Dreamwalker (2 page)

Chapter Three

Through a combination of boredom, lack of sleep, and the monotone drone of the Greyhound's diesel, Pete fell sound asleep during the last leg into Atlantic City.

He didn't have a mansion dream this time. It couldn't be a mansion dream because
she
was in it. Dream Girl from last night's suspension bridge escape was back.

Pete's continuing dream storylines did not have continuing characters, not characters with clarity. Except for her. Since the middle of last summer, Dream Girl, as he called her, made regular appearances. Usually she co-starred in adventure dreams, but never during excursions to the mansion. He assumed she was some amalgamation of attributes and feelings about girls he had dated, part high school girlfriend, part teenage fantasy, and part a girl that he met one summer when his family spent a week at Lake Placid. The dreams, though never sexual, were always sensual. The dreams she graced had an added, soft emotional tone, no matter what the setting. Their connection was near telepathic and instantaneous. To ask her name seemed superfluous.

In this dream, the two of them were at some subconscious knock-off of the Bronx Zoo. She walked with Pete between exhibits, holding his hand. They passed out of the shade and the sunlight lit a halo around her golden hair . She closed her eyes and gave one of her radiant smiles.

“Could it be more perfect?” she said.

He held her calfskin-soft hand in both of his. “Not likely.”

At the grizzly habitat, only a low picket fence separated the public from the shaggy brown bear. The big bear ambled over to several onlookers and stretched its head over the fence top. The patrons reached out and ruffled the animal's thick coat. It closed its eyes in blissful happiness.

They stopped at the fence and Dream Girl scratched the bear under its chin. Pete rubbed the side of its head. The silky fur ran through his fingers. The bear smelled of cinnamon and campfires.

Pete felt a wet nudge at the base of his neck and turned around. The other patrons were gone, but a zebra stood behind him on the path. A giraffe bent down and rubbed its head against Dream Girl's shoulder. She turned from the bear and sighed.

“I was wrong,” she said. “It could be more perfect.”

Pete looked across at her and smiled. Then a sudden force tossed him straight up in the air. When he fell back to the ground…

…he was sitting in the Greyhound bus again. It lurched to a stop in front of a retro 60's bus station. A neon sign read ATLANTIC CITY. He shook himself awake.

The day's bus trip had convinced him of a two things. First, his stiff neck said that bus seats were ergonomically unsound places to sleep. Second, he knew why people became so enamored with cars. The boring trip took over ten excruciating hours, a lot longer than driving.

Guilt had forced him to call his parents at the last stop. He tried to explain the inexplicable to them and failed miserably. His father kept asking if he was on some kind of drugs. He assured them he was all right. He didn't ask them for anything, except to clean out his dorm room and withdraw him from college for the semester. To their chagrin, he also told them that, no, he wasn't sure about next semester either. He told them he'd call again.

“Atlantic City!” the driver called out. “All out for Atlantic City.”

Pete got up, grabbing his backpack from the seat next to him. The setting sun shone in his eyes through the bus windows. He followed one other transient soul out to the parking lot. Seven remained on board for points unknown beyond the seaside Vegas.

The other traveler was an Army PFC in camouflage fatigues. The sharp-looking, black man was about Pete's age. As he left the bus, a middle-aged couple standing at the edge of the station spied him. The man wore a button-down, white shirt and a pair of gray dress pants that tried to hide their age behind razor sharp creases. But frayed cuffs could not dispel the man's dignity. The large woman had on high-heeled shoes and a matching bright yellow dress that afforded no slimming qualities. A huge smile lit her soft face. She spread her arms out wide. Her husband ducked to avoid an inadvertent backhanding.

“Leonard!” she screamed. “My baby!”

Leonard smiled as if he just smelled home cooking. He started walking toward his parents, but the closure rate did not satisfy his mother. Arms still spread like a braking albatross, she came running to him with the short steps her dress and high heels permitted, body parts rolling up and down under her billowing clothes. Her husband followed a few safe, measured steps back. In contrast to his ebullient wife, his face betrayed no emotion.

Leonard's mother's arms engulfed her son and she squeezed him like a grape in a big yellow wine press. The driver dropped a long, green, military duffle bag at Leonard's feet.

“My baby boy's done come home,” the mother sang, rocking him back and forth. She released him and held his shoulders. “Safe and sound!”

From behind her, Leonard's father extended his calloused hand to his son.

“Welcome home, son,” his father said.

Leonard reached around his mother and grasped his father's hand. They exchanged one solid downward shake.

“Good to be back, Pa,” he said. “I told you I'd make it okay.”

“Proud of you, son,” the father said, releasing Leonard's hand. The threat of tears welled up in his eyes. The father reached down and picked up Leonard's duffle bag.

“Let's get you home, son.”

The reunited family walked away from the station. Leonard's mother talked incessantly. Leonard just smiled and nodded, a tacit admission of the futility of attempting to wedge in a response. Leonard's father followed a step behind, proud and straight, duffle bag slung over his shoulder. Out of the line of sight of his family, he finally allowed the edges of his mouth to enjoy the slightest upward curl.

The door to the bus hissed closed. The diesel engine rumbled and the vehicle departed to its next destination. It passed Pete and belched an extra puff of black smoke from the tailpipe as Pete's parting gift. Standing there on the near empty street, in a strange city without friends or family, he'd never felt so isolated.

The siren song of legalized gambling enthralled Atlantic City in the 1990s. City leaders approved casino gambling, hoping to rekindle the city's 1950s glory days as a prime vacation destination. They saw a future where the shuttered boardwalk businesses would reopen, hotels would rebuild and refill. New casino jobs would end the chronic unemployment. The city would arrest the decay that had slowly eaten it alive.

At least had been the plan.

Instead, the city became schizophrenic. Across Atlantic Avenue on the bus station's right glowed the promised new Atlantic City. Towering buildings sporting “Taj Mahal” and “Bally's” signs beckoned with bright lights and the assurance of quick payouts. Expensive cars dropped the well-coiffed at red carpets. Busses disgorged pensioners ready to strike it rich.

The uninviting streets to the left offered none of the above. The four lanes of Atlantic Avenue formed an impermeable barrier to the vitality and cash that flowed through the casinos. The high-rises ended as abruptly as the Cliffs of Dover and west of Atlantic Avenue nothing stood taller than three stories. Dim streetlights, spaced far apart, left most of them in forgiving, cloaking shadows.

VPD warning lights flashed in his brain. A few blocks from the bus station and he'd be lost for good with his poor sense of direction. With no idea where he was, and no idea where to go, he waited for the inspiration that drew him here to point the way.

A breeze blew in from the sea past the casinos. A white plastic shopping bag skittered westward. He figured he wasn't called here for the gaming. Pete turned from the boardwalk and walked into the grittier neighborhood.

The world west of Atlantic Avenue was gray and black. The overcast sky masked the sun. Tightly packed buildings ran the whole block with no alleys between them. Most were three stories and narrow, single-family homes long comfortable with housing many more than that. The decaying buildings wore their faded paint like shabby coats and lined each street like the homeless at a soup kitchen. Some buildings were completely boarded up. Others had only one window covered, reminding Pete of a boxer's eye swollen shut after a punishing round. Signs on the street proclaimed it a “Drug Free Zone,” indicators that it most certainly was not.

People eyed Pete with suspicion as he passed. He was an outsider, and they all seemed to know it.

The farther he penetrated the dying neighborhood, the gloomier he felt. He was in a strange city with nowhere to live and no source of income. After the bus ticket purchase and obtaining a roadside lunch that still sat leaden in his belly, he estimated he had two-hundred fifty dollars in the bank. In retrospect, following his VPD was a dumb idea.

He trudged down the street. His backpack weighed a thousand pounds. He needed a plan.

Chapter Four

In another corner of Atlantic City, Prosperidad sat motionless across from her client. Two burning tapers reflected in her brown eyes and banished the darkness to the round table's edge. Her floral head wrap draped down across the shoulders of her matching dress. A wooden cross dangled from her neck on a length of rough twine. Her chocolate skin glistened in the dancing light.

A chicken's foot, some small bones, and a braid of hair sat jumbled in the table's center. Prosperidad stared transfixed at the talismans. Her hands passed over the assemblage with a quick inward dart followed by a slow retreat, as if drawing some unseen power from them.

“The signs will not please you,” the seer said. Her gaze never left the table. Her words sang with a thick Caribbean lilt. “A dreamwalker comes. Your plans may be in danger. The future grows more cloudy.”

From the darkness on the table's far side, her client's countenance appeared in the candlelight. The thin, black face sported a moustache and goatee. Long dreadlocks hung Medusa-like past his high cheekbones. The chain around his neck swayed forward, propelled by the weight of a gold, twin-snake medallion. The whites of his eyes glowed in stark contrast to his jet-black skin.

“This dreamwalker,” Jean St. Croix said with a Haitian accent, “where is he from?”

“He traveled far,” Prosperidad answered, “but is here already. He influences the bones.” She pointed at the tabletop.

“He is powerful, this one?” St. Croix asked. His eyes narrowed and he leaned into the table, as if to draw more details from the seer.

“Only in the other world,” Prosperidad said. “But he is unaware of his strength.”

St. Croix gave a predatory smiled and nodded. After so many years in his service, Prosperidad could read that expression. St. Croix now contemplated dark, despicable deeds and relished the thoughts.

“He won't live to learn what he can do,” St. Croix said. He pulled his head back from the circle of light. Beads clicked against beads in the darkness as he left the reading room.

Prosperidad had not told him all. Jean St. Croix was an unpredictable man, and often held accountable those who delivered bad news. So she kept the disconcerting, ambiguous part of her divination from him, just in case. But she'd seen a river of blood. Whose, she couldn't say.

She hoped her silence ensured it wouldn't be her own.

Last month, she'd called upon the Antelope Spirit to bring a deliverer, someone who could halt the wicked events unfolding at St. Croix's hand. Could this dreamwalker be the one? For the sake of the city, she hoped so. But the one she saw was so young…

He would be heartbreaking to sacrifice.

Chapter Five

Darkness consumed the rough edge of Atlantic City as Pete walked deeper into the town. The force that drew him east from Ithaca now drew him back northwest along Tennessee Avenue.

A third of the way across one street, Pete caught a flash of yellow from the corner of his eye. A taxi came careening around the corner.

The yellow Crown Victoria had seen better days, but not in the current decade. It rode low on worn-out springs, which all but collapsed on the far side as it squealed through the high speed turn. The generic, black-stenciled letters on the door read ISLAND CAB CO, with a pair of crossed palm trees below it, one white and one black. The driver was barely visible over the steering wheel, just a rapid succession of hands as the cabby overcorrected to force the wheezing four-door to hold the road.

Pete leapt back. The bumper of the city cab grazed his leg. The fleeting impact sent him sprawling against the curb.

“
Son of a bitch!”
Pete said.

The cracked taillights disappeared down another street.

“Welcome to Atlantic City,” he said to himself.

Pete picked himself up out of the stinking gutter and flicked something damp and gray from the leg of his jeans. He didn't want to know what it was. Or had been.

He crossed the street. This wasn't Panera Bread territory. Too much risk and too little disposable income. The mom-and-pop stores he passed were remnants of businesses once vibrant, before Atlantic City flat-lined and needed casinos for a pacemaker. A corner grocery, a liquor store, a barber shop. All clearly had regular business. He guessed that the liquor store had the most. But the days of reinvesting profits into paint and plaster were long gone. The tired storefronts, beaten by the summer sun and salt air, bent under the weight of decades of customers. For these dowager queens of the business world, no longer enamored with outside appearance, waking each day and seeing cash was victory enough.

The wafting smell of garlic and tomatoes reminded him he hadn't eaten decent food all day. Spaghetti and meatballs suddenly sounded like manna from Heaven.

The mouthwatering scent floated over from a small Italian restaurant on the bottom floor of a two-story building up ahead. This corner building was still in surprisingly good repair. The windows were clean and the paint around the frames still had some gloss. Soft lighting lit the inviting interior like a vintage oil painting.

The large plate glass window in front had DISTEPHANO'S painted on it in gold letters. Rows of round tables crossed the black and white tile floor. Red and white checkered cloths draped each table complemented by a centerpiece of salt and pepper shakers, a flickering votive candle, and a jar of crushed red peppers, practically a set from
The Godfather.

A sign in the bottom left corner of the window read:

APARTMENT FOR RENT

He looked up at the windows on the floor above the restaurant. The apartment had to be a walkup from DiStephano's. In this neighborhood, it couldn't cost much.

“I've got to start looking somewhere,” he said to himself.

He entered the restaurant. The endemic smell of garlic and other spices sent his stomach grumbling in anticipation of hot food. It was 6:25, and the restaurant was empty. He walked to the back table where a portly man in a stained white apron and black pants shuffled papers and smacked a calculator with fingers that could double as sausages. Pete slung his pack to the floor.

The man looked to be in his late 50s. Gray nearly replaced the black in his short hair. Under a prominent Roman nose, his thick moustache had yet to yield to the silver onslaught. He huffed a series of short, sharp, frustrated sighs.

“Excuse me,” Pete said.

The man didn't even look up. He signed the bottom of one page
Silvio DiStephano
and set it aside.

“You sitta up front,” he said, pointing to a table across the room. “Maria take you order.” The accent was first generation Italian, the English absorbed through a New York City filter.

“No, sir,” Pete said. “I was asking about the apartment.”

The restaurateur looked up at Pete for the first time and sized him up top to bottom.

“You need apartment? Is one bedroom over store. No pets. Furnished,
un poco.
C
apisce
?”

Pete nodded. Everything he owned sat in the pack at his feet. Furnished sounded good, even
poco
furnished, whatever that meant.

“What's the rent?” he asked, afraid of the answer.

Mr. DiStephano looked him over again, this time a deeper assessment, eying him with a hint of recognition.

“You just get here, no?”

“Right off the bus,” Pete replied.

Mr. DiStephano made a fist and pounded the table, as if celebrating his insight. He smiled mightily.

“You need job,” he announced. “Apartment is free with job. You do some prep, you do some dish. Minimum wage. Cash on Friday.
Va bene?”

Another stroke of good fortune? A job and housing all in one stop. Of course, Pete could see a lot of downsides. “Cash on Friday” meant he was working off the books, and from the looks of the paperwork mess in front of the owner, that was in a business where the books were a distant memory. He had a feeling that the days would be exhausting, and living upstairs meant he would probably be on call for anyone who missed work.

But it was dark outside now, and the night promised to be cold. He could scrounge a meal for dinner and he would have a roof over this head. Those imperatives overrode any misgivings. And that same intuition that told him what city to travel to, and which way to walk, voiced no objections to the idea.

Anyway,
he thought,
this place is dead. I handled hundreds of students per hour slinging dirty dishes at me in the Ithaca cafeteria. How much business could they do here?

“I'll take it,” Pete said.

Mr. DiStephano stood up. He had a half-foot on Pete easy.

“I'm Papa,” he said. He pointed a finger at Pete. “Dishwasher is hard work.”

He grabbed Pete's hands and flipped them palm up.

“Ah, soft little lamb's hands. You no work all your life.”

Pete gritted his teeth. He had done his high school fast food stint and washed dishes to repay Ithaca College. Cutting lawns. Shoveling driveways. He'd worked his ass off since he was fifteen.

“I can pull my weight,” he said, pulling his hands free. “I've worked in a restaurant before, doing dishes and working the prep line.” He embellished his verbal resume a bit to make Papa regret his snap judgment.

The older man smiled and sat back down at his table. He pulled a single key from his pocket. It had the worn, gouged edges earned over a long life. He tossed the key in front of Pete.

“Room on right, top of stairs. Dump you bag.” The man looked up at the clock on the wall and pointed. Papa DiStephano was going to be a big pointer. “You work five to close. You late already. I dock you half day pay. You no late no more,
capisce?”

Late?
Pete thought.
Five seconds ago, I didn't have a job. Now I'm working a half-shift for free.

He bit his tongue. At least he wasn't sleeping in the street. “Be right back.”

He bounded up the stairway at the rear of the restaurant. At the top of the steps, he used the key on the solid wood door to the right.

It was about two-thirds the size of his dorm room. Diffused street lighting bled in through a small dirty window in the far wall. Pete learned the English translation for
poco
. There was one bed, one dresser, and a closet-sized bathroom that ate into the limited living space. He checked the bed. The mattress was firm, the sheets were clean. This place would suffice while he figured out why he was here at all.

He dropped his pack on the floor and opened it. He untied his running shoes and traded them for the greasy work boots he always wore in the cafeteria. He shed his sweat shirt and put on a plain white T-shirt. He'd show him the old man knew how to dress for work in a kitchen.

He left the room and closed the door behind him. The thrum of voices rose up the stairwell. He descended into the restaurant and stopped in shock. The place was half full.

Two women bustled between tables, jotting orders down on small pads of paper. Boisterous laughter erupted from one table and customers at the adjoining two joined in on the joke. The front door barely closed before a new couple yanked it open again. The customers wore the battered ball caps and faded jeans of the working class. The streets were near empty on Pete's way here. Now all of Atlantic City chowed down at DiStephano's.

He dashed down the steps and through the black swinging doors to the kitchen. A white cloth apron hit him square in the face. It smelled of bleach and cheap detergent.

“Petey!” Papa DiStephano said. “Whatta you not understand about ‘already late'? Hit the pots before you lose whole day pay.”

The tight kitchen bustled with activity. Papa D wielded a chopping knife over a wood-surfaced prep table at lightning speed. To his rear a bank of ovens and stoves that dated from the 1930s baked and boiled and sent a plume of steam into the ceiling vents. To the right of the kitchen, a huge stainless steel table led to an industrial dishwasher.

Pete was familiar with the type. A rack of dishes went in on one side and a conveyor pulled them out the other, hot and clean. The table overflowed with huge empty pots and pans, each encrusted with tomato-based residue that had been burned to a charcoal solid. Those were a bitch to clean.

He slid the apron over his head and moved to the loading end of the dishwasher. He grabbed the hanging spray nozzle and shot a rinsing spray at the pots. The stream splashed back and soaked his chest in water and marinara sauce.

He looked down at the dripping mess on his apron.

“Welcome again to Atlantic City,” he whispered.

A commanding woman in black walked into the kitchen to post two paper order slips at the prep table. Her long black hair was swept up in a bun and secured with a tortoiseshell clip. She eyed Pete in the corner dishwashing hole.

“So,” she said to Papa D as he stirred the world's biggest pot of minestrone, “where's Stevie?”

“He call in. Again. He no work here no more.”

“Who's this?” She pointed over at Pete with her thumb.

Papa D looked guilty.

“He's the new boy, Mama” he said, as if it should have been obvious to her. “He take apartment, too.”

Mama D raised one penciled eyebrow as she inspected Pete. Even through the cloud of steam from the dishwasher, Pete could see she was not happy. He might have passed Papa's cursory interview, but he had not passed his hers.

“You checked him out?” she asked Papa D.

“
Va bene
,” Papa D replied, turning back to the bubbling soup. “He check out okay. He work hard.”

She rolled her eyes, shrugged, and went back out the kitchen door.

She had to be the wife. Who else would treat Papa D as an equal? And apparently new dishwashers in the kitchen were a common thing. A tribute to Papa D's management style, no doubt.

Pete blasted a pot with the sprayer hose. He would not see the outside of the kitchen again until 1:00 a.m.