by Laura Bickle
“My bunkmate and I were trying to sleep, listening to all this racket. And the stone banging around in the locker. He hadn’t been sleeping—said he’d had terrible dreams about a fanged woman chewing his flesh. I told him again that he had to give the rock back. It’s much easier to have these discussions in the dark.” The old man’s gaze is unfocused. “When it sounds like the world’s coming apart around you, and you can’t look anyone in the eye.”
“Did he take it back?” I ask.
The old man sighs. “No. The rock slammed around in the locker until it broke the hinges open. In the dark and in the emergency lighting, I couldn’t see what was happening, but I heard that rock rolling to his bunk and beating the hell out of him.
“I got up, struggled to get my hands on that thing. It was like trying to hold a cannonball. I put my hands to it, pleaded with it.” The old man puts his hands together next to his ear, as if he’s holding the stone. “I told her...I’ll take you back. But you have to show me.”
I swallow. “You didn’t go out in that storm?”
“I did. I had no choice. It was either that, or the damned rock was going to beat my mate to death, and I’d be in the brig for murder. My buddy was barely conscious as it was, bloody-nosed and yelling at me to get that thing away from him.
“I think the kami understood. The rock settled down, and the storm began to calm. I got dressed, slipped it into my coat. By some miracle—and by miracle, I mean the kami—I sneaked out unnoticed. I walked past the deck officer and people bailing water like they couldn’t see me. I was, for that brief time, a ghost. I took a rowboat down to the dock, my little patch of water smooth as glass for yards around me. The rain maybe obscured me, I don’t know. But it was like walking down the dock, surrounded by a curtain of gray.
“I took the rock out, asked where to go. The kami was in there. She showed me through the Bunko. She showed me to go north, along dirt roads. Images of a fox walking. I walked all night until I found this pitiful little roadside shrine. The rain had pulled all the cherry blossoms from the trees and plastered the old stone in pink.
“I found the hole in the corner, put the rock back in, and heaped dirt around it. I heard something like a sigh, and then...” The old man’s hands flutter. “The sun came out of the clouds. A fox walked around the corner of the temple, looked at me, and went under it. I had the good sense to take off then.”
“Wow,” I breathe.
“I walked back to the ship, soaked to the bone. I made up some story about being washed overboard, knocked out, and coming to by the dock. There was enough chaos that folks believed me.”
“What about your bunkmate?”
“He told our CO he fell out of his bunk and the turbulence knocked him around with his footlocker. He didn’t want to talk about it, and neither did I.”
The old man puts his feet on his desk. “But you can bet your ass, next chance I got, I found a good hooker to take the Bunko away from me.”
I’m not sure if I’m supposed to laugh or not, but Pops is grinning. He laces his hands behind his head. “I still dream of her sometimes. She was something else.”
“The prostitute?”
“Nah. The fox woman. I believe the phrase now, son, is...” His hands move in curves in the air before him. “Dat ass.”
I can’t help it. I lose it and start laughing. The old man joins me, and it’s several minutes before I can stop guffawing long enough to wipe the tears from my eyes.
“I also got something else that night, but you can’t tell no one,” Pops says.
“What? Herpes?” I blurt.
Pops throws a sheaf of papers at me. “No, dumbass. I got a tattoo.”
“Lola?”
“Not that one. Didn’t know your grandmother then. This was a secret.” He reaches for the hem of his shirt to show me.
“Really?” I lean forward, intrigued. I’ve never seen the old man without a shirt. He even wears one to the beach.
Pops rolls his eyes and lifts his shirt over his head. He’s pale and stringy, like a chicken in the supermarket, and a scar from heart surgery many years ago stretches over his sternum. He turns around to show me his back.
“Holy shit,” I gasp.
On his right shoulder, stretching from his shoulder halfway down his ribs, is the most beautiful tattoo I’ve ever seen. It’s a woman in a kimono, with wild black hair blowing in an unseen wind. She’s surrounded by cherry blossoms, and a fox winds around her feet. It looks like one of the old Japanese block prints I’ve seen in books. The guys down the street at the tattoo shop would totally shit themselves over this.
“That cost a pretty penny,” he says. “But she’s the devil on my shoulder. Or the angel. Depending how you look at it.”
“That’s amazing,” I say, resisting the urge to touch it. I’ve seen shitty prison and drunk soldier tattoos rendered in navy blue ink. This has color. It’s a little blurry, and a bit warped under the stretching of skin and time, but it’s still really beautiful.
“I got this guy who—I suspect—tattooed for the yakuza, the Japanese Mob, to do it.”
“They existed back then?”
“Oh, yeah. They passed those tricks on from the samurai times. I did have to tell him the story before he’d do it.”
I gaze at the sensuous figure. “Damn. Dat ass. What did grandma say about it?”
“I told her I got drunk. Things happen when you’re drinking.”
I laugh.
“You can’t tell nobody! Not even when I’m dead.” The old man struggles to pull his shirt back down over his head. “Let ’em find it when the undertaker comes for me, and let ’em try to puzzle that one out.”
“Okay. I swear.” Though I’m pretty darn sure my dad and uncle have seen it at some point after Pops’s surgery, I can grant him the illusion that it’s Our Big Secret.
Pops nods under his shirt.
“So...” I say more soberly, “is it like that sometimes? Spirits anchored to things?”
“Yeah. You’ve seen a few of ’em around here, and it’s more common than you think. Spirits attached to things can affect people without the Bunko. But with it...one can get to the root of the problem pretty damn quick. See what the ghost remembers. Bits of the past of the object.”
I sigh. “You don’t miss it? You don’t miss the Bunko?”
Pops smiles at me. “Nope. Not in the slightest. Well, maybe if I got to see the fox woman again...” He drums his fingers on the table thoughtfully, but I can tell he’s not serious by the glint in his eyes.
“Grandma wouldn’t have liked that.”
“Kidding.” He raises his hands in surrender. “God knows we’ve got enough weird shit in this shop that I don’t need to go looking for trouble. Not at my age.”
My gaze slides to the hallway leading out to the floor. It’s hard enough to avoid trouble on my own. Even harder if they keep bringing it in and forcing me to look at it. I turn back to him. “Do you think—”
But I forget what I was going to say. Pops is rubbing his chest, a dazed look on his face.
“Pops?” Cold fear rises in my throat.
The old man isn’t focusing on me. His eyes are bugging, and his fingers twist in his shirt.
I jump over the desk and reach for the phone to call an ambulance. I have it in my hand before he slides out of his chair and hits the floor.
CHAPTER 4
I’m yelling.
I don’t know if I’m yelling into the phone, down the hall, or both. I hear myself saying, “He’s had a heart attack, Stannick’s Pawn Shop. I need an ambulance!” A lady is yammering on the other end of the line, some bullshit about keeping him still and baby aspirin and making sure I’m calm. I am not fucking calm.
Bert barrels into the room, my dad stepping on his tail. Dad falls to his knees beside Pops. Pops isn’t saying anything. He’s pale as a slice of Wonder Bread, unable to speak. Spittle flecks the corner of his mouth. The remains of his dinner slip off his desk, and my
dad’s knees grind the Spam into the carpet.
I keep repeating our address into the phone until my uncle takes it from me. I back away, hands still tangled in the cord. I feel helpless, terrified.
“What happened?” my father demands.
“We were just talking, and he grabbed his chest.”
“C’mon,” Bert says. “We gotta get out front and flag down the ambulance.”
I don’t want to leave, but Bert grabs my shirt collar with one of his deceptively strong stubby little arms and drags me down the hallway to the front.
Bert and I stand out on the curb. Sirens howl above the blood pounding in my ears.
“Is he gonna be okay?” I ask Bert.
Bert looks back at me with his reptilian eyes. “I don’t know,” he admits. “I sure hope so.”
I know he’s old. How old, I’m not sure, but I get the sense he’s seen a lot of human death. Maybe he can read the signs.
Lily peers out the front door of Betty’s Burgers. “Raz?” she calls, jogging up to the curb. She takes one look at my face and doesn’t ask any questions, thank God. She just holds my hand.
A red ambulance and a fire truck pull up to the curb, lights washing over the facade of the building. I’m dimly conscious of more gawkers coming, dribbling out of the tattoo shop and the bail bondsman’s place. Some guy I don’t know asks what happened, and Bert tells him to mind his own business.
Two men in white shirts with tackle box-things run into the store, following Bert. I follow them, pulling Lily along in my wake.
There’s not enough room in the old man’s office for everyone. Lily and I crowd into the hallway, pressing our backs to the wall as a gurney clatters toward Pops’s office. Radios crackle above the low, even tone of my uncle’s voice. Instruments beep and hiss.
Lily squeezes my hand.
They bring Pops out on the gurney. An oxygen mask is fitted over his face, and he seems very small under the sheet, about a thousand years older than he really is. Pops’s eyes are closed, but his breath fogs the mask. My dad clings to the back of the gurney, behind the paramedic, clutching at it like a child behind a shopping cart who’s afraid to be left behind.
Lily and I fall into the entourage behind them. They load Pops up. My dad jumps into the ambulance with the paramedics. My uncle tries to climb in, but the paramedic says they only have room for one.
The rest of us stand on the curb, watching the red lights strobe above us. They don’t turn the siren on as they pull away. I wonder if that means the old man is doing better than we think, or if it’s because they don’t want to stress his heart.
By now, a crowd has gathered. Betty comes up to us, throws her arms around me, and presses me to her suffocating bosom. She’s telling me that Pops is going to be all right.
I don’t trust myself to speak. I’m too afraid of bursting into tears.
MAYBE IT’S BEING BURIED in Mrs. Renfelter’s ample cleavage, but I somehow get separated from Lily. I follow Bert and my uncle back into the shop, missing the feel of Lily’s hand in mine.
It’s decided that Bert will stay behind to close the store. The way his little T-rex claws knit and click together, I can tell he’s worried. I promise to update him as soon as I can. He promises to find Carl and bring him to the hospital.
We can’t find the damned ‘CLOSED’ sign. The shop hasn’t been closed during my lifetime. For Chrissakes, I remember it being open on Christmas morning, and people trying to hock their unwanted bread makers and fugly cowboy boots that didn’t fit. Bert finally finds the sign in Pops’s office. He strings it on the door and draws the steel security curtain as my uncle walks his motorcycle out of the basement.
Donning his helmet, I climb on the back. My uncle never wears a helmet; the one he keeps on the back is just for passengers and the cops. His expression behind his sunglasses is unreadable. He guns the engine. I grab onto the back of the seat, and we roar down the street.
It’s good that it’s too noisy to talk. The air and the thrum of the engine wash over me. I try not to think, not to feel, just lose myself in the adrenaline thrill of a motorcycle ride.
Was there some early warning sign I’d missed? Pops seemed to be having trouble pulling his shirt over his head after he showed me his ink. I thought that had been just old aches and pains, the stiffness in his joints that he often complained of. I wonder now if a glob of the Spam sandwich has somehow gunked up an artery, or if this is the cumulative effect of hundreds of Spamwiches I’ve brought for him over the years. If so, this is all my fault.
A familiar feeling. I’ve been responsible for death before, and this is far too much like it. Helpless. It’s suddenly damp inside my helmet, and I’m grateful no one can see me behind the tinted visor.
Brick buildings zing by, and I can see flashes of ocean in the slivers of light between them. Gulls circle overhead, and I want to escape, be down at the boardwalk, eating an ice cream cone and watching the Ferris wheel spin before the casinos. But we turn deeper into town, beyond the neon and the places made pretty for the tourists. The beautiful hotels with their marble lobbies and sharply-pressed concierges are miles away. The quality of the streets degrades as we moved further into the heart of Starboard City, and the cracks in the pavement rattle my teeth.
My dad always says that money and power are focused on the boardwalk, and that it’s been that way since the time of Prohibition, when the Mob ran cheap liquor inland and paid the cops to look the other way. He says it’s good to be close to all that shiny power and money, to reap the benefits. That’s why we are where we are, close to a bail bondsman and just a few blocks from jail and the casinos. Near both to people who need money and those who have it. But not too close to the hotels and pretty palaces. Too close to all that heat and light, and we could get burned.
The city hospital rises up in a block of empty lots surrounded by barbed wire. It’s incongruously white and modern in contrast to its dilapidated surroundings, all gleaming concrete and blue one-way glass.
Sid pulls up to the emergency room entrance. I tug the helmet off and give my face a scrub with my sleeve as Sid gives the valet the keys, a twenty-dollar bill, and a whole mouthful of threats about what would happen if the bike got damaged.
We hurry through the whoosh of the sliding doors into air that smells like sweaty feet and bad toenail fungus.
After removing my belt and emptying out a handful of change, I get through the security checkpoint’s metal detector. Sid has more problems. He dumps out two knives, a wallet on a chain, and a gun into the gray plastic tray before the metal detector.
Security, predictably, goes apeshit. Sid explains that he has a permit, but they’re still not going to let him in the door with that shit. Sid is fine with that, but he wants his stuff back when he leaves. This results in a supervisor being called, and a bunch more BS being laid down on both sides.
I drift into the waiting area and scan the couches under the thrumming television. My dad is sitting under one of those televisions, his elbows on his knees, staring at the floor. I sit down next to him.
We sit in silence for some time, listening to the drone of the television, a woman sobbing two rows over, and Sid bitching at the security officers.
“He’s my dad,” my father says.
I lean in beside him, my shoulder pressing against his. “Yeah. I know.”
Eventually, Sid gets himself disentangled from Security, though I suspect his pockets are much lighter. He proceeds to spend some time beating up the Coke machine in the lobby. Soon after, Bert stomps through the security checkpoint with Carl in tow.
My cousin Carl is a year younger than me, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at him. He’s almost as tall as his dad and wider than Bert. He’s got a full head of luxurious blond hair, a bit of a unibrow, and is in the process of stretching his earlobes. I give him shit about that, especially since the football jersey he wears is sort of incongruous with ear gauges, but the coach promised him the stars and the moon if he jo
ined up.
I don’t give him too much shit, though. He’s the kind of guy who looks like he could tear you limb from limb and use your bones as toothpicks for the sheer pleasure of it. But he’s really a giant pussycat—for the most part.
Carl’s monobrow wriggles up and down like a nightcrawler. He sits down beside me, and the plastic chair creaks in protest. “What happened, man?”
I take a deep breath, let it out. The breath doesn’t quaver, so I trust myself to speak. “Heart attack, we think. I dunno. He just grabbed his chest, went pale, and slumped.”
Carl claps his meaty paw on the back of my shoulder. “Good thing you were there, man. This could’ve gone very badly.”
I grimace. “It still could.” But I appreciate that Carl doesn’t blame me. Carl never blames me. He doesn’t even blame me for my brother’s death, when just about everybody else does.
“It won’t. This is different.” Carl gets up and goes to the vending machine. He elbows his dad aside to extract a Mountain Dew, my favorite. He comes back and hands it to me.
Staring down at my scuffed shoes, I wrap my hands around the bottle. Last time I’d been at the hospital was for Zach, and it had gone badly. Carl has the decency to realize that. For a guy who could moonlight as the Incredible Hulk, he’s pretty fucking sensitive.
“Yeah. We’ll see.” My voice is small.
Carl nods. “Lily and Mrs. Renfelter are gonna come.”
My grip feels tenuous on the slick bottle. I know they want to support us, but I’m not sure how much solicitude I can honestly bear. One well-braised hamburger patty, and I might just start bawling.
A woman in green scrubs approaches, and my dad sits up straight. She’s holding a clipboard and has a stethoscope draped around her neck. She stops two feet before us, crouches down to talk to us like we’re children. “Are you the Stannick family?”
