“That’s not the way it goes. I should know, I wrote it.” Ghost’s voice was fading. “Oh, silver southern moon… tell me your sweet lies, then let me drown deep in your eyes….”
“Somedaaay,” Steve joined in. He and the whiskey sang Ghost to sleep, the whiskey with its somnolent amber song, Steve with a voice that cracked when he tried to hit the high notes. Behind them the river passed in silence; the lowest-hanging branches brushed the water, and the leaves rotted on the bough. The moon spread like butter on the black river, and Ghost’s eyes closed; with his head pillowed on the hump between the seats, he began to dream.
They bypassed Roxboro, but Steve saw the power plant on Lake Hyco, lit up all glowing green and white like a weird birthday cake, its million pipes and wires and glass insulators and metal gewgaws reflected in the lake. On the way back, if Ghost was awake, they’d drive up there to a hill Steve knew and look out over the pastures and the lake and all the glittering Milky Way. An hour or so after passing out Ghost was usually raring to go again. His dreams gave him new strength. Or made him laugh or cry, or sometimes scared the shit out of him.
Steve put his hand on Ghost’s head, smoothed back wisps of hair from flickering closed eyes. He wondered what was unfolding beneath his hand, beneath the thin bone, inside the orb of ivory that cradled Ghost’s weird brain. Who was born and murdered and resurrected inside that skull? What walked behind Ghost’s eyelids, what lithe secret phantoms tapped Ghost’s shoulder and made him whimper deep in his throat?
Ghost often dreamed of things that were going to happen, or of things that had already happened that he couldn’t possibly know about. These premonitions could come when he was awake too, but the ones that came to him in dreams seemed to be the most potent. More often than not they were also the most cryptic. He had known when his grandmother was going to die, but then so had she. Though surely painful, the knowledge had given them the time they needed to say goodbye.
Goodbye for a while, anyway. Ghost had inherited his grandmother’s house in Missing Mile, where he and Steve lived now. Steve had spent plenty of time in that house as a kid, watching Miz Deliverance mix herbs or cut out cookies with her heart-shaped cutters, building forts in the backyard, sleeping over in Ghost’s room. Even now, five years after her death, Steve sometimes thought he felt the familiar presence of Miz Deliverance in a room, or just around a corner. He imagined this was something Ghost took for granted.
Suddenly unnerved by the prospect of touching Ghost’s dreams, Steve put his hand back on the wheel.
They drove past a graveyard full of softly rotting monuments and flowers, an abandoned railyard, a barbecue shack whose sign advertised GRAND OPENING EVERY FRI AND SAT NITE. A rabbit darted across the road. Steve braked, and Ghost’s head rolled back and forth on his thin neck—so fragile, so fragile. These days Steve was paranoid about something happening to Ghost. Ghost was spacy, sure, but he could take care of himself. Still, Steve couldn’t help watching out for him, especially now that Ghost was the only person he felt like spending time with.
They had other friends, sure, but those guys mostly wanted to go out drinking and smoke weed and talk about Wolfpack football at the state university over in Raleigh. All of which was okay, even though the Wolfpack was always pretty shitty, but Ghost was different. Ghost didn’t give a flying fuck about football, Ghost could drink everybody else under the table and not get a damn bit weirder, and Ghost understood all the shit that had gone down over the past few months. The shit with Ann. Ghost never asked Steve why he didn’t forget about Ann and get himself a new girlfriend; Ghost understood why Steve didn’t want to see Ann or any other girl, not for months and months, maybe not ever.
Not until he could trust himself, anyway. Right now he did not deserve the company of women. However lonely or horny he got, he had it coming to him for what he had done to Ann.
He played with strands of Ghost’s hair as he drove, winding them around his fingers, marvelling at their fineness, their silvery-gold luster. Just to feel the difference, he ran his hand through his own coarse hair, hair the color of a crow’s wing, hair that stood up in wild loops and cowlicks. His hair was dirty, and he noticed that Ghost’s was too. Steve hadn’t been taking care of himself—he’d gone days without a shower and over a month without washing his clothes; he’d been late for his job at the record store three times last week; he was putting away a twelve-pack of Bud every day or two—but he hoped it wasn’t rubbing off on Ghost. There was such a thing as being too damn sympathetic. Steve’s hand felt greasy. He wiped it on his T-shirt.
They were here. Steve had no idea where, but he saw what he wanted: the faded light of an ancient Pepsi machine sitting outside a fishin’-and-huntin’ store, casting dim red and blue shadows in the dirt of the parking lot. Steve swung the T-bird in and killed the ignition. Ghost’s head had slipped onto Steve’s knee, and he eased out from under it. There was a little dark spot on the knee of Steve’s jeans. Ghost’s spit, Ghost’s drunken sleeping spit. Steve rubbed it into the cloth, then absently put his finger in his mouth. A faint taste of whiskey and molasses… and what was he doing sucking someone else’s spit off his finger? Didn’t matter. Ghost was lost deep in dreams. Time to go to work.
Steve fished in the backseat. Cassette cases—so that was where Ann’s damn Cocteau Twins tape had ended up. Steve had always hated it anyway, the girl’s feathery voice that was supposed to be so angelic and the ethereal-seasick wall of sound. Empty food bags and a veritable sea of beer cans. Finally he dug out his special tool, a length of coat hanger bent into a hook at one end. He wondered if he ought to pull the T-bird up so it was hiding the front of the Pepsi machine. No, he decided; anybody out driving this time of night is probably on business just as shady as mine.
With a last glance at Ghost, Steve knelt, fed the wire into the coin-return slot of the machine, and wiggled it around until he felt it catch. He tugged gently and seconds later was blessed by a shower of silver. Steve scooped the quarters, dimes, and nickels out of the dirt, shoved them into his pockets, hustled back to the car, and got the hell out of the parking lot.
Twenty fast miles later, Steve had the radio on a rock station and Ghost was trying to decide whether to rejoin the living. “Are we still in North Carolina?”
“Yeah.” Steve turned Led Zeppelin down and waited for the stories. Ghost always told Steve his dreams, and they were sometimes coherent, sometimes nonsensical and lovely, and almost invariably a little frightening. Ghost sat up and stretched, working out his sleep cramps. Steve saw a flash of belly where Ghost’s sweatshirt parted from his tie-dyed pants. Pale skin, golden hair sparse and curly. Ghost looked out the window for several miles, his brow furrowed, his eyes puzzled. That meant he was remembering. Steve waited, and Ghost began, haltingly, to speak.
“When they were young… they were the world’s darlings. The world’s opinion meant everything to them, even though they tried to pretend it meant nothing. Their town was even grayer and muddier when they pranced along the streets after midnight, and the rooftops bent to kiss their dyed hair. They wandered through the shops putting their delicate fingerprints on the window glass and china, touching anything colorful or sweet, pinching things between thumb and forefinger as if to grasp the town in both hands would dirty them. Sully them.” Ghost rolled “sully” over his tongue as if it were scuppernong wine; in his thick Carolina voice the word took on a dark, rich flavor. “Sully them. The big boys at their school shouted things at them, black dirty things that stank of toilet-wall scrawls and smeared basins. But those boys never fought them because they knew the twins were magic. Everyone knew the twins would go away to the city someday, where they could pick rhinestones out of the cigarette sludge in the gutter, and the moon would be as aching and vivid as neon cheese in blue velvet sky. And they did. They went to New Orleans.”
Ghost stopped, looked away down the train track they were crossing. Tiny colored lights shone far down the line, fairy lights, Christmas lights, though i
t was only the middle of September.
Steve closed his eyes, remembered the road, opened them again. “Go on,” he said. “What happened to them in the city?”
“Artists put them in films. They were twins, and the hip crowd loved the perversity of that. Their mirror-image pornography was art. They were Donatello Davids, skinny and beautiful, not heavyset like Michelangelo’s. Androgynous striplings who outlined each other’s bones in lipstick. And they were allowed every art and luxury and perversion the city held because of their over-rouged lips and their sluts’ eyes and the poetry of their hands.
“They grew jaded, tired, but still insatiable on their own mattress. They lived and lived and saw the first lines appear around their eyes. They saw years of liquor, expensive cigarettes, drugs and passion etch themselves on their movie-starlet faces. They watched the mirror as they would have watched a quicksilver film of their death, in a cold heat of fascination, dread, clutching each other. They bit at each other’s throats in desperation, thinking to regain beauty in blood, to drink the pulse of life. But their blood was thin, grainy, mixed with other substances—no longer the rich purple fountain they had once known. They went out less, spending whole days flat on the mattress like two dry sticks side by side, forgetting to eat, watching the cobweb cracks in the ceiling plaster widen, spread like the tracery on their faces. They—”
The high stupid scream of a siren split the night open. Ghost’s voice trailed off. Blue light pulsated in the rearview mirror, turned Ghost’s face pallid, made the litter of beer cans seem to whirl and dance.
“Shit,” said Steve, trying to decide whether to pull over. His mind spun with the blue light: the store and the Pepsi machine were forty fucking miles behind! No one had seen him jimmy the machine, no one. Would he go to jail? Would Ghost go too, as an accessory to the crime he had slept through? Ghost would lie, say he’d planned it, trying to take some of the heat off Steve. Ghost was only twenty-two, Steve a year older. They had their whole lives ahead of them and an open bottle of whiskey in their hands… Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Steve’s mind raced, and the radio got louder, and the siren ripped the night apart, and he heard Jimmy Page wailing on guitar and then Ghost’s voice, not at all panicky, saying, “Pull over, Steve, pull over, you dumb fuck!”
Steve wrenched the wheel to the right, braked hard, and they skidded on the surface of the dark road and slowed… slowed… stopped, gravel spraying from the tires, a thin trail of black rubber behind them. But they were whole and safe, and so was the car, and most blessedly of all, the police car was passing them, siren still screaming, light still whirling like a cold blue dervish.
“Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” said Steve, and let his hands drop from the steering wheel, his head fall back against the seat. He was aware of Ghost reaching over to kill the ignition, putting his hand on Steve’s shoulder, moving closer across the seat. No questions (why are you so paranoid about the cops tonight, Steve? just carrying a couple of joints? or maybe jimmying Pepsi machines again? or hiding the raped and gutted corpse of your ex-girlfriend in the trunk?), no accusations (we coulda been KILLED!), just the gentle, wordless comfort of Ghost’s hand on the back of his neck, Ghost’s thoughts inside his head.
For a few moments Steve accepted the comfort gratefully, thirstily. Then he remembered who he was (Steve Finn don’t need nothin’ from nobody! No, not much, not much), straightened up, and shook Ghost off. Ghost withdrew, understanding all too well. Understanding maddeningly. Steve wanted to hurt Ghost, to stop the waves of complacent sympathy pouring from the passenger seat. But Steve could not find the words to hurt Ghost, and if he had found them, he could not have made himself use them. The best he could come up with was “Don’t you call me a dumb fuck.”
“Okay,” said Ghost, so soft that Steve could barely hear him.
Up ahead was a riot of lights and movement. Red lights, blue lights, someone standing in the road flagging the T-bird down. Steve stopped, and the flagman motioned him forward. Slow, he signalled. An ambulance. Two police cars. An officer talking to a tired country woman in a torn bathrobe and curlers. The woman held the collar of a Doberman, restraining it. The dog snarled at the police, strained toward the T-bird as it passed at five miles per hour. A brick ranch house built close to the road, its scrubby yard littered with broken toys and car parts; on the porch the woman’s family, a man holding four small children back, apparently telling them not to look. The man was small and red and scrawny as a chicken neck. The children craned their necks, pointing, curious.
There was something else in the yard, near the roadside, something that had excited the dog, something the children were trying to see. Something naked, dry, withered. A child—but what could have shrivelled it so, leached its life away? Steve saw a backpack lying nearby, spilling the kid’s life. Clothes. A couple of toy robots. Transformers, Steve knew from watching the Saturday-morning commercials. The kid must be a runaway. Flecks of gravel were embedded in the soft skin of his face; his head lolled back, half severed, the dark red cavern of his throat glistening—but there was so little blood, and the raw tissues within looked wasted, parched. A gray blanket settled over the planes and angles of the little body. A small brown hand protruded, thin and dirty, scraped by roadside grit.
As Steve rolled down his window and handed his driver’s license to one of the cops, Ghost turned his head and stared back at the blanket, at the body beneath it. His eyes lost their focus; then, slowly, they closed. Ghost saw through the blanket, through death. He saw how the boy had looked alive, curiosity and intelligence in his young eyes. The name came to him as clearly as a memory: Robert. He felt the fury that had made Robert climb out his window, steal away from home and parents who used him as a receptacle for their overprotective love. There was something they had not let him do—go to a ball game or spend the night at a friend’s house. Ghost almost had the knowledge; then it slipped away. It didn’t matter. The important thing was that the boy need not have died. Ghost felt Robert’s fear at being alone under the tall trees and the wide midnight sky, the great glittering impassive sky. He felt the boy almost turn around, almost save his own life, but the wounded pride of adolescence would not allow him.
Ghost felt Robert’s terror mount as he caught sounds—insidious whispers, soft laughter—sounds not of the night and its usual spooks but something darker, stranger, more purposeful and far, far deadlier. And then the hands, grabbing him from behind, four strong and sharp-fingered hands, and the hungry mouths all over him, sucking out his strength and his life. At the end there was only pain that spiralled up and up and stretched itself impossibly thin—exquisite pain, pain that precluded all thought, all memory, all identity. To know such pain was to lose one’s self, to become the pain, to die borne away on pain, its high soundless song in the ears. That was what had happened to Robert.
Ghost lay quiet, and he knew the insensate loneliness of a corpse on the roadside, growing cold, the taste of blood melting from the tongue, the eyes filming over, the impossibility of human contact ever again, of comfort ever again. Ghost tried to swallow, but his throat would not work, and he made some small gasping sound and felt Steve’s big hand covering his own, enfolding his fingers, squeezing life back into him.
“Let it go, Ghost,” Steve said. “You can’t take on all the pain in the world. Let it go, man.”
Ghost shuddered, then began to slip back. Warmth. Blood where it ought to be, in his veins, flowing safely and sanely.
The ambulance, the police cars, the lonely dry dead thing under the blanket were far away now, left behind.
“What happened to those twins?” Steve asked as they drove on. “In your dream.”
Ghost thought, remembered. Suddenly he didn’t want to think about those twins:
But Steve wanted to hear the rest of the story. Ghost hoped it was only a story, only a dream. He never knew, not at first. “They grew weak,” he said. “Eventually they had to spend alternate days alive. One would watch over the other, keeping vigil over th
e still chest, the blotted-out eyes, the drying mouth. At the first tinge of dawn the dead twin would begin to move, and the living twin would lie down and stretch himself taut on the mattress, his skin already crackling on his bones, his hair straggling like grass across his bare hollow shoulders. One day… one day… One day their eyes were open, but neither of them moved.”
Ghost finished in a rush of breath, whiskey and fear breath, upset all over again. Steve kept hold of Ghost’s hand. Ghost’s fingers twitched.
“Jesus, Ghost,” Steve said. “Jeeesus, Ghost.”
2
The last dying days of summer, fall coming on fast. A cold night, the first of the season, a change from the usual bland Maryland climate. Cold, thought the boy; his mind felt numb. The trees he could see through his bedroom window were tall charcoal sticks, shivering, afraid of the wind or only trying to stand against it. Every tree was alone out there. The animals were alone, each in its hole, in its thin fur, and anything that got hit on the road tonight would die alone. Before morning, he thought, its blood would freeze in the cracks of the asphalt.
On his razor-scarred, wax-scabbed desk before him lay a picture postcard. The design on its front was multicolored and abstract. There were splotches of deep lipstick pink, streaks of sea green and storm gray, flecks of gold embossed in thin bright leaves. He picked up his fountain pen with the graceful heart-shaped nib, dipped its delicate tip into his bottle of ink (pen and ink having been stolen from the art room at school), and wrote a few spidery lines on the message side of the postcard.
Then the boy stretched his legs under the desk and with the bare toes of both feet grasped the bottle he had hidden there. The liquor inside was a darker amber than he was used to, and when he took a swig, there was a sharp taste of smoke behind the familiar musky burn that hurt his throat. He swallowed the whiskey, licked his lips to wet them with liquor-essence and his clear spit. Then he picked up the postcard, brought it to his mouth, gave it a whiskey tongue-kiss, kissed it as hungrily as he had ever dreamed of kissing the sweetest, richest mouth. And he picked up the pen again and signed his name: Nothing.
Lost Souls Page 2