Sean Ulman
A water truck speeding down a dirt road chucked douses of dust upon Ludmilla. She snapped a picture as she dove into the buckling dirt bank. In the photo, the passenger riding shotgun has his trucker cap tucked over his eyes; his bleached teeth are clenched; there is no discernible driver.
…..A half mile ahead she rounded the bend of Punta Gorda, the vista’s highest point. Stucco cottages and relative castles painted pastel tints with wattle palappa roofs prickled the cacti-laden terrain. Gazing down the sheer cliff, she watched the fanned fins of rooster fish cut riffles in the lucid aqua shallows. Halfway to the horizon she spotted the glowing gloppy bumps of humpback whales breaching the sun-bleached surface, spouting spume spurts of gold-leafed fume. Judging the problematic photographic distances and direct sunshine, she dusted off the camera and descended without taking any photos.
…..When the sun slanted to a light that was favorable for photographing she took setting photos. Roadrunners running, cactus-chomping donkeys with choya cactus clumps chocked into their cheeks, camera-gawking geckos, horned grebes hunting in green wave walls, a parade of gliding brown pelicans wing-clipping wave-crests, time elapsed snaps of the rising tide, tide pool pockets packed with purple urchins blue-clawed crabs and spiraled snails, mesmerizing black sand designs spackled along the slick tide-swept after-surf, head high surf waves sans surfers, tangerine sunsets that (when aided by a deft depth-defying eye flip) looked like another endless sea (an archipelago supplied by a thread of checked clouds), her navy blue tent in an arroyo with a background equal parts bright blue (cobalt sea, cerulean sky)…
…..She saw no humans. She saw no ghosts.
…..She studied her photos for ghosts (she had caught one that way once). She found several smudges, photograph faults referred to as ‘ghosts,’ but no ghosts like the glowing grotesque human forms rumored to haunt this deserted desert seaside haunt.
…..The next morning she took photo evidence of human and/or ghost activity. A palm tree swaying above a cactus garden in need of simple gardening, rusted beer cans adorning a dying bush, a snowy plover roosting in a sneaker footprint, four-wheeler ruts, a snorkel tube stuck in the sand, a row of seven motor boats overturned on a sand-berm (silver hulls beaming above a gleaming silver sea), a fire ring of ash-decked rocks.
…..Ludmilla swam. A lone sun-swelled silhouette advanced along the curve of surf. Heat-wave distorted, the flickering figure wobbled like a mirage. When Ludmilla dashed out of the sea the silhouette melted into the shaking meld of froth, mist, whitewash and waves.
…..Ludmilla walked down her arroyo toward town. She took a picture of a Scrub Jay perched on a cordon above the tangle of barbed desert scrub. She took photos of the structures she passed. A stucco modern-molded two floor flat, a four bedroom spread, an abandoned surf shop with metal bars barring the front door plastered with surf stickers. She did not take pictures of the terraced mansion’s model jungle of parched crispy thrapping palm fronds. She scaled the six-foot stucco wall. Two single-bricklined paths forked. One wound around the once palatial place, through trash, beer bottles and thirsty verdant vestiges. The other led into an octagonal open-air foyer which fed six second entrance options. From the hard-barked leafy tree canopying the foyer, Ludmilla plucked a wilting orange blossom. She blew it out f her hand and followed it into an arched hallway. She went up a corkscrew staircase, down another arched hallway. She glanced at dusty photographs. Two men hoisting sea-hunting treasures – a gargantuan marlin, two trophy tuna, a juvenile giant squid. She heard torpid snoring. At the end of the hall in a room strewn with sunshine and sundry clutter (laundry, fishing tackle, two unimpressive impressionist paintings, a sailboat’s sail in need of patching, succulents in cracked pots), she saw the sleeper. A naked man with a faded tan, sprawled belly-down on a king-size mattress sans linens. Stepping into the room, Ludmilla’s heel tipped a beer bottle. The rattling glass tattled. The sleeper snarfed a snore short, shot up and grasped the Hawaiian sling lying beside him.
…..“Whaddya want!?” His blinking eyes were too tight with sleep to see. Mussed blond wisps fluttered above his all but bald pate. As he crawled toward the front of the bed with the sling’s spiked trident defensively aimed at her, Ludmilla snapped several photos.
…..“You ghosts want a shoot-out. Shoot! Go ahead. Shoot!” The man reached under the front of the bed and swung up a shotgun and pumped it. Ludmilla drew her camera up like a dueling gunslinger and shot another photograph.
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In the summer Sean Ulman works in Alaska as a technician for a shorebird study. In the winter he lives in Delaware where he writes about Alaska. Sean’s fiction has recently been featured in Kill Author, Thieves Jargon, and The Scrambler.
