Marc Zicree - Ghostlands

“How old are you, Mr. Shango?” Mama Diamond asked as he settled beside her.

“Let’s just say thirties and leave it at that.”

“I’m old enough to be your mother…or grandmother, if I’d gotten an early enough jump on things.”

Shango smiled. “You applying for the job?”

“We’ve been looking after each other for some time now. No need to start sticking labels on everything.”

They were still for a time, with the stillness each had cultivated over the years to shield themselves from people, to keep invisible and apart, but which now had evolved into easy companionability.

Finally, Mama Diamond said, “I’ve been ruminating a tad…thinking over what we’re living for.”

“That’s a big subject for so early in the day.”

Mama Diamond looked off to the mountains in the distance, the eroded cliffs that ringed the Badlands. All those fossil bones in the rocks, all those creatures that were born and raised their young and died…

In times past, Mama Diamond had scraped those bones out of their resting places, had wrenched her shining gems from the living earth, and thought them her fortune.

Her cache of gems was slag now, turned to slurry when Atherton went into meltdown. But she didn’t mind. Looking back, she realized that what she’d considered her living for so many years had hardly been living at all.

The mountains talked to you, if you were quiet enough to listen; she’d known that even back in Manzanar. But there was a new thing they were telling her now, a deeper truth.

All those generations down the ages, young and old, looking out for each other, surviving and making a life…

She mulled it over, watching tawny boys and girls clamber over slides and jungle gyms, arc high on swings. “May Catches the Enemy found her boy Inigo…. Papa Sky’s hooked up with Enid now…. That young Cal Griffin’s got his sister Christina back, who I guess was pretty much a daughter to him all along….”

As autumn waned and winter arrived, their whole wayward adventure through Wyoming and Iowa and South Dakota had revolved around reunion between parent and child, whether actual or surrogate, old or new. In this transcendent, shifting world, the only choice for them all was to be caretakers of one sort or another, good mothers and fathers, good stewards; to love each other and not falter, to be uplifted by their mutual need and regard, to be better than any of them had ever seen reason or need before to be.

Larry Shango raised an eyebrow. “You’re saying we better get busy raising a family?” he asked Mama Diamond.

Mama Diamond turned her dragon-young eyes to him, and the wetness in them caught the morning sun. “I’m saying we found one, Mr. Shango.”

In the late morning, they all gathered once more, outside what had been the Visitor Center, to compare notes and make their plans.

“I’ve heard some mighty fine things about that Preserve Mary McCrae’s got running,” Papa Sky told Cal. “Figgered I’d mosey on down, have me a look-see. ’Sides, me and Enid can give ’em a concert they’ll never forget.”

Enid nodded, saying nothing, affectionately eyeing the old blind man-who, Cal could see now that he knew the score, bore Enid more than a passing resemblance, once you got past the affectations of clothes and hair.

“Yeah, me too,” rasped Howard Russo, who now sported Hugo Boss sunglasses between a porkpie hat and a striped suit that would give a drunk-tank lush the white shivers.

Larry Shango opined that it was getting on time for him to pay a call back home, to see how the President’s son was getting on, in the care of Shango’s first and second and third cousins-not to mention the great-aunts and other assorted relations, who he felt sure remained every bit as rooted to the sultry bayou swamplands as their fathers and their fathers’ fathers had been.

As for Mama Diamond, Burnt Stick held no further allure. If anyone chose to lay claim to her store and the dead bones sleeping within, more power to them. Her attention now lay on returning to reclaim Marsh and Cope from where they were stabled, then continuing on with Larry Shango to meet his clan, who-if Shango’s twenty-year avoidance of them were any indication-would be noisy and contentious, boisterous and cantankerous…and joyously alive.

“I hear the ground’s so wet there, you can’t bury a soul,” Mama Diamond observed.

Shango nodded. “Even in the tombs, you put someone in, they rot away to nothing. Then you just jam more folks in.”

Mama Diamond smiled inwardly. A land that dissolved its dead like an Alka-Seltzer in water, that took them into the bosom of the earth and left nothing behind, not a scrap to pry out and shine and hoard.

That suited her just fine.

“If it’s just the same to you, Calvin,” Doc Lysenko chimed in, “Colleen and I have gotten rather used to your company. We thought perhaps we might continue sharing your road, for a time.”

“Assuming,” Colleen added, “you ever get around to telling us what that road happens to be.”

Cal shot his sister a glance. “Well, seeing as we’ve come this far from New York…”

He let Christina finish it. “It seems kind of a waste not to keep right on going.”

“Don’t tell me,” Goldie piped up. “You’re goin’ to Disneyland!”

“Been there, done that.” Cal said, deadpan. “But the Pacific has its appeal…depending on what we find.”

“Hmm…” Herman Goldman considered, glowering. “In the words of Yogi Berra-or was it Samuel Goldwyn? — I could say, ‘Include me out.’” He grinned, extending Cal a hand. “But what would I do for laughs?”

True enough, Cal reflected. Since their time inside the mountain, Goldie had been laughing a good deal, as though a weight had been lifted, as though he’d come back to himself…or more than himself.

“I could open up a portal a la Goldman,” Goldie offered. “We could be there in a jiff.”

“That’d kinda take the fun out of it,” Cal responded. “I mean, it’s like flying instead of taking the train.”

“Neither of which is an available option at this particular moment,” Goldie observed. “Although, given the progress of the assorted boffins from Atherton, I’d say both will almost certainly make a comeback in the very near future.”

No rush, Cal thought, at least as far as he was concerned. Time to go slow awhile, to have a little respite from the cell phones and boomboxes, the voicemail and internal combustion. Bring back health care, sure, running water and all the blessings of the modern age, but let’s take a holiday.

A holiday…what a concept.

It had been a never-ending battle across the U.S., from the five boroughs to the Windy City to the Great Plains and this sun-beaten land. Cal felt like a heavyweight near the end of his days, still battling but having lost all his agility and spring, with nothing left but scar tissue and a growing inability to talk.

Could he really let all that go?

Marcus Sanrio might not be dead, after all, might still be roaming the back roads somewhere, weakened and lieutenant-less but at large. And either way, there might be other Bad Things out there, almost certainly would be.

In time, they might have to again put on their armor, buckle on their blades.

But Cal also knew it was high time to get a life.

He caught himself looking at May Catches the Enemy, who stood nearby in the shadows with her son. She brought her emerald eyes to meet his, and held his gaze there.

At last, Cal managed to say, “I suppose you’ll be staying.”

She looked questioningly to her son. Like Howard Russo, he wore shades and layers of protective clothing, but with considerably more restraint and style. He rubbed his chin contemplatively.