Free Spirits

by Julia Watts

  When I ask her, Mom checks her watch. “Okay, but it’ll just be for a few minutes. We’ve got to get home by midnight so Adam’s dad can pick him up.”

  There are no streetlights by the riverbank, and the sky is black velvet. Mom gets a flashlight out of the trunk so we won’t trip over roots or rocks. I hold the flashlight in one hand and the mirror in the other as we make our way to edge of the water.

  “There he is!” Abigail says. “Do you see him, Miranda?”

  I shine the light near the figure, but not directly on it. It’s a boy, a couple of years older than Adam and me, maybe, wearing a Confederate Civil War uniform that hangs loosely on him because he’s so thin. His cheeks are sunken in, and his eyes are hollow even though he looks young enough to still have baby fat.

  “Hold up the mirror so I can talk to him,” Abigail says, and I do.

  “Hello,” Abigail calls. “I’m in the mirror. Can you hear me?”

  “I can hear you.” It’s an older boy’s voice, on the verge of changing, with a Kentucky twang.

  I look back at Adam and Mom. “Can you hear him?”

  Adam nods.

  Mom shakes her head, which isn’t surprising since she can’t hear Abigail anymore either.

  “My name is Abigail,” Abigail says from the mirror. “I died of scarlet fever when I was twelve. I usually stay in a house, but my friend Miranda has discovered that I can travel if I’m inside a mirror.”

  “Hit’s a pretty mirror,” the ghost boy says. “My mama had one just like it. My name’s Virgil Thomas. I was a soldier camped out in these parts.”

  “Did you drown in the river?” Abigail asks.

  Virgil laughs. “Drowning was what got me in the end, but it was kind of a race to see what was gonna do it. I got caught where some mini balls blew up some fellers and a bunch of their teeth and chunks of their bone got stuck in my arm, and I got real sick. Took a fever, got the flux. One night I woke up in my tent just burning up and feeling like I’d die right there if I didn’t get me a drink of water. I couldn’t hardly walk I was so weak from the flux, so I crawled to the river. I musta passed out from the fever, face down in the water. So it was a drink of water that kilt me.”

  “Is this riverbank where you stay when you’re in the earthly realm?” Abigail says.

  “Yes, miss. I can’t go no farther than them trees over yonder.”

  “When I was here before I saw other spirits, too,” Abigail says.

  “They’re around here somewhere,” Virgil says, but he pronounces “somewhere” like “summers.” “Adahy’s the little Injun boy’s name. He got bit by a water moccasin in this river— that’s why he’s here. He’s real shy when it comes to the living, but he’s a right nice little feller. Can’t speak no English, but he can kindly act out things so I can understand them. Now the other one—she don’t speak no English neither, but she speaks a different tongue than Adahy does. She paces and cries more than she talks. She ain’t been here as long as me and Adahy. Sometimes she’ll let him sit next to her and hold her hand, but she screams bloody murder if I try to get close to her. I try to tell her I don’t mean no harm, but she can’t understand me no better than I can understand her. I don’t even know her name.”

  Mom touches my shoulder. “Tell Abigail we need to go.”

  I do, and she says goodbye to Virgil.

  “Goodbye,” he says to her, and then he nods to me and Adam, too. “Y’all come back and see me whenever you want to. It’s nice to get to visit with folks.”

  Once we’re in the car, Abigail says, “How old do you think Virgil was when he died? Fourteen or fifteen maybe? That’s not so much older than I am.”

  I’ve finally caught on to why Abigail wanted to visit the river. “Abigail, do you like him or something?”

  She giggles, and I have a feeling that if ghosts could blush, she would. “Well, he is charming, isn’t he? And there’s something about those uniforms with all those shiny brass buttons…”

  “Okay, boy in the car!” Adam says. “No giggling about boys while I’m here, even if the boy you’re talking about has been dead for over a century.”

  “Well, so have I,” Abigail says. “It’s good that the two of us have things in common.”

  “So, Mom,” I say, “I bet you never would’ve agreed to take Abigail out for pizza and a movie if you’d known she was chasing after a boy.”

  “Well,” Mom says, “I’d definitely make you stay home if you were going to chase boys, but you’re just twelve. And Abigail is older than she looks.”

  Chapter 9

  I’m in the garden with Granny, helping her loosen the ground for planting, when Adam rides up on his bike. “Hey,” he says to me, and then to Granny, “Hello, Mrs. Chandler.”

  “The signs say it’s time to plant,” Granny says. She hardly ever says hello back to people. She just starts talking about whatever’s on her mind. “Does your family plant any special vegetables that come from your country?”

  “Not really,” Adam says. “But Mom does grow cabbage for kimchee. It smells awful when she makes it.”

  “She orta come over here and make it the same day I put up my kraut,” Granny says. “We’d stink up the whole county!”

  Adam grins, then turns to me. “I was wondering if you might want to go for a ride with me once you’ve finished helping your granny.”

  “She’s helped me plenty,” Granny says. “She can go.”

  I wash my hands with the hose and get my bike from the barn. As soon as we ride off where Granny can’t hear us, Adam says, “So is that bike, like, a hundred years old?”

  Adam’s bike is shiny and new, the racing kind where you ride around with your butt up in the air. Mine’s been repainted with purple spray paint, which doesn’t disguise its age. “It’s not a hundred. It was my mom’s when she was my age.”

  “It’s got the weirdest seat I’ve ever seen,” he says.

  “It’s a banana seat. They used to be cool.” I think about all the fashions from the hippie days that show up in magazines now. “They will be again, too.”

  “You keep waiting for that day,” Adam says, showing how much faster his bike is than mine.

  Once he slows down so I can catch up, he says, “So I had an idea last night. I was thinking, there are only two other restaurants in Wilder besides El Mariachi. What if one of the owners of the other two restaurants decided to cause trouble for El Mariachi? It would get rid of the competition.”

  “Hm,” I say. “Well, it’s kind of a shot in the dark, but it’s better than anything I’ve got.”

  “I was thinking we might go talk to Big Ed at the Burger Buddy…see if he says anything suspicious.”

  I crinkle my nose in disgust. “If we’re going to get him to talk to us, we’ll have to order something.”

  “Sodas should be safe,” Adam says.

  The inside of the Burger Buddy should be white, but years of grease buildup have turned the walls the dull yellow of unbrushed teeth. The menu board on the wall is the kind where the food items are spelled out with stick-on plastic letters. Lots of the letters have fallen off and not been replaced, so it’s possible to order a “CHEE URGER” and “RENCH RIES.”

  Big Ed himself is behind the counter, which he’s wiping with a greasy rag, to spread the grease around more evenly, I guess. His face has a few days’ growth of stubble, and he’s wearing a filthy yellow-white apron over a dingy undershirt. He takes a look at Adam as we sit at the counter and says, “We ain’t got no Chinese food here.”

  I try not to wince. “That’s okay. We were just hot from riding our bikes and thought we’d stop by for Cokes.”

  “Huh,” he says, like he doesn’t trust us somehow. But he gets us our Cokes in plastic glasses. When I pick up my glass I almost drop it, it’s so slick with grease.

  I look around the empty restaurant. “I guess this is a slow time of day, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Big Ed says. “It’ll pick up in the evening when fellers wan
t to come in and shoot pool.”

  “Do any of the guys from over at the meat packing plant come in to shoot pool?” I ask.

  “Naw.” He lights a cigarette, which makes me worry about a grease fire. “Most of them’s Mexicans, and they don’t want to eat here. They got their own place.”

  “You mean El Mariachi,” Adam says. “You ever been there?”

  “Naw.Ain’t goin’ there neither.They can have their tacos and their nachos. I’ll stick to my good old American hamburgers.” He looks at Adam. “I no likey ‘flied lice’ neither.”

  “Steamed rice is much healthier,” Adam says while shooting me a “please help me” look.

  I don’t much want to be in Big Ed’s mind, but I’m there anyway. And really, it’s not a very busy place. Looking at Adam, he’s thinking,“Look how squinty his eyes is,” but he’s not thinking it in a hateful way. He’s noticing it the same way you’d notice a cat was a certain color. Big Ed’s brain isn’t full of hate. It’s not full of much of anything.

  Once I’m out of his head, I make a big show of draining my glass, look at Adam, and say, “Ready to go?”

  He nods.

  “You’uns come back sometime and play some pinball or something,” Big Ed calls as we leave.

  “I no likey flied lice?” Adam says as soon as we’re outside. “What an idiot! I can totally see him dosing El Mariachi’s food with Ex-Lax.”

  “The thing is,” I say, getting back on my bike. “Big Ed is nowhere near smart enough to come up with an idea like that. I mean, putting Ex-Lax in food is a scummy thing to do, but it’s also clever. Big Ed isn’t clever. I was in his head, Adam. And I was just about the only thing in there. I honestly think when he said that stuff about Chinese food, he really wasn’t even trying to be mean. He honestly thought that was how you strike up a conversation with an Asian person. He’s just ignorant.”

  “Yeah, well, a lot of hate comes out of ignorance,” Adam says.

  “But that doesn’t mean ignorance and hate are the same thing. When I was in his head, the way he was thinking of you was with this kind of clueless curiosity—the way a little kid looks at an exotic animal in the zoo.”

  “Gee, that makes me feel better. Now I’m a zoo animal.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I guess what I’m trying to say is that in his own stupid way, Big Ed kind of liked your difference and found it interesting. He didn’t hate you for it.”

  Adam shrugs. “Well, that may be, but I don’t think I’ll be stopping by the Burger Buddy to play pinball any time soon.”

  “Me neither. Besides, I bet the machine’s so greasy you can barely keep your hands on it.”

  Adam laughs. “So…wanna go to the Whippy Dip?”

  The Whippy Dip is on the outskirts of town, near the meat packing plant. It’s a long ride, and by the time we get to the small metal building with a big plastic ice cream cone on top of it, a real ice cream cone sounds pretty good.

  We go up to the window, and Vonda, the owner of the Whippy Dip, says, “Hey, how you’uns doing?”

  I’ve seen Vonda lots of times when I’ve come over for ice cream, and her bleached blond hair always has the same amount of black at the roots. She always wears the same shade of blue eyeshadow.

  I tell her we’re good, ask how she is, and order a chocolate cone. Adam gets a vanilla because boys like vanilla for some reason.

  “So,” I say, licking my cone, “have you gotten more business here since the meat packing plant opened?”

  “Lord, yes,” Vonda says, smiling. “I’ve had to hire somebody to help me at lunchtime during the week ’cause I just about get more business than I can handle. Them Mexican fellers is so funny. They make fun of my chili dogs ’cause they say the chili ain’t got no spice to it. One of ’em brought in this big bottle of Mexican hot sauce for me to keep here, and every time they come I get it out for them and they douse their chili dogs with it. I tried some one time, and I thought my tongue had done burnt out of my head.”

  “Have you ever eaten at the Mexican restaurant?” I ask.

  “Oh, yeah, I go there every couple of weeks or so,” Vonda says. “I never order nothing too hot, though. I tell you, some people talk bad about the Mexicans that come here, but all the Mexican fellers I’ve met from over at the plant are as nice as they can be. Hard workers. Love their families. Good to their mamas.” She grins. “Some of them’s awful good-looking, too.”

  I think of Isabella’s brother. “Yes, they are.”

  “Well, we know she didn’t do it,” Adam says as soon as we’re back on our bikes and headed toward town.

  “Yeah, that’s all we know, isn’t it?” I’m pedaling fast on my bike to try to keep up with Adam. “Who didn’t do it. And I’m starting to feel like that’s all we’re ever going to know. I hate to let down Isabella, but I’m wondering if maybe this was just one of those bad things that happens and nobody can do anything about it.”

  “I know what you mean.” Adam sighs. “Well, at least we got an ice cream out of the experience.”

  Chapter 10

  This morning after months of making awful noises, Mom’s car stopped making any noise. When she came into the kitchen she said, “Well, old Bessie wouldn’t start. I guess I’d better call the mechanic for a tow, huh?”

  “It’s kind of like waiting to call the ambulance after somebody’s done died,” Granny said, but Mom didn’t seem to think it was funny.

  I’m walking with Mom over to A and S Car Repair. Mom said that maybe if the mechanics saw that she was a widow with a child, they’d take pity on her and not charge so much.

  I asked if we should maybe dress in rags, too, but she didn’t laugh at that either. Not knowing how much it’ll cost to fix her car makes her lose her sense of humor.

  A and S Car Repair is a gray concrete block building surrounded by piles of used tires and a few old cars that seem beyond repair but stay around so the mechanics can tinker with them when business is slow. I follow Mom into the garage where her car is sitting with the hood up. I breathe in the strange smells of manliness: oil and gas and grease and sweat.

  A big man with a gray ponytail all the way down his back is washing his hands at the utility sink in the corner. As soon as he sees us, he dries off and says, “Mrs. Jasper?” His eyes are twinkly blue, and his gray mustache and goatee that make him look like he could be from another time.

  “Yes,” Mom says.

  He comes over and holds out a beefy hand for Mom to shake.

  “I’m Rick,” he says, which matches the name stitched on his light blue shirt. “I’m the one that took a look at your car this morning.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Mom says. “This is my daughter, Miranda.” I’m surprised she doesn’t mention she’s a widow and lives on a small fixed income.

  I’m kind of surprised when he sticks his hand out in my direction. Not many grownups shake hands with kids. But since he’s one of the few, I reach out and take it.

  As soon as my skin touches his, I’m on fire. Flames lick at my brain, but then I realize it’s not my brain I’m feeling. It’s his. There’s so much anger—so much rage—it boils like hot lava. Looking at my mom, he thinks, With that black hair and the way she’s dressed I thought she might be a spic at first. But I don’t reckon she is, not with that red-headed, fair-skinned little girl. Guess if she’s not a spic, I won’t charge her double. Not like those greasy beaners over at the meat plant that want me to fix their thirty-year-old broke-down pickup trucks.

  Now his thoughts run all over the place. Pictures flash in my head: an American flag, a Bible held up in an old man’s knotty hand, a huge pot of beans with handfuls of pills being stirred into them.

  He’s the one. I don’t have one speck of proof other than what I just saw in his head, but I know it.

  When I come back into myself, Rick is saying,“No guarantees with a car this old, but I’m thinking we can probably get old Bessie patched up till she’s good for a few more thousand miles.”r />
  “That would be great,” Mom says. “So you think you can have it ready by the end of the week?”

  “Unless the parts are slow to ship, it shouldn’t be a problem,” he says. His tone is so pleasant and friendly, nobody would suspect how much hate is in his head.

  Once we’re out of the garage, Mom says, “What happened in there? When you shook his hand, it took you way too long to let it go. I could tell you were creeping him out, but at least he was nice about it. And he’s not charging me too much to fix the car.”

  “He’s not nice. I went into his head. I didn’t mean to, but I did. And I saw all kinds of ugly things.”

  Mom puts her arm around me as we walk toward home.“Poor baby. I’m sorry. People’s heads are full of all kinds of ugliness. When you’re older, it gets easier. You won’t just fall into people’s thoughts accidentally. You can choose when to do it.”

  I nod. I feel a little sick.

  “Did you see anything you need to talk about?”

  “No.” We’re passing in front of the Piggly Wiggly, and my eye catches the pay phone in the parking lot. “Would you mind if I called Adam for just a minute?”

  “That’s fine. I can wait for you.”

  After four rings Mrs. So answers, and I ask if Adam’s there. As soon as he picks up, I say, “Can you come over tonight after you get finished with your homework? You and Abigail and I need to talk.”

  Abigail and Adam are sitting on the floor of my room, looking at me like kindergarteners waiting for their teacher to tell them a story.

  “I know who did it,” I say. “Who tampered with the food at El Mariachi.” I remember the pictures in Rick’s head: the American flag, the Bible held up in an old man’s hand. They’re the same pictures that came into my head when I put my hands on the words spray painted on the front of the restaurant. “It’s the same person who wrote the graffiti.”

  “Well? Who is it?” Adam demands.

  “His name’s Rick. He works at A and S car repair. He’s probably in his sixties. He has long gray hair in a ponytail.”