American Ghost

by Paul Guernsey

  Other than the nervous, unceasing twitch of its tail, the staring goat seemed paralyzed. Both dogs began slinking forward over the snow, and I thought somehow to alert Ben; I bent to him and said his name, but he merely gave his ear a brisk, irritated swipe before continuing on with his game. I did it again, and again he waved me away.

  The dogs separated and slowly circled. Then, as if by agreement, the large dog froze while the smaller one crept closer. Finally, the goat lowered his horns and committed to a charge. The goat leaped, the smaller dog wheeled away, and the larger dog, the hyena dog, rushed in and closed its jaws on the goat’s belly, just ahead of the haunch. The other dog jumped to take the struggling goat by the throat.

  I’ll spare you the worst of the horrors here, except to say that a goat can make a scream that sounds remarkably human. That noise pulled Ben to the window, where he slapped at the wall and yelled, “Stop it!” As if in obedience, the goat fell silent—but the dogs did not even glance toward the window.

  Ben dropped to his knees and jerked open the lower drawer to his dresser. He took out my shirt-wrapped gun, laid it bare, stared at it a moment. I told him, “Don’t shoot yourself, asshole,” though I knew he couldn’t hear me. He ran from his bedroom and down the hallway to the kitchen, where he kicked open the backdoor. Both dogs lifted their heads at the slap of the door against the vinyl outside wall of the trailer; they were covered to their eyes in blood, clouds of frozen breath boiling from their mouths. At Ben’s appearance, they began fading toward the woods.

  Ben lifted the gun and squeezed the trigger. Nothing. He looked at the gun—his hand was shaking badly—and he clicked the safety off. He raised it and squeezed the trigger. Again nothing. Then he remembered that he needed to chamber the first round and he clumsily, tremblingly racked the slide. Once more he sighted down the barrel—but by then the dogs were gone. The woods had absorbed them like ghosts. Ben fired anyway. Toward the ghostly woods he shot again and again, flame spitting from the barrel until the gun was empty. Then he stood panting and staring out over the yard and its snow-mounded metallic debris and the carcass of the goat whose blood continued to color the steadily falling snow.

  Two hours later, his hands still trembling, it finally occurred to him to return the planchette to the Ouija board; he was shaken and he wanted to talk. By then I’d come up with a plan to use the tragedy to my own advantage. I didn’t want to do it—I felt bad about it—but I didn’t see any other way to get him working again. So I let him sit at that card table for a good long while; I wanted to make him beg. Finally, when I saw tears forming in his eyes, I sent the planchette sliding to spell out my message.

  YES I MD THT HPN

  NOW FNSH YR JOB JKASS B4 SMTHN RLY BAD HPNS

  (Yes, I made that happen. Now finish your job, before something really bad happens.)

  After that, Ben did go back to work. By pretending I’d been responsible for the killing of his grandmother’s goat, I succeeded in bullying him into resuming our task. And he was better at the job than ever: he’d sit for hours without even his usual and frequent food and bathroom breaks, taking my dictation. That’s what I gained by scaring him, and I believe that if I had not done so, he might never have returned to writing.

  But I also lost something of value as well, because there were some unintended—though in hindsight, entirely predictable—consequences to my deception. Ben never said a word, but I could tell that his attitude toward me had shifted, that the innocence of our association was over. Now when he worked his Ouija board and scrawled my words into his notebook, he no longer drove me to frustration with childish questions and ridiculous digressions; instead he said very little at all, keeping his lips pursed and his eyes on the table, working with the concentration of someone who looked forward to getting finished and moving on. It was apparent he no longer viewed me as his special invisible friend; instead, I’d become a spirit of ambiguous intention—a gray and possibly sinister presence around whom he needed to watch himself, for fear of inspiring further violence.

  Following an initial glow of satisfaction, I began to find this change to be almost unbearably sad—and I also learned that there was no going back to the way things had been. Whenever I’d pitch him a peace offering in the form of a joke or a compliment, he would just nod and say “Okay, that’s cool,” and then he’d wait for me to move on with my story.

  IT WZ JST A FKN GOAT B ID NVR HRT U

  “Oh, don’t I know it,” he quickly replied. “I never thought that for a minute. It’s cool, Thumb. It’s totally cool”—a response that made me think of a cringing boy hoping to forestall the fury of an abusive father. I found this image so upsetting that a couple of days later I ended up fully confessing that I’d been just as much of a spectator to the killing of the goat as Ben himself.

  I JST USD IT 2 GT U 2 QUIT PLAYN GMES N GO BK 2 WRK

  “No shit? Well you sure had me fooled! Thanks for telling me that.”

  RLY B BLEV ME

  “I do believe you. Now, what were you saying?” Then, his fingers spidered against the planchette, he sat without speaking as he waited for me to continue my story.

  Even more troubling than the loss of Ben’s trust, however, was a new and wild slyness that I sometimes detected in the sharp movements and unaccustomed narrowness of his eyes. I was sure that inside his head he’d taken a crafty turn; that he was rebelling against me somehow; that he was scraping together some kind of treachery. I wanted to find out what it was, but I couldn’t think of an effective way to go about this discovery. It would be almost impossible to trick him into telling me, because my cruelty had made him continually wary of anything I said. For probably the first time in his life, Ben was always thinking hard before he spoke. And I certainly couldn’t scare it out of him, because that card was already out of my hand. He was prepared for me now, and no matter what nightmares I menaced him with, he’d merely deny that anything at all was afoot. In fact, Ben was able to keep his secret until the next time we visited Fred.

  *

  Following the absurd instructions Fred had given him when we’d last paid him a visit, Ben went out to the farm wearing black dress shoes, a dark suit, and a black overcoat. He was visibly relieved to find a well-beaten path through the snow alongside Fred’s barn. Even so, he walked on eggshells because the shoes were new and their leather soles extremely slick, and he was afraid of placing his full weight on a snow-covered patch of ice and flying into the air. When we finally reached the electric fence, there was not a pig in sight, probably because it was so cold outside; I looked through the wall and saw them all lying or milling about on the concrete floor. There were many fewer pigs than there had been the last time we’d come by, which meant Fred had sent a bunch to the slaughterhouse. I also saw Fred himself, clad in a blood-smeared vinyl apron as he walked to the wide doorway with something cradled in both of his calloused hands. When he emerged into mortal view, we saw that he carried a limp and nearly shapeless lump from which stuck a twist of umbilical cord and four little legs tipped with tiny trotters. As soon as it hit the cold air of the outdoors, the still bundle of black-and-white flesh began to smoke.

  Fred’s eyes were red, probably from tiredness—although it occurred to me it was not impossible that he also felt sad. He had to stare for a moment before he recognized Ben in his good clothes, but he did not seem surprised to see him. He said, “You haven’t come at a good time, friend. I’ve still got seven sows that are ready to farrow.” Vapor boiled out of his mouth and mingled with the wisps dancing up from the dead newborn. He nodded at the Dunkin’ Donuts bag Ben carried and added, “Is that for me?”

  “Yes,” replied Ben, his eyes still glued to the lifeless creature Fred was holding. “I thought … ”

  “I’ve got my hands full right now. I’ll get it later; set it down right there and put a little snow on top so it doesn’t blow away. Far enough from the gate so a pig can’t reach through and grab it.”

  Ben did as Fred had asked, bowing
toward the snow to weight the paper bag. Then, as he stood again, brushing melting snow from his pink fingers, I saw that his mouth was a bloodless line and his eyes were narrowed in the same suspicious way that recently I’d so often noticed.

  “I have something to tell you,” he said to Fred—a declaration that was not part of the script we’d worked on together. Whatever he’d been plotting, it seemed like he was ready to unleash now, and there was nothing I could do to stop him.

  “To tell me?” said Fred. “What might that be?”

  “The thing, the manuscript I want you to help me with. I’m not the one that’s writing it.”

  “No? Who is, then?”

  “The guy, the dead guy, the ghost. Thumb. He’s the one that’s really writing it.”

  I immediately understood what Ben was up to. Telling Fred the truth about me was guaranteed to piss the old man off. He would think Ben was completely crazy—or worse, making fun of him—and likely chase him off his property with a rake. Order him never to come back under pain of a beating—which would make it useless for Ben and I to continue our work together. He’d then be off the hook. He’d be free of me, the demanding, goat-murdering ghost. I had to admit, Ben’s assumptions seemed sound; in fact, his plan would be admirable if it weren’t so infuriating.

  Fred gave a little snort and said, “Your character is writing his own story? Well it certainly seems that way sometimes, doesn’t it? It’s happened to me, in fact.”

  “No, dude, I mean he actually is. He’s a ghost, and he’s really writing it.” How I yearned to give Ben a kick in the ass. If only I had a leg, and a leather-booted foot….

  Fred stared at him. After a moment his jaw tightened, and color began building in his cheeks. The explosion of obscenity that Ben counted on was working its way through the pipes. And I’m sure it soon would have arrived all on its own if Ben hadn’t gotten smug and decided to prod it along.

  “I just write it down for him. That’s all I do. Thumb spells it all out on the Ouija board, and I put it in my notebook.”

  A few heartbeats passed, and Fred audibly exhaled, his mouth staying parted. His eyes widened and his shoulders settled. After a moment, in a quiet voice he said, “You use a Ouija board?” I remembered then, the Ouija board illustration at the start of the automatic-writing chapter in one of his hypnosis books.

  “That’s how I talk to him. That’s how Thumb writes the book.” A slight smirk was pulling at the corner of Ben’s mouth. The little asshole was enjoying himself.

  Unexpectedly, Fred said, “Well, I’d like to hear more about that … Ben. That’s very interesting. But first, I need you to do me a favor.” He stepped to the fence and said, “Here, take this.” He still had the dead piglet in his hands, though it no longer steamed in the cold.

  “Wait—what?” Ben’s smirk vanished and he began backing away. “No fucking way.”

  “Come on. I’ve got a whole litter in there to take care of. I need to get some heat lamps set up before I lose more of them.” He lifted his bearded chin toward the back of his property. “See that hill, with the tall pine trees on it? There’s an old cemetery up there; when you reach it you’ll see the tops of the slate gravestones sticking up. Take her up; lay her out on the snow. The ravens will do the rest. By tomorrow, there won’t be anything left. You and I’ll be the only ones who know she ever existed.”

  When Ben remained statue-still, Fred said, “Get it in gear, sunshine. If you’re going to be a writer, you can’t be squeamish.”

  Ben, almost in spite of himself, wobbled forward and received the cooling mass in his cupped hands. As he was trudging toward the hilltop through knee-deep snow, Fred called out behind him. “I’ll be waiting for you.”

  Ten minutes later, Ben set down his small burden, vomited a short distance away just like he had after disposing of the dog-savaged remains of his grandmother’s goat, and scrubbed his hands and lips with fresh snow. When he reached the corner of the barn again, Fred reemerged to open the gate in the electric fence.

  “Come in,” he said. “I made some coffee. Let’s have a talk.”

  For a minute Ben stood wavering, his palms, now stained the color of rust, open before him as if he expected Fred to pass him the carcass of another tiny pig. Up on the hill, ravens were already descending, just as Fred had predicted.

  “Come in,” Fred repeated. “Quickly, before they figure out I’ve opened the gate.” From the flash of confusion that crossed his face, I could tell that Ben was at first uncertain who Fred was talking about. Then he realized it was the pigs. The pigs would figure it out.

  And still he hesitated. This was the opposite of what he’d planned. Instead of chasing him off the farm forever so that he’d never have to see Fred again or write another word for me, Fred was trying to pull him deeper in. I caught a look in Ben’s eye and realized then that he wasn’t used to being invited anywhere; it was difficult to resist. After a moment his entire body twitched beneath all that new, dark clothing, and then he took a step, and then another. Fred closed the gate behind him, and warily he followed the old man into the barn.

  The two of them wove a path among the massed bodies of sleeping pigs, past cinderblock enclosures full of pregnant sows and sows with piglets to an open pen that contained two chairs and a card table, on which a candle burned. Next to the candle rested a spiral-bound notebook and a pen. Ben froze, obviously wondering what it was Fred wanted from him, and seemed to consider retracing his steps back out into the snow and the sunlight.

  “Want some coffee?” Fred said. “I’ve got a little kitchen in the front room. It’s up there.”

  “No,” Ben said. He shook his head. “I’m good. You know, I really … ”

  “Tell me about that Ouija board.”

  Ben shrugged. “It’s, uh, you know, a Ouija board. My gram had it.”

  “Yeah, so what about it? What were you saying about it before?” Now that he had Ben in the barn, Fred could afford to let a little of the old sharp impatience return to his voice.

  “Well, like I said, that’s how I talk to Thumb. He spells out the words, and I write them down.”

  “And you’re telling me in all honesty you actually believe that Thumb exists?”

  “I don’t believe he exists—He does exist. He’s here right now, in fact; he and I came here together.” As Fred was looking around him, his eyes wide and a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, Ben added, “In fact, he’s with you more often than I am. He hangs out and watches you, and when we write, he tells me what you’ve been doing. You’d know that if you read our manuscript.”

  “He does?” said Fred. “What does he tell you about me?”

  “He says you talk to yourself.” Fred looked surprised for a moment, then nodded and grinned his lopsided grin.

  “Yes, I do. More than a little. But that wouldn’t be hard for you to imagine, since my only company here is pigs.”

  “I used to like Thumb; I used to want to help him. But he’s been a prick lately.” At this Ben’s eyes darted around guiltily; I’d told him my story about the beating I’d given Dirt, and he looked as if he expected me to materialize in front of him and fill his mouth with my knuckles.

  “What else did Thumb tell you about me?”

  “I don’t know. You’re a writer, but not a successful one. And you’re not very happy.” Laughter exploded from Fred.

  After a moment Fred said, “Sorry, I’m laughing at myself, not at you. And Thumb sounds like a very observant young man. See, though, the thing is, there is no Thumb. But the truth is even more interesting than a ghost. Thumb is your subconscious mind pretending to be someone named Thumb. All the writing you’ve done up to now? It’s all your own work even though it feels to you like you’ve been taking dictation from somebody else. We’re talking scientific fact here; it’s a well-documented psychological and creative phenomenon.”

  “Nope,” said Ben. “He’s real. And he’s probably standing right here, all pissed off at me for telli
ng you about him. He probably wants to kill me.”

  “Okay,” said Fred. “All right.” He lifted his hands to show that he wasn’t interested in arguing. “It doesn’t really matter whether you believe what I say or not. Maybe it’s even better if you don’t. So let’s just move on to the mechanics of the whole thing. Tell me: writing with your Ouija board—having to wait for every word to be spelled out—how is that working out for you as a … as a”—Fred fought to force the word out—“as a writer?” Ben shrugged again.

  “It used to be okay. We have a system worked out to make it go faster. I didn’t mind it. But now I’m kind of sick of it. It’s slow, and boring. And like I said, I’m not that happy with Thumb anymore. He’s been nasty; that’s why I told you about him in the first place. Just because he didn’t want me to. Fuck you, Thumb, if you can hear me.”

  “Well, look, I’ve got something I’d like to show you. It doesn’t work well for me, but I’m interested in seeing if it would be effective for somebody like you. It’s a technique—something that might work instead of the Ouija board. It’s like the Ouija board—same principle—but a lot faster. It’s called automatic writing. So how you do it is, you hold a pen in your hand, and your subconscious—the invisible spirit, whatever—uses you as a tool to write whatever it has to say on a piece of paper. No spelling it out letter by painful letter and then scribbling it down afterwards. In fact, back in the early 1900s, entire novels were written this way by people who thought they were taking dictation from spirits. Mark Twain—the Huckleberry Finn guy—supposedly even wrote a novel from beyond the grave.” Ben looked into the farrowing pen at the flickering candle and the notebook. His seemed to relax; automatic writing was obviously less worrisome than many of the other things he imagined that Fred might propose.

  “The thing is, Mr. Muttkowski, I was thinking about not having anything more to do with Thumb at all. Like I said, he’s a prick.”