You’re not dead.
She looked up, beyond the rushing darkening lanes, to the flat desert that was shifting by so much more slowly. Probably the bus was somewhere around Victorville by now, still an easy sixty miles out of L.A.
On her panicked late-afternoon drive out of Los Angeles two years ago she had seen a Highway Patrol car behind her, just south of Victorville, and she had meticulously pulled off and let him go on by, and had had a hamburger at a Burger King alongside the freeway. Then she had driven the next dozen miles northeast on a side road paralleling the freeway, to let the cop get far ahead. Even on the side road she had stopped for a while, at a weird roadside lot among the Joshua trees where a white-bearded old man had assembled a collection of old casino signs, and big plywood caricatures of a cowboy and a hula dancer, and assortments of empty bottles hung on the bare limbs of scrawny sycamores, out here in the middle of the desert. Out of sympathy for another outcast, she had bought from him a book of poems he’d written and had published locally.
Now, biting her nails aboard a rushing Greyhound bus, she wondered if the old man was still there, wondered if Southern California still had room for such people.
Or for herself. She and the old man at the ramshackle roadside museum had both at least been alive.
THE MAN known as Sherman Oaks screamed when the heat scalded his left arm, and he fell to his knees in the lush ice plant of the shadowy freeway island at the junction of the 10 and the 110.
After a few choking moments he was able to stand up and breathe; but his heart was pounding, and his left arm, still hot but at least not burning now, was pointed stiffly south. His right palm and the knees of his baggy pants were greenly wet from having crushed the ice plant. Beyond the thickly leaved branches of the bordering oleander bushes, the flickering tracks of car headlights continued to sweep around this enclosed park-like area as they followed the arc of the on-ramp onto the southbound 110.
He ate it, he thought numbly. The kid ate it, or it ate him.
But I’ll eat who’s left.
He had come here to check his ghost traps. The trap right in front of him had caught one, but the ghost seemed to have fled when he had screamed. Sherman Oaks decided to leave the trap here—the ghost would come back to it in a few hours, or else another ghost would come. Sometimes he was able to bottle five or six from just one trap.
He had knocked the trap over when he had fallen, and now he righted it: a hand-lettered cardboard sign that read, SIT ON A POTATO PAN, OTIS. Other traps he had set up in this secret arbor included several more homemade signs—THE NOON SEX ALERT RELAXES NO ONE HT, and GO HANG A SALAMI, I’M A LASAGNA HOG—and scatterings of jigsaw-puzzle pieces on patches of clear dirt. Better-known palindromes, such as Madam, I’m Adam, didn’t catch the attention of the wispy ghosts, and heavier items such as broken dishes seemed to be beyond the power of their frail ectoplasmic muscles to rearrange: but the Potato Pan and the Sex Alert and the Lasagna palindromes kept them confounded for hours, or even days, in wonderment at the way the sentences read the same backward as forward; and the ghosts would linger even longer trying to assemble the jigsaw puzzles.
Real, living homeless people seldom came here, knowing that this isolated patch of greenery was haunted, so he sometimes dropped a big handful of change among the jigsaw pieces—that trick would hold ghosts probably till the end of the world, for they not only felt compelled to put the puzzle together but also to count and stack the money; and apparently their short-term memories were no good, because they always lost count and had to start over. Sometimes, when he arrived with his little glass bottles, the ghosts would faintly ask him for help in counting the coins.
And then he would scoop the ghosts in and stopper the bottles tight. (It was awkward, using just his right hand; but sometimes he had actually seemed able to nudge them along a little with his missing left!) He had always known that he had to use glass containers—the ghosts had to be able to see out, even if it was only as far as the inside lining of a pocket, or they rotted away and turned to poison in the container.
He had his makeshift traps all over the city. In RTD yards under the Santa Monica Freeway, ghosts would climb aboard the doorless old hulks of city buses and then just sit in the seats, evidently waiting for a driver to come and take them somewhere; and they often hung around deserted pay telephones, as if waiting for a call; and sometimes in the empty cracked concrete lots he would just paint a big bull’s-eye, and the things would gather there, presumably to see what sort of missile might eventually hit the target. Even spiderwebs often caught the very new ones.
Sometimes he got so many bottles filled that even his stash boxes wouldn’t hold any more, and he could sell the surplus. The dope dealers that catered to the wealthy Benedict Canyon crowd would pay him two or three hundred dollars per bottle—cash and no questions and not even an excitation test with a magnetic compass, because they had known him long enough to be sure he wouldn’t just sell them an empty bottle. The dealers siphoned each ghost into a quantity of nitrous oxide and then sealed the mix into a little pressurized glass cartridge, and eventually some rich customer would fill a balloon with it and then inhale the whole thing.
The cylinders were known as smokes or cigars, slang terms of the old-timers who attracted ghosts with aromatic pipe tobacco or cherry-flavored cigars, and then inhaled the disintegrating things right along with the tobacco smoke. Take a snort of Mr. Nicotinus, walk with the Maduro Man. It had been considered a gourmet high, in the days before health and social concerns had made tobacco use déclassé. Nitrous oxide was the preferred mixer now, even though the hit tended to be less “digestible,” lumpy with unbroken memories.
Sherman Oaks favored ghosts raw and uncut—not pureed in the bowl of a pipe or the cherry of a cigar, or minced up in a chilled soup of nitrous oxide; he liked them fresh and whole, like live oysters.
He opened his mouth now and exhaled slowly, emptying his lungs, hearing the faint roar of all the ghosts he had eaten over the years or decades.
The Bony Express, all the fractalized trinities of Mr. Nicotinus.
To his left the towers of downtown, among which he could still pick out the old City Hall, the Security Bank building, and the Arco Towers, were featureless and depthless silhouettes against a darkening sky stained bronze by the returned smog. but the cooling evening breeze down here in the freeway island somehow still carried, along with the scents of jasmine and crushed iceplant, a whiff of yesterday’s desert sage smell.
His lungs were empty.
Now Sherman Oaks inhaled deeply—but the kid was too far away. That old gardening truck had apparently kept right on going; he should have got the license number. But his left arm, still uncomfortably warm, was at least pointing toward the nearest loop of the track the kid was leaving. West of here.
The actual flesh-and-blood left arm was gone—lost long ago, he assumed from the smooth, uninflamed scar tissue that covered the stump at the shoulder. The loss of the limb had no doubt been a dramatic incident, but it had happened back in the old life that he knew only through vague and unhelpful fragments of dreams. He couldn’t now even remember what name he might once have had; he had chosen “Sherman Oaks” just because that was the district of Los Angeles he’d been in when awareness had returned to him.
But he still felt a left arm. Sometimes the phantom hand at the end of it would feel so tightly clenched into a fist that the imaginary muscles would cramp painfully, and sometimes the “arm” felt cold and wet. When someone died nearby, though, he felt a little tingle of warmth, as if a cigarette ash had been tapped off onto the phantom skin; and if the ghost was trapped somehow, snagged on or in something, the phantom arm would warm up and point to it.