by Kim Fielding
“You have a gun?”
Tag laughed and kissed Jack’s cheek. “Metaphor.”
THE NOTHING space was getting colder. It had always been dark, but now the lack of light was so profound that Jack could barely even remember the sunshine. The spaces inside him now seemed as wide as the Grand Canyon. It was going to be harder than usual to gather his essence and become solid.
To the extent that he could think in this state, Jack wondered about endings—which might be better and which were worse. Drowning. Burning. Simply drifting apart like fog dissipating in the morning sun. He’d never liked endings. When he was a kid and went to the movies, his least favorite part was when the theme music swelled, when the title card said THE END in swirly letters, when the curtains moved across the screen. He didn’t care how happy the characters were or how neatly their problems had been solved. He wanted more. He wanted the picture to go on forever.
“Jack? Are you here, man?”
The voice drew Jack out of his stupor, but he realized it wasn’t Tag. Jack exerted himself just enough to make out the basics of the motel room. What he saw was a hulking figure standing in the middle, taking up a lot of space. “C’mon, dude. I ain’t gonna do anything bad. Just wanna talk to you.”
After wavering uncertainly for a few moments—hoping in vain that Buddy would give up and disappear—Jack materialized, leaning against the kitchenette counter and clothed in jeans, a white tee, and his old favorite boots.
Buddy startled just a little bit, then grinned. “Holy shit. You’re fucking good at that.”
“Hi,” Jack said. He produced an entire pack of cigarettes, shook one out, and tucked the rest in his shirtsleeve. He lit up and took a deep drag. “Did the maid tell you about me?”
“Yeah. Spent half an hour yelling at me in Spanish, and all I got out of it is she ain’t coming back in here until you’re gone. She offered to bring in her priest to exorcise you.”
That was a possibility that had never occurred to Jack. “Will you?”
“Nah, man. You and your man paid for the room. It’s yours fair and square till you stop paying or break one of the rules. You ain’t cooking meth or having wild parties, so we’re good for now.”
Jack was relieved. He didn’t know whether an exorcism would work—he wasn’t even Catholic—but didn’t want to find out. “You seem pretty matter-of-fact about a haunting.”
When Buddy laughed, his whole body moved. “I been suspecting something was up since I first saw you. You looked…. My granny was a curandera. When me and my cousins got sick, she’d slap mud on us and make us drink this terrible herb tea—tasted like warmed-up puke—and she’d say these chants over us. We always got better. And she wasn’t no fortune-teller or nothin’, but sometimes she’d have a dream that came true. She’d warn people about shit. Told my uncle TJ a bird was gonna kill him. He laughed it off, said she was a crazy old lady. Next week he went up on the roof to clear away some pigeon nests and he fell off and broke his neck.”
Jack walked to the bed and sat down. “That could be a coincidence.”
“Could be. But she was always sayin’ stuff like that. When I was a tiny little thing still wetting the bed, she told me someday a bear would be my true love.” He grinned widely. “You seen pictures of Rick.”
“Yeah.” Jack couldn’t help laughing at that. “I guess she was right about that.”
“She always was. She could be a mean old bitch when you crossed her, but damn! She wasn’t no fool. And she told me that I had special eyes. ‘You can see the fade,’ she used to tell me. I didn’t know what the fuck she was talking about, and she never would explain.”
“The fade?”
“I figured it out years later, when I saw my first ghost. Scared the crap out of me. Looked like a regular lady sitting in the park, but her edges were all fuzzy. Like ragged paper.” He pulled out one of the chairs at the table, spun it around, and straddled it backward. “I figured out pretty quick she wasn’t gonna hurt me. And I seen other ghosts since. Some of ’em are really there, only a little bit… I dunno. Faded. And others are hardly more than shadows and I gotta squint to see ’em at all.”
“Oh.” Jack had never seen a ghost until the other day at the dam. He hadn’t believed in them until he became one, at which point he pretty much had to concede they existed.
He pinched out the butt of his cigarette and tossed it away. It vanished in midair, but he lit another. Buddy sat and watched, not in the least surprised.
“How do I look?” asked Jack.
“Pretty goddamn solid. When you and Tag checked in, there was just this little bit of a hint around you. I wasn’t even sure it was there, ’specially since your pal Tag could see you too. Usually I’m the only one sees dead people. But I got more clues later.”
“Such as?”
“When we chatted. You didn’t say much about yourself. And that’s okay—some guys just don’t wanna share, right? But every once in a while you say something a little bit off. The words ain’t quite right. They’re old-fashioned. And then there’s your smokes.” He pointed at Jack’s hand, which held another cigarette.
Jack looked at the cigarette curiously. He didn’t see anything unusual about it. He’d seen people smoking in the casinos and hadn’t noticed any differences between their cigarettes and his. “What about them?”
“They don’t smell right.” Buddy tapped his large, bumpy nose. “My sense of smell ain’t that great. Busted my nose in fights a couple times too many. But your smokes just ain’t normal. So I was pretty sure what you were, and I was discussin’ with Rick what to do about it when Bianca came squawkin’ to me last night.”
The cigarette smoke detail had escaped Jack’s notice since he couldn’t smell at all. He wondered if Tag had registered the faulty smoke, back when Tag was still thinking Jack was a hallucination. But then, maybe delusional cigarettes would smell weird too.
“Have you had conversations like this with a lot of ghosts?” asked Jack.
“Not really. Most of ’em are sorta minding their own business and I leave them alone. Some of ’em are lonely, though. Few years back, me and Rick lived in Florida, out near Cape Canaveral, and our garage was haunted. Poor bastard hung himself there back in the seventies. I used to talk to him while I worked on my bike. Guy was prob’ly boring as a box of rocks when he was alive and death hadn’t improved him, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt me to shoot the shit with him now and then.”
Jack understood exactly how that ghost must have felt. While the motel still stood and he was able to eavesdrop on people, he’d ached with the need for conversation. Even meaningless talk would have been something. He’d looked back at all the little interchanges he’d had when he was alive—a few words with the grocery clerk, a “Hi, how are you?” with security guards at the studio, early-morning grousing with the fellows at the packing plant—and he’d hated himself for not appreciating them at the time. When the motel closed down and he was abandoned, Jack had nearly gone crazy with the solitude. There were times he was certain he’d forgotten himself completely and would never find himself again. Someone as talkative as Buddy must have been a godsend to the Florida ghost.
“What happened to him?” asked Jack, although he was a little afraid of the answer.
“He had a kid, a daughter. They were estranged when he died. He dictated a letter to me, sayin’ how he was sorry and how he always loved her and he hoped she was having a happy life. I tracked her down and gave it to her. Told her I found it tucked away in the garage, but I dunno if she believed me. Handwriting wasn’t his. But he said stuff only he would have known, so she knew the words were his. She cried. But when I walked outta her house, she was standing a little straighter than when I went in, like there was less weight on her shoulders. And her dad, he was gone when I got home. Never saw him again.”
Jack nodded. “I think… I was told that we stop being ghosts when we solve whatever problem’s bothering us.”
“Makes sense.�
� Buddy tilted his head. “How ’bout you, kid? What’s your problem?”
When Jack remained silent, staring at his feet, Buddy snorted softly. “C’mon. You don’t gotta be shy with me. I’ve seen more crazy shit than you could imagine. What did you want that you never got?”
Raising his head to look at Buddy, Jack said, “I wanted to be a movie star. A big one. Bigger than James Dean.”
That brought a soft laugh, but not at Jack’s expense. “Maybe James Dean’s a ghost too.”
Well, that was an interesting thought. If Jack found a way to travel to that lonely intersection in California, would he find a phantom still there, mourning the loss of his Porsche?
“You’re better-lookin’ than he was,” Buddy said.
“But he was a better actor. He was a star.”
“I can’t help you with this one, kid. Like I told you, I know a guy makes porn, but that’s not what you want. Besides, I dunno whether a ghost looks right on camera.”
“That’s okay. I stopped wishing for it decades ago.”
“But something’s still keepin’ you here.”
Jack stood and crossed the room to the small window near the door. He drew the curtain aside slightly. There was nothing to see except the empty courtyard, the building where Buddy lived, and the bright security light, but Jack looked anyway. “I want to be here,” he said quietly after a while. “I don’t care about closure or eternal peace or the chance to wear a halo and play the harp.”
“Whatever’s waitin’ for you, Jack, it’s gotta be a lot better’n the Baja Inn.”
“I don’t care.”
Buddy was quiet for a minute or two. Jack couldn’t see his face but could almost hear him thinking. When Jack turned from the window to face him, Buddy looked sad. “It’s Tag, ain’t it? You got it bad for him.”
“I’ve only known him a few days.”
“So? Me and Rick hooked up at this skanky bar in Chicago. We both thought we were just in it for a quick fuck, but afterward we sat down for a couple of drinks. By the time I took him home with me that night, I knew he was the one.” Buddy fluttered his eyelashes dramatically and clasped his hands over his heart. “My One True Love.”
“Yeah,” Jack said with a sigh. “But neither of you was dead.”
Buddy pointed at him. “You ain’t asked for my advice, but I’m gonna give it to you anyway. Ain’t none of us can control everything that happens to us, and the world ain’t never gonna be perfect. So we do the best we can with what we have, and we appreciate what we have when we got it.” He smiled, his teeth white amid his dark whiskers. “Sometimes things work out better’n we think they will.”
“This won’t,” Jack replied bleakly.
“Then get your kicks when and where you can get ’em.”
Get your kicks on Route 66. Jack heard that song for the first time in a Jane Powell picture—he couldn’t remember the title just now. He loved the recitation of place names, which had seemed so exotic to him in Omaha. He ended up using birthday money to buy the Nat King Cole version, but his parents disapproved and wouldn’t allow it to be played on their hi-fi. He only got to listen to it on the rare occasions when neither of them was home. One of the first things he purchased when he started working at the meatpacking plant was a record player of his own so he could listen whenever he wanted. He’d forgotten the record when he hastily packed up his stuff and left Nebraska. He wondered what happened to it. Maybe Betty kept it. In any case, he got kicked for good on Route 66, didn’t he?
Buddy hauled himself off the chair and leaned against the wall near the fridge. He hooked his thumbs in his pockets and gave Jack one of his long, thoughtful looks, then reached up to scratch his beard. “I wanted to ask you a favor.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. I been thinkin’ on it since I first saw you, and now that I know for sure who you are… I guess you’re the man for the job.”
“What job?”
“You’re not the only one haunting the Baja.”
Eighteen
TAG HAD long since lost track of what day of the week it was, but he supposed in Vegas it didn’t really matter. Night had fallen and the casinos were packed, everyone eager to party. He walked into a few of the places on the Strip, but none of them felt right, so he left again without wagering anything. A voice inside his head urged him to give it up, to go back to the Baja, collect Jack, and get the hell out of Dodge. Find some swanky hotel somewhere along the Pacific—La Jolla, maybe—and fuck each other’s brains out. Hold on to Jack so hard and so tight that Jack couldn’t possibly disappear.
But that voice was a fool. Tag knew the truth: no matter how desperately he clutched the things he cared about, sooner or later he’d lose them all.
So when an empty taxi stopped for a red light, Tag waved his arm and then climbed on in. “Take me downtown,” he said.
The downtown casinos had tried to route traffic their way from the Strip. They’d created something called the Fremont Street Experience, which Tag thought was a damned stupid name. He could picture the publicity guys sitting around a table, scratching their heads.
We got music and a light show and a bunch of stores selling tourist crap. What’re we gonna call it, boys? An experience? Anybody got anything better? No? Okeydokey. Experience it is.
Despite the name, the ploy had worked. People still came down to see the show and visit the grande dames casinos, the kinds of places that evoked thoughts of Bugsy Siegel rather than Donald Trump.
But if you stepped a block or two away from the Experience, downtown was not glittery. The casinos were seedy, catering to the desperate, the demented, the down-and-out. Hookers trawled for tricks, drug deals went down in alleys, beggars hoped for enough handouts to buy another bottle of booze or another hit of meth. People got knifed and shot.
Tag paid the cabbie—a fifty, no change, which made the cabbie grin—and walked away from the neon. It didn’t matter how much cash he carried in his pocket, that he’d earned most of a college degree and had lived for a while in a pretty nice apartment. This part of town contained the kinds of places where he always felt he should be. Places that smelled of garbage and piss, where the walls were scrawled with graffiti and half the windows were boarded up.
He didn’t bother checking the name of the betting place. It didn’t quite deserve to be called a casino, although it had a weird resemblance to a Wild West saloon. The room was big and dark. Off to the right, a bar ran the length of the wall. A half-dozen men and women sitting on stools gazed blankly at the grainy TV screens or at the video poker screens set into the bar. The two bartenders were deep in conversation with each other, ignoring everyone else.
To the left were several banks of slot machines, jangling and blinking obscenely. And beyond them were a bunch of gaming tables that looked grungy even from the doorway. The dealers looked dead-eyed but faintly menacing. Great, Tag thought. Now I’m imagining zombies instead of ghosts.
Nobody was at the blackjack table except the dealer, who was surprisingly young and good-looking. His black hair was gelled into spikes, and his cheeks and chin were dark with stubble. He wore a maroon shirt and black vest. His eyes were so dark that Tag couldn’t make out the pupils.
“What’s the maximum bet?” Tag asked.
“How much do you have?”
Tag lifted his chin. “I’ll start with ten grand.”
The dealer showed sharp teeth when he smiled. “That’s a good place to start.”
After pulling a stack of bills from his pocket, Tag set them on the felt. The dealer’s hand was almost too fast to follow as he grabbed the money and replaced it with a tall stack of chips. He counted the chips three times. “Wouldn’t want you to think I’m cheating you,” he said with a grin.
“I’m sure you’re honest as the day is long.”
“Mister, I am a man of honor. I always keep my word and I never, ever renege on a promise.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Let’s play.”
The dealer’s tag said his name was Dane. He was a flashy shuffler, putting a lot more height and wrist action into it than was strictly necessary. “Cut it?” he asked when he was done.
Tag pulled a card and stuck it at random in the stack. Dane smiled at him as if he’d done something clever and placed the top of the stack into the shoe. Tag pushed all his chips into the box.
“So where you from?” Dane asked, making no move to deal.
“Around.”
“I hear that’s a nice place. I’m from down south.”
“You don’t sound like it.”
Dane shrugged. “I’ve worked hard to get rid of the accent. People hear that drawl and they think you’re stupid. I’m not stupid.”
“I didn’t think you were.”
With an especially bright smile, Dane took the first card and set it in front of Tag faceup. It was an ace. With the corner of his mouth quirked, he placed a second card beside it—a ten. “Blackjack! You’re a lucky man, mister.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
Dane’s cards were a pair of nines. He looked pleased as punch when he doubled Tag’s stash. “Another hand?”
“Of course.”
“I was a afraid you were one of those quit-while-you’re-ahead guys.”
“I’ve never been one of those guys.”
The second hand was a push—they both had eighteen—and on the third hand, Dane got seventeen and Tag busted, losing his entire twenty thousand.
“Wow, tough break, mister.”
“I bet you’re heartbroken over it.”
“There’s a bet you’d win.” Dane leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Nothing I like more than helping a guy get lucky.”
Oh, for Christ’s sake.
“I want twenty more,” Tag said and handed over more cash.
Dane lifted a well-sculpted eyebrow. “You are a man of surprising depth, my friend.”
“Not really.”
