You Are Destined To Be Together Forever [an Odd Thomas short story]

He had been hanging out with me for some months, though he made no effort to explain himself. The dead don’t talk. I don’t know why. But they have ways of conveying their concerns and desires. Mr. Presley seemed content just to keep me company.

As I got behind the wheel of the Mustang, Stormy said, “What’s he wearing this time?”

“That ridiculous Arab getup from Harum Scarum. Sorry, sir, but it is ridiculous.”

All other lingering spirits that I had known were limited in their wardrobe to the clothes they had been wearing when they died. Mr. Presley, however, was capable of manifesting in anything he had worn during his storied career. He tended to avoid the flashy Vegas costumes that made him look like a less-well-coiffed Liberace.

Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that he had in an instant changed from the Harum Scarum garb to the flamenco-dancer costume that he had worn in Fun in Acapulco: tight black tuxedo pants, a two-thirds-length black jacket, and a ruffled white shirt with an elaborate black foulard at the throat.

“Better,” I said.

He made a gun of his thumb and forefinger, pointed it at me, and winked.

You might wonder why Stormy Llewellyn would believe I can see spirits. She’s a practical girl with a commonsense plan for her future. She works part-time behind the counter at Burke & Bailey’s in the mall, scooping ice cream and mixing milkshakes. She intends to be an ice-cream entrepreneur with her own shop by the time she’s twenty-four and to build a chain of six stores by the time she’s thirty. She is already saving half her wages toward the financing of that plan. Stormy is not the kind of sixteen-year-old girl who believes everything—or anything—I say just because I’m her guy.

I’m her guy. I can’t tell you how deeply it pleases me to write those three words. My father’s a mess, my mother’s psychotic, I’m a fry cook without his own car, a geek who lives in one room and a bath above a garage, and I see dead people and worse. She’s the coolest girl in school, and every guy who sees her stands awestruck, with his tongue hanging out. Nevertheless, I’m her guy, me and no one else, maybe because I’m able to keep my tongue in my mouth when I look at her and because I can make her laugh.

Anyway, she believes in my paranormal abilities because she’s had some experiences in my presence that confirmed them. For example, she was with me when an angry poltergeist destroyed my brand-new stereo system for no good reason. And Wyatt Porter, chief of police, has vouched for me, because I have shared my prophetic dreams with him and have given him other paranormally obtained information that has helped him close cases. Only the chief and his wife, Stormy, Ozzie Boone, and Terri Stambaugh know about my sixth sense, and they all protect me from discovery by others.

Now, as I drove the Mustang along the alleyway behind the Pico Mundo Grille, Stormy said, “Maybe Elvis doesn’t want to leave this world because so many people loved him here. The day of his funeral, over fifty thousand gathered at the gates to Graceland.”

“Guess you’ve been talking to Terri,” I said. My boss at the Grille was an obsessive Elvis fan, though she was fifteen when he died, and he was even then long past his prime.

“The lines waiting to view him in his casket totaled two miles,” Stormy said.

Mr. Presley had come forward from the backseat, leaning over the console to see Stormy’s face.

She said, “They needed one hundred vans and four hours to move all the flowers from the funeral at Graceland to the cemetery for the graveside service.”

As I braked at the end of the alley, I glanced at Mr. Presley, and he looked at me, and in his spirit eyes were spirit tears. He had always treated his fans with respect until the last few years, when his drug use and health problems prevented him from giving them the high-quality performances for which they had paid.

We rode in silence for a block or so, and then Stormy said, “Eighty cops and forty sheriff’s deputies weren’t enough to control the grieving crowd. The governor had to call up thirty National Guardsmen to assist them.”

Mr. Presley slipped once more into a corner of the backseat, gazing out a side window, clearly distraught.

At a red traffic light, I stopped and glanced at Stormy, aware that she was up to something with all those funeral details.

She met my eyes but spoke loud enough to be sure that my other passenger heard her. “Maybe he doesn’t want to leave this world because so many people loved him here,” she said again, but then she added, “or…or maybe he’s embarrassed by how his life spun out of control, and he’s afraid to cross over and face those fans who adored him but saw how he spiraled down in the end. It can be tough to be idolized by millions and even tougher if you can’t live up to the image they have of you.”

I wasn’t surprised by her bluntness. She was, after all, Stormy Llewellyn. Llewellyn is a variant of Leo, which comes from the Greek leon, meaning “lion” and implying abundant strength of character and will and physique, all of which applied to her. And you know what stormy means. Although not surprised, I did feel some sympathy for Mr. Presley, and I said, “That was a little hard.”

“Tough love,” she said.

And of course what she’d told him was at least as much love as it was tough. He had died in 1977. Rare is the spirit who lingers here so long after death. He needed to understand and accept the reason that he had not yet moved on; and whatever words were required to bring him to his senses, even if tough, would be a kindness.

Instead of responding to what Stormy said, Mr. Presley did a little mime routine, first boring vigorously in his nose with one finger, then pretending to reel from his nostril a few yards of snot.

“How’s he taking it?” Stormy asked.

“Immaturely.”

Mr. Presley rolled the imaginary snot into a wad the size of a baseball and threw it at me.

A horn honked behind us. The light had changed. Nevertheless, I delayed long enough to pretend to catch the hideous but nonexistent ball of mucus and throw it over my shoulder, back at him, before I accelerated across the intersection.

“What was that about?” Stormy asked.

“Snotball.”

“Again?”

“He always was a big child at heart.”

You might think that the presence of the lingering dead would make of my life a solemn if not even sorrowful affair, grim and dark and shot through with fear. It is at times grim and dark and shot through with fear—when it’s not silly, amusing, and shot through with foolishness.

We had traveled a few miles and were in that area where Maricopa Lane passed from suburban neighborhoods into a semirural landscape, when a man with a meat cleaver embedded in his neck came out of nowhere and dashed in front of the car. Even if I had been driving the Batmobile, with its ability to stop on a dime and give six cents in change, I couldn’t have avoided hitting the guy. Anyway, braking didn’t matter, which I knew because of Stormy’s failure to cry out in alarm. I drove through the spirit as he pointed at me. With the nimble grace of the lingering dead, he passed through the front of the car, boarding the vehicle at fifty miles per hour, folded to a sitting position, and settled into the backseat, beside Mr. Presley, the laws of physics no longer applicable to him.