Dead Things

by Stephen Blackmoore

  He blinks a couple of times. “Of course, sir,” he says. A few minutes later I’m on the road in somebody’s S Class. Kid’ll probably lose his job, but who wants to be stuck parking rich assholes’ cars, anyway? Doing him a favor.

  I can’t get Ellis’ final hissing word out of my head. What did he mean Boudreau didn’t kill Lucy to get me back? If not that, then why did he do it? I’ve heard stranger noises coming out of corpses.

  It could have been gas, the final vestiges of my spell pulling random noise from his brain. I once saw a guy who’d been dead three days sit up, shriek “Eureka,” then fall back down, and there wasn’t a touch of magic on him that I could find. Dead people just do weird shit sometimes. Chalk it up to a couple of killer burps and move along.

  I hit the freeway, head toward Downtown. I have an idea of what to do, but I’m going to need help. A while later I’m standing at the Union Station bathroom wall hoping the door is still there. Dreading the door is still there.

  No one has erased my chalk lines and runes, though there have been some creative additions in black marker. Signs and symbols of the city; marking territory, throwing curses, pronouncing love, or at least a good blowjob. Crude, unfocused, but magic nonetheless.

  I refresh the lines and symbols, smear a drop of blood onto the wall, wonder if one of these days my brand of magic’s going to get me a case of Hep C. I push a little power through it and watch the door slide away. Darius’ bar is eerily quiet. Dim lighting, chairs stacked on tables, smell of day-old cigarettes and spilled beer. He sits at the one table still set up. Two chairs, two glasses, a bottle of scotch.

  “Am I interrupting a tender moment here?”

  “Please,” he says. “Been waiting for you for hours now. Have a seat. I know why you’re here.”

  “Then you know I don’t have time to dick around.”

  I take the seat opposite him. He pours a measure from the bottle for each of us. “You got plenty of time here. I just want to make sure you’ve thought about what you’re wanting before you ask for it.”

  “I have. I’m not crazy about it but unless you got another idea, Santa Muerte’s pretty much the only option I got left.”

  “You could just walk away.”

  “Little late for that.”

  “Yeah,” Darius says. “Little late for that.”

  “Why do you care, anyway?” I say.

  “You know how many people I let in this place? I mean the ones I let come and go as they please, not the riffraff that I let stumble on in.”

  “No idea,” I say, though I’ve wondered that before. Darius is lord over his domain. Nobody’s getting in unless he wants them to. I know some he lets in out of curiosity. Throw folk together see what kind of trouble they can get up to. But the rest, the ones who know him, who know what he is, that’s different. There can’t be many of those and I don’t know why I rate.

  “Damn few, I’ll tell you that much. Damn few.” He drinks his shot, pours himself another. “I like you, son. I do. Even when you’re being a stupid, fuckin’ moron.”

  “Thanks. Not a lot of people see it like you do.”

  “That’s because they don’t know you like I do. If I do this thing, if I give you what you want, we’re quits. You’re no longer welcome here.”

  “Whoa. What the hell? Why?”

  “Balance of power. You don’t know your own strength, do you? You been bouncing around from place to place, person to person, you don’t know what’s what. Settle down a little and maybe you’da figured out you’re not like other people.”

  “Yeah, I know I’m not like other people. I see dead things. I talk to dead things. I make dead things.”

  “There you go being a stupid, fuckin’ moron again. All right, here’s how it is. You think you’re getting a big gun. Thing is you ARE the big gun. You just don’t know how to pull your own trigger. You hook up with that old witch and now she’s got the gun, not the other way around.”

  “And you’re afraid she’s going to point me at you?”

  “Ain’t no secret, her dislike of competition,” he says. “I’d rather not take the chance.”

  Darius might be the last actual friend I have in this town. Do I want to throw that away? But how much of a friend is he? I haven’t been in here for fifteen years. Will I miss something I’ve grown so far away from?

  Oddly, yeah, I think I will miss it. Out of this entire mess Darius’ bar has felt more like home than anywhere else I’ve been. “You got a better option? Because believe me I don’t want to do it.”

  He shakes his head. “Nope. Wish I could help you, man. Really do. This one’s your call and your fight.”

  “Then I guess we’re quits,” I say.

  —

  Sanctuario De La Santa Muerte. Hand painted sign, black on a bright red background, crude painting of her on one side. I look at the card that Darius gave me. The address written on it was easy to find. Wedged between a nail salon and a coin-op laundry in a strip mall south of MacArthur Park. It’s a church.

  I pull the Mercedes up between a Tercel and a Bondo-patched Mustang. The storefront could just as easily be a donut shop or a taqueria. Mylar covers the glass, throwing back a smoky reflection. A sign in the door proclaims ABIERTO.

  I push the door open, an electronic chime sounding off. I don’t know what I’m expecting but it’s not this. The store is an explosion of color. Bright yellow walls, blue, fuchsia and lime green shelves. Multicolored prayer candles for love, attraction, money, revenge.

  Statues and shrines to Santa Muerte line the shelves and sit on the floor. From four-foot-tall resin-cast skeletons down to dashboard models with black plastic gems for eyes. Key chains, jackets, t-shirts. Crazy bitch has her own souvenir shop.

  “Can I help you?” A Latino man with heavy-lidded eyes smokes a cigar behind the counter. Thick muscles stand out in his arms, his neck.

  “Maybe,” I say. “Seeking an audience.”

  “A believer,” he says, nodding slowly. “I thought so.” He points at the bruises on my face. “You don’t look like a tourist.”

  “Oh, I believe. I’ve met her.”

  “We all have in one form or another. A dying father, a dead wife, a murdered sister.”

  “No escaping death,” I say. “When’s Mass?”

  “Friday nights at seven,” he says. “I’m Eduardo. I lead the congregation.” His handshake is like a steel vise.

  “Was thinking something a little sooner.”

  “You don’t need to wait if you’re giving an offering,” he says. “Through there.” He gestures to a doorway covered by black, velvet curtains.

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  I step through and it’s like night and day. Strings of white Christmas lights run along the walls, casting a hazy glow across everything. Wrought iron candelabras every few feet, plastic benches lined up as pews, a podium and a folding table as an altar. And off to one side, her.

  At least one of her shrines. This one looks like she did in the cemetery, skeleton in a white wedding dress, the scythe in one hand, globe in the other. Bottles of tequila sit at the skeleton’s feet, cigar clenched between crooked teeth. The floor is littered with roses and envelopes stuffed fat with cash.

  I sit down on one of the benches. I don’t care what church I’m in, I always feel stupid. Gods are petty, pissy children at best. I can’t get behind the idea of worshipping them.

  I look around the room. “All right,” I say, “I’m here. Now what?”

  Nothing.

  “Helloo.” I knock on one of the benches. “You are not gonna make me do this. Seriously?” No response. “Fine.” I’m tired and I don’t have time for this bullshit. I step up to the shrine, think about kicking it over.

  Instead I pluck the cigar from between the skeleton’s teeth, bite the end off, stick it in my mouth. Flame from my fingertip and a minute later I’m puffing away, blowing smoke over the altar, whispering her names like a litany;
Sagrada Muerte, Poderosa Señora, La Madrina, La Flaca.

  I have no idea what I’m doing. I know she likes cigars, I know smoke purifies, I know some of her names. Beyond that for all I know I should be doing this in lederhosen with ABBA playing in the background. I smoke and recite for a good twenty minutes. Nothing happens. Good cigar, though.

  This is bullshit. I stub the cigar out in one of her eye sockets. Crazy bitch doesn’t want to talk to me, fine. I push the curtains aside and head back through the storefront. Eduardo’s eyes follow me as I stalk past.

  “Didn’t get the answer you wanted?” he says.

  “Didn’t get any answer,” I say.

  “You will. She answers all of us in time.”

  “Time I don’t have,” I say and push open the door, the little chime sounding off as I leave.

  —

  The 110 Freeway’s a parking lot at the best of times, so when my lane opens up and the traffic tapers off I know something’s wrong. Cars peel away from me. No matter how many times I move over I’m still in the far right lane.

  I pull over to the shoulder and get out of the car. The freeway’s empty. No cars, no sounds of traffic. Just the wind whistling past. Below me I can see the city, but there’s something off about it. The angles are wrong, details on the architecture somehow off. I turn back toward the road and see the green freeway sign that wasn’t there a second ago.

  MICTLAN—EXIT ONLY

  Guess I’m getting that audience after all.

  —

  You’d think by now I’d have been to hell. After all there are so many of them. These are the places the dead end up after they’re done hanging around as haunts and wanderers. Gehenna, Tartarus, Valhalla, Duat. The list goes on. Some are punishments, some are rewards.

  The Aztecs had Mictlan, a place far to the north where your spirit would be tried and punished for years before finally coming to rest. Like the Mayan Xibalba most folk need to travel through trials to get to their final reward. From what I hear it’s one of the least appealing.

  As I take the Mercedes down the off-ramp, I start to see why. The air here is Santa Ana dry, the sun a merciless spotlight that bleaches the landscape. I roll up the windows and crank the air conditioner. The city’s still here. Or at least a city. The California bungalows, boxy post-war apartment buildings, pre-fab strip malls are all represented. But instead of concrete and stucco, it’s bone and sinew, flayed skin, torn muscle. City Hall constructed of femurs and skulls, the L.A. River a thin trickle of blood running through a calcified channel. Palm trees of interlocking skulls span the horizon, their fronds desiccated scraps of flesh.

  Los Angeles as a study in bone.

  And there are the ghosts. They flicker by, more solid than I’m used to. They aren’t playing out their final moments, or wandering around lost and empty. They’re just going about their days as though nothing is any different. There aren’t a lot of them, which I suppose makes sense. Santa Muerte isn’t a huge presence up here in L.A., most of her worshippers are farther south, but she’s got a decent following.

  And can I really say she’s crazy? When it comes down to it she’s not human, even if humans created her. And the surroundings might not be the most tasteful, but I’m not seeing tortured spirits hanging over lava pits, or anything.

  I look around for a street sign, but I don’t find any. If this place maps onto the real L.A. I should be somewhere around Adams and Figueroa. I have no idea where to go next. I’m not crazy about getting out of the car and asking directions.

  Okay, if I were a batshit Aztec death goddess, where would I hang out? It’s going to be somewhere symbolic, something that has significance to her.

  Or to her followers. Immigrants dealing with death and frustration and injustice. That doesn’t narrow it down much. L.A. was Spanish before the U.S. took it over and half the population’s Latino. But even then the city has given them a raw deal.

  I run through all the local history I can remember looking for something big, something to be pissed off about. The murder at Sleepy Lagoon where nine Hispanic kids got railroaded for a murder they probably didn’t commit. The Zoot Suit Riots in ’43 that led to four, maybe five hundred arrests and plenty of dead.

  Stuff to be pissed about, sure, but neither of those feels right. Would anyone have had to die? Maybe not. Just some kind of big fuck you to Latinos you that she would want to take back, maybe? It takes a second and then I think I have it. I turn the car north and head up the skeletal freeway.

  —

  When Mexico lost California things changed. The people who were here had all their power and land stolen or stripped away. Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. Demeaned and disenfranchised, they spent the next hundred and fifty years getting the shaft. Still are, and they make up half the population of this city.

  Back in the forties Chavez Ravine was a community of Latino families north of Downtown. Had their own schools and churches, grew their own food, kept to themselves. The rest of the city liked it that way. Would have preferred they didn’t exist at all, but, hey, you can only do so much without being accused of blatant racism, right? Not that they didn’t try or much cared.

  And then the money happened. Federal dollars to turn Chavez Ravine into housing projects. Kicked everybody out with false promises of new homes, then sat on the land until a guy cried Socialism and ran on what amounted to a “Kick the Mexicans out” ticket got elected, bought up all the land from the government and plopped a baseball team in the middle of it all.

  Fucked-over Hispanic landowners, meet Dodger Stadium.

  —

  I know I’m in the right spot when I get off the bone freeway and see an Aztec pyramid where the stadium should be. It’s the only place I’ve seen here not made out of bone.

  The pyramid is an enormous limestone structure whose size would put Tenochtitlan to shame. From down here the temple at the top looks tiny. I park the Mercedes at the base and make my way up the steps to the top. It seems to take forever. By the time I reach the temple building I’m sweating.

  Like the rest of the pyramid the temple building is huge. Carved snakes and jaguars line the entrance and each brick has a scene depicting someone’s gruesome death in stunning detail. As shrines go it’s a far cry from the back room of a strip mall on Alvarado. Inside, burning braziers cast a golden glow, throw flickering shadows across the stonework, making the carvings dance.

  I think about trying to make myself look presentable but toss the thought aside. It’d take a lot more than slicking back my hair and straightening my tie.

  Santa Muerte sits on a stone throne at the rear of the building, her scythe in one hand, a globe in the other, her bleached skull hidden behind the veil of her wedding dress. Another throne sits by her side. Empty.

  “Talking to you can be a real pain in the ass, you know.”

  “You are angry,” she says. “Hardly the sort of behavior I would expect from a supplicant.”

  “Damn right I’m angry. But not with you. With Boudreau. You were right. I tracked down his ghost and now he’s gunning for me. And he has a friend of mine. I aim to get him back.”

  She lifts her veil and stares at me with those soulless pits of hers. Not moving, not talking.

  “I was wondering if you might give me a hand,” I say, finally.

  “Why would I do that?” she says. “I’ve offered you power. I’ve offered you a place at my side. You’ve refused my gifts. And now you ask for help. What do you have to offer?”

  I take a deep breath, let it out slowly. I know I’m going to regret saying this, know it’s going to come back and bite me in the ass. But I don’t have the firepower to take on Boudreau myself. I can’t see any other way.

  “I’ve reconsidered. If you still have that job open.”

  Her skull twists to one side. She’s looking at me like a dog that’s just seen a particularly unusual bird. “I don’t know. Convince me.”

  Arrogant bitch. “No. You either want me or you don’t.
I’m not gonna beg for this. I’ll take my chances alone with Boudreau before I get on my fucking knees. Sorry I wasted your time, Señora. I’ll see myself out.” I turn my back on her, head for the exit.

  It isn’t until I’m stepping over the threshold that she says, “Wait.”

  “Yeah? Why?”

  “Because I need strength and bravery, not a weak willed fool who caves at a little pressure. A test. You passed.”

  I turn around to face her. She’s standing inches behind me. I wish she’d stop doing that. “No more tests.”

  “No more tests,” she says.

  “Then it’s time to negotiate,” I say. “What do you offer for my services?”

  “My power added to yours. You will have my command of the dead, you will be known by and safe from my followers. You will have my protection and my help.”

  “And in return?”

  “You will be my red right hand. You will kill in my name. You will carry out my judgment upon my enemies.”

  “I choose if I carry out your orders. You said you don’t want a mindless lackey. I’ll decide.” She says nothing for a long while. I don’t know if she’s thinking or just bailed. There’s no way to read her. I can’t tell if I’ve pissed her off or made her happy.

  “Agreed,” she says finally. “But you will not interfere as I carry out a sentence or with whoever I choose as my emissary in your stead.”

  “Agreed,” I say. I can feel her boxing me in already. I can think of a hundred ways that one demand can go wrong. “I will not be at your beck and call. I’m independent and I won’t be interfered with. I do a job for you I do it my way.”

  “Yes. But know that you will be mine and you will be marked as mine.”

  The noose tightens some more. Am I in? Do I need this that badly? Can I honestly not take Boudreau without this?

  “Do you agree to all this?” she says. “Do you swear your oath to me, bind yourself to me, join with me to be by my side and protect me and my interests above all others?” She puts out her hand, fingers stretching out. “Do you agree?” she says again.