Secondhand Souls (22 page)

When you kill a goddamn albatross with your first big league at-bat, you think, yeah, that’s going to be the highlight they play when I do something good. They’re going to go, “Oh, nice turnaround by Nelson, but let’s take a look at that time he killed the rare seabird.” But no. You show the world that you have the athletic prowess to not be able to run into a fat Dominican when there’s a fucking line painted up to him, that piece of film is going to Cooperstown, and ne’er a day shall pass from now to the end of time when your name is mentioned that with it is not shown your dumb ass flying through the air to land with your dick in the dirt to be tagged out as gentle as Jesus picking a baby to be born.

Doesn’t get any worse, right? Can’t, right? Nineteen times a season. Regular season. Twenty-five times if you count spring training games. I got to the point where a week before we played the Dodgers I’d start losing my shit. Making dumb mistakes in the field. I get some beta-blockers from my doc to slow my heart down when we’re playing L.A. so I can hit, but I can’t field for shit on them either. So they bring up a kid from the minors who takes my place as the starter. I become the utility guy, playing when someone is hurt or bats from the wrong side. Pinch hitting, unless it’s against the Dodgers, because believe me, I’m not the only one who notices I’m cursed. As bad as it can get, right? If I’m a pitcher and I let a guy get into my head this bad, I’m selling Chevys in Petaluma, because fuck-knows I can’t go into broadcasting and have the Superman clip play every goddamn day, and the front office isn’t going to hire the dead bird/cocksucker guy to coach or scout, right? So I still have a job, year-to-year contract, minimum money, which isn’t bad, except now I have a kid and wife who wants to hang with the wives whose husbands are making major coin, and she spends and dresses like them, too. Could be worse, though, right?

Then the Giants’ starting catcher decides to shoot his coke dealer in the off-season in a Miami disco, at the same time that Villarreal’s contract is up at the Dodgers, so that babbling fucking ball of chorizo becomes our starter. So it’s every day, every goddamn day I go into the clubhouse. “How you doin, Skipper? How’s your wife? Your kid getting big, huh? How’s your mom?” Guy has been in the States ten years now and he’s still only got about forty words of English, which he rearranges a hundred times a day to get up my ass.

“She’s dead, Chava. Just like she was this morning! Just like she will be in twenty fucking minutes when you ask me again, Chava. She’s dead!”

She wasn’t dead. My mother is still alive and lives in Jupiter, Florida, with seven miniature poodles, but that’s not the point. The guy was annoying.

He says, “Oh, I’m sorry, man. Anything I can do? Man, that must be so hard. I lose my mother, I don’t know what to do. My heart goes out to you, man. How’s your wife holding up?”

So that’s when I decided to kill the cocksucker. But not right away, because now that he’s not playing for the Dodgers anymore, my batting average is going up and I don’t want to jinx it. So instead, I compromise and decide to get him kicked out of the game and ruin his life in the interim.

This is a time in baseball when steroids have become a pretty big deal. On our team, you got Barry Bonds, who is hitting home runs like a mortar barrage, and whose head has grown to a size where when they make his promotional bobble-head, they just do the whole thing to scale, while across the bay in Oakland, Mark McGwire now has forearms like Popeye and will only speak in dialects of horse, and they’re keeping José Canseco chained to a post under the ballpark and throwing him raw meat until right before game time, so the league is starting to get sensitive about it. Personally, I stay away from the juice, as I already have what my wife calls “anger issues” and steroids are suppose to be bad for that, but the league is starting to spot-check players, so I figure this might be my chance to get rid of Villarreal without jinxing my hitting.

By this time, my wife was breeding Yorkshire terriers, so naturally I’m nearly able to claim her vet as a dependent on my taxes, so in exchange for a stack of prime tickets behind home plate, the vet hooks me up with some animal steroids in powder form, which are supposed to be tasteless except for a slight hint of dog balls, which I figure Villarreal will never notice because he constantly eats jerk chicken and Caribbean pulled pork, which, for all I can tell, are spiced with garlic, fire, and dog balls anyway. So I start slipping a spoonful of powdered dog balls in Villarreal’s Gatorade in the clubhouse, and after a week or so, when I figure it has built up in his system enough to be detected in a piss test, but before he starts barking and humping an ump’s leg, I have my wife call the anonymous tip line to rat him out.

Now, it’s a hard sell with the league to convince them a guy is on performance-enhancing drugs when he’s so slow that when he hits a double, fans can go take a leak and still get back to their seats to see him slide, but my wife, it turns out, is a terrific liar, so I’m thinking that Villarreal is going to be peeing in the hundred-game suspension cup any day, but the day before the spot test, the son of a bitch whiffs on a backdoor slider, winding himself into a knot and snapping the hamate bone in his right hand, which gets him put on the disabled list for three weeks while he has the bone removed. (Turns out the hamate bone is one of those things like the appendix, the tonsils, and algebra, that you don’t really need but is left over from a time when we used to live in trees and didn’t have calculators.)

But with Villarreal out of the clubhouse for a month, my batting average jumps up twenty-five, my blood pressure drops twenty points, and I’m starting to make some good plays on defense. At this point, when my guard is down, my wife decides that we need to buy a house in Marin with a bigger yard for her dogs, and I’m in such a good mood, I give in, and before you know it, I’m commuting to the ballpark across the Golden Gate Bridge every day.

A week before he can actually start playing, Villarreal comes back from Arizona, where he was doing rehab on his hand, and he’s in the clubhouse, all day, every day, “How you doing? You getting some good at bats, man. How’s your wife? She like the new house?”—six thousand times a day, and my batting and fielding go to shit again and I’m afraid I’m going to get sent down to the minors unless Villarreal shuts the fuck up. But how?

So my wife is on me about the new house, how there are all these plants in the backyard that aren’t safe for her precious puppies and maybe even the kid and she wants them out of there. Foxglove, she calls them. Really tall flowers. I look at the Yorkies, which are about a foot tall at best, and the foxglove, the poison part are the flowers, which are about four feet off the ground, and I tell her I’ll get to it next time we have a day off.

“Digitalis,” she says. “It’s in the flowers. If one of them eats one of those flowers, their little heart will explode and we won’t even know what it was from.”

“What?” I say. I say, “What?”

“Digitalis. They make heart medication from it. If you have a weak heart—”

Before she finishes her sentence I decide it’s time to do some yard work because, goddammit, those little dogs give her a lot of joy and you can’t have one of their little hearts explode from eating those horrible flowers. So I cut those sons-a-bitches down, pile them up until I have a whole bale of them, then put them in the garage workshop where the puppies can’t get to them, and so they can dry and I can get rid of them responsibly.

So next day off at home the team has, I strip all the dried flowers off the stems and crunch them up in a coffee grinder, until I have about a baby-food jar full of fine powder, I mean really fine, like you pinch it between your fingers and it just sticks in that shape. Of course I don’t taste it, but it doesn’t have very much odor at all, and I can’t wait to get to the clubhouse next game day and get ready for the team meal. I mean I am excited. I cram as much of the powder into the jar as I can, and I’m off to the ballpark. But as I’m driving down the hill out of Sausalito and onto the bridge, I’m almost too excited. I mean, I’m sort of out of breath, and I’m sweating like crazy. Then my vision gets kind of blurry, like vibrating blurry, and I lose sight of the road for a second, I drifted out of my lane a little, I guess.

It turns out that there was a semi-truck coming the other way that stopped me from really hurting anyone else, although don’t let them fool you, no matter what they say about how safe Mercedes are, they cannot withstand a head-on with an eighteen-wheeler at fifty miles per hour. Guy driving the truck was fine.

Yeah, it turns out that digitalis can be absorbed through the skin, so I probably should have worn gloves when I was preparing my powder. Who knew?

Villarreal batted .335 that year and you can bet your ass he didn’t shut up the entire time. I’m just glad I wasn’t there for my funeral, because I know he probably talked until half the people there wanted to join me in the casket just for some peace and quiet.

“So, like I said, I’m cursed. You think it was the bird or the murder plot?”

“I don’t know,” said Mike.

“Do you believe in karma? Because if karma is a thing, I’m thinking it’s the murder plot.”

“That sounds reasonable,” said Mike. “But why are you telling
me
about it?”

“You don’t know?”

“That’s why I asked.”

“Well, because I’m stuck. I’m not moving on. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. Mind you, I don’t know how it’s supposed to be, but this isn’t it—stuck on a bridge forever with a bunch of other loopy spirits. I thought you were the one that was supposed to move things along.”

“And telling me about an annoying catcher is supposed to help that how?”

“It’s supposed to make you realize it, I suppose,” said the ballplayer. “It’s like stealing second base. The manager can tell you to go, the first-base coach can signal you to go, the batter can know you’re going to go, but you have to watch the pitcher, watch the catcher, watch the first baseman, you have to see all the signs, then
you
know it’s right to steal. I’m just one of the signs, but you have to make the move to steal.”

“That’s the least helpful sports analogy I’ve ever heard.”

“Well, you’re not the one who needs help, are you?”

22

Fresh

B
ird played “Summertime” on the speakers. Minty Fresh stepped out of the back room of his store when he heard the bell over the door jingle and saw a man in a yellow suit and homburg hat coming down the aisle. Minty caught himself against the counter. The man in yellow pulled up, almost losing his balance, but for sure losing his cool with the misstep. The man in yellow had no more expected to see Minty Fresh than Minty expected to see him. He turned his surprise into a fingertip-to-the-brim-of-his-hat salute.

“Minty,” he said.

“Lemon,” said Minty Fresh, all of sudden feeling his shit tightening down.

“I didn’t expect to find y’all here.”

“I expect not,” said Minty.

“I had some business with Evan.”

“Yeah, he don’t work here anymore.”

Lemon looked to the back of the store, where a fortyish African American man in a nice suit was browsing the jazz vinyl.

“I don’t suppose y’all got them souls vessels here, do you?”

“No, cuz, I do not. Those motherfuckers are not here.”

The man in the suit—he wore caduceus pin on his lapel, a doctor—came to the counter with a first pressing of Mile Davis’s
Birth of the Cool
. He set it on the counter, and as the Mint One rang it up on his old-style mechanical register, the doctor looked from Minty, to Lemon, to Minty, then back to Lemon. From the seven-foot, shaved-head man wearing a mint-green shirt and chocolate dress slacks in light wool, to the linebacker-sized gent dressed head to toe in yellow, even down to his yellow python-skin shoes.

“Are you two for real?” he asked.

“Pardon?” said Lemon.

“You two. You look like you walked out of a seventies blaxploitation film. You know, when you reinforce the stereotype like that, you make it harder on all the younger brothers coming up, right? Difficult enough for a young man to make his way without every old white lady in town terrified she just spotted Superfly down on Market Street. Forget about a black
woman
trying to be taken seriously.”

He laid down his cash and took his change and the record. “I have a hard enough time getting my son not to talk like a thug as it is, and having you two dinosaurs riding in on the
Soul Train
from the Cretaceous is not helpful. You are grown-ass men. Act like it. Do you feel me?”

Lemon and Minty both nodded slowly, remembering doing that same contrite, synchronized nod when they were boys. The doctor shot his lapels, tucked his record under his arm, and strode out of the store.

Lemon glared at the door, then turned back to Minty. “Harsh.”

“Seventies? Motherfucker, I had these shoes made
last
year,” said Minty, his voice two indignant octaves higher, looking down at his Italian patent-leather loafers in mint green, as smooth and shiny as pillow mints.

“Excuse me for perpetuating your stereotype,” said Lemon, “but we got some archetypical shit to do up in here and we need to dress the part.”

“You don’t never be lyin’,” said Minty, using the phrase for the first time in twenty-five years. “You don’t never be lyin’.”

“But he
do
have a point,” said Lemon.

“Yeah, you
do
be a bit ostentatious,” said Minty.

“Me?” said Lemon, pointing to himself, touching his diamond tie tack in the process as if pushing an irony button. “Me? You ever look at yourself, niggah? Nine-feet-tall motherfucker weigh thirty-two pounds—shit, you be ostentatious standing in the weeds wearin’ camouflage.”

“Style can’t be denied, Lemon. That’s the difference between you and me: you a slave to fashion and I’m a sultan of style.”

Lemon laughed, started to talk, then laughed some more, pointing at Minty to hold the moment until he got his breath. When he did, he shrugged grandly, raised his arms as if appealing to the holy spirit, and said, “Since when was this fashionable?”

“ ’Bout the time that piece of trash Buick was new,” said Minty, grinning.

“Know what? Fuck that niggah, he don’t know us when we didn’t have but a single pair of raggedy-ass trousers each, am I right?”

“You know you are?” Minty in the groove now of how they talked to each other.

“How your mama?”

“Still dead.”

“So sad, that woman a saint, what she put up with. I learned some shit over the years. Counseling. Your daddy was emotionally unavailable, you know that?”

“That’s right.”

“And
my
daddy treated women like they was throwaway things—you know that fucked up my shit.”

“You a broke-dick dog, Lemon Fresh.”

“You know I ain’t at all what I used to be.”

“I was picking up on that. New hat, right?”

Lemon laughed again, wheezing a little bit. “You funny. Hey, you still got that book I sent you?”

“No, I passed it on, like you do.”

“You did all right, though.”

Minty looked around the shop, at his handmade Italian shoes, back at Lemon. “I coulda used some coaching.”

“You know how it is, we was young and stupid.”

“We?”

“But we ain’t now.”

“No, we ain’t.”

“In fact, I’m not even who I am no more, you know, ’cept for my good looks and charm and whatnot.”

“That right?”

“My shit is informed by a thousand-year-old super-enlightened being from the Underworld up in here.” Lemon thumped his lapel with an open hand.

“Super-enlightened, huh?” Minty looking baffled.

“What you sayin’?”

“Super-enlightened and he still let you drive that ugly-ass, dog-bit old Buick.”

“You saw that, did you? I was gonna get that shit pounded out.”

“Look like something happen when you was running. You always was afraid of dogs. Walk a quarter mile not to go by that white dog Miss McCutcheon had fenced up in her yard. Was you running from them doggies, Lemon?”

“That white dog come over that fence once, you wasn’t there. I spent best of an afternoon top a Oldsmobile before Miss McCutcheon come get him. I hated that dog.”

“You
was
running.” Minty smiled. “S’alls I need to know.”

“You think you smart. I know you, Minty Fresh. I watch yo mama whip yo ass for having pee pants when you was five. But you don’t know me. This ain’t gonna be like it was before. I ain’t like Orcus.”

“Who?” Minty tsking like,
What you wasting my time with now?

“Orcus. Big, black motherfucker with wings, tore shit out of this town. Kill him a bunch of y’all motherfuckers. You know who I mean.”

“Oh.” Minty searched his memory. “Oh, yeah, what ever happened to him?” He knew what happened to Orcus. He’d been torn apart by the Morrigan.

“Not the point,” said Lemon. “I ain’t like him, all bustin’ shit up, biting people’s heads off and shit. I’m moving in smooth, in the daylight.” He held out his arms, just letting sunlight through the front windows get all over him. “Shit about to get real up in here, Minty.”

“It feel like it is.”

“But nobody don’t get between me and what I want got a worry in the world.”

“That’s good to know.”

“Not even that pale white girl of yours.”

“Mmmp,” Minty said. A percussive sound, like disappointment hitting home. He shook his head slowly, looking at the counter, just wishing, regretting, truly unhappy that Lemon had gone there, and when he looked up, when his head snapped up, his eyes were like golden fire. “You ain’t bad, Lemon.”

Lemon’s eyes went wide for a second, then he tightened down, tried to show some swagger. “You don’t know
me
. You ain’t just talkin’ to
me
anymore, cuz.”

“You ain’t shit, Lemon.”

“You don’t know what I am now, Minty. I been fifty years in a cave, I have outwaited mountains, I have slain multitudes, I have brought dark death down on whole cities. Do not fuck with me.”

“Uh-huh.” said Minty, unimpressed. “Of all of us, all of us that collect souls, pass them on, do the business of Death,
you
all of sudden chosen by this badass lord of darkness to lead his conquest over light? You, Lemon Fresh? You? Why you? What make
you
special? Your blood? Is it your golden eyes?”

Minty leaned on the counter, leaned forward, eyes wide, so Lemon could get his point. “Is that it, motherfucker?
You
the only one in the whole world picked to start a new order, the only upstart from the Underworld to rise in
my
motherfucking city? You? Bitch-ass Lemon motherfucking-broke-ass-Buick Fresh? Niggah, please.”

“You need to chillax, cuz.” Lemon was suddenly interested in the rack of CDs near him. “You got any Xanax, or gin or something back there you can self-medicate with, ’cause that anger is not healthy. Our peoples got high blood pressure. They a vein standing out on your head, right here.” He took off his hat and pointed to a spot on his own head. “Right here, like throbbin’ and shit. You probably havin’ a stroke.”

Minty said: “You touch any of my people, what happened to Orcus will look like a spa day compared to what happen to you. Now get the fuck out my store.”

Lemon looked up from the CDs. “Don’t push me, niggah. I will end you right here.”

Minty now held his arms out to his sides, angry Jesus style,
suffer all the bitch-ass motherfuckers need an ass-whoopin’ unto me
,
for I shall rain wrath down upon them—
that look.

Lemon took a step toward the counter, then saw something there in Minty’s stare that stopped him. He checked his watch, which was thin and gold and looked feminine on a man his size. “You lucky I got appointments and shit.” He turned on his heel and strolled away, limping a little from his burden of unshakable chill. The bell over the door jingled and he was gone.

“You a lying motherfucker,” Minty said. He went to the back room, found a bottle of cognac he kept in the desk, uncorked it, then paused, corked it, put it away. He didn’t need to steady his nerves. He went back out front. Flipped and cued the album on the turntable, then sat on the high-backed stool he kept behind the counter, stretched his legs out, threw his head back, closed his eyes, and let Bird’s notes wash over him.

He didn’t know what he would have done if Lemon had come at him, if whatever Lemon was now, or what deity was wearing Lemon had come at him—he didn’t have a plan, didn’t have a clue, but he was steady, cool as a sea breeze, unafraid, because there
was
something, even if he didn’t know exactly what it was. Even as he’d asked Lemon,
What make you special?
he had felt it.
You ain’
t the only one, Lemon.

L
ily said, “Has it ever occurred to you that this Death Merchant thing is just a shitty job?”

“A dirty job,” Charlie said. “The
Big Book
says it’s a dirty job. But, yeah. I used to think that we were like Death’s middle management, but we’re not. We’re Death’s grunts.”

They were sitting at the bar in Charlie’s empty shop, there to plan what they were going to do with it. “Whatever you are, it’s ridiculous. There’s no vacation time, no retirement, and if you fuck up, the universe as we know it will collapse. Plus, the system is insanely complex, and you know what chaos theory says about that.”

“Sure,” said Charlie. “But go ahead and say so I’ll know that you know, though.”

“Chaos theory, more or less, says that in any complex dynamic system, it’s impossible to predict behavior because even the tiniest variable can have a huge effect down the line, throw everything into chaos.”

“Right,” Charlie said. “But Audrey doesn’t think that chaos is necessarily bad. It sounds kind of bad to me.”

“That’s because you’re thinking of chaos as disorder, but they’re not the same thing. And she’s a Buddhist, and they’re all about just making sure you’re paying attention or something. Remember what she said about the universe seeking order, balance, and the wobbles when it can’t find it? Well, chaos is the condition between order and disorder, the transition between one system and another. So that’s what’s going on.”

“Well good,” Charlie said. “I should check on Sophie. I left her playing upstairs.”

“You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

“Yes, it’s just that when I try to apply it . . . No. How do you know this stuff? Isn’t chaos theory math or something? I thought you went to culinary school.”

“That’s where I learned it. First day, right after you learn to wash your hands and sharpen a knife. You have to know chaos theory to make basic biscuits.”

“Really? For biscuits? I never gave my mom credit . . . Really?”

“No, not really, Asher. Did your brain stay tiny and reptilian when Audrey changed you into a real boy? I’m trying to tell you I don’t think we should reopen your store. I don’t think you’re going to need it, because there’s a new system happening. I’m trying to tell you I don’t want to work in retail, for you or for Rivera. I have a thing now. I’m beyond working in retail.”

“The crisis line, I understand.”

“No, not the crisis line—yes, the crisis line, but there’s something else. Look, I’ve always had an empty place in my life that I’ve alternatively tried to fill with food and penises, but now I have something. Mike, the guy who used to be you, that guy you look like, he’s calling me. He’s calling me from the bridge—from beyond the grave. Just me, only me.”

“Wow,” Charlie said. “Like, now? Since—I mean—after he’s dead?”

“Yesterday,” Lily said. “From one of the hardwired lines on the Golden Gate.”

“Wow,” Charlie said.

“Yeah,” Lily said.

“How’s he doing?”

“Kind of hard to say. He sounds happy, but a little freaked out that he’ll be accused of boning a nun.”

“Hey, that’s consensual. And she’s not really a nun anymore.” He hung his head. “I miss her.”

“And it’s been how long since you’ve seen her?”

“Yesterday.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Asher. One day? M and I broke up months ago, and still when I think about him as I’m going to sleep, my heart sounds like someone falling down the stairs. One day?”

“But I just got her back, sort of.”