And even though he knew that there was not really any arm attached to the shoulder, Sherman Oaks found it awkward to walk through doorways or down bus aisles when the phantom limb was thrust out in that way. At other times the missing hand would for whole days at a time seem to be clutching his chest, and he would have to sleep on his back, which he hated to do because he always started snoring and woke himself up.
He squinted around at the darkening grove. He knew he should check the other traps, but he wanted to find the kid before someone else did; obviously Koot Hoomie Parganas had not yet reached puberty—that was why the boy couldn’t absorb the super-smoke that he was overlapped with, even if he had actually inhaled it now. The unabsorbed ghost would continue to be conspicuous.
Sherman Oaks lifted his head at a sudden rustling sound. With muffled cursing and a snapping of oleander branches, someone was clumsily breaking into his preserve. Sherman Oaks tiptoed toward the intruder, but relaxed when he heard the mumbled words: “Goddamn spirochetes can’t hear yourself think in a can of tuna fish. Yo bay-bee! Gotcha where they want ’em if it’s New York minutes in a three-o’clock food show.” And Oaks could smell him, the sharp reek of unmetabolized cheap wine.
Oaks stepped out into a clearing, intentionally stamping his feet. The stranger goggled at him in vast confusion.
“Get out of here,” Oaks told him. “Or I’ll eat you too.”
“Yes, boss,” quavered the stranger, toppling over backward and then swimming awkwardly back toward the oleander border, doing a thrashing backstroke across the ice plant. “Just lookin’ to get my ashes hauled.”
You got your ashes hauled years ago, thought Oaks as he watched the ludicrous figure disappear back onto the freeway shoulder.
But Oaks was uneasy. Even this sort of creature, the creepy old ghosts who had accumulated physical substance—from bugs and sick animals, and spilled blood and spit and jizz, and even from each other, sometimes—might go lurching after the boy, in their idiot intrusive way. They always seemed to find clothes to wear, and they could panhandle for money to buy liquor, but Sherman Oaks could recognize them instantly by their disjointed babbling and the way the liquor, unaffected by their lifeless token guts, bubbled out of their pores still redolent with unmetabolized ethanol.
They couldn’t eat organic stuff, because it would just rot inside them; so they mindlessly ate…rocks, and bottle caps, and marbles, and bits of crumbled asphalt they found in the gutters of old streets. Sherman Oaks had to smile, remembering the time a truck full of live chickens had overturned on the Pasadena Freeway, freeing a couple of dozen chickens who took up messy residence on one of the freeway islands. Passing motorists had started bringing bags of corn along with them on the way to work, and throwing the bags out onto the island as they drove past. Several of the big old solid ghosts had mistaken the corn kernels for gravel, and had eaten them, and then a couple of weeks later had been totally bewildered by the green corn shoots sprouting from every orifice of their squatter’s-rights bodies, even out from behind their eyeballs.
To hell with the ghost traps, thought Sherman Oaks. I can go hungry for one night. I’ve got to track down that kid, and that big unabsorbed ghost, before somebody else does.
THE SKY was purple now, darkening to black, and the Queen Mary was a vast chandelier of lights only a quarter of a mile away across Long Beach Harbor, throwing glittering gold tracks across the choppy water to where Solomon Shadroe stood on the deck of his forty-six-foot Alaskan trawler.
His boat was moored at a slip in the crowded Downtown Long Beach Marina, by the mouth of the Los Angeles River, and though most of the owners of the neighboring boats only rocked the decks on weekends, Shadroe had been a “live-aboard” at the marina for seventeen years. He owned a twenty-unit apartment building near the beach a mile and a half east of here, and even though his girlfriend lived there he hadn’t spent the night on land since 1975.
He swiveled his big gray head back toward the shore. He had no sense of smell anymore, but he knew that something heavy must have happened not too far away—half an hour ago he had felt the punch of a big psychic shift somewhere in the city, even harder than the one that had knocked him down in the alley yesterday evening, when he’d been moving the refrigerator. And all of the stuffed pigs in his stateroom and galley and pilothouse had started burping and kept it up for a full ten minutes, as if their little battery-driven hearts would break.
A few years ago it had rained hard on Halloween night, and he had climbed into his skewed old car and rushed to a Montgomery Ward’s and bought a dozen little stuffed-pig dolls that were supposed to oink if you “GENTLY PET MY HEAD,” as the legend had read on the boxes; actually the sound they made was a prolonged burp. As soon as he had got back to the boat he had pulled them all out of their boxes and stood them on the deck, and they had soaked in the Halloween rain all night. To this day they still had the old-bacon mustiness of Halloween rain.
Now they were his watchdogs. Watchpigs.
Shadroe limped back to the stern transom and stared past the lights of the Long Beach Convention Center, trying to see the towers of Los Angeles.
He had been ashore today, dollying a second used Frigidaire to a vacant apartment on the ground floor of his building—the refrigerator he’d tried to install yesterday had fallen onto his foot, possibly breaking something in his ankle and certainly breaking the refrigerator’s coils, and right there was a hundred dollars blown and the trouble of hiring somebody to take the damned inert machine away—and through an open window in another apartment he had caught a blare of familiar music. It was the theme song of the old fifties situation comedy “Ghost of a Chance,” and when he had stopped to ask the tenant about it he had learned that Channel 13 was running that show again, every afternoon at three—by popular demand.
The sea breeze was suddenly chillier on his immobile face, and he realized that he was crying. He couldn’t taste the tears, but he knew that if he could, they would taste like cinnamon.
One night, and it looked like being soon, he would go ashore and stretch out and take a nap on the beach. Just so there was no one around. He really didn’t want anyone else to get hurt.
AND MILES away to the northwest, out on the dark face of the Pacific, fish were jumping out of the water—mackerel and bonita leaping high in the cold air and slapping back down onto the waves, and sprays of smelt and anchovies bursting up like scattershot; fishermen working the offshore reefs noticed the unusual phenomenon, but being on the surface of the ocean they couldn’t see that the pattern was moving, rolling east across the choppy face of the sea, as if some thing were making its underwater way toward Venice Beach, and the fish were unwilling to share the water with it.
“JESUS, JACKO did you get beat up again?”
Someone was shaking the boy awake, and for a few moments he thought it was his parents, wanting to know what had happened to the friend he’d been playing with that afternoon. “He was swimming in the creek,” he muttered blurrily, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. “And he went under the water and just never came up again. I waited and waited, but it was getting dark, so I came home.” He knew that his parents were upset—horrified?—that he had calmly eaten dinner and gone to bed without even bothering to mention the drowning.