Marc Zicree - Ghostlands

So what orders might these cops be under regarding trespassers? What orders would he be under, in like circumstances?

Not to kill, these guys didn’t have that vibe. But not to run off, either. To contain, to imprison, to hold.

But just as certainly as Larry Shango knew how to elegantly loop a Windsor knot and fieldstrip an M-16 blindfolded, he knew that wasn’t going to happen here, not nohow, not no way.

So. Show them his government-issue ID, his pass from the President, or at least the man who had once been President and whose bone and flesh and hair were now dusting away in an unmarked grave?

It might work…but the government as such was about as solid a concept, deserving the same respect in most parts, as paper money nowadays.

And if it failed to impress…well then, adios , element of surprise.

All this played out in Shango’s mind on the whole instantaneously, like a burst of data downloaded in toto, preverbal, hard-wired, known.

As did the action he took next.

Stepping in front of Mama Diamond to shield her, Shango dropped down, grabbed the ten-pound sledge from its resting place on his back, drew it from the straps that held it there, and threw the big hammer dead midsection at the cop in front. It hit the man square in the solar plexus, driving him back with a grunt of surprise and exhaled breath into the other two, who stumbled on the uneven ground and flailed to keep from falling.

As Shango expected, the blow caused cop number one to drop his service revolver. Shango dove onto the cool wet grass, seized the gun and came up with it held steady in both hands and trained on all three.

Okay, so it was a cowboy thing to do, but along with all those Shadow tapes his dad had brought home that long-ago flea market day back in New Orleans, he’d also brought some Lone Ranger.

And if Mama Diamond didn’t look a whole hell of a lot like Tonto, well, that wasn’t to say the notion didn’t still hold water.

The three cops were regaining their footing, breathing hard, just getting a sense of the new situation.

Now, let’s just hope none of them’s a hothead….

“Gentlemen…” Shango began, but didn’t have an opportunity to get much further into the fine art of compromise.

For just then, about the forty-eighth unanticipated, virtually impossible thing that day happened.

A blaring horn shattered the night and twin headlights raked over them. Shango immediately looked aside, but his eyes were dazzled and he was momentarily blinded.

The deep thrum of an engine roared up and Shango could hear big rubber tires turning off the nearby road and crunching onto the grass.

And although Shango was no connoisseur of poetry, a snatch of Coleridge rose up in his mind.

It was a miracle of rare device….

From the corner of his eye, he saw that Mama Diamond had grabbed hold of the horses to steady them. Shango re-angled his stance to keep the gun on the three men and also on the newcomers.

The door of the big Cadillac opened and its driver stepped out. Vaguely through the headlights, Shango could see others in the car, sitting watching them.

The driver ambled up, a silhouette backlit by the brilliant light.

“Mr. Shango,” the voice said, and he could hear the smile in it. “I was just thinking of you.”

Then Cal Griffin stepped up and shook his hand.

The girl was asleep in the bed that looked like her bed, in the apartment that was like her apartment. For one night, no dreams visited her, and it was as close to heaven as life, waking or sleeping, could ever be now.

The old man stood over her, watching her with blind eyes, his face gentled, the dark lines etched like furrows in old bark, there in the darkness.

“Thought I might find you here,” the voice behind him said in a whisper.

Papa Sky turned. He had heard the boy coming, of course, padding into the room on light, quick feet; nothing ever surprised Papa, nothing in the world of sighted men, that was.

Now, in the realm of their minds, that was a different story….

He led the boy out into the hall, softly closed the bedroom door. “Glad to see you back in one piece,” he said, without the slightest hint of irony.

“Where’s-?” Inigo didn’t have to finish the sentence; they both knew who he meant.

“I don’t rightly know. He’s a wild one, my wandering boy.”

“They’ll be coming soon, I think,” the boy said, and there was excitement under his words, and fear.

“That’s good, real good. You hungry? Carnegie Deli might still be open.” Neither of them added, If it’s there at all; rather the copy of it, replicated, abducted from memory, and not gone back to mist and yearning…

They exited out onto the street, which tonight at least retained its solidity, the paving stones arrayed in orderly fashion, the walls standing upright. The air was warm with a mild breeze, perfect for a late-autumn night, with none of the humidity that so often cursed the city nor the frosty promise of coming snow. This was an idealized New York, not a real one, after all-a fact that was further confirmed as Papa Sky caught the lovely roller-coaster trill of the opening strains of Pops’s magnificent “Potatohead Blues” playing out of some phonograph from a distant window a street or two north. He knew this had been lifted out of his mind, it had to be; Papa Sky had actually played with Louis Armstrong once, along with Kid Orry and some of the other great old cats, fifty years back, on a paddlewheel steamboat, at Disneyland, of all places. Life was full of things so odd you had to laugh not to cry, it always had been.

Papa Sky knew where all those cats were now, under the sod, where by all rights he should be. He wondered what became of that paddlewheeler and the rest of that place.

Well, maybe I’ll just go there, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, if I ask the Powers That Be real nice, pretty please with sugar on top….

Nah, don’t even go there, Old Man, not even for funnin’. You play with fire, you get burned, even if you’re eighty-three years old and blind as a stone.

“He was like her, like Christina,” the boy beside him spoke up without prompting, bringing Papa’s thoughts back to the street here and now, where he was tapping out an easy rhythm with his cane as he turned from Eighty-first onto Columbus and headed south (all this being an unspoken agreement, you understand, to assign the familiar names and directions to these passing mirages, these phantasms).

“That so,” Papa Sky answered.

“Quiet, and strong,” Inigo said. “And patient, too.”

“Fine, that’s fine.” Papa thought back on when he’d first met Mr. Cal Griffin and his entourage, in Chicago, in Legends, when he’d been a traveling man, even at his age, a man on a mission. “He still with that Russian doctor, and that girl with the spiky hair?”

“How you know her hair’s spiky?”

“Just sounded like it would be, is all.”

“Yeah, he’s still with them.”

“And how about that other cat, the twitchy one? Mr. Magic?”

“Goldie, yeah. He’s there, too.” Papa caught the tightness in the boy’s voice, sensed something hurtful there, but he didn’t delve further. You respect people’s pain, and give it room.

“And what about Enid…Enid Blindman?” Papa Sky ventured, and it was his turn to feel a spear of pain in his chest, like a warm blade slipped between his ribs into the soft place beneath.

“Nah, I didn’t see him.” Inigo replied offhandedly. And why not? He’d never met the young bluesman, who could work his voice and four-reed chromatic harmonica and guitar of finest maple into a sweet honey sound, into miracles like angel wings.