The Afterlife

by Gary Soto

  "What the hell?" Angel muttered. He watched a leaf rock in the air, caught it, and examined it. He looked directly at me, and when I squeezed his shoulder, the pressure of my hand entered his flesh. I touched something at the core of his soul.

  "Chuy?" he asked the air.

  "Angel," I mouthed. I squeezed and let go.

  The rake fell from his hand.

  I stepped back. I had so much to tell him, my bro since first grade. But I had no voice other than the icy chill of my breath. I had no other way to reach him than the vague feeling of touch. But he was aware that I stood in front of him.

  "Chuy," he said. His eyes filled with the gray waters of sadness.

  I laughed to myself. I recalled how he and I had liked the same girl in fifth grade. We were desperate for love even then because we understood we were not good-looking. Behind Room 34, he and I threw punches at each other, our noses immediately bloody. We were fighting royally over Maya Ramirez all because that afternoon she had glanced our way as we were eating slices of watermelon over a dented trash can. Flies were coming out of the trash can, plus the sour smells of an old hot dog or something. But we were eating our watermelon down to the rind when she smiled flirtatiously. "Hijole!" we yelled, juice running from the corners of our mouths. Later that week, we had a pushing match on the baseball diamond, and Angel jabbed a pencil at me during recess. That brought us to blows after school, and neither of us was the victor. We were fools, in fact, because just as Angel caught me with a roundhouse punch to my temple that sent my head twisting to the side, out of the corner of my eye I made out Maya walking with Gilbert Romo, a guy from sixth grade who was strong enough to put us both into headlocks and trot us gently into a brick wall.

  I was thinking of Angel and me, and our past. This was all we had. The past. He was mi carnal, the guy I hung with. I was going to miss him and our crazy ways.

  Then the wind picked up, and try as I might, I couldn't anchor myself in Angel's yard. The leaves scuttled, and a tree snapped under the wind. I bounced from his yard westward toward downtown. The leaves were releasing themselves in their simple deaths, and, I suppose, I should have been doing the same.

  Chapter Three

  THE WIND deposited me downtown and then weakened to nothing more than a draft. I anchored myself on the Fulton Mall by tightening my stomach and willing myself not to blow away like litter. I meandered among its stores, all Mexican or Hmong-owned, and none of them doing good business at that early hour. The sun rode over a tall building. The few city pigeons and sparrows responded to the bright but cold sun by warbling and chirping. These birds were a natural sanitation crew; they pecked at popcorn and the shells of sunflower seeds. They hauled away hot dogs, burger buns, doughnuts, churros, and other food that messy shoppers tossed as they went from one store window to the next. What the shoppers were buying was anyone's guess.

  I'm dead, I thought as I turned and scanned the sights of one sad, ugly mall. I ain't a part of this no more. I ain't a part of a family, either, just a word on my parents' lips—Chuy Chuy, Chuy. I was a sad chant one day after I got killed.

  I shrugged. I hitched up my pants and entered a boutique that sold candles, ceramic pots, and plastic flower arrangements. The salesclerk was a girl that I went to elementary school with. I forgot her name and she wouldn't have remembered mine, either. She probably wouldn't even recognize me. "I got nothing to show, anyway," I laughed to myself. I was invisible and touchable as light.

  "Hey, girl!" I called.

  She turned a page of People en Español. There was more intrigue in those pages than in me, the ghost. She licked a finger and turned another page. I blew my cold breath on her and she shuddered, then got up and put on the sweater that hung on a chair, and returned to reading. The girl couldn't keep her eyes off the dudes in those pages!

  "You remember me?" I asked.

  She turned the page of the magazine.

  Speed reader, I thought. I shrugged my shoulders and swung around to size up the place. It was sorry; business was nonexistent. Even some of the candles were drooping. The plastic flowers were faded. The ceramic pots were ready to crumble back into clay. I also noticed that there was a rack of cards—birthday, anniversary, wedding announcements. I wondered if there was a Sorry-Your-Son-Was-Stabbed Card. I would have looked except, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the dude with yellow shoes pass by in a hurry. He was dressed in the same pants but he was bundled up in a Raiders jacket that was two sizes too large. Yellow shoes and a black-and-silver jacket? The dude had no sense of color coordination, definitely no Señor GQ.

  "Cabrón," I hissed, my hands closing into fists.

  It's you.

  I flew through the glass door and bounced toward the dude. I sidled up to him—it was him all right, the one with the mean face of a teenage rat. He had sharp front teeth and narrow eyes charged with the red of spilled blood. His hair was slicked back, oily. He was exactly as I remembered, but taller and leaner, as if what he ate went right through him and down the toilet.

  "You're the one!" I accused.

  He kept walking.

  "How come?" I asked.

  He slowed to a stop in front of a panadería with its oven of bread smells wafting from inside. His eyes locked on the gingerbread pig cookies. His sneaky attention then wheeled to a mother and a boy, cookie in hand, coming out of the bakery. He had the look of a lowlife ready to snag the treat from the child's hand.

  I frosted his neck with my breath as a sort of warning. He turned away from the mother and child and slapped his neck as if a mosquito had settled its long needle into his skin. He was confused as he walked away, a worry line on his brow.

  "You can't see me, huh?" I said.

  I had to laugh. I thrust my hand just left of his heart and let him feel the coldness of a ghostly fist. He staggered, weirded out by a sensation he couldn't recognize. I next stabbed my spear hand into his lower back and right above his navel, the places where he had gotten me.

  "Ay," he moaned.

  I began to sense my own power. I could go where I pleased, and I possessed an invisible touch that made people feel me. My killer was feeling me, though he might have thought it was the coolness of morning among the tall buildings of downtown. He shrugged his collar around his throat. He breathed out and saw his breath hang in the air, then break apart and disappear. He breathed out again and punched his frosty breath with a quick jab.

  "How do you like it?" I asked. He had taken my life—or did I mean my body? After all, I still had a sense of myself and a place in this world. It was just a different reality.

  He glanced over his shoulder, as if he regretted not going inside the panadería to feast on those pig cookies. He was aware that something was happening to him, though guilt was not part of it. He reacted instinctively. He reached for his knife in his front pocket and would have pulled it out except a pair of heavy cops with the look of the pig cookies had rounded the corner from Tulare Street. They were walking our way, not the least in a hurry, because what crime occurs in the morning? Crimes—like my death, anyone's death—always take place at night.

  "How come?" I mouthed at Yellow Shoes. I plunged my hand into his pocket and touched the knife that had touched me dead.

  Yellow Shoes peered down at the front of his pocket. This stopped the cops, the weirdness of a dude flapping open his jacket and looking at the area around his crotch. The cops sized him up, but almost immediately their attention was drawn away by the radio squawking on the belt of the shorter of the two cops.

  "You thinking about me?" I asked. "Or them?"

  While Yellow Shoes hurried away, I clung to his back like the bad memory of the night before. He started walking in a hurry, then running, and I had to laugh to myself because the vato, lean as he was, was out of shape. He was huffing big time, and all because of me.

  "Giddy-up, burro!" I hollered, and whipped his nalgas with an invisible hand.

  I learned that I could cling to a person for a free ride. I sta
yed on his back, taking in the sights of inner-city Fresno. I passed abandoned homes, rundown stores, a sloppy game of hoop at Dickey's Playground, and car lot upon car lot of rides that were waxed shiny outside but corroded under the hood. The billboards advertised a bail bondsman and check-cashing services.

  I couldn't read the burro's mind, but I sensed that he had a meeting with someone—a dude with a longer blade than the one in his pocket? He strutted with purpose. Then he uttered the words, "Fat-face Fausto."

  Fausto? I had gone to middle school with a kid named Fausto. He was a year older than me, and three years dumber. He was mean as a snake, a bully who every day thrust his hands into the pockets of small kids for their lunch money. That had been his thing in elementary school and junior high, until he tried it on one short kid who speared his throat and beat his ass. The kid, a Filipino, was schooled in martial arts, and was strong and dart-fast.

  Yellow Shoes took a sharp right into an alley and dropped his blade into a Dumpster. A horde of flies was disturbed by this unexpected delivery. The flies were feasting on something dead, fruit or meat, or lapping up something sugary, like on the lid of an ice-cream carton. Yeah, that's it, I told myself. Flies going to town on ice cream!

  There, in the alley, I breathed into Yellow Shoes's ear, and he cupped it with his hand. He could sense me. I frosted his other ear with the warning, "Watch your back, ese," and jumped off. I was tired of the free ride. I followed him as he jogged up the alley and cut through a yard of the same apartment building where the cops had earlier set things straight—the husband and wife were on the balcony, looking down on children playing in the oil-splotched driveway. This married couple seemed tired, their dark eyes a nest of wrinkles. Two babies were clinging to their legs—the children wouldn't let go until they were sixteen or so. Their marriage was going to work out, it seemed, though there would be other broken pots and vases cracked over the husband's stubborn head. In time, he would figure it out.

  Yellow Shoes leaped over a kid on a tricycle and, hoisting up pants that were nearly falling off his skinny ass, ran across the street to a house painted white on one side and green on the other—an eyesore, my papi would argue. Someone had started a weekend project he couldn't finish. Yellow Shoes entered the house without knocking, and I did the same by going through the wall.

  The living room was jammed with bicycles, all stolen, I figured. There were cruisers and mountain bikes with mud still caked to the tires. I was surprised that Yellow Shoes hadn't tossed the kid off the tricycle and carried another stolen good into the house.

  "Fausto," Yellow Shoes called.

  Fausto appeared from the kitchen and was, in fact, the dude I knew from middle school. He was sporting a dingy wife-beater, and blowing on a bowl of steaming menudo. What was it, eight years since I had seen him thrust a hand into a little kid's pocket for money? The dude was big. His gut was a slab of fat. A front tooth was missing, and, in a way, he was missing, too. He had dropped out and dropped out of sight. So this is what he was doing. Stealing bikes and porking out?

  "Where you been?" Fausto asked, then blew on his menudo and took a careful sip from a soupspoon.

  Yellow Shoes looked down at his murderous hands. He had no answer he could toss into the air to make conversation.

  "Killing," I filled in for him. "Tell him you been killing."

  "How come you wearing those sissy shoes?" Fausto asked.

  Yellow Shoes sucked in his cheek in anger. I could tell that he didn't like being spoken to in that voice. Also, he liked his shoes.

  I approached Fausto and blew on his menudo for him. I put my arms around him all nice. God, I hated him in middle school and was hating him now even more. What was he but a thug who pushed people off bicycles and yelled, "It's mine now. Get your face outta here!"

  "I been doing stuff," Yellow Shoes answered.

  Doing stuff? I wondered. Is that all it was?

  Fausto spooned soup into his mouth and chewed. I could tell he was surprised that his morning meal had cooled. I liked being invisible. I turned away and mounted one of the bikes, my hands on the handlebars. It was a nice ride, one that I would have liked when I was a kid.

  "We got to move these by nine tomorrow," Fausto said. He pointed vaguely at the bikes in the corner, all of them with red tags. Damn, I thought, Fausto's all organized. Maybe he wasn't so dumb after all. But he was sure uglier now, with his tooth gone and his bloated belly.

  "I want my money now," Yellow Shoes demanded.

  "You'll get it later, Chuy."

  Nah, man, I thought, we share the same name? Qué gacho! What rotten luck! Still, I gave him the name Yellow Shoes, not Chuy. That was my name!

  Yellow Shoes made a face and demanded, "I want it now, man."

  Fausto sucked up a wiggly length of tripas and stirred his soup with his spoon. He rolled his tongue over his remaining front teeth. "You'll get it."

  Yellow Shoes spread his coat and mounted his hands on his skinny hips. I want it now, his stance said. He then made a brave move and spoke up. "Right now, man."

  "'Right now, man,'" Fausto squeaked back. He laughed and pushed his hand under his wife-beater and rubbed his belly. A tattoo of a bikini-clad woman showed. Qué ascol

  Yellow Shoes patted his front pocket, but then remembered that his blade was in a Dumpster, flies grubbing on my old, dried blood.

  Fausto set his bowl down on a table stacked high with Lowrider magazines, slapped his hands clean, and said, "All right. I owe you, don't I?" He left the room, pulling up the back of his pants. They were hanging so low, they showed his chones, which he was wearing inside out. I could see the label—his waist was a thirty-eight.

  I got off the bike. I breathed in Yellow Shoes's ear, "I'd run if I were you, tonto." I had a premonition that no good was about to happen, and when I swiveled my body around, I jumped into the air at the sight of Fausto, a fat locomotive, charging out of the kitchen. I'm certain that he was done with breakfast and was ready for a little workout.

  "No!" Yellow Shoes yelled, left arm raised.

  But what was "no" to a dude who made his living off stolen goods? He struck Yellow Shoes in the mouth. Fausto clipped him with an uppercut to his jaw; apparently he was a face-attacker. But I was wrong! Fausto pumped a couple of good shots into Yellow Shoes's ribs, a left and a right that made me wince. I hated getting hit in the stomach because there was hardly any padding on me—even in life.

  "Stop it, man!" Yellow Shoes cried. He danced behind some bicycles and they began to fall over.

  "'Stop it, man!'" Fausto mimicked in a whiny voice. He had a look of pleasure on his face, like he was playing pinball.

  But the early massacre stopped when Fausto's cell phone began to ring. Fausto, breathing hard, glared at Yellow Shoes, smoothed his hair, and reached into his pocket. "Yeah?" he asked. His eyes were still locked on his foe, who was desperately trying to pull off a brake cable from a bicycle to use like a whip once round two began.

  I heard the voice on the other end of the phone ask, "What's happenin', dawg?"

  "Nothing. Just kickin' the shit out of Chuy here." He giggled at that remark.

  Then the voice became a muddle of words I couldn't make out. Fausto wagged his head once and clicked the phone off. He examined his thumb—it was red with menudo broth. He sucked his thumb like a baby and burped. "Now, where was I?"

  Yellow Shoes sniffled. He was holding a brake cable in his hand.

  "So you think you're all bad." Fausto laughed.

  "You started it, homes, not me."

  "'You started it, homes,'" Fausto mimicked. He picked up his bowl of menudo and stirred its heavy broth with a spoon. "It's all cold, man! I can't eat my breakfast in peace." Still, he took a spoonful and ate, clicking his tongue because it was so good. The dude had no manners; eating in front of someone and not sharing.

  I was tired of the show. I stepped through the wall and ventured into the street. Two dogs were sniffing each other as they went round and round, head to
tail. Across the street, two kids on the front lawn were playing sword fight with rolled-up newspapers. It seemed like a lot of fun, and good practice for a time when they might need to know such a skill. Then a herd of kids appeared, all laughing, and some barefoot. They had no sense of seasonal changes, no sense that it was no longer summer but mid-fall.

  "God," I mouthed, my head lifted skyward. "Are you really up there?"

  The wind was picking up. My instincts were picking up, too. I could always hunt Yellow Shoes later. I had somewhere else to go. I winced when I heard a scream coming from the house. Someone was hurting, and, thank God, it wasn't me. It wasn't anyone decent, just two thugs heading for an early grave.

  I WAS GOING TO say good-bye to Rachel, a girl I knew when she and I were little. She beat me up a lot, the cholita, and once stole my trike when I was just out of my Pampers. I knew everything about her. We grew up together on the same street. She was bad, and at thirteen had a tattoo on her arm that said mala. In time she wiggled into a tight dress and looked fine. But she was always tough, crazy, and a mess—her dad was in Corcoran, her mother a barfly in red shoes and a skirt too short for her age. While I don't blame her, Rachel was one of the reasons why I became a ghost. That evening I was killed, she and I were going to hook up. I liked her a lot, even when she sometimes taunted me by saying, "You remember when I used to kick your ass?" Rachel, my girl from my childhood. I would go through the pain of yet another deadly exit if it meant one long kiss from her. A swap of tongues, a tight embrace under the full moon of October. Yeah, I would do it again.

  When I passed through the wall of her house, she was sitting on the couch, the TV muted. Though it was almost noon, she was dressed in her pajamas. Her eyes were red. A smudge of black mascara on her cheek was the color of twilight. I suspected at first that she had a headache, because she was rubbing her forehead. Then I saw: She was applying a face ointment, a preventive measure for pimples? She was sad about me, yet thinking about how to look pretty. It made sense, more sense than what was appearing on television: a muscle truck was crawling up the back of a Volkswagen Beetle.