Ghouljaw and Other Stories

by Clint Smith

  His mother sighs. “Oh, that would be such a help, Ray. Maybe some time this week? Whenever you’re free.”

  Aside from playing handyman around the house, Ray has nothing but free time. “Sure thing. Tomorrow or the next day, maybe.”

  Ray appraises the cluttered table, noticing a shoebox full of photographs. He lifts a small stack of pictures, flipping through them casually. They’re mostly of him and David as kids. Ray pauses, staring at one particular photo. It’s of him as a toddler—his first trip to Vaught’s Barber Shop. His small, tear-streaked face is frozen in mid-cry, cheeks flushed, a little spittle on his lower lip. There’s a white barber’s cape fixed around his neck, and the cushioned chair looks enormous in contrast with his tiny body. Ray’s mom had always thought this photo was adorable. Ray’s attention flicks to the margin of the picture. His dad’s there, just out of frame—his arms and big hands reaching for Ray, presumably to keep him from struggling out of the chair—a harsh, domineering gesture. Ray drops the stack of photos back into the box and sets the check on the bookcase before returning to the kitchen and finishing his chores at the sink.

  Later this evening, Ray is sitting in his father’s recliner. The TV drones with a primetime game show. His mom is sitting across the room, on the couch, contentedly reading her Bible. People around here turned to scripture—to God, Ray supposed—in search of answers when self-reliance failed. Part of him wants to let her be, to allow her to sustain her healing as long as she needs it. Another part of him wants to stroll over there and remove that book from her lap—and save her from dwelling on empty promises.

  It’s not lost on him that he is quietly, and if only proximally, filling in for his dad. This is a ritual, Ray realizes. This is mom’s grieving.

  Deacon’s Creek did not cope well with grief, let alone surprises. Ray’s faithless exodus six years earlier had been no surprise, but Roger Swanson’s fatal heart attack had been a small-town shocker. It had been predictable arithmetic that the all-American Roger Swanson would end up courting, and later marrying, the equally virtuous Alice Burkhart. Roger and Alice were married, and with almost divine swiftness they discovered she was pregnant. David arrived—healthy, perfect. Roger and Alice had originally agreed to have two children, but after the first, they’d decided that one son would suffice.

  Abortions were unheard of in Deacon’s Creek—unheard of not because they never occurred, but because they went unspoken. After David, Alice’s subsequent pregnancy had been a “surprise.” But when Ray was old enough to decode the discontent in his parents’ little euphemism, he automatically translated “surprise” to “mistake.” Later, Ray figured he wasn’t so much a disappointment as something they hadn’t prayed for. After all, praying only got you so far.

  Over on the couch, Ray’s mother occasionally makes a soft hm sound, as if discovering some passage or platitude that pleased her. Now she gently closes the book and looks up at Ray. “Thank you for staying, Ray.”

  He doesn’t know if she means staying in the living room to keep her company or remaining in town. He twitches a smile. “Sure, Mom.”

  “You may doubt it, but your father was so . . . proud of you.”

  His smile fades a bit, not out of anger. Maybe she’d intended that comment to be a heart-wrenching sentiment, but it was a bit far-fetched to be true. “That’s very kind to say, Mom.”

  “He loved you and David so much. But your brother was always so distracted”—she makes a dismissive gesture—“with his career, all that.” From the TV comes the ding-ding applause of the game show. “He loved you both the same, but that love was different. Does that make sense?”

  No. “Of course, Mom.”

  After a while, Alice says she’s going to bed, and Ray hugs her goodnight.

  Later, with night fully pressed in against the windows, Ray creeps down to the basement to fetch a bottle of wine from his father’s stash. He selects a dusty one from the cobwebby rack, one with a hard-to-read label, and returns to the chair in the living room to watch some TV.

  As opposed to David’s old room, Ray’s boyhood bedroom has gone virtually unchanged since he left roughly six years before. Some of his old clothes are even hanging in the closet. Clumsy from the wine, Ray turns down his bed and surveys the claustrophobic space. Posters from his teenage years have remained hanging here and there—White Zombie, Motörhead, Rage Against the Machine.

  Ray glances over at the bookshelf lined with some old paperbacks, a few yearbooks. He pulls one of the yearbooks from the shelf, the one from his junior year—that would have been a year before the accident. It’s not the first time in recent weeks that he’s indulged in this sort of sentimental time-travel, which fills him with a giddy trepidation, as if he might stumble onto something that will make sense, that might be a sign, that might fix things.

  But Ray—thanks to some snooping on the computer—had kept track of the present. He knew that Heather lived two counties over, close to Indianapolis, and he’d done his best to keep tabs on the cyclic nature of her love life—the boyfriend/boredom/breakup rebound rhythm of her relationships.

  He flips open the yearbook. Because both their last names began with S, he gives a cursory glance at Travis Steinhauer. But no matter how much Ray distracts himself with these antiquated memories—these people trapped between these faded pages—he finishes each pointless return by staring at the black-and-white photo of Heather.

  In his dream, Ray is driving. Not his car, but his father’s black ’69 Chevelle convertible, a yellow racing stripe painted down the middle. The angle of the sun and the mildness of the air suggest it’s morning. He’s coursing along a lineless road, curving smoothly through hilly woods. Overhead, spokes of sunlight flash in and out between a low-lying canopy of tree limbs; but in a visual trick, the color of the leaves steadily alternates between the chlorophyllous greens of spring and the autumnal tints of orange, gold, and burgundy, creating a kaleidoscopic effect that mesmerizes Ray, making it difficult for him to keep his eyes on the road. He hears the radio—Springsteen, he’s sure of it. The second track from Nebraska. The combination of aural and ocular sensations makes him grin. Just as he extends his hand to turn up the volume he notices his passenger. Heather smiles.

  Ray’s heart begins to drum and his dream-respiration becomes feathery. Random mosaics of shadow and morphing shards of sunlight pass over her face; her brown hair lifts in the gently rushing breeze. She’s poised daintily, with her legs tucked up under her. Her skin tone is something between peach and nutmeg, as if she’s been lying out by the pool all morning. Heather’s heavy-lidded gaze grows seductively severe as she murmurs, “Better keep your eyes on the road, Ray.”

  The lineless road snakes on, an endless artery of S-curves. But it’s no longer black, and now looks to be covered with a slick layer of crimson.

  Ray fumbles for the right thing to say. On the radio, Springsteen’s still singing, a mellow tune, one of Ray’s favorites—the one about everything dying, everything coming back, the one about Atlantic City.

  Again he goes for the volume knob, but this time a pale hand clasps his wrist. Ray fixes his eyes on the hand and follows it up to Heather’s face, which is no longer tanned and healthy, but waxy, wasted, as if she were in the throes of some fever.

  “Ray,” she says, “you have to pay attention. You have to leave me alone.”

  “Why are you sick?” To his ears, his voice sounds as if he’s talking under water.

  She shakes her head impatiently. “I’m not sick.” She frowns. “I’m not sick because I didn’t stay.” Heather lets go of his wrist. The dream-sun sinks with alarming swiftness, as if light were being extinguished with one simple exhalation. Under the Chevelle’s headlights, Ray can see the crimson-coated road as he continues coursing through the tunnel of trees. He steals a glance at his passenger.

  Heather’s complexion suggests she’s been dead for weeks. Her gray, vein-riddled flesh looks bruised in spots, putridly supple in others. There’s a glos
sy spot just under her scalp where he thinks the skin has sloughed away, exposing portions of her skull. Her sunken, unblinking eyes are filmed with baby-blue cataracts, and her features are made more livid by the weak glow from the radio.

  Ray tightens his grip on the wheel. Heather opens her corpse-purple lips to speak. “Ray—” she starts, but stops when a thick line of moss-colored drool dribbles out of her mouth. Heather quickly cups a hand to her chin. She wipes her mouth primly, as if embarrassed, and offers a demure smile. “Oops.”

  Despite her deteriorated exterior, and dream or not, Ray thinks she’s lovely.

  When she speaks again, her voice is mud-curdled. “You know Daddy will never let you see me again.” Leaves begin falling from the ceiling of tree limbs. “Ray?” says the boggy voice next to him, but he does not look over. He tries to think of what to say, because he has the suspicion that with the right words—with healing words—he can fix things. He can bring her back. I’ve changed, I’ve grown up. It’s not too late. The radio grows static-lashed, and there is someone speaking just under the hissing white noise.

  Again the voice comes, “Ray,” but it is no longer Heather’s.

  Roger Swanson, wearing the suit he was buried in, is casually angled in the passenger seat, unchanged since the funeral: dark hair slicked back, a mortician’s veneer of powdery makeup, a salesman’s grin showcasing rows of shark-glossy teeth. “Son,” he says, his tone casual, conversational. “You certainly are a fuck-up.”

  Ray swallows and looks away. Just under the radio’s static, he can make out the sermonic cadence of a shouting preacher: “By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac . . . and he that had received the promises offered up his only-begotten son . . .” Ray imagines a jowly face beaded with sweat.

  “Your mother and I were always so disappointed in you.”

  Ray exhales thinly. “I know.” His voice is lost under the droning pulpit-pounding preacher. “And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it upon Isaac his son . . .”

  Even in his awareness of the dream, Ray still has to summon the courage to say, “You had a very small heart when you were alive.”

  As if he hadn’t heard, Roger says, “You could have killed that girl, you know that? And who in the hell gave you permission to drive my car?”

  “. . . So Aaron came to the altar and slaughtered the calf as a sin offering for himself . . . his sons brought the blood to him and dipped his finger into the blood and put it on the horns of the altar . . .”

  It only now occurs to Ray that he might be able to stop the car. He stomps down to where the brake pedal should be, but his foot pushes into something moist, like water-saturated peat. He presses frantically, uselessly. The headlights and dashboard gauges flicker and fade. Cold, meaty fingers close around Ray’s throat, fetid breath inches in on his cheek. But when the voice comes it’s not Roger Swanson, but Heather. “You know Daddy will never let you see me again.”

  Ray shudders awake, the soft hue of dawn powdering his bedroom with gray light. Ray drops his legs over the side of the bed and runs fingers through his long, sleep-matted hair.

  Ray and Heather’s car wreck had been a serious accident. But in the sequence of things, the car wreck was really the second accident—going to the hospital exposed the first.

  They’d been dating for over a year when they found out she was pregnant. Unplanned, of course. For a couple of seniors in high school, they had kept it a secret in order to formulate a solution of how to tell their parents. Neither believed it would be well received.

  They went for a drive. It had been a Friday, late in the night by that point. What was supposed to be a date had turned into a debate about how to break the news to their mothers and fathers. They were cruising country roads when Ray brought up the possibility of adoption or abortion. Heather dismissed this immediately, appalled that Ray would even contemplate such things.

  He was trying to explain that he wasn’t suggesting they do either, but they should at least discuss it. Voices were raised, ultimatums were issued. Ray was looking over at Heather when her eyes went wide. Ray ploughed into a deer, the car spinning into a tree before flipping sideways into a ditch.

  Sometime the next morning, Ray woke in the hospital. His mother was in a chair next to the bed. He could hear his father’s strident voice down the hall. Hours earlier in the ER, after blood work was pulled, it was determined that neither had been drinking. However, it had been discovered that the seventeen-year-old passenger was several months pregnant, and that the fetus had been lost.

  Ray sat up in the hospital bed and winced, drawing his hand up to his head, feeling some sort of gauzy wrapping there. He demanded to see Heather. With his mother trying to stop him, Ray staggered out of the room and into the first triage stall he could find, throwing back the curtain to discover a haggard man reclining in the bed, his rheumy eyes appearing amused by Ray’s uncoordinated entrance. A tangle of liquid-filled tubes hung from machines and IVs, all leading down to his frail, liver-spotted forearms. Ray fell against the side of the wall, staring at the old man as if for some sort of answer. The frail man lifted one of his tube-needled arms, extending a crooked finger directly at Ray. A smile appeared, exposing long nicotine-tinted teeth. Heather was gone.

  An hour after shaking away the residue of his dream, Ray is sitting at his parents’ kitchen table, leafing through a stack of newspapers. One is the local paper, the others were from closer to Indianapolis. Closer to Heather. Most of the jobs are in the city publications.

  Ray returns to the local paper, a headline catching his eye: EVENSONG CEMETERY VANDALIZED.

  He is almost finished reading the thin column when he hears his mom’s bedroom door open. A few seconds later she shuffles into the kitchen, and they mumble good-morning greetings to each other.

  His mother pours a cup of coffee. “Anything interesting?”

  Frowning at the newspaper, Ray says, “Not really. Someone vandalized the cemetery, knocked over some headstones and stuff.”

  His mom had just taken a sip from her mug. “Really?” Her tone suggests revulsion. “Some people just have no . . . conscience.” Silence. “And, you know, that’s not the first time that’s happened.” She moves around toward Ray’s side of the table and peers out the window at the crisp, blue-orange morning. “I hope they left your father’s spot alone.”

  Ray says nothing; but, out of simple decency, has a flicker of agreement. His mom clears her throat and seems to shake the news away. “So, any good news in the paper?”

  Without glancing up Ray says, “A job. Maybe. I need some cash.” He gives a sheepish grin. “Help with rent money and groceries.”

  His mom sighs a laugh. “Oh, Ray. You can stay for as long as you like—you know that.”

  “Tell you what,” Ray says. “I’ll stop by Crenshaw’s, deliver that check to Wendell, and then go fishing for a job.”

  Steam curls from Alice’s coffee mug. “You know,” she says, tousling Ray’s unkempt hair, “you could use a haircut before you go out and conquer a new career.”

  Ray smirks, conceding his rough-around-the-edges appearance. “I know, I know.”

  After taking a sip, his mother lowers the mug. “Harlan Vaught certainly could use your business,” she says, and adds, “Best haircut in town.”

  Ray returns to the classifieds. After a second or two he says, “Sure, more like the only haircut in town.”

  On his way to Crenshaw’s Market, Ray decides to run by the cemetery, curious about the condition of his father’s plot.

  As opposed to the dozen or so toppled headstones in the cemetery, Roger Swanson’s marble maker remains undisturbed. The ground covering his grave, on the other hand, is a mess.

  Crossing a grassy area just off a gravel path, Ray spots a groundskeeper. Ray approaches, offhandedly noting that they’re roughly the same age. The groundskeeper says, “Good mornin’,” a grin cracking under the bill of his ball cap.

  Ray gives a curt
nod. “Morning.”

  “Come out to check on somebody?”

  Ray hesitates. “Sort of.”

  The guy’s sunglasses reflect the sun as he bobs his head. “Yeah. Already had some people drop by this morning. Who you looking for?”

  “My da—” Ray licks his lips. “Swanson. Roger Swanson.”

  The groundskeeper jabs a thumb over his shoulder. “Just got done with that one. Vandals didn’t mess with the headstone, but they sure did trample the hell out of the dirt.”

  Ray paces a few yards to get a closer look. Sure enough, the mound of dirt had been gouged and scattered, but the polished marker remains untouched. Ray’s eyes move to the dates of his father’s life-span. The groundskeeper sidles up next to Ray. “You his son?” Ray squints, and after a moment nods. “Don’t worry, man. I set down some more seed on his spot.” Ray had already noticed the fresh, wheat-colored specks of grass seed.

  “Thanks for that.”

  “No problem. Hell, your dad was an easy fix. He’s one of the lucky ones.” He gestures toward the haphazard destruction. He spits to his side and wipes at a small trail of saliva hanging from his lower lip. “Some assholes have no respect for the dead.”

  The pickled pigs’ feet are kept in brine. But Ray knows, from his formative years working at Crenshaw’s Market, that the proper terms for these butcher-friendly solutions are sodium nitrites, nitrates, and sulfur dioxides. Preservatives, in other words—the formaldehydes of the food industry.

  The pigs’ feet are displayed on top of the curved glass above the rows of steaks and other cuts of meat. Nothing’s changed. It’s always been this way.

  Ray waits at the meat counter for a few seconds before a stout old man with youthful eyes emerges, parting a hanging curtain of clear plastic strips.

  “Can I help you?” the old man says. He’s wearing a paper butcher’s hat and a red, chest-to-knee apron. Ray smiles, and recognition spreads on the man’s face. “Well, I’ll be damned! Raymond, how the hell are you?”