The Afterlife

by Gary Soto

  "Did his mommy buy his car?" I taunted. "His daddy?" I was full of envy. He had a car, a letterman's jacket dangling with medals and stuff, and, of course, the memory of Crystal in his arms.

  Crystal whipped her head around and gave me a mean look, the kind my mom gave me when she wanted me to shut up.

  But I didn't shut up. "What's he better at, football or baseball?"

  "He's not the boyfriend you're thinking about."

  Not the boyfriend you're thinking about, I mused. What did that mean?

  "You don't understand."

  I had heard that line before and used it, too, mainly on my parents. Jealous that she was riding up front with Jason, I pouted and watched the houses pass in a blur. This dude was speeding at an hour in the morning when people were off for church or bringing out their mowers for a trim of the quickly dying autumn lawns.

  After a straight line across Selma, hardly braking at the two stop signs, both riddled with bullet holes, Crystal's boyfriend pulled up in front of a rich person's house. How could I tell? There were two Lexuses in the driveway and what looked like a Porsche under a cover. On the porch stood two cut pumpkins, one smiling and the other making a long, ugly face.

  "Who lives here?" I asked Crystal, who had her face buried in her hands.

  "No," she cried. "Leave him alone, Eric."

  "No, what? What's wrong?"

  "It's Jason's house," she stammered.

  "Jason? I thought this dude was Jason."

  Confused, I got out of the car when the stud got out of the car. He muttered juvenile-level cuss words, and marched toward the front door. But he didn't have to knock, because another kid his age—my age—in another letter men's jacket came out, his fists closing and his jaw set. Neither said a word as they started hitting each other violently. The medals on their chest jangled like keys.

  Dawg, I thought, jumping up so that I hung in the air.

  They battered each other for a few furious minutes and then took off their jackets to really get to work. With each strike, blood flowed, hair bounced, bone crushed, and air left their guts. They muttered threats and groans and savage remarks about each other's mothers. I was glad right there and then that I didn't have to defend my mother's honor. These two were vicious.

  "Who's the other dude?" I yelled at Crystal, who was still sitting in the front seat of the car. Her head was bobbing as she sobbed. She refused to explain.

  A neighbor, in his old-man slippers, came out, yelling for both of them to stop. They listened to the neighbor for a second, snorting like bulls. Their breath was hot from wherever anger and hate dwells inside the body.

  "Jason, what is this about?" asked the neighbor. He had it all wrong. Jason was the dude I rode in the car with—no?

  The two jocks caught their breath. Then they started again, this time with wild kicks, none of which connected solidly. They were out of gas. Their blows slowed and then picked up, then slowed again as the blood in their veins couldn't carry enough oxygen to help them really hurt each other.

  They stopped fighting and stared at each other.

  "She didn't come home last night," Jason said after he gathered enough air in his lungs to form that one sentence. He caught more air and asked. "Is she with you?"

  "Nah, she ain't with me. Her parents came over and were asking about her, but I told them that she was probably with you."

  I still couldn't figure out what was going on.

  "Stop it, Eric!" Crystal screamed. She had gotten out of the car, and not by conventional means. She flew up through the roof.

  The neighbor was right. The dude who came out of the house was named Jason, and I figured the other dude was Eric, the dude who drove us here.

  "Eric, leave Jason alone!" Crystal shouted, but who could hear a ghost?

  I would have scratched my head, but I had no fingers. So I screamed at Crystal, "Who are these dudes?"

  "My boyfriends," she sobbed.

  Dawg, I thought. The girl's got two boyfriends—no, three, counting me if I had my way. And I could! I realized I was in a better situation than either of them. I was a ghost while they were torn flesh, hurt bone, and spilled blood at the moment. But they could easily become ghosts, the way they were going.

  Eric threw a lovely roundhouse punch that sent Jason down for the count. He staggered backward and fell into a sitting position on the front lawn. He was out cold, sitting up, eyes closed, and nobody home.

  "I want you to leave her alone," Eric threatened. "She's my girl!" By mistake he picked up the letterman's jacket that belonged to Jason and hurried to his car.

  God help them, I prayed, when they got the word of Crystals suicide. Each one would think that it was his own fault, or maybe the other person's fault. no Would they go to the funeral, and if they did, would they be wearing each others jacket and the same look of gloom?

  I ALWAYS DREAMED about sleeping in a pile of hay in the arms of someone I loved. Actually, not sleeping but lolling groggily on a natural mattress. Now I was. I was lying side by side with Crystal in a horse pasture, but had no arms to embrace her. If I had, I'm not sure she would have let me. She just lay at my side staring at the sky that held two clouds. It was already late afternoon, and soon the evening would descend like a cloak. But for the time being, I was next to her and I didn't give a shit whether she had two boyfriends or ten. In fact, I was mad at them because one of them—maybe both of them—had led her to kill herself. It had to be about those jocks who were now at their separate homes staring at their letterman's jackets and thinking, Jesus, the other dude's got mine. That would mean they would have to meet again and swap a few blows. I figured, let them hurt each other. Let their perfect jock smiles be ruined. As for me, I had Crystal, or sort of. When I reached over, she turned her face away from me. She was thinking of home and, maybe, why she committed suicide over two jocks.

  "Crystal," I whispered.

  "What?" she asked after a moment of silence. She turned her face back to me. We were so close we were seeing cross-eyed.

  "Why did you have two boyfriends?"

  "I was popular." She said this with a straight face and then laughed with one hand on her belly and the other shading her eyes.

  "Come on, homegirl."

  She wiped the corner of her eye, as if a tear of laughter had crawled out. "It's true."

  I sat up, grinning. "You think you're something, huh?" She was something.

  Crystal sat up. "Yeah, I'm something, or I was until I killed myself."

  "Over Jason and Eric. They're nowhere." Of course, in my heart, I realized that they were studs and maybe even really decent at heart. And they could both fight.

  "No, I killed myself because..." Crystal turned away from me.

  "What?" I asked, and rolled over her ghostly body to face her. I liked her nose, delicate as porcelain, whereas mine was like a spud, a papa.

  "Because I didn't think I was going to do it." She swallowed and added, "You know, make it big in life, like Martha Stewart or Oprah. I could make it big here in Selma, but not in New York."

  The whole world knew Oprah, but who was this Martha Stewart? She had the name of a dead president's wife. "You were going to go to New York?"

  Crystal frowned at me. "You don't get it, buster." She rambled on that it could be Chicago or San Francisco or Los Angeles. The city didn't matter. What mattered was making it. She would be small in a new place, just a little ant carrying her briefcase to work. Wherever she was going, she doubted that she could demand the same attention as in Selma, where she was vice president of her school, a cheerleader, a nearly straight-A student, and even a member of 4-H. She told me she had applied to Harvard and Stanford and got rejected. She was going to USC.

  "Hey I was nowhere all my life. It wasn't that bad." I bragged that if I had lived, I would have attended Fresno City College.

  Crystal fumed. "Don't you understand? I got rejected!"

  Dawg, I thought. She was scared of failing. So that was it.

  We
lay staring at the sky, both of us quiet. The two clouds were gone, the sky darker now that the sun was eclipsed by a walnut tree.

  "Crystal," I meowed romantically. I turned my face to her. "You know I like you."

  Crystal blinked her eyes at the sky.

  But my mood shifted quickly "But I got to go see someone at my house." I was up. "Plus, you were going to see about your parents."

  At the word parents, Crystal rolled into a ball on that haystack.

  "Crystal," I called softly.

  "What," she answered, not so softly.

  "I went to see my grandfather. He died six years ago of cancer." I told her that I was probably going to be buried there, in the same cemetery. I told her it was kind of nice, with trees and lawns that were cut weekly.

  Crystal sat up, her legs folded in a yoga position. Her face was lined with worry. "I guess you and I are going to disappear, huh? Like, really disappear." She swallowed that truth. "Like really die, huh?"

  I listened to a distant airplane. A bird on the barbed wire fence. A horse whinny. These were the sounds that are singled out in the country, especially on a pile of hay that either a horse would eat or the wind carry away, flake by flake. I wish we could have lain there forever.

  "I have a confession," Crystal began. Her face had brightened.

  "What, another boyfriend?"

  She smiled. "Sort of," she teased.

  I held my breath. Was she messing around with all of Selma?

  "I remember you."

  I offered her a confused look. I didn't get what she was saying, though it had to be good because her face was open and beautiful.

  "I remember when you were picking grapes and got stung." She pulled her hair behind her eyes. "I thought you were cute."

  I smiled. "You don't really remember, do you?" I asked. "You're just playing with me!"

  "Yeah, I do!" Her smile was like a flower.

  "And I was cute?" I was really begging for a compliment.

  Crystal rose and hugged and kissed me. "Yes, you were cute. Even with your fat swollen face."

  We gazed into each other's eyes until we were both out of focus. I then pulled away from her as I repeated that I had to go back home and take care of business. I sailed into a sky that was bloodred where the sun was going down. I turned and yelled, "I'll be back." I would have waved but my arms were gone. I told her that I loved her, but my words were snapped up by the heartless wind.

  Chapter Eight

  DUSK BROUGHT the cries of peacocks sailing across the scraggly lawns of Roeding Park. I kicked down the street where, the night before, Crystal's car had sat with Crystal inside, dead. The police and an ambulance had come and gone along with a tow truck that hauled her ride away. I stared at a blotch of oil.

  "Ah, Crystal," I cried, then pivoted and walked toward a group of young trees where darkness was knitting the oncoming night.

  I pictured her mom crying into her hands, and her dad leaning his shoulder against a wall, his closed fists wiping a couple of tears that would replenish themselves when he was asked to view her body. I pictured her two boyfriends, Jason and Eric, going through the school yearbook in search of pictures of her.

  "Ah, Crystal," I repeated, head down. I looked up when a wind reshuffled the leaves on the lawn. Before me lay the homeless guy whom I had saved by cooling his hot forehead. He had died after all and was now a ghost, too. I wasn't surprised at all.

  "I tried," I told him, stepping toward him. What could I fear from him or anyone else?

  "You were the one?" he asked.

  I nodded my head.

  "I remember someone trying to help me."

  The ghost was younger than the bag of bones that had leaned against the tree. I could see that when older people died and became a ghost they took on a younger appearance, not a final road-weary flesh. I was still learning about death.

  "You had a fever," I explained. The memory of his ghost lifting from his body was etched in my mind. "I tried to help you, sir."

  "Yeah, I was sick and had this fever for two days," the man explained. "But I was just tired of it all." He grumbled about people going camping and how he had been doing it for ten years. But his camping, he argued, was homelessness. He wanted to sleep in a bed. He asked my name.

  "Chuy" I answered.

  He munched on the inside of his lower lip as he considered my name. He was calm for being a ghost. When I was on the roof of Club Estrella and examining my body right after I died, I was tripped out by my new status as ghost. In fact, at that time, there was no fear in me, nor a sense of loss, not like now. I was suffering over the loss of Crystal and the wide expanse of the years I didn't get to live. I asked his name.

  "Robert Montgomery," he answered. "Like the actor."

  "What actor?"

  "What do you mean, 'What actor?' The actor!" This Robert Montgomery, tall and lean, scratched his chin. He was puzzled that I didn't recognize the name. "I guess he might have been before your time."

  We watched a cop car pass, its backseat vacant but ready to be filled because the cop, a young one, was looking for trouble. Anything to bring his nightstick like a saber from his holster. When the cruiser disappeared from sight, I braved the question. "Ain't it weird that you died and came back? That you're a ghost?"

  "Nah, not really. I always felt like a ghost anyway, because people would look through me all the time."

  I understood what he was saying. Because he was a homeless guy, people walked by as if he were invisible. I was not righteous, because I had walked by the homeless, too, indifferent to the chant of "spare change." My dad taught me to avoid them. He argued that they were too lazy to work.

  He pointed toward the road. "You know, I saw this girl kill herself."

  I jerked.

  "She was really young." He seemed remorseful that he hadn't been able to help Crystal.

  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, to
o." 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?"