She listened to the message of Minty Fresh weeping after her again, a message which she had no intention of erasing, ever. The next message was from him, too, and hoping there might be begging—she could use some begging—she listened, but as soon as she heard the words “motherfuckin’ forces of darkness and whatnot,” she cut off the message with a punch of the callback button.
8
Friends of Dorothy
Mike Sullivan found himself waking up every morning thinking of the ghost, Concepción, and again, every night before he went to sleep. He made a special effort to wash his coveralls, so they were sparkling white speckled with International Orange, which didn’t come off in the wash, and he polished the scuffs off his hard hat with car wax. As he shaved in the morning, he practiced the expression on his face he would have when he told her the fate of her Russian count, and all day, every day, throughout the day, he tried to be prepared for her appearance. He had spent five days painting the structure under the roadway before she returned.
“Oh, Señor Sullivan, I am so happy to see you,” said Concepción, swinging around one of the trusses under the bridge like a real girl might swing around a lamp post in the park on a joyful summer day in a musical comedy, her skirts flaring out around her.
“I’m happy to see you, too,” he said. “Please call me Mike.”
“Mike it is, then,” she said with a shy smile and a fluttering of her eyelashes. If she’d had a fan, she would have flirted from behind it. “What have you found out of my Nikolai?”
All of Mike’s preparation had not prepared him for this, for a ghost that was light of spirit. A sullen, grieving, heartbroken ghost, yes, but not this bright and laughing Conchita who skipped amid the heavy steel like a feather on the wind.
He checked his safety lines, then took off his hard hat and held it over his heart, just as he had practiced. Then he told her. Watching the light go out of her eyes made him feel as if he’d just kicked the angel of mercy in the mouth.
“A horse?” she said.
“Sorry.”
“A horse? A horse! A goddamn horse! I wept for two centuries and he fell off a horse six weeks after he sailed away?”
“Really sorry,” Mike said. “But he was riding across Siberia to St. Petersburg to get permission from the Czar to marry you when he fell.”
“Nobody just falls off a horse. Who falls off a horse?”
“It said on the Internet that he snapped his neck when he hit the ground, so he didn’t suffer.”
“All this time, I thought I might have said something wrong, I worried he had fallen in love with another, that the Czar had imprisoned him for breaking the rules of trade, but no, for him it was over in an instant. He didn’t have to go all the way to Siberia to fall off a horse. We had horses here. My father had men who could have pushed him off a fucking horse.”
“Excuse me, Conchita,” said Mike, “but that doesn’t sound like the Spanish lady who—”
“What do you know about Spanish ladies? You, with your stupid bucket, you, spattered with your orange paint.”
Mike swallowed hard and put his hard hat back on. “But you can rest now, right? You can be at peace.”
“Peace!” Her dress and hair whipped around her as if in a hurricane wind, although it was a calm day on the bay. “Oh, there will be no peace. I am two hundred years grieving, it will take at least a hundred to get over my anger. Oh, yes, señor, there will be haunting. Such haunting as no one has ever seen. If anyone in those cars passing above is of Russian blood, I shall visit such horrors upon them, they will wish they had fallen off a horse. They will beg to fall off a horse.”
“But he loved you,” said Mike. He was grateful to whatever circuit breaker in his brain had stopped from telling her that she was beautiful when she was angry, for, although she was, she was also scaring the shit out of him, nearly as badly as the first time she’d appeared to him.
She stopped raging for a moment. “Do you think so?”
“It says so in all the books. His love for you is legendary. A few years ago they brought earth from his grave to mingle with yours in Benicia. Your name is inscribed on his tombstone in Russia, with the words ‘May they forever be together.’ ”
“Oh,” she said. She bit a nail, kept a delicate finger against her lower lip, as if to keep it from trembling.
“I’m very sorry, Conchita,” Mike said.
She smiled again, all for him. “I know. You are my gallant champion. You have done as I asked and I have given you no thanks.”
Mike shook his head. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t think of anything to say, he was having trouble even swallowing—being forgiven for not being able to change history had touched him more than he would have ever guessed.
She reached out and caressed his cheek and he was sure that this time he could feel her touch.
“I must go now,” she said. “But I will come to you again, if I may?”
Mike nodded.
“And I must ask you, my gallant champion, for another favor.”
“Anything,” he managed to say without his voice breaking.
“There is another one here on the bridge that would speak with you, but if you don’t wish to hear him, I will understand, my champion.”
“As long as I’m hooked in, I suppose it will be okay. No sudden surprises, okay?”
“I will send him now,” she said. “I will see you soon. Thank you, my love.”
“Wait, your what?” Mike said, but she had stepped into a beam as if stepping behind a curtain and was gone.
Before he could pick up his paint bucket to move on, a guy in a suit and a wide-brimmed fedora floated down from the roadway and settled in a seated position on the beam where Mike was standing.
“Nice-looking broad,” said the guy in the hat.
Mike realized that at the appearance of the second ghost, even though he was braced for it, he peed just a tiny bit in his shorts. Just a bit. There’s something about being suspended over a two-hundred-foot drop that snaps you to attention, and in a second he was back in control, dealing with a weird situation in the only way you could, weirdly.
“I thought you knew her,” Mike said. “She brought you to me, right?”
“Well, yeah, but I’ve never seen her. Persons are less put together on this side of the bridge, you don’t so much see each other as you get an impression of them as they go by, and the impression I get most of the time is they’re loopy as a snake salad. Not this broad, though.”
“So you two talked?”
“Sure, you could say talked. Ghosts mostly communicate by odor. Gotta tell you, you got a house that smells like farts, you got a haunted house. Next time you think, oh man, Grandma farted, think again, it might be your dead grandpa. Unless your grandma eats a lot of cabbage, then it’s probably her. Cabbage can be a rough road for old people. But’s there’s good, too. Every time you smell peaches, a ghost just got his rocks off. I should have known that broad was a dish before I even saw her, she smelled like peach pie.”
Mike wanted to punch him. The ghost looked as solid as any person, sitting there on the beam, his feet dangling, ships and wind surfers passing two-hundred feet below, and Mike wanted to punch him right in the mouth for saying Concepción smelled like peach pie—like ghost come. Instead he swung his paint mop, which is what they used most of the time—a rough, fist-sized mop on the end of a two foot stick, to spot paint the bridge —swung it backhand, hoping he could knock off the ghost’s stupid ghost fedora. Instead the mop just whiffed right through the shade and flung paint off into space. The ghost didn’t even notice.
Exasperated, but trying to hide it, Mike said, “Well, why are you here? Why did she send you to me. She said it’s difficult for you to appear this way, so why?”
“Whoa, don’t get sore, I’m getting there.”
“Well, get there.”
“Fine,” said the ghost, thumbing the lapels of his jacket. “You don’t have to hit me with a brick.”
I was working in the Naval Investigations Service out of Chi-town when we first got word of a potential enemy propaganda operation called the Friends of Dorothy operating on the West Coast, probably originating in Frisco. I know, What’s Naval Investigations doing in Chicago, a thousand miles from the nearest ocean? That’s the slickness of our strategy, see: Who’s gonna suspect navy cops in the middle of Cow Town on the Prairie, am I right? Of course I am.
Anyways, we get word that new troops shipping out to the Pacific out of San Fran are being approached on the down low by this Friends of Dorothy bunch, who are playing up on their prebattle jitters, trying to cause some desertions, maybe even recruit spies for Tojo.
So the colonel looks around the office, and as I am the most baby-faced of the bunch, he decides to send me out to Frisco under cover as a new recruit to see if I can get the skinny on this Dorothy and her friends, before we got another Axis Annie or Tokyo Rose on our hands, only worse, because this Dorothy isn’t just taking a shot at our morale on the radio, she’s likely running secret operations.
I tell the colonel that despite my youthful mug, I am an expert on the ways of devious dames and I will have this Dorothy in the brig before he can say Hirohito is a bum, maybe faster. So five days later I find myself on the dog-back streets of San Fran with about a million other sailors, soldiers, and marines waiting to ship out.
Well, San Fran is getting to be known as Liberty City, as this is the spot where many guys are going to see the good old U S of A for the last time ever, so in spite of restrictions and whatnot all along the Barbary Coast, every night the town is full of military guys out for one last party, looking for a drink or a dame or the occasional crap game. It’s a tradition by this time that the night before you ship out, you go up to the Top of the Mark, the nightclub on the top floor of the Mark Hopkins Hotel on California Street, where a guy can have a snort whilst looking at the whole city from bridge to bridge, and if he’s lucky, a good-smelling broad will take him for a twirl around the dance floor and tell him that everything is going to be okay, even though most guys are suspicious that it’s not. And these are such dames as are doing this out of patriotism and the kindness of their heart, like the USO, so there’s no hanky-panky or grab-assing.
Word has it that the Friends of Dorothy are recruiting at the Top of the Mark, so I don a set of navy whites and pea coat like a normal swabby, and stake out a spot by the doorman outside the hotel. As guys go by, I am whispering, “Friends of Dorothy,” under my breath, like a guy selling dirty postcards or tickets to a sold-out Cubs game (which could happen when they make their run for the pennant). And before long, the cable car stops and off steps this corn-fed jarhead who is looking around and grinning at the buildings and the bay at the end of the street like he’s never seen water before, and he’s sort of wandering around on the sidewalk like he’s afraid of the doorman or something, and I gives him my hush-hush Friends of Dorothy whisper.
So Private Hayseed sidles up to me and says back, “Friends of Dorothy?”
“You’re damn skippy, marine,” says I.
And just like that, the kid lights up like Christmas morning and starts pumping my hand like he’s supplying water to douse the Chicago fire, or maybe the Frisco fire, as I hear that they also have a fire, but I cannot but think that it was not a real fire, as Frisco is clearly a toy town. Kid introduces himself as Eddie Boedeker, Jr., from Sheep Shit, Iowa or Nebraska or one of your more square-shaped, corn-oriented states, I don’t remember. And he goes on how he is nervous and he has never done anything like this before, but he’s about to go off to war and might never come home, so he has to see— and it’s all I can do to calm the kid down and stand him up against the wall beside me like he’s just there to take in the night air and whatnot. You see, I am dressed like a sailor, and he is a marine, and although technically, swabbies and jarheads are in the same branch of the service, it’s a time-honored tradition that when they are in port they fight like rats in a barrel, which is something I should have perhaps thought of when I picked my spy duds.
So on the spot I compose a slogan of war unity so as to shore up my cover. “Fight together or lose alone, even with no-necked fucking jarheads.” I try it out on the doorman like I’m reading it off a poster and he nods, so I figure we’re good to go.
“C’mon, marine,” I says to the Private Hayseed, “I’ll buy you a drink.”
So we go up the elevator to the Top of the Mark, and I order an old-fashioned because there’s an orange slice in it and I’m wary of scurvy, and I ask the kid what he’ll have, and he says, “Oh, I ain’t much for drinking.”
And I says, “Kid, you’re about to ship out to get your guts blown out on some godforsaken coral turd in the Pacific and you’re not going to have a drink before you go, what are you, some kind of moron?”
And the kid provides that, no, he’s a Methodist, but his ma has a record of the Moron Tabernacle Choir singing “Silent Night” that she plays every Christmas and so I figure the answer is yes and I order the kid an old-fashioned with an extra orange slice hoping it might help cure stupid as well as scurvy. But I also figure that old Eddie here is exactly the kind of dim bulb that Dorothy and her cohorts will try to go for, so I press on, pouring a couple more old-fashioneds into him, until the kid is as pink-faced as a sunburned baby and gets a little weepy about God and country and going off to war, while I keep trying to slide in questions about Dorothy, but the kid keeps saying maybe later, and asks if maybe we can’t go hear some jazz, as he has never heard jazz except on the radio.
Well, the bartender provides as there is an excellent horn player over in the Fillmore, which is only a hop on the cable car, so I flip him four bits for the tip and I drag Eddie down to the street and pour him onto the cable car, which takes us up the hill and over to the Fillmore, which is where all the blacks live now, as it used to be a Jap neighborhood until they shipped them off to camps and the blacks moved in from the South to work in the shipyards bringing with them jazz and blues and no little bit of dancing.
And as we’re getting off the car, I spots some floozies standing outside the club right below a War Department poster with a picture of a similar dame that says, “She’s a booby trap! They can cure VD, but not regret.”
And as we’re walking up, I says, “Hey, toots, you pose for that poster?” And one of the rounder dames says, “I might have, sailor, but I ain’t heard no regrets yet,” which gives me a laugh, but makes Private Eddie just look down and smile into his top button. He whispers to me on the side, “I ain’t never done anything like this before.”
I figured as much, but I say to the kid, “That’s what the Friends of Dorothy are for, kid,” just taking a shot in the dark.
And he gets a goofy grin and says, “That’s what the guy said.”
And I say, “What guy?” but by that time we’re through the door and the band is playing, the horn player going to town on the old standard “Chicago,” to which I remove my sailor’s hat, because it is, indeed, my kind of town. So we drink and listen to jazz and laugh at nothing much, ’cause the kid doesn’t want to think about where he’s going, and he doesn’t want to think about where he came from, and I can’t figure out how to get behind this Dorothy thing with the band playing. After a few snorts, the kid even lets a dame take him out on the dance floor, and because he more resembles a club-footed blind man killing roaches than a dancer, I head for the can to avoid associating with him, and on my way back, I accidently bump into a dogface, spilling his drink. And before I can apologize, when I am still on the part that despite his being a pissant, lamebrained, clumsy, ham-handed army son of a bitch, it is a total accident that I bump into him and spill his drink, he takes a swing at me. And since he grazes my chin no
little, I am obliged to return his ministrations with a left to the fucking breadbasket and a right cross which sails safely across his bow. At which point, the entire Seventh Infantry comes out of the woodwork, and soon I am dodging a dozen green meanies, taking hits to the engine room, the galley, as well as the bridge, and my return fire is having little to no effect on the thirty-eleven or so guys what are wailing on me. I am sinking fast, about to go down for the count. Then two of the GIs go flying back like they are catching cannonballs, and then two more from the other side, and through what light I can see, Private Eddie Boedeker, Jr., wades into the GIs like the hammer of fucking God, taking out a GI with every punch, and those that are not punched are grabbed by the shirt and hurled with no little urgency over tables, chairs, and various downed citizens, and it occurs to me that I have perhaps judged the kid’s dancing chops too harshly, for while he cannot put two dance steps together if you paint them on the floor, he appears to have a right-left combination that will stop a panzer.
Before long, guys from all branches of service are exchanging opinions and broken furniture and I hear the sinister chorus of MP whistles, at which point I grab the kid by the belt and drag him backward through the tables and the curtain behind the stage and out into the alley, where I collapse for a second to collect my thoughts and test a loose tooth, and the kid bends over, hands on his knees, gasping for breath, laughing and spitting a little blood.
“So, kid,” I says. “You saved my bacon.” And I offer him a bloody-knuckled handshake.
Kid takes my hand and says, “Friends of Dorothy,” and pulls me into a big hug.
“Yeah, yeah, Friends of fucking Dorothy,” I say, slapping him on the back. “Speaking of which,” I say, pushing him off. “Let’s take a walk—”
“I gotta get back to Fort Mason,” the kid says. “It’s nearly midnight. The cable cars stop at midnight and I gotta ship out in the morning.”