Flight of Death - Richard Hoyt Page 0,8

from her mouth.

Through what had to be the longest cup of coffee in my life, she told me — although only the gods could hazard a guess why I would care — about how Adonis was from a poor family and had worked his way up the hard way, doing every kind of odious and backbreaking job imaginable, and was now politically left-wing and passionately nonmaterialist. He loved the West and lived frugally and was politically sensitive to the have-nots of the world, et cetera. He hiked. He fished. Blah blah blah.

She said Adonis was a superb wildlife photographer who saved every last dime but still had to fly back to Chicago and the East often to beg money from various foundations so he could document the lives of everything from whales and seagulls to baboons and butterflies. She said the bum part was these frequent money-raising trips, but Adonis had to take them; shooting documentaries was an expensive proposition, even though he was careful and costed out every item of a project. He was currently shooting a documentary on owls, which meant he could go with Jenny on her census-taking duties.

Adonis was thoughtful and generous as well as talented. Dogs and kids and old ladies and cripples and ugly people all just loved him. Couldn’t get enough of him. Adonis! Adonis! Adonis! He did the dishes. He vacuumed. He left the toilet seat down at night.

I tried not to hear what she was saying, because I wasn’t especially fond of dogs pissing everywhere and jabbing me in the crotch with their noses, and he had me on the toilet seat part for sure.

I thought, Come on, lady, don’t do this to me. So I took a little detour to get you in out of the cold; it was the civilized thing to do. We wound up having a good time. You don’t owe me all this explanation. Life goes on.

Other than Adonis’s fund-raising trips, his only fault, as far as Jenny would admit, was that he turned the heat too high when he fried eggs. He had a thing about high heat and eggs and got crabby as hell if she said anything. He just cooked the crap out of eggs.

She loved him. I got the picture. I could have told her eggs gave me gas, but I didn’t.

We drank coffee in silence for a couple of minutes, and then she called the wonderful Adonis from a pay phone. When she got back, she said Adonis would drive up from their house in Portland and fix whatever was wrong with her car. On top of everything else, it turned out that Adonis was handy with machines and tools; he’d diagnosed the problem on the telephone and was going to fix it himself.

I drove her back to the motel, where she gave me a quick hug and got out. “Thank you for the good night and the fan, John Denson. I liked telling you about the owls and everything. You’re a detective yourself, and you didn’t laugh when I said I was going to find whoever it was who murdered that owl.”

God, did she ever smell good. “You truly are a beautiful woman, and smart, too. I envy Adonis,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said, “I like you too.”

She meant it, which I suppose accounted for the catalog of St. Adonis’s numerous merits. “Well, thank you, beautiful Jenny. Good luck with your spotted owls and adios. If perfect Adonis ever takes a powder, you’ve got my card.”

“Ask your friend Willie to talk to Owl and Mouse for me.”

“I’ll do it,” I said.

I waved good-bye and headed downriver on the interstate, this time bucking a head wind, side door still popping. There was no way in hell I could compete with a man whose only real fault was burning eggs. Someone ought to sculpt a wax Adonis and display him in some sort of Domestic Hall of Fame.

For a while back there — before she remembered her loyalty to Adonis — Jenny had really been something. I vowed that next time, by God, I’d keep on driving; to hell with ladies in distress, leave ’em in the cold.

A splendid, blinding orange sun rising at my back, I wheeled toward Portland, where I would cross the Columbia River on the interstate and head north past Vancouver for the turnoff to Sixkiller.

Still, Jenny MacIvar would be at Sixkiller too. Maybe I would yet get a chance to make her forget Adonis the incomparable, photographer