American Ghost

by Paul Guernsey

  I stared at her as she hovered there, smiling her ironic smile. After a long moment, a question began to form on my lips, but she forced me to put off asking it by saying, “You haven’t seen the cellar yet. And we need to go down there right away; Pickle’s been waiting for us, and she’s getting more antsy by the minute; she’ll be pulling her hair out in fistfuls before too long.”

  So I followed her as she descended directly through the floor. We ended up before a heavy steel door that was bolted from the outside, and through which I could see a person moving around in the space beyond. I tried to complete the thought I had been struggling to put into words a moment before. “So, why would they have wanted to kill you?”

  As she seemed to do so often, Angelfish gave me an answer that appeared unconnected to my question. She said, “Scratch was brought up on a farm out West. He calls this area down here the ‘farrowing floor.’”

  “You’d just had his daughter. Why … ” But at that moment, the person on the other side of the door let out a plaintive, quavering call.

  “Earth to Angelfish,” she said.

  “Uh-oh,” said Angelfish. “See, she expected us earlier, and now she’s starting to lose it a little. Your fault entirely, Thumb.”

  At that Angelfish passed through the door, forcing me to follow her into what appeared to be the narrow central area of yet another dormitory. Compared to the rest of the house, the construction here looked fairly recent; Blood Eagles had probably done the carpentry themselves. The place was furnished with a couch, a flat-screen television tuned to a talk show, a half-dozen standing lamps, and a couple of coffee tables with their accompanying chairs. On either side of this lounging space were four doors leading to tiny bedrooms, and at the far end was a small kitchen and dining area.

  The southern-accented voice that had cried out to Angelfish belonged to a thin, freckle-faced biker mamma dressed in slippers, pajamas, and an open bathrobe far too big for her, and whose reddish-brown hair was twisted and streaming in every direction. She was clutching a blue enamel hand mirror with a scrimshaw-like design etched in black on the back. A moment after we entered, she began speaking into the oval mirror as if it were a microphone.

  “Earth to Angelfish!” she said. “Come in, Angelfish.” She held the mirror at arm’s length and began doing a bizarre dance in which she awkwardly twirled herself first one way and then the other, almost like a toddler trying to make herself dizzy.

  “I’m right here, Pickle!” Angelfish called.

  “Earth to Angelfish! Please come in, Angelfish.” During one of her twirls, the bathrobe flew back and I could clearly see that beneath those baggy pajamas Pickle was pregnant. In a jolt I recalled the two pregnant young women I’d seen at the clubhouse the day I died. Then I remembered Angelfish in the underground river, telling me about the baby who was in danger.

  Angelfish explained, “She can’t hear me unless she sees me in the mirror, and she spins like that because she’s trying to find me. The problem is, she can’t find me unless she stops that damn spinning long enough for me to get behind her.”

  “Angelfish! Angelfish! Come in, Angelfish!” Angelfish stepped toward Pickle and began shadowing her movements as she tried to position herself behind her shoulder and in line with the mirror. Twirling and bobbing together in that poorly choreographed way, the two of them put me in mind of a pair of courting cranes, or an especially clumsy duo of ice dancers.

  “That chick is with child,” I said.

  “Dude, you should be a detective.” Angelfish continued gliding behind Pickle in what looked like an attempt to set her chin first on one and then the other of Pickle’s collarbones.

  “Come in, Angelfish! Are you here, Angelfish?”

  “I’m here, honey! You can stop twirling, honey!”

  I thought about Angelfish’s story of her pregnancy, her childbirth, and her death. I thought about Cricket and our baby, and a sick feeling welled up in me. “What the hell’s going on here, Angel? Is Scratch the father of her baby, too?”

  “Oh! There you are! Oh my God!” Pickle placed her free hand on her breastbone. “Oh my God! I thought you weren’t coming.” Pickle stopped spinning, only to stagger with dizziness as she tried to stand still and stare into the mirror. It was amazing, but there in the glass, as clearly as if she were alive, I was able to see Angelfish’s face; it was different—a little more full, a touch less symmetrical, and a great deal less blonde than the version I saw when I looked at her—but the differences, at least to my mind, were not significant.

  “We got here late,” said Angelfish. “I brought a friend, and he had something else to do. How are you, Pickle? How are you feeling? Are you still getting sick?”

  “Sick? Oh, no. Not sick; not no more. Not for a little while, knock wood. Who’s your friend? And, guess what? Guess what, Angelfish?”

  “What is it, honey? What’s going on?”

  “Scratch said—Hello? Are you there?”

  Angelfish slid to her right and said, “I’m right here, Pickle. Just stop waving the mirror around so much, okay?”

  “There! There you are. Whew! Anyway, Scratch said if this baby’s a boy, I get to keep it this time. Isn’t that cool?”

  Angelfish frowned. “Honey, I think Scratch probably already knows what the baby is.”

  “Well no, none of us knows. Because we told the doctor we wanted it to be a surprise.”

  I said, “So, Scratch … ”

  “Pickle, my friend wants to know if Scratch is your baby’s daddy.”

  “Well, you know very well my baby daddy’s Chimp. He makes the prettiest little girls—but his boy baby would be a handsome one, too, don’t you think? After all, he’d look just like Chimp! So, who’s your boyfriend, Angelfish? Is he a ghost dude, too? Is he hot? Is he here right now?”

  “Hi, Pickle. My name is Thumb.”

  “She can’t hear you. For one thing, you’re not in the mirror. For another, I don’t think the mirror works for anybody but me.”

  “So, what’s going on with all the biker babies? Scratch is selling them?”

  “They’re private adoptions.”

  “What, Angelfish?” said Pickle. “What did you say?”

  “Sorry, honey. I was talking to Thumb. He’s asking me where the babies go.”

  “They go to nice homes,” Pickle said. “In other states. Nice parents who give them everything and send them to private school. They all grow up to be filthy rich and happy. Can he hear me, Angelfish?”

  Angelfish intentionally moved so she was no longer in line with the mirror. She told me, “The Blood Eagles get maybe seventy thousand for each kid. Girls who pass all their medical tests are preferred, and bring a better price. Private doctors, private lawyers, friendly judges in friendly states; everything looks legal, at least on paper—everything except for the fact that the mammas are owned by the club and they don’t really have a say. But that last part’s a Blood Eagles family secret.”

  “Jesus. Is that what happened to your baby?”

  “Angelfish! Where did you go, Angelfish?”

  “It is. In fact, Chelsea was the first baby to go. Her adoption hit a few snags, but overall it went smooth enough for the club that they sometimes worked with a couple mammas at a time after that. Girls from shitty families or no families at all who would do what they were told for love of the Blood Eagles and the promise that they could one day keep a kid. The few that didn’t fall in line and resisted signing the papers ended up like me—dead.” She stepped back before the flashing mirror and said, “Yo, Pickle. I’m right here.”

  Pickle said, “Did you say his name was Thumb? I know Thumb.” Angelfish looked at me.

  “She’s wrong. I never met her; I’m sure of that. Unless maybe she was another dancer at The Hat.” Angel’s expression changed in a way that told me she knew far more than she’d been letting on, and suddenly I imagined the earth opening up to swallow me.

  “He says you never met him, honey.”


  “No; I never met him. I only know about him from Cricket. Did you ever know Cricket, Angelfish? Probably not; she was only here for a few days when I was knocked up with my first baby, my little girl who’s in Texas now. I think you were gone by then, Angelfish. It was me and Doll, who had her baby first, and then they brought Cricket down here, but not for long.”

  After a stunned moment, I fought off the horror that threatened to hold me paralyzed and I managed to say, “When the hell did all this happen?” I wondered whether it was possible that Cricket had been imprisoned here shortly after my death, or perhaps even before I died, without my missing her—and, if so, in either case, had they taken her, or had she willingly, for some self-destructive reason, actually placed herself in their greasy hands? And what about Lizzie, in whom I’d taken so much hope—did this mean she wasn’t mine? Or could it be that this obviously insane girl, Pickle, was just having a hallucination?

  “Pickle, Thumb wants to know when this was.”

  “I don’t know. Long time ago. Like I said, I was pregnant then; that’s all I remember. Doll right away got pretty tired of hearing Cricket go on so much about Thumb, but she let it go. Otherwise, Crick was a pretty cool chick.”

  Angelfish said, “So what exactly was Cricket telling you about Thumb?”

  Pickle shrugged and brought the blue hand mirror close enough to her face to fog it with her breath. “She told us this, and she told us that. She made him sound like an ordinary dude; you know how they all just think about themselves? It didn’t seem like he took very good care of her—sorries, Thumb, if you can hear me.

  “Then, the night before she left here, she told us she was gonna kill him. And I’m pretty sure she did, because we never saw her again—and here he is, a ghost.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Angelfish and I stared at one another. She wasn’t smiling. I said, “She’s crazy, this chick. I think she’s making that up. Some of it, anyway.” Angelfish slowly shook her head.

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m a ghost.” She lifted her face toward the ceiling and the floors above us. “I hang around and hear them talking. They say all kinds of things.”

  “Shit.”

  “There’s more…. ”

  But I could not stand to listen to another word about how the woman I trusted had fired a bullet, maybe two, into the back of my brain. I rose through the ceiling of Pickle’s dungeon, and as Angelfish shouted for me to return, again calling out that there was more I needed to learn, I continued straight up through the attic and the roof and into the nighttime sky.

  Above the house, beneath the stars and in the open air, I was temporarily disoriented. Then I saw the faint glow of two spirit paths, one leading West, the other marking the route above Riverside on which we had arrived. I began to retrace our flight along the twisted arc that had led us here from The Magic Hat. Below me as I flew I could see a line of nine motorcycles with shining headlights weaving their way toward the clubhouse like a Chinese dragon in a New Year parade; the Blood Eagles were headed home from their night on the town, and I knew that riding among them would be Mantis, Chimp, Fat Harold, and perhaps one or two others who, along with Scratch, had co-starred in Cricket’s betrayals. I found myself wishing I had the power to make every one of those bikes explode into spontaneous flames—which, of course, was nothing more than the impotent fantasy of a helpless spirit. I arrived at The Magic Hat, zig-zagged across the water to the eastern shore the way Dirt had shown me, and went back to my haunt, where I immediately extinguished myself in that other river, that rolling river of darkness and forgetting—the river known only to the dead.

  I would have stayed forever, had I been able, in that disassociating flow, but the Great Whatever still had places she/he/it required me to go. After some days passed—it was now late summer; beyond that I didn’t know the date—those waters cast me into the air above my hopeless concrete stairs. With little else I felt like doing, I descended to the top step, and there, for what could have been a week, I sat, hand under chin, like The Thinker at the Gates of Hell. Traffic rumbled by; rain fell; a couple of kids walking past swung for a few minutes on Tigre’s old tire swing, and still I stayed, sitting fast.

  One thing I thought about during that time was revenge for all that had been taken from me—fatherhood, love, life—but not against Cricket, who had fired the fatal round. Not only did I feel far more regret than anger when I thought of her, but I knew she had a child to care for, and I would not deprive a baby of its mother regardless of what she’d done, and no matter who its father had been. No, it was Scratch whose death I imagined, in a number of different ways. Under just the right conditions, for instance, I thought it might be possible to scare another biker into shooting him.

  The Great Whatever seemed to get wind of my homicidal musings, and it was around then that a messenger bearing a severe warning visited me in the river—you might remember that I mentioned this ghost at the very beginning of my story. He, or she, was the one with a voice like the gurgle of the river itself, the one who told me that if I ever caused the death of a person, damnation would be my reward. But at that point, I was not sure I really cared.

  Thinking about Cricket’s baby—and still my baby as well, perhaps—also put me in mind of that poor, crazy, pregnant girl, Pickle, trapped in the basement of the clubhouse. As soon as that kid was born they were going to take it away from her and sell it to someone—the most evil thing I’d ever heard of, and yet one more circumstance I was forbidden to act upon. In fact, saving that child would be more difficult than mere revenge, because while vengeance only required that I somehow kill Scratch, saving that baby from being sold off like a puppy would require killing several other Blood Eagles as well in order to prevent the sale from going through. I was helpless in every direction, and it was maddening.

  It was then that my mounting anguish caused me to make a huge mistake. While in the wake of Pickle’s revelations my enthusiasm for finishing my book had all but disappeared, I one day went to visit Ben, for no other reason than that I was lonely. I found him home and ready to work—in fact, he’d been both angry and worried about my long absence. Together we sat in his room and wrote, and although Pickle’s story was a little ahead of the events he and I had so far reached in my afterlife biography, I nonetheless dictated it to him in a hopeless and misguided attempt to unburden my heart.

  His lips pursed, Ben wrote all that I told him without pausing, or speaking. When I was finished, he sat back and cupped his pudgy hands against the sides of his head and stared at his bedroom wall. After a moment he said, “So that’s the baby Angelfish told you about, way back when. Not yours. Not hers. This one. Pickle’s baby. The one she needed your help to save.”

  I hadn’t thought of that, but it was possible he was right. In spite of myself, I was impressed at his unexpected flash of inductive intelligence. When he picked up the pen again, I told him as much.

  That could be. But I’ve thought about it, and there’s absolutely nothing we can do.

  Ben said, “We? You couldn’t, because you’re dead. But I could at least call the cops.”

  That’d be useless. Dude, you have no proof that Pickle even exists. And you don’t know her; she’s batshit crazy; even if the police dragged her up from the cellar, she’d probably tell them she was fine. That she was looking forward to being a mother, or that she was giving up the baby of her own free will.

  Ben sat stewing for at least ten minutes without touching the pen. Finally, he stood up from his writing chair, went to kneel before his chest of drawers, and drew out my Beretta Tomcat, which was now wrapped in an oiled rag rather than my old t-shirt. He returned to set the gun on his writing table, unwound the cloth from around it, then sat down to stare at it. The gun’s blue finish gleamed with a sheen imparted by the oil from the rag. Several times he picked it up and turned it over and over in his hands; the oil stuck to his skin and made his fingernails shine. Then he placed it back on the table, and I waited im
patiently for him to lift the pen.

  When he was finally ready to write again I asked him what he planned to do.

  Fuck are you doing?

  “If nobody can help—I sure wouldn’t drag old Mr. Muttkowski into this—I guess I have to do it myself.”

  I imagined Ben trying to shoot his way through the Blood Eagles clubhouse, and it made for a disturbing movie. Most likely, at some point he’d suddenly realize what he’d gotten himself into, and he would lose his nerve and run. It would take a lot of luck just to get back out and escape in his grandmother’s car. Or perhaps, at the gate or inside the front door, if he managed to make it that far, they’d come in force to confront him, and he might end up actually squeezing off a shot or two. He’d doubtlessly miss—although it was possible he’d successfully wing somebody. In either case, the bikers would descend on him like bearded Furies, disarm him, take out knives, slice open his pants, hack off his little dick and toss it to the dogs. Then, as Ben shrieked in a flailing astonishment of agony, they’d carve up the rest of him until he finally gurgled, twitched, and fell silent. For the first time since I was a child, I found myself using multiple exclamation points as I wrote. In this case, they seemed entirely appropriate:

  No! This is not a fucking video game! You’ll just get yourself killed!! I told you to throw that fucking gun into a pond!!!

  “Yeah, but what am I supposed to do? Nothing? How is that acceptable? Who else is gonna help her?”

  Not you! Not you!!! You wouldn’t get anywhere near her. They’d murder you.

  “Maybe so, Thumb. But I don’t think I can just let them do this to her. And anyway I think you underestimate how great video games can be to get you ready for something like this. That’s how the Army trains soldiers these days.”