment. Then his eyes began to blink as if he were about to sneeze. Hertell leaned slightly forward in anticipation. Mister Frostie took a deep breath and from deep within began:
"Merciful and Loving God, receive these tiny friends who soil our carpets yet give us unconditional love. Who now find themselves in Your presence due to their complete ignorance of both inertia and the redeeming blood of Jesus Christ that brings them life everlasting. You see them now naked, broken, torn, flattened by a driver’s momentary inattention, poor hand-eye coordination, or simple indifference. May they be precious in Your loving sight.
Great and Everlasting Father, You knew their last moments, their fear and confusion, the sanctuary of the gutter and the safety of the sidewalk beckoning, salvation in sight but not in reach, instinctive, futile darting to and fro, from certain death to certain death, or frozen by dog logic in the path of the great, looming mystery that roars like the rushing wind, only to crush them remorselessly beneath steel-belted radial angels of death.
O blessed Redeemer, grant them comfort and peace in Your ever-expanding procession.
Lord High King of Heaven, would that You will grant us, the waiting, the lost, the condemned, that same loving comfort and peace, when we pass from life to mere matter and find ourselves before You as they—naked, broken, torn, from a lifetime of darting pointlessly, or frozen in fear, ignorant and rejecting of the sanctuary and salvation that is ours... for the mere asking."
Hertell watched. Mister Frostie appeared to visibly swell as he concluded his prayer...
And now, may this prayer, here softly spoken, muted and muffled by this veil of flesh and clay, resound throughout the planets, galaxies, and parallel universes, so that every molecule and atom in Your Creation’s wake rings with our unconditional love!! AAAAAAMENNNNNNN!!!!!
Hertell stood quietly as the “Amen” faded away into the hillsides. He took a satisfied breath.
Mister Frostie lit up a cigarette. “Okay, we can cover’m up now.”
Hertell knew the past, from Precambrian to the Mesozoic, from Jurassic to the Neolithic, but he didn’t know the future. It never occurred to him he would never see Mister Frostie again.
