Last Call: Expiration Date Part 25

-Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland DIOS TE GUARDE TAN linda," said Angelica Elizalde softly into the sea breeze.

She had taken off her sneakers in order to wade out in the low, breakwater-tamed surf of Los Angeles Harbor. The lights of the Queen Mary rippled across the dark water, and Elizalde shivered now when she looked at the vast old ship out there by San Pedro.

She had walked down to this narrow stretch of beach from the bus stop at Cherry and Seventh, and she was still putting off the decision of whether or not to meet the Peter Sullivan person up in the parking lot on the bluff. She glanced at her watch and saw that she still had half an hour in which to decide.

She paused and looked back up the sh.o.r.e. A hundred yards west of her, the Mexican women's fire still fluttered and threw sparks on the breeze. She might just plod back there and talk to them some more. The bruises on her knees and hip were aching in the cold, and it would be nice to sit by the fire, among people who could hear her secrets and not consider her insane.

Elizalde had walked up to the fire when the sun was still a flattened red coal in the molten western sky, and in her exhaustion her Spanish had effortlessly come back to her, so that she was able to return the greetings of the women and make small talk.

She had smiled at the toddler daughter of one, and the woman had touched the girl's forehead and quickly said, "Dios te guarde tan linda"-G.o.d keep you pretty baby. Elizalde had remembered her grandmother doing the same whenever a stranger looked at one of the children. It was to deflect mal ojo, the evil eye. But Elizalde also remembered that it was a routine precaution, and she smiled at the mother too, and crossed herself. Only after the mother had smiled back, and Elizalde had accepted the gestured offer of a seat on the sand beside the fire, had she felt hypocritical.

Veladoros, devotional candles in tall gla.s.ses, ringed the fire; and Elizalde soon learned that these women were here waiting for midnight, when, it then being the Friday before El Da de los Muertos, they would bathe their piedras imanes in the seawater.

Elizalde realized that she had not misunderstood the word yesterday it did mean magnets. Her new friend Dolores untied her handkerchief and showed her her own, a doughnut-sized magnet from a stereo speaker. The best ones, Elizalde had gathered, were the little ones from old telephones-stubby cylinders, no bigger than a dime in cross section, that looked like the smoking "snakes" that her brothers had always lit on Cinco de Mayo and the Fourth of July.

Witches used the magnets as part of the ritual that transformed them into animals, she learned, but piedra imanes were good things to have around the house to attract good luck and deflect spells. The magnets needed to be fed-by tossing them into dirt or sand so that they became bristly with iron filings-and it was a good idea to immerse them in the sea on this one Friday every year.

As she'd sat there and listened to the gossip and the jokes and the occasional scolding of one of the children for playing too close to the fire, Elizalde had lain back against a blanket over an ice chest, and from time to time had made such answers and remarks as she imagined her grandmother would have.

And she heard stories-about a man in Montebello who had to wear sungla.s.ses all the time, because one night he had left his eyes in a dish of water in his garage and taken a cat's eyes to see with while he made a midnight cocaine buy, and returned at dawn to find that the dog had eaten the eyes in the dish, leaving the man stuck with the vertical-pupiled, golden-irised cat's eyes for the rest of his life (Elizalde had commented that, in fairness, the cat should have been given the dog's eyes); about how raw eggs could be used to draw fevers, and how if the fevers had been very bad the egg would be hard-cooked afterward; about los duendes, dwarves who had once been angels too slow in trying to follow Lucifer to h.e.l.l, and so were locked out of Heaven and h.e.l.l both, and, with no longer any place in the universe, just wandered around the world enviously ruining human undertakings.

Elizalde had already heard stories about La Llorona-the Weeping Lady-the ghost of a woman who had thrown her children into a rushing flood to drown, and then repented it, and forever wandered along beaches and riverbanks at night, mourning their deaths and looking for living children to steal in replacement. As a child, Elizalde had heard the story as having occurred in San Juan Capistrano, with the children drowned in the San Juan Creek; but, in the years since, she had also heard it as having occurred in just about every town that had a large Hispanic community, with the children reputedly thrown into every body of water from the Rio Grande to the San Francis...o...b..y. There was even an Aztec G.o.ddess, Tonantzin, who was supposed to have gone weeping through Nahuatl villages and stealing infants from their cradles, leaving stone sacrificial knives where the children had lain.

These women that Elizalde had met tonight told a different version. Aboard the Queen Mary, they whispered, lived a bruja who had somehow lost all her children in the moment of her own birth, and then drowned her husband in the sea; and now she wandered weeping everywhere, night and day, eating los difuntos, ghosts, in an unending attempt to fill the void left by those losses. She had eaten so many that she was now very fat, and they called her La Llorona Atacado, the Stuffed Weeping Lady.

Elizalde wondered what character of folklore she herself might fit the role of. Surely there was the story of a girl baptized once conventionally with water and once with a fertilized egg, who endured a second birth (out of a milk can!) in a shower of coins, and who fled her home to wander along far rivers, in a foredoomed attempt to avoid the ghosts of the poor people who had come to her for help, and whom she had let die.

What would the girl in that story do next, having journeyed all the way back to her home village?

She looked again at her watch. Ten of eight.

She turned her plodding steps across the sand toward the steel stairs that led up the bluff to the parking lot. It was time to meet Peter Sullivan.

Sullivan had parked the van in a dark corner of the lot, and had walked away from it to smoke a cigarette in the spotlight of yellow glare at the foot of a light pole a couple of hundred feet away. Moths fluttered around the gla.s.s of the lamp a dozen feet above his head, flickering and winking in and out of the light like remote, silent meteors.

He had arrived at Bluff Park early, and had made a sandwich in the van with some groceries he'd bought after his flight from Venice; and though there were still three or four cans of beer in the little propane refrigerator, he had been drinking c.o.ke for the last couple of hours. He always felt that Sukie was in a sense somewhere nearby when he was drunk, and anyway he wanted to be alert if the Elizalde psychiatrist actually showed up.

He was watching the cars sweeping past on Ocean Boulevard, and wondering if he shouldn't just get in the van and head back to Solville-which, he had learned, was the name given by the other tenants to the apartment building he had moved into today.

Now that he was sober again-hungover, possibly-teaming up with this Elizalde woman didn't seem like such a good idea. If she was unbalanced, which it sounded like she had every right to be, she might just lead deLarava to him. How could he take her to Solville, expose that perfect blind spot to her, when she might be crazy? He remembered his first sight of her in Venice-crouched in the mud below the ca.n.a.l sidewalk-wearing two sets of clothes-talking into a storm drain-!

He took a last deep drag on the cigarette, then patted his jeans pocket for the van keys.

And Elizalde touched his shoulder.

Sullivan knew that he had felt the touch an instant before it had happened, and he knew it was her; but he stood without turning around, still staring out at the cars pa.s.sing on Ocean Boulevard, and he exhaled the cigarette smoke in a long, nearly whistling exhalation as a slow snowfall of dead moths spun down through the yellow light to patter almost inaudibly on the asphalt.

He dropped the cigarette among the lifeless little bodies, stepped on it, and then turned to face her, smiling wryly. "Hi," he said.

She sighed. "Hi. What do we do now?"

"Talk. But not out here where we might draw attention, like we did this afternoon. That's my van over in that corner."

"Those ... hands are in it?"

"Yeah. If they become my hands again, we'll know somebody's looking at us again."

They began walking across the asphalt away from the light, their swinging fingertips separated by three feet of chilly night air. Enough light reached the boxy old vehicle for it to be clearly visible.

To his own annoyance, Sullivan found himself wishing that he had washed it. "Somebody egged my van," he said gruffly. "Makes it look like I threw up out the window."

"While you were going backward real fast," she agreed, stopping to stare at the dried smear. "When and how did that happen?"

"Today." He led her around the front of the van to the side doors. "A guy, an old friend of mine, tried to turn me over to a woman who wants to eat my father's ghost; I think she wants to capture me, use me as a live lure. The old friend threw an egg at me as I was driving out of there." He unlocked the forward of the two side doors and swung it open. The light was still on inside-the battery could sustain a light or two for a full day without getting too weak to turn the motor over. "Beer and c.o.ke in the little fridge there, if you like."

Elizalde looked at him intently for a moment, then stepped lithely up into the van.

She leaned one hip on the counter around the sink, and Sullivan noticed to his embarra.s.sment that the bed was still extended, and unmade. I must not really have meant to meet her, he thought defensively.

"Sorry," he said. "I wasn't antic.i.p.ating company." And what is that supposed to mean? he asked himself. He threw her a helpless glance as he climbed up and pulled the door closed.

"You've got to wash off the egg," she said, and for a moment he thought she had meant on your face. Then he realized that she meant the egg on the outside of the driver's door.

"Is it important?"

"I think it's a marker," she said, "and more than a visible marker. Like a magical homing device. Raw eggs have all kinds of uses in magic. I should get out of this van right now, and walk away, mask or no mask. You should too, in a different direction."

Sullivan sat down on the bed. "I've got a place we can go where the psychic static will drown out the egg's signal. I'm pretty sure. Anyway, there's certainly a hose at this place, we can wash it off." She didn't seem crazy, and he was tired of spinning through his own circular thought-paths over and over again. "I think we should stick together."

"That's what Peter Sullivan thinks, huh." She stepped around him and sat down in the pa.s.senger seat, watching him over her shoulder. "Okay, for a while. But let's at least be a moving target." She looked forward, out through the windshield, and stiffened.

Sullivan stood up and hurried to the driver's seat with the key.

Outside in the parking lot, several people were standing on the asphalt a few yards away from the front b.u.mper, shifting awkwardly and peering. Sullivan knew that he and Elizalde had been alone in the parking lot a few moments earlier.

"Ghosts," he said shortly, starting the engine. "Fresh ones, lit up by our overlapping auras." He switched on the headlights, and the figures covered their pale faces with their lean, translucent hands.

He tapped the horn ring to give them a toot, and the figures began shuffling obediently to the side. One, a little girl, was moving more slowly than the rest, and when he had clanked the engine into gear he had to spin the steering wheel to angle around her.

"d.a.m.n little kid," he said, momentarily short of breath. The way clear at last, he accelerated toward the Ocean Boulevard driveway.

Elizalde pulled the seat belt across her shoulder and clicked the metal tongue of it into the slot by the console. "I saw her as an old woman," she said quietly.

He shrugged. "I guess each of 'em is all the ages they ever were. He or she was, I mean. Each one is-"

"I got you. Put on your seat belt."

"The place is right here," he said, pushing down the lever to signal for a left turn.

The first faucet Sullivan found, on the end of a foot-tall pipe standing in weeds at the corner of the Solville lot, just sucked air indefinitely when the tap was opened. He walked across the dark lot to another, ascertained that it worked, and then drove the van over and parked it. He carried a big sponge out to scrub the outside of the driver's door, and then had to go back inside for a can of Comet, but at last all the chips and strips of dried egg had been sluiced off the van, and he locked it up.

Elizalde carried a beer in from the van to Sullivan's apartment, and when she popped it open foam dripped on the red-painted wooden floor. The only light in the living room was from flame-shaped white bulbs in a yard-sale chandelier in the corner, and Sullivan berated himself for not having thought to buy a lamp somewhere today. At least there were electrical outlets-Sullivan noticed that Shadroe had put six of them in this room alone.

Sullivan had carried the plaster hands inside, and he laid them against the door as though they were holding it closed.

"This is your safe place?" Elizalde's voice echoed in the empty room. She twisted the rod on the Venetian blinds over the window until the slats were vertical, then walked to the far wall and ran her long fingers over a patched section where Shadroe had apparently once filled in a doorway. "What makes it safe?"

"The landlord's dead." Sullivan leaned against another wall and let himself slide down until he was sitting on the floor. "He walks around and talks, and he's in his original body and he's not ... you know, r.e.t.a.r.ded-he's not a ghost, it's still his actual self inside the head he carries around. I believe he's been dead for quite a while, and therefore he must know it, and be taking steps to keep from departing this ..."

"Vale of tears."

"To use the technical term," Sullivan agreed. "The place must be a terrible patch of static, psychically. The reason I think he's aware of his situation is that he's made it a terrible patch physically, too, a confusing ground-grid. All the original doors and windows seem to have been rearranged, and you can see from outside that the wiring is something out of Rube Goldberg. I can't wait to start plugging things in."

"Running water can be a betrayer too."

"And he's messed that up. I noticed earlier today that the toilet's hooked up to the hot water. I could probably make coffee in the tank of it."

"And have steamed buns in the morning," she said.

Her smile was slight, but it softened the lean plane of her jaw and warmed her haunted dark eyes.

"Hot cross buns," added Sullivan lamely. "Speaking of which, do you want to order a pizza or something?"

"You don't seem to have a phone," she said, nodding toward an empty jack box at the base of one wall. "And I don't think we should leave this ... compound again tonight. Do you have anything to eat in your van?"

"Makings of a sandwich or two," he said. "Canned soup. A bag of M&M's."

"I've missed California cuisine," she said.

"You were out of town, I gather," he said cautiously.

"Oklahoma most recently. I took a Greyhound bus back here, got in late Tuesday night. Drove through the Mojave Desert. Did you ever notice that there are a lot of ranches, out in the middle of the desert?"

"I wonder what they raise."

"Rocks, probably." She leaned against the wall across from him. " 'Look out, those big rocks can be mean.' And on cold nights they put gravel in incubators. And, 'd.a.m.n! Last night a fox got in and carried off a bunch of our fattest rocks!' "

" 'Early frost'll kill all these nice quartzes.' "

She actually laughed, two contralto syllables. "Don't get excited now," she said, "but your dead man's got the heat turned all the way up in here, and not a thermostat in sight." She unzipped the front of her jumpsuit and pulled down the shoulders, revealing a wrinkled Graceland sweatshirt; and when she pulled the jumpsuit down over her hips and sat down to bunch it down to her ankles, he saw that she was wearing faded blue jeans.

She began untying the laces of her sneakers, and Sullivan made himself look away from her long legs in the tight denim.

"I hope you don't trust everybody," he said.

Out of the top of her right sneaker she pulled a little leather cylinder with a white plastic nozzle at the top. It had a key ring at the base of it, and with the ring around her first finger she opened her hand to show it to him. "CN mace," she said with a chillier smile. "In case the soup is bland. I don't trust anybody ... very far."

Sullivan discarded the idea of taking offense. "Good." He straightened his legs out across the floor and hooked a finger through the loop at the corner of the f.a.n.n.y pack that was hanging on his left hip; then, not knowing whether he was being honest with her or showing off, he pulled on the loop-the zippers whirred open as the front of the canvas pack pulled away, exposing the grip of the .45 under the Velcro cross-straps.

Her face was blank, but she echoed, "Good."

She had taken her shoes and socks off and pulled the jumpsuit free of her ankles and tossed it aside. She stretched her legs, wiggling her toes in the air.

"But," Sullivan went on. He unsnapped the belt and pulled it from around his waist, and then slid the f.a.n.n.y pack across the floor toward the door. "I've decided to trust you."

She stared at him expressionlessly for a long moment, but then she spun the leather-sleeved cylinder away. It b.u.mped the heavy pack six feet away from where she sat, and she said softly, "All right. Are we partners, then? Do we shake on it?"

On his hands and knees he crossed the floor to her. They shook hands, and he crawled back to his wall and sat down again.

"Partners," he said.

"What do you know about ghosts?"

To business, he thought. "People eat them," he began at random. "They can be drawn out of walls or beds or empty air, made detectable, by playing period music and setting out props like movie posters; when they're excited that way, magnetic compa.s.ses will point to 'em, and the air around tends to get cold because they've a.s.sumed the energy out of it. They like candy and liquor, though they can't digest either one, and if they get waked up and start wandering around loose they mainly eat things like broken gla.s.s and dry twigs and rocks. They-"

"Produce from the Mojave ranches."

"Amber fields of stone," he agreed. "They're frail little wisps of smoke when they're new, or if they've been secluded and undisturbed. Unaroused, unexcited. The way you eat them is to inhale them. But if they wander around they begin to accrete actual stuff, physical ma.s.s, dirt and leaves and dog s.h.i.t and what have you-"

"What have you," she said, politely but with a shudder, "I insist."

"-and they grow into solid, human-looking things. They find old clothes, and they can talk well enough to panhandle change for liquor. They don't have new thoughts, and tend to go on and on about old grievances. A lot of the street lunatics you see-maybe most of 'em-are this kind of hardened ghost. They're no good to eat when they get like that. I worked for a woman who stayed young by finding and eating ghosts that had been preserved in the frail state, in old libraries and hotels and restaurants. She lives on water, aboard the Queen Mary-"

"I just heard about her! And she drowned her husband in the sea."

Sullivan crawled across the floor again and picked up Elizalde's beer. "I never heard of her having a husband. May I?"

Elizalde had one eyebrow c.o.c.ked. "Help yourself, partner. I just wanted a sip to cut the dust."

Sullivan took a deep swallow of the chilly beer. Then he sat down next to her, setting the can down on the floor between them.

"What do you know about seances?" he asked breathlessly. "Summoning specific ghosts?"

She picked up the can and finished the beer before answering him. "I know a turkey can hurt you if he hits you with a wing-you've got to have 'em bagged up tight in a guinea sack. Excuse me. With ghosts, you'd be smart to have some restraints in place, before you call them. They do come when you call, sometimes. Seances are dangerous-sometimes one of them is for real." She yawned, with another shudder at the end of it, and then she glanced at the two white hands braced against the door. Sullivan was thinking of the ghosts they'd seen in the parking lot a few minutes ago, and he guessed that she was too. "I'm not hungry," she said in a low voice.

He knew what she was thinking: Let's not open the door. "Me either," he said.

"You've got your leather jacket for a pillow, and I can ball up my jumpsuit. Let's go to sleep, and discuss this stuff when the sun's up, hmm? We can even ... leave the light on."

"Okay." He stood up and took off the jacket, but then crouched and folded it on the floor just a couple of feet from her, and stretched himself out parallel to the wall.

She had leaned toward the window to pick up the jumpsuit, and then she stared at him for several seconds. The gun and the mace spray were islands out in the middle of the floor.

At last she sighed and stretched out beside him, frowning uncertainly as she set the empty beer can on the floor between them. "You ... read the whole interview?" she said as she slowly lowered her head to the bunched-up jumpsuit. She was looking away from him, facing the wall. "The interview of me, in LA. Weekly?"

Sullivan remembered reading, I've reacted against the whole establishment I was raised in, there-I'm not Catholic, I don't drink, and I don't seem to be attracted much to men.

And he remembered Judy Nording, and Sukie, and his sonnet that had wound up so publicly in the trash. I suppose I've reacted too, he thought. "Yes," he said gently.