The Afterlife (7 page)

I had to smile to myself as I remembered the two of us trying to climb the chain-link fence.
Trying
is the word. I got my pants cuffs caught on the top of the fence and flipped back to hang upside down, mouth open. It was weird. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the flames grazing on the grass and the smoke begin to rise in puffs that signaled trouble. But I didn't become scared until I heard the distant wail of fire engines. I pictured the firemen with hoses and ladders. I pictured smoke curling around my body on the fence, like a chicken on a barbecue grill.

Eddie tried to unhook me, but he wasn't strong enough to lift me up and free my pants cuffs. He said that I was going to be okay, and gently let me fall back and rest against the chain-link. He ran away promising to get help. I was really scared then. I envisioned my mom burning my legs with a good belt-whipping. Now there was fire!

"Eddie, you funny dude," I said, then laughed. We were troublemaking
mocosos
that day!

It took a fireman to unhook me from the fence. I couldn't tell if he was smiling, or frowning—I was hanging upside down and couldn't tell up from down, but was smart enough to hurry away once my dizziness disappeared.

What was that—twelve years ago? Eddie was now studying air-conditioning at City College, and I
was dead and losing myself to the eventual dark hallway of a wet grave.

I was looking at the wall where a slightly curled Raiders calendar was nailed when a key rattled in the door. The doorknob turned, and Eddie entered cautiously as he scanned the living room—in this part of town, there was every chance of encountering a thug waiting in the shadows. His eyes were red, his face as gray as ash. It took him a lot of effort to get the key out of the door.

He checked out the kitchen before hurrying to the bathroom to take a leak that lasted longer than I could hold my breath—if I had had breath. He didn't flush but came out zipping up. He was starting again for the kitchen when he heard a tap on the front door. Eddie froze. His eyes spun crazily in their sockets, and I sensed he was thinking about what to pick up—the coat hanger on the kitchen table, the hammer on the chair? He was searching for a weapon to use to defend himself. Who was knocking on his door at that late hour? Not some religious group asking if he wanted to be saved.

The tap came again, this time softer.

Eddie stepped toward the door and hesitated, his breathing shallow. He took a step backward and picked the hammer up off the chair. What was he going to do? Nail the intruder to the wall?

I floated over to Eddie and stood so close I could see the pulse in his throat. He swallowed his fear and reached for the doorknob. He pulled the door open slowly. No one was there.

Light footsteps—a woman in pumps?—clicked down the driveway of the duplex. When they faded, Eddie, hammer raised, stepped outside and discovered on the mat a folded dish towel that I recognized from home—what was it doing there? When he picked it up and opened it, he found a gun, heavy as the hammer in his hand.

"Jesus," he muttered. He walked down the porch and hurried out into the driveway. "
Tía,
I can't do it."

Tía? My mother? Had Mom delivered a handgun in a towel to her nephew? It was so clear, just like the moon tangled in the nearly leafless sycamore trees. My mom expected revenge, and she chose Eddie to see to this revenge. I thought she would have known better. After all, she was a grown-up. After all, she went to church every Sunday, and didn't the Bible say something about not taking another person's life?

"Mom," I said, "you can't do this." I flapped my arms at my side, as if I, the fallen angel, could take off and leave this place. So that's what they were talking about in the kitchen.

Her old Buick's headlights lit up the black asphalt lining the street. She pulled away from the curb, and I tried to run after her with my long strides. I might have kept up with her car—she was a slow driver who went by the rules and used both hands on the steering wheel—except the wind pushed me in the other direction.

"No!" I screamed at Mom. "You can't ask him to do this!"

I slowed to a walk and turned around, head down. I loved my cousin, who many years ago tried to unhook me when I was hanging upside down. I would crave his friendship until my body disappeared altogether. Friendship is what I longed for, but nature was telling me to move on. When I looked up, my cousin was setting the hammer on top of the handgun, the tools of a terrible trade.

THE WIND
that whips through the valley in fall sent me rushing toward Blackstone Avenue then shifted so that I once again ended up on Fausto's street. Radios were crying out Mexican songs, and over that I heard the frying of something delicious—chicken tacos?
Came asada? Chicharrones?
I was aware that I couldn't eat, but the aroma...

I stood in the middle of the street—and jumped out of the street and nearly out of my mind when I saw a ghostly outline of a girl roll past. I guessed it right away: She was dead, like me, and recently dead because she couldn't control her body. She was tumbling, and her long brownish hair was waving like seaweed. Her mouth was shaped into a sorrowful O.

"Dawg," I crowed to myself.

I wasn't the only one departing life in Fresno; others were shutting their eyes as the pulse in their wrists slowed to a stop, though their watches continued to bang out the time. I felt self-centered, me thinking all along that I was the only person to have lost his life. I asked myself:
Where are the others, the old and sick who gave up their ghosts daily, or those who died in accidents? Where were those who died from cancer, heart attacks brought on by heartbreak, or diseases I couldn't even pronounce?

This girl,
I asked myself.
Who is she?

I put my long-distance runner years to use and caught up to her just as she righted herself and wobbled dizzily. I was familiar with that sensation of dizziness, that and a lot more. Immediately, she began to style her hair back into place. Funny how she was primping even when she was a ghost. Who was there to see her but me? The sorrowful O of her mouth completely disappeared and was replaced by the sleepy look of someone shaken awake.

"You got to tighten your stomach muscles," I tried to explain.

She jumped backward, shocked by my presence. Her arms were raised in self-defense.

"Don't be scared," I said in a slow, deliberate manner. I wanted to be understood, trusted.

A curious look sprang up on her face. A line cut across her brow, and I could see by that single little line what she would look like when she got older. Then I realized that she would never get older.

"The wind," I said. "It'll blow you around. You have to tighten your stomach muscles, get really low if you want to stay in one place." I considered raising the front of my shirt to show her how to tighten those stomach muscles, but I was afraid that she would grimace at my knife wounds.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"Chuy" I answered. I hesitated, but went ahead and boldly asked: "How did it happen? How did you die?"

She shrugged her shoulders and turned her face away. She didn't want to tell me.

But I was sure that her death had not been violent. She didn't suffer through a car wreck or a gunshot. She was whole and—I had to gulp—beautiful. Her face had the shape of a valentine heart.
You little wimp,
I scolded myself,
are you falling in love or what?
Truth is, that's how I am, or
was.
I was known for falling in love at the sight of both good-looking and not-so-good-looking girls. I wasn't very choosy. Once, when I was ten or so, I fell in love with a track star on the back of a Wheaties cereal box. She was my dream girl. I even cut her out and taped her to my bedroom wall.

"My name is Chuy," I said again. I was suddenly embarrassed because I had no visible hands, and my feet were gone. However, she didn't appear frightened.

"Mine's Crystal," she said, then asked, "Did you hear me? Crystal, my name is Crystal."

"Yeah, I heard," I said. "I understand." It appeared that we ghosts could talk to each other.

We stood in the middle of the street, shy as ponies. When a car turned down the corner and headed our way, weaving because the driver was drunk on whatever, Crystal hurried to the sidewalk. But I stood my ground, chest slightly pushed out, in fact, and let the car go through me like I was fog. Yeah, I was showing off. I admit it, me all
macho
as I stuck out my chest at the approaching headlights. But I also wanted to show her what we ghosts could do. The whole world could smash through us and nothing would happen. A jet could fall on our heads and we would just walk away singing "Cielito Lindo."

"You're not hurt?" Crystal asked as she approached me.

Hurt? Me? I had already seen the worst in my life. A car traveling through me was painless.

"Nah," I said.

Show-off me! I leaped into the lower branches of a tree. Crystal, giggling, bent her knees and shot upward and past the tree. She smiled, formed the word "oops" on her lips, and slowly descended, holding her dress to her sides so that it didn't parachute out and reveal what was underneath. Devilish me, I considered taking a peek up her dress, but I liked her too much. Why be like that?

In the tree, her legs swinging, she told me that she was from Selma, a town outside of Fresno. I had once picked grapes there—my dad wanted me to know what it meant to labor under the sun surrounded by the wasps that buzzed through the vines. She was seventeen, a senior in high school, and vice president of the school. She was even a cheerleader.

Dang, I thought.
Vice president of a high, school! A cheerleader!

"What about you?" she asked I couldn't say that I was cheerleader. But I could have easily been elected vice president of the lonely boys on campus. I told her that I was in high school, too. I told her that I ran track. I swallowed before I lied about the blue ribbons hung on my bedpost at home.

She gave me a squint as if she didn't believe me.

I shrugged my shoulders and giggled into my arm. I confessed that I wasn't that good at long-distance running, that I ran because it was something to do and was the only sport that I could letter in. I was too small for football and basketball. And wrestling? I had a gap-toothed girl cousin who once pinned me in seventeen seconds.

"I run track, too," Crystal said.

"No way," I argued. "You can't do everything!"

She nodded her head. "I'm good," she declared. She wasn't bragging but telling me how it was.

Mouth open, she gazed openly at where my hands should have been.

"They're gone," I said. "So are my feet."

"We're dead, huh?" she asked innocently.

"Yeah," I answered. This was weird. The two of us talking about being dead and neither of us caring, really.

"Are we going to be like this?" she asked.

I knew what she meant. She meant whether we were going to be ghosts for a long time or—she was inspecting the stumps of my arms—or if we were just going to vanish.

"I don't know," I lied. How could I tell her right away that we were slowly going to disappear?

"You're not telling me the truth!" She smiled at me because I was such a bad liar.

I shrugged my shoulders. I had no answer about what happens to us. But if she had asked me if I had liked her, I would have stuttered, "Baby, I'm for real." Or some other silly come-on line.

In turn, I was sure that she liked me, a little bit at least. But what good was this now? Beyond her I could see the night sky and the stars giving off their icy energy. I felt like crying. How could I explain to her that I was disappearing, and that it was going to happen to her? I figured that she had died that evening, and by tomorrow, midday, maybe later, her hands would be gone along with the feet that brought her all those first-place ribbons in track. That is, if she was telling the truth and ran track. I had heard that the girl runners of Selma were better than good—great, as our coach hollered at our sorry-ass team.

"Yeah, I'm disappearing," I admitted, with a shrug of my shoulders. "It's just the way it is."

Her eyes lost their innocent luster. She frowned and examined her own hands. She was wondering whether she was going to disappear in time.

"It just happens," I explained lamely. My sorrow for myself and Crystal was as deep as any river. We were ghosts, and what happened later when we lost our ghostly bodies was a big mystery.

I told her how I had been killed at a nightclub all because I stupidly commented that I liked this guy's shoes. The shoes were yellow, really different. I told her that he killed me with a knife and lied when I said it hardly hurt at all. I bit my lower lip and hesitated about asking again how she had died.

Crystal pulled her hair behind her ear. She jumped down from the branch, and I got a sense that she didn't want to discuss her death. There was something she didn't want to share.

I jumped down, too. "Follow me," I said.

I took long strides, and she followed, almost skipping. She liked how her hair lifted, and how she could stay in the air churning her legs. She was feeling beautiful, I'm sure, and looked beautiful at that hour of night when barking dogs had shut up and were bedding down on army blankets. When the wind pushed against us, I told her to tighten her stomach muscles.

She rubbed her stomach, giggling. She blew off course for a second, actually flew up to tree level, but soon descended.

"Tighten up," she sang as she remembered what I had explained about anchoring yourself against the wind. "I got to tighten up." She laughed with a hand over her mouth, and I liked that gesture a lot. I could tell that she wasn't scared of being a ghost.

I led her down the street and in the direction of Fausto's house. I wanted to see if I could do something about his bike-stealing scam.

The lights inside his house were off.

Crystal made a face that revealed her snobbery. She didn't like the neighborhood, with its junky cars and houses leaning crookedly on their foundations. The apartment buildings were hideous. Laundry the color of defeated nations hung on lines. The screens on the windows were torn.