“The back bumper of my car’s only in front of your driveway by an inch, Oswald,” she said. “The car in front of me is too far back, I’m sorry, it’s not like it’s actually in your way.”
“In my way, and in the red,” Oswald said, not even glancing at me, staring at Sadie with damp-looking eyes magnified behind thick lenses. “The police have been notified.”
“Whatever,” Sadie said. “Fine, I’ll move it.” She stood up, glared at him, looked at me apologetically, and walked over to a well-worn black compact that was, maybe, poking two inches into the little driveway that led to Oswald’s garage. She got in and drove away.
I nodded at Oswald. “Beautiful day,” I said.
He squinted at me, then turned and went back to his house, up the steps, and through the front door.
I glanced at the book Sadie had left on the steps. It was a monograph on contraceptive methods in the ancient world. I wondered what she was studying. A few moments later she came walking up the sidewalk and returned to her place on the steps. “Sorry,” she said. “Oswald’s a dick. He never even opens his garage. As far as I know he doesn’t even have a car.” She shook her head.
“Every neighbourhood has a nasty, petty person or two.”
“I guess. Most people here are pretty nice. I’ve only been here a year, but I know a lot of people well enough to say hello to, and Oswald’s the only one I really can’t stand. Him and his ‘vocabulary words’. Somebody told me he’s an English teacher, or used to be, or something. Can you imagine being stuck in a class with him?”
“I’d rather not think about it. So. Am I someone you’ll say hello to in the future?”
“You haven’t given me a reason not to yet,” she said. “Look, it’s nice meeting you, but I’ve got studying to do.”
“What subject?”
“I’m getting my master’s in human sexuality. Which, today, means reading about how ancient Egyptians used crocodile shit and sour milk as spermicide.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Did it work?”
“Actually, yeah. But it can’t have been very much fun.” She rose, picked up her drink, and went into the apartment building.
I love a woman who can toss off a good exit line, I thought.
The next morning I ran into Sadie, and she invited me to brunch at a café down near the lake. We ate eggs and drank mimosas on the restaurant’s patio, where bougainvillea vines hung all around us from pillars and trellises. She wanted to know things about me, and I was game, telling her a few stories from my travels. She was from Chicago, so I told her about the month I’d spent there, leaving out my battle in the train yard with a golem made of hogmeat. I told her a bit about my months working on a riverboat casino on the Mississippi, though I didn’t mention the immortal singer in the piano bar who’d once been a pirate, and wanted to start plundering again, before I convinced him otherwise.
“So you’re basically a drifter,” she said, sipping her second mimosa.
“We prefer to be called ‘people of no fixed address,’ ” I said.
“How long do you think you’ll stay here?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, leaning across the table, looking at her face, which seemed to fit some ideal of faces I’d never before imagined. “I’m like anybody else, I guess. Just looking for a place to call home.”
She threw a napkin at me, and it bounced off my nose, and I thought I might be falling in love.
Sadie had to study, so I spent the rest of the lovely Sunday meeting people in the neighbourhood. It’s not hard, once you overcome their initial reluctance to talk to strangers, and hearing I was Miss Li’s nephew made most folks open up, too – the lady was well-liked. I visited the closest park, just a few blocks away, where some guys from the neighbourhood were playing basketball. I got in on the game, and didn’t play too well, and they liked me fine. I got invited to a barbecue for the next weekend. I helped an older guy wash his car, and then spent an hour with Mike, who was rebuilding the carburettor on his motorcycle – I didn’t know much about machines, but I was able to hand him tools and talk about California scenic highways. I chatted with mothers pushing strollers, young kids riding scooters, surly teens, and old people on afternoon walks.
And every time I got someone alone, if they were from around here, I talked to their deep down parts, and I asked them what was wrong with this place.
I didn’t find out anything unusual. Oh, there were crimes – this was a big city, after all, even if a residential neighbourhood. There were occasional break-ins, and a mugging or two, though none right around here. A couple of car thefts. But nothing poisonously, unspeakably bad. Maybe my senses were out of whack, or I was picking up the irrelevant psychic residue of some long-ago atrocity. I have trouble adapting my mind to the shortness of human time scales, sometimes.
It was late afternoon when I went past Ike Train’s place. He had a tidy little house, and a bigger yard than most. His porch was shadowed, but I could see the big man sitting on a creaking wooden swing, messing with something in his hands. I was going to hello the house, but Ike hailed me first. “You’re new!” he shouted. “Come over!”
“Mr Train,” I said, delighted, because I do love meeting people, especially ones who love meeting me. “I’ve heard about you.” I passed through the bushes, which overgrew his walk, and went up to his porch. He held a little man-shaped figure made of twisted wire and pipe cleaners in his hands. He set the thing aside and rose, reaching out to shake my hand. His grip was strong, but not a macho show-off strong, just the handshake of a man who wrestled with pipe wrenches on a regular basis.
“You’re staying with Miss Li,” he said, sitting down, and gesturing for me to take a cane chair by his front door. “Her nephew?”
“I’m Reva. More of a grand-nephew from the other side of the family, but yeah.”
“What brings you to town?” He went back to twisting the wire, giving the little man an extra set of arms, like a Hindu deity.
“I’ve been travelling for a few years,” I said. “Thought I might try settling here.” Maybe I would, for a while, if I could find a way to get rid of the bad thing making the whole street’s aura stink. Being in a body again was nice, and even on our short acquaintance there was something about Sadie I wanted to know better, like she was a flavour I’d been craving for ages.
“It’s a nice enough place,” Ike said.
“So tell me,” I said, leaning forward. “Are you from around here?”
Ike’s hands went still, the wire forgotten. “Oh, yeah,” he said, and his voice was different now, slower and thicker. “This is my home. Nobody knows how hard I work to keep it clean, how filthy it gets. The whole fucking city is circling the drain. Dirty, nasty, rotten, wretched . . .”
I frowned. That was his deep down self talking, but it didn’t sound like him. “Ike, what do you—”
“We have to twist their heads all the way around,” he said, his voice oddly placid, and turned the little wire man in his hands, twisting its round loop of a head tighter and tighter until it snapped and came off in his fingers. “Break them and sweep them up. Clean up the trash, keep things clean. Yeah. I’m from around here.”
“Ike,” I said, careful, because there were sinkholes in this man’s mind, and I didn’t know how deep they were, or what might be hidden inside them. “Maybe you and me can work something out.”
“No,” he said, and crushed the little man. “There’s nothing to work out. Everything’s already been worked out.” He stared at me, through me, and his eyes were wet with tears. “There’s nothing you can offer me.”
I stood up and stepped back. He was from around here, I was talking to his deep down self, but Ike wouldn’t work something out with me. I didn’t understand this refusal. It was like water refusing to freeze in winter, like leaves refusing to fall in autumn, a violation of everything I understood about natural law. “Don’t worry about it, Ike. Let’s just forget we had this talk, huh?”
Ike lo
oked down at the broken wire thing in his hands. “Nice meeting you, ah, buddy,” he said. “Say hi to Miss Li for me.”
I headed back down the street towards Miss Li’s, thinking maybe Ike was crazy. Maybe he had something to do with the badness here. Maybe he was the badness. I needed to know more. I asked Miss Li about him, over dinner that night, but she didn’t know much about Ike. He’d lived on the street longer than anybody, and his parents had owned his house before him. He was seriously from around here. So why had talking to his deep down self been so strange and disturbing?
“Hey, Reva,” Sadie said when I answered the door. “You busy?”
It was Monday, and the street was quiet, most everybody off about their business. “Not for you,” I said, leaning against the doorjamb.
“Could you come up to my place and help me with something?”
I grinned, and grinning felt good; I’d forgotten that about bodies, that genuinely smiling actually caused chemical changes and improved the mood. “I’m at your service.” I pulled the door shut and followed Sadie down the steps and up the street. I didn’t bother locking the door – nobody would rob the place while I was staying there.
“What do you know about spiders?” she said, leading me into the lobby of the apartment building. The floor was black tile with gold flecks, and there was a wall of old-fashioned brass and glass mailboxes. I liked it. The place had personality.
“Hmm. Eight legs. Mythologically complex – sometimes tricksters, sometimes creators, sometimes monsters, depending on who you ask.”
She looked at me, half-smiling, as if she wasn’t sure if I was joking. She opened a door, revealing an elevator with a sliding grate. We went inside, and she rattled the gate closed. Back in the old days there would have been a uniformed attendant to run the elevator. This must have been a classy place in its day. “Can you recognize poisonous spiders? I’ve heard there are some nasty ones out here, black widows and brown recluses, stuff like that. There’s a spider in my tub and it’s freaking me out a little.”
“It’s probably gone by now, right?” The elevator rattled and hummed as it ascended.
“I don’t think it can get out. It keeps trying to climb the sides of the tub and sliding back down.”
She was standing a little closer to me than she had to. I wondered if I should read anything into that. “So you want me to get rid of it?”
“If it was a snake or a rat or something, I’d do it myself. Most things like this don’t bother me. But spiders . . .” She shuddered. “Especially when I don’t know if they’re poisonous or not. I heard the bite of a brown recluse can make your skin rot away. Bleah. Vicious little things.”
I shrugged. “They’re just trying to get by. Besides, there aren’t any brown recluses in California.”
She frowned. “But everybody says there are.”
“It’s a common misconception. Only a handful of brown recluses have ever been found here, and they all came with shipments from the south or midwest. They aren’t native anywhere west of the Rockies. Hundreds of people go to their doctors in California every year saying they’ve been bitten by recluses, but the bites are always from some other bug, or they’re just rashes or something.” The fear of brown recluse spiders in California was an oddly persistent one. I’d once seen a billboard in San Francisco, with a several-million-times-life-size depiction of a fiddleback spider, and a strident warning in Spanish. People do tend toward the fearful, even without cause.
Sadie gave me a new, appraising look. “No shit? You’re, like, a spider expert or something?”
I laughed. How could I explain that I just had a really good sense for where things came from? “Nah, just something I read about. Anyway, whatever kind of spider it is, I’ll take care of it for you. There are lots of black widows out here. Not to mention scorpions.”
“My hero,” she said, and touched my arm. It was the first time I’d been touched in this body, other than a handshake and Miss Li’s friendly embrace, and I had to stop myself from taking Sadie in my arms right then. Having a body again was wonderful. Why had I gone without for so long?
She let me into her apartment, which was furnished in student-poverty-chic, mismatched furniture and beat-up bookcases overflowing with texts, prints of fine art hung alongside real art of the student-show variety. The apartment was big, though, for a single person in Oakland, with a nice sized living room, a little kitchen separated by a counter, and a short hallway leading to other doors. “This is a nice place.”
“I know!” she said, and I liked how sincere she sounded. “It’s crazy cheap, too. I looked at a lot of apartments when I first moved here, and they were all way more than I could afford, but this one’s half as much as other apartments this size. I’ve got a bedroom and an office. I guess the owner doesn’t live around here, and doesn’t realize how rents have gone up these past few years? I don’t know, but it’s my good luck.”
“You don’t know the landlord?” I disapprove of absentee landlords on principle.
“Nah, I just mail rent checks to a PO box. There’s a tenant on the first floor who gets even cheaper rent than the rest of us for managing the place, making sure leases get signed, interviewing people, all that. If she ever moves out, I might try to get that gig. It can be a lot of work, though – there’s a lot of turnover here. Because it’s so cheap, we get plenty of people who are down on their luck, and some them just take off without paying their last month’s rent. I guess that’s what deposits are for, though. Two or three girls have skipped out since I moved in, just leaving their stuff here. Not that they had much. They were all on drugs, I heard. Sometimes this place is like a halfway house.”
“Huh,” I said, thinking. “How are the pipes? You said Ike Train is the plumber here?”
“Yeah. I don’t know if he’s a lousy plumber or if the place just has shitty pipes, but it seems like he’s over here all the time – somebody’s always got a leak or a bad drain or something. But, hey, at these prices, we don’t expect perfection. Anyway, speaking of bathrooms . . .” She led the way down the hallway, opening the door onto a nice big bathroom, with an old claw-footed tub.
I looked into the bathtub. “That,” I said, “is a daddy longlegs.” Specifically a Spermaphora, but why show off?
“Aren’t they, like, the most poisonous spider in the world? But their fangs are too short to bite humans?”
“Another myth,” I said. “They’re pretty much harmless. They can bite, but it wouldn’t do much to you.” I reached down, picked up the spider by one of its comically long legs, and walked over to the open window. I set the spider on the sill, and it scurried off down the exterior wall. I looked back at Sadie, who stood by the door, looking at me.
I hadn’t been in a body for long, but I knew that look. “You’re not afraid of spiders at all, are you?”
“I needed some excuse to get you up here,” she said, taking a step toward me. “I wasn’t sure if you liked me, but the way you looked at me in the elevator . . .”
“I guess I’m not subtle.” But I was lucky.
“That’s okay. Games can be fun, but there’s nothing wrong with the direct approach, either.” She stepped in close and kissed me, putting the palm of her hand on my chest, over my heartbeat. I kissed back, my body responding in that wonderful way that bodies do.
“Mmm,” I said after a moment. “So you’re a student of human sexuality, huh?”
“Sure,” she said. “But there are some things you can’t get from a book.”
Afterwards, as she brewed tea in her kitchen and I sat, feeling loose-limbed and glorious, on a stool at the counter, she said, “Look, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea . . .” She had her back turned to me, and that was too bad, because she wasn’t saying anything she couldn’t say to my face.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It was what it was. And it was very nice. But I don’t think it gives me a claim on you. Which doesn’t mean I’d object if you wanted to do it again.”
Now she turned, and she looked relieved. “Sometimes I just want to be with somebody. You seem nice, and god you’re pretty, but I’m not looking for a boyfriend or anything right now. I’m so busy with school, you know?”
That gave me a little pang, I admit, because of course I wanted to be seen as irresistible boyfriend material, even though I know I’m no more constant than a bank of fog blowing through. But she was being honest with me, at least. A lot of bullshit in this world could be avoided if people just told the truth, however inconvenient it might be. And maybe, if I could get rid of the nastiness on this block, I could settle down here, and become more constant, and win Sadie over. I was pretty low-maintenance. Hadn’t I rambled around this world enough? Maybe it was time to pick a home and stick with it for a while.
I had an idea about the source of the badness here now, anyway. It’s not like I’m a great detective or anything, but I can see how things fit together, when it’s right in front of my face. I wondered why no one else had ever figured it out.
“Want to go out again sometime?” I asked. “I haven’t taken in much of the local scene yet.”
“Sure,” she said, placing a cup of steaming tea on the counter before me. She looked me right in the eye. “We can do something this weekend. Or we could just stay in all weekend having sex. I’ve got toys in my bedroom I didn’t even show you.”
My heart went pitter-pat, and other parts of me did other things. Having a body was so wonderful, I wasn’t sure what had ever possessed me to leave my last one.
Ike Train’s back yard had a nine-foot wooden privacy fence, overgrown with vines that made it seem even higher. The lock on his gate was nothing special, though, so I popped it open pretty easily that night. He had a big garden back there, lots of tomato plants, the earth all churned up. I checked his back windows again – still dark, and he was probably deeply asleep, like the rest of the block. I found a shovel and a likely mound of earth, near the back fence, and started digging. I didn’t worry about Ike waking up and noticing me. I wasn’t going to get noticed unless I wanted to be. I was in a body, but that didn’t mean I’d given up all my powers.
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