Homicide My Own (26 page)

“It explains why I was always drawn to you,” he said, and added quickly, “As a friend. Okay, there were a couple hot dreams….”

“I’m gonna slap you upside the head.”

“And I always knew you had a special feeling for me.”

“Not that special,” I said.

I wondered, though, at what point true friends hook up, how far back does the connection extend? What war, what struggle, what century? I wondered if Odd and I always carry weapons, back through the ages? Were we made to be centurions and soldiers?

The battle of Chosin Reservoir took place in November, 1950. ( I had to look it up on the internet.) I was born January 11, 1951, the same day as Jeannie Olson, but a continent apart. She was killed in April, 1967. Odd was born the next month, just before Memorial Day.

In April of 1967, it was all I could do to stay in school. I was two months away from graduating but I wanted to drop out and go somewhere. At the time I thought it was just my eagerness to see a wider world. I lived in the coal regions, after all, and almost all the kids were leaving. But with me it wasn’t really eagerness, it was some kind of anxiety. Something was pulling me westward. I was born, or reborn, in Pennsylvania, Jeannie in Washington, and in 1967 it was time for us to link up again…only that wasn’t going to happen this time because Nascine intervened and murdered Jeannie.

I told all this to Odd. “Then you would be reborn in Spokane. I would meet Connors in California, and we would go back to his hometown, and somehow you and I would wind up on the same police force. Woi Yesus.”

We realized that all of that, all that we knew, was nothing in relation to all the questions we would never have answered.

I don’t know to this day if Odd ever told another soul, but I did. I told the story, first to Connors, then to a select few others. It’s an entertaining story, in its way, whether believed or not, and, frankly, it is a little hard to believe. I have told it here for the last time. I could care less who believes what..

In the backseat, behind the cage, the felon and his lover and her mother slept on. I kept Odd awake, until I saw he didn’t need me to do that. We fell silent for a long stretch of road, until we hit the city limits.

“Spokane, Washington,” said Odd.

“Home,” said I.

“I never much liked it here.”

“Me neither,” said I. “But here we are.”

“We oughta get out of this place.”

“No. Let’s live it out here, there’s always after.”

“There is no new consciousness born, and no consciousness is ever destroyed. All consciousness resurfaces somehow. That’s why we continue to go from life to life, all of us, the same beings, from the limitless beginning of time…every sentient being has been your mother.”

Rimpoche Nawang Gehlek