“Pleasing myself—is that a double entendre?”
“No.”
He stuck an arm through the slats on the back of the chair and slung it over his shoulder, then batted his eyelashes at me, turned, and sashayed back toward the counter. “You sure? Maybe you know who I was thinking about the last time I jerked off.” I sighed, and said, “Miss Mattie? Is that you?”
“Nice try, but she’s not here. Your aura would’ve spiked if you were really talking to her.” He dropped the chair in front of the counter and opened the McDonald’s bag. “What’d you get?”
“Two combo meals.”
“What about me?”
“One is for you.”
“I’m a vegetarian, you knucklehead.”
“What?”
“You’re seriously that oblivious—how long have we known each other?”
“Uh, I dunno. You can have my fries.”
“Good. I’m starving.” He flicked his gum into the trash and stuffed a good dozen fries into his mouth. “These used to taste better when I was a kid, but I think they were fried in lard back then.”
“So how long have you been a, uh….”
“Five years. It’s a religious thing.”
Crap. I’d always figured Crash had some sort of nonspecific New Age belief system. I didn’t know he considered himself a member of an actual religion. Maybe he was Hindu or something—he seemed to know an awful lot about chakras and meditation. Did Hindus eat meat? And if they didn’t, how come the Indian restaurant down the street had such amazing Chicken Tikka Masala? Once upon a time, back when my training had been less about snap-and-pop and more about esoteric concepts, I probably could’ve told you what religions made which demands, especially the more arcane ones. But I’d probably killed the brain cells that held that knowledge with one too many hits of nitrous.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You can eat meat in front of me. I’ll deal.” I hunkered down over the counter and chowed down half a burger.
Maybe I’d been hungry too. Aside from the hunger, the other thing that had been gnawing at me—underneath the litany of criticism I’d been subjected to lately—was the idea that the amusement park hadn’t been riddled with ghosts. Because even through the Auracel, I can usually sense their presence. The drugs just allow me to tune it out.
“D’you think ghosts take up space?” I asked.
Crash took a long, thoughtful pull on the massive soda. “Don’t know. You can see ’em. What do you think?”
“They don’t stand inside other people. Living people. They don’t stand inside each other. But they walk through walls and furniture and stuff like it’s not even there.”
He nodded as he finished the rest of one super sized fry and continued on to the next. “Subtle bodies.”
Was he serious, or was that another Crash-joke along the lines of golden showers? “What’s that?”
“Astral. Etheric.”
Those, I knew about—enough that maybe I could figure out his religion without having to resort to actually asking. “What discipline talks about that?”
“Oh, you name it. Subtle bodies pop up in everything from Tantric to Crowley. Spiritualists, too—the Victorian table-rappers who said ghosts shot ectoplasm, the ones who staged fake photos of garden fairies.” Super.
“So it’s bullshit.”
“You’re pretty quick to get defensive, for someone who’s seen it all in action.” Crash crumpled up the greasy cardboard sleeve, threw it back in the bag, then took the top bun off my second burger and stole the tomato slice. I ignored his tongue stud as he licked off the mayo. “I think a few of the table rappers were probably real mediums. Plenty of shysters along with ’em, but you figure one or two had to be legit.”
“Hard to say.” At least without tracking down their graves, seeing if any were still lingering around, and then trying to figure out if they’d be willing to level with me or not.
“I thought you could see people going astral. Why the second-guessing?”
“No. I can’t, usually. I need to be on psyactives.” Or drunk. “I was just trying to figure out why crowded places don’t tend to be haunted, but isolated places do.”
“Or what if it’s the other way around?” Crash sucked grease and salt off his fingers like he was giving his own hand a blowjob. I didn’t notice. Not at all. “What if places get deserted because on some sub-sensory level, the mundanes of the world know there’s something spooky about an area and they start avoiding it? It’s like the chicken and the egg. Maybe you’ll never know.”
I picked the second burger off the bun, ate the meat and cheese in few bites, wadded the soggy bun into a ball and shoved it back in the bag. Miss Mattie was still nowhere to be seen. It wasn’t fair. I was playing nice with her little Curtis and everything—hadn’t I even brought him fries? Regardless, she remained indifferent to my thirst for arcane knowledge. I took a long swallow of Coke instead.
Crash folded a piece of gum into his mouth. “So…I can’t help but ask…what’s with your hair?”
“I got it cut.”
“Where? At the Moe Howard school of cosmetology?” I could tell Jacob wasn’t too keen on my hair lately either, but it had grown way over the dress code length, and I kept missing my appointment at the real salon because I’d been scouring the scene of a domestic stabbing all week to see if the spirit might know where her loverboy took off to. Unfortunately, it seemed she’d moved on before I had a chance to chat. “Just one of those places where you don’t need an appointment.”
I ducked when Crash grabbed for my head, but he was just as fast as me. I felt his fingers slide through my hair, watched him peer down his nose at whatever he was seeing. “This angle’s all wrong. Sit.”
I’d been kind-of kneeling in the tripod chair so I could hover over the counter while I ate. It creaked when I turned and tucked my leg beneath me. Crash pulled a comb out from under the cash register, rounded the counter and started pulling up hanks of hair from random parts of my head, measuring them between his fingers, and scowling. “I can save this cut. Lemme get my shears.” I’d be stuck with it a while. Then it would start all over again, the awkward haircut that grew out some and had a few decent weeks, then was suddenly too long for the dress code. A never-ending cycle.
“Yeah, sure.”
“You not too proud to let him help you. Almost—it still be hard for you. But you got trust built up between the two of you now.” I whipped around. Crash was gone, and there was Miss Mattie, big and glossy-skinned mahogany, fanning herself with her paper St.
Anthony fan.
“I’m so glad to see you. Listen, don’t go. I need to ask you—”
“I done told you, I’m not here for you. You got to find your own path.” In one of the cramped rooms behind the store, drawers and doors squalled open and banged shut.
I sighed. “Fine. Do you have something you want to say to Curtis? I’ll tell him. I’ll even write it down so I get it right.”
“He do want the best for you. He need to be needed—we all need to be needed. He be a good friend to you if you let him.” I knew that.
Suddenly, that seemed pretty profound. I’d known that for a long time—and it wasn’t one of those things I took for granted. The people I considered to be my friends were few and far between. Really far between. “Okay. Yeah.”
Miss Mattie scowled down at a handmade sign propped on the counter. It was cobbled together from the glossy Sunday Tribune ads, where a hastily cut out male underwear model with a really prominent package had been pasted over the world’s cleanest stovetop.
A comic book style dialog balloon that read,
Did you sign up for the
Sticks and Stones newsletter?
hovered beside him.
She couldn’t seem to make heads or tails of the sign. Neither could I, really, but maybe that was the point. To make you look, even if you didn’t quite get it. “It don’t make you no less of a man to ask for help.” She pronounced it
axe
. “You got to ask yourself what’s more important—to try to do everything your own way and lose it all, or to ask for help so you can get what you need, when you need it. Always remember, you not here in this world alone. You got friends.”
“It’s just a haircut—but him and me, we’re cool. I know it might not always sound like it, but that’s just the way we ta—”
“Sometimes the only place you find help is the last place you look.
Remember that.”
Then she was gone, without even bothering to exit through the closet door.
I stared at the last place I’d seen Miss Mattie, then dropped my gaze to the underwear model. The hodgepodge sign was vaguely disturbing. That was probably intentional, too.
“I gotta unlock the door.” Crash swept back into the store and set a pair of scissors, a bottle of Windex—or probably what used to be Windex and was now water, judging by the fact that it was clear and not bright blue—and a jar of some trendy hair paste on the counter.
“Don’t worry. It’s usually pretty dead before noon.” Just because he’d said that, people were milling around on the landing waiting for the store to open. One of them was a short, round Hispanic woman who went right for the Santeria supplies. The other one was a white guy with long, greasy hair and a patchy beard. From where I sat, he looked smelly.
Crash said, “Just a sec,” to me, dug around for his keyring and unlocked his register. Within seconds, the Hispanic woman was at the counter with an armload of prayer candles. Crash wrapped each one in newspaper before he bagged it, gave the customer her total in Spanish, and made quick change for her twenty. She took her bags and left without a word. “One of my regulars,” Crash said. “She doesn’t have a lot to say. I think she feels guilty for shopping at a gringo store.” The grubby guy was still browsing.
“Sit,” Crash insisted, and shoved at my shoulder. I hadn’t even realized I’d stood up. A cop-thing, most likely. When I thought about it, how rote a majority of my responses were, it felt pretty bleak. Or maybe that was the point. Maybe that’s what training was really all about.
I sat.
He spritzed my head with Windex water. It didn’t smell like ammonia.
Probably just plain water. Then he combed through and parted my hair in a bunch of places. “You want me to go conservative, then?”
“I uh…” I didn’t. Not deep inside. But I could hardly ask for a mohawk. “Whatever you think is best.”
“I always knew you could sweet-talk me like crazy. Don’t worry, baby.
You’re in good hands.” He tilted my head down and snipped at my hairline in back, tiny nips. “I wish the butcher who got to you before had left me some length to work with.”
Points of wet hair sprinkled the floor beside the chair. Very small, a quarter of an inch, even less. Crash kept working my hair, fingers and comb, comb and fingers, measuring and finessing while the tiniest bits of hair rained down.
“You cut hair?”
Crash let go of my head and I looked up. The grubby guy was standing closer to us than I would’ve liked, especially with me sitting down.
“How much?” he asked.
“You can’t afford me. Is that all, or do you need some charcoal?”
“Uh, no. I’m good.”
Crash rang up the sale, then came back around to the front of the counter and picked up wherever he’d left off. “Another regular?” I asked.
“I dunno. He’s shopped here a few times, but there’s something in his vibe that rubs me wrong. He’s always buying bouncebacks, curse deflection stuff. Which raises the question—look down, there you go—is he really surrounded by people who continually fling hexes and whammies his way, and if so, what did he do to deserve it? Or is he just paranoid? Either way, I’m not exactly itching to add him on Facebook.”
Crash grabbed my chin and tilted my face up. I held my breath while he leaned over me and put his face right in mine to check the sides of my hair for length. He gave his gum an annoyed crack and took another quarter inch off one side.
Had he felt my aura spike when Miss Mattie showed up, or had the creepy guy’s vibes thrown enough interference from out on the landing to cover it? Hard to say—but my guess was, Crash would’ve had a comment or two if he’d known I was just chatting with his long-lost neighbor. Why had she bothered to talk to me just to tell me it wasn’t wussy to ask for help? I was well aware of how much help my hair needed—and I’d already resigned myself to the Crash treatment.
Overprotective, I guess.
Crash traded the scissors and comb for the little jar of hair stuff and rubbed some paste between his palms. “I know you can’t be bothered to style it—”
“Not necessarily.”
“—but humor me just for today.”
He worked the paste through my hair and tweaked it. I used to put my ’hawk up with Elmer’s glue and egg whites. I could manage a dab of paste.
“Yeah, not bad. I wanna give you a trim in a couple of weeks when the front has a chance to recover from the chop shop.”
“Uh, how much do I owe you?”
Crash waved it off. “Never mind. It’s enough to know you won’t be scaring my customers away. So what else was on your agenda today?
Did you need any actual supplies?”
Bob Zigler had downsized my stealth exorcism kit to a repurposed pocket-sized breath spray and an emptied out Chap Stick tube. I was at the point where I could zap a repeater with a quarter teaspoon of Florida Water and a pinch of herbs, and I had enough sandalwood powder to last me through Christmas. Still, if Crash wasn’t going to accept money for the haircut, I figured I should probably buy something. “I dunno. I’ll look around.”
What would he stand to make the most off if I bought it? The stat-uettes, probably. They were the biggest ticket items in the whole store. If I bought one, though, he’d probably look for it the next time he came to visit—and if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s clutter.
Throws too many shadows.
Also, he’d probably ask me why I wanted to buy Ganesh in the first place, given that I’m agnostic. It’d be a lot easier to simply drop a few twenties on his floor when he wasn’t looking, but in all likelihood they’d end up in the pocket of the bearded guy, or someone just like him.
I turned and scratched my head, wondered when the last time was I’d washed my hair. Then I remembered the paste, and
then
I laid my eyes on a row of books. Books had a decent markup, right? And I might actually find some use for them. “What do you have that’s recent?”