The Afterlife (8 page)

"It ain't that bad here," I said, though I had to admit the neighborhood was dilapidated. I climbed the steps and walked through the wall and then back out.

Wow,
Crystal said through her expression. Her snobbery disappeared.

I held up the stump of my arm, beckoning her to follow.

She floated up the steps and, by my side, entered the den of nickel-and-dime thieves.

F
AUSTO WASN'T
home, and neither was my punk killer in yellow shoes. I could live without either of them, and so could all of Fresno. Truth is, I had the suspicion that Fausto didn't really live in there, but considered the run-down place a warehouse for the stuff he ripped off. Perfect—an export business that would leave the neighborhood children crying. I could change that.

I had learned a thing or two about my body. When I touched the hinges of the front door with the stubs of my arms, the coldness of death made the hinges snap. I was providing the bikes with an escape route, though I knew they were not going to start pedaling on their own.
¡Imposible!
But I was acquainted with run-down neighborhoods. When a door was open, the street kids, spitting sunflower seed shells, would climb the steps and holler, "Hey!" maybe three times. If there was no answer, they would enter like bugs, antennas tuned to the sound of someone home. But unlike ants that carry away crumbs, these kids, praying to the Saint of Breaking and Entering, would tiptoe in like ninjas and take what pleased them.

Straddling a lowrider bicycle, Crystal watched me freeze the hinges. Together we breathed on the door until it collapsed at an angle—what was death but a cold wind, after all? She watched while biting the ends of her hair and clapped as the door fell when a draft pushed against it. The things that go knock in the night went unnoticed in this
barrio.
Not even the dogs barked.

The clock on the wall read 2:45. We were wide awake in the heart of the night. The moon had already carried itself westward and, in time, the night would shed its darkness. By five o'clock the eastern horizon would be rubbed with the pink of a new day. Fausto, a night thief, would not return until the afternoon. Or maybe not at all. He could be sleeping with some
chica
who didn't know better.

"Let's go," I told Crystal.

Crystal got off the bicycle and approached me. She grimaced at me as if I didn't make any sense. "What do you mean?"

"I have to go home," I said. Jokingly, I asked, "You want to meet my mom?"

The words
home
and
mom
had the strands of hair falling from her mouth. As we left the house and bounced down the front steps, I recognized the longing inside her. She wanted to go home herself and to say good-bye to her parents.

Still, I asked, "What are you thinking?"

"Nothing," she answered.

Nothing? The way I figured, the mind was always swirling one thought or another. It was impossible not to think something, even in sleep. But in sleep they called your thoughts dreams—or nightmares.

"Come on," I begged as I drew close to her. "Tell me."

Crystal was unafraid of the stumps of my arms. She gripped them and murmured something about disappointing her parents. About what, though? I examined her face for a clue, but found none. "What are you thinking?" I probed.

"Just something," she answered. She nervously undid the top button of her blouse.

I was aware that she was picturing her family, mom and dad, and maybe her bedroom, and her brothers and sisters, if she had any. That was what I had pictured on the roof of Club Estrella—home with Mom and Dad in front of the television. I gritted my teeth as I remembered something else.
Dawg,
I thought. I kept a three-pack of condoms under my mattress, and none of them ever got used! In a week or so, my mom would come in and straighten up my bed and discover that box. I could see her rattling it against her ear, then start crying as she realizes that she would never have grandchildren.

Crystal lowered her face. Her beauty had me pressing my body to hers. I hugged her, and she hugged me back. Her face rested against my neck. God, how come I hadn't met her when I was living?

"I need to go back home," she said, and pushed me away gently. Her eyes had a sorrowful look that spread to me. I felt my own sorrow, which deepened when I saw that my calves were vanishing. For me, time was running out.

She moved away from me and stood in the street. She faced south toward Selma, and I could tell that she had much to say to her parents. But she didn't have the words to tell them. She was dead and a ghost, and her parents, for all I knew, were unaware of her death. She had been dead only a few hours. Perhaps her body hadn't been found yet.

Crystal,
I beckoned with my eyes. Boldly, I asked, "How did you die?"

"Pills," she answered, after she searched my face for trust. I suppose she found it in my eyes. She bit her lower lip and punished it really hard because when she let go I could see the teeth marks in her lip.

Wind whipped around her, and her long hair flowed. Her skirt also flapped like wings.

A dude,
I figured. A dude was involved. Why else would she kill herself? I pried and asked, "What was his name?"

She turned and started walking up the street. She intended to get back home.

I was torn whether to go back to my family or go with Crystal. She began running without a good-bye. Pitifully, I swallowed my loneliness. I couldn't stand losing her, and, nearly crying because I wasn't sure if I would be able to make it back to Fresno before disappearing altogether, I chased after her.

"Crystal," I yelled, and joked, "Let's do breakfast in Selma!" The town had no more than ten thousand people, and maybe two thousand cows and an equal number of chickens and pigs. In fact, in Selma there was every chance that your best friend was a fly-speckled pig that you fed daily from a dented pail.

I was soon running at her side, me, a perennial third-place long-distance runner. We galloped in time, left leg and then right, twin gazelles leaping in the darkness of night. I was keeping up, stride for stride, and observing the quiet street where I imagined poor families sawing logs of sleep. I imagined the warm beds and the blankets rising on each snore. I imagined a mother stumbling from bed as her baby began to kick and cry.

Crystal smiled at me, and I had to smile, though there was no happiness in my heart. I was no longer thinking of myself but of Crystal—her body lay somewhere in Fresno, maybe unclaimed because it had yet to be discovered. Right then, I poked her shoulder with the stump of my arm and got her to slow to a walk.

"Crystal," I said. "I've got to ask something."

She pulled her hair from her eyes, which were luminous in the night.

"Where did you die?"

"Don't ask," she whimpered. When her eyes narrowed, some of their brightness disappeared.

"I got to," I answered. I had to know whether her body was found, or if some stray dog was circling it. She could be in a ditch, the passenger side of a parked car, or half-clothed in a shallow grave. She was dead, I realized, but I wanted to protect her body. Maybe I could be the first to show my respect, like I'd seen on TV People will put teddy bears, flowers, and balloons where a friend got killed.

"Why?" she asked, rocking on her heels because I was close enough to kiss her. I thought of making that kind of move, but my question was serious. Just where was she—her body? We stood like that,
eyes level on each others. Just then a car turned onto the street and both of us watched it approach, picking up speed. Crystal took my arm, squeezed her eyes shut, and we let the car pass through us.

"That's a funny feeling," she commented as she turned and watched the car continue down the street, its brake lights a sinful red as the car turned another corner. The tires squealed, but just barely.

I continued to probe. "Come on, girl, where?" I repeated. "Where did it happen?"

She pointed vaguely. "In my car."

"And where's your car?" I had to brace myself because the wind was picking up. Crystal, however, a new ghost, blew halfway down the street. I flew to her and asked again.

"At Roeding Park," she confided. She faced southward, her hair blowing and her skirt flapping, revealing thighs that were muscled from running.

Of course, I knew the park. Teenagers like us shared our loneliness in that park, where at night peacocks howled like witches. I had been one of those teenagers, me and my
carnal
Angel, both of us sitting on top of benches as we took turns complaining about life, which, for us, was mainly school, maybe parents if they were jacking us up about our laziness. I recalled the rush of wind through the eucalyptus and how that mighty tree dropped leaves.
We tore those leaves like movie tickets, leaf after leaf that kept our hands busy. We went there to talk about school and about our parents and how they didn't know us because they were always working. What was Dad anyhow except a man who worked and came home to watch television? And Mom? A gossiper whose mouth was a bud of lines from dunking donuts into creamy coffee and talking too much. How I was wrong. That's just how parents were. My mom had warned me not to go to Club Estrella, while Dad, his hand on the remote control, offered up only his hangdog eyes.

Soon we were entering Roeding Park from Olive Street. An unseen peacock howled.

"Spooky," I remarked.

Crystal had to laugh. "Like us, huh?" She laughed with a hand on her belly. "We're ghosts!"

The wind rattled the eucalyptus and bent the thinnest branches. Leaves fluttered in the dark as they fell. Somewhere a swing squeaked. The door of a utility shed banged like a hammer. Though it was dark and the homeless were sleeping on cardboard the length of coffins, we weren't scared. The ducks weren't either. Some were quacking and waddling around, though they should have been asleep at the edges of their muddy pond. In a few hours, the ducks would be poking their bills into their feathery shoulders and riding the mossy water in search of food.

We flowed over the wet lawn and, for the fun of it, rode a merry-go-round that was pushed by the wind. Crystal's hair flowed and her face was a blossom of happiness. I loved her. I wanted to say as much, but what good would it do? A lot, for me at least. But the time was not right; after all, we were in search of the place where she had died, for her body.

We flew from that merry-go-round across the park. We stopped and hovered near a homeless man propped against a tree, shivering. A dirty blanket covered him up to his throat.

"What's wrong with him?" Crystal asked, worried.

The man was sick with fever and more than sick: He was a homeless guy who was dying.

"He's dying," I answered.

I stepped back, scared. His ghost was starting to peel away from his body. It started to rise, but I quickly got down on my knees and applied my stumps to cool the man's fever.
Don't die,
I begged.
Please don't die.
I touched his face with my stumps, pulled them away, and applied them again.

I had never seen anyone die before, and I didn't want to start right then. I applied my cool ghostliness to his forehead. The man was funky smelling, his teeth nearly orange as Cheetos. I noticed that a part of his earlobe was gone. The man, it seemed, had had a rough life.

I glanced over my shoulder. Crystal was biting the ends of her hair, a bad habit. Leaves were falling through her body. That seemed like a habit, too—things passing through us because we were ghosts with the weight of smoke.

"Is he going to be okay?" Crystal asked.

Okay?
I wondered.
Probably not. What man parks his body against a tree at night?

Slowly the ghost that he was giving up receded back into his body. He moaned with relief and tossed his head side to side. His shivering began to lessen.

I stood up and flowed to Crystal, and together we watched the man sleep, his fever having broken. His breathing was even, and when he cranked out a nasty snore, we had to laugh. He was sick, we knew, but in the morning he would have to figure out whether to drag himself to a clinic or just lie against the tree and wait for his ghost—his afterlife—to resurface and rise from his body. It was up to him.

"Let's go," I suggested. "I don't know what else to do."

It was still dark among the trees, whose tops were thrashing about, but I could tell that the sky was becoming pale in the east. Crystal led me through the park, confused about where she had parked her car. Then we found it by the tennis courts. Beads of dew frosted the front window. We approached slowly. Crystal lowered her head. If she could have produced tears, she would have dampened the lawn with her sadness.

The police hadn't yet found her car or her body.

"I can't look," Crystal cried. She spun away and walked inside a eucalyptus tree, its thickness absorbing her.

I was full of distress, too. I considered walking inside the same tree to see if we fit, one girl and one boy. Instead, I sat on top of a bench and remembered when I was little and how Eddie and I used to play "pretend dead." Shot by imaginary gangsters, we would topple on the grass and see who looked more dead than the other—I had my little trick of keeping my eyes open and staring at the sky motionless. And Eddie? I couldn't do what he did. He would let flies crawl on his face. Once, a mosquito even landed on his throat and starting pumping away. Did Eddie slap that vampire of insects into a bloody mess?
Chale!
No way.

Finally, Crystal emerged from the tree. She pulled her hair behind her ear. We held and rocked each other as if we were slow dancing. In fact, we might have been slow dancing to some rhythm inside our head. In that position, I asked her: "Why did you kill yourself? You're so beautiful."

"You think so?" she asked, her head turned slightly away. She doubted her own natural beauty.

I kissed her neck and breathed in her ear. "Are you kidding?"

She lowered her face into my shoulder, a new sensation for me, one that made my back and shoulders quiver. God, a young woman crying into my shoulder. Most of the ones I met wouldn't let me hold their hand, let alone share with me their grief. But this was so different. I hugged her tenderly, and glanced over her shoulder at the car, where the Crystal that most of the world knew was slumped. I realized I didn't want to see her that way. At the moment, I didn't care how she died. The cops, though, would want to know everything. And they would. It was dark now, but once the eyelid of night rose on a new day, some early-morning jogger would come across her body. The one in the car, not the one leaning into my shoulders.