American Ghost

by Paul Guernsey

  Still aiming their snouts in Ben’s direction, most of the pigs grunted in seeming agreement. Then, as Fred lowered the rake, he caught sight of Ben out of the corner of his eye, and he turned to face him fully. Several seconds passed during which Fred stared expressionlessly at the young man who gripped spiral-bound notebooks in both of his pudgy hands. Finally he said, “Who the fuck are you?”

  “My name’s Ben.”

  “Well if you’re looking for Iris, she doesn’t live here anymore. But to be honest, from the looks of you she’s way out of your league, anyway. And believe me fellow, your wardrobe is the least of it.”

  “No, I’m not,” Ben said.

  “What, then? Come to ask about working for me? Got the passion for pigs? Because I’ve been thinking about hiring somebody. The successful candidate will be a person with a strong back, no sense of smell, and not much of a brain. You look like you might fit exactly one of those criteria; I’ll leave you to guess which one.”

  Ben’s eyes widened. “Not pigs, no.”

  “Then why are you here? I’ve got shit to do, and I mean that literally. So, either use your vocal cords to produce some meaningful vibrations”—at this, his gloved right hand rose beside his head and snapped the air like a mouth—“or get the hell out of here and let me do my job.”

  Ben stared out over the pig run, obviously at a loss for words; I wanted to slap him. After a moment, Fred narrowed his eyes and seemed to consider stepping forward to give him a poke with the rake handle. But finally Ben said, “You’re a writer.”

  Fred glared. “Who sent you here?”

  “You’re Frederick H. Muttkowski, the writer.”

  “I will not ask you again. I will just start kicking your ass.”

  Ben took a step back from the fence. He turned one foot in the direction of Fred’s driveway and the safety of his grandmother’s car. Knowing Fred as well as I did by then, I had instructed Ben to avoid at all costs admitting that he was running interference for a ghost; instead, I had supplied him with a few credible lies, which now, disastrously, seemed to have gotten log-jammed in his throat. At last, to my relief, he was able to say, “Nobody sent me!”

  “I’m waiting,” said Fred. “But not for long.”

  “Dude!” said Ben. “You’re on the internet! I just Googled you, is all.” He lifted the notebooks in Fred’s direction and continued, “I got this … I got this thing I wrote. I need some help with it from a writer. That’s all I want.”

  “Go ask your English teacher to help you with it. That’s what they pay them all those millions for.”

  “I’m not in school anymore. And the job needs a professional.”

  Fred turned the rake so that the teeth rested against the hard-packed ground. He placed both gloved hands atop the rounded end of the handle. After a moment he lifted his chin at the notebooks.

  “If I look in there, what am I going to find?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What is it? Your ‘thing’ that you wrote?”

  “It’s … I don’t really know how to describe it. It’s kind of a murder mystery.”

  Fred grimaced and shook his head. “I am not the least bit interested in reading any kind of half-baked genre bullshit. Not that I’m a snob, or anything.”

  “Well, it’s really more of a ghost story.”

  “Strike two, buddy. Go home.”

  Ben drew a shaking breath. “Well it’s … could you just please have a look?” To my distress he added, “If you don’t like it, I will never bother you again.”

  Fred thought for a moment before stripping the gloves from his hands and tucking them beneath the arm that held the rake. He lifted the rake and wordlessly kneed his way through the mob of pigs to stick his free hand across the fence. Ben gave him the notebooks. Fred opened the topmost one as he stood with the rake handle resting against his shoulder and huge pigs jostling for the privilege of nibbling his boots. He spent five seconds scanning the first page before handing them back. Peering over the tops of his glasses to look Ben directly in the eye, he said in a quiet voice, “Son, you aren’t even literate. Now, go away.”

  *

  If legitimate mediums—people able to talk to the dead—were anything but rare, I never saw the evidence. In my entire afterlife I only “met” one other living person aside from Ben who could communicate with a ghost, and that person, a biker mamma named Pickle, was at least halfway out of her head. Because of my connection with Ben and the ability he gave me to transmit messages to the living world, I imagine that most other ghosts would have envied me a lot.

  But the truth is, I was unhappier and more frustrated after meeting Ben than I had been before. The problem was that having a psychic hunchback at my beck and call presented me with certain choices I had not previously faced—choices that were so completely miserable I would have felt relieved not to have had them at all. For instance, after Ben came along, I could have dictated a letter to Cricket and poured out my heart, telling her finally and clearly how I had felt about her and how great it was that she’d had our child—our boy, or girl, who would now be well over six months old. Of course this really was not much of a choice, because it would have been such a monstrously selfish thing to do—something that not only would have literally spooked Cricket, perhaps even driving her and our baby back toward her old, downwardly mobile way of life, but also no doubt affecting her relationship with Chef or whatever man might now be serving as our child’s stand-in father. Still, it was a course of action I was forced to consciously reject and, in rejecting, had summoned a tide of regrets that until then I had pretty much held at bay.

  But the most painful decision I had to make was one that was not as mad-makingly obvious. Without the slightest danger of alerting or alarming Cricket, I could have coached Ben through some elementary research to find out whether we’d had a boy or a girl, and what name Cricket had given our child. His name! Her name! And there was a good chance that without much effort Ben could have gotten me a photograph as well. How I longed to know; how I longed to see, regardless of how painful knowing and seeing would be.

  But the rub was in what I already knew about myself. In life I’d had a genius not so much for making bad decisions, but for rationalizing or ridiculing away all of my good choices until nothing but the bad ones remained. If my vague, and vaguely unreal, son or daughter out there in the near world somewhere were to take shape in my mind as a specific person—a human being with a sex, a name, and a face—there was a strong possibility I would begin to feel the irresistible tug of a thousand reasonable-seeming and toxic pretexts for haunting the lives and meddling with the minds of those I cared most about.

  No. It was far better for me not to know.

  *

  It was lunchtime on a warm fall day, and Frederick H. Muttkowski came to the screen door of his house with a half-eaten hard-boiled egg in one hand, a brown bottle of ale in the other. He peered down at Ben, who after knocking had retreated with his notebooks to the lowest step, and he said, “You disappoint me. You and I had an agreement that you wouldn’t come back.”

  In the words I had insisted he rehearse while looking in a mirror, Ben said, “Sir, if you would just have one more look. The story is the thing, once you get past my bad spelling. And, if you can get past the spelling … and the punctuation, too, I guess, the writing isn’t half-bad either.”

  “If you do say so yourself,” said Fred, and took a bite of egg. “I told you no before, and I’m running out of polite ways of telling you to get lost. I have absolutely no interest in reviewing any more of your moronic scrawlings.”

  “I can pay you,” Ben said.

  “Well, good for you. Come back with a bag of gold and maybe we’ll have a conversation.” Then Fred closed the inside door and faded back into the depths of his house.

  *

  About two years earlier, I had made a couple of remote caches of cash and other supplies as a precaution against a law-enforcement raid or other catastr
ophic event that would make it necessary for me to leave the Pine Tree State in a hurry. Post-death, I had not yet figured out a way to reach the locations of those buried stashes on my own, but I was able to give Ben detailed directions to the nearest one, which lay beside a stone wall at the wooded edge of a hilltop blueberry field. I remembered that the view from the field, of ponds and forests, was spectacular, especially in the fall.

  Although I had promised to give Ben money—I had no further use for the stuff myself—I had been reluctant to send him off on a treasure hunt because of the fact that, enclosed within the moisture-proof box among my two changes of underwear, three-thousand dollars in worn twenty-dollar bills, and a few other items I thought would be useful to a man on the run, there lay a Beretta Tomcat .32-caliber semi-automatic handgun with a seven-round clip and a full box of ammunition. It was my strong belief that what the living world needed least was one more fool with a firearm. In fact, I still believed it possible that if that other idiot, Dirt, had not had his Glock close at hand on the day the woodpecker came knocking, I might still be alive.

  But now I had no choice, given Fred’s stubbornness so far. At sundown, I sent Ben skulking up the blueberry hill along a vague foot trail, his grandmother’s garden spade and a pickaxe he had borrowed from his next-door neighbor clutched in his hands. After dark, several hours later, he returned to the trailer with my treasure box, which he immediately carried to his bedroom, locking the door behind him. Over and over again, he riffled through the stacks of twenties with shaking hands; it was obvious he’d never expected to handle that much money at one time. He then removed all the other treasure-box contents, spread them onto the grayish sheets of his unmade bed and, to my dismay, spent a considerable amount of time pointing the handgun at the mirror above his dresser. I was worried that he’d see it as a substitute for the heroic sword he’d always felt belonged in his hands.

  When finally—thankfully—he cracked a warm can of Moxie and sat down at the Ouija board, I told him that while the other items in the box still belonged to me, the cash was his to keep in partial payment for taking my dictation. I suggested that he open a bank account and deposit two hundred dollars a week until all of it was in. Of course, by then we had long before worked out our code:

  RMBR T GUN Z MINE I WNT U 2 THRW IT N T NEAREST POND

  Instead however, he wrapped the pistol in one of my t-shirts and stuck it beneath some of his own clothes in his bottom dresser drawer. After that, whenever I mentioned the Beretta and what I wanted him to do with it, he always pretended not to have understood me.

  *

  The next time we visited Fred, it was another relatively warm day in either late November or early December, and we found the old man reading a dog-eared paperback edition of Under the Volcano as he sat behind his barn in a lawn chair, his booted heels propped on the spine of a sleeping swine.

  “No,” said Fred, when he saw Ben come around the corner.

  Ben carried our notebooks in one hand and a paper Dunkin’ Donuts bag in the other. He held out the bag and said, “Here you go, Mr. Muttkowski.”

  “Is that a donut?”

  “No; it’s what you said you wanted.” I felt proud of Ben then; he was learning to stick his ground.

  Fred sighed, took his feet from the pig, which reacted with a lazy grunt, and walked to the fence. He accepted the bag, opened it, and peered down into it as if he thought it might contain a snake. Then he reached inside to remove a small velvet box that, until recently, had lain buried beside the blueberry field along with three thousand dollars, my underwear, and a gun. He popped the hinged lid and spent a moment studying the gold coin that lay nestled in the box before looking up at Ben with a grim expression and saying, “Did you hurt anyone in the house you broke into to get this?”

  Having already rehearsed this part—in the mirror, while holding my Beretta in his hands—Ben said, “I didn’t steal it. It was my gramp’s; my gram gave it to me after he died.”

  “You’re fucked, you little freak; I’m going to call the police.”

  “The coin is from Denmark. It’s one of four of them they made for the two-hundredth birthday of Hans Christian Andersen. Gramp sent for it. This one’s from The Shadow—you can see the illustration thingy on the back.” Ben dug into his pants pocket for a wad of paper that he painstakingly unfolded, smoothed against his thigh, and then squinted at for a moment before reciting: “A word is a shadow, said the shadow, and as such, it must speak.” He looked up and added, “That’s my favorite line. From The Shadow.”

  As Fred continued to stare at him, he dropped his gaze again, and in a softer voice he said, “That’s your bag of gold, Mr. Muttkowski. That you asked for. Will you help me with my book, now?”

  When Fred finally spoke, it was to say, “Kid, do you think you’re in some kind of fucking movie?”

  “Wait—what?”

  “Are you fantasizing that I’m actually some sort of beautiful old man who, though grumpy on the outside, secretly aspires to help you turn your life around? Help you gain confidence and competence and coach you maybe to win the girl of your dreams?”

  “Uh … ”

  “Because I’m not. I am the furthest thing from that person, especially where you’re concerned. I don’t care about you or your so-called book, or your gramp, or any of your trailer-trash problems. Nothing. Not one mother-fucking bit of it.”

  Ben edged back from the fence. “You told me that if I brought you a bag of gold you would help.”

  “You only brought me one coin, you cheater. And what I said was we would talk. What I want now is some dope. They still call it that, don’t they—dope?”

  Ben widened his eyes. “You mean weed?”

  “Pot. Mary Jane. Mota.”

  Ben let out a surprised laugh and nodded. “They call it dope sometimes.”

  “I want some. I haven’t been high in twenty years and I think I’m overdue. Is it still sold by the ounce?”

  “It is, if you want that much. That’s a lot, though…. ”

  “Jesus! I sound like Rip Van Winkle, don’t I?” He barked out a laugh. “And, aren’t you a knowledgeable and helpful young man all of a sudden. Bring me an ounce of it. Something good—and keep in mind that, while it’s been a while, I can still tell the difference.”

  “For real, dude?”

  “Don’t forget a couple of packages of rolling papers. Zig-Zag, if they still exist.” He stuffed the bag containing the gold coin into his jacket pocket. “Take off now, fellow. I’ve got work to do.”

  *

  Fred’s marijuana wish was an easy-enough one to make come true; Ben knew a friendly dealer who lived three trailers away, and even after shipping some expensive presents to his out-of-state toddler siblings, he still held plenty of my ill-gotten cash with which to buy it. As soon as his grandmother’s car was once more available for his use—two days later—Ben drove back to the farm and triumphantly passed a second Dunkin’ Donuts bag across the gate in the electrified pig fence.

  “Papers are in there, too,” Ben said with a touch of smugness in his voice. “I even bought you a lighter.”

  Fred took the bag from him without opening it and said, “Great. Go away now.” When Ben stayed at the fence blinking and not moving, he added, “You didn’t think I was going to invite you to smoke some of it with me, did you? That would hardly be appropriate in a mentor-mentee relationship. Come back in three days—and when you do, make sure you’re wearing a suit and a tie.” With that he turned, paper sack in hand, and walked into his barn without looking back.

  Once we’d returned to his grandmother’s trailer, still in possession of the notebooks with my story scrawled inside them, I tried to encourage Ben.

  HE CLD HSLF YR MENTOR W R MKN PROGRES W ND 2 KP TRYN

  But I could tell that not only was he getting tired of dealing with Fred and his eccentric, seemingly endless, demands, but now that he had a little money in his pockets the novelty of having an invisible friend—me�
��was starting to wear thin, and his mind had begun wandering in some different directions. The next day, he deserted me right in the middle of a writing session, went out in the station wagon with a wad of my cash, and came back with a new flat-screen television and an Xbox 360. He set up all of this equipment in his room and he began to play a loud video game in which people killed one another with a variety of weapons. As he played, it started snowing outside, but Ben was so busy he barely noticed.

  The heavy snow continued on and off for the next several days, piling up against the sides of the trailer and icing the coat of the sluggish black goat in the backyard, and all the while Ben entertained himself nonstop with his sophisticated new electronic toys. He was so preoccupied with his gaming that he missed his appointment with Fred and completely ignored the Ouija board. In fact, at one point during the long snowstorm, I arrived in his room to find that the planchette had somehow gotten knocked to the floor and partially buried beneath a mound of dirty clothes—where it remained for the next several weeks as Christmas approached and Ben, in the animated role of various muscular and tough-talking demigods and demi-demons, electronically shot, stabbed, hacked, and blasted his way through an endless assortment of anti-heroic Xbox scenarios.

  Christmas and New Year’s came and went with a glassy-eyed Ben barely leaving his room at all, except to boil a pan of ramen noodles or to say hello to the occasional relative who stopped by. He did not once attempt to talk to me, and I began to consider giving up on him and going back to the abandoned church to hang out full-time with Virgil and Gib. Finally, however, a dark accident worked in my favor—though it also came with some unintended consequences.

  One day as the oblivious Ben single-mindedly thumbed his gaming console, I saw a dog emerge from the woods behind the trailer. A lop-eared mongrel, it stood just beyond the scope of the black billy goat’s long rope and waited. Dog and goat stared at one another until finally the dog gazed over his shoulder to watch as a pack mate stepped out from the trees. The second dog was long-legged and hyena-like, with a bowed back and a head it held close to the ground.