A car went by, playing “Get Up 10” at top volume. The sound washed up against the houses and faded again as the driver steered past, his head turning to look at me on the curb. I pictured myself briefly through his eyes, the halo the streetlamp would make on my red hair. No—I’d forgotten I was blond now. With my pale arms I would only register as the white shape of a girl.
I imagined Robin like this, a bright, flaring afterimage, leaving behind a bedroom full of faces and a ghost waiting for a taxi.
The cab pulled up after half an hour or so, and I jumped up to keep the driver from hitting the horn. He was an old man, with the ruddy, broken-capillaried skin that you saw all over Vegas, Irish people who’d been under the desert sun too long.
“You going to the airport, you said?” he asked as I swung open the back door.
“Yeah, the Hertz rental.”
“You got any bags?”
“No.”
He started to turn around in the Floreses’ driveway. “You going to the airport and don’t have any bags?”
“I’m just going to rent a car.”
He looked at me in the rearview mirror. “Yeah? Kind of late to be renting. You going on some kind of trip?”
“I just need to get out of my sister’s house for a while,” I said. “I’m in town to visit her and she keeps taking the car and leaving me in the house by myself.”
“She take the car overnight?”
“No, I just…If she knew I was renting a car she’d want to know why, and it’d be a whole argument, and I don’t…” I shrugged. “Can I smoke in here?”
He tapped his thick fingers on the steering wheel. “Tell you what,” he said, after a few seconds, “you can come sit up here with me and open the window if I can play my music.”
“Deal,” I said immediately.
He pulled over on the neighborhood street and put his hazards on. I got out onto the sidewalk and shuffled over to the passenger-side door, sliding in beside him and pressing the button for the window.
“I’m Billy,” he said when I’d lit up, sticking his hand out.
I hesitated, then shook it. “I’m Alice,” I said, making up the name on the spot.
Billy shifted the car into gear. “You like Wanda Jackson, Alice?”
“I don’t know who that is,” I said truthfully.
“She invented rockabilly,” he said, taking out a CD case and prying it open one-handed. The woman on the cover had blue eye shadow up to her eyebrows and helmetlike ratted hair. He slid the CD into the dashboard’s mouth and turned up the volume.
“Please love me forever…”
“I met her once,” he told me over the sound of her voice. “In 1965. I didn’t know who she was then. I didn’t use to listen to popular music. Saw her again at the show she did in Tucumcari a few years back. She’s just as pretty as she ever was.” He gave me a sidelong glance. “How long you been in Albuquerque?”
“A few days.” I sucked on my cigarette. “I’m from Washington State. You?”
“I grew up here,” he said as I stuck my head out the open window. “Lived here all my life.”
The music swelled, and Wanda Jackson went into a final crescendo. The Nashville vibrato was impossible to talk over; it was almost operatic. I stared at the irregular shapes of darkened condos sliding past as Billy sped up on Tramway. A mini-storage building loomed like a boulder, widened as we met it, and shrank again in the side mirror. The movement of my face caught my attention, and I pursed my lips as the song ended. “Billy, what do you think about ghosts?” I said into the brief silence.
“About ghosts?” Billy repeated, keeping his eyes on the road. He had a long, straight wrinkle down his cheek, the only angular element in his otherwise lumpen face.
“Yeah.” I leaned back against the seat, loosening my shoulders to show that I wasn’t serious.
“I try not to think about them.” Billy came to a stop at a red light, jostling us.
“Have you ever met one?”
I watched him peel a sliver of his thumbnail away; it went too easily, with the consistency of bar soap. “I don’t know,” he said, putting his hands back on the wheel as the light turned green.
“You don’t know? That sounds like maybe you did.” I exhaled a long, pretty plume of smoke out of the window.
“Well, it was my grandmother,” Billy said. “She died when I was young. But for years after she died, I used to think she’d come sing to me, you know, just as I was falling asleep. Not any song I’d heard on the radio. It was in German. My parents figured I’d made it up—they’d never heard it either. But when I was a teenager we heard a recording of Elvis singing my song. ‘Can’t you see, I love you, please don’t break my heart in two…’ And I knew the words in German, I could sing right along with him. ‘Muß i’ denn, muß i’ denn, zum Städtele hinaus, Städtele hinaus…” That’s the name of the song in German, ‘Muß I Denn.’ I don’t even speak German. My grandmother never spoke it around my mother. She thought it would keep her from learning English, you see.”
I clasped my hands. “But she sang it to you. That’s so sweet.”
“That’s what you think, huh?” Billy said.
“You don’t think so? She sang you to sleep.”
“Well, let me just say: I believe when we die, we go to heaven. Or we go to hell. And my grandmother was a good person. I believe that too. How can I imagine that a loving God would confine her to half an existence here on Earth? I can’t believe that, Miss Alice. I have to believe that she is truly gone. So what was the thing that sang to me? I think it was the devil, or one of his emissaries.”
I rolled up the window and folded my hands in my lap. “Maybe you were just remembering. From when you were a baby. That’s nicer, isn’t it?”
Billy smiled. “If I could choose what to believe, I sure would choose that.”
“You can choose. I do it all the time. You can think exactly what you want to think. The thoughts make the person, you know.” I tapped him on the shoulder. “Ask me what I do.”
We were pulling up to the Hertz lot, and Billy distractedly searched the signs. “Well, I would if I could figure out where to go. There’s no entrance that I can see…Oh, there we go.” He looked over at me, recovering the conversation. “What do you do, Miss Alice?”
“I’m an actress,” I said, fooling myself even as I said it. “Now ask me where I’m from.”