This boy is the ghost, she told herself; Sullivan said they can accumulate mass from organic litter, and eventually look like solid street people.
But Elizalde couldn’t believe it. For a moment she pulled her attention away from the sidewalk pedestrians they were passing, and craned her neck to look down into his pinched, pale face—and she couldn’t believe that a restless ghost could have made those clear brown eyes, now pellucidly deep with fear, out of gutter puddles and sidewalk spit and tamale husks. And his eye socket was bruised! Surely the bogus flesh of those scarecrows couldn’t incorporate working capillaries and circulating blood! He must have a ghost…on him, somehow, like an infestation of lice.
A big ghost, she reminded herself uneasily, remembering how steadily the compass needle had pointed at it from blocks away.
She still couldn’t see the red pickup truck, behind or ahead. Apparently the mace had worked.
They had nearly reached the corner. She spat the compass into her shopping bag. “What’s your name?” she asked, wondering if she would even get a response.
“The kid’s in shock,” said the boy huskily, his voice jerking with their fast steps. “Better you don’t know his name. Call me…Al.”
“I’m Angelica,” she said. Better you don’t know my last name, she thought. “A friend of mine is in that brown van across the street. See it?” She still had her hand under his arm, so she just jerked her chin in the direction of the van. “Our plan is to get out of here, back to a safe place where nobody can find us. I think you should come with us.”
“You’ve got that compass,” said the boy grimly. “I’ve been in a Van,’ and I can scream these lungs pretty loud.”
“We’re not going to kidnap you,” said Elizalde.
They shuffled to a rocking halt at the Lucas corner, panting and waiting for the light to turn green. Elizalde was still looking around for pursuit. “I don’t even know if my friend would want another person along,” she said. She shook her head sharply, wondering if it could even be noon yet. “But I think you should come with us. The compass—anybody in the whole city who knows about this stuff can track you.”
The boy nodded. At least he was standing beside her, and hadn’t pulled away from her hand. “Yeah,” he said. “That is true, sister. And if I put my light back under the bushel basket, if I—step out of the center-ring spotlight, here, this kid will collapse like a sack of coal. So you’ve got a place that’s safe? Even for us? How are you planning on degaussing me? This damned electric belt’s not worth one mint.”
Hebephrenic schizophrenia? wondered Elizalde; or one of the dissociative reactions of hysterical neurosis? MPD would probably be the trendy analysis these days—multiple personality disorder.
She floundered for a response. What had he said? Degaussing? Elizalde had heard that term used in connection with battleships, and she thought it had something to do with radar. “I don’t know about that. But my friend does—he’s an electrical engineer.”
This seemed to make the boy angry. “Oh, an electrical engineer! Ail mathematics, I daresay, equations on paper to match the paper diploma on his wall! Never any dirt under his fingernails! Maybe he thinks he’s the only one around here with a college degree!”
Elizalde blinked down at the boy in bewilderment. “I—I’m sure he doesn’t—I have a college degree, as a matter of fact—” Good Lord, she thought, why am I bragging? Because of my rumpled old clothes and tangled hair? Bragging to a traumatized street kid? “But none of that’s important here—”
“B.S.,” said the boy now, with clear and inexplicable pride. “Let’s go meet your electrical engineer.”
“Shit, yes,” said Elizalde. The light turned green, and they started walking.
CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN
“But that’s not your fault” the Rose added kindly.
“You re beginning to fade, you know—and then one ca’n’t help one’s petals getting a little untidy.”
Alice didn't like this idea at all…
—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass
SULLIVAN had seen Elizalde crossing the street, and when he saw that the reason she was moving slowly was because she was helping a limping kid along, he swore and got out of the van.
He had noticed the onset of bar-time as he’d been driving, five or ten minutes ago, when he reflexively tapped the brake in the instant before the nose of a car appeared out of an alley ahead of him; he had then tested it by blindly sliding a random cassette into the tape player, cranking the volume all the way up, and then turning on the player—he had not only cringed involuntarily, but had even recognized the opening of the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” just before the first percussive yell had come booming out of the speakers. He had switched the set off then, wondering anxiously what was causing the psychic focus on him, and if it was on Elizalde too.
And now here she was with some kid.
He met them by the traffic-light pole at the corner, and he took the shopping bag from her. “Say goodbye to your little friend,” he said. “We’ve gotta go now Bar-time, you feel it?”
“Yes, I do,” she said, smiling. “Other people out here probably do too. Act natural, like you don’t feel it.”
She was right. He smiled stiffly back at her and hefted the bag. “So, did you get your shopping done? All ready to go?”
Two teenage Mexican boys swaggered up to them, one of them muttering, “Vamos a probar la mosca en leche, porqué no?” Then one of them asked her, in English, “Lady, can I have a dollar for a pack of cigarettes?”
“Porqué no?” echoed Elizalde with a mocking grin. She reached into her pocket with the hand that wasn’t supporting the sick-looking boy, and handed over a dollar.
“I need cigarettes too!” piped up the other teenager.
“You can share his,” said Elizalde, turning to Sullivan. “We’re ready to go”, she told him.
We’re not taking this sick kid along with us! he thought. “No,” he said, still holding his smile but speaking firmly. “Little Billy’s got to go home.”
“Auntie Alden won’t take him today,” she said, “and it’s getting very late.” ‘
Sullivan blew out a breath and let his shoulders sag. He looked at the boy. “I suppose you do want to come along.”
The boy had a cocky grin on his face. “Sure, plug. On your own, you might get careless and open a switch without turning off the current first.”
Sullivan couldn’t help frowning. He had spent the morning at an old barn of a shop on Eighth Street called Garmon’s Pan-Electronics and he wondered if this boy knew that, somehow. Was the boy’s remark the twang of a snapped trap-wire?
“I told him you’re an electrical engineer,” said Elizalde in a harried voice. “Let’s go!”
After a tense, anguished pause: “Okay!” Sullivan said, and turned and began marching his companions back across the liquor-store parking lot toward the van. “The collapsing magnetic field,” he told the boy, in answer to the boy’s disquieting remark, “will induce a huge voltage that’ll arc across the switch, right?” Why, he wondered, am I bothering to prove anything to a kid?