by John Shirley
Come to think of it I did do something else, that last year: I listened to music. Okay, so it was in a bar. I sat on a bar stool at Jinky Jake’s, in southwest Vegas, and listened to their antiquated jukebox. Not one of those modern systems that take music off the internet—but a real old jukebox with old vinyl records in it. It played scratchy old 1940s music. I loved bebop and big band and New Orleans trad jazz and western swing. I’d sit on that bar stool, trying to decide if I would spend my last three dollars on juke music or on their cheapest beer.
It hadn’t been a good year.
And now I was dead, walking on a sandy path in the afterlife.
Fiona and I got to the top of the trail, slowly ascending into brighter daylight. We paused and I looked over the prospect inland. A notch in the bluff led to a shallow valley enfolded by a mix of darkly lush maples and oaks. A body of clear water lay mirrorlike to the south; to the north, curtains of rain rippled softly. In between, a small town was spread out below us. Most of the houses were old-fashioned colonial-style cottages, some of them oddly proportioned. It reminded me of woodcuts I’d seen of early villages in western Massachusetts, some little burg Ben Franklin and his cronies would visit.
“That’s Main Street, right there,” Fiona said. “Follow that to the downtown area. There’s a boardinghouse, a two-story brick place with ivy on it—you can’t miss it. You can stay in that for now, if you want. I’d stay out of the swamp to the south, if I was you—at least don’t go there alone. And if you go north”—she pointed north, where the hills rose steeply to a series of ridges cloaked in low cloud—“keep your eyes open. Some up there are good people, but some . . .” She shrugged with one shoulder. “We have some crazies here, too.”
I had a lot of questions and opened my mouth—but she shook her head and raised a hand. “Enough for now.”
I chuckled. “Okay, Fiona. I hope I’ll be seeing you around.”
“You will. I’m a sort of mascot here.”
“Listen—can I ask . . . couldn’t all this—I mean what I’m experiencing—couldn’t it be one of those hallucinations from . . . like when the brain’s running out of oxygen? Next there’ll be a tunnel and then a light and then . . . light’s out.”
“No. Didn’t you already pass through a tunnel?” she asked.
“Now that you mention it—yeah.”
“Believe in this place, Nick. ’Cause it’s real and it’s solid. I mean, some of us call the Earth the ‘dirt world,’ but the afterworld has its own dirt.” She stomped once on the ground for emphasis. “Solid, too. You’ll see. I’ve been here about sixty-five years. And the light’s never gone out yet. I mean, it gets dark, but not like you would think.” She turned her gaze down the dark sea. “I’ve got so I like it here. Mostly.”
She smiled self-mockingly, toyed with her hair, and then turned back toward the beach. She started down the hill. I watched her descend into the mist, hoping she’d turn and wave to me. She didn’t.
When I lost sight of her, I turned and walked the other way, down into the valley.
I thought, The Valley of the Shadow of death?
But there wasn’t much shadow of death in the valley. Mostly, I’ve found, Garden Rest is a nice place. Except for the occasional murder.
SECOND
“Why’d I come here?” I wondered, aloud, walking along the cobbled road. “Why this place, particularly?” Birds were stirring in the trees shadowing the cottages. Ravens squawked, and small, brightly colorful birds trilled. Now and then, mixed with the birdcalls, some of the birds seemed to mutter actual words in shrill, faintly mocking voices. “Gettaclue. Gettaclue. Here I am. Here I am. Here I am . . . Openandsee . . . gettaclue . . .” My boot steps echoed along the quiet row of cottages. A few larger houses were set back from the rest, behind intricate wrought-iron fences tangled with flowering vines. The blossoms, red and blue, both familiar and unfamiliar in shape, seemed almost Day-Glo in the morning light. The larger houses, partly coated in moss, looked old, more weathered.
I shook my head. Had Fiona said I’d chosen this place? I had been an urban person all my life. New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New Orleans, Las Vegas. This place was so rustic—it wouldn’t be like me to choose a place like this, even subconsciously.
I felt a twinge, thinking of Las Vegas. What a lonely, stupid death it had been, choking to death in the muted blue light of a casino sign, the thin glow coming all sickly through my apartment window.
The blinking casino sign had spoken to me, as I’d died. You gambled one more time, and you—
“You lost?” The question came from a man leaning against an unlit streetlight, hands in the pockets of his creased trousers. “Easy to feel lost when you first get here.” The streetlamp fixture looked old-fashioned, something from the gaslight era. The man was old-fashioned, too.
He wore a salt-and-pepper suit, cut 1930s, tight waist, a speckled bow tie, and spats. He had slicked-back brown hair, high forehead, a long nose, a sardonic curve to his mouth. He was chewing a fibrous plant stem, like a piece of green twine, the way a hayseed in an old movie chews straw.
I strolled toward him. There didn’t seem much reason to hurry. I was dead, after all. (But urgency does come to men in the afterlife. It comes hard and fierce sometimes.)
“What’s up,” I said. “I’m not exactly lost but not exactly oriented. I’m dead, is all. Name’s Nicholas. Nick if you want. Who’d you be?”
“Name’s Bertram.” He grinned. “Bertram if you want. You don’t have a cigarette with you, at all?”
I couldn’t help laughing. “No, haven’t got one. Fiona asked, too.”
“Figures. I don’t know why nobody’s ever quite managed to make a damn cigarette here. Isn’t like smoking’d kill us.” His accent seemed Texan, with you sounding like yew. He took a gooily-chewed stem out of his mouth and looked it over frowningly. “No goddamn tobacco. Just these here frip things. They’re not bad, though. You get a buzz off ’em. And we do have liquor of a sort. You wanta drink, hoss? You can get a drink any hour, day or night here. Buy you a drink at Brummigen’s or at the Sour Grapes. They got a pretty good imitation of wine there.”
“Relieved to hear there’s liquor here. But uh—is that the first thing I should do, getting into town—go to a bar? Not supposed to report to an angel or something?”
“Haven’t got any angels that I know of, or anything else like that. Some ladies look like angels, without the wings. Most of ’em don’t act like angels though, God bless ’em.” He stuck the twig back in his mouth and chewed meditatively. “Oh, I suppose I oughta take you over to the boardinghouse, so you don’t have to go to the trouble to grow a cottage, right off, or beg a room in one of the big houses. Not that you couldn’t just stay outdoors, if you were of a mind to, there’s no skeeters. It’s pretty good, clement weather around here if you stay close to town. Well, sir, right this way.” He straightened up, stretched, and started off down the street, hands back in his pockets.
I fell into step beside him, and we walked east along Main Street. “So you have weather here.”
“Sure do. Even seasons, in a mild way. But if you want wild weather, you travel for it. Some do. What’d ya’ll do, for a living? In the Before, I mean.”
“I was a half-assed private investigator. Las Vegas.”
“I used to have dealings with private eyes in the Before. I was a horse-race tout. Well, I did a lot of stuff. Bookie. Card sharp. Not that I ever cheated nobody. I was just good at cards. Knew when to hold ’em, when to fold ’em. You want to play some poker? We got standard fifty-two-card decks here.”
“Maybe later. Where’s that boardinghouse?”
“That’s where we’re headed.”
I felt pretty comfortable with him. He was a gambler and I’d just come from Vegas. “You been here awhile?” I asked.
“Yeah. The suit tell you? We never seem to develop fashions here. Some try, now and then”—he grinned—“but it’s unfashionable to have a fashion. Yes sir, I was shot dead by Big Jim Krest in Forth Worth, in 1940, so I’ve been here, uh . . . how long is it?”
“Bit more than seventy years.”
“Seventy years!” He whistled. “Well I’ll be a ding dong daddy from Tallahassee. I done lost track.”
“How’d we end up here, in this . . . town? I mean why here, particularly, Bertram? Why us, why here?”
He grinned ruefully. “I’m no expert on that airy fairy stuff, hoss. I just look for a chance to have a good time. I take me a walk, I smell the air, have a drink, play some cards. Try my luck with the ladies. Glad to be still around at all in some way. I don’t know that much about how the town got here. Or how I got here—why me, why here. I have wondered. It’s true this ain’t like where I was living, pre-death. I was a towny.”
“Me too. Seems a strange fit.”
“But would you really want a—where’d you say, Las Vegas? I’ve heard about that Vegas. Would you really want a Las Vegas afterlife?”
“Hell no. I was no saint but I wasn’t that bad.”
“Anyway, what I hear is, where you show up in this world is something you choose. You just didn’t know you were choosing it. And you choose it because somehow you know you need it.”
I looked around skeptically, and suddenly realized that I liked it here. The gently scintillating sun was rising up over the bluffs between the town and the sea, and I felt its subtle warmth on the back of my neck; saw it was stretching my shadow out over the cobblestones. It definitely seemed like a real place, not just some afterlife dream. The cobblestones were dirty, cracked in places. The cottages lining the road had a certain shabbiness about them. Not decayed, just worn, like they weren’t getting enough maintenance. Some of them were flanked by thick trees dangling with Spanish moss; it looked incongruous with the Old New England housing.
“ . . . Gettaclue. Gettaclue. Here I am. Here I am. Here I am . . .”
“Are those parrots up there? They seem to be talking.”
“Not parrots, nah. Some local species, hoss. They kinda do talk, yeah, but Lord knows you’ll have a dull time of it you try to have a conversation with one. And I wouldn’t hear what they say quite the same way you would. It’s just a way to sing, for them. They echo in your mind, see. They’re not exactly like birds on Earth. No droppings, at least. But they’re territorial—they get in a dust up, sometimes, and you hear ’em cuss each other out! Now, you want to have a conversation with an animal, find yourself a dog. Some of the stray dogs around Garden Rest do have something to say. Especially if you like to talk about smells.”
I glanced through a cottage window, where a woman seemed to be making tea. I could see a teapot jetting steam. She was a handsome, red-cheeked, buxom woman in a silken kimono, looking about forty, with a single streak of gray in her long auburn hair.
She seemed to become aware of my gaze, and she looked out at me curiously but without any real warmth. She was holding her kimono closed with one hand—looking right at me, she let it drop open to reveal she wore nothing beneath it.
Then, as we strolled on, I lost sight of her. Pleasant while it lasted. Some things about me have not changed in the afterlife.
“That’s Jocelyn, in there,” Bertram said. “She’s been here about two years. She’s a bit loose. Likes to read people’s fortunes, believe it or not.”
“She could go with, ‘You are going to stay dead.’ Always accurate.”
“Ha! You brought your sense of humor with you! That’s good. But don’t let some of the older ones hear you using that term ‘dead,’ they’ll lecture the hell outta you. They don’t like it. Me, I don’t give a good goddamn what you call it. Well here’s another lady—don’t know this one. New to town.”
A tall, rather cadaverous woman was striding toward us; she had short, mousy brown hair, a long black dress, and gray orthopedic shoes. Her pale gray eyes were sunken, her lips pursed. She was looking at the addresses on the street—then she stopped, quite suddenly, and gasped. She was staring up at a balcony. On the balcony, about two and a half stories up, was what appeared to be a man in early middle age—age is only an appearance here. He wore a quilted blue dressing gown, taking his ease; a young woman with disheveled blond hair sat beside him under the eaves of the house. His peak-roofed stone house was almost palatial compared to the others on the block.
The man on the balcony was jolly, squat, bald, bullet headed; he had a stick of frip in one hand, a cocktail in the other—and the young, slim blonde, in an unbuttoned red shift was snuggling close by his side. The girl, leaning forward, had an arch, mocking look about her, bright red lips smirking down at the woman in the orthopedic shoes.
“Claudine!” the man exclaimed, seeing the woman on the street.
She glowered up at him. “Brennan!” Her voice sounded crowlike with rasping fury. “I’ve searched over half the continent for you! I knew you were here somewhere!”
Bertram and I stopped a few paces down, turning to watch the scenario play out. There was time, after all.
“Dammit, Claudine, I was sent here for a reason!” Brennan bellowed to her, standing; his robe opened to show a bare, hairy chest and the cocktail slopped over the balcony railing. Claudine stepped back to avoid the splash of clear fluid. “If you were supposed to be with me in the afterlife, you would be already!”
“You’re hiding from me, is all! I found out about all those affairs the same year you died! You’re a cheating scumbag!”
“Oh for crying out . . . Claudine, the guilt gave me a heart attack, okay? I paid my dues!”
“Is this how you pay your dues? By paying this little whore?”
“Whore!” the blonde fluted, laughing. “Better than being a naggy old bitch! I’ve heard all about you! Cold as an icicle, he said, and shaped like one too!”
This seemed to burn the last inch of the fuse down on Claudine’s firecracker, and she rushed the front door, burst in, and churned up the stairs inside—we couldn’t see the steps from where we were, but we could hear her orthopedic shoes pounding up them.
“Jesus!” Brennan burst out, licking his lips. “Candy, you’d better get out of here . . . Go hide in the bath!”
The girl dodged through a door behind the balcony and was lost from sight. She must have gotten under cover, because Claudine rushed out without losing any momentum, storming up to Brennan on the balcony. He backed toward the railing, his hands lifted.
“Claudine, listen—”
“You are not supposed to behave like a pig all the way into the next world!” she shouted, charging him.
“Claudine!” She gave him a vicious shove and he flailed for balance, grabbing the balcony with his outspread hands, his back arched over it.
She snatched up the wooden chair he’d been sitting on, and swung it, hard, connecting with his head—the balcony cracked, and broke . . .
“See we got the ol’ laws o’ physics here, too,” Bertram said dryly, as Brennan came plummeting down, striking the lane face up, the back of his head cracking on the cobblestones.
“Ouch,” Bertram said.
“Yeah.” I grimaced. I could see blood spreading from his fractured head . . .
Blood? Here?
The blonde scurried out the front door, her dress still unbuttoned, her feet bare, and ran down the street. “Major!” she yelled. “Mr. Doyle!”
I walked over to Brennan and hunkered beside him. His glazed eyes were blinking spasmodically, his mouth working. He seemed alive. He licked his lips and said, “Dammit . . . Claudine . . .”
Bertram stepped up beside me. I stood and murmured, “I thought he was a goner. But you can’t die here, I guess. If you’re already . . .”
“O
h you can kinda kill folks here,” Bertram said. “But not like that. Not even by cutting off their fool heads, much less bashing them in. Look.” He pointed at Brennan’s head. The split in his skull was gone. He was no longer bleeding. His eyes were clearing. I could see that the welt on his forehead where she’d hit him was going down, vanishing.
“Help me up, goddammit, somebody,” he said, stretching out his arms.
Bertram and I helped him to his feet. “How you feeling, Brennan?” Bertram asked.
“Headache. Healing up I guess.”
“Didn’t know you were married.”
“I’m not! Not in the afterlife, dammit! Oh God, here she comes . . .”
Claudine was striding toward him again.
Brennan shook his head firmly. “You are not going to hit me again, woman . . .”
“Here, what’s all this?” A voice called out. I turned to see a round-faced man with a thick mustache, its ends waxed to points, lank red-brown hair, peppered with gray. He came hurrying toward us, almost trotting. If we did any real breathing around here, he’d be short of breath. With his tweed knickerbockers, his patrician air, he had the look of a British middle-class gentleman from Edwardian times—but he was coatless, in his shirtsleeves and suspenders, as if he’d been interrupted at something. “What’s all this I hear about ladies chucking gentlemen off balconies?”
“Attempted murder, is what it is, Doyle!” Brennan growled. “This here woman did it!” He pointed at Claudine. “My ex-wife! It’s her done it!”
“ ‘Ex-wife!’ ” she snarled. “We were never divorced!”
Brennan gave out with a short bitter laugh. “Till death do us part, Claudine! I died! And if you’re here, so have you, for that matter!”
Doyle cleared his throat. “Ah—according to the rules of the last life and this one, madam,” he said soothingly, half bowing to Claudine, “the gentleman is correct. The marriage is no longer in force.” Doyle rolled all his Rs like a Scot; his accent was a perfect mesh of English and Scottish. He looked up at the balcony. “Brennan—you didn’t really let this woman knock you through that railing?” He put a hand over his mouth as if to cover a smile.