American Ghost

by Paul Guernsey

  The next day, he received another visit, this time from two beautiful young women, both of whom, in addition to bearing the same vague resemblance to Fred, were also nearly identical to one another in every other way except for the fact that one of them had black hair while the other was a blonde; Ben could not tell which color, if either, was the natural one. The blonde girl wore a knee-length tartan skirt and a frilly white blouse, a golden locket dangling from her neck, while the dark-haired twin had on pants made of tight-fitting black leather, with a many-zippered jacket to match. Her face was a celestial map of metallic piercings. Ben would later write that he immediately fell in love with both of these girls even though, as they stood outside the gate to the electric fence, they were furrowing their perfect foreheads in seeming fury.

  “Where is our father, you freak?” asked the blonde twin. Her voice was like music.

  Ben said, “I wish I knew so I could tell you.”

  “If you did something to him, I will fucking kill you,” said the pierced and black-haired sister. She sounded like a rock star; Ben thought he would like to hear her sing a song.

  “I didn’t,” said Ben. “I’m helping him, is all.”

  But the black-haired sister seemed not to have heard him. She said, “I’ll come right in there and rip your ears off. That’s how I’ll start.” Ben found himself almost wishing that she—or better yet, both of them—would do just that. Being pummeled, scratched, crushed against the ground—perhaps even bitten—by such a pair of angels was as fine a death as Ben could imagine.

  *

  During the handful of days Fred remained away—six altogether, rather than the four or five he’d said—spring arrived for good, and the frozen ground had turned to bubbling mud. Cici was not home when he pulled his truck into the driveway, so Fred quickly changed into his work clothes and walked down to the back of the barn carrying our notebooks.

  He called Ben’s name as he stood outside the fence. Their roles temporarily and weirdly reversed, Ben emerged from the barn wearing rubber gloves and carrying a rake.

  “Did we lose anybody?” Fred asked.

  “Wait—what?” said Ben.

  “Are all of my pigs alive?”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  Fred nodded, “Well … well done, it seems.” He lifted the notebooks and gave them a couple of shakes. “So, I’ve spent some time thinking about all of this. Talked to some people, actually; showed them my edited version of what you’ve done. And I’m pretty sure now I can turn it all into a book.”

  “A real book? You mean like, that somebody would publish?”

  Fred laughed dryly. “Well, we’ll give it a fucking shot. My track record isn’t good; I’m about zero for five at this point. But we can try.”

  After a moment, Ben nodded, paused, nodded again. His eyes swept the pounded ground of the pig run. Finally, in a voice barely louder than a murmur he asked, “Will my name be on it? If it gets published?”

  The question seemed to catch Fred by surprise. His mouth opened, and for an instant it looked as if he were going to laugh again. He drew his hand across his mouth once, then once more. His fingers were still obscuring his lips when he began speaking.

  “Ben, you’re actually a character in this book, which is quite a landmark. Quite a special honor. What’s a byline compared to that sort of immortality?” He stopped to assess Ben’s expression, which was far from a look of delight, so he continued: “But … I kind of see your point. I kind of know what you mean. So tell me, do you know what an acknowledgments page is?”

  “Acknowledgments page? I don’t think so. But I have to tell you that lately I’ve been considering trying to go to college; I didn’t do that good in high school, and I’m thinking my name on a book might help me get in.”

  “College!” said Fred. “Great idea. I’d write you a glowing recommendation. As for the acknowledgments page, it’s usually the first real page in a book. The first page by the author, anyway. It’s certainly the most important page—one of them. It’s where all the people who have contributed to the book are mentioned. Your name would absolutely go on the acknowledgments page. In fact, it would be the very first name on that acknowledgments page. Stellar. Just a stellar … kind of thing.”

  Ben stared at him without speaking. Fred stared back until the silence grew heavy. Then he looked down and scuffed his booted toe against the ground. Just as he looked up again and seemed about to make some further concession, Ben said, “That’s not quite right.”

  “Well, so …”

  “I mean, as pissed off as I’ve been at Thumb, it’s really his story. His name should go first on the acknowledgments page. Then my name.”

  Fred’s eyes widened. He smiled, his tongue touching his bottom lip. He gave a vigorous nod. “Thumb. Of course. Thanks for reminding me. Not just Thumb, in fact: Daniel ‘Thumb’ Rivera. His name will absolutely go first on the acknowledgments page. Then yours. Still stellar.”

  “What about money?” Ben asked.

  “For the book?” Fred said. He laughed. “To be honest, the way I’m planning to go about this, there’s not likely to be much, if any.”

  “But some?”

  “Maybe. If there is, I’ll give you some of it. And if you’re really going to college, I might be able to help out there, too. Not out of my pocket, of course, but I bet I could help you find a scholarship or two. I used to know how to do that sort of thing.”

  Ben was undeterred. “How much will you give me, if you get any money for the book?”

  Fred sighed and rolled his eyes. “Half. How’s that? Fifty-fifty. Keep in mind, though, that half of nothing is nothing.”

  Ben seemed satisfied with that. He nodded. He smiled. Then he actually reached to shake Fred’s hand.

  As for Daniel “Thumb” Rivera himself … I guess I thought it was okay, too. It was my story—novelized, if it needed to be—that I wanted out in the world; I didn’t really care who took credit for having written it.

  CHAPTER 13

  With the arrival of my second spring as a ghost and Fred Muttkowski’s enthusiastic involvement in our project at long last—each day he was now spending two or more hours in his vacant farrowing pen with our notebooks balanced on his lap—Ben and I began a sprint to finish the book, often working through both morning and afternoon, with just a handful of quick breaks for him to eat, or shit, or attempt to appease his grandmother, who frequently nagged him about hunting for a job. We were more efficient than ever; not only were we much faster than we’d been with the Ouija board, but we even worked out a system whereby I could capitalize and punctuate without slowing us down excessively.

  From the start of this new beginning, however, it was clear that things had permanently changed between us. In spite of his having held out for my inclusion on the acknowledgments page, Ben still carried something of a grudge against me over the death of his grandmother’s goat—he didn’t completely buy my claim of innocence, and he certainly no longer saw me as harmless. Our collaboration remained almost entirely businesslike.

  When Ben and I weren’t working, rather than flying off to the abandoned church as I formerly might have done, I spent my days and nights haunting the concrete stairway to my vanished former home and staring out over the marsh as I remembered, brooded, and wondered. By then my yard had become something of a dumping ground for people who didn’t want to pay the fees at their local recycling center. My immediate surroundings now included several stacks of worn tires, a threadbare couch whose upholstery was bloated with rainwater, a heap of asphalt shingles, two piles of old lumber profusely fanged with nails, and a couple of shredded garbage bags whose former contents had been spread by animals through the unmowed grass. One afternoon when a shiny minivan pulled to the shoulder and stopped, I assumed this was someone with yet another bag of trash to toss, and I began to wish I could do something aside from just sitting there and fuming; I wanted to swear or throw a rock. But the driver turned out to be Cricket—and with her was a b
aby, a little girl, who slept in a car seat behind her. A girl!

  I rose from the steps as Cricket, in jeans and a sweater, her hair shorter than I had ever seen it, stepped from the car and quietly closed the door. Almost faint with excitement, I was ready to rush over and get as close as I could to the child. But after looking warily around her for a moment, Cricket moved toward me, so I stayed on the stairs and waited. She crossed the feral lawn to stand before me; she was close enough to touch, and how I did yearn to put my arms around her and crush her to me and feel her against me—the deceptive strength of her thin shoulders, the firm push of her breasts, the beat of her heart against my chest, the heat of her internal fire. Her hands clasped before her, she stood staring through me for a long minute; I found the lack of direct eye contact unsettling. Eventually she murmured, “This place is so ugly now. But I feel closer to you here than anywhere else. I don’t know why.” She drew in a shuddering breath, and when she spoke again, she was whispering: “Anyway, I miss you. I wish you were here. I think … ” but instead of finishing the thought, she pressed her fist against her lips and sharply shook her head. After she took her hand away, she said, “Goodbye again.”

  I groaned as Cricket turned to face the road once more. So soon, oh my God. But then she lifted her chin toward the car. She was whispering again: “That’s Lizzie. She’s asleep. She’s beautiful. She has—” she paused to brush the back of her wrist against an eye “—She has Charles’s last name. Chef’s last name. Anyway … we just thought we’d stop by.” She gave a little laugh, then walked to the car, got in, and began to buckle her harness.

  I ghosted my way through the sliding passenger door. The little girl—Lizzie—was still asleep and breathing softly. She was a healthy-looking dumpling of a child with a pink bow in her still-wispy, light-brown hair. Her complexion was very pale—much more like Cricket’s than mine. “Hi, Lizzie,” I said. I wished she would open her eyes so I could see what color they were. I also wished I could pass on to Cricket my cryptic warning from Angelfish that the baby might be in danger—perhaps from the same person who’d killed me. Maybe I would have Ben write her that letter after all—although as I’d already figured out, a letter from a dead guy presented dangers all its own.

  Cricket started the car. “Bye, Lizzie,” I said. “I love you. Te quiero mucho.” The car started moving; the rear bench seat passed through me followed by the lift gate, then I was hanging all alone in midair above the edge of the road.

  The following day Chef showed up and stepped out of a convertible sports car bearing dealer plates. His blond hair was cut and combed, he was sporting a neatly trimmed moustache, and he seemed to have lost some weight—although this may have been nothing more than an illusion brought about by the fit of his fine suit. After looking around for a moment, Chef lit a cigarette—I’d never known him to smoke anything but weed—and he walked up to the steps where I was sitting.

  “Dude,” I said. “You’re looking prosperous. What’s going on?” It was only then that I noticed an unfamiliar hardness in his eyes. Though there was no telling what had caused it, the change was profound; these were almost the eyes of someone else, and it disturbed me to imagine him turning them on my daughter.

  Unlike Cricket, Chef did not speak to me. Instead, he just smoked and glowered, and when he had finished his cigarette, he flicked the butt against the back of the lowest concrete step, where it lay smoldering beside my foot. Then he walked back to his car and drove away.

  *

  The next visitor I received was another ghost.

  One moonless evening a dense fog rolled in from the coast and came flooding through the marsh, smothering the landscape for miles. With mortal eyes I barely would have been able to see the edge of the road from my seat on the steps a few yards away. It was through this fog, and seemingly from all directions at once, that I heard a man attempting to whistle. Over and over he squeezed out the same half-dozen broken notes as he seemingly struggled to master the beginning of a tune. I thought the whistler probably had company because every few seconds, even as he slid from note to tortured note, there came a separate timbre like the blat of a child’s toy horn.

  Eventually the spirit materialized out on the road and, still eerily whistling, came walking toward me from the direction of town. Fog swirling around him, he stopped before my stairs and stood glowering down at me and I recognized him as the ghost of Dirt. His face was unshaven and he was dressed in the same greasy-looking clothing he’d worn in life; after a moment he ceased whistling and spread his mouth in an angry grin. One front tooth remained missing, the other was still black. I was about to say something to him when I heard that horn again, after which I saw a flash of scarlet behind his ear—and suddenly the eye and long beak of a bird loomed above his shoulder. The bird clawed its way up Dirt’s back until its feet were fastened to what would have been his collarbone had he been alive, then the amber eyes in its red and tufted head were watching me from beside his own. It was a pileated woodpecker. The bird studied me for a moment before abruptly swiveling its neck in Dirt’s direction and stabbing its thick black beak into his ear. Dirt grimaced and a moment later the woodpecker drew out a beetle with wildly waving legs and swallowed it with a single toss of its head.

  “Fucking bastard,” muttered Dirt. I was unsure whether he meant me or the bird.

  I said, “What’s wrong with you? You’re a ghost now; you could take any shape you wanted. What’s with the bird, and why do you still look like a walking piece of garbage?”

  Dirt sneered and shook his head. “No, Thumb, I can’t look like anything I want. I’d look like fucking Brad Pitt if I could. Showing myself to other ghosts like this—it’s part of my atonement.”

  “Oh. Well I guess you do have some things to atone for.”

  “Fuck you, and so do you. And I wouldn’t be here talking to you if I didn’t have to.”

  This was surprising to me. “You’re a messenger? You?”

  Dirt nodded. “Otherwise you can be sure I wouldn’t give you the shit off my shoes.”

  I had a good, long laugh at this as Dirt stood gritting his awful teeth at me and balling his fists. The woodpecker, meanwhile, scooted over to his other shoulder and pecked a couple of times against the side of his head. Finally I said, “So what’s your message, then, messenger? Are you here to admit you killed me?”

  “Me?” It was his turn to look surprised. “No.” Then he smirked. “Not to admit it, at least.”

  “Do you know who did?”

  “I thought you knew. It was the Blood Eagles. They blew your fucking head off.” I felt like punching him. But a ghost can no more punch another ghost than a shadow can assault another shadow.

  “There was one of our posse there, too. Standing behind me with the gun. I never saw him. I figured it might have been you.”

  He studied me, and finally, in a tone that suggested he was impressed with his own cleverness, said, “I bet that’s your atonement. To find out. Isn’t it?”

  “Part of it.”

  The smirk returned to his face. “Well, we all had reasons to hate you, Thumb. But right now that’s not important ’cause there’s a place I got to take you. Come with me.”

  Through thick fog we flew toward Riverside on the same ghost path Virgil had shown me long before. When we had almost reached the college, Dirt banked away and led me toward the river; a couple of minutes later, we were standing in a supermarket parking lot a stone’s throw from the muddy, tidal shore. Fog crawled from the river and swarmed past us like a living creature.

  “Really?” I said. “You mean after all this time I finally get to go across?”

  “A dead lobsterman showed me this path a while back,” said Dirt. “But I’ve only made the trip a couple of times. The route’s a tricky little zigzag, like a lightning bolt, and it’s easy to lose the way.”

  He led me out over the swirling tide. We turned upriver for a half-mile or so and then headed to the middle of the flow, where we ch
anged direction yet again and began to cross a little island of seaweed-smothered rocks that lay exposed by the falling tide. It was then that we spotted two other ghosts gliding toward us over the water and through the fog, heading for the bank we had recently abandoned. They were the strangest spirits I had yet seen: young American Indian men who obviously had lived during a much earlier epoch, and who were dressed in buckskin leather elaborately decorated with shells and colored beads.

  “Is this part of your message? Are we supposed to talk to these guys?”

  “I don’t think so. I never seen them before. Weird-looking fuckers, though.”

  At first we heard them speaking in their language, but they shut up as soon as they spotted us. We moved off to the edge of the fairly narrow spirit path in order to let them slide past without having to go through us. I said hello as they ghosted by but they didn’t reply; they only stared at the pileated woodpecker, which was now clinging to Dirt’s arm, tail pointing skyward. When they were gone Dirt said, “Couple of pricks, anyway.”

  “They’ve got their reasons not to like us, I think.”

  A few more zigs and zags and we reached the far shore, where we ascended a trash-strewn bank and emerged onto an industrial-looking nighttime street. I was excited to be there.

  “Is this the place?” I asked.

  “It’s a little farther on,” said Dirt.

  We moved along the nearly deserted strip of potholed blacktop until we arrived at a highway overpass at the base of which sat a flat-roofed brick building that throbbed with music. There were blackout curtains covering the insides of all the windows, and between the curtains and the glass of each window flashed the garish neon outline—alternately pink or blue—of a shapely, long-haired woman sitting with her knees angled invitingly, her arms stretched behind her to support the weight of her arched torso, and her head thrown back in the anticipation of ecstasy. The pink neon sign above the front doorway identified the place as “The Magic Hat.” A dozen motorcycles were angled along the front wall like horses at a hitching post, while the parking lot was half full of pickup trucks commingled with a handful of sedans and two or three out-of-place-looking mini vans. “The Hat,” which was what its regulars called it, was familiar to me; in fact, I’d actually spent a considerable amount of time there, back in my heartbeat days.