“A few,” she said. “Can’t you hear ’em? Singing away in there? Don’t you remember what that’s good for, Jackie?”
The breeze was enough to ruffle the fans on the palms, but its sighs and the chiming were still the only sounds rising from the bottle tree. It sounded a little like a glass armonica—Benjamin Franklin’s instrument, once thought to cause neurological damage because of its vibrations. But that might have just been lead poisoning from the paint on the crystal bowls.
“That’s just the wind,” I said. “Those ghosts are harmless, Ms. Bukvajova.”
She laughed, and came out of the shade of the porch into the sunlight. She stumped forward, hands stuffed now into the pockets of her mustard-colored cardigan. It matched her house. The sweater hung from her stooped shoulders like a yoke supporting her fists in slings. “Harmless,” she said, “but not useless.” She pushed past me, trailing unwashed sourness. Flakes of dead skin nested among the roots of her eyebrows and in her thinning hair.
She pulled a hand from her pocket to tap a metal church key against the base of an amber-colored bottle. The sighing and moaning redoubled. “Just the wind.”
She pulled the bottle off the branch and popped a champagne cork into the top, then set the corked bottle at the base of the tree.
“I’m sure I should remember you,” she said. She pulled down another bottle and corked it, but had to get a stepladder for the third. It was just leaned up under the eaves; obviously, she used it a lot.
“I’m not sure there’s anything to remember.”
She snorted. “I forget a lot these days, Jackie. It’s the price of getting old. What do you forget?”
I wasn’t too sure of the wisdom of a sixty-year-old woman climbing ladders, but it’s not a city’s job to babysit children and old people. I might have volunteered to climb up anyway, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to abet whatever she was doing with the ghosts.
Especially if one were Lassie.
Whatever I was opening my mouth to say slipped out of memory even as I was reaching to turn it into words. “So if they’re harmless but useful,” I asked instead, “what do you use them for?”
Ms. Bukvajova was halfway up the ladder. She turned stiffly, holding on to a fragile dead branch, and tapped her forehead with her free hand. “All sorts of things. Some I cook myself and some I sell. Ghosts are memories. I reckon they’ve got more uses than I recollect, even, and I recollect a few. I made sure to write ’em down.”
When she clambered down, she held a straw-yellow bottle in one hand, her thumb pressed over the neck. She shook the bottle as if shaking up a soda so it would spray, and raised it to her mouth. The gesture was deft and quick; her throat worked as if she chugged a beer; her lashes, crusted with yellow grains, brushed her cheek. I watched, fascinated, searching for any sign of change. Tatters of
“Hits the spot, it does,” she said, and wiped moist lips on the back of her wrist.
Another man might have picked a fight, taken the bottles away, smashed the tree. But then there was the question of what good that would do and who had the right of the matter. There was no law against catching ghosts, neither man’s nor moral. They were dead already. Exploiting a lingering shade, to be honest, bothers me a damned sight less than eating bacon does. And I eat bacon.
But it made me curious. Vegas is chinks and cracks, and magic grows in some of them. I’m the sort of person who can usually be found poking around deserted lots with a field guide, so to speak, trying to decide if what I have here is really yellow wood sorrel or something else entirely. I like to know what the growing things are.
So I kept thinking about Ms. Bukvajova as I guided the BMW back through light Sunday traffic, pausing in front of the gray block, lattice-and-glass facade of St. Christopher’s on Bruce, near the North Las Vegas police station. Kids squealed in the public swimming pool down the street. Chlorine hung acrid on the air.
Children really are tougher than adults. It was enough to make me sneeze from here.
Stewart emerged after the exodus, blond hair immediately evident in the sunlight. I wondered if he had stayed inside to introduce himself to the priest. Stewart’s churchgoing, just not religious. Or just not any one religion in particular. He visits them by turns.
He’s the other half of Las Vegas—well, half is the wrong word; there’s overlap—and my city has more churches per capita than any other in America. And no, that doesn’t include wedding chapels.
Stewart sauntered up to where I stood bracing the bike and ran a hand up my arm. I handed him his helmet; he left a lip print on the glossy side of mine before strapping his own in place. Then his feet were on the pegs and we sailed into the traffic stream, sliding into the space left in front of an old man in a gold Lincoln Town Car who had hit the brakes in shock at the public display of affection.
We were already in the neighborhood, so we swung by Jerry’s Nugget to avail ourselves of the legendary eight-dollar prime rib for his first lunch and my second one. Somehow we wound up going to the Italian place instead, and Stewart stuffed garlic bread into his mouth and swallowed beer until the pizza and salad showed, like I’d been keeping him on bread and water.
Stewart wasn’t big. He was fair-haired, wiry, and he bit his thumbnail while he was thinking. I liked watching him eat. I liked his enthusiasm and flightiness and the fact that I knew it was all a pose.
“How was church?” I asked when he’d slowed down enough to answer questions.
He pushed a piece of pepperoni around with his fingertip, then licked the grease off the nail. “Boring. We need cuter priests in this town.”
“They don’t pick them for the way they fill out their trousers,” I answered complacently. I assembled a forkful of lettuce, onion, and a bite of pizza with crushed reds and parmesan, and stuffed it into my mouth. No matter how many times I did that, Stewart still looked at me in disbelief. Hey, it tasted good. “What do you want to do tonight?”
“Dunno,” he said. “Sunday night in Vegas. We could go to a movie.”
“We could go to a bar.”
“Mmmph.” Not such a bad idea, though, by the way he tilted his head and lifted an eyebrow. “What did you do today?”
I shrugged. “Hung out at the Crown and Anchor. Drove around. The ghosts are back.”
“Ah, so,” he said, and flicked beer at me. I ducked, laughing, and the waiter shot us a dirty look. Didn’t bother me: Service is always slow in there, and Stewart and I overtip. “Sounds like a thrilling day.”
I didn’t
It turned out that what we did that night was go to the circus. I like circus folk, and I love the circus. So because Stewart loves me, we go to the circus every time it’s in town.
Well, Vegas has its own local circuses. A new Cirque du Soleil every couple of years, and we’ve seen them all, including the traveling shows. The animal acts are being phased out after what happened to Roy Horn. But it’s a big deal when an arena show comes through, and an even bigger one when it’s a tent show.
Call me old-fashioned, but it’s not
Oestman Brothers Circus and Traveling Show had set up on the desert lot near Sahara, the one they’re always going to build a casino on any day now. We arrived an hour and a half before showtime, light still smeared across the sky, holding the dark at bay.
Not that darkness stood much chance against Vegas. Night tried to fall as we wandered the side tents— viewing fortune-tellers and caged tigers in their shaded enclosure, munching on cotton candy—and it only changed the quality of light. Neon saturated the atmosphere, heavy-hung, so I expected to see it move in swirls with each current. Stewart and I walked through it as if it were a fog. At one point he grabbed my hand and I turned to look at him and saw him crowned in ghostly radiance. I ducked down and kissed him on the grin, despite the sharp intake of breath from a scandalized matron on the far side of the candy-apple booth. I hoped the guy guessing her weight guessed high.
When I leaned back, the light was still there, and it buoyed me.
It has its own
