George Martin - Lowball

The meter maid wheeled on him, red-faced and sweating. “You! Why can’t you park like a normal person?”

“I’m real sorry about that meter. Did you get my note?”

“Your note? This is-” She pointed at the broken meter so strenuously that she had to grab her hat with her other hand. “-destruction of city property!”

“Yeah. Those things aren’t cheap, Rusty,” said Officer Moloka.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t you know it’s illegal…” The meter maid trailed off. “What is that on your face?”

Wally’s fingertips scraped along his jaw and forehead. He found a blue plastic “E” stuck to his left ear, and the word “barrel” over his right eyebrow.

“You really want us to take him in, Darcy?” asked the furry cop.

The parking lady seemed ready to choke. Ghost hid behind Wally’s legs. “He-the-it’s-city property, and he’s a repeat offender! This is how it starts, the death of the city. First it’s jaywalking and littering, then it’s people ramming parking meters just for fun, and then it’s a short slide to lawless anarchy. This,” she said, again gesticulating at the destroyed meter, “is the bellwether of the decline of a civil society!”

The policewoman sighed and crossed her arms. Her partner leaned over to look at Wally’s license plates. “Diplomatic plates. If we issue a citation they’ll just appeal and have it rescinded.”

“He does this on purpose. He’s hiding behind his job!”

“Oh. You mean them fancy plates? I didn’t even want those,” said Wally. “But Lohengrin insisted.”

He was trying to agree, but that only seemed to make the meter maid-Darcy-more angry. Or, at least, the color of her face turned a darker red.

She said, “Do you see what I mean? Practically boasting about his ability to flout the law. And he does! Broken windshield, broken taillight, parking beyond the allotted length of time at a broken meter, destruction of city property.”

“Write him up if you want,” said Officer Moloka, “but we can’t walk him down to the precinct. First, I don’t want to be the one who has to explain to the chief why the UN is breathing on the mayor who’s breathing on him. And second, he’s got his kid with him.” She winked at Ghost.

The meter maid flipped open her pad and clicked her pen. Officer Bester said, “Your funeral, Darcy.”

“I’m doing my job.” She started to fill out the ticket, paused, and waved her pen at the cops. “And I’m going to find that van, too.”

“Whoa, whoa. No.” Officer Moloka shook her head and waved her hands as if trying to fend off somebody with bad breath. “Those guys are dangerous. They won’t balk at hurting a meter maid-”

“Parking enforcement officer!”

“-and they won’t be intimidated by a parking ticket.”

“Yeah,” said Officer Bester. “If you see them, call the cops.”

“I am a cop.”

The other police officers waved good-bye to Ghost and returned to patrolling their beat. The hairy one turned around and made a face at Ghost. She giggled.

“I won’t try to get out of this ticket,” said Wally.

Darcy wrote out the citation, tore a carbon copy from her pad, took the magnet from Wally’s hand, and used it to stick the ticket to his chest.

“You’d better not,” she said. Wally waited until her cart puttered away to haul the Impala out of its parking spot. He really needed to learn how to parallel park.

“That was funny,” Ghost said when the coast was clear.

The run-in with the parking lady caused Wally to forget all about Ghost’s trouble at school until he saw the severed cotton cow ear on the floor alongside her bed when he tucked her in. Wally was too heavy to sit on the edge of her bed without causing her to flop onto the floor, so he knelt beside it. Ghost handed him Green Eggs and Ham .

“Read it, Wallywally. With voices,” she said.

“Tell ya what. I’ll read a little bit if you tell me about what happened at school today.” He picked up the scrap from Jo’s costume. “This wasn’t very nice.”

“I hate Jo. She’s dumb.”

“No you don’t. Tomorrow you’ll forget all about it and want to be pals again. But she won’t forget it, because you hurt her feelings real bad. She’ll remember you as a mean person. You should tell her you’re sorry.”

Ghost looked away. She went insubstantial, as she sometimes did when she wanted to run away from trouble. But she didn’t float away through the ceiling. Good kid.

Wally asked, “Is this about Mr. Richardson?”

She rematerialized. “He’s gone. He didn’t say good-bye.” Her voice broke; her accent grew thicker. She sounded much more like the girl she’d been when she first arrived in New York when she added, simply, “He was nice.”

Ghost still didn’t trust many adults, but she talked about Richardson from time to time. That counted for a lot.

Wally read to her. He did the voices.

Later, he took out the telephone book. Richardson, unfortunately, wasn’t an unusual name. There were several Richardsons in and around Jokertown. But one of those had to be Ghost’s teacher. A guy like that, if he worked in Jokertown he probably lived nearby, too.

It took half an hour to work his way down the list of telephone numbers. The first number he called belonged to a man-or a woman, it was hard to tell-whose voice sounded like two people speaking not quite in unison with each other. They (he? she?) didn’t know any schoolteachers. The second number rang fifteen times with no answer. When Wally called the third Richardson on the list, he got an earful from a lady whose telephone number was apparently quite close to that of a popular Chinese takeout place and who was pretty sensitive about wrong numbers. The fourth number belonged to Mr. Richardson-the-teacher’s cousin, but she said she didn’t keep in touch and hadn’t spoken to him for a while. She gave Wally her cousin’s telephone number, apologizing that it might be out of date. It was the number that rang without answer. Wally gave her his name and number and asked her to please have Mr. Richardson get in touch if she happened to hear from him.

Ghost floated through the wall from her bedroom just as he was hanging up. She mumbled to herself in a language Wally didn’t understand; it was spoken only in the PPA. Her fingers curled as though clutching a knife hilt. He had to wake her because his hand passed through her shoulder when he tried to lead her back to her bedroom. She yawned. He carried her back to bed, wondering about her dreams.

It seemed part of Ghost would always dwell in the dark jungles of the Congo, in a land of mass graves and Leopard Men. Some wounds healed; some turned into scars.

She had enough of those. He wanted to be a good foster dad for her. That meant protecting her from new scars and new traumas when he could. He couldn’t always be there; the world was a big place. You couldn’t protect everybody all the time. But the way he saw it, this meant it was important to save Ghost from the little hurts of life when he could.

He thought about it while preparing for bed. He took a fresh pad of steel wool from the box under the bathroom sink. As he scrubbed himself, Wally decided it wouldn’t take more than a couple of hours to stop by Richardson’s place. He’d find him before picking up Ghost tomorrow.

He touched the photo of Jerusha Carter on his bedstand. It wasn’t a real photo-he’d printed it from the American Hero web site. It was all he had. But it was something.

“Miss you,” he said, and turned out the light.

On weekday mornings, Ghost took the subway to school with Miss Holmes, their neighbor across the hall. Miss Holmes was a bat-headed physical therapist who worked at Dr. Finn’s clinic, next door to Ghost’s school. Sometimes she let Ghost ride on her shoulders, and when she did Ghost practically disappeared between the enormous hairy ears.