Mean Streets

by Jim Butcher

“No. She didn’t know where the grave was. I had to find it. You ever heard of her?”

  He narrowed his eyes and searched the ground for his memory, brushing pebbles and bits of weed away from the headstone. “No. Antonio Arbildo lived here, long time ago, but he moved away. Old man, then. He get rich, the whole family go to the D.F.—Distrito Federal, Mexico City,” he explained with a nod. “I’m a little boy, then—so tall,” he added, holding his hand up about two feet from the ground, and cackling. He shot an amused glance at me from the corner of his yellowed eyes. The ghost of Iko trotted back from his hunting and threw himself down in the dirt about two feet from the old man with a contented dog sigh. The old man made no comment.

  I nodded. Another interesting connection, but not complete. “Are there Arbildos buried in this panteon? Maybe Maria-Luz?”

  Again he shook his head, his gnarled stick fingers digging into the ground to pull a weed. “Not her. Some a long time ago, sí. Not now.” He pointed to a group of equally abandoned graves nearby. “There.”

  Hector Purecete had been buried within sight of the Arbildos of San Felipe, yet it seemed Maria-Luz had never found him on her trips to Oaxaca. But with the two false graves Mickey and I had found, maybe that wasn’t so strange. Of course the Arbildos of San Felipe and those of Mexico City weren’t necessarily the same family, but I doubted it.

  I nodded to the old man and got up, unkinking my work-stiff knees and back, to go look at the graves of the Arbildos. The most recent had been buried in 1943. When I got back to Purecete’s grave, the old man was gone, but his water bottle still stood in the soft earth between the gravestone and Iko’s napping form sprawled in the dirt. I looked around for the man. A dozen hats identical to his bobbed in the field of graves, but I couldn’t spot the old man under one. I took another sip of the water and went back to work, thinking Iko had it good.

  By two o’clock I’d gotten the weeds cleaned up and the plot squared away. Some helpful live children helped me find stones to replace the missing border around the grave, begging, in return, for “mi calavera,” which confused me until Mickey showed up.

  He made a face at them and started digging into one of the boxes of ofrenda decorations. “They want these,” he explained, dragging out a box of small sugar skulls, coffins, and lambs we’d purchased in the market that morning. “Like your trick or treat, but with skulls.”

  He handed me the box and snapped at the kids to go away as soon as they had their “calavera” in their sticky fists.

  “Need to work, here!” he added to me, unfolding a small card table he’d snatched from the guesthouse. “Usually the ofrenda’s at home, but yours will have to be here.”

  The ghost dog sat up and watched us work. We got a few odd looks from the humans, too, as we put up the decorations, but no one came to ask what we were doing. Mickey helped me bend long, slender poles into arches over the table and attach them to the legs. Then we put colored paper over it all and hung up the paper banners, which were decorated with punched silhouettes of skeletons dancing, riding bicycles, eating, and generally carrying on. We made patterns on the grave with the marigolds, magenta cockscomb flowers, and greenery, edging it all with white candles in tiny glass jars.

  Mickey looked around. “You should go wash while I put out the food—and bring back water in the big bowl for the spirits to wash in, too.”

  I shrugged, not minding a pause to clean the dirt and sweat off my face and hands while Mickey took over—he had managed to avoid the really filthy work of weeding, edging, and shoring up the grave, after all. Iko dogged me to a standpipe where a few other people were washing up and filling containers with water for flowers or washing. The old man was standing near the water spigot and grinned at me as I approached.

  “It is going well, your ofrenda?”

  “I think so. Does it look OK?”

  He glanced toward Purecete’s grave. “Sí. Is very nice for the angelitos—white is good.”

  “Mickey picked the color.”

  “Really?” the old guy said, raising his eyebrows. “Surely for him, red is more likely.”

  I turned to glance back at Mickey. He did have a lot of red in his aura. . . .

  “You mean Mickey?” I asked.

  “Your amigo joven, sí. So very angry . . .” He shook his head.

  I stared at the old man. “What is it about Oaxaca? Is everyone around here tuned in to the freaky frequency?” I asked.

  His laugh was like sandpaper. “Only you, pequeña faisán. But, you are staying to see the angelitos?”

  “Sí,” I answered, turning back to the immediate task, putting my hands under the cold water that streamed from the pipe, and then throwing several handfuls onto my sticky face. Iko stuck his muzzle into the water and tried to drink it, but I wasn’t sure any was making it down his ghostly throat, no matter how fast his spectral tongue was going. “Maybe it’s not so bad that Mickey’s supposed to be home with his family tonight.”

  “Maybe.” The old man nodded. “I also must go tonight, so I bid you buenas noches. Dress warm—the night takes the heat away. And give your amigo good wishes from Tío Muñoz, eh?”

  “I will, gracias,” I replied, filling the washbowl for the spirits of dead children. My hands full, I nodded again to him and turned to head back to the plot, wondering what Mickey was up to.

  “Buena suerte,” the man said with a chuckle as I started off.

  I turned my head to look back at him over my shoulder and saw him scratch Iko’s head, smiling. I guess I wasn’t even surprised. Then he turned and walked away, vanishing into the crowd with a golden glitter in his wake. I stood a moment staring after him, not sure what he was; nothing about him seemed ghostly, yet in the mess of the active Grey of Oaxaca, I hadn’t noticed he had no aura. What was he? I frowned, holding the heavy bowl of water. Iko pawed at my knee and barked, prancing impatiently on the path.

  I shook off my surprise and walked to rejoin Mickey.

  While I’d been gone, Mickey had laid out a small feast of sweets, soda pop, and pan de muerto as well as some more substantial food—all provided by his aunt. Small plastic toys were scattered among the cockscomb flowers that we’d piled up around a stack of empty boxes at the back of the table and an arc of small teacups and saucers surrounded a dish for the copal incense. A dozen more white candles now stood on the boxes. It looked like an album cover for something gothic and creepy.

  “Nice, huh?”

  “Umm . . . yeah. These ghosts eat a lot. . . .”

  Mickey shrugged. “They eat the spirit of the food. My cousins say the food they leave behind has no calories.” He barked a derisive laugh. He pointed to the end of the table. “Put the water, comb, and towel where the hot bottle is.”

  I saw a large vacuum flask where he pointed.

  “Tía Mercedes made hot chocolate. You can put it on the ground till you need it,” he said. “Pour some for the angelitos after you light the candles and the incense—they should come when they smell it. And there’s a box under the ofrenda with some food and a blanket and stuff for you. Think you can make it?”

  “It’s not as cold as a stakeout during a Seattle winter.”

  He snorted. “Gonna be empty up here. Most people do this at home.” Mickey gave me an assessing look that clearly found me a bit wanting.

  “I think I can handle it,” I said.

  Yet another shrug as he started gathering up the excess supplies. “The angelitos come at four and stay until the morning. You’ll have to do it all again tomorrow for the adults, too. I’ll pick you up when the sun comes up.”

  “Hey, Mickey, Tío Muñoz says Happy Birthday.”

  He jumped back from me. “What?”

  “An old man near the water said I should tell you he sends his good wishes.”

  He stared at me. “Tío Muñoz? Mierda! He’s a legend in my family. He’s a . . . a . . .”

  “Ghost? Didn’t look like a ghost. . . .”

  Mickey was shaking his head a
nd gathering the excess stuff in a hurry. “No, no. . . . He’s the one—you know: I said about my great-uncle? What’s the word . . . a bad wizard.”

  “Warlock?”

  He shook his head. “No. . . . Not a brujo. He’s . . . a black sorcerer. Undead.” He threw the last of the materials into a box and snatched it up against his chest, eyes wild—which was not what I’d have expected. “I’m going back to Tía Mercedes. You’ll be fine, yeah?”

  “Yeah . . . ,” I said, not sure why he was freaking so thoroughly, since his Tío Muñoz wasn’t any kind of undead I knew.

  “Yeah, right. OK. I’ll be back for you in the morning. Don’t go talking to Tío Muñoz! Don’t believe what he says!”

  Iko and I followed him with the rest of the boxes and loaded them into the Chevy under the weight of Mickey’s red-and-orange brooding. Then we watched him drive away, leaving the ghost dog and me in the emptying panteon as the hour of dead children approached.

  The last of the homeward-bound walked out of the gate—two small children in slightly rumpled clothes—strewing a path of marigold petals for the dead. I watched them lay the deep orange line down the road until they disappeared around a bend in a mood of strange solemnity. I walked back to the grave, Iko dancing before me all the way.

  The ghost dog seemed more real than ever, if still a bit translucent. As the long shadow of the mountain began to steal the light, that became less apparent, but a new oddity began to show around him: a blue glow like marshlight that flickered over the dog shape and cast it into strange silhouette against the pockets of twilight forming in the cemetery as night crept forward.

  I unfolded a camp stool from the box and set it aside, paused to put on my coat, and dug deeper for a box of kitchen matches. As the church bell began pealing four, I lit the candles and the copal, sending the sweet, musky scent into the cooling air. The breeze stirred the grasses near the fence to rattling. Smoke and Grey mingled, sparking with gold and white lights, and I could hear the Grey humming, the shapes of the mountains glowing in the silvery mist as great bulks of power.

  Something splashed into the water bowl and I turned with a jerk to see nothing, no small shape lurking near the table end, as I’d half expected. I shivered as my skin prickled with a premonition of movement nearby. The darkness was still only a threat, but a presence seemed to gather with it, though nothing stepped forth. Yet.

  I poured hot chocolate into one of the teacups and sat down to wait while afternoon advanced toward evening. The ghost dog lay down beside me and smiled with secret thoughts. We waited, swirled in the dizzying odors of the night and the sound of distant music from houses just out of sight, alone in the hush of sacred anticipation in the doorway to the Land of the Dead.

  Something brushed past me, giggling. Iko barked and chased the formless whisper of laughter across the burial ground toward the iron gates. Then nothing. The ghost dog returned and threw himself down on the ground with a dog sigh. Candles smoked and the stream of incense swayed upward like a charmed cobra. The muttering emptiness of the cemetery held sway long past sunset, past the eight o’clock peal from the church tower.

  I renewed the hot chocolate in the cup and sipped a little myself, finding it more bitter and spicy than American chocolate. It went better with the sandwich Mickey’s aunt had packed for me than the coffee did, but I thought I’d better save it in case of tiny haunts. Maybe it was because I was thinking of it, but that was when a little cup of chocolate on the table rattled and I looked again at the ofrenda.

  One of the cups was moving in its saucer, tilting forward and back. Tiny silver-mist hands clutched for it and missed again and again. I stood up and picked up the cup, saying, “Here, let me help you.”

  I held the cup low and filled it to the brim. Then I offered it down around my knees, holding it still until I felt something tug on it. I let myself slip all the way into the Grey, looking for whatever was pulling on the cup.

  A skeleton child, barely as tall as the table, reached for the cup. Its bony, incorporeal hands met the porcelain, but couldn’t grip. I tipped the cup and watched the steaming chocolate dribble onto the ground while the foggy skeleton seemed to nibble at the edge of the cup. It pushed the cup away and clacked its teeth in satisfaction.

  The toys on the table moved. Smears of color hovered around the ofrenda, lined up in front of the other, empty, cups. I poured chocolate into all of them and watched shadows of the cups tilt and rise as spectral hands reached for the sweets. There was a burst of chatter—like radio static—and a dozen small skeletons dressed in the memories of their best clothes appeared around the table. They weren’t as well formed as the adult ghosts I’d seen—as if they hadn’t had time to get the knack of being alive before they were dead. None of the chatter was quite understandable to me—unlike the adult ghosts I’d talked to—coming through to my mind only in Spanish.

  Iko jumped to his feet again and began trotting around the little ghosts, sniffing them, but he returned disgruntled and disappointed to my side and sat down with a huff of breath. Apparently none of the skeletal kids was familiar.

  I felt small hands on my knees and plucking at my sleeves. I looked down and found two small skeletons dressed in cloudy white dresses looking back up at me with empty eye sockets.

  I’m not much of a kid person, so I never know what to say or do when faced with children. I had no idea if the ghosts of children knew any more than they had when alive, but even children have information. I squatted down, feeling my bad knee pop.

  “No hablo español muy bien,” I said, probably mangling what little I remembered from years living in Los Angeles. With my luck they didn’t speak anything else, but sometimes ideas came through with ghosts, even when the language was foreign, as they had with the ghost of Ernesto Santara. “Ustedes habla inglés?”

  They turned their skulls on their slender spines in unison: no. They didn’t bother to talk at all, but, with a shiver, I knew they were twins then, and they wanted to know why I was in their graveyard. No one had come for them in a long time and they were lonely—was I are lative of theirs? How I knew these thoughts I couldn’t begin to tell you.

  I shook my head and pointed to Purecete’s memorial stone. “I’m looking for him. And for Maria-Luz Carmen Arbildo. Maria-Luz y Hector.”

  Two skulls tilted in curiosity as if to say, “Why those two?” while a toy truck pushed its way across the dirt nearby guided by a misty skeletal boy.

  “Umm . . . ,” I started, not sure how to explain. “Como Maria-Luz . . . umm . . . knows?” I stumbled through the language, tapping the side of my head and hoping the sign translated somehow. “Hector?”

  The skulls consulted each other with a glance of unseen eyes. They turned back to me and spoke as one. The words pushed the concept into my head, naked and complete, but not in English. “Él es su padre.”

  Her father. Whose burial place she did not seem to know, whose name she did not have. “Oh,” I breathed, the situation both more clear and less. Why the black-magic present, then? What was the nature of that paternity that she sent such a dubious gift?

  The twin ghosts beckoned me to follow and they drifted toward the Arbildo plot. Leaving the chocolate and the ofrenda behind, I followed them and Iko followed me.

  The graves of the Arbildos were crowded with tiny skeletons and strange, half-formed shapes of silvery energy thick as clay moving in some somber dance. The two skeletal girls floated through the weird party and stopped before a grave with an unusual double cross of gilded iron from which the gold had flaked until only shreds remained. “Nuestra madre y nosotros.”

  This was the grave of Dulcia Maria-Carmen Ochoa Arbildo, wife of Antonio, and her two daughters, Carmen and Lucia, who had all died in April of 1936. The girls had been four years old. Dulcia had been twenty-five.

  “Por qué—” I started, but the ghosts of Carmen and Lucia pointed their bony fingers at the crowd of small spirits.

  “Vea: nuestros hermanos y hermanas.” />
  I looked. Beside the grave huddled a knot of unformed shapes, the features of lives they never lived flickered and changed, fluid as water, over half faces the size of my fist. I’d seen this before; they were transient souls, in flux between one life and the next. Grave upon grave across the plot was littered with the reminders of children who had never been born, or died while still infants and toddlers. They were everywhere, generation after generation of the family’s bad genetic luck and horrific accident. It seemed as if the Arbildos of San Felipe had been cursed.

  Maybe, against all tradition, this was something the family preferred to forget. Hardly a wonder, then, if Antonio Arbildo had removed his family from this place as soon as he had the money to do so. Not too surprising if he had named a boat for his ill-fated wife, or that the boat had been lost with everyone aboard, except a single man and a dog.

  A dark shape started to push the grid into some new form, struggling against the strength of the Grey’s energy lines. Iko barked suddenly and the deep humming of the Grey hit a sour note. The ghosts flickered out with a collective gasp. The shape collapsed back into darkness and I was alone again in the graveyard.

  I still didn’t have all the pieces, but an idea was forming in my head. Dead children and a daughter by the wrong father . . . I returned to my camp stool and sat again beside Purecete’s grave, pouring out the last of the chocolate and wondering if the ghosts would return.

  They didn’t.

  Dawn came up slowly in cold shades of blue, while I huddled, expectant and ultimately disappointed, in the empty panteon. It was still lit only by candles and drifted with copal smoke when Mickey arrived.

  He avoided my glance and packed up the food and chocolate, the toys and gewgaws, in glowering silence. I let him. My body was too tired and my brain too full of strange threads weaving slowly and incompletely into a tapestry I didn’t yet understand to want to add the frustration of cross-examining my volatile escort to the mix. I followed him back to the Chevy, hardly noticing that Iko had disappeared with the dawn and didn’t follow us to the car this time.