by Carter
“I’m sorry you feel that way.”
“It’s not just me. Half the people here, they completely ignore.”
“Half the people here they can’t even see. They’re ghosts.”
“Don’t be profane!” she snapped.
“Sorry.”
“You know how I hate it when you use that language.”
“And what language would that be, Mom?”
“Don’t mouth off to me, Vincent. I may be old, but I can still put you over my knee.”
“I have no doubt of that, Mom.”
“But anyway, you’re here now, I guess that’s what matters. It won’t take us long to pack our things. Is that woman you married in the car, or is she back at your place? Maybe she could make us a nice dinner for once. I’ve never met a woman who was a worse cook. It’s no wonder that you’re so thin. The suitcases are under the bed.”
I sighed. I knew this conversation was going to happen, it always did, but that didn’t make it any less unpleasant. Through our entire exchange, Dad stared at his television. In the early days of his time at Mistwood, I felt bad talking as if he wasn’t in the room, and consciously tried to avoid it, but I eventually gave up on the idea. Mom would seldom, if ever, leave his side, so if I wanted to talk to her about him, I had to do so in his presence.
“I just came for a visit,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“You know the two of you can’t come live with me.”
Her shocked expression seemed so authentic, I could almost believe she wasn’t acting. She flapped her mouth open and closed a few times, those twig fingers of hers fluttering to her mouth, her eyes even darker than usual.
“Well!” she said. “And after you promised us and everything.”
“I never promised.”
“Your father is going to be very disappointed. He’s been looking forward to coming to live with you for a very long time.”
“Mom—”
“Some way to show gratitude to the parents who raised you. Dump them off in a Siberian prison and let them rot.”
“This is hardly Siberia. They even have indoor plumbing. And if you’re very good, you can watch Wheel of Fortune on the big-screen TV.”
“Don’t make jokes with me, young man! Your father always took that attitude with me, too, and I could never stand it.”
“It was probably in self-defense.”
“What? What is that supposed to mean? This isn’t like you, all this coldness. Where’s my nice little Vincent?” Her voice changed instantly from shrill to a soothing purr. She circled around her chair and brought her hand to my face as if to pat it, lowering it only at the last moment. “My little boy. That woman has corrupted you, hasn’t she?”
“Mom—”
“You’d never act like this on your own. I know she hates us.”
“Billie doesn’t hate you.”
“Oh, yes she does. She’s told me so before. She’s said it right to my face.”
“She’s done no such thing.”
“Are you calling your mother a liar? And who names their child Billie, anyway? It’s a white-trash name, what somebody names a tramp.”
“Careful, Mom.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said it. Sometimes I just speak the truth without thinking about people’s feelings. It’s my flaw. I know. But don’t worry about her right now. Worry about your parents, that’s all I’m asking.” Her tone turned pleading, desperate. We were right on schedule. “We’re your flesh and blood. We belong with you. Don’t leave us in this prison any longer. Oh, Myron, if you could only—”
“Oh, it’s Myron now, is it?”
“I just—I just want what’s best for your father.”
“Me too,” I said.
“Can’t we talk about this?”
“No.”
“All the other people here make fun of him behind his back. If you could only see it.”
“I have a hard time believing that, Mom.”
“It’s true! One time, I even—”
“Mom, Dad has to stay here.”
“But—”
“He has to. I can’t take care of him around the clock. And much as you’d like to think you can, you know you can’t either.”
Pink blossomed in her cheeks. “Well! I’ve been taking care of him all my life. Why would you think—”
“Because you’re dead, Mom.”
“How dare—”
“You’re a ghost.”
“I’m no such—”
“You are,” I said sternly. “You know you are. And as much as he leans on you, he still needs the help of living people. I’ve got to make a living, so who do you propose stays with him all day?”
She glared at me with enough intensity to melt what was left of the planetary ice cap. Behind those flaring eyes of hers, I could see her mind racing, trying to come up with some new line of attack that would wear me down. Instead of waiting, I bent down in front of Dad so I was directly in his line of sight.
It took a few seconds, but he blinked a couple times and focused on me.
“Oh, hello!” he said.
“It’s me Myron, Dad.”
“Myron … I, uh … Well, I know that!”
“I know you do, Dad. I’m just reminding you. I just wanted to say hello and make sure you’re doing well. You doing okay?”
“Like a can of peaches, son,” he said, and grinned.
It was one of his oldies, an expression I hadn’t heard from him in a long time, and him saying it along with my name, his eyes as alive and full of intelligence as I’d seen them in a long time, was enough to get me to choke up. I patted him on the shoulder, then, impulsively, leaned in and kissed him on the forehead. That wasn’t something he would have permitted in the old days, not being a man comfortable in the realm of physical affection, and he probably wouldn’t have allowed it if he’d been his full self now, but what the hell. These weren’t the old days.
When I turned to Mom, I saw a new visitor had entered the room—a black cat with a white starburst over his left eye. He sat primly by the door, staring at me.
“Well, hello little friend,” I said to him. “What’s your name?”
Mom wrinkled her nose. Since the skin on her face didn’t generally move much, this wrinkling must have taken enormous effort. “Oh, that horrible beast is back. I keep telling them it’s carrying germs all over the facility, but no one listens. It just showed up one day like a rat out of the rain and people let it stay. Terrible. Some people even feed it scraps while they’re eating!”
While she spoke, the cat turned its attention from me to her—or at least it certainly seemed it did.
“Well, that’s funny,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“That cat … There, it’s doing it again. It’s looking from me to you. It’s almost like it sees you.”
“Well, why wouldn’t the little vermin see me? I’m standing here, aren’t I?”
I didn’t have the heart to explain to Mom what I’m sure she already knew: Animals didn’t see ghosts. Despite all the folklore, that included cats. In the past five years, I’d had plenty of opportunities to witness animals around ghosts, even on zoos and farms, and not once did they seem to react to anything ghosts did—even when ghosts walked right through them.
Animals also didn’t seem to have ghosts of their own, a troubling fact that I couldn’t quite understand. Being a big believer in evolution, I couldn’t see why humans deserved to exist beyond death when primates, cats, or even earthworms didn’t, but that was the world I lived in. But I’d been told that perhaps there were animal ghosts. We just couldn’t see them.
Of course, I didn’t know for a fact that this cat was real. Maybe I was witnessing a cat ghost.
“Does it have a name?” I asked.
“Heavens,” Mom said, “I don’t know what they call that thing. Oh, wait, yes I do. They call it Patch.”
“Well, that’s fitting,” I said
. I squatted on the floor on front of it, extending my hand. “Come here, Patch. Here, kitty. Come on, kitty.”
Patch eyed me curiously for a moment, then strutted forward. He was a slender but muscular, body rippling under his fine coat of fur, a little panther. His patch made me think of a mask someone might wear to a masquerade ball. Before reaching me, however, he veered around Mom’s legs, his black tail appearing to curl around her calf. Mom yelped and danced away, a little jig that got me to laugh.
When Patch pushed up against my palm, he was as warm and real as any cat could be. I let out the breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.
“Good kitty,” I said.
He started purring immediately.
Chapter 10
It was supposed to be a routine stop, the questioning of a distant relative of one Larry Elton, our beer-for-brains murder suspect. Larry was wanted in a two a.m. fight at a dive bar on MLK Boulevard, a fight that had left Larry’s co-worker and fellow Blazers fan, Mario Balamo, unconscious and bleeding from the ear in the alley behind the bar. Three witnesses pegged Larry as the assailant, apparently in a dustup over who was the best player to ever suit up for the Blazers. Larry insisted it was Bill Walton, Mario went with Clyde Drexler, and the next thing everybody knew the two were arguing it out with their fists.
Unfortunately for Larry, Mario died on the way to the hospital from internal bleeding in his brain. Rather than turn himself over to the police, Larry had also chosen to run, which was why Alesha and I were involved. It wasn’t exactly an exciting case, but that also meant it was a good one for my first day back on the force after a seven-month absence.
It was nearly noon and my stomach was grumbling. The apartment complex where the cousin lived was an ugly house of cards a half a mile from PDX, chipping brown paint on walls that looked like they might crumble at any moment. A mini-mart was on one side, an abandoned auto shop on the other. A jumbo jet on a landing approach screeched overhead. The only pretty things in the neighborhood were the oaks lining the street, their leaves showing the first signs of yellow and crimson.
Alesha parked the cruiser at the curb and killed the engine, mercifully also putting her music out of its misery. The street was filled with people, some sitting outside the apartments, some wandering the cracked sidewalks, so many people for this part of town and this time of day on a Tuesday that I knew most of them had to be ghosts. But which ones? Two heavily tattooed white skinheads were playing catch with what I thought was an odd-shaped ball, until I realized that the reason the ball was odd-shaped was that it wasn’t a ball at all.
It was a baby.
“You okay?” Alesha asked.
I stared, transfixed, at the baby—pink and healthy, dressed only in a cloth diaper. The arms and legs were moving, which meant it wasn’t a doll. That meant the baby was a ghost, too. Or at least I hoped so. Since Alesha wasn’t jumping out of the car to do something about it, I was probably right.
The hunger pains in my stomach were replaced with a queasy nausea. Why were all the weird ones out today? Most of the time, I’d learned, ghosts were just as boring as the living, but every now and then the freaky ones showed up to really mess with me.
“Myron?” Alesha pressed.
“What? Yeah, I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
“I’m fine, I’m fine!” I insisted.
“You can wait in the car,” she said. “It’s no big deal. It’ll just take two seconds, then we can get some lunch.”
“I’m not going wait in the fucking car. Let’s go.”
I got out of the car before she could protest. The air was crisp but warm, a staple of fall days in the Willamette Valley, usually my favorite time of year. If there weren’t so many damn ghosts everywhere, I might have been able to even enjoy it. Making matters worse, the blood rushed to my head, and I had to steady myself with a hand on the warm hood.
“You sure you’re okay?” Alesha asked. “Don’t play tough guy with me, Myron. I’m your partner. Be honest. I’m not going to tattle on you to the shrink or anything.”
A woman with a big red perm and wearing seventies bell-bottoms was pushing a boy on a tricycle right toward me, no intention of swerving. I managed to avoid her at the last second, giving her a long hard stare as she passed. She noticed my stare and shrieked, pushing the boy so fast down the weedy sidewalk that the pedals thudded repeatedly against his calves, prompting him to cry. The lady glanced back at me repeatedly, her face panic-stricken. Most ghosts didn’t like to walk right through the living, but some either didn’t care or actually liked doing it for kicks. Try as I might, I just couldn’t let them pass through me if I had a choice in the matter.
“Myron?” Billie said.
“I’m fine,” I said.
Many of the other ghosts, including the two playing catch with the baby, were now looking at me. Dozens of ghosts. It did make it more obvious which of the people were living and which weren’t, since the living were still mostly ignoring me, and there were only a handful of them at that. But I shouldn’t have made eye contact. It was one of the first things I’d learned, that if I didn’t make contact, most of them would go on ignoring me. Show them that I could see them and anything could happen. Sometimes very bad things.
“Myron—”
“Let’s go,” I said.
Studiously avoiding eye contact with anyone living or dead, my head still spinning, I lead the way up the sidewalk to the driveway that led to the inner parking lot. The two skinheads followed, one of them with the baby under his arm as if it were a football. I picked up my pace.
“Hey,” Alesha said, “what’s the rush?”
The unit I was looking for was on the second floor, toward the back. In one of the empty parking spaces, a naked and bloated old man was sprawled on his back, not moving. I waited to see if Alesha would notice him, but she didn’t. Another airplane, much louder, rumbled toward the runway somewhere past the moss-covered roof and the oaks behind it.
“Hey, you,” one of the skinheads called to me.
He was on my heels, closing fast. I reached the concrete steps that led to the unit and started up, Alesha behind me. The skinheads followed, and even worse, the baby started crying. It was a real doozy, too, a full-throated roar bordering on a scream. I needed to make a choice. Since it was obvious they weren’t going to leave me alone, I could continue to try to ignore them while we talked to the suspect’s cousin, or I could let Alesha go on up ahead without me. With my head already swirling, I wasn’t sure how well I could function with the two skinheads badgering me. Especially with the baby going nuts.
I stopped halfway up, grabbing onto the iron rail, feigning sickness—or half-feigning it, anyway.
“What is it?” Alesha asked, touching me on the elbow, leaning in close.
The skinheads stopped two stairs below. I glanced in their direction, letting my gaze sweep past without stopping on them, and saw the baby squirming, its little pink face contorting in its unhappiness.
“Maybe I will sit this one out,” I said. “As long as you think you got it?”
She rolled her eyes. “I think I can handle it. I was working with Jaffe while you were out. It was pretty much like working by myself anyway. Never seen a guy eat so much. Head back to the car and I’ll be there in a minute.”
“No, I’ll—I’ll be waiting here, at the bottom of the stairs.”
“You sure? I think you’d be—”
“I’ll be here.”
Alesha grimaced, then patted me on the back and headed up. I heard her mutter something about stupid white guys, obviously just loud enough for me to hear. She wore a gray trench coat and black pants, similar to what I was wearing, but somehow she made the outfit look great. Maybe it was the form-fitting cut of the clothing, but it probably had more to do with the figure underneath. I caught myself admiring the swing of her hips. I would have forced myself to look away if not for the skinheads breathing down my neck, and wouldn’t you know it, Alesh
a happened to glance back and saw me admiring her.
She raised an eyebrow. I smiled, then looked away, embarrassed. The weird thing between us had only gotten weirder lately.
“Hey, man,” the skinhead with the baby said. “Hey, we’re talking to you, man. Look at us.”
Instead of looking at Alesha, who was proceeding down the balcony to the unit at the end, I fixated my attention on a wheelless Corolla, up on wooden blocks under one of the carports, half chipping blue paint, half dull gray metal, the back window not glass but duct tape and semi-clear plastic. An oil spot under the back fender reflected the warped smear of a rainbow.
“Hey, man, what’s your deal?” the other skinhead said. “You can see me, right?”
I kept staring at the beat-up Corolla. Alesha had reached the door and was knocking on it.
“Yeah,” the other one said,” he can see us. He’s trying to pretend he can’t.”
“You’re the dude we’ve heard about,” the first skinhead said.
This got my attention, and I couldn’t help but look at them. Seeing them up close, I saw that their faces were sunken, their skin pockmarked and pale, their hair thin. The tapestry of tattoos on their arms and necks distracted a little from their haggard appearance, but only a little. Meth heads, most likely. The one holding the baby was a little taller, but otherwise they could have been brothers.
“I knew it,” the skinhead holding the baby said. There wasn’t much left of his teeth but a few blackened nubs. “You the one, right?”
“I guess,” I said in a whisper.
“Well, shit,” the other guy said. A tattoo of a swastika covered most of his neck. “Dude’s like a celebrity.”
“Who’s been talking about me?” I asked.
“Like everybody, man,” the skinhead with the baby said. The baby was starting to work itself up again, squirming all over the place. “They’re calling you the ghost detective.”
I shook my head, glancing up at Alesha. She was knocking on the door and didn’t appear to have noticed my whispered remarks. The apartment door opened. Because of the angle, I couldn’t see who answered. Alesha, relaxed and at ease, showed her badge. She was talking, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying—especially now that the baby was sputtering into another cry.
