The Afterlife by Gary Soto Page B

finger at the peacock and made a chopping motion with his hand. He could have whacked and whacked, but his efforts would have been meaningless. His powerless hand had the weight of air. "So what goes?"
    I didn't understand.
    "We're dead, and now what?" he asked. He was examining the stumps of my arms and my legs that were almost all gone. The guy was not discreet. "You look like someone chopped part of you off. Is that how you died?"
    I shook my head. "Someone stabbed me."
    Robert pondered my murder for a moment, a hand smoothing his hair. "Someone stabbed me, too." He explained that it was over what mattered most to him—a bottle of wine.

    "And you lived?" I asked.
    "Oh, yeah. He stabbed me in the shoulder—the dummy missed my throat—and I hit him with a brick that dropped him pretty good. I finished my drink all by myself."
    So here was my new companion. I repeated my name again when he asked it, and informed him that I had been a ghost for two days, almost three. I grew fearful. I remembered that I didn't have much time before I would disappear altogether, just vanish. I still wanted to tell my mom and dad that I loved them, to see Angel and Eddie, the four Js, maybe Rachel. I started to walk away.
    "Where you going?" Robert asked.
    "Home."
    "Home," he repeated softly. He smacked his lips as if he could taste home.
    His longing was familiar. Crystal suffered from that longing, and I had suffered it, too. Home is what ghosts seek out after they die—it was just natural.
    "But I don't know what home is," he confessed. He briefed me on the years he'd spent at three or four foster homes, and he didn't care for any of them, though at one home the foster mother cooked a nice chicken dinner every Friday. He smacked his lips as if he were tasting it again.

    When I asked if he had been born in Fresno, he answered, nearly insulted, "Yeah, of course." As if Fresno was the only place to be born.
    We left the park and immediately got onto a bus that was so bright we had to shade our eyes. Though we were the only passengers, we took a seat in the back where candy wrappers and potato chip bags gathered. It was in the light of that moving bus that Robert got another eyeful of me.
    "You really do got no legs," he said sorrowfully. "Or arms." He shook his head and bit his lower lip. He went into himself, his face dark in spite of the light.
    "I'm disappearing," I said without explanation.
    Robert bowed his head. He felt terrible for me. "God, you were only a young man. Who killed you?"
    "Some dude," I answered. I imagined a pair of yellow shoes. I recalled how he wiped his blade on my shirt and hissed in my ear, "What did you say to me,
cabrón?
"
    "I'm really sorry," Robert cooed. He put an arm around my shoulder.
    "Bad luck," I said, snuggling up to him because he needed friendship more than me. It had probably been years since anyone sat close to him.
    "I got stabbed," he said, "and I lived."

    "You told me already."
    His eyes rolled in their sockets. "Oh, yeah, I did, didn't I?" Even as a ghost his memory was ruined from drinking cheap stuff. "Hey, did I tell you that I once slept on a bus like this for twelve hours straight?"
    I shook my head.
    "Yeah, I paid once and got to ride the bus all day. It was raining. I guess the bus driver felt sorry for me."
    As the bus rolled down the street, occasionally hitting a pothole, I had to wonder about what I called my bad luck. How was it that some dudes got stabbed and shot and lived? How did the Almighty decide? If I had stayed home on Friday night, I would be with Angel right now at the end of a glorious Sunday. We would be grass-stained from neighborhood football, and our worst wounds would be from getting our butts whipped, our pride dented. Our Sunday football game would have been dinner conversation since our families—he at his place, me at mine—liked to eat as a family on Sunday evenings.
    The bus braked and sighed. I watched a dude swagger onto the bus, his