As I chugged up close, I saw Downsy move quickly back into his cabin from where he had been leaning over the clammer on the side of the boat. His engine roared, and he turned the boat around and left the guy standing there in the water. His boat almost hit the front of mine as he took off. I called to him, but he never looked back. I pulled my boat up alongside the guy in the water and was about to yell, “How about a lift,” when I saw why Downsy had split.
Bobbing in that iron-gray water, trying to keep his head above the swells, was the Trentino kid. He wasn’t the decomposed horror show that John Hunter had described, but his skin was mottled a very pale white and bruise green. Around the lower portion of his throat he had that drowned man’s blue necklace. His hair was plastered to his head by the water, and those big green eyes peered up at me, his gaze literally digging into mine. That look said, “Help me,” as clearly as if he had spoken the words. He was shivering like mad, and he held his arms up, hands open, like a baby wanting to be carried.
I sat there in the wildly rocking boat, staring in disbelief, my heart racing. What good it was going to do me against the dead, I didn’t know, but I drew my knife, a ten-inch serrated blade and just held it out in front of me. My other hand was on the throttle of the engine, keeping it at an idle. I wanted to open the engine up all the way and escape as fast as possible, but I was paralyzed somewhere between pity and fear. Then a big wave came swamping the kid and slamming the side of my boat. The whole craft almost rolled over, and the peak of the curl slapped me in the face with ice-cold water.
The dead kid came up spluttering, silently coughing water out of his mouth and nose. His eyes were brimming with terror.
“What the hell are you?” I yelled.
His arms, his fingers, reached for me more urgently.
“Deaths,” the old-timers had said, as in the plural, and this thought wriggled through my frantic mind like an eel, followed by my realization that what Downsy had been fleeing was the “curse.” I took another wave in the side and the boat tipped perilously, the water drenching me. Clams scattered across the deck as the baskets slid, and my cull box flew over the side. I felt, in my confusion and fright, a brief stab of regret at losing it. I looked back to the kid and could see that he seemed anchored in place, his foot no doubt in a sinkhole. Another minute and he would be out of sight beneath the surface. I thought I’d be released from my paralysis once his eyes were covered by the gray water. I dropped my knife and almost thrust my hand out to grab his, but the thought of taking Death into my boat stopped me in mid-reach.
I had to leave or I’d be swamped and sunk just lolling there in the swells. ”No way,” I said aloud, with every intention of opening the throttle, but just then the kid made one wild lunge, and the tips of the green-tinged fingers of his left hand landed on the side of the boat. I remembered John Hunter telling me it was the rule of the bay to help when you could. The boat got slammed, and I saw the kid’s hand begin to slip off the gunwale. I couldn’t let him die again, so I reached out. It was like grabbing a handful of snow, freezing cold and soft, and a chill shot up through my arm to my head and formed a vision of the moment of his true death. I felt his panic, heard his underwater cry for his father, the words coming clear through a torrent of bubbles that also released his life. Then I came to and was on my feet, using my season-and-a-half of rake-pulling muscle to drag that kid, dead or alive, up out of the bay. His body landed in my boat with a soggy thud, and as it did, I was thrown off balance and nearly took a dive over the side.
He was curled up like a fetus and unnaturally light when I lifted him into a sitting position on the plank bench at the center of the boat. A wave of revulsion passed through me as I touched his slick, spongy flesh. He’d come out of the water wearing nothing, and I had no clothes handy to protect him against the wind. He faced back at me where I sat near the throttle of the engine. There was a good four inches of water sloshing around in the bottom. I quickly lifted the baskets of clams and chucked them all over the side one at a time. I had to lighten the load and get the boat to ride higher through the storm. Then I sat down with those big green eyes staring into me, and opened the throttle all the way.
Lightning streaked through the sky, sizzling down and then exploding over our heads. The waves were massive, and now the storm scared me more than the living corpse. I headed toward the dock, aiming to overshoot it since I knew the wind would drive us eastward. If I was lucky, I could get to a cove I knew of on the southern tip of Gardner’s Park. I had briefly thought of heading out toward Grass Island and beaching there, but in a storm like the one raging around us, there was no telling if the island would be there tomorrow.
I never tried harder at anything in my life than preventing myself from wondering how this dead kid was sitting in front of me, shivering cold. The only thought that squeaked through my defenses was, “Is this a miracle?” Then those defenses busted open, and I considered the fact that I might already be dead myself and we were sailing through hell, or to it. I steadied myself as best I could by concentrating on cutting into the swells. The boat was taking a brutal pounding, but we were making headway.
“We’re going to make it,” I said to Jimmy, and he didn’t smile, but he looked less frightened. That subtle sign helped me stay my own confusion, and so I just started talking to him, saying anything that came to mind. By the time we reached the bridge and were passing under it, I realized I had been laying out my life story, and he was seeing it flash before his eyes. I did not want to die that afternoon with nothing to show but scenes of the bay and my hometown. What I wished I could have shared with him were my dreams for the future. Then I noticed a vague spark in his gaze, a subtle recognition of some possibility. That’s when the full brunt of the storm hit—gale-force winds, lashing rain, hail the size of dice—and I heard above the shriek of the wind a distinct cracking sound when the prow slammed down off a huge roller. The boat was breaking up.
With every impact against the water came that cracking noise, and each time it sounded, I noticed the kid’s skin begin to tear. A dark brown sludge seeped from these wounds. Tears formed in his big eyes, became his eyes, and then dripped in viscous streams down his face, leaving the sockets empty. The lightning cracked above and his chest split open down to his navel. He opened his mouth and a hermit crab scurried out across his blue lips and chin to his neck. I no longer could think to steer, no longer felt the cold, couldn’t utter a sound. The sky was nearly dark as night. We fell off a wave into its trough like slamming into a moving truck, and then the wood came apart with a groan. I felt the water rising up around my ankles and calves. Then the transom split off the back of the boat as if it had been made of cardboard, and the engine dropped away out of my grasp, its noise silenced. One more streak of lightning walked the sky, and I saw before me the remains of the kid as John Hunter had described they would be. The next thing I knew, I was in the water, flailing to stay afloat amidst the storm.
I was a strong swimmer, but by this point I was completely exhausted. The waves came from everywhere, one after the other, and I had no idea where I was headed or how close I had managed to get to shore. I would be knocked under by a wave and then bob back up, and then down I’d go again. A huge wave, like a cold dark wing, swept over me, and I thought it might be death. It drove me below the surface, where I tumbled and spun so violently that when I again tried to struggle toward the sky, I instead found the sandy bottom. Then something moved beneath me, and I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming, but I remembered my father riding me on his back through the ocean. I reached out and put my hands on a pair of shoulders. In my desperation, my fingers dug through the flesh and latched onto skeleton. We were flying, skimming along the surface, and I could breathe again. It was all so crazy, my mind broke down in the confusion and I must have passed out.
When next I was fully aware, I was stumbling through knee-deep water in the shallows off Gardner’s Park. I made the beach and collapsed on the sand. An hour passed, maybe more, but when I awoke, the sto
rm had abated and a steady rain was falling. I made my way, tired and weak, through the park to Sunrise Highway. There, I managed to hitch a ride back to the docks and my waiting car. It was late when I finally returned to the Alamo. I slipped off my wet clothes and got into bed. Curling up on my side, I quickly drifted off to sleep, the words of the old crone’s rosary washing over me, submerging me.
The next day I called the police and reported the loss of my boat, so that those at the dock who found my slip empty wouldn’t think I had drowned. Later on, when I was driving over to my mother’s house, I heard on the radio that the storm had claimed a life. Downsy’s boat was missing at the dock. Ironically enough, they found his body that morning washed up on the shore of Grass Island.
A few days later, it was also discovered that the storm had left some interesting debris on the beach at the south end of Gardner’s Park, close to where I had come ashore. Two hikers came across pieces of my boat, identified by the plank that held its serial numbers, and a little farther up the beach, the remains of Jimmy Trentino.
I went to two funerals in one day—one for a kid who never got a chance to grow up, and one for a guy who didn’t want to. Later that evening, sitting in a shadowed booth at the back of The Copper Kettle, John Hunter remarked about how a coffin is like a boat for the dead.
I wanted to tell him everything that happened the day of the storm, but in the end, felt he wouldn’t approve. He had sternly warned me once against blabbing—even when drunk—about a bed I might be seeding for the coming season. “A good man knows when to keep a secret,” he had said. Instead, I merely told him, “I’m not coming back to the bay.”
He laughed. “Did you think you had to tell me?” he said. “I’ve seen you reading those books in your boat on your lunch break. I’ve seen you wandering around town late at night. You don’t need a boat to get where it’s deep.”
I got up then and went to the bar to order another round. When I came back to the booth, he was gone.
I moved on with my life, went back to school, devoted more time to writing my stories, and through the changes that came, I tried to always be sure of myself. In those inevitable dark moments, though, when I thought I was about to panic, I’d remember John Hunter, his hand reaching down to pull me from the water. I always wished that I might see him again, but I never did, because it couldn’t be any other way.
“Are you always so nice to dead people?” she asked.
A Soul in a Bottle
Tim Powers
The forecourt of the Chinese Theater smelled of rain-wet stone and car exhaust, but a faint aroma like pears and cumin seemed to cling to his shirt-collar as he stepped around the clustered tourists, who all appeared to be blinking up at the copper towers above the forecourt wall or smiling into cameras as they knelt to press their hands into the puddled handprints in the cement paving blocks.
George Sydney gripped his shopping bag under his arm and dug three pennies from his pants pocket.
For the third or fourth time this morning he found himself glancing sharply over his left shoulder, but again there was no one within yards of him. The morning sun was bright on the Roosevelt Hotel across the boulevard, and the clouds were breaking up in the blue sky.
He crouched beside Jean Harlow’s square and carefully laid one penny in each of the three round indentations below her incised signature, then wiped his wet fingers on his jacket. The coins wouldn’t stay there long, but Sydney always put three fresh ones down whenever he walked past this block of Hollywood Boulevard.
He straightened up and again caught a whiff of pears and cumin, and when he glanced over his left shoulder there was a girl standing right behind him.
At first glance he thought she was a teenager—she was a head shorter than him, and her tangled red hair framed a narrow, freckled face with squinting eyes and a wide, amused mouth.
“Three pennies?” she asked, and her voice was deeper than he would have expected.
She was standing so close to him that his elbow had brushed her breasts when he’d turned around.
“That’s right,” said Sydney, stepping back from her, awkwardly so as not to scuff the coins loose.
“Why?”
“Uh . . . ” He waved at the cement square and then barely caught his shopping bag. “People pried up the original three,” he said. “For souvenirs. That she put there. Jean Harlow, when she put her handprints and shoe prints in the wet cement, in 1933.”
The girl raised her faint eyebrows and blinked down at the stone. “I never knew that. How did you know that?”
“I looked her up one time. Uh, on Google.”
The girl laughed quietly, and in that moment she seemed to be the only figure in the forecourt, including himself, that had color. He realized dizzily that the scent he’d been catching all morning was hers.
“Google?” she said. “Sounds like a Chinaman trying to say something. Are you always so nice to dead people?”
Her black linen jacket and skirt were visibly damp, as if she had slept outside, and seemed to be incongruously formal. He wondered if somebody had donated the suit to the Salvation Army place down the boulevard by Pep Boys, and if this girl was one of the young people he sometimes saw in sleeping bags under the marquee of a closed theater down there.
“Respectful, at least,” he said, “I suppose.”
She nodded. “ ‘Lo,’ ” she said, “ ‘some we loved, the loveliest and the best . . . ’ ”
Surprised by the quote, he mentally recited the next two lines of the Rubaiyat quatrain—That Time and Fate of all their Vintage prest,/ Have drunk their cup a round or two before—and found himself saying the last line out loud: “ ‘And one by one crept silently to Rest.’ ”
She was looking at him intently, so he cleared his throat and said, “Are you local? You’ve been here before, I gather.” Probably that odd scent was popular right now, he thought, the way patchouli oil had apparently been in the ’60s. Probably he had brushed past someone who had been wearing it too, earlier in the day.
“I’m staying at the Heroic,” she said, then went on quickly, “Do you live near here?”
He could see her bra through her damp white blouse, and he looked away—though he had noticed that it seemed to be embroidered with vines.
“I have an apartment up on Franklin,” he said, belatedly.
She had noticed his glance, and arched her back for a moment before pulling her jacket closed and buttoning it. “ ‘And in a Windingsheet of Vineleaf wrapped,’ ” she said merrily, “ ‘So bury me by some sweet Gardenside.’ ”
Embarrassed, he muttered the first line of that quatrain: “ ‘Ah, with the grape my fading life provide . . . ’ ”
“Good idea!” she said—then she frowned, and her face was older. “No, dammit, I’ve got to go—but I’ll see you again, right? I like you.” She leaned forward and tipped her face up—and then she had briefly kissed him on the lips, and he did drop his shopping bag.
When he had crouched to pick it up and brushed the clinging drops of cold water off on his pants, and looked around, she was gone. He took a couple of steps toward the theater entrance, but the dozens of colorfully dressed strangers blocked his view, and he couldn’t tell if she had hurried inside; and he didn’t see her among the people by the photo booths or on the shiny black sidewalk.
Her lips had been hot—perhaps she had a fever.
He opened the plastic bag and peered inside, but the book didn’t seem to have got wet or landed on a corner. A first edition of Colleen Moore’s Silent Star, with a TLS, a typed letter, signed, tipped in on the front flyleaf. The Larry Edmunds Bookstore a few blocks east was going to give him fifty dollars for it.
And he thought he’d probably stop at Boardner’s afterward and have a couple of beers before walking back to his apartment. Or maybe a shot of Wild Turkey, though it wasn’t yet noon. He knew he’d be coming back here again, soon, frequently—peering around, lingering, almost certainly uselessly.
Sti
ll, I’ll see you again, she had said. I like you.
Well, he thought with a nervous smile as he started east down the black sidewalk, stepping around the inset brass-rimmed pink stars with names on them, I like you too. Maybe, after all, it’s a rain-damp street girl that I can fall in love with.
She wasn’t at the Chinese Theater when he looked for her there during the next several days, but a week later he saw her again. He was driving across Fairfax on Santa Monica Boulevard, and he saw her standing on the sidewalk in front of the big Starbuck’s, in the shadows below the aquamarine openwork dome.
He knew it was her, though she was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt now—her red hair and freckled face were unmistakable. He honked the horn as he drove through the intersection, and she looked up, but by the time he had turned left into a market parking lot and driven back west on Santa Monica, she was nowhere to be seen.
He drove around several blocks, squinting as the winter sunlight shifted back and forth across the streaked windshield of his ten-year-old Honda, but none of the people on the sidewalks was her.
A couple of blocks south of Santa Monica he passed a fenced-off motel with plywood over its windows and several shopping carts in its otherwise empty parking lot. The 1960s space-age sign over the building read RO IC MOTEL, and he could see faint outlines where a long-gone T and P had once made “tropic” of the first word.
“Eroic,” he said softly to himself.
To his own wry embarrassment he parked a block past it and fed his only quarter into the parking meter, but at the end of his twenty minutes she hadn’t appeared.
Of course she hadn’t. “You’re acting like a high-school kid,” he whispered impatiently to himself as he put the Honda in gear and pulled away from the curb.
Six days later he was walking east toward Book City at Cherokee, and as was his habit lately he stepped into the Chinese Theater forecourt with three pennies in his hand, and he stood wearily beside the souvenir shop and scanned the crowd, shaking the pennies in his fist. The late afternoon crowd consisted of brightly-dressed tourists, and a portly, bearded man making hats out of balloons, and several young men dressed as Batman and Spiderman and Captain Jack Sparrow from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
Ghosts: Recent Hauntings Page 5
