Alternate Routes

by Tim Powers

  “We can?” She sniffed and rubbed the back of her hand across her mouth. “Why didn’t we sleep in one last night?”

  “Because Galvan is very careful about drawing official attention. California Retail Food Code, Article Four: an area used as sleeping quarters shall not be used for conducting food facility operations. It’s a firing offense, but we should be able to get away with it for a night or two, just till we can figure things out.”

  Castine leaned back and closed her eyes. “And tomorrow?”

  Vickery shrugged. “We go out with the fleet. We’ll already be right there at the commissary.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  On a narrow overgrown island in the Los Angeles River, Santiago sat in the shade behind a curtain of willow branches, holding a fishing pole that stuck out over the water. Leaves hung limp in the warm morning air, and dragonflies paused frequently to hover in place over the slow-moving water, but he was wearing a zipped-up windbreaker, gloves, and a wire-mesh fencing mask.

  The Long Beach Freeway was less than half a mile away to the east; and to the north, just past the train tracks at the top of the concrete embankment on that side of the river, was a building on Bandini Boulevard that Laquedem said was familiar to certain ghosts, and might attract them. Santiago had long ago learned that ghosts could often be found lingering on the many little islands in the LA River, generally in the freeway-side stretch from Dodger Stadium down to Bell Gardens; and if he were separated from the mainland on all sides by running water, he could speak to them in complete sentences without them following him afterward.

  Santiago was perched on the west side of this island, with a thicket of sumac and willow and tall weeds behind him, and in front of him, through the willow branches, a view up the concrete slope of the western embankment to the back side of a furniture warehouse.

  The hook on the end of the boy’s line was a binder clip, and the bait was a parking sticker with TUA printed on it. He had broken the side-window of a car on Bandini Boulevard an hour ago to peel the sticker off the inner side of the windshield, a risk he would not have taken for anyone besides Isaac Laquedem. Two years ago the old man had found him hiding out in a packing crate behind a Home Depot on Figueroa, when Santiago had been ten years old and virtually starving, and Laquedem had given the boy food and money and directed him to various sorts of unofficial shelter, in exchange for agreeing to run errands that the old man couldn’t do himself.

  It had been the leather bands that Santiago wore on his wrists that had led Laquedem to him—the boy was in the habit of sleeping with his hands crossed and clasping the bands, and that frail connection of the ghosts in the two bands had been enough for Laquedem to sense and locate him.

  The boy flexed his hands now on the cork grip of the fishing pole, and looked with melancholy affection at the sweat-stained strips of leather.

  The bands held the subsumed ghosts of Santiago’s mother and father, killed one midnight in 2015 while trying to cross the San Diego Freeway, south of the Border Patrol checkpoint at Camp Pendleton. The coyote who had smuggled the little family up from Rosarito in a truck camper had dropped them off on the freeway shoulder and told them to cross the freeway to the Buena Vista Lagoon, follow its banks down to the beach, and then walk north past the checkpoint; but Santiago’s parents had never seen a freeway before, and had not known how quickly a distant pair of headlights could become a deadly immediate hammer, and though young Santiago had managed to whirl away from the rushing bumper, his mother and father had been struck and flung tumbling back onto the gravel of the eastern freeway shoulder. The car that had hit them had not paused in its northward course.

  His dying mother had unhooked the bands from her wrist and muttered over them, and she had touched one with her tongue and whispered to Santiago that he must touch the other to his father’s bloody lips; then she told her son to wear them on his own wrists so that his parents could always be with him; and then she shivered and was still. Santiago had taken all the papers and money from their pockets, then dragged their bodies down the slope away from the intermittent glare of the freeway lanes. He had tried for an hour to dig a hole with his bare hands before he finally despaired of burying them, and in the end he had just covered the bodies with palm fronds and tufts of flowering mustard.

  Back up on the freeway shoulder, he waited for nearly half an hour until he could see no headlights at all in the northbound lanes, then sprinted across them to the median wall, climbed over it, and crouched by a cluster of sunflowers until the southbound lanes were empty. He ran to the west side of the freeway and scrambled down the slope to the marshy border of the lagoon, and the sky had faded to gunmetal gray and the sun had risen behind him by the time he had made his way to the beach. There he had eventually met a handful of other fugitives, and, tagging along with that shifting and changing group, he had within a couple of days found himself in Los Angeles.

  The line on his fishing pole twitched, and he gripped the pole more tightly. It vibrated for several seconds, and then a figure stood beside him, swaying and mumbling. The image of a business suit with a white shirt and a tie hovered stiffly in front of it, like an oversized cutout for paper dolls.

  Its words became more distinct: “Hey, kid, let me use your phone, government emergency, I need paramedics, a pair o’ medics, parameciums . . .”

  It was the silhouette of a man, its face a churning blur; but the fact that it spoke indicated that it probably still had a tongue, and Santiago was glad he was wearing the fencing mask.

  He had conversed with ghosts several times in these past two years, but it was still profoundly disturbing to talk to a cast-off ectoplasmic shell that believed it was still part of a human.

  Reminding himself of Laquedem’s instructions, the boy took a deep breath and then in a fairly steady voice asked, “Have you caught Herbert Woods yet?”

  An answer to this question, Laquedem had said, would indicate whether or not the ghost was indeed a onetime agent of the nearby TUA, and would also be a clue to how recent its death might have been.

  “Woods!” said the thing. Its face was still an indistinct blob. “Was that him, who shot me? What are you wearing, Terracotta? I caught up with the Castine woman, in a circus car, and how can you drive with faces looking in all directions at once? That’s what I want to know.”

  Santiago had no idea whether or not this was an answer Laquedem would find useful, but he pressed on. “How many ghosts have we been interrogating per day?” He substituted we for the prescribed you since the ghost seemed to believe it was speaking to another TUA employee.

  A wet snuffling seemed to be the only answer to the question, and then Santiago jumped as the thing’s tongue flicked out and slapped across the wire mesh of the fencing mask. The still air seemed to shake with subsonic drumming. “D-deleted persons, please!” the thing said when the tongue vanished. “Retrievable! Castine and her pal, they were here but they went back to the world whole, not all fucked up like this! Now talking fame, through every Grecian town, has spread, immortal Theseus, thy renown. Get me back!”

  The subsonic booming seemed to be synchronized with Santiago’s heartbeat now. “We need to know how many we’ve been calling up,” he said, sweating behind the wire mesh, “for the—” he groped for an authoritative word, “—for the settings. On the machine.” Surely, the boy thought, some sort of machine must be involved.

  “You’re the one who’s been talking to everyone in Hell, I see your dumb old telephones everywhere. Did you lean on that guy in the weird house out on Mulholland yet? When was it he called you? I didn’t get any of the cigarettes, and the hot dog stand fell to pieces.”

  “A lot?” pressed Santiago desperately. “A lot of deleted persons?”

  “You think you’re so big. You say you got this, and you got that, and you got clothes that don’t evaporate . . .”

  The thing’s tongue sprang out again, thudding against Santiago’s chest, and its face had become clearer now; the boy could
see wide, staring eyes below a bloody forehead.

  Santiago hastily decided that the interview was over, and he fumbled a plastic disk out of his jacket pocket and held it up. It was one of Jack Hipple’s spirit level stars, with short glass tubes glued on it like spokes on a wheel.

  “Why are you tilting?” Santiago asked in a shaky voice.

  “Wha—am I?” The ghost peered at the disk, presumably noting that each of the radiating tubes indicated a different line as level. “Damn, I—”

  The figure rocked from side to side as if pivoting on a hub in its midsection, then turned upside down, and then began rotating clockwise like a big pinwheel. The rotation got faster, and when it was a spinning blur the thing winked out of existence with a thump that stirred the willow leaves.

  Santiago let out his held breath and peered through the wire mesh at the river and the weeds and trees around him; but he saw no incongruous figure anywhere, and the faint thudding sensation had ceased too. He relaxed at last, and tucked the spirit level star back in his pocket.

  Lifting the sweaty fencing mask off his head, he stood up on the muddy accumulated soil of the little island and hefted his fishing rod. He pulled in the line and noted that the black metal binder clip held nothing now; perhaps the ghost had taken the parking permit back with it to the afterworld.

  Santiago stepped out into the flowing water; it was barely a foot deep, and the only risk was of slipping on the slimy cement and falling, which would leave his clothes smeared with green algae. But he made it to the embankment without even a wobble, and sat down on the slanted cement halfway up to street level.

  Laquedem had said that the Herbert Woods whom the TUA was looking for was in fact Sebastian Vickery. Santiago had more-or-less introduced Vickery to the Castine woman beside the 10 Freeway two days ago, and yesterday the two of them had driven a TUA man to meet Laquedem at Holy Sacrament. Shortly after that Castine had driven the funny car right into the afterworld—and, according to this recent ghost, she had returned from there, with a guy who was apparently Vickery. Hm!

  Laquedem had bought tickets for Santiago and himself on a bus to Barstow this evening, but the old man had told Santiago to try to find Vickery and bring him to him. I’m afraid you won’t find the poor devil, Laquedem had told the boy, but it’s possible. If he succeeded in doing what I told him to do, we don’t need to take that bus.

  Santiago had ridden his bicycle to the Galvan commissary kitchen, and had been told that Vickery was out on one of the trucks and was scheduled to be back sometime after five. Santiago would check back then. In the meantime . . .

  This ghost had said, Did you lean on that guy in the weird house out on Mulholland yet? When was it he called you?

  Santiago didn’t trust Hipple, but he had done some business with him during the last year or so—the boy had bought ghost repellers from him, and had twice brought him ghosts that wanted to be subsumed into organic objects. It might be profitable to let Hipple know that the TUA apparently had plans to “lean on him.”

  Los Angeles buses all had bicycle racks on the front, and Santiago could be at Hipple’s place in an hour.

  Two days ago Santiago had ridden his bicycle back to the place where the Castine woman had shot a TUA man; two men had been lying inert on the pavement, one with a puddle of blood around his head, and Santiago had known that police would be arriving shortly, but before riding away again he had picked up the dead man’s pistol, and later stashed it under a rock in a fenced-off lot near Western—probably he should retrieve that before going out to Hipple’s place.

  The boy stood up, tucked the fishing pole and the fencing mask under one arm, and walked up the embankment slope toward where he had left his bicycle.

  Castine had proved to be competent at writing up orders and hanging them on the metal strip above the window and taking payments, so Vickery devoted his attention to spinning corn tortillas on the oiled grill and folding them and stuffing them with carne asada and shredded lettuce and cheese, while ’Turo was manning the deep fryers, shaking the baskets of churros and chicken and beef taquitos and dumping the browned contents onto big paper towels laid across a stainless steel tray. Vickery wiped his forehead with the sleeve of the white shirt he’d bought for five dollars at a thrift shop yesterday afternoon, and opened an oven door to check the progress of a rack of enchiladas. The air conditioner roared in the truck’s low ceiling, but it must have been ninety degrees in the steamy interior.

  The truck was stopped down the street from a high school, and even though it was presumably against the rules for students to leave campus, it seemed to Vickery that every one of them was spending the lunch hour waiting in line on the sidewalk out there.

  Castine threw him a brief glance over her shoulder. “Who’d have thought teenagers all have credit cards?” She slid a card through the little black PayPal reader and handed it back across the open counter to a girl with blue hair. Castine’s own auburn hair was disarranged by a bandage taped onto the side of her head, and today she was wearing black jeans and a sweatshirt with flowers embroidered on the back. The sweatshirt was dark with sweat under the arms, and she would surely have taken it off if she’d had a blouse on under it.

  In addition to the long-sleeved white dress shirt, Vickery wore faded gray jeans and a pair of fairly new black wingtip shoes. They had kept the leather jackets, which hung now on the truck’s back door.

  Castine slid another credit card through the PayPal reader and hung the order slip on the strip above the window.

  “By the time they’re twenty they’ll be in lifetime debt,” Vickery grumbled, returning his attention to the tacos. He had an anonymous pre-paid Visa card himself, but was seldom able to load it with more than a hundred dollars.

  After fetching his motorcycle and riding it to another thrift shop yesterday, they had proceeded to the commissary, where they’d been able to shower and change into the new lot of secondhand clothes. With the commissary’s first aid kit and his memories of emergency medical aid training, Vickery had cleaned and disinfected Castine’s head wound and put a bandage on it, and they had both agreed that a scar and the future necessity of brushing her hair over a bald patch was preferable to the risks involved in going to an emergency room with a gunshot wound. Galvan had not put in an appearance. Dinner had been microwaved burritos and frijoles filched from one of the refrigerators, and after everyone had gone home they had made themselves comfortable in the fully-reclined front seats of the truck.

  “Ariadne, and strings,” Castine had said then, her profile intermittently visible against the old cycling sodium vapor lights in the commissary parking lot. “Was that the Labyrinth, where we were?”

  Vickery had already closed his eyes. “It was no part of the LA freeways, for sure.”

  “Didn’t used to be, anyway,” she had said, then said nothing more, and within a minute he had fallen asleep. At some point during the night he had awakened to hear her crying, very quietly, but he had pretended to go on sleeping, and after a minute her breathing became regular, with only an occasional hitch.

  Headlight glare from cars pulling into the lot at 5 AM had awakened them, and they had pretended to have arrived only moments earlier.

  Then they had spent a busy hour in the crowded kitchen, swiping heads of lettuce across an electric slicer, chopping tomatoes and onions and peppers and whirling them in food processors, and pre-cooking chili verde and carne asada for later reheating in the trucks. By six-thirty the trucks had been loaded, and Vickery had checked the oil and coolant levels and tire pressures of the one they’d slept in, and dawn had found the fleet of trucks trundling out of the lot, bound for curbside locations all over Los Angeles.

  Vickery now slid two tacos toward Ramon, who was loading trays, and when he looked at the bar over the counter window there were no more order slips. He straightened up and peered out past Castine through the counter window, and saw only a couple of teenagers looking at their phones.

  Ramon stepped from
the kitchen area into the truck’s cab, and called, “We’re done here. On to the building site on Olympic?”

  Vickery peeled off his polyethylene gloves and pushed them through the trash slot. “How’s the metronome? That’s only a couple of miles from Old Man Ten.” He wiped his sweaty hands on his jeans.

  “Quiet right now.”

  “Okay, but be ready to shut down and scoot.”

  When the last cardboard tray of tacos had been handed out through the counter window, Vickery closed the shutter and latched it, and he blinked around in the new dimness as Ramon started the truck and shifted it into gear.

  Vickery unhooked a scraper from a rack and pushed it across the grill while ’Turo put a couple of small steel bins back in the refrigerator. Castine folded a seat down from the wall and perched on it, bracing her feet on the corrugated black vinyl deck.

  “Can I help?”

  “Today you just do sales,” Vickery told her. “We’ll work you up to cooking.”

  He caught her frown as he moved to the sink to wash the scraper.

  We’ll flee LA as soon as we can figure a secure way to do it, he thought irritably. Our first concern is to try to get you hired and find some sort of shielded lodging. Maybe a boat somewhere. We can’t go on sleeping in trucks and tombs.

  Ramon had been driving down Crenshaw, and Vickery braced his hand on the quilted metal wall over Castine’s head as the truck made a left turn onto Olympic—and Castine yelped and leaped out of her seat in the same moment that Vickery heard the rattle of the dashboard metronome start up.

  “Hot air from somewhere,” Castine said, rubbing her left arm.

  Vickery stepped past her and waved his hand through the space where she had been sitting, and then yanked it back. The air was hot, but stationary there, not a draft.