Two quarters in the parking meter bought him an hour’s worth of time, and he turned his back on the soft boom of the surf and stalked across Pacific with the hands clamped against his ribs and his hands jammed in his pockets. The plaster hands were heavy, but at a 7-Eleven store an hour ago he had bought six lightbulbs and stuffed them into his jacket pockets, and he didn’t want to risk breaking any of them by shifting the awkward bundle under his arm. He stepped carefully up the high curb at the north side of Pacific.
Almost there anyway, he told himself as he peered ahead.
He was in a wide, raised parking lot between the North and South Venice Boulevards, and past the far curb of South, just this side of a windowless gray cement building, he could see a railing paralleling the street, and another that slanted away down, out of sight. There was a gap there between rows of buildings, and it clearly wasn’t a street.
He crossed the parking lot and hobbled stiffly across South Venice, and when he had got to the railing and the top of the descending walkway, he stopped. He had found the westernmost of the canals, and he was relieved to see that it didn’t look familiar at all.
Below him, fifty feet across and stretching straight away to an arched bridge in the middle distance, the water was still, reflecting the eucalyptus and bamboo and lime trees along the banks. The canal walls were yard-high brickworks of slate-gray half-moons below empty sidewalks, and the houses set back from the water looked tranquil in the faintly brassy October sunlight. He could see a broad side-channel in the east bank a block ahead, but this ramp from South Venice led down to the west bank, and apparently the only way to walk along that side-canal would be to go past it on this side, cross the bridge, and then come back.
By the time he had walked halfway down the ramp toward the canal-bank level, he had left behind the gasping sea breeze and all of the sounds of the beach-city traffic, and all he could hear was bees in the bushes and wind chimes and a distant grumbling of ducks.
He had never cared to read up on this particular seaside town, but from things people had said over the years he had gathered that it had been built in the first years of the century as a mock-up of the original Italian Venice; the canals had been more extensive then, and there had even been gliding gondolas poled by gondoliers with Italian accents. The notion hadn’t caught on, though, and the place had fallen into decrepitude, and in the years after World War II it had been a seedy, shacky beatnik colony, with rocking oil pumps between the houses on the banks of the stagnating canals.
He was walking along the sidewalk now, and he’d gone far enough so that he could look down the cross canal. Another footbridge arched over the blue-sky-reflecting water in that direction, framed by tall palm trees, and a solider-looking bridge farther down looked as though it could accommodate cars.
City-planning types had moved to have the canals filled in, but the residents had protested effectively, and the canals were saved. The neat brickwork of the banks was clearly a modern addition, and many of the houses had the stucco anonymity or the custom Tudor look of new buildings, though there were still dozens of the old, comfortably weather-beaten California bungalow-style houses set in among ancient untrimmed palm trees and overhanging shingle roofs.
Two women and a collie were walking toward him along the sidewalk he was on, and though neither of the women looked particularly like the pictures he’d seen of Elizalde; he dug with his free hand into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out one of the lightbulbs and the paper 7-Eleven bag.
Sullivan noticed a brown plastic owl on a fence post, and it reminded him that he had seen another one on a roof peak behind him. Ahead, now, he spied still another, swinging on a string from a tree branch. And he could hear several sets of jangling wind chimes—maybe Elizalde was right about ghosts being drawn to places like this, and the residents had set out these things as scarecrows. Scareghosts.
“Afternoon,” he said as he passed the ladies and the dog.
When they were behind him he slid the lightbulb into the bag and crouched over the pavement. He glanced back at the two women, and then swung the bag in an arc onto the cement, popping the bulb.
Both of the women jumped in surprise—right after the noise.
“Excuse me,” he said sheepishly, nodding and waving at them.
He straightened and kept walking, tucking the jingling bag back into his pocket.
The white-painted wooden footbridge was steep, and he paused at the crest to shift the Houdini hands to his left side. He was sweating, and wishing now that he’d left the things in the van.
The water below him was clear, and he could see rocks in it but no fish. There had been fish—
HE WAS halfway up the sidewalk of the branch canal, staring at a bleached steer skull on the wall of an old wooden house (another scareghost!), and he had no recollection of having descended from the bridge or walking this far up.
Aside from the two women he had seen, who had since disappeared, there seemed to be no one out walking along the canals this afternoon. He looked around. Even the houses all seemed to have been evacuated—he hadn’t even seen a cat. (His heart was knocking inside his chest.) The water was too still, the houses by the canal were too low, crouching under the tall legs of the palm trunks, and the silence wasn’t nice anymore—it was the silence of a dark yard when all the crickets suddenly stop chirping at once.
Elizalde wasn’t here, and he didn’t want to meet whatever might be.
Without noticing it he had already passed the footbridge on this canal branch, but the wider bridge was still ahead of him, and as he started toward it he saw a car mount it from the islanded side, pause at the crest, and then nose down the far slope-slowly, for the arch was so steep that the driver couldn’t be able to see the pavement ahead of him.
Just A.O.P., dude, Sullivan thought.
He was clutching the plaster hands with both of his own hands as he walked now, and it was all he could do not to break into a run. He didn’t look back to make sure nothing was crawling out of the canal behind him, because he was sure that if he did, he would have to keep on looking back as he fled this place, would have to walk backward toward the bridge that led away to the normal city channels that were asphalt and not water, and something would manifest itself ahead of him, and then just wait for him to back into it.
His eyebrows itched with sweat, and he was breathing fast and shallow.
This is just a funk, he thought, a fit of nerves. There are other canals here (Are there?) and Elizalde might be on the sidewalk of the next one over, or the one beyond that; she might be stark naked and waving her arms and riding a goddamn unicycle, but you won’t see her because you’re panicking here.
So be it. She couldn’t have helped me anyway. I’ll find some other way to warn my father’s ghost (this trip out here was an idiotic long shot) after I drive out of this damned town and find a place to relax and chug a couple of fast, cold beers.
His right shoulder was brushing against vines and bricks as he strode toward the bridge, and he realized that he was crowding the fences of the houses, avoiding the bank—horrified, in fact, at the thought of falling into the shallow water.
the way all sounds echo like metallic groans underwater
He must have just dropped the plaster hands. He was running, and his unimpeded hands were clenched into fists, pumping the air as his legs pounded under him. From the shoulder of his jacket he heard a snap, and then another, as if stitches were being broken.