His mind thought, Jesus, but his voice could not even whisper it. Fright had clogged his throat, thickened his lungs, and he could only stand and stare at the softly gleaming figure who looked not at him but at some unnamed spot a few feet to Brad’s left. The man was terribly emaciated, and Brad fancied he could see the outline of the backbone pressing against the diaphragm. The arms and thighs were like sticks, and the neck that supported the grizzled head was not much thicker. That head was capped with a gray-white patch of hair and mapped with wrinkles. The genitals were shrunken into insignificance.
The sirens wailed, the dogs howled, and Bradley Meyers stood shaking, waiting for something to happen, for the man to turn, to disappear, to move toward him holding out a pencil-fingered hand. But the man did not move, not at all, not even to sway like a leaf in the breeze. He only stood, his lower legs and feet lost in the worn-out sofa, looking languidly at that spot until Brad turned and looked too, trying to keep half an eye on the withered figure.
There was nothing there, just the wall with the big red, black, and white Nazi flag Brad had had there for years. Could he be looking at that?
What the hell does it matter what he’s looking at! Brad thought savagely, turning back to the wispy figure. He tried to speak, cleared his throat, tried again. “Hey,” he said softly. “What … Are you for real?”
There was no answer, no tremor of understanding in the old man’s countenance.
“What are you?”
Still no answer. Just the old man standing there, shining weakly, and as Brad’s eyes became adjusted to the poor light, he thought he could see the opposite wall through the man’s body. A ghost, he thought with numbing certainty. A ghost.
“Chris,” he called, but the bedsprings did not squeak, she was not coming. “Chris!” he barked, and he heard an answering moan from the bedroom. “Come here!” His words did not banish the thing. It still stood silently, as if it too were waiting for Christine.
“What is it?” she called, her speech sleep-dulled.
“Just … come here.” He heard her bare feet on the floor, the rustle of her robe as it left the hook, her footfalls down the hall, a deep yawn in which irritation was evident. “Jeez, Brad, it’s four in the—”
“Shut up. Look at that. Do you see that?”
Behind him, she drew in breath for a scream that never left her. She stood, breath locked, over an abyss that reached up with dark hands to catch her, unable to scream, to breathe, to move. Brad turned and saw her chained features, her mouth like a great black “O” in the blackness around her, and knew that she saw it too. Finally her breath blew out in a whistling whimper that held such terror and helplessness that he put his arms around her, blocking her view of the old man.
But she gazed straight into his chest as though she saw it still, then closed her eyes as the first paroxysm of fear shivered out of her. “Oh, migod, migod, migod,” she whispered in a rapid litany. “Who is it, who is it?”
And because he did not know he said nothing.
“Who is it!” she grated, clawing at his arm. “What’s he want? Who is he?”
“Let go,” he said, pushing her away to where she could see the old man once more. She whimpered again, transfixed by the sight, unable to turn her eyes away. Outside the sirens screamed. “It’s a ghost,” he said over their wail. “What else? It’s a ghost.”
“Noon …”
“Look at it! You can see through it.” Bradley Meyers felt a strange excitement interwoven with his fear, pushing it down on the loom of his emotions until it faded into the background like a neutral color in a field of vivid red, leaving only that intense interest, an overpowering need to know. He had seen too much of life to be scared for long by the semblance of death. Now he felt the adrenaline surge within him, and all he could think was “What is it? What is it?”—concerned only with the knowing, not with fear. He moved toward it slowly, with a healthy respect for the unknown, his tongue licking his dry lips.
“Brad … don’t—”
“Shut up,” he hissed. She knew better than to disobey, but the room seemed filled with her hoarse panting. Brad shuffled closer, until he was only a few feet away, then reached out a hand. But something he could not name stopped him from touching the man, and instead he moved to the side, grasping the arm of the couch, which he slowly slid toward himself.
The couch moved easily enough, its worn casters creaking as they rolled over the carpet. But the old man’s body did not move, and soon his lower legs and most of his feet were revealed. It seemed to Brad that the bottom half inch of flesh sank into and became part of the carpet.
“Brad …” He looked at Christine. Her face was pinched and she was shaking, tears running down her cheeks. “Go back in the bedroom.”
“Oh, Brad …”
“Go on.” She slowly backed away toward the hall. When she could no longer see the old man, she turned and ran to the bedroom, slamming the door behind her, her frenzied sobs still clearly audible in the living room.
Bradley Meyers swallowed and cleared a piece of phlegm from his throat. Then he walked in front of the old man so that he stood directly before his gaze, staring into the blue-lustered eyes. He felt nothing, no suggestion of being looked inside of, no psychic tingle. It was merely like looking into the eyes of a particularly well-rendered statue. He stepped out of the line of its gaze then, and walked closer to it. It stood, seemingly relaxed, arms hanging loosely at its sides, not noticing that he approached. Now only a foot away, Brad steeled himself as he did when he was a child taking his first plunge off the high board, and tried to touch the old man’s arm.
At first he thought that perhaps he was afraid, that though his conscious mind wanted to touch whatever was there, his terrified subconscious would not permit it, keeping his fingers from coming into contact with the blue-black skin. But then he realized with a start that he was touching it, or touching the space it filled. His fingertips seemed to be inside the old man’s flesh, although he could still see them, dim and hazy, like phantom fingers. He withdrew them quickly, then carefully put them back again. In, out, in, out, making contact without feeling or sensation. There was not a trace of coldness, wetness, warmth, anything.
“You really are a ghost,” he said in awe. But the black man did not confirm or deny Brad’s statement. He only stood, unaware of the young man touching him, looking patiently at the spot on Brad’s Nazi flag.
“Brad!” Christine’s cry came from their bedroom. It was high and fluttery as if the madness that had been stalking her had at last taken hold, and Brad turned from the apparition and ran down the hall, hoping that the black man would still be there when he returned.
When he opened the bedroom door, Christine was standing at the window, the curtain drawn back. She was looking out onto Market Street below. “What’s wrong?” he asked curtly. She only shook her head in short birdlike jerks, unable to turn away from the window. “What is it?” He went to her, jostled her aside, and looked out.
The street was filled with ghosts. Blue shapes stood, sat, reclined, all of them gleaming dimly like dozens of broken neon signs. Some were half in, half out of parked cars, just as the black man had been partially encased by the sofa. Across the street in the parking lot where a transient hotel had stood until the late fifties, vertical rows of naked blue bodies, men and women alike, hung stationary in the air. One of them, laden with fat, was in a half crouch, as if in the process of falling. His right arm was up, elbow out, in the position of holding something unseen to his throat, which gaped with a wound from which a gout of dark liquid hung suspended. Brad could see the thick ropiness of the man’s severed windpipe.
Near him a young woman lay on her side in midair, her belly bloated with pregnancy. Her hands were jammed between her legs, her eyes were closed, her mouth open in an unheard howl. Most of the apparitions were older, but many were young and middle-aged, and there were more than a few children. Brad noticed one boy no older than ten lying in the doorway to
the Murphy Apartments across the street. Only the top half of his body was visible through the door, but Brad could see that he was lying face down like a bearskin rug, arms out in front of him, his chin resting on the rough sidewalk, his head cocked awkwardly. The pale blue glowing eyes looked up toward the window where Brad stood with Christine whining and shivering beside him, and something in the eyes froze Brad for a second, as though they were speaking to him, trying to make him remember something long forgotten.
“Brad …” Christine whimpered.
“Shh!”
“Brad, let’s go!”
“Shut up!” he snarled, turning to her, furious at her for invading his thoughts just as he almost had it, just as he’d nearly remembered.
But she would not be quiet. She shook her head back and forth, her eyes darting to the window and away again. “No,” she said. “We gotta get out—we gotta leave—”
“Leave? Leave what?”
“Leave this place, leave this … this … this town! We gotta get away!”
“For the last time, Chris, shut up. We’re not going anywhere, so just shut the fuck up. Get back in bed and pull the covers over your head, or go hide in the closet, but don’t you open your goddamn mouth again!” He shoved her to punctuate his order, and her body rocked back so that she fell weeping to the floor, from which she crawled up onto the bed and under the covers, pulling them over her head.
Now, Brad thought. Now who …
“Whassamatter?”
He turned, his teeth grinding together in anger, to see Wally standing in the doorway, his outgrown Fred Flintstone pajamas leaving his round tummy bare and vulnerable. “Go back to bed.”
“I heard Mommy—”
“Go back to bed!” Brad shouted, crossing the small room in a bound and pushing the boy across the hallway and against the opposite wall. Wally’s lip quivered, but he did not cry, only picked himself up and padded head down back into his room. Christine whimpered loudly under the covers, as if the blow had hurt her as well as her son, but she said nothing. Brad looked out the window at the boy half on the sidewalk, half hidden by the door, and let the sirens drown out her cries.
He struggled, trying to remember, to recall so long ago, so many years, the summers past, the town park, rubber horseshoes and snow cones, and now he was starting to get it, trading baseball cards and drinking Double Cola and riding down those steep dirt paths over the bank on their bikes with devil’s head decals and pinwheel spinners and box hockey, oh, Christ yes, the kid who always beat everybody at box hockey, and he could see long ago the knuckles covered with Band-Aids and the same hands outstretched now on the sidewalk with those scabs and cuts and bruises and (Andy) that shock of wheat-colored hair (Andy Koser) and the ears that stuck out too far …
Andy Koser.
CHAPTER 2
“Oh, no … oh, no … oh, what a shame, May.” Mrs. Meyers seemed glued to the phone. Her head was shaking back and forth, and Brad knew it was something bad. Probably nothing that touched them of their family because Mom wasn’t crying, but something bad just the same. His appetite was swiftly disappearing the longer his mother clucked, and he dabbed at the stiffening Maypo with a spoon, building a small dam to hold the milk from the center. He hoped she would hang up before he had to go to school so he could find out what the news was, but she showed no signs of putting down the phone, and his Hopalong Cassidy wristwatch told him he’d have to leave now if he wanted to meet Al Withers on the corner of Orange and Spruce.
“Mom …” he said softly, standing up.
She heard and raised a hand to tell him to wait, still enrapt by what Mrs. Nolt was telling her.
“I gotta go, Mom.”
She tightened her face and gave him one of her pruney looks. “Brad’s got to go, May,” she said into the phone. “Call you right back, ’kay? … Uh-huh. Bye-bye.” She hung up with a reluctant sigh. “Okay, hon. Got your lunch?” He held up his lunch pail and she nodded approvingly. “Eat all the celery now, okay? And the apple.”
“What was wrong, Mom?”
“Oh, on the phone? Well …” She looked away—at the sink filled with breakfast dishes, then at his half-eaten Maypo. “Oh, you didn’t finish your cereal …”
“What was it? Something I shouldn’t know about?”
She squared her shoulders as if about to tackle a particularly rotten job, like cleaning the oven. “No. No reason why you shouldn’t. Do you know the Koser boy?”
“Andy?”
“Is he the one close to your age?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, he had an accident. You know the Murphy Apartments?”
Brad nodded. He and his cousin had gone to Andy’s one time last summer to trade for a Richie Ashburn card. “Well, there’s a steep stairway up to the second floor where the Kosers live, and … Andy fell down it.”
“He fell down the stairs?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Was he hurt?”
His mother’s face wrinkled up again and she nodded shortly. “Yeah, hon. Real bad. He’s, uh … Andy’s dead.”
“Dead?”
“Uh-huh.”
“From … just from fallin’ down the stairs?”
She nodded. “Mrs. Nolt said he broke his neck. Died very fast. I don’t think he suffered at all.”
Brad swallowed hard. The Maypo was dancing and churning in his stomach. “When was it?”
“Last night after supper. Mrs. Nolt found out because Mr. Nolt is on the ambulance crew. Seems Andy was going out to play baseball down at the park and he just tripped or something. “
Brad bit the inside of his lip. He didn’t think he was going to cry, but he didn’t know what else the feeling that was boiling up inside him could be. “Maybe … uh … maybe his bat,” he suggested in an effort to seem detached, adult. “His bat?”
“Maybe he tripped on it.”
“Oh. Well, yes, maybe he did.” His mother bent and kissed him on the cheek. “You’d better run now if you’re not going to be late.” She seemed uncomfortable, as she did whenever his father told a joke that had anything to do with s-e-x. “If you want, we could talk some more about this tonight. Or with your father when he gets home.” She smiled wanly. “Go on now. Watch the street corners.”
He was a little late, but Al Withers was waiting for him anyway. “Ya hear about Andy Koser?” was the first thing he said.
“Yeah,” Brad answered. “Mrs. Nolt called my mom.”
“Mine too. Bet she musta started around six this morning. Bet everybody knows.” They walked for a while without speaking. “Boy,” Al said at last, “it’s really weird, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“You ever know anybody else that died?”
“My grandma. But she was pretty old.” Brad had been six at the time, three years before. His maternal grandmother had gotten lung cancer after smoking a pack of Luckies a day since her twenties. Her husband, a retired railroad man, had had to quit years before, after a bout with TB. Brad thought his grandfather’s house smelled a lot better now.
“All my grandparents are still alive,” said Al with a trace of pride. Then his smug smile turned into a frown. “I wonder what happened.”
“You mean how he fell?”
“Naw, I mean after. You know, did he go to heaven or what?”
“I guess so. He was kind of a good guy.”
“You believe in heaven?” Al asked.
Brad didn’t answer right away. “Yeah, I guess.”
“Me too. I guess.”
“I don’t think my dad does. He doesn’t go to church or anything. And when I ask him about God and all, he just says he doesn’t have much time to think about that.”
“He an atheist?” Al’s eyes got big.
“No!” Brad replied. “I didn’t say that. He just doesn’t think about it much.” He spotted a bottle cap on the sidewalk and they shuffle-kicked it back and forth for a while until Al missed and it went into the gutter. “I wonder if he d
id go to heaven,” Brad said.
“Sure. What would God send a little kid to hell for? Cheatin’ at box hockey?”
“Andy didn’t cheat—he was just good.”
“You’re not supposed to block the puck with your knuckle.”
“Ah, you’re just too scared of getting hurt to do it.”
“So are you,” Al shot back, and it was true. Brad had always admired the nonchalant way Andy Koser had taken the sharp raps of the rough wooden puck on his knuckles without complaint. He’d once asked Andy if it didn’t hurt. Andy’d grinned and said, “Sure, but if you wanta win, you gotta get your knuckles stung.” Brad didn’t think winning was worth that.
“I wonder,” mused Al, “how he … uh … how he looks. You know?”
Brad nodded.
“I mean, how long before he … before bodies start to rot?”
“Pretty fast.”
“Yeah, I guess. You think he’ll have those white worms—what are they?”
“Maggots?”
“Yeah, that’s them. Like in that Edgar Allan Poe movie. You think he’ll have them?”
“Dunno,” said Brad. “Probably not. I don’t think you get them when you’re embalmed.”
“They got tighter coffins today too, huh?”
“Oh, yeah.” They walked on. Brad didn’t know what was in Al’s head, but in his own there were things he hoped he could forget about before he went to bed that night. Things like losing his balance and falling, the same kind of feeling as when the Comet at Dobbs’s Park went over the first ridge, dropping the coaster down that long chute so that you seemed to fall forever. But there you never hit bottom—there the pavement never came up smack against your head. To kill you.
Kill you. Brad tried to imagine what being dead was like, but couldn’t. He could only think of it as a long sleep from which you’d never wake up. In his heart he really couldn’t conceive of heaven, of a place with clouds and harps and wings and white robes and everybody flying around and singing all day about how great God was. It just didn’t seem right. He tried, but he just couldn’t make himself believe it. Then that worried him, because in the back of his mind he did believe in hell. Or at least in punishment. Now he tried to picture Andy Koser in heaven and found the spectacle ludicrous. Andy Koser, with his turned-up nose and those Dumbo ears that stuck out way past the limits of his butch cut, sitting on a cloud with King David and Moses and George Washington, and all of them singing hymns.… If they didn’t have box hockey and baseball cards in heaven, Andy was going to be pretty bored. “You think,” he asked Al, “they got baseball cards in heaven?”
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