American Ghost

by Paul Guernsey

  Ben, you’re crazy. They’re killers, and you’re not.

  Ben sighed, picked up the gun again, slowly tumbled it in his hands. Finally he said, “Well one thing you’re right about is that I won’t do much good with this unless I practice.” At that he stood up, tucked the Tomcat into his belt, knelt again to remove a box of thirty-two caliber cartridges from his bottom drawer, then walked from his room, out the back door of his house, through all the white-trash detritus of his backyard, and up a trail into the woods.

  *

  A day or so later, as I returned to my haunt from a short rest in the underground river, I was startled to find Cricket sitting in my usual spot on the steps. She wore her leather jacket, a baseball cap, and a pair of dark glasses. She had opened two bottles of beer; one bottle rested in her hand while the other—it was my usual brand, and I immediately knew she’d brought for me—stood on the bottom step. Her minivan was parked on the street; I looked through it and was disappointed to find that Lizzie was not with her. I had no idea why she’d come, but I hoped—desperately, unrealistically—that it was to tell me that everything Pickle had said was a lie.

  Looking out across the marsh, Cricket took a couple of sips of her beer and set the bottle down. She reached into her jacket and drew out a package of rolling papers and a plastic vial of weed. She took her time crafting the joint, fussing over it as she always did until the taper was perfect. When she was finally satisfied with her handiwork she fired it with a lighter, took two short hits, and placed it on the top step. As soon as she turned to pick up her beer again, a freak gust of wind flipped the joint off the steps and into the weeds, where it lay smoldering. Cricket stared after it for a moment before saying, “Well, I guess you don’t like to get high anymore. I don’t either; not much anyway.”

  She sipped the beer and said, “So … it’s been almost two years now, Thumb. I was gonna come talk to you on the exact date, but now I won’t be able to. Charles, Lizzie, and I, we’re all moving to Seattle two weeks from today.” After another sip she said, “Fresh start, and all. Oh, and don’t worry—Tigger’s coming too.”

  Seattle? That alone was enough to fill me with despair. But something in her tone also robbed me of my hope that she was about to tell me what I longed to hear. Pickle had told the truth.

  Cricket said, “But two years, like I mentioned. I think it’s been long enough for me to stop feeling so guilty for what I did, don’t you think? For what I had to do? For Lizzie’s sake, I think it’s time for me to forgive myself, so that’s why I’m here.”

  Cricket, I said, Jesus. Forgive yourself? Is Lizzie even my kid? Tell me that, at least.

  “Yeah,” Cricket said, nodding as if she’d actually heard me speak. “Life’s tough enough; the last thing a kid needs is a guilty, miserable, self-destructive mom. I knew you’d understand.”

  No, I don’t understand …

  “Thank you. Thank you, Thumb. I’m sorry about how it all turned out. For what I did, I’m sorry. I loved you, you know. In a way I always will.” She took a long, last drink from her beer and poured out the rest. She tossed the bottle into the weeds, kissed her fingers and touched them to the stairs. Then she stood. “Bye now, baby.” She tipped her face to the sky. “See you in the clouds sometime, maybe.”

  Just tell me why, Cricket….

  She walked down to her car and drove away.

  *

  After many more days of brooding about all the things that had been done, and all I could not do, boredom got the best of me again. Several times I went to Ben’s trailer to try talking him out of his plan to confront the Blood Eagles, but I did not find him there. Each time I visited, I poked my head through his chest of drawers in search of my Beretta, and each time the gun was gone as well.

  Eventually, I decided I would fly out to the abandoned church and visit with Virgil and Gib, whom I had not talked to for some time. I did not plan on sharing my despair with them; I would leave out what I’d learned about my death, and instead amuse Gib with some white lies about what I’d done with Angelfish, all the while allowing their honest happiness at seeing me to buoy my spirits. Out I went into the sky, and by the time my feet touched ground on the gravel road that led to the church, I’d actually begun to feel eager to see to them.

  But as I drew near enough to the abandoned building to see and hear inside, I could sense that things had changed, and I stopped to take stock. Most notably, along with my two friends I made out the figures of four other ghosts gathered in the pews; three women and a man, all of them older spirits—by which I don’t mean spooks who had been dead for a long time, but rather people who had passed over only after turning white and withering, at least a little, with what the living think of as old age. The four “new dudes” were trading funny stories with Gib, and their repeated laughter rolled out from the church in waves. As I moved closer, I could see that Gib sat side by side with one of the three women, his arm on the back of the pew behind her.

  “Gibbous Waxing,” I said to myself. “Good for you.”

  I would have gone in then and allowed myself to be introduced, but the other new thing I noticed was that Virgil did not take part in the party; instead he floated at a distance from the others. He was moving about the church with a seeming aimlessness that was entirely out of character for him. It was just then that Gib also noticed the professor’s peculiar behavior.

  “Virgil,” Gib called, and his new friends hushed then so that he could continue speaking. “Why don’t you come sit with us?”

  “No thank you,” said Virgil, his voice sounding weak.

  “What’s the matter, pal? Are, you feeling okay?”

  “No, I’m really not. I can’t describe it, other than to say it’s a vague feeling. I feel almost as if I’ve got one foot in some other world that I can’t yet see.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Professor,” Gib said with worry in his voice. “If I could, I’d bring you a glass of cold water.”

  “I know you would, Gib. Thank you, anyway. But don’t be concerned; I think perhaps I’m finally about to wake up from my long dream, and that’s probably a good thing.”

  I decided then against going in: If I entered, it would be unforgivable for me to ignore Virgil in favor of Gib and the other cheerful, joking older folks—and yet the professor and I, with our two heavy humors, rather than lifting each other up likely would only end up sinking one another like a couple of drowning swimmers. No, I would come back here only when and if I could actually serve my friend as something other than an anchor, a manacle, and a length of heavy chain.

  Instead I flew off to Muttkowski’s farm, where I found Fred seated in his farrowing-pen office. Heaped on the card table alongside his old manual typewriter were several half-inch-high stacks of manuscript which together probably would constitute nearly an entire draft of our book. Also on the messy table: an ashtray holding a blackened crumb of reefer pinched in an alligator clip and three of Ben’s spiral-bound notebooks.

  Fred was shuffling through his typewritten sheaves of manuscript, scribbling and crossing things out with a red Bic pen. For a while I stood at his shoulder and watched him work, and in this way I learned that he had already redacted Ben’s and my version of events right up to the part where the Ghost Hounds showed up at the church. Although this was excellent progress, it still bothered me a bit to see the extent of the license he had taken with my story, both in its telling and in its larger meanings. Not only had he removed events and observations of importance to me, but there were places in the work where he’d dropped in literary references I could not come close to comprehending and—most painful of all—there were many passages describing actions I’d allegedly taken and thoughts I’d supposedly entertained that had been distorted or even wholly fabricated, apparently for no other reason than to suit Fred’s offbeat, pig-farming fancy. But there was little I could do about any of that, beyond trying to feel grateful and lucky at being the first dead man ever privileged to tell a tale—r
egardless of whether the story was entirely my own. Best, I guess, to leave it at that.

  *

  I spent many more days on my concrete steps, around which the high, unmowed grass had begun to turn brown and die. One morning Angelfish appeared on the road and drifted over to settle herself next to me. We sat without speaking until she finally remarked, “You have a beautiful haunt here, Thumb.”

  “Yeah, they should dig it up in one big chunk and put it in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; you couldn’t ask for a finer representation of American rural decay.”

  “I don’t mean what’s left of your house—although most people would think it’s an improvement over the dressing room in a strip club. I mean the fact that it’s so peaceful, and the view you have. The swamp, or whatever, is kind of pretty.”

  “It’s a marsh. The difference is … never mind. And yeah; it is beautiful. It’s full of wild things, and mystery.”

  “As for these steps,”—she pretended to pat the concrete with her hand—“I’m going to call them Thumb’s stairway to heaven.”

  We both laughed, and I said, “I love a girl with a sense of irony.”

  Then she became serious. “Listen, dude, you didn’t stay for the end of Pickle’s story. There was more to it than you heard—some parts that would have helped you make sense of things.”

  “I heard enough—from Pickle, and from Cricket herself when she came here a few days ago. The woman I cared for killed me, and the baby she had probably wasn’t mine—which means that when I died, I left behind absolutely nothing of value. My life, such as it was, was a waste.”

  “But it was your kid. That’s what Cricket told Pickle and the other chick who was in the cellar with them. She had just figured out she was pregnant and was trying to decide how to break it to you when the Blood Eagles grabbed her off the street one night, and stuck her down on the farrowing floor with Pick and Doll.”

  “So, she really is my child? Lizzie?” I was almost afraid to let myself believe it. “And, they kidnapped Cricket? She didn’t go there on her own?” As soon as I spoke, and in spite of the fact that I knew she’d somehow managed to get more or less safely away, I realized what a selfish thing this was to be happy about. Angelfish gave me a look that let me know she shared this thought, and I added, “Did they hurt her? Why did they take her in the first place? And, how could she have let herself shoot me? If our places were switched I would have willingly died before I harmed her.”

  “Other than to slap her some at the beginning when she’d yell at them, they didn’t hurt her much. But they did threaten her. First, they put her down there with the other girls so she could learn from them all about how the baby business worked. Then they told her they were going to keep her there until she had a baby of her own—and if she caused any problems for them, they’d put her under the ocean afterwards. That was when she told Pickle and Doll she was already knocked up, and that the baby belonged to you. She talked to them about everything; she wanted to tell them as much as she could about herself in case she didn’t survive. Then maybe someday one of them would be able to talk to somebody who knew her—talk to you, maybe—and her disappearance wouldn’t be a mystery.”

  “So, Scratch wanted to sell my kid—Cricket’s and my baby?”

  “Well, he wouldn’t of known it was yours until they took her to the doctor for her tests and found out how far along she was. But, I doubt that would of stopped him from selling it so, yeah.”

  “I only wish I was alive right now,” I said. “I’d kill that fucker.”

  “Thumb, why they took Cricket, though, wasn’t for your baby, or anybody’s baby, but for you, so they could have her kill you. You were so different from most of the rest of us in that life—the rich dude’s college, and all—that Scratch got the idea you might have family who could put pressure on the cops to keep looking for you, and also make a lot of trouble for the Blood Eagles, if you happened to vanish. So, instead of getting your blood directly on their hands—to help murky the water in case there was a serious investigation, and no doubt also because Scratch just thought it would be an entertaining thing to do—they came up with the idea of making somebody close to you do the shooting. And who closer and with more imaginable reasons as far as the cops would be concerned, than your own old lady?

  “So after a couple of days, they brought your girl up from the cellar and they made her an offer. They told her, ‘Thumb’s coming here, and he’s a dead man, no matter what—and you’re a dead woman, too. But if you’re willing to pull the trigger on him and then just hand the gun over to us, we’ll let you walk out of here, and that way at least one of you will survive.’”

  For a minute I sat swirling with rage and sadness. I said, “Okay. Maybe they did do that; it’s possible. But, like I said, I couldn’t have shot her if the tables were turned.”

  “But, you just said you’d give up your life for her.”

  “Willingly.”

  “Well, that’s what you did, Thumb.”

  “But, it wasn’t my choice!”

  “So, the way Pickle tells it, Cricket was a smart chick, and a brave one. She kept hoping you would smell a rat and not come out to the clubhouse. But you didn’t—you just weren’t that smart—and you did, and once you were there, she knew you wouldn’t leave alive no matter what she did or didn’t do. She also knew what your choice would be, if anybody gave you one: that you’d give up your life in order to save the two of them. To save Cricket and your baby. So she let you make that decision without you knowing you’d made it. And because she was strong enough to follow through on her deal with Scratch, instead of the three of you being dead, or you and Cricket both being underwater, with your baby sold away to strangers, two of you are alive, and together.”

  I rose from the steps and ghosted all around my yard which, I noticed for the first time, was showing signs of slowly turning back into forest, whiplike aspen shoots popping up everywhere among the trash and through the grass. I felt the urge to run away again—to try to fly out over the marsh and disappear, but I fought the feeling and went to sit back down next to Angelfish.

  “What you just told me is a fairy tale,” I said. “At best, it was crazy thinking on Cricket’s part. For one thing, how did she know they’d let her go once she killed me?”

  “I guess she didn’t, really. But, she must of figured there was at least a chance, and the smallest chance is better than no chance at all. Plus, their plan would of made some sense to her: To confuse the cops, in case they found your body or something, she’d be a more smoky smokescreen alive and walking around free than she would as a murder victim herself. Blood Eagles could just stash that gun, with her fingerprints and DNA all over it, someplace where the cops would find it and then start talking about how she’d been telling everybody she was pissed at you for one thing or another and planned on dropping you in the dirt.”

  I said, “And how, supposedly, would anybody believe that Cricket, by herself, would have taken me out and thrown me in the ocean?”

  Angelfish waved a dismissive hand. “Dude, you’re way over-thinking it; these aren’t cops like the cops on TV; you’re worrying about details nobody else would give a crap about. Besides, didn’t you and Cricket live with another bunch of scummers, all of them with jail records? Maybe one or two of them helped her do it; they either hated you or wanted Cricket for their own old lady, or both, or who the hell knows, or even cares? The only thing provable, if police divers found you, or if your poor skull with a couple of slugs rattling around in it got pulled up in a trawling net, or if the club themselves decided to announce that they had an idea where you were, would be that Cricket fired the shots that killed you. Beyond that, do you really think anybody would spend a lot of time playing TV detective in order to drag the Blood Eagles into it? No; Cricket, still chirping her wild-ass story about how she made a deal with the devil to save her and her unborn baby, would end up going to prison.”

  I rose again, flew all around, went back. Holdin
g a pretend pistol in my hands, I said, “What I would have done, if I’d had a loaded gun, instead of killing Cricket, would’ve been to turn and put a bullet right between Scratch’s eyes.”

  “I’m sure you would of. And then you would of tried to shoot your way out of that clubhouse—but you wouldn’t of got far, especially with only one or two more bullets in your gun. You, Cricket, and little thumb-sized Thumb Junior would of ended up in puddles of blood, and in a hurry, too.

  “But Cricket is smarter and has a cooler head than you; I’m sure she thought of that, and it wouldn’t of taken her long to realize it wouldn’t work. Besides, knowing how the Blood Eagles do business, you can be sure that behind Cricket, when she had the gun, would of been a club member with another gun that he would of used to shoot her if she had made the smallest move to make him nervous. Then, after she did what they told her, that same dude would of stepped up next to her and said, ‘Good job, sugar; we’ll take it from here. Just drop that gun into this plastic bag, and you can be on your way.’”

  After a long silence I said, “It’s … ” But I could not continue; there just were no words that would work. I shook my head.

  “I know,” Anglfish said.

  “I can’t … ”

  “I know it, honey. It can’t fit in you all at once. Not yet, anyway.” She made a patting motion against my knee.

  “I need … ”

  “I absolutely understand. It’ll take some time. Don’t forget, I’ve been through something like this myself. I’m gonna leave now and let you think. If you need me, you know where I am.”

  Angelfish pretended to kiss me on the cheek. Then she disappeared.

  *

  After I’d given it some time, it was all easy to imagine. Though Cricket would have wanted to close her eyes before she squeezed that trigger, she would have realized that she owed it to me to bring down the darkness as swiftly as possible. She would have opened wide her sighting eye, willed her shaking hands to hold steady, and taken careful aim. If I were slow in falling over, she would have fired a second shot without their having told her to.