Free The Afterlife by Gary Soto Page B

except a man who worked and came home to watch television? And Mom? A gossiper whose mouth was a bud of lines from dunking donuts into creamy coffee and talking too much. How I was wrong. That's just how parents were. My mom had warned me not to go to Club Estrella, while Dad, his hand on the remote control, offered up only his hangdog eyes.

    Soon we were entering Roeding Park from Olive Street. An unseen peacock howled.
    "Spooky," I remarked.
    Crystal had to laugh. "Like us, huh?" She laughed with a hand on her belly. "We're ghosts!"
    The wind rattled the eucalyptus and bent the thinnest branches. Leaves fluttered in the dark as they fell. Somewhere a swing squeaked. The door of a utility shed banged like a hammer. Though it was dark and the homeless were sleeping on cardboard the length of coffins, we weren't scared. The ducks weren't either. Some were quacking and waddling around, though they should have been asleep at the edges of their muddy pond. In a few hours, the ducks would be poking their bills into their feathery shoulders and riding the mossy water in search of food.
    We flowed over the wet lawn and, for the fun of it, rode a merry-go-round that was pushed by the wind. Crystal's hair flowed and her face was a blossom of happiness. I loved her. I wanted to say as much, but what good would it do? A lot, for me at least. But the time was not right; after all, we were in search of the place where she had died, for her body.

    We flew from that merry-go-round across the park. We stopped and hovered near a homeless man propped against a tree, shivering. A dirty blanket covered him up to his throat.
    "What's wrong with him?" Crystal asked, worried.
    The man was sick with fever and more than sick: He was a homeless guy who was dying.
    "He's dying," I answered.
    I stepped back, scared. His ghost was starting to peel away from his body. It started to rise, but I quickly got down on my knees and applied my stumps to cool the man's fever.
Don't die,
I begged.
Please don't die.
I touched his face with my stumps, pulled them away, and applied them again.
    I had never seen anyone die before, and I didn't want to start right then. I applied my cool ghostliness to his forehead. The man was funky smelling, his teeth nearly orange as Cheetos. I noticed that a part of his earlobe was gone. The man, it seemed, had had a rough life.
    I glanced over my shoulder. Crystal was biting the ends of her hair, a bad habit. Leaves were falling through her body. That seemed like a habit, too—things passing through us because we were ghosts with the weight of smoke.

    "Is he going to be okay?" Crystal asked.
    Okay?
I wondered.
Probably not. What man parks his body against a tree at night?
    Slowly the ghost that he was giving up receded back into his body. He moaned with relief and tossed his head side to side. His shivering began to lessen.
    I stood up and flowed to Crystal, and together we watched the man sleep, his fever having broken. His breathing was even, and when he cranked out a nasty snore, we had to laugh. He was sick, we knew, but in the morning he would have to figure out whether to drag himself to a clinic or just lie against the tree and wait for his ghost—his afterlife—to resurface and rise from his body. It was up to him.
    "Let's go," I suggested. "I don't know what else to do."
    It was still dark among the trees, whose tops were thrashing about, but I could tell that the sky was becoming pale in the east. Crystal led me through the park, confused about where she had parked her car. Then we found it by the tennis courts. Beads of dew frosted the front window. We approached slowly. Crystal lowered her head. If she could have produced tears, she would have dampened the lawn with her sadness.

    The police hadn't yet found her car or her body.
    "I can't look," Crystal cried. She spun away and walked inside a eucalyptus tree, its thickness absorbing her.
    I was full of distress, too. I considered walking inside the same