Part 12 (1/2)

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.