"So you're basically a drifter," she said, sipping her second mimosa.
"We prefer to be called 'people of no fixed address,'" I said.
"How long do you think you'll stay here?"
"Oh, I don't know," I said, leaning across the table, looking at her face, which seemed to fit some ideal of faces I'd never before imagined. "I'm like anybody else, I guess. Just looking for a place to call home."
She threw a napkin at me, and it bounced off my nose, and I thought I might be falling in love.
Sadie had to study, so I spent the rest of the lovely Sunday meeting people in the neighbourhood. It's not hard, once you overcome their initial reluctance to talk to strangers, and hearing I was Miss Li's nephew made most folks open up, too — the lady was well-liked. I visited the closest park, just a few blocks away, where some guys from the neighbourhood were playing basketball. I got in on the game, and didn't play too well, and they liked me fine. I got invited to a barbecue for the next weekend. I helped an older guy wash his car, and then spent an hour with Mike, who was rebuilding the carburettor on his motorcycle — I didn't know much about machines, but I was able to hand him tools and talk about California scenic highways. I chatted with mothers pushing strollers, young kids riding scooters, surly teens, and old people on afternoon walks.
And every time I got someone alone, if they were from around here, I talked to their deep down parts, and I asked them what was wrong with this place.
I didn't find out anything unusual. Oh, there were crimes — this was a big city, after all, even if a residential neighbourhood. There were occasional break-ins, and a mugging or two, though none right around here. A couple of car thefts. But nothing poisonously, unspeakably bad. Maybe my senses were out of whack, or I was picking up the irrelevant psychic residue of some long-ago atrocity.
I have trouble adapting my mind to the shortness of human time scales, sometimes.
It was late afternoon when I went past Ike Train's place. He had a tidy little house, and a bigger yard than most. His porch was shadowed, but I could see the big man sitting on a creaking wooden swing, messing with something in his hands. I was going to hello the house, but Ike hailed me first. "You're new!" he shouted. "Come over!"
"Mr Train," I said, delighted, because I do love meeting people, especially ones who love meeting me. "I've heard about you." I passed through the bushes, which overgrew his walk, and went up to his porch. He held a little man-shaped figure made of twisted wire and pipe cleaners in his hands. He set the thing aside and rose, reaching out to shake my hand. His grip was strong, but not a macho show-off strong, just the handshake of a man who wrestled with pipe wrenches on a regular basis.
"You're staying with Miss Li," he said, sitting down, and gesturing for me to take a cane chair by his front door. "Her nephew?"
"I'm Reva. More of a grand-nephew from the other side of the family, but yeah."
"What brings you to town?" He went back to twisting the wire, giving the little man an extra set of arms, like a Hindu deity.
"I've been travelling for a few years," I said. "Thought I might try settling here." Maybe I would, for a while, if I could find a way to get rid of the bad thing making the whole street's aura stink. Being in a body again was nice, and even on our short acquaintance there was something about Sadie I wanted to know better, like she was a flavour I'd been craving for ages.
"It's a nice enough place," Ike said.
"So tell me," I said, leaning forward. "Are you from around here?"
Ike's hands went still, the wire forgotten. "Oh, yeah," he said, and his voice was different now, slower and thicker. "This is my home. Nobody knows how hard I work to keep it clean, how filthy it gets. The whole fucking city is circling the drain. Dirty, nasty, rotten, wretched…"
I frowned. That was his deep down self talking, but it didn't sound like him. "Ike, what do you —»
"We have to twist their heads all the way around," he said, his voice oddly placid, and turned the little wire man in his hands, twisting its round loop of a head tighter and tighter until it snapped and came off in his fingers. "Break them and sweep them up. Clean up the trash, keep things clean. Yeah. I'm from around here."
"Ike," I said, careful, because there were sinkholes in this man's mind, and I didn't know how deep they were, or what might be hidden inside them. "Maybe you and me can work something out."
"No," he said, and crushed the little man. "There's nothing to work out. Everything's already been worked out." He stared at me, through me, and his eyes were wet with tears. "There's nothing you can offer me."
I stood up and stepped back. He was from around here, I was talking to his deep down self, but Ike wouldn't work something out with me. I didn't understand this refusal. It was like water refusing to freeze in winter, like leaves refusing to fall in autumn, a violation of everything I understood about natural law. "Don't worry about it, Ike. Let's just forget we had this talk, huh?"
Ike looked down at the broken wire thing in his hands. "Nice meeting you, ah, buddy," he said. "Say hi to Miss Li for me."
I headed back down the street towards Miss Li's, thinking maybe Ike was crazy. Maybe he had something to do with the badness here. Maybe he was the badness. I needed to know more. I asked Miss Li about him, over dinner that night, but she didn't know much about Ike. He'd lived on the street longer than anybody, and his parents had owned his house before him. He was seriously from around here. So why had talking to his deep down self been so strange and disturbing?
"Hey, Reva," Sadie said when I answered the door. "You busy?"
It was Monday, and the street was quiet, most everybody off about their business. "Not for you," I said, leaning against the doorjamb.
"Could you come up to my place and help me with something?"
I grinned, and grinning felt good; I'd forgotten that about bodies, that genuinely smiling actually caused chemical changes and improved the mood. "I'm at your service." I pulled the door shut and followed Sadie down the steps and up the street. I didn't bother locking the door — nobody would rob the place while I was staying there.
"What do you know about spiders?" she said, leading me into the lobby of the apartment building. The floor was black tile with gold flecks, and there was a wall of old-fashioned brass and glass mailboxes. I liked it. The place had personality.
"Hmm. Eight legs. Mythologically complex — sometimes tricksters, sometimes creators, sometimes monsters, depending on who you ask."
She looked at me, half-smiling, as if she wasn't sure if I was joking. She opened a door, revealing an elevator with a sliding grate. We went inside, and she rattled the gate closed. Back in the old days there would have been a uniformed attendant to run the elevator. This must have been a classy place in its day. "Can you recognize poisonous spiders? I've heard there are some nasty ones out here, black widows and brown recluses, stuff like that. There's a spider in my tub and it's freaking me out a little."
"It's probably gone by now, right?" The elevator rattled and hummed as it ascended.
"I don't think it can get out. It keeps trying to climb the sides of the tub and sliding back down."
She was standing a little closer to me than she had to. I wondered if I should read anything into that. "So you want me to get rid of it?"
"If it was a snake or a rat or something, I'd do it myself. Most things like this don't bother me. But spiders…" She shuddered. "Especially when I don't know if they're poisonous or not. I heard the bite of a brown recluse can make your skin rot away. Bleah. Vicious little things."
I shrugged. "They're just trying to get by. Besides, there aren't any brown recluses in California."