The Afterlife (11 page)

We drifted toward the road.

"I went up to the car," he continued, "and she was crying. She had taken something." He became silent and closed his eyes to mutter a prayer. With his eyes closed, he added, "I think she regretted what she had done, but there was nothing she could do, or I could do. The stuff was in her system."

I envisioned Crystal in the car and the pills she had gulped like breath mints. Maybe she was listening to music as she went under. Maybe she was holding a rosary or a photo of her family. I considered telling this newly dead man, this ghost, that I loved her. But I remained quiet and shut my eyes for a short prayer.

"Yeah, the cops came and they took her away and then they saw me right there." He pointed to the tree where he had rested in fever. "Saved the cops the trouble of coming back and picking me up. The city ought to give me an award!" He laughed and did a little dance. The guy, it seemed, was what my dad would call a character.

When a peacock cried a haunting scream, Robert screamed and scampered inside the tree he was standing next to.

"Robert!" I called. "That bird ain't gonna hurt you. Come on out!"

He behaved himself and came out, looking nervously about for the peacock. "Man, it's weird that we can go through things."

"You're a ghost," I told him. "You're like smoke, but better than smoke. You can go into anything you want."

"Can I fly?" He stretched out his arms and flapped them as if I didn't understand his question.

"Yeah, but you don't go very fast."

He laughed, and wagged a threatening finger at the peacock and made a chopping motion with his hand. He could have whacked and whacked, but his efforts would have been meaningless. His powerless hand had the weight of air. "So what goes?"

I didn't understand.

"We're dead, and now what?" he asked. He was examining the stumps of my arms and my legs that were almost all gone. The guy was not discreet. "You look like someone chopped part of you off. Is that how you died?"

I shook my head. "Someone stabbed me."

Robert pondered my murder for a moment, a hand smoothing his hair. "Someone stabbed me, too." He explained that it was over what mattered most to him—a bottle of wine.

"And you lived?" I asked.

"Oh, yeah. He stabbed me in the shoulder—the dummy missed my throat—and I hit him with a brick that dropped him pretty good. I finished my drink all by myself."

So here was my new companion. I repeated my name again when he asked it, and informed him that I had been a ghost for two days, almost three. I grew fearful. I remembered that I didn't have much time before I would disappear altogether, just vanish. I still wanted to tell my mom and dad that I loved them, to see Angel and Eddie, the four Js, maybe Rachel. I started to walk away.

"Where you going?" Robert asked.

"Home."

"Home," he repeated softly. He smacked his lips as if he could taste home.

His longing was familiar. Crystal suffered from that longing, and I had suffered it, too. Home is what ghosts seek out after they die—it was just natural.

"But I don't know what home is," he confessed. He briefed me on the years he'd spent at three or four foster homes, and he didn't care for any of them, though at one home the foster mother cooked a nice chicken dinner every Friday. He smacked his lips as if he were tasting it again.

When I asked if he had been born in Fresno, he answered, nearly insulted, "Yeah, of course." As if Fresno was the only place to be born.

We left the park and immediately got onto a bus that was so bright we had to shade our eyes. Though we were the only passengers, we took a seat in the back where candy wrappers and potato chip bags gathered. It was in the light of that moving bus that Robert got another eyeful of me.

"You really do got no legs," he said sorrowfully. "Or arms." He shook his head and bit his lower lip. He went into himself, his face dark in spite of the light.

"I'm disappearing," I said without explanation.

Robert bowed his head. He felt terrible for me. "God, you were only a young man. Who killed you?"

"Some dude," I answered. I imagined a pair of yellow shoes. I recalled how he wiped his blade on my shirt and hissed in my ear, "What did you say to me,
cabrón?
"

"I'm really sorry," Robert cooed. He put an arm around my shoulder.

"Bad luck," I said, snuggling up to him because he needed friendship more than me. It had probably been years since anyone sat close to him.

"I got stabbed," he said, "and I lived."

"You told me already."

His eyes rolled in their sockets. "Oh, yeah, I did, didn't I?" Even as a ghost his memory was ruined from drinking cheap stuff. "Hey, did I tell you that I once slept on a bus like this for twelve hours straight?"

I shook my head.

"Yeah, I paid once and got to ride the bus all day. It was raining. I guess the bus driver felt sorry for me."

As the bus rolled down the street, occasionally hitting a pothole, I had to wonder about what I called my bad luck. How was it that some dudes got stabbed and shot and lived? How did the Almighty decide? If I had stayed home on Friday night, I would be with Angel right now at the end of a glorious Sunday. We would be grass-stained from neighborhood football, and our worst wounds would be from getting our butts whipped, our pride dented. Our Sunday football game would have been dinner conversation since our families—he at his place, me at mine—liked to eat as a family on Sunday evenings.

The bus braked and sighed. I watched a dude swagger onto the bus, his pants all
huango,
his eyes narrow, sunflower seed shells spraying from his mouth. It was Yellow Shoes!

"Get back here!" the bus driver bellowed. His eyes were raised to the rearview mirror. If he was married and had a son, I guaranteed that son would perk up when his dad spoke.

"What you want?" Yellow Shoes bawled without respect.

"For you to drop some coins into this thing." The driver, a black man with a belt of fat around his middle, wasn't someone to play with. He pounded a giant fist on the meter that gobbled coins and dollar bills. The bus didn't get about on courtesy. No, it ran on money, hard-earned or stolen. I was sure the coins that Yellow Shoes let fall from his tattooed fingers were stolen.

At first, I didn't say anything to Robert, who was staring out the window at two men carrying a couch down the sidewalk—the couch was either stolen or bought at a yard sale. Instead, I slid out of my seat and approached Yellow Shoes, who had fit headphones over his oily ears.

"You're a punk," I growled. I remembered that he and I shared the same name. I suddenly hated my name—Chuy—and hated the music that was coming out of his headphones. The beat was loud and stupid.

Alert, Robert got up and approached us. He had lived on the street for years and was a better judge of character than most people. He gave Yellow Shoes a mean look. "Is he the one?"

I nodded my head.

"Does he still have the knife on him?"

"Nah, he tossed it."

The bus rolled on, its springs squeaky over the rough road.

"So what powers do we got?" Robert asked. "What do you mean?"

"Can we hurt him? Jack him up?" He hooked a thumb at Yellow Shoes.

Hurt him?
I hadn't thought of revenge and, actually was trying to keep Eddie, my
primo,
from seeking revenge. Now this man whom I had saved wanted to do away with Yellow Shoes.

"Nah, we can't do anything," I answered. I didn't want to let on that we ghosts could cause mayhem with the living.

"What an ugly face!" Robert snarled.

"Yeah,
muy
ugly."

We returned to our seat. The bus stopped and two kids with skateboards hopped on, laughing. They were dirty but good kids, like Angel and me at one time. Their elbows and knees were bloody from falling, their palms black with oily grime from gripping the bottoms of their boards.

"What you lookin' at, white boy?" Yellow Shoes taunted. He pulled the headphones from his ears. His rat face twitched.

The boys' only response was to backtrack and sit closer to the driver.

"I said, what you lookin' at?" Yellow Shoes hollered.

The kids, skateboards pressed between their knees, looked straight ahead. They took a sudden interest in the car the bus trailed.

"I hate that kid," Robert growled. He turned to me. "He killed you and you don't want to do anything about it?" Robert wagged his head in disgust that could have been directed either at me or at Yellow Shoes. "In my time—"

I cut him off. "I don't want to talk about it." I fumed as I thought of Fausto, bike thief and thug of all thugs. I had a great, painful urge to erase him and Yellow Shoes from the face of our dirty little planet. I boiled with a sudden hatred.

The bus rolled for a mile, but no one else boarded. In Fresno, everyone owned a car. If you didn't, you were elderly, young, disabled, or truly poor.

Robert nudged me. "You sure you never heard of Robert Montgomery? He was a famous actor. Think he won an Oscar, the whole enchilada."

"Nah, never heard of him."

"That's good then," Robert said. "Because now you can just remember me, okay?"

I was confused.

Robert rose from our seat, sidled up to Yellow Shoes, and slowly stepped into my killer's skin, as if he were slipping into one of those black diving suits. Robert's head stuck out of Yellow Shoes's body, two heads on a single set of shoulders.

"I'm going to stir up this little fool," Robert said. He offered up a sorrowful good-bye with a wink of an eye. "Remember me. See you on the other side."

The other side,
I wondered.
What is on the other side?

Robert disappeared into Yellow Shoes's body, not unlike how he stepped inside the tree. Yellow Shoes quivered, juiced up by the sudden appearance of another soul inside him. He looked sick, scared. A sunflower seed shell fell from his lips. He let the bag of sunflower seeds spill to the floor. "Bus driver, I don't feel good!" Yellow Shoes threw his head into the window. The thud left a greasy smear on the glass. He thrashed about. His legs fanned in and out.

This commotion brought the bus driver's eyes to the rearview mirror.

Yellow Shoes stood up, then sat back down. His teeth chattered like castanets. His knees went up and down like pistons. I thought of the movie
The Exorcist.
Was his head going to twist and spray vomit? At the thought, I got up and jumped from the bus as it was moving. I didn't want to see any more. I rolled twice and righted myself in front of a paint store with graffiti on the front. I had never been a hero, though I can say that I saved a man who shared a name with an actor I had never heard of. Then again, I never heard of ghosts who were willing to crawl into another body. Especially a killer's body.

"Dawg," I muttered.

The bus braked and the two kids jumped off the bus, their skateboards hitting the pavement. They were sailing from trouble on a Sunday evening when the sky was boiling with rain clouds.

EDDIE'S APARTMENT
. A black suit was laid out like a shadow on his couch. It was from the Salvation Army, I noticed by the tag attached to the sleeve, but the white shirt was new and still in its package. A pair of shoes that needed polishing lay at the cuffs of the pants. All that was needed was Eddie's body to fill those clothes with the warmth of his flesh. I wondered what kind of suit my mom got me. A black one like Eddie's? Or was she going to use the brown one I bought last year for the fall dance?

I sat on the couch and swallowed my fear. It tasted like wet earth. When was I going to be buried? Monday? Tuesday? I yearned to make my rounds once more in Fresno and beg—but how?—that my mother leave Eddie alone. Why should he seek revenge?

The telephone began to ring. I got up and found it in the kitchen sitting next to a toaster. His machine kicked in: "This is Eddie. You know what to do, man."
Beep.
Then my mother's voice in a whisper: "Eddie, you can find him,
mi'jo.
Please find him. I have more bullets if you need more. I'll see you at the rosary in a little bit." There was the sound of a television in the background. Then the final prodding: "
Mi'jo,
he loved you a lot. He would do it for you."

My mom's voice was spooky and her message even scarier. I imagined her completing this call and shuffling back to her couch, where she would pick up her knitting needles.
Maybe she was knitting a ski mask for Eddie,
I mused. No telling who's who in that getup.

I turned and jumped when I spied the towel my mom used to carry the gun. The gun wasn't there, though.

"Mom!" I scolded. "Why get Eddie involved?"

I imagined the gun cradled in the pouch of Eddie's Fresno State Bulldog sweatshirt. I imagined the bullets oily and merciless in their drive to hurt someone.

Next to the towel lay a newspaper article reporting my murder. The suspect, the article said, was Hispanic, early twenties, and lean, with a shaved head. It could have been anyone, even me, and this frightened me. At that moment, Eddie could be tracking down my killer on such vague details. I figured that he could shoot in the sky and the bullet that came down would most likely hit an unlucky soul who fit the description.

The article also announced my rosary at Everlasting Light Mortuary. My stomach sank because the rosary was scheduled for 6:00, and it was 5:15, according to the clock on the wall. I was out of the apartment, flying. But the wind sent me into streets and alleys I didn't want to go down. I tightened my stomach and pushed with all my might. I got there "Chicano time," late.

The Everlasting Light Mortuary didn't appear to live up to its name. The corners of the building were hammered open in search of termites.
Dawg,
I thought,
I'm going to be buried in a coffin eaten by termites?
I hoped that my mom and dad had ordered a metal casket. But I had nothing to joke about when I walked through the termite-infested walls and saw my family and friends, a few lingering around the coffin where my body lay. Candles sputtered, incense hung in the air. Organ music droned out of a cracked speaker. The termites got to snack on the woofers, too.