Veladoros, devotional candles in tall glasses, ringed the fire; and Elizalde soon learned that these women were here waiting for midnight, when, it then being the Friday before El Día de los Muertos, they would bathe their piedras imanes in the seawater.
Elizalde realized that she had not misunderstood the word yesterday—it did mean magnets. Her new friend Dolores untied her handkerchief and showed her her own, a doughnut-sized magnet from a stereo speaker. The best ones, Elizalde had gathered, were the little ones from old telephones—stubby cylinders, no bigger than a dime in cross section, that looked like the smoking “snakes” that her brothers had always lit on Cinco de Mayo and the Fourth of July.
Witches used the magnets as part of the ritual that transformed them into animals, she learned, but piedras imanes were good things to have around the house to attract good luck and deflect spells. The magnets needed to be fed—by tossing them into dirt or sand so that they became bristly with iron filings—and it was a good idea to immerse them in the sea on this one Friday every year.
As she’d sat there and listened to the gossip and the jokes and the occasional scolding of one of the children for playing too close to the fire, Elizalde had lain back against a blanket over an ice chest, and from time to time had made such answers and remarks as she imagined her grandmother would have.
And she heard stories—about a man in Montebello who had to wear sunglasses all the time, because one night he had left his eyes in a dish of water in his garage and taken a cats eyes to see with while he made a midnight cocaine buy, and returned at dawn to find that the dog had eaten the eyes in the dish, leaving the man stuck with the vertical-pupiled, golden-irised cat’s eyes for the rest of his life (Elizalde had commented that, in fairness, the cat should have been given the dog’s eyes); about how-raw eggs could be used to draw fevers, and how if the levers had been very bad the egg would be hard-cooked afterward; about los duendes, dwarves who had once been angels too slow in trying to follow Lucifer to Hell, and so were locked out of Heaven and Hell both, and, with no longer any place in the universe, just wandered around the world enviously ruining human undertakings.
Elizalde had already heard stories about La Llorona—the Weeping Lady—the ghost of a woman who had thrown her children into a rushing flood to drown, and then repented it, and forever wandered along beaches and riverbanks at night, mourning their deaths and looking for living children to steal in replacement. As a child, Elizalde had heard the story as having occurred in San Juan Capistrano, with the children drowned in the San Juan Creek; but, in the years since, she had also heard it as having occurred in just about every town that had a large Hispanic community, with the children reputedly thrown into every body of water from the Rio Grande to the San Francisco Bay. There was even an Aztec goddess, Tonantzin, who was supposed to have gone weeping through Nahuatl villages and stealing infants from their cradles, leaving stone sacrificial knives where the children had lain.
These women that Elizalde had met tonight told a different version. Aboard the Queen Mary, they whispered, lived a bruja who had somehow lost all her children in the moment of her own birth, and then drowned her husband in the sea; and now she wandered weeping everywhere, night and day, eating los difuntos, ghosts, in an unending attempt to fill the void left by those losses. She had eaten so many that she was now very fat, and they called her La Llorona Atacado, the Stuffed Weeping Lady.
Elizalde wondered what character of folklore she herself might fit the role of. Surely there was the story of a girl baptized once conventionally with water and once with a fertilized egg, who endured a second birth (out of a milk can!) in a shower of coins, and who fled her home to wander along far rivers, in a foredoomed attempt to avoid the ghosts of the poor people who had come to her for help, and whom she had let die.
What would the girl in that story do next, having journeyed all the way back to her home village?
She looked again at her watch. Ten of eight.
She turned her plodding steps across the sand toward the steel stairs that led up the bluff to the parking lot. It was time to meet Peter Sullivan.
SULLIVAN HAD parked the van in a dark corner of the lot, and had walked away from it to smoke a cigarette in the spotlight of yellow glare at the foot of a light pole a couple of hundred feet away. Moths fluttered around the glass of the lamp a dozen feet above his head, flickering and winking in and out of the light like remote, silent meteors.
He had arrived at Bluff Park early, and had made a sandwich in the van with some groceries he’d bought after his flight from Venice; and though there were still three or four cans of beer in the little propane refrigerator, he had been drinking Coke for the last couple of hours. He always felt that Sukie was in a sense somewhere nearby when he was drunk, and anyway he wanted to be alert if the Elizalde psychiatrist actually showed up.
He was watching the cars sweeping past on Ocean Boulevard, and wondering if he shouldn’t just get in the van and head back to Solville—which, he had learned, was the name given by the other tenants to the apartment building he had moved into today.
Now that he was sober again—hungover, possibly—teaming up with this Elizalde woman didn’t seem like such a good idea. If she was unbalanced, which it sounded like she had every right to be, she might just lead deLarava to him. How could he take her to Solville, expose that perfect blind spot to her, when she might be crazy? He remembered his first sight of her in Venice—crouched in the mud below the canal sidewalk—wearing two sets of clothes—talking into a storm drain—!
He took a last deep drag on the cigarette, then patted his jeans pocket for the van keys.
AND ELIZALDE touched his shoulder.
SULLIVAN KNEW that he had felt the touch an instant before it had happened, and he knew it was her; but he stood without turning around, still staring out at the cars passing on Ocean Boulevard, and he exhaled the cigarette smoke in a long, nearly whistling exhalation as a slow snowfall of dead moths spun down through the yellow light to patter almost inaudibly on the asphalt.
He dropped the cigarette among the lifeless little bodies, stepped on it, and then turned to face her, smiling wryly. “Hi,” he said.
She sighed. “Hi. What do we do now?”
“Talk. But not out here where we might draw attention, like we did this afternoon. That’s my van over in that corner.”
“Those…hands are in it?”
“Yeah. If they become my hands again, we’ll know somebody’s looking at us again.”
They began walking across the asphalt away from the light, their swinging fingertips separated by three feet of chilly night air. Enough light reached the boxy old vehicle for it to be clearly visible.
To his own annoyance, Sullivan found himself wishing that he had washed it. “Somebody egged my van,” he said gruffly. “Makes it look like I threw up out the window.”
“While you were going backward real fast,” she agreed, stopping to stare at the dried smear. “When and how did that happen?”