Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

You can build cantilevered structures from them, where the only things holding them together are gravity and leverage and the weight of the pieces. The heavier the chip and the wider, the better. Some of these were Stratosphere millennium-fireworks chips, and some were black-and-white dollar chips from the old Silver Slipper, which isn’t there anymore. The red edges and the black edges made a pattern like the facade on a brick Victorian.

I was engrossed in trying to match the red and black ink of the spill of card suits small as a Gila’s beaded scales sleeving my left arm and curling across my throat.

I had stopped to think about my next move while smearing blue cheese on a white roll with all the flavor and consistency of drywall—because I’m Vegas, and we can get you Wyder’s pear cider and Branston pickle, but we’re not smart enough to figure out that a ploughman’s lunch is only as good as the bread—and after a minute or two I noticed somebody watching from the railing.

I was pretty sure he was a ghost.

Nobody walks in Vegas if they can help it. One, it’s too hot. Two, we’re not real good on traffic signals and respecting the crosswalks and all that sissy East Coast stuff. Three, I saw him otherwise, not in the hard-world way. And finally, he was transparent, which was a clue. Even in the absence of apparent crushing damage.

I lifted up my eye patch and scratched under it, not-so-incidentally taking a long look with my otherwise eye while blocking it from casual view with the hand. He stared like a dog who is very politely noticing that you’re eating a steak dinner. I tipped cider onto the pavement.

The ghost brightened appreciably, but raised a hand and shook his head. More for me; I finished the pint and set the glass down so it wouldn’t tip on the latticework tabletop. The ghost turned away, looking over his shoulder. He couldn’t have said Follow me better if he was Lassie.

I pinned a twenty and a ten under my empty glass, stuffed a last piece of “cheddar” into my mouth, left the chips, and vaulted the white picket fence between the patio and the sidewalk. Painted wood scorched my palm.

Lucky the rail wasn’t iron. I blew on my palm and shook my fingers out as I followed the ghost down Tropicana toward the Strip, wheels sizzling by on my left. Each car kicked up a wave of heat and the oil stench of baking asphalt. Business owners tape towels around the handles of doors in a Vegas summer, and children blister bare feet on manhole covers. My feet baked in my Docs, the leather of my pants squeaking with every step. Up and down my left arm, the sun picked out the clubs and spades in hot pinpricks.

In the lot, I yanked on my helmet, jacket, and gloves—not necessarily in that order—and rocked the old BMW off the stand before spurring it to life. A fortuitous break in traffic put me on the road.

Ghosts keep up with motor vehicles just fine—or maybe I should say, on the bike, I could move almost as fast as the ghost wanted. My guide led me up Maryland, through the old downtown with its square land-claim grid of numbered streets, then up Las Vegas Boulevard where it turns into Fifth Street. He turned west on Carey, along a strip of California-style stucco homes with six-foot block walls interspersed with desert lots.

He stopped between MLK and Rancho, and I let the bike glide to a halt alongside. Light planes from the North Las Vegas Airport skimmed overhead, cutting across a sky with all color baked out. On my right more housing developments swelled like cactuses, only visible as sand-colored block walls and the red tile roofs rising behind them. On my left, though, the scraggy trees and scrub desert of an old ranch estate were marked by a weathered sign, the back and both sides enclosed by housing-tract walls. You couldn’t say much for the curb appeal.

BMWs don’t roar like American bikes or whine like Japanese ones. But mine rumbled as I guided it up the dirt driveway, following a serpentine course to avoid the ruts and stones. The name on the mailbox was Bukvajova, which really seemed like it ought to be familiar. Dust dulled the maroon gas tank and dimmed the chrome on the handlebars before I turned in behind a windbreak of ratty evergreens.

The house wasn’t in any better shape than the vantage from the street suggested. Mustard-colored paint peeled in scrofulous plates, shaggy as cedar bark. I might have thought it wasn’t inhabited. Abandoned structures can stand for decades in the desert, even if they aren’t built of stone, and a lot of the old Vegas houses were made of cinderblock.

Vegas is a city with no history, though. We have a conspiracy of dismemory. Tear it down, pave it over, build something new. Nothing left but the poker chips and the elephant’s graveyard of neon signs tucked away in an alleged museum that’s not even open to the public. If the historical society takes an interest in a building, six will get you ten it burns down within a season. People forget, remake themselves, come here to change their lives and their luck.

Sometimes it works.

Small branches from a moribund elm littered the house’s tar-paper roof. The tree was doomed, but not dead; Dutch elm disease kills from the crown.

I made sure the kickstand was on hard earth and walked toward the house. My ghost had vanished, though I had expected to see him under the wind chimes on the front porch.

A crystalline clinking wasn’t only from the chimes. Around the side, another nearly dead elm swayed in the breeze. Its fingerling branches had been broken off blunt, and onto each stick was thrust a colored bottle—gold, violet, emerald, Tŷ Nant ruby, Maltine amber, Ayer’s cobalt blue. They tinkled as the tree moved, and I wondered how they managed not to smash in anything like a real wind.

I was tipping up my eye patch to get a better look when my footsteps alerted someone. Which is to say, a burro in the yard behind the house started braying as if badly in need of oiling, and that was the end of my stealth.

The otherwise glow of trapped ghosts swirled inside the bottles on the dying elm. I felt I should hear them tapping, scratching at the inside of their rainbow prisons. But only the light breeze soughed across the mouths of the bottles. Some people say the sound is the evil spirits crying for release, but it’s not.

I’ve never seen the point in trapping ghosts. The ones you could catch in a bottle tree are harmless, and the ones that aren’t harmless, you couldn’t catch in a bottle tree.

I wondered where my Lassie-ghost was, and where I was supposed to find the well with Timmy in it. And as I was wondering—the burro still sawing away, no doubt infuriating the suburban neighbors—the front door banged open hard enough that my boots cleared earth. I flipped down my eye patch; no point making an innocent bystander look at a scarred socket.

Like Odin, I traded the eye for other things. Unlike Odin, it didn’t involve a gallows tree, and I didn’t expect anything in trade but a plain pine box and a hasty burial. What I got was being made the genius of Las Vegas, guardian of the Sin City and all her fallen angels.

It’s a strange old world.

The woman standing on the shaded porch was in her sixties, I thought, stoop-shouldered, yellowing gray hair tucked behind her ears. Despite the heat, she dressed in a raveling cardigan pulled lumpy over a blue-and-white star-patterned shirt that hung, untucked, to the thighs of shapeless brown slacks. She scowled through filthy glasses. “Who’s there?”

Mushy diction, as if she’d forgotten to slide her dentures in. When I turned to her, she leaned forward against one of the four-by-fours holding up the porch roof, peering through strings of hair.

“Jackie.” When I stepped from the shade of the dying elm, sun thumped my head like hot sand. There were a couple of wizened forty-foot Mexican fan palms on the property, but they cast no more shade than telephone poles.

“Jackie,” she said, and kissed air. “I think—no, I don’t remember you.”

“I don’t think we’ve met,” I said, but as I said it I wasn’t sure anymore. Her cloudy blue eyes, the shape of her nose …

Useless. If she’s lived in Vegas sixty years, I might have seen her hundreds of times. Especially back when there were only a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand people in town. But I didn’t remember her now. “Ma’am, is this your bottle tree?”

“This is private property.” She blinked sagging lids. “My bottle tree? What do you know about bottle trees?”

“They’re for catching ghosts,” I said. “Protection from evil spirits. Ms. Bukvajova? Mrs.?”

She shrugged. All the same to her.

“Do you have a lot of evil spirits here, Ms. Bukvajova?”