American Ghost

by Paul Guernsey

  “That’s terrible. I mean that you … oh, my God.”

  “It is terrible,” she said. “Thank you. I mean, there are worse things, but not many.”

  “So, how long ago did you die?”

  “I think I just told you it was two and a half years ago.”

  “You told me you had your baby two and a half years ago.”

  “Yes. That’s right.”

  “So, you must have been … were you sick, or something?”

  “No, I wasn’t sick.”

  “So, what happened? Some big complication? I mean, I’m sorry to pry like this, but my girlfriend had our baby about a year ago, quite a while after I’d already died. It’s such a huge coincidence.”

  “You, a baby too?” said Angelfish, not exactly sounding surprised, as she watched me through narrowed eyes. “Yeah, what are the odds of that?” Then, nodding but not smiling as she echoed my words, she added, “And yes, you’re right; it was a big complication. That sure is one way of putting it.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. But, you say she was adopted by some people. Do you know, are they good people, at least?”

  “I think so,” said Angelfish. “No reason for them not to be. I know they’ve got a lot of money, anyway. They didn’t know.”

  “Well, that’s … something. But what didn’t they know?”

  “It is something. I’m glad your girlfriend got to keep her baby. No matter what else happens, Thumb, you should always be thankful for that.”

  After a pause during which Angelfish turned to watch her friend Crystal finish her final dance and exit through the curtains, I said, “Are you going to keep claiming you never talked to me before? In the river? About saving a baby?”

  She was staring at the curtains, which continued to ripple in Crystal’s wake. She said, “There’s not much we can do for my baby, now.”

  “What about that spirit path? To get to the clubhouse. Can you help me out?”

  She looked back at me. “There’s somebody else I think you need to talk to first. She’s got a story you’ll find helpful.”

  “Really? A real person? Or a … an ethereal one?”

  I was relieved when Angelfish cracked an unambiguous smile. “Pickle? Sometimes I think she’s somewhere in between. But she is alive—at least for now. Come back here tomorrow night, and we’ll go see her.”

  CHAPTER 14

  The next night I returned to the Magic Hat at our appointed hour, more or less—we ghosts carry neither watches nor cell phones—but I failed to find Angelfish waiting in the parking lot as we had arranged. Rather than scanning the building with my freakish x-ray vision, I entered The Hat and ghosted around, searching for her in the public area as well as backstage, in the dressing rooms and offices. I had finally seated myself in the cockpit to watch the performance when I sensed her presence back outside on the blacktop, and I walked through the wall to meet her.

  “I think you’re late,” I said. She was wearing jeans and an untucked plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a long braid swung down the middle of her back; the overall effect made her appear quite a bit younger and far more innocent than she had the day before, when she’d alternately tricked herself out as a business woman and a stripper.

  She said, “Did you really think I was going to get here first and wait for you?” She came over and pretended to kiss my cheek, momentarily making me forget not only that our meeting was taking place outside of a strip club, but also that we both were dead, and the otherwise earthly normalcy of our situation—we, a man and a woman, smiling, bantering, kissing, just as any living couple might do at the start of a first date—nearly overcame me with a dizzying sense of strangeness.

  “You look nice,” I said, falling almost helplessly into the role the circumstances had assigned to me.

  Angelfish said, “Let’s fly,” which immediately broke the disorienting spell of otherworldly mortality, because I knew she meant literally for us to take to the sky. Pointing upward toward what in a moment I realized was the planet Mars, she added, “The path from here runs almost straight toward that really bright star; can you see it? We go a little bit to the left of where the moon is now, then we make a downward turn and head for the shore. It’s almost like following a rainbow from end to end—a rainbow with a kink in it, except there won’t be any pot of gold.” As she spoke—and for the first time ever in my afterlife—I was able to see a faint, milky glow that marked part of the spirit route she had described. After nearly two years of death, apparently I was getting to be a “mature” ghost who could find his way around the ghostly world. This idea was at least as unsettling as it was liberating, because I had long before figured out that the more skilled I became at negotiating the afterlife, the less attachment I would have to everyday matters and the faster my cherished humanity would trickle away—to be replaced by only God knew what.

  The aerial path was wide enough for the two of us to travel on it side by side without our avatars intersecting. After we made the turn she’d told me about, I was fairly certain of where we were headed.

  “We’re going to the clubhouse after all, aren’t we?” I asked.

  “We are. Are you scared?”

  Strangely enough, I was a little afraid. But I answered, “I’m a ghost; what can happen to me?”

  “That’s right. What could happen to you?”

  “Now, if we were still alive, I’d have reason to be worried. You’re one of them after all; you’re a mamma for the Blood Eagles.”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “I’d have to wonder whether you were setting me up.”

  “You’d be a fool not to give that some serious thought.”

  “As it is, though, not only do I own an array of super powers, including 360-degree vision that comes with an x-ray option, but I’m already dead.”

  “That’s the biggest advantage to being dead; nobody can kill you.” After a pause she added, “They can still hurt you, though.”

  After that we didn’t talk until we could see the clubhouse and the surrounding grounds below us and we began to descend. Then I said, “By the way—and, tell me if I’m getting too nosey here, again—but I knew most of those dudes down there. Do you know which one was your little girl’s father?”

  Angelfish narrowed her eyes and drew back her upper lip. “Asshole! Of course I know who Chelsea’s father is.” A moment later, just before we touched our feet to the lawn in front of the huge house—and although I was not expecting any further information from her—she said, “It was Scratch, if you have to know. Scratch is Chelsea’s father.”

  We drifted together through the closed front door and into the entrance hall, past the little room with the guns and the video monitors—it was manned by a young Blood Eagle I did not recognize—and entered the vacant great room, which looked nearly the same as it had on my previous and only visit, except that there seemed to be even more partially disassembled motorcycles strewn about, and no longer did a ladder stretch toward the nest of wires that bulged from the ceiling; apparently they’d given up, at least temporarily, on replacing the missing light fixture.

  “Why?” I said, as we stood looking around.

  “Why what?”

  “Why Scratch?”

  “Oh, are you disappointed in me?” There was an edge to her voice.

  “Kind of. That tattooed face and the fangs, and everything. The fact that he’s a murderer a few times over. My murderer, come to think of it. But it’s really not my business … ”

  “I fell in love with his strength. I was young, I had nobody, and I thought he could take care of me. I thought he would take care of me. And FYI, I was already dead by the time he killed you.” For the first time since I’d met her, she sounded bitter.

  “Like I said, it’s your business.”

  “And don’t you dare judge me. You made plenty of mistakes of your own.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “I sure did. That’s why I’ve been so anxious to come here, in fact; I died h
ere, and I need to get a more complete picture of the worst and last mistake I made. I never knew who pulled the trigger—he was standing behind me—and I’ve got to find that out.”

  “Like, as part of your atonement?”

  “That’s right. Yeah.”

  “Well, don’t go spooking around on your own just yet. Like I said last night, there’s someone you have to talk to here, and she’s waiting for us now. That’s the important thing; that’s why I brought you.”

  “Hell with that,” I said. “I can talk later to whoever. What I want is to get a closer look at Scratch, and see if I can find any evidence of anything. In fact, I think I see him back there now, in the same room where I died. My dying room.”

  At that point, we were interrupted by a chorus of barking so loud it would have been painful to mortal ears, and Scratch’s three big pit bulls—two of them seemingly chiseled from black volcanic glass, and the third and largest with a hide of brilliant, unbroken white—rose together from behind a sheet-shrouded couch to trot in our direction. The click of their nails against the floor echoed in the cavernous room.

  “Oh, hello boys!” said Angelfish, her voice as syrupy as if she were talking to a baby. “Big, strong, handsome boys, yes you are!” The dogs repeatedly passed through our legs as they milled about, growling in their throats and sniffing for the source of the atmospheric disturbance they sensed. Angelfish pretended to pet one of the black dogs on the head. After a moment, in her normal voice, she said to me, “This is strange. They come to greet me sometimes, and they sort of follow me around in a friendly way. But they never get riled up like this; they never bark or growl.”

  The Blood Eagle who was stationed in the entrance hall opened the door to the great room and bellowed, “Dogs! Shut the fuck up!”

  “Shut the hell up yourself,” I said as he was closing the door again—and the dogs, all three of whom had all momentarily frozen and fallen silent at his command, began scrambling around and barking again, louder than before.

  “Shut up!” the biker howled, but he did not bother reopening the door.

  “Interesting reaction,” said Angelfish. “Probably because you’re a dude? When Scratch attack-trains these guys on people in padded suits, the targets are always dudes. So maybe they just feel more of a threat from a male ethereal person than from little old me.”

  I laughed and said, “Too bad I make them feel threatened. So, where are all the other Blood Eagles right now? I’m x-raying the place, and I only see Scratch himself along with this dick in the hallway, that other jackass out by the gate, and a couple on the floor above us—they’re in a bed, so one’s a woman—and somebody down in the cellar. There should be a dozen or fifteen people here.”

  “They’re bikers. They party. Knowing them, they probably all rode down to Portland to hang out in the Old Port. They do that two or three nights a week.”

  “Why didn’t your fuck-buddy go with them?” Just then, the white dog snarled and lunged, snapping his jaws where they would have made me bleed, if I’d been made of flesh and blood.

  “Ouch,” I said—although, of course, I felt nothing at all.

  Angelfish told him, “It’s okay, boy! There’s nobody there!” Then she lifted a finger toward my face and spent a long moment seeming to consider a number of different responses before she finally spoke.

  “Are you going to keep doing that? Rubbing my face in my mistake?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I won’t.”

  “He never goes with them anymore. He’s got business worries, so mostly he just sits back there in his office, tapping away on his computer.”

  “Well that just sucks that he’s not able to get out on the town. I think I’ll go have a peek over his shoulder and take a look around his room.”

  “Negative. What we need to do now is to go down into the basement and talk to Pickle.”

  “We can do the Pickle thing later. Like I told you, I’ve been waiting for almost two years to get into this place.” I started walking toward the door to the room where I’d been murdered, and one of the black dogs moved along behind me, sniffing the floor as if to track me.

  Angelfish called, “Thumb!” and I thought she would continue trying to talk me out of detouring in Scratch’s direction. Instead, she said, “Look at that! Say something to that dog.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know; something mean. Something loud.”

  “Bad dog!” I yelled in my ghost voice. “Bad, stupid dog!” The dog barked and snapped at empty space, a thick rope of slobber flying from its mouth and spinning through my knee. The other two animals raced over as if to see what the excitement was about.

  “Happy now?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “I couldn’t be happier.”

  *

  In my death room they had covered the front of the brick fireplace with a panel of white-painted plywood. On the hearth, with its back legs resting on the wooden floor, stood Scratch’s black desk. The seat of his chair shadowed the spot where I must have lain bleeding on the floor. On the desk there were ledger books and piles of papers and a computer whose keyboard Scratch was punching with his long-nailed index fingers. A spreadsheet glowed on the screen. Cursing Scratch beneath my ghostly breath, I traveled through and through the desk as I circled him, looking at him from every angle. Although less than two years had passed since I’d seen him last, he looked as if he’d aged; he had put on perhaps fifteen pounds of doughy weight, and his tattooed face had begun to sag so that the red wings that spread from the inside corners of his eyes appeared as though they were drooping. On the bridge of his nose, just beneath the tattooed, blue-eyed death’s head, perched a pair of black-framed bifocal glasses, the seam distinctly visible in each smudged lens.

  I told him, “You’re dying, you bastard, and you don’t even know it. And, when I meet you in the afterlife, I will kick your ass from here to the end of time.”

  Just then Scratch surprised me by giving a sudden groan. “Oh, God,” he said, his grimace exposing his cosmetically bonded vampire fangs. “The fucking insurance, on top of it. This cannot go on the way it is.” He tore the glasses from his face and, before he thought better of it, seemed ready to throw them across the room. Instead, he closed them and worked them carefully into the tight top pocket of his weathered denim cut, after which he shoved the keyboard aside to make room on the desk for his folded arms. He buried his face in the crook of an elbow.

  “Come on, Scratch,” I said. “I was hoping for some action from you; a show of evil shit. But all you are right now is pathetic.” He answered with a broken snore.

  Able to draw neither satisfaction nor entertainment from the dozing man himself, I crawled inside his desk and nosed around. There were a few loaded handguns in there, a couple of .22s—no telling whether one had been the weapon that ended my life—along with more papers and notebooks. There was an entire drawer of drug paraphernalia, including pipes, rolling papers, lighters, a ceramic mortal and pestle, and a scattering of capped syringes. But I found nothing that shed light on the circumstances of my death: who it was who had shot me, and where they had hidden my remains.

  I had high hopes for the contents of a combination safe that stood to one side of the desk, but when I stuck my head inside of it, I discovered only the most commonplace assortment of personal and criminal materials—an entire pound, more or less, of pot, some white powder in a glass vial, assorted pills in plastic bottles, yet another handgun—this one a tiny .22 automatic sealed in a ziplock bag—a modest stack of money, some legal documents that seemed to include deeds and other contracts, a few brightly colored, battery-operated sex toys, a wad of women’s undergarments.

  Disappointed, I spent a little more time looking around the rest of the room before I moved out and began exploring the remainder of the house—all of it except for the cellar, which I was saving for last because I knew that was where Angelfish wanted me to go. I went all through the first floor including the kitch
en and dining area without finding anything interesting, and then one by one I cased the upper stories of the house. These were warrens of dark, messy bedrooms and ashtray-strewn sitting areas that together made up a set of particularly slovenly dormitories—the sort of quarters you might expect to find below decks on a pirate ship. Beyond the third floor was one more level of vacant space and storage rooms and, above them all, a low, unfinished, and dusty attic. On the whole, almost everything looked completely unmenacing and entirely ordinary, and nowhere did I see anything that might help me solve my mystery—and, really, why should I have? I’d been killed nearly two years before; my death was ancient history. How illogical it had been of me to imagine that at this point there might still be obvious evidence of the crime that had ended me lying around in plain sight.

  When I had finally and completely satisfied my doomed curiosity, I drifted back down the four flights of wide, wooden stairs to where Angelfish was waiting. She was sitting in mid-air with her legs crossed beneath her.

  “Hi, honey,” she said. “Did you find your dead body?”

  “Stupid, wasn’t it? I don’t know what I was really looking for anyway. A written confession posted on the wall? A gun still smoking?”

  “I know where your bones would be, if that’s a comfort.”

  “Really? Where’s that?”

  “With all the rest of everyone’s they’ve killed. The property here, one of the reasons it was so expensive is that it’s got a piece of frontage on the river, with its own boat dock.”

  “So, you’re telling me I’m sleeping with the fishes? In my green plastic shroud?”

  “You are, no doubt, sleeping with the fishes. Either in the river or out under the ocean. In your heavily weighted plastic shroud. Instead of a teddy bear, you’re cuddling a cinder block.”

  I nodded. “That makes sense, I guess.”

  “They’d of been careful to put you down someplace where a fishing boat wouldn’t trawl you back up; maybe out among the lobster traps near a big pile of rocks or construction debris, or a sunken barge or something. That would be the kind of place to look if you were still obsessed with finding yourself. Me, I’d just as soon let myself rest in peace. In fact, I think it’s kind of nice to imagine you and me might be resting side by side down there somewhere. Maybe holding hands and sticking starfish all over each other like badges.”