Cold Fire

Jim felt as if he were standing on a narrow spine of land between two precipices, with safety to neither side. On the one hand was the life he had been living, filled with torment and despair that he had tried to deny but that had overwhelmed him at times, as when he had taken his spiritual journey on the Harley into the Mojave Desert, looking for a way out even if the way was death. On the other hand lay an uncertain future that Holly was trying to paint in for him, a future that she insisted was one of hope but which looked to him like chaos and madness.

And the narrow spine on which he stood was crumbling by the minute.

He remembered an exchange they'd had as they lay side by side in his bed two nights ago, before they had made love for the first time.

He'd said, People are always more. complex than you figure.

Is that just an observation. or a warning? Warning? Maybe you 're warning me that you 're not what you seem to be.

After a long pause, he had said, Maybe.

And after her own long pause, she had said, I guess I don 't care.

He was sure, now, that he had been warning her. A small voice within told him that she was right in her analysis, that the entities at the mill had only been different aspects of him. But if he was a victim of multiple personality syndrome, he did not believe that his condition could be casually described as a mere mental disturbance or a troubled state of mind, as she had tried to portray it. Madness was the only word that did it justice.

They entered Main Street. The town looked strangely dark and threatening-perhaps because it held the truth that would force him to step off his narrow mental perch into one world of chaos or another.

He remembered reading somewhere that only mad people were dead certain of their sanity. He was dead-certain of nothing, but he took no comfort from that. Madness was, he suspected, the very essence of uncertainty, a frantic but fruitless search for answers, for solid ground.

Sanity was that place of certainty above the whirling chaos.

Holly pulled to the curb in front of Handahl's Pharmacy at the east end of Main Street. "Let's start here.”

first "Why?" "Because it's the first stop we made when you were pointing out places that had meant something to you as a kid.”

He stepped out of the Ford under the canopy of a Wilson magnolia, one of several interspersed with other trees along both sides of the street.

That landscaping softened the hard edges but contributed to the unnatural look and discordant feeling of the town.

When Holly pushed open the front door of the Danish-style building, its two glass panes glimmered like jewels along their beveled edges, and a bell had tinkled overhead. They went inside together.

but Jim's heart was hammering. Not because the pharmacy seemed likely to actually be a place where anything significant had happened to him in his children hood, but because he sensed it was the first step on a path to the truth.

The cafe and soda fountain were to the left, and through the archway Jim saw a few people at breakfast. Immediately inside the door was the small newsstand, where morning papers were stacked high, mostly the Santa Barbara daily; there were also magazines, and to one side a revolving wire rack filled with paperback books.

"I used to buy paperbacks here," he said. "I loved books even back then couldn't get enough of them.”

The pharmacy was through another archway to the right. It resembled any modern American pharmacy in that it stocked more cosmetics, beauty aids, and hair-care products than patent medicines.

Otherwise, it was pleasantly quaint: wood shelves instead of metal or fiberboard; polished granite counters; an appealing aroma composed of Bayberry candles, nickle candy, cigar-tobacco efiluvium filtering from the humidified case in behind the cash register, faint traces of ethyl alcohol, and sundry pharmaceuticals.

Though the hour was early, the pharmacist was on duty, serving as his own checkout clerk. It was Corbett Handahl himself, a heavy wide-shouldered, man with a white mustache and white hair, wearing a crisp blue starched. shirt under his starched white lab jacket.

He looked up and said, "Jim Ironheart, bless my soul. How long's it been-at least three, four years?" They shook hands.

dead- "Four years and four months," Jim said. He almost added, since grandpa died, but checked himself without quite knowing why.

Spritzing the granite prescription-service counter with Windex, Corbett Handahl wiped it with paper towels. He smiled at Holly.

"And whoever you are, I am eternally grateful to you for bringing beauty into this gray morning.”

Corbett was the perfect smalltown pharmacist: just jovial enough to seem like ordinary folks in spite of being placed in the town's upper social class by virtue of his occupation, enough of a tease to be something of a local character, but with an unmistakable air of competence and probity that made you feel the medicines he compounded would always be safe.