The Better Liar(42)

“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. ‘Mu? i’ denn, mu? i’ denn, zum St?dtele hinaus, St?dtele hinaus…” That’s the name of the song in German, ‘Mu? 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.”

    “You’re not from Washington State?”

“Not if I don’t want to be.” I beamed at him, and he chuckled.

“All right, where are you really from?”

“Los Angeles, California,” I breathed. “Am I lucky?”

“I don’t know,” Billy said, the long deep wrinkle pressing into his cheek as he parked in front of the Hertz rental office. “Are you?”

I handed him the fare, and dug out a penny to put on top of it, Lincoln face up. “I’m your lucky sign,” I said.

Billy laughed outright, picking up the penny and putting it in his cupholder. “I’ll hang on to that,” he said. “Why don’t you hang on to this?” He gave me twenty dollars of the fare back. “For keeping me company.”

I pictured him younger, with yellow hair and the same blue eyes; the specter of his charm was still upon him. “Oh, Billy,” I said. “That’s really kind of you. Really, really kind.”

“Have a wonderful trip, sweetheart,” he said. “Give me a kiss before you go.” He tapped his cheek.

I kissed his melting cheek and hung there for a moment, gripping the roof of the car. The Hertz sign backlit me, setting the stray hairs in my peripheral vision on fire. I wondered if you could possess someone for a good reason; if maybe it was an angel who had visited him after all.