Salsa Nocturna: A Bone Street Rumba Collection

by Daniel José Older

  He pumped a few more times on her chest and then took a look at the monitor. Perfect: Ventricular fibrillation. Those ridiculous squiggly lines that could be shocked back into a normal rhythm. Victor charged the defibrillator to its highest setting, made sure he was well out of the way and pressed SHOCK. The Collector's body jolted. The lines on the monitor recomposed into a healthy blip-blip-blip.

  One by one, the floating objects began dropping to the ground. The Collector had already begun to change when Victor looked back down. Her skin had smoothed out and she had gained about 100 pounds. She let out a low moan.

  "No!" she sobbed. "No, no, no, no!" She raised her face, now with the proper careening-towards-middle-age look to it. Her eyes were blood shot and tear stained. She pounded the floor with her fists.

  Victor stood up and gave her some room. "Things didn't work out like you planned?"

  "Get out!" moaned the woman, newly not-old, half-naked and awkward on her bedroom floor.

  "Whatsamatter?" Victor said, "You not the Collector anymore?"

  "No, I'm not the damn Collector. I'm Emma. Emma Fastbinder. I'm from Vermont." Emma Fastbinder needed a bath. She didn't make the flowy shoulder cloth look majestic like the Collector had, and her makeup was splotched messily across her face. She looked like she'd just woken up after the wackest bachelorette party ever.

  Victor noticed suddenly that the shooting had stopped. He felt like he hadn't known this kind of peace and quiet in years, like if he were to walk outside he'd hear the rustle of soil nurturing a young tree, the slow progress of a worm along the pavement, the beginning of a new morning.

  "So much...work to be done," Emma groaned. "Must start all over...from the very beginning. Must contact the others." She looked up groggily. "Bobby, do you have a phone I could use?"

  A flush of childlike joy came over Victor. He felt fresh, ready to go and see the world, even if it meant having to step over a few bodies on the way. He smiled down at Emma, clicked his radio back on, lit a cigarette and then turned around and walked out the door.

  Red Feather and Bone

  There it is: A flash of crimson against the gray, gray sky. I jot down some notes and squint back into my eyepiece. Its ragged siren song reaches toward me through the cold skyscrapers. The cawing replaces my irritation with sorrow – a gentle blues that reminds me that I'm every bit as singular and lonesome as that bright red flicker of feather and bone.

  I'm not used to this bird watching shit. I'm the guy the New York Council of the Dead brings in for the really nasty jobs. The headless bastards trying to make it back to tell their ex-wives some bullshit, the homicidal midget house ghost – all these wayward souls with grudges that won't stay where they belong – that's my turf. Unlike the rest of the NYCOD, though, I'm only half dead. Yes, my skin is more gray than brown – a weird neither-here-nor-there hue, just like me, and I'm eerily cold to the touch. But I've perfected the forced easy grin of the living, the authoritative cop snarl, the just-walking-by shrug. In short, I pass. It allows me access to places that fully dead COD agents could never get their translucent asses into, so the ghouls upstairs dispatch me only on those good juicy messes.

  At least, that's how it was right up until three weeks and four days ago, when my partner Riley Washington disobeyed orders and did away with the child-killing ghost of a long dead plantation master. Riley went rogue and the Council went batshit – sent the full raging force of their soulcatchers on him. Everyone's been out there looking, except for me. They knew I'da sooner hugged the dude than taken him out, so I'm stuck staring at the Manhattan skyline, watching this stupid long-necked bird trouble the skeevy business men with its beautiful, pathetic song. Below me, the tall shadows of the elite COD soulcatchers roam back and forth, looking for my friend.

  To top it all off, it's the middle of day – that horrible, bright lull when there're no shadows and no mercy. I put down the binoculars and walk back to the rooftop shed. A small, translucent child is waiting for me inside. He's about five or six, sipping absentmindedly from my two-day old coffee and staring much too closely at the scribbled over maps and bird drawings plastered across my walls.

  "What you doing there, youngin?"

  "Minding mine," the child says.

  "Actually, you're minding mine. Why don't you go help some dead geriatric cross the street?"

  The boy gives me such a haunted, intense stare that I'm not sure what to do with myself. He looks familiar – one of these lost soul child phantoms that haunt the outer boroughs running odd errands for folks like me in exchange for toys and candy. This one, as I recall, is only interested in rusted-out car parts and electrical wiring.

  "You want a light bulb?" I try. He scoffs and hovers his little body to another corner. His bulgy eyes scan the floor plans to a building my bird was sighted in.

  "What do you want?"

  "You think the ghost bird came from the burial ground?"

  "Seems likely," I say. The thing started its midday cooing in a high-rise beside the weird shaped, corporate rock that comemorates some forgotten African slaves. "I don't know where else it would come from down here. The thing is old, from what I can tell, and not any species I can find in the bird nerd books. All the buildings it shows up in are within a five block radius of the site. It's starting to add up." The boy grunts thoughtfully and floats over to an old map I found of the financial district in 1863.

  "Where'd you get this map?"

  "Ganked it from the research room at the historical society. But this is a nonsense assignment, kid. What you care?"

  He hovers for another minute and then turns, looks up at me and says: "Just curious. Thank you for the nice visit." He moves out the door and then pokes his little head back in. "Oh, and I have a message for you. Almost forgot."

  It can't be from the Council – when they want to get in touch they just blare another staticky transmission directly into my head with that creepy dead people telepathy they got. My slow, slow heart quickens by a fraction. Could it be—

  "It's from Riley?"

  "Gimme a battery charger."

  "I don't have one, man, just tell me who it's from."

  "Give to get, get to give. You got a blender?"

  I briefly consider going for my blade. It's that kind of day. "You want my extension cord?"

  He considers for a few seconds. "Yes, it's from Riley."

  I unplug the cord from the wall and my lamp and start wrapping it around itself. "I'm really not in the mood to bargain any more – what's your name, shorty?"

  "Damian."

  "Damian, I'm done playing." I toss him the cord. "What's the message?"

  He sizes me up carefully. "Where ass meets Anderson at eight." A pause. "Bring that map along." And he's gone.

  * * *

  In the Chambers Street train station, commuters are cluttering around a street musician. The music is wack, but the crowd is huge, which means it's either a midget in a costume or a hot chick. Turns out to be neither. When I shoulder my way deep enough in to get a good look, I find a half visible, shiny fellow doing an old fashioned jig to some scratchy canned music. He's tall and frail, dressed in baggy, rotting trousers and seems to have some kind of circus makeup on. Folks are just gaping at him obtusely and he's yukking it up.

  If there's one thing the COD is really, really uptight about, it's dead folks appearing to the living. Course, the high-up afterlifers do it whenever they see fit, work their way deftly through and around whatever bureaucratic loopholes they can find, but those of us on the streets know there's no leeway when it comes to human interactions. So I'm not surprised when a burly, translucent team of patrol ghouls comes swooshing down through the turnstiles towards the giddy dancer. The crowd feels the chill circulate and begins to disperse. The performer chuckles, grabs his radio and shoots off like a rocket into one of the train tunnels. The patrol team disappears into the darkness after him, cursing and snarling as they go. I shake my head and get on a Brooklyn-bound train. Something is definitel
y fucked up in ghost world.

  * * *

  When Riley and I first started working together – back when I was still coming to terms with having died in some horrific, unknown way that wiped out all my memory and then been partially resurrected – we used to have a constant caller named Anderson. He was a suicide – I think he'd been a banker or something in life – and he was crazy about Puerto Rican ass. He couldn't even really do anything with it, being a ghost and all, but for some damn reason the dude wouldn't stop showing up at this one spot in Bushwick and harassing the girls. It was dumb shit – tying two ponytails together or giving invisible wedgies – but it was noticeable enough to show up on the COD's disturbing-the-living radar and land me and Riley out there again and again.

  Now it's a quarter to eight, a dim September night and Bushwick is alive with bustling, laughing, gossiping Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and Ecuadorians. They mingle in and out of the cuchifritos spots and fruit stands, sending ruckus spanglish prayers and flirtations up into the rumbling train tracks above. I'm quiet and a stranger hue than the rest of them, but still: I am home. I never get the stares here that I do downtown. The occasional brand new whitey wanders past, sometimes in cautious bands of two or three.

  I'm not surprised to see my old friend Riley sitting in the little triangular park just off Broadway where Anderson used to pester women. I am, however, a little disturbed to see his ghostly ass sitting directly across the chessboard from an overweight and very much alive fellow in a bulging guayabera. They're both laughing, probably each thinking he's got the other one's king three moves from checkmate. I reconcile competing urges to hug and slap Riley by pulling up a folding chair and lighting my smoke like it's no big deal.

  "Whaddup," Riley says without looking up from the game.

  "It is what it is."

  He gestures towards the big guy sitting across the table. "Gordo, Carlos, Carlos, Gordo." Gordo extends a hand to me. I don't usually touch the living. I'm corpse cold and can find out way more information than I'd ever need to know about someone from a casual tap. But this man's face regards me with such genuine kindness I'm caught off guard. I shake his hand and he doesn't flinch when he feels my chilly skin. He looks me dead in the eye, smiles, and then helps himself to one of my cigars.

  "I'm done with the invisible bullshit," Riley replies to my unasked question.

  "So I see."

  "It's not like they don't know we here. Especially chubby old Cubanos like this motherfucker."

  Gordo chuckles. "It's true!"

  "And COD coming for me anyway. What I got to lose?"

  I just shake my head. He has a point. "You wanted to talk 'bout something?"

  "Yeah, what you have on the bird situation?"

  "It's BS. They just throwing grunt work at me. Why's everybody so interested in it?"

  "What you got?" Riley's still staring at the game but I can tell his mind is elsewhere.

  "What I told the Damian kid. He didn't let you know 'bout his spy mission?"

  Gordo's lost in thought. I can see the strategic little lines twirling around his head and by his self-satisfied grin I'm guessing it's paying off on the chessboard.

  "Alright, I'll level with you." Riley finally looks at me. "I didn't want to get you too deep in this, for your own sake, but we need your help."

  "Check," Gordo says.

  "Fuck." Riley lurches a pawn one square further into a suicidal last-ditch get the queen back mission.

  "Mate."

  "Fuck-fuck. Alright, we have to go anyway. C'mon, Gordo, let's show Carlos what we building."

  * * *

  "The kid's been working on this thing for a while actually," Riley says as he sends a metal gate clamoring loudly out of our way. "I guess Gordo here started helping him out a few months back, just putting pieces together that the little guy couldn't manage with his little ghost hands." He makes pathetic flapping motions with his arms.

  "I can hear you, dickface," a voice says from the darkness inside. We're somewhere along the ambiguous line between Williamsburg and Bushwick, down a deserted backstreet. The empty warehouses will soon be swank million dollar lofts, but for now they're just canvas for young graffiti writers.

  Gordo leads us into a vast, open room that was probably once full of either endlessly-sewing Chinese ladies or churning machinery. Tiki torches throw flickering illumination onto a pile of junk sitting in the back of a rusty old pickup truck. Damian is floating circles around it, appraising each piece and occasionally tinkering with a little silver tool.

  "You guys are opening a mobile second hand store?" I say. "That's exciting."

  Riley and Damian look miffed, but Gordo lets out a grandfatherly belly laugh. "No, no, Papi. It's a machine!"

  "What's it do?" I think I see my extension cord in there, along with a few car parts I'd traded to Damian the last time I needed a message run.

  "It opens things," Riley says, looking at me as if I should know what the hell he's talking about. I make go-on-with-it hand motions at him. "It makes new doors. To things."

  "No." The meaning is slowly trickling down to me now. "Doors to...places?" I say. Riley nods. "Places where dead people live?" I need to sit down. "You're building an entrada-making machine?"

  An entrada is an entrance to the Underworld. There's only about a dozen in the city; they're all old as shit and very well hidden. I've never met anyone that can remember when or how they came about – had always just figured it was a natural phenomenon actually. "Are you sure?" I say, cocking an eyebrow.

  Damian floats over to me. "Allow me to explain the situation, Carlos, because Riley would prefer being cryptic and Gordo's just gonna sit there and chuckle."

  "It's true," Gordo confirms. He eases his wide ass into an easy-chair and lights up a Malagueña.

  "About three weeks ago, the ghost bird starts showing up downtown."

  "Right."

  "NYCOD puts their best man on it. He is perhaps of questionable allegiance when it comes to certain recent defections, but when it comes to getting the job done, second to none."

  "Now, that I'm gone, of course," Riley puts in.

  "Go on."

  The boy's more animated than I've ever seen him. He floats in little figure-eights around his junky invention as he speaks. "Strange, right? Such a star agent on something as trivial as an irritating bird?"

  "That's what I'm saying."

  "And all those patrols downtown..."

  "Right!"

  "Well, you and I both got wise to the bird having something to do with that Burial Ground Memorial, as we spoke about earlier. Turns out the thing ain't supposed to be around at all. It's like the one that got away, three hundred years later."

  "Eh?"

  "Let's drive and chat," Riley says. "We don't have much time."

  * * *

  The Williamsburg Bridge is backed up with party kids trying to make it on time but still be fashionably late. The city sparkles on either side of us, those emptied-out skyscrapers looming like old gods in the later-summer night. We're squashed four across the front seat of Gordo's old pickup, the two ghosts sandwiched in between the one and a half living bodies. Damian partially unrolls a yellowed piece of parchment and hands it to me.

  "What's this?"

  "The missing piece, I believe." It's a chart of some kind. Little squares with writing scribbled over them sprawl across the page in a crooked hectagon shape. "The placement map for the African Burial Ground." I squint at one of the boxes. LITTLE THADDEUS, B. 1730 - D.1746, ORIG: DAHOMEY is written in tiny, elegant script. The one below it says: MISS LUCY TRINIDAD, B. ? - D. 1750 APPROX 82 YEARS OF AGE. HEALER. ORIG: KONGO.

  I look at Damian.

  He nods. "Everyone."

  I unroll further. The little boxes go on and on. "There's thousands of them!" Damian nods again. "Where did this come from? Who made it?" Damian puts his tiny finger to the bottom left corner of the map. CYRUS LANGLEY, it says in the same delicate handwriting. MADE WITH LOVE & LIGHT THAT TH
E CHILDREN OF OUR CHILDREN'S CHILDREN MAY KNOW FROM WHENCE THEY COME & UPLIFT THEIR SPIRITS & OUR OWN.

  "Who's Cyrus?" I ask, but Damian's already directing my attention to a box near the center of the map. CYRUS LANGELY, B. 1725 - D.1755. CONJURER IN THE OLD TRADITION. ORIGIN: UNK. EDUCATED IN THE MAGICAL ARTS OF BOTH WHITE FOLKS & THE NEGRO. BORN SLAVE DIED FREE & FREE WILL 1 DAY AGAIN BE.

  Gordo leans on his horn, breaking my reverie.

  "Get the fuck out of the way you scrawny hipsters!" Riley screams out the window. "Tell 'em, Gordo, I don't think they heard me."

  "¡Comiendo mierda y gastando zapatos!" Gordo yells.

  Riley eyes him suspiciously. "Did you say what I said?"

  "Basically," Gordo chuckles. The mini-coop in front of us jolts into motion and catches up with traffic further down the bridge.

  I could drown myself in this map. The names and histories seem to go on endlessly. "It's bigger than I realized."

  "Bigger than anyone realized," Damian says. The line of cars is picking up pace again.

  "So the monument itself..."

  "Just the tip of the iceberg," Riley says.

  "And this Cyrus fellow?"

  "Made the map after he was dead and buried down there obviously," Damian says. "They discovered it with the first few bodies that came up at the construction site, tracked down some surviving descendants of Langley and returned it to them. This is what I think happened: When the last African was interred at the burial ground and the property started looking juicy for real estate, the COD from way-back-when did their little lockdown spell maneuver, entrapping the dead within. Far as anyone in the afterlife is concerned, the place never happened."

  "Which is basically what they did up here too," I said. "Best I can gather."

  "Right, but then some pesky bones turned up in the nineties and they had to make amends."

  "So they picked a choice few," Riley says, "you know, fill the color quota, and let the rest rot. The Council of the Dead basically did the same thing. The burial site is still sealed shut, no souls get out, no souls get in. Without interaction, without change, movement, they'll all go into a coma-like state and eventually waste away."