Mean Streets (20 page)

I wanted to ask him more about Arbildo, but I excused myself from Banda and said I’d be right back. Let him assume I needed the washroom, if he liked. I stood up and the dog darted out of the bar and into the main concourse. I hoped my luggage would be all right with the lawyer for the time it would take to chase the dog.

And it was fine, since the dog only got a few feet farther into the concourse before the shape seemed to fall apart and drift into the clutter of thousands of passengers’ energy coronas moving through the silvery space of the air terminal. A few shapes had no living person within them, but most of those were simple repeating ghosts or fogs of happenstance and emotion left over from some altogether human interaction. The shadowy dog trotted back to me and pushed against my legs again.

Banda was looking impatiently at his watch when I returned to the bar.

“I can’t stay longer. Have some clients to meet in twenty minutes and the traffic is getting bad. I have to go.” He took a card from his inner jacket pocket and offered it to me. “If you have any more questions, call me. My cell phone number is on here. Good luck, Miss Blaine,” he added, picking up his briefcase and heading for the door.

“Hey,” I called. “Aren’t there any other documents? And what am I supposed to do about the dog?”

“Any other documents in Miss Arbildo’s file are none of your business, Miss Blaine. As to the dog, the check is right here—you could just turn right around with it in your hand and call this thing done, as far as I’m concerned. But if you feel you have to, take the broken bits up to Oaxaca and leave ’em. Stick ’em back together with superglue if you want.”

“What about the grave? Where is it?”

“Damned if I know,” he called back. “Pick one!”

He waved and ducked out before I could ask him anything more. It appeared that Guillermo Banda just wanted shut of Marie-Luz Arbildo and her nutty will and I was as convenient a way as any. I followed him a few paces out the door, saw him duck past the customs area, waving to the guards on the other side as he went past—old friends? Something odd was going on with Banda, but I wasn’t entirely sure what. I did pause to wonder if the breaking of the dog was entirely an accident. . . . I shook off that thought and went back to my seat, the Grey dog scampering along in my wake.

I ordered some food and ate in a hurry before heading to the Mexicana Airlines desk to pick up my new boarding passes and check my luggage for the flight to Oaxaca. The phantom dog stuck to my side the whole time, casting glances around the room and sniffing for signs—of what I didn’t know.

For just a moment as I boarded the little prop plane I wondered what to do with the dog before I remembered that no one but me would even be aware of it. It huddled under my feet the whole hour we were in the air and again on the ride from the airport, which reminded me of the regional airports I’d grown up near in Los Angeles County with their pushcart stairs and wind-blown tarmac. A white van was standing at the curb outside, offering rides to downtown Oaxaca City, and the ghost dog and I shared the vehicle with a family of six and two couples who all seemed excited beyond my ability.

The van driver dropped each group off, leaving me at a tall, Spanish colonial building on the edge of the downtown core. As far as I could tell, the whole area was late Spanish colonial, though at that elevation, darkness had already fallen and it was hard to see details beyond the streetlamps. The road was layered thickly with silvery ghosts and loops of memory, playing like old movies in a two-dollar theater. I saw a discreet sign on the buttercupcolored plaster wall that indicated the carved wooden door before me led to my guesthouse. I pulled the bell handle as instructed and was greeted with a flood of light and the odors of spicy cooking as the door was opened wide.

“Soy
Harper Blaine—” I started.

“Oh! Miss Blaine!
Sí!
Come in! You were bumped to a later flight?” the dark-haired woman in the doorway asked, snatching my bag indoors with one hand as she waved me in with the other. “We have dinner for you if you like it.”

She turned her head and called for “Miguelito!” who proved to be a teenager as tall as a professional basketball player and as dramatically emo as a Cure album cover. “You are in
manos de leon
,” she continued to me while pointing at my suitcase without shifting her gaze from my face. “My nephew will take your bag. You can wash and come back down to the
sala
for some food.”

I was almost dizzy with exhaustion by then, but I know better than to argue with whirlwind women. I followed “little Miguel” up the tiled stairs and around an open gallery to a door with a painting of a magenta coxcomb flower on it. Miguelito unlocked the door for me and put the suitcase just inside before handing me my key and slouching off with an insouciant nod.

I glanced down over the railing before I went into the room. In the courtyard below I could see people gathered around a ceramic firepit that gleamed with heat, serving themselves from a nearby table laden with food. The cool mountain air settled gently from above through the open center of the building’s roof, drifting down to meet the swirl of sparks and heat that rose from the gathering below.

I was so tired I didn’t make it back down that night. I woke up in the morning on October thirtieth with one boot on and one off and the ghost dog running in and out through the closed door, whining. Someone was tapping on my door. Groggily, I stumbled to it and opened up.

Miguel-the-not-so-small was slouching there—clad in black jeans, black T-shirt, and black boots with his naturally dark hair hanging over his eyes—probably hoping I hadn’t heard his timid tapping and he could lope off to whatever he’d rather do than wait on me. The energy around him was a dun-colored cloud shot with red lightning bolts of annoyance—or something short-tempered and pissy—while thin gold lines trailed off his fingertips in a way I’d never seen before. In the face of his determined gloom, I smiled at him with perverse malice, in spite of being still half asleep.

“Buenos días
, Miguel!” I chirped—fairy-tale princesses had nothing on me for chipper.

“Yeah, yeah . . . good morning to you, too.” His accent was still pretty strong, but his English was clear. And abrasive. I could almost see the expletive deleted from that sentence still hanging in the air in all its F-bomb glory. “Tía Mercedes said I’m supposed to show you around the city ’cause you have some kind of business thing. . . .”

“Yup! Busy-ness. Busy, busy! Gotta find a grave.”

He frowned at me. “Grave?” he asked, as if I surely didn’t know what I’d just said.

“Yup. I have a mission to do something with a grave and I don’t know where it is.”

“Today?”

“No. On Sunday, November first.”

“Oh.” Was that disappointment? “Día de los Muertos. Yeah.”

“Is today special or something?” I asked as he started to turn away.

“Yeah. There’s, like, a whole series of Days of the Dead. Todos Santos—November first—is just the big one the tourists are all crazy for. Today’s, like, the day for the spirits that died by violence. Tía Mercedes doesn’t celebrate that in the house—we have to go outside so the mad ghosts don’t come in and mess stuff up.” He shrugged and started to turn away, having lost all interest in me, now that I was no more interesting than the average tourist.

I grabbed his arm. “Hey, where y’going, Miguel?”

He huffed his hair out of his face and glared at me. “Call me Mickey.”

“Not Mike?”

“No.” Like, duuuuh, I thought facetiously. Was I this snotty as a teenager?

“Mickey Mouse fan, then? Mickey Mantle?”

He snorted, and pulled his arm out of my grasp. “Tía Mercedes has breakfast downstairs in twenty minutes. Then we can go look for your grave. OK?”

I didn’t miss the implication of whose grave, but I did ignore it. “OK. Be right down. Thank your aunt for me.”

He skulked away as I retreated into my room. I took a very fast shower and threw on clean clothes.

I’d been given a room with its own bath, which I suspected was an unusual luxury in an antique house. And there was no denying the building—some wealthy man’s town home originally, I’d have bet—was exactly as old as its style indicated. It didn’t mimic Spanish colonial, it
was
Spanish colonial.

Downstairs the food was endless and lush: eggs scrambled with corn tortillas, green salsa, and cheese; fried plantains; grilled tomatoes; bread and sweet pastries only distantly related to the greasy churros found in American malls. Coffee, chocolate, and milk were all available as well as horchata and fruit juice. My hosts, the Villaflores family, felt that their guests during the holiday should be well fed before they faced a day of hiking up and down the mountainous elevations of Oaxaca City and its environs. Midday meal would be on our own, but dinner with the family was open to all, Mercedes informed me—she was the proprietress I’d met the previous night. I thought I’d have to find an excuse to dodge it or I stood a good chance of gaining five pounds before November second, hiking or no.

Miguel-call-me-Mickey was not so enthusiastic, picking at his food and jumping up the moment I was finished, telling his aunt we had to leave and get to the
“palacio de gobierno”
that morning or we’d never get in before they closed. He sloped off to wait for me outside while I thanked Mercedes for breakfast.

She smiled. “Gracias. I hope you won’t mind Miguelito too much—he is bored here. I don’t know why he came at all—such an odd boy—but at least he can be some help to you. If he doesn’t make you scream and leave him in a ditch by the road.”

“Oh . . . I think we’ll be OK,” I replied, thinking there would be ample opportunities to knock a hole in Mickey’s attitude if I wanted to. Angsty teens aren’t much of a challenge after vampires and vengeful ghosts and monsters in the sewer.

Stepping through the door, the sound of the Grey really hit me. Where Mexico City had been a strong, steady song of steel and silk, Oaxaca was a wild roar. It sounded like the Battle of the Bands in which someone had forgotten to tell the musicians not to play all at once. Layers of contrasting melody and meter, song and noise flooded the mist-world and made the lines of energy around me spark and throb. Strata of time and memory seemed to juggle and flow, like Einstein’s river. It was tiring just to stand in it.

Mickey lounged against the wall outside, smoking a noxious-smelling cigarillo and shifting his fake-sleepy gaze around the street like a hoodlum looking for a chump in a black-and-white film. I stood on the doorstep for a minute while he ignored me. Then I tapped his foot with mine to get his attention—OK, maybe a little more insistent than a tap, but not a full-on kick. He jerked upright and muttered a phrase under his breath even I knew was an insult.

“Hey, I thought you were in a hurry,” I said.

He grunted and threw down his smoke, grinding it out under his toe with more malice than the horrid thing deserved. “Yeah, right.” A sentence that seemed to mean nothing when he said it.

He gathered himself after a final glance around and turned his back to me, heading out into the street. “This way.”

I wondered if his shoulders got tired carrying the weight of that chip.

I was there because of the holiday, yet I hadn’t thought of some of the implications of its presence beyond the possibility of office closures and an increased presence of the dead. Once out on the street with Mickey, it became obvious that el Día de los Muertos was a much bigger thing than Halloween and there was more to contend with, both living and dead, than bureaucrats on holiday. We walked down the wide, gray-bricked road, hemmed in by a mix of adobe and buildings of pale green stone, none newer than the late 1920s, many painted, like the Villaflores house, in rich shades of red, yellow, orange, or the native pale green. The bricked street boiled with ghostly traffic on foot, in cars, on horse-and donkey-back, even a group of ancient Spanish soldiers marching with pikes pointing at the sky.

I was startled to note that unlike the ghosts of Seattle, most of these looked like skeletons in clothing and not like the remembered shapes of live people. Skulls grinned and empty eye sockets gleamed with only the memory of eyes. They were completely aware of us, too, watching us as we went and seeming amused. It was unsettling to be observed through eyeless, unblinking sockets, and so much more closely than I was used to.

We scuffed through the legions of phantoms without talking for a while, to a huge central plaza. Miguel paused and pointed into it, saying in a bored voice, “That’s our famous
zocalo.
Where the Federales shot all those teachers a couple of years ago. That was in front of the old palacio de gobierno, but it’s a museum now. We’ll have to go through the market to get to the new one—I hope you don’t want to stop and go shopping,” he added with a sneer. He didn’t know me very well. . . .

I rolled my eyes and ignored the jab—for now. “I’m not much of a shopper. I just need to find this guy’s grave by November first.”

“You know which cemetery?”

“Nope, just have a name and a date of death.”

“Yeah, right. We’ll go to the Registrar of Deaths.” He said it with such relish I had to stifle a giggle. “We have to move it, though, ’cause they’ll close early. Día de los Muertos is a major holiday. It’s like your Christmas, only with dead guys. The market’s crazy full with old ladies like Tía Mercedes and all their kids doing the shopping for the ofrendas and all that. And tourists. And you want to get inside before the ghosts of the violently dead return.” He gave me a sly glance from the corner of his eye to see if I’d bite, but I didn’t.

“Then we’d better get going,” was all I said.

We continued down the street to the market with the ghost dog tagging at our heels and the gold threads that dragged from Mickey’s fingertips spinning out through the crowds of spirits that thronged the streets already crowded with the living. He seemed unaware of the vibrant threads spooling from his hands. I wished I knew what that shiny energy strand was all about, but I’d have to wait and see.