Ghostlands

SIXTY-ONE

Life is loss, Cal Griffin had once told himself, amid the drifting flakes of ash coming off Magritte’s funeral pyre, by the waters of Lake Michigan. But he might as well have said, Love is loss, for the many lessons his life had given him.

Looking about him now, though, around the big table in the flickering candlelight redolent of vanilla, as they all shared a final dinner together-his sister, and Inigo, May Catches the Enemy, Larry Shango and Mama Diamond, Colleen and Doc, and Enid Blindman and Papa Sky-he felt confident he could add, And sometimes, it’s not.

They had weathered the Storm together, beaten it back and emerged with the only treasure that really counted, the human one.

Over in Iowa, Atherton was sweeping up after the whirlwind, and here outside Pine Ridge, Walter Eagle Elk and the other survivors were emerging out of the Stronghold into the good, fresh air, secure that nothing lurked any longer within the Six Grandfathers to steal away their lives and souls.

“Hey, quit hoggin’ the oregano,” Howard Russo demanded of Colleen, reaching across the table with his spidery grunter arm.

“Tell me,” she said, slapping his hand away, then sliding him the jar, “are you this rude because you’re an agent or a grunter, or both?”

“Lay off the grunters,” May Catches the Enemy shot back, laughing and warmly eyeing her son. “Can’t we all just get along?”

Inigo had chosen the place for their last meal and, being a kid, it stood as no surprise that he’d selected the Pine Ridge Pizza Hut. It had been shuttered since the Change, but Morris Cuts to Pieces had opened the place up for just this occasion, had fired up the woodstove and managed to cobble together a pretty decent pizza, all things considered, although chunks of buffalo steak were still a pretty sad substitute for pepperoni.

Odds were damn good he’d be seeing his fair share of business from now on, Cal reflected, considering that Rafe Dahlquist and Theo Siegel and Melissa Wade and the rest of the physics team from Atherton were now ensconced within the mountain (thanks to a portal opened up courtesy of Herman Goldman, bachelor-at-large), working alongside the rehumanized scientists of the former Source Project.

Ironic that, considering Theo and Melissa were now a grunter and flare respectively; two of the posthuman species, working alongside untransformed men and women to unlock the secrets of this fierce new universe.

Only dragons were unrepresented. But then, none of this would have come to pass if not for Ely Stern’s intervention.

Would they ultimately manage to tame the Source Energy, perhaps seal it away again?

Who could say?

But, whatever the outcome, it would no longer be magic; it would instead be what it had always been, truthfully-merely a further realm of science.

“You look thoughtful,” Colleen said to Cal. “Quit it.”

Cal grinned, and took another slice of pizza.

Later outside, Cal found Christina peering up at the night sky. Now that the moon was on the wane, Venus and Mars shone out clear and bright, in this sky that was as black as Lady Blade’s gleaming hair.

It was a mild night, and Cal realized that whether the winter was gentle or fierce, spring would soon enough be here. He wondered if the seasons would return to some semblance of normalcy, or if they would remain as unpredictable as they had been of late.

“The future’s just a ghost, you know,” Christina said, aware of Cal without turning back to look at him. “What you think you’re gonna have, how you think it’s gonna be…Just some mirage that waves at you in the heat, but you can’t ever touch it.”

Cal nodded, and thought of the life he once thought he’d have back in Manhattan, working for Ely Stern, watching Tina rise through the ranks of the American Ballet Theatre or some other preeminent company.

A phantom, nothing more, that had haunted and eluded them, like the future Jeff Arcott had envisioned of the Spirit Radio bringing a new birth of freedom to the land, with himself as its guiding spirit and patron saint. Arcott had pursued that illusion until it had destroyed him, rendered him a ghost, if he remained anything at all.

And all of them one way or another had been driven, shadowed and bedeviled by the memories of ones they’d lost, or never had at all.

Past and future, phantoms all…

Time to let go of all the ghosts, Cal thought, and at last come out of the Ghostlands.

Which was the whole world, until we let go…

“I can still be a dancer,” Christina said, to the night, to the stars. She turned to Cal, her feet never touching the ground, smooth as liquid. “Just a different kind, a new kind.”

“How’d you get so smart?” he asked her, drawing near.

She wafted to him, the only ghost her smile. “I was raised by smart people.”

His boots crunching on the parking lot gravel and the call of larks filling the daybreak air, Larry Shango found Mama Diamond on a bench outside the SuAnne Big Crow Boys and Girls Club. Now that folks were reclaiming the land, Chick Big Crow had been able to open the center again; this facility that federal money had built and that she’d dedicated to the memory of her daughter, a high school basketball star who’d spoken out against drugs and alcohol, who’d inspired hope in her people; the daughter lost to a traffic fatality before everyone in the world had shared in one great disaster.

“Guess not everything funded by the government was all bad,” Larry Shango said as he approached Mama Diamond. She was bundled up sitting in the brisk sun, watching Indian kids surge onto the playground; kids exuberant with the joy of being in the open again, of being alive.

“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.

“I’ve never seen the ocean, Mom,” he said finally, sneaking glances Christina’s way. “I’d sure like to.”

May Catches the Enemy, who was also Lady Blade and the Widow Devine, smiled knowingly.

On the ancient plains, under the sky that went on forever, Christina danced, and Enid Blindman and Papa Sky and Goldie played. Not to ward off anything or to forget anything, just for the sheer damn joy of it.

High above within the clouds, cruising in thermoclines exhaled by the sun-heated earth, the dragon peered down with raptor-keen eyes that could readily observe without any of them having the least knowledge of his gaze.

He felt a warmth that came, not from the fiery furnace kindled within him, but from another source entirely.

“Love” was not a word that Ely Stern ever used, and he did not use it here.

But even so, looking down on them, on the ones he had brought to this unforgiving land, the ones he had safeguarded and endangered, confounded and inspired…he smiled.

Then he banked in a great wide arc until he caught the wind and was uplifted by it.

Soon, he was far away, heading east.