American Ghost

by Paul Guernsey

  He took a break, did some farm chores, relit the candle, and tried again in the early afternoon. But the results were no better than they’d been in the morning, and it quickly became clear that, rather than writing for him, his autonomous hand would give him nothing but a few dozen more pages of swirling childishness. That was when I decided to step in, thinking that I might somehow be able to influence the way his pen moved against the paper.

  “Fred,” I said, my head hovering next to his, “Try writing what I tell you.” In what I hoped might be an affirmative response, the pen shot to the top of the page, then back down to the bottom.

  “Good,” I said. “Let’s try a word, now. That word is … ” Fred’s fist clenched so tightly his knuckles turned white, then it shoved the pen to the middle of the page, where it scrawled in a tight circle with such pressure that the paper tore beneath it. The pen drilled down through five or six sheets and then, in a sudden jerk, his hand punched backward through my unseen face before flying forward again to launch the pen through the air, shattering it against the cinderblock wall of the farrowing enclosure.

  Empty, Fred’s hypnotized hand thumped to the card table, where it lay as limply as a bird blasted from the sky. Fred stared at it in astonishment before carefully flexing his fingers. After a moment he gave a snicker and said, “Clearly, my subconscious is every bit as fucked up as the rest of me.”

  I would have thought he’d give up on writing after that. Even the most determined person can’t endure failure forever. I was also worried he’d start drinking heavily, and that was why I returned to the farm the following morning—where I found him preparing to give it another go.

  The card table and candle were gone now, as were all the books on hypnosis. The rolling chair remained, and the laptop computer had made yet another return; Fred was clutching it as he stood next to the chair. A moment after I arrived, he turned to the gate of the farrowing pen and began to speak—though whether he was addressing the throng of pigs that had gathered there or a group of human hallucinations standing among the swine, I could not tell.

  “The job is actually quite simple,” he said. “No more complicated than shoveling pig shit off of concrete. Get words on the screen. One word at a time, one shovelful at a time. From this point forward, I declare my writer’s block to be at an end.”

  He settled into the chair, stared at the screen, tapped out the word, “Once.” Gave a single twirl of his chair, deleted the word—and then in seeming paralysis, spent ten minutes staring at the laptop while his fingers slowly writhed above the keyboard.

  Finally, still peering down at the empty screen, he muttered, “Well, let’s see. When the work is going well, I always do this.” He scooted his chair to the closest wall, placed his booted feet against the cinder blocks, and pushed himself off. Then he twirled and pressed his boots onto the wall next to which his rolling chair had come to rest.

  “And when it’s going really well, I do this”—giving himself a more forceful shove that barreled him across the farrowing pen.

  “And when it’s going really, really, really well … ” He cocked his legs, planted his soles, and gave a kick so forceful that as the chair rolled, its front wheels lifted from the ground, tipping it out from behind him and launching him backward and headfirst into cinderblocks, where his skull making an audible clunk against the gray concrete. He then slid down the wall and crashed heavily to the floor where he lay unmoving, his legs entangled with those of the overturned chair, the back of his head propped awkwardly against the filthy lowest line of cinder blocks, and his soiled baseball cap pushed down so that it covered his face. There he remained, looking as if he’d been shot, as two dozen pigs squealed in ear-piercing panic outside the gate of the farrowing pen.

  If I hadn’t been able to hear his heartbeat, I would have worried that he’d killed himself. As it was, I thought it likely he’d fractured his skull, scrambled his brain, reduced himself to a vegetable. And there was nothing I could do for him—not even call for help.

  But after a couple of minutes, he groaned. A moment later, a shaking hand rose to lift the hat from his face and adjust his glasses. After yet another minute, he pushed himself to a sitting position, squinted out at the pigs, who had continued their high-pitched vocalizing, and shouted, “Pigs! Shut the hell up.”

  The squealing died down almost immediately. Most of the pigs fell to grunting instead, their dripping snouts protruding through the bars and oscillating enthusiastically in seeming hopes of sniffing out Fred’s prognosis.

  Fred pulled off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, put his glasses back on. He then stared for a long moment at his laptop, which lay open against the floor with a diagonal crack across its screen—a mockery of black blankness.

  Aloud, in a voice containing neither humor nor irony, Fred said, “This is like death.” After a moment, he amended himself with a sigh: “It is death. I’m nothing but a fucking ghost, now. A ghost is all I am.”

  I waited there in the barn until he climbed to his feet, righted his rolling chair, and began moving around again. When I was sure he was okay—physically, at least—I flew home—where I found my road and my yard crowded with black-helmeted firefighters and their flashing vehicles, and my house fully engulfed in flames.

  CHAPTER 9

  The fire crews knew the house was abandoned, so they watched it burn until it had completely collapsed into its basement, after which they hosed down the blazing embers. When they went away, ghost-like wisps of smoke still crawled toward the sky. After that, all that was left was the foundation, heaped with charred debris, and the blacktop driveway—which had partially melted then rehardened like lava, and now led to nowhere—as well as the concrete front steps with their two wrought-iron handrails, both of which had been weirdly twisted by the heat. No longer did it require a ghost’s x-ray vision to see into my backyard from the road; the big red maple tree closest to the house—the one from which Dirt had shot the pileated woodpecker—was scorched on one side, most of its fresh, new foliage having disintegrated. But the wooden fence had survived, and the other two trees remained undamaged. Tigre’s training tire still dangled from one.

  With walls no longer surrounding it, my special spot above the front door was now a point fixed invisibly in midair; nevertheless, it continued to serve as my canal of birth and death, leading me to and from the dark river, and it didn’t matter a bit that its man-made framing was gone.

  For many days after the blaze, I didn’t feel like visiting Fred or talking to the other ghosts, so I stayed home and sat on my steps. During this time of sitting, my road experienced a brief upsurge of traffic as people drove past to take in the results of the catastrophe. A few even got out of their vehicles and walked around the yard holding their phones in front of their faces. The day following the fire was the busiest: the county fire marshal stopped by and took some photographs, a ragged-looking reporter for the local weekly newspaper and its website did the same, and then my landlord and his insurance adjuster showed up. After the insurance woman had filled out her forms and driven away, my landlord took a half-dozen vinyl “Keep Out” signs from the trunk of his car and staked them along the front of the property, where they immediately caught the breeze that rolled up out of the marsh and began to flutter like an array of plastic pinwheels. Then he too drove off.

  After that, it poured rain for two solid days, during which I continued to sit there on the steps, the wind-driven water slicing through me in sheets. At the start of the storm, I heard an occasional hiss as the rain hit one of the remaining hotspots in the gaping hole behind me, but within minutes all hissing had stopped, and then the only sound was the continual and rapid thudding of large raindrops as they punched through the cooling ashes.

  Finally, in the late morning of the third wet day, the sun emerged and began drawing a thick mist from the marsh across the road. It was then that a car pulled up in front of the house, and a heavy-set man stepped out to release a dog from the passenger seat. It to
ok me a few moments to realize that the man was Chef, and the dog, Tigre. In fact I recognized Tigre first, because Chef was dressed completely unlike himself: He wore dress slacks, a button-down shirt, and a tie, and on his pocket he wore a blue pin-on plate that identified him as “Charles,” which was his given name. Clearly, Chef the meth cook now had a regular job of some kind, and had entered the straight-and-narrow.

  “Good for you, Charles,” I said in my ghost voice.

  Tigre came right to the steps and ran up and down them and through me and through me, madly jerking his stump of a tail.

  “Hey, buddy,” I said. “You’re looking good. It’s so nice to see you.” In fact, he had gotten a little smooth for my taste—quite a bit less like the chiseled block of granite he had been under my care and training. He carried a bit of extra padding now. But he looked healthy; that was the important thing. He was alive, and he seemed well fed and happy. I stuck out my hand and passed it over the top of his big, square, devil-horned head every time he swung it within my reach.

  After a minute, as Chef stood watching with his mouth slightly ajar, Tigre scrambled off the steps and ran two complete circles around the cellar hole, front yard to back. During his third circuit, I couldn’t help saying—again in my inaudible, ghostly voice—“Hit it, boy.”

  He responded, or seemed to respond, by launching himself into the air and latching onto his tire swing.

  “I’ll be damned,” Chef said.

  Tigre hung there, whining; undoubtedly this exercise was harder for him than it used to be. But he also seemed determined not to let his lack of conditioning deter him from fulfilling his life’s purpose for a final time.

  “Shake it boy,” I whispered, “Give her a shake.” His groaning whine of unaccustomed exertion shifted to a keen of eagerness as he began dancing in the air and snapping his head from side to side in an attempt to tear out a chunk of steel-reinforced rubber.

  “I’ll be damned,” Chef said again. Then he and I both heard a car door open, and when I turned my attention toward the road, I saw Cricket struggling to ease herself from behind the wheel of her father’s white Lexus.

  “Oh, jeez, Claire,” Chef said. He rushed down to the road to help her, and as he awkwardly drew her from the car by her elbow, I saw that she was hugely pregnant. The world stopped spinning.

  When I was able to think again, I counted the months and determined that the kid could well be mine. At once I recalled all the many occasions, just before my death and then afterward, when she would refuse to drink, would merely play with her cigarettes, and would take only a token puff of pot. So, it seemed likely she had known about this baby back then—although if that were true, why hadn’t she told me?

  Of course, there was no guarantee it belonged to me; there had been times when she was out of my sight, sometimes for days at a stretch. I was either a fool or a father-to-be. But, the latter seemed most likely: Even though Cricket enjoyed flirting—was skilled at it, in fact—once she left Chef’s futon for my bed, I never got the sense she was seriously tempted to sleep with anyone else.

  “Look what they’ve done to it,” Cricket said as she viewed the remains of the house. Then, carrying a bundle of flowers—a much nicer one, containing tulips and irises, than the bouquet of carnations that had decorated the kitchen table on the day of my memorial service—she made her way toward where I sat. Chef moved with her, stretching his arm protectively and a little possessively across the small of her back.

  “Did you see him, Claire?” said Chef, lifting his chin in the direction of Tigre, who was still whining, swinging, and squirming in his game attempt to demolish the tire. Cricket looked up and stood staring at my dog.

  “Oh my,” she said after a moment, with a catch in her throat. “It’s like … it’s like … ” Then she was sobbing. With the flowers clutched in one of her hands, the other hand grabbing at a fire-warped iron rail, she sank from beneath Chef’s arm and settled to her knees in front of the steps. Slowly, like a flower wilting, she bent forward until her forehead rested on the second step only inches from my foot. It was then that I noticed the engagement ring on her hand—the tiniest chip of a diamond set in a modest band.

  Shuddering and gasping, for a long time she continued rolling her head against the concrete as Chef hovered helplessly above her, his empty arm hanging in the air. His lips twitched with words that he was unable to speak; in the end, he said nothing and surrendered to his helplessness, letting his arm sink to his side and bending his own face toward the ground.

  I reached down and placed my hand on top of Cricket’s head—although of course, I could not feel her hair, and she could sense neither my touch, nor even my presence. At last, she pushed herself back to a kneeling position, unwittingly passing my fingers through the top of her skull as she did so. She wiped her face with the back of her wrist and, without looking at Chef, asked him for his handkerchief. After she had scrubbed her face of smeared makeup and tears and had blown her nose, she gave a sigh, set her jaw, and placed the flowers on the bottom step.

  “Goodbye,” she whispered. Then out loud to Chef: “Help me up.”

  They stood silently for a minute more, watching Tigre at his exercise. Finally Cricket said, “We need to go before a Blood Eagle rides by and spots us here. And you need to get to work, anyway. Call him; I’ll take him home with me.”

  “Tigger. Down boy,” Chef called. But the dog ignored him.

  Cricket waited a moment, then she clapped her hands and sang out, “Come on, pal.” Still he continued to growl and swing.

  But when I said, “Tigre! Suelta!” he dropped to the ground and lay there gasping.

  “Delayed reaction,” Chef joked. “The words have to kind of rattle around in his brain for a while before they fall into the right slots.”

  “I hope he didn’t kill himself there,” said Cricket. “Look how exhausted he is. Let’s go, buddy!” At this, Tigre climbed shakily to his feet and staggered around the foundation into the front yard, the pink necktie of his tongue dripping and yo-yoing.

  They all walked to the road together, and Cricket opened the back door of the Lexus so that the dog could crawl inside. Then she turned to Chef and smiled.

  She said, “You know what? I’ve got a psychic feeling.”

  “You do? What is it?”

  “You’re gonna sell a car this afternoon. Some lady customer’s not going to be able to resist that sweet Alabama accent.”

  “Oh,” said Chef, and laughed. “I hope so. And my boss does, too.”

  They exchanged a dry little kiss, then Cricket squeezed herself behind the wheel of her dad’s car. Just like that, she was gone.

  Chef remained a minute longer, surveying the wreckage of our former home, his eyes squinted and his hands on his hips. It was impossible to tell what he might be thinking.

  Finally, aloud he said, “Danny Starbird Rivera. Adiós, Thumb.” After a moment he added, “I’ll take care of her. She’s my girl now.” Then he, too, was gone.

  *

  Ben, his urgent tone warning me that he’s slipping into full would-be-rescuer mode, is on me immediately once I’ve finished dictating this episode. He blurts, “So, Cricket was pregnant! All along, she was pregnant.”

  YES

  “So, dude, weren’t you worried? Didn’t you see, like, a possible connection between what Angelfish said—about a baby being in danger and the fact that Cricket was going to have a baby?”

  IM NO STPD B

  (I’m not stupid Ben)

  “But, like, you weren’t worried?”

  DUDE I WZ FCKN WORRIED

  “So, like, the third time, the last time you talked to Angelfish, what did she say? You have to tell me now—you tell me, or I pack up this Ouija board and never touch it again. Did she say any more about the baby?”

  NO MO ABT T BBY

  (No more about the baby)

  “Dude, then what was it?”

  ALL SH S WZ KP LKN 4 ME I CN HLP U FND WHO KLD U

>   (All she said was keep looking for me I can help you find who killed you)

  “That’s it? That she could help you find your murderer?”

  TSIT

  (That’s it)

  “And after that you never talked to her again, there in the dark river or whatever?”

  NO

  Ben hops up, paces back and forth in the little room, scratches his head with both hands, sits down again. “So you wanna know what I think, dude?”

  NO

  “I think Angelfish was another one of those messenger ghosts. And I think she was trying to warn you that whoever killed you wants to hurt your kid, too. Doesn’t that make sense?”

  After a moment I made the planchette skate up to the left corner.

  YES

  “And even after it’s born—I figure it must be born already, isn’t that right?—the dude who killed you may still be making bad plans against it. Don’t you think so, Thumb?” When he realizes I’m not going to answer, Ben adds, “So dude, you got to do something.”

  Sure, Ben. But what?

  *

  After my house had burned and cooled, and my landlord, my woman, my dog, and the man who passed for my best friend all had come and gone, I frequently found myself stumbling into those distance-warping openings that Professor Shallow liked to call wormholes, and that Gib, who did not care for them, always referred to as “pecker tracks.” Usually, I happened across them while I was traveling to one of the handful of places I was able to go—to Muttkowski’s farm, for instance, to hear what Fred might say that day to his pigs and his imaginary friends. As I moved along my spirit route, I would unexpectedly crash through a seeming “soft spot” in the space that surrounded me—this felt like a plunge through river ice, though without the feeling of wetness, or cold—and then I would find myself shot headlong to another place, and, occasionally, to a slightly different time.