Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 12

He stopped between MLK and Rancho, and I let the bike glide to a halt alongside. Light planes from the North Las Vegas Airport skimmed overhead, cutting across a sky with all color baked out. On my right more housing developments swelled like cactuses, only visible as sand-colored block walls and the red tile roofs rising behind them. On my left, though, the scraggy trees and scrub desert of an old ranch estate were marked by a weathered sign, the back and both sides enclosed by housing-tract walls. You couldn't say much for the curb appeal.

BMWs don't roar like American bikes or whine like j.a.panese ones. But mine rumbled as I guided it up the dirt driveway, following a serpentine course to avoid the ruts and stones. The name on the mailbox was Bukvajova, which really seemed like it ought to be familiar. Dust dulled the maroon gas tank and dimmed the chrome on the handlebars before I turned in behind a windbreak of ratty evergreens.

The house wasn't in any better shape than the vantage from the street suggested. Mustard-colored paint peeled in scrofulous plates, s.h.a.ggy as cedar bark. I might have thought it wasn't inhabited. Abandoned structures can stand for decades in the desert, even if they aren't built of stone, and a lot of the old Vegas houses were made of cinderblock.

Vegas is a city with no history, though. We have a conspiracy of dismemory. Tear it down, pave it over, build something new. Nothing left but the poker chips and the elephant's graveyard of neon signs tucked away in an alleged museum that's not even open to the public. If the historical society takes an interest in a building, six will get you ten it burns down within a season. People forget, remake themselves, come here to change their lives and their luck.

Sometimes it works.

Small branches from a moribund elm littered the house's tar-paper roof. The tree was doomed, but not dead; Dutch elm disease kills from the crown.

I made sure the kickstand was on hard earth and walked toward the house. My ghost had vanished, though I had expected to see him under the wind chimes on the front porch.

A crystalline clinking wasn't only from the chimes. Around the side, another nearly dead elm swayed in the breeze. Its fingerling branches had been broken off blunt, and onto each stick was thrust a colored bottle-gold, violet, emerald, T Nant ruby, Maltine amber, Ayer's cobalt blue. They tinkled as the tree moved, and I wondered how they managed not to smash in anything like a real wind.

I was tipping up my eye patch to get a better look when my footsteps alerted someone. Which is to say, a burro in the yard behind the house started braying as if badly in need of oiling, and that was the end of my stealth.

The otherwise glow of trapped ghosts swirled inside the bottles on the dying elm. I felt I should hear them tapping, scratching at the inside of their rainbow prisons. But only the light breeze soughed across the mouths of the bottles. Some people say the sound is the evil spirits crying for release, but it's not.

I've never seen the point in trapping ghosts. The ones you could catch in a bottle tree are harmless, and the ones that aren't harmless, you couldn't catch in a bottle tree.

I wondered where my La.s.sie-ghost was, and where I was supposed to find the well with Timmy in it. And as I was wondering-the burro still sawing away, no doubt infuriating the suburban neighbors-the front door banged open hard enough that my boots cleared earth. I flipped down my eye patch; no point making an innocent bystander look at a scarred socket.

Like Odin, I traded the eye for other things. Unlike Odin, it didn't involve a gallows tree, and I didn't expect anything in trade but a plain pine box and a hasty burial. What I got was being made the genius of Las Vegas, guardian of the Sin City and all her fallen angels.

It's a strange old world.

The woman standing on the shaded porch was in her sixties, I thought, stoop-shouldered, yellowing gray hair tucked behind her ears. Despite the heat, she dressed in a raveling cardigan pulled lumpy over a blue-and-white star-patterned s.h.i.+rt that hung, untucked, to the thighs of shapeless brown slacks. She scowled through filthy gla.s.ses. "Who's there?"

Mushy diction, as if she'd forgotten to slide her dentures in. When I turned to her, she leaned forward against one of the four-by-fours holding up the porch roof, peering through strings of hair.

"Jackie." When I stepped from the shade of the dying elm, sun thumped my head like hot sand. There were a couple of wizened forty-foot Mexican fan palms on the property, but they cast no more shade than telephone poles.

"Jackie," she said, and kissed air. "I think-no, I don't remember you."

"I don't think we've met," I said, but as I said it I wasn't sure anymore. Her cloudy blue eyes, the shape of her nose ...

Useless. If she's lived in Vegas sixty years, I might have seen her hundreds of times. Especially back when there were only a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand people in town. But I didn't remember her now. "Ma'am, is this your bottle tree?"

"This is private property." She blinked sagging lids. "My bottle tree? What do you know about bottle trees?"

"They're for catching ghosts," I said. "Protection from evil spirits. Ms. Bukvajova? Mrs.?"

She shrugged. All the same to her.

"Do you have a lot of evil spirits here, Ms. Bukvajova?"

"A few," she said. "Can't you hear 'em? Singing away in there? Don't you remember what that's good for, Jackie?"

The breeze was enough to ruffle the fans on the palms, but its sighs and the chiming were still the only sounds rising from the bottle tree. It sounded a little like a gla.s.s armonica-Benjamin Franklin's instrument, once thought to cause neurological damage because of its vibrations. But that might have just been lead poisoning from the paint on the crystal bowls.

"That's just the wind," I said. "Those ghosts are harmless, Ms. Bukvajova."

She laughed, and came out of the shade of the porch into the sunlight. She stumped forward, hands stuffed now into the pockets of her mustard-colored cardigan. It matched her house. The sweater hung from her stooped shoulders like a yoke supporting her fists in slings. "Harmless," she said, "but not useless." She pushed past me, trailing unwashed sourness. Flakes of dead skin nested among the roots of her eyebrows and in her thinning hair.

She pulled a hand from her pocket to tap a metal church key against the base of an amber-colored bottle. The sighing and moaning redoubled. "Just the wind."

She pulled the bottle off the branch and popped a champagne cork into the top, then set the corked bottle at the base of the tree.

"I'm sure I should remember you," she said. She pulled down another bottle and corked it, but had to get a stepladder for the third. It was just leaned up under the eaves; obviously, she used it a lot.

"I'm not sure there's anything to remember."

She snorted. "I forget a lot these days, Jackie. It's the price of getting old. What do you forget?"

I wasn't too sure of the wisdom of a sixty-year-old woman climbing ladders, but it's not a city's job to babysit children and old people. I might have volunteered to climb up anyway, but I wasn't sure I wanted to abet whatever she was doing with the ghosts.

Especially if one were La.s.sie.

Whatever I was opening my mouth to say slipped out of memory even as I was reaching to turn it into words. "So if they're harmless but useful," I asked instead, "what do you use them for?"

Ms. Bukvajova was halfway up the ladder. She turned stiffly, holding on to a fragile dead branch, and tapped her forehead with her free hand. "All sorts of things. Some I cook myself and some I sell. Ghosts are memories. I reckon they've got more uses than I recollect, even, and I recollect a few. I made sure to write 'em down."

When she clambered down, she held a straw-yellow bottle in one hand, her thumb pressed over the neck. She shook the bottle as if shaking up a soda so it would spray, and raised it to her mouth. The gesture was deft and quick; her throat worked as if she chugged a beer; her lashes, crusted with yellow grains, brushed her cheek. I watched, fascinated, searching for any sign of change. Tatters of otherwise light blew around her, but that was all. When she lowered the bottle and belched she looked the same.

"Hits the spot, it does," she said, and wiped moist lips on the back of her wrist.

Another man might have picked a fight, taken the bottles away, smashed the tree. But then there was the question of what good that would do and who had the right of the matter. There was no law against catching ghosts, neither man's nor moral. They were dead already. Exploiting a lingering shade, to be honest, bothers me a d.a.m.ned sight less than eating bacon does. And I eat bacon.

But it made me curious. Vegas is c.h.i.n.ks and cracks, and magic grows in some of them. I'm the sort of person who can usually be found poking around deserted lots with a field guide, so to speak, trying to decide if what I have here is really yellow wood sorrel or something else entirely. I like to know what the growing things are.

So I kept thinking about Ms. Bukvajova as I guided the BMW back through light Sunday traffic, pausing in front of the gray block, lattice-and-gla.s.s facade of St. Christopher's on Bruce, near the North Las Vegas police station. Kids squealed in the public swimming pool down the street. Chlorine hung acrid on the air.

Children really are tougher than adults. It was enough to make me sneeze from here.

Stewart emerged after the exodus, blond hair immediately evident in the sunlight. I wondered if he had stayed inside to introduce himself to the priest. Stewart's churchgoing, just not religious. Or just not any one religion in particular. He visits them by turns.

He's the other half of Las Vegas-well, half is the wrong word; there's overlap-and my city has more churches per capita than any other in America. And no, that doesn't include wedding chapels.

Stewart sauntered up to where I stood bracing the bike and ran a hand up my arm. I handed him his helmet; he left a lip print on the glossy side of mine before strapping his own in place. Then his feet were on the pegs and we sailed into the traffic stream, sliding into the s.p.a.ce left in front of an old man in a gold Lincoln Town Car who had hit the brakes in shock at the public display of affection.

We were already in the neighborhood, so we swung by Jerry's Nugget to avail ourselves of the legendary eight-dollar prime rib for his first lunch and my second one. Somehow we wound up going to the Italian place instead, and Stewart stuffed garlic bread into his mouth and swallowed beer until the pizza and salad showed, like I'd been keeping him on bread and water.

Stewart wasn't big. He was fair-haired, wiry, and he bit his thumbnail while he was thinking. I liked watching him eat. I liked his enthusiasm and flightiness and the fact that I knew it was all a pose.

"How was church?" I asked when he'd slowed down enough to answer questions.

He pushed a piece of pepperoni around with his fingertip, then licked the grease off the nail. "Boring. We need cuter priests in this town."

"They don't pick them for the way they fill out their trousers," I answered complacently. I a.s.sembled a forkful of lettuce, onion, and a bite of pizza with crushed reds and parmesan, and stuffed it into my mouth. No matter how many times I did that, Stewart still looked at me in disbelief. Hey, it tasted good. "What do you want to do tonight?"

"Dunno," he said. "Sunday night in Vegas. We could go to a movie."

"We could go to a bar."

"Mmmph." Not such a bad idea, though, by the way he tilted his head and lifted an eyebrow. "What did you do today?"

I shrugged. "Hung out at the Crown and Anchor. Drove around. The ghosts are back."

"Ah, so," he said, and flicked beer at me. I ducked, laughing, and the waiter shot us a dirty look. Didn't bother me: Service is always slow in there, and Stewart and I overtip. "Sounds like a thrilling day."

I didn't decide not to tell Stewart about Ms. Bukvajova. It just, you know-completely slipped my mind.

It turned out that what we did that night was go to the circus. I like circus folk, and I love the circus. So because Stewart loves me, we go to the circus every time it's in town.

Well, Vegas has its own local circuses. A new Cirque du Soleil every couple of years, and we've seen them all, including the traveling shows. The animal acts are being phased out after what happened to Roy Horn. But it's a big deal when an arena show comes through, and an even bigger one when it's a tent show.

Call me old-fas.h.i.+oned, but it's not really a circus without a big top.

Oestman Brothers Circus and Traveling Show had set up on the desert lot near Sahara, the one they're always going to build a casino on any day now. We arrived an hour and a half before showtime, light still smeared across the sky, holding the dark at bay.

Not that darkness stood much chance against Vegas. Night tried to fall as we wandered the side tents-viewing fortune-tellers and caged tigers in their shaded enclosure, munching on cotton candy-and it only changed the quality of light. Neon saturated the atmosphere, heavy-hung, so I expected to see it move in swirls with each current. Stewart and I walked through it as if it were a fog. At one point he grabbed my hand and I turned to look at him and saw him crowned in ghostly radiance. I ducked down and kissed him on the grin, despite the sharp intake of breath from a scandalized matron on the far side of the candy-apple booth. I hoped the guy guessing her weight guessed high.

When I leaned back, the light was still there, and it buoyed me.

It has its own otherwise energy, that light in Vegas. It's as much me as my skin and fingers, as much my partner as Stewart is-alien and present-so sometimes I feel it from the inside and sometimes I feel it like a caress.

Somewhere between the rigged dart game and the crocodile boy, we finished our junk food and joined the people moving inside. Under the big top, it was sawdust and lights and collapsible bleachers, and Stewart and I clomped up them to find our seats. He promptly got up again to fetch popcorn and c.o.kes-I have no idea where he puts it-and was back before the seats finished filling up. He's got a knack for picking the quick line. Just lucky like that.

I had my head craned back, staring up at the highest point of the big top, when he slid a bag of roasted chestnuts into my hand. "They call it the king pole," I said. "The whole tent hangs off it. That used to be one h.e.l.l of a tree."

"Yeah," he said. "So was the one Odin hanged himself off of. And look where that got him-overrun by Christians."

"Blind and forgotten," I said, and touched my eyepatch.

Stewart winked under blond bangs and stole a chestnut back.

It was a nice enough little circus. They had a couple of elephants that came on toward the end of the show, and as I sat there and ate chestnuts I wondered if they were abused. Not everybody treats their animals as well as Siegfried and Roy. Yeah, I worry more about animals than people, which is stupid. Some folks justify it by saying that animals don't make the choices that lead to their torment and destruction, but it's a bit facile to pretend people have any more autonomy.

In reality, the rat race is a handicap. Except the previous winners start with less weight, not as far to run, and a better knowledge of the track. And the more you fail to keep up, the more weight gets piled on.

It's a scary business, life.

This was a three-ring circus, where there's a big act in the center ring-that's where the elephants were-and something smaller on either side. Because we got our tickets late, we were over by the concurrent clowns, and Stewart seemed to be watching them more than the elephants. He doesn't like animal acts.

I like watching the ringmaster. When the elephants trouped out, I knew it had to be time for the capper. The man in the sequined red topcoat ran out to the middle of the center ring and gestured for his microphone, which glided from the bigtop to be caught with a conjuror's flair.

Behind him, trapezes snaked from the scaffolding. Running men brought out a pedestal. The knotted shroud of the net rose and grew taut, like an emerged moth plumping chrysalis-rumpled wings, while the ringmaster's voice rang across the stands.

"Ladies and gentlemen. Children of all ages! May I direct your attention to the center ring!?

"You have seen aerialists and acrobats. You have seen wire dancers and tumblers, funambulists and flyers. But you have never seen anything like this.

"All the way from the primeval forest of mysterious Moravia, I give you-the Flying Bukvajovas!"

"Huh," I said, as the catcher was winched up to his trapeze and the first of the flyers began to ascend the platform. "I could swear I've heard that name."

Stewart gave me a funny look. "They've been through town before. We saw them about ten years ago. With a different circus then. And I don't think that was the first time. I'm pretty sure they were here when the dam was going in...."

"Oh," I said. "Of course." And ate another nut. One of those multigenerational circus families.

The ringmaster's microphone reeled back into the stratosphere. He fled the ring in a scatter of sequin reflections, something like an animate mirror ball. I shrugged off a chill.

"Jackie?"

"Somebody stepped on my grave."

Stewart stole another nut. "Maybe the ringmaster is evil."

I tried to steal it back, resulting in a wrestling match that scattered popcorn across the floorboards and glares across nearby patrons. Casualties of war. To add insult to injury, Stewart popped the kidnappee into his mouth before I managed to retrieve it.

"No evil ringmasters," I said. "I won't allow it. Screw Ray Bradbury."

"That was a carny," Stewart said complacently, defending what remained of his popcorn. "And anyway, Bradbury's not my type."

Later that night, when the city glow was creeping around the edges of the hotel-room blackout curtains brightly enough to compete with my bedside lamp, I lay staring at the ceiling. I was supposed to be reading a book. Stewart was playing a Gameboy, but the beeps were intermittent.

I let the paperback fall across my chest. "Hey, Stewart?"

"Mm?"

"Have you noticed yourself forgetting things?"

"Like my car keys?"

Smart a.s.s. "No. Like things you used to know. Street names. Your first girlfriend's favorite color. That sort of stuff."

"I wonder how you'd know if you forgot something," he said, hitting pause on his game. "I mean, really forgot it. Do you ever think about Alzheimer's? Or a brain injury? You'd never know what you were missing, would you?"

"No," I said, picking up my book. I hadn't been paying enough attention to the last three pages and had to flip back until I found something I remembered reading. "Or yes, maybe. I don't know. I mean, if you were losing time, like not making new memories, probably not. But if you were forgetting things like your husband's or wife's name? Then probably. And you might try to cover it up."

He looked at me suspiciously.