Expiration Date (49 page)

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.

S
ULLIVAN 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.

A
ND
E
LIZALDE
touched his shoulder.

S
ULLIVAN 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?”

“Today.” He led her around the front of the van to the side doors. “A guy, an old friend of mine, tried to turn me over to a woman who wants to eat my father’s ghost; I think she wants to capture me, use me as a live lure. The old friend threw an egg at me as I was driving out of there.” He unlocked the forward of the two side doors and swung it open. The light was still on inside—the battery could sustain a light or two for a full day without getting too weak to turn the motor over. “Beer and Coke in the little fridge there, if you like.”

Elizalde looked at him intently for a moment, then stepped lithely up into the van.

She leaned one hip on the counter around the sink, and Sullivan noticed to his embarrassment that the bed was still extended, and unmade. I must not really have meant to meet her, he thought defensively.

“Sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t anticipating company.” And what is
that
supposed to mean? he asked himself. He threw her a helpless glance as he climbed up and pulled the door closed.

“You’ve got to wash off the egg,” she said, and for a moment he thought she had meant
on your face.
Then he realized that she meant the egg on the outside of the driver’s door.

“Is it important?”

“I think it’s a marker,” she said, “and more than a visible marker. Like a magical homing device. Raw eggs have all kinds of uses in magic. I should get out of this van right now, and walk away, mask or no mask. You should too, in a different direction.”

Sullivan sat down on the bed. “I’ve got a place we can go where the psychic static will drown out the egg’s signal. I’m pretty sure. Anyway, there’s certainly a hose at this place, we can wash it off.” She didn’t seem crazy, and he was tired of spinning through his own circular thought-paths over and over again. “I think we should stick together.”

“That’s what Peter Sullivan thinks, huh.” She stepped around him and sat down in the passenger seat, watching him over her shoulder. “Okay, for a while. But let’s at least be a moving target.” She looked forward, out through the windshield, and stiffened.

Sullivan stood up and hurried to the drivers seat with the key.

Outside in the parking lot, several people were standing on the asphalt a few yards away from the front bumper, shifting awkwardly and peering. Sullivan knew that he and Elizalde had been alone in the parking lot a few moments earlier.

“Ghosts,” he said shortly, starting the engine. “Fresh ones, lit up by our overlapping auras.” He switched on the headlights, and the figures covered their pale faces with their lean, translucent hands.

He tapped the horn ring to give them a toot, and the figures began shuffling obediently to the side. One, a little girl, was moving more slowly than the rest, and when he had clanked the engine into gear he had to spin the steering wheel to angle around her.

“Damn little kid,” he said, momentarily short of breath. The way clear at last, he accelerated toward the Ocean Boulevard driveway.

Elizalde pulled the seat belt across her shoulder and clicked the metal tongue of it into the slot by the console. “I saw her as an old woman,” she said quietly.

He shrugged. “I guess each of ‘em is all the ages they ever were. He or she was, I mean. Each one is—”

“I got you. Put on your seat belt.”

“The place is right here,” he said, pushing down the lever to signal for a left turn.

T
HE FIRST
faucet Sullivan found, on the end of a foot-tall pipe standing in weeds at the corner of the Solville lot, just sucked air indefinitely when the tap was opened. He walked across the dark lot to another, ascertained that it worked, and then drove the van over and parked it. He carried a big sponge out to scrub the outside of the driver’s door, and then had to go back inside for a can of Comet, but at last all the chips and
strips of dried egg had been sluiced off the van, and he locked it up.

Elizalde carried a beer in from the van to Sullivan’s apartment, and when she popped it open foam dripped on the red-painted wooden floor. The only light in the living room was from flame-shaped white bulbs in a yard-sale chandelier in the corner, and Sullivan berated himself for not having thought to buy a lamp somewhere today. At least there were electrical outlets—Sullivan noticed that Shadroe had put six of them in this room alone.