The Sleeping and the Dead (9 page)

“I won't tell.” I winked, just between us girls, but she shook her head no. “Well, what can you tell me?”

“So you know James?”

“I'm buying a camera from him.”

“Yes, it is so terribly sad, isn't it? And he is so young and handsome.”

Before I could ask what she meant, Preston stepped out with my divorce papers neatly paper-clipped and tucked away inside a clean new manila folder. His familiar smile was gone. “Have you read these?” he said so sternly it surprised me. He sounded like my father on the few occasions when he actually tried to be a father.

I said, “Of course.”

“I can't advise you to sign this.”

“Why not?”

“
Why not?
You realize you get nothing.”

“I know.”

“No alimony. No part of his estate. Nothing.”

“I don't want anything from Reed,” I said.

“He is worth several millions,” Preston said.

“Oh Jackie!” Leta gasped. “You can't!”

“You could set yourself up nicely,” Preston said. “Are you sure you want to give that up?”

“I don't need the hassle.” I took the folder from him and he shrugged. Leta clucked her tongue as she counted out the money for the motorcycle pictures, fifty dollars in cash. I took the bills and stuck them in my back pocket, then pulled Deiter's GMPI cap tight over my eyes.

“You're a fool, Jackie Lyons,” Leta said as I opened the door. I didn't need her to tell me that.

 

9

B
Y THE TIME
I
MADE
it home, it was doing a little bit of everything outside—sleet, rain, even a little snow swirling, none of it sticking, not even to my windshield. Other drivers on the roads had lost their minds. I passed half a dozen accidents just in the four miles between Preston's office and my apartment, but I didn't stop to shoot any of them. Instead of going straight upstairs, I headed for the mercado to buy some food and sinus pills.

It was always the same short Hispanic guy standing behind the counter. He had never once looked me in the eyes. He had a dark round Mesoamerican face with almost no trace of European in it, a face you might see looking sideways at you from the wall of a pyramid. I grabbed a shopping basket and rolled to the coolers in back, loaded up with four quarts of Tecate beer, and a twelve-pack of Diet Coke. I grabbed some limes, a block of queso blanco and a pack of fresh tortillas. The sinus pills were behind the bulletproof glass at the cash register.

By the time I made it to the front of the store, our landlord, Walter Pinch, was leaning against the counter. “Afternoon, Miss Jackie,” he almost sang. He shook my hand with his moist, bony one, then unloaded my basket, setting everything on the counter.

Walter Pinch was a black man no bigger than a twelve-year-old boy. He dressed like a COGIC preacher in a black three-piece Italian suit, red silk tie and red handkerchief sticking three inches up from his top pocket, half a pound of gold on his bony knuckles and a diamond as big as a split pea in his grill. He used hair straighteners and walked on his toes like he was walking onto a stage.

This close to him, I could smell the gin on his breath. I instantly grokked his plight—a straight gin man with a mickey in the back pocket, never got drunk, just a nip now and then until the end of the day when the pint was empty and his liver was another day harder with the sclerosis that would ultimately lay him dick-up in the earth. I liked him the first time I met him, when he rented me the apartment and offered to carry up my stuff, weak and feeble as he was.

He introduced me to the man behind the counter. “This here is Jackie Lyons. She's taken the apartment upstairs,” Walter said. “Jackie, this here is Nachos.”

“Happy to meet you,” Nachos said. He finally looked at me and smiled.

“She just moved in,” Walter continued. “This is Nachos's store. He's been here about six years now, ain't it?”

He nodded and said, “
Siete
.”

“Nachos is good folk. You need anything, Nachos has got it. If he ain't got it, he'll get it.”

“That's good to know,” I said. “You look like you're having yourself a fine day, Mr. Pinch.”

“Every day is a fine day, Miss Jackie. Life is too short to have shitty days.”

“Sometimes life gives you shitty days.”

“That's true enough,” Walter agreed. “All the more reason not to make shitty ones yourself.” He squeezed my arm as he staggered by, headed toward the beer coolers at the back. Nachos rang up my stuff.

“So what's your real name?” I asked him.

“Mynor.”

“Is this your place?”

“I'm just the manager. I started out sweeping floors here, now I still sweep floors, but I'm the manager. The owner lives in Singapore. So you live upstairs?” I nodded. “The music, is it too loud?”

“It's OK,” I said. I barely even noticed the Tejano music anymore.

“I can turn it down. My wife listens to it.”

“I don't mind.” He seemed to like that I didn't mind. He smiled as he rang up my beer. He had perhaps the worst set of teeth I'd ever seen in my life. He looked like someone had dipped his teeth in acid and stuck them back into his face to rot.

“Where are you from?”

“Arizona,” he said. “But my parents are from Guatemala.”

Walter returned from the back with a quart of Miller Genuine High-Life tucked under his scarecrow arm. “By God, you do clean up nice, Miss Jackie,” he said, sucking his diamond tooth and looking me up and down. He edged up beside me and breathed some gin fumes my way. “I honest to God thought sure enough you was a junkie.” He touched my arm just above the elbow. “But God damn if you ain't looking fine today.”

“You rent to junkies, Mr. Pinch?”

“When they pay cash money,” he said. “Beggars can't be choosers, I always say. What you say, Nachos?”

“She is very pretty,” Mynor said without looking at me. He bagged each quart of Tecate in its own brown paper sack, as though I were going to drink them outside on the curb. “A little skinny.” He shrugged apologetically.

“Shit, I like skinny women. You could've pushed my ex-wife through a keyhole, God rest her soul.” Walter screwed off the top of his quart bottle and took a swig, looking at me with one eye closed, then sat heavily in an old split-cane chair in the corner by the door. It looked like it had been placed there just for his use. “I like your hat. What's GMPI? Is that the police?”

I gave Mynor two of my tens. “You've been here seven years?” He nodded and handed me my change. “You ever see any ghosts?”

“No, but we get a lot of shoplifters.”

“You seen a ghost, Miss Jackie?” Walter asked.

“I don't know. Maybe.”

“I lived in that apartment near eight years, I never saw nothing,” he said. He looked like he was scared I might ask for my money back.

“You ever have trouble with that bedroom door coming open by itself, Mr. Pinch?”

“No, but I kept it open most times. Living all by myself, you know,” he said. His rheumy yellow eyes narrowed and he leaned forward in his chair. “But this ain't the first time. You seen one before, ain't you?” He leaned the chair back against the wall and put his hand on the pocket where he kept that bottle of gin. “Was you born with a caul over your face?”

“A what?”

“A caul. A veil over your head. My granny always said a child born with a veil can see the dead.”

“It's true,” Mynor said. “My mother says it's also a sign of good luck, and that you won't die from drowning. She was born with a veil.” He slid my bags across the counter but I didn't pick them up. What Mynor said had given me a chill. Back in my rescue training days in the Coast Guard, the instructors used to call me “unsinkable.” I wasn't the biggest or the strongest, and I sure as hell wasn't the best swimmer, but every time it looked like I was about to go under for the last time, I'd pop back up and keep going. That's the only reason I graduated from that course.

“That's just crazy, Nachos. A woman with a caul ain't got no good luck. It just means she haunted,” Walter said. He took another swig of Miller like he needed it in the worst way, then wiped his mouth with his handkerchief. “I had an auntie born with a veil—dead folk coming round drove her so crazy she hung herself in a closet. Left three babies my mama had to take care of.”

“My mother never said anything about a caul,” I said. I took my bags. I didn't want to talk about it. It had been my experience that talking about my special friends sometimes made them appear. I hadn't said my grandfather's name aloud in twenty years.

“Me, I got no truck with the dead,” Walter said to the air above his head. He downed another slug of beer and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his pinstriped suit. “I knowed a down-low man was staying in a Holiday Inn in Jackson Missippi one night about 1976 when a ghost comes in his room and tells him to get the fuck out, nigger. Just like that—get the fuck out, nigger. He say the man had on a Confederate uniform, so he thought it was the Klan. Time he jumped out of bed, weren't nothing there but a smell he say he ain't never smelled but once, and he wouldn't say where.”

“What did he do?” Mynor asked.

“Got the hell out! Slept in his car the rest of the night. Said it was the best night of sleep he ever got.” I nodded to them and left. As the door shut behind me, Walter said, “He's dead now. The AIDS got him 'bout five year ago.”

*   *   *

I awoke some time in the night shivering in bed, thinking that the heat was broken. I sat up and saw a cloud of smoke seeping under the closed bedroom door. I threw back the covers and stood up in bed. It didn't look like normal smoke, the kind of smoke that might have come from a fire I had set by accident again. It was too white and it pooled like water in front of the door instead of spreading out or rising up.

Sometimes I had nightmares. Not normal nightmares. That's why I locked my door at night. I told myself to wake up. I whacked my forearm against the brick wall beside my bed. It hurt like hell and it didn't wake me up. I didn't really expect it to.

The pool of smoke grew into a pale white column that solidified into the shape of a woman. She had no face, just a mouth, as though she was wearing a veil over her eyes. She turned and opened the door and floated into the kitchen. I stood on the bed, my shivering shaking the whole bed.

When she didn't return, I slipped to the floor and tiptoed to the door, but the kitchen was dark and the den empty. Rain slid in sheets down the bay window behind me. It looked like the glass was melting. I could almost believe it was a dream, if not for the open door. I tried to convince myself that I was dreaming again or that it was the heroin purging from my system, but I didn't believe my excuses any more this time than I had last night or any of the other times. She hadn't even used the key to unlock the door, this ghostly figment of a dream, this undigested bit of queso. Apparently she didn't like me closing my bedroom door.

I returned to bed and pulled the covers up. I took the Leica with me this time, rested it on my stomach and waited to see if the woman would reappear. I waited maybe an hour. Hard to say how long I lasted before I gonked. But the next morning, I woke up in almost the same position, the camera lying beside me in the bed, my sneakers sprawled in the middle of the floor with the shoestrings knotted together again.

I called Deiter. He answered on the first ring.

“What time can you be here?”

 

Wednesday

 

10

T
HREE GUYS SAT AROUND
MY
kitchen table playing with their toys. It was early, a couple of minutes after 6 p.m., and the rain was coming down harder than ever, rattling like fingers across the bay window in the bedroom. Deiter's GMPI ball cap was turned around backward on his hayrick of hair. It was the first time I'd seen him in any anything but pajamas. He checked the battery charge on a Panasonic RR-DR60 digital audio recorder.

Next to Deiter sat a guy about my age, square-faced like a book, with short dark hair and a toothy smile. He wore a black GMPI shirt that clung like cellophane to his muscles. He had forearms like a gorilla and hands big enough to palm a sixteen-pound bowling ball. There were two pieces of equipment in front of him—a Sony NightShot digital infrared camcorder and a K-11 Safe Range EMF meter. His name was Grant. He and Deiter founded Grant-Marks Paranormal Investigators about ten years ago.

“Anybody want a beer?” I looked at my dwindling cache. My last remaining quart of Tecate wasn't nearly enough for three grown men.

“We don't drink alcohol during an investigation,” said Trey, the third guy at my table. He was about twenty-two, five-ten, a shade over 140 pounds, dressed in dirty overalls and a pair of rubber hip waders folded down to his knees. He had just gotten off work locating buried cables—he was the Call Before You Dig man. His investigative equipment consisted of a pair of brass rods housed in an old flute case. His left cheek stuck out like he had a golf ball in his mouth.

“Sometimes we drink plenty after we're done,” Deiter laughed.

“What happens first?” I asked.

Deiter nodded at Grant and turned on the digital camcorder. Grant said, “First thing we do is make a sweep of the area with the EMF reader.” He turned on his machine and began moving slowly around the room, stopping at each point where the meter registered a change. “I'm getting a small increase near the stove,” he said. “And the refrigerator. They're both ancient, so there's nothing unusual about that. Point one, point two, not enough to notice.”

“Not enough to notice what?”

“A strong EMF field can sometimes generate the sensation of being watched, or feelings of fear or anxiety.”