Ghost Town

by Richard W. Jennings

  If only I had a dog, I thought, I wouldn't have to (depend on this imaginary Indian who comes and goes like a will-o'-the-wisp, dispensing dubious advice.

  The weirdest catalog I came across was one for sex toys. It was so strange that it made me never want to grow up. I shuddered as I shoved it to the bottom of a trash bag.

  If this is the future, I thought, what's the rush?

  My bed, which is where I was spending ninety-nine percent of my time, was no longer a conventional human's bed. As my needs had changed, I'd converted it into something resembling a great blue heron's nest, piling up comforters and pillows into a concave, circular shape and positioning myself in the middle.

  There was no cozier place to ride out a thunderstorm.

  "I'm concerned about what's happening to you," my mother said one afternoon during a long commercial about plastic food storage devices that for some reason put me in mind of armadillos. "Don't you think you should try to walk around a little bit?"

  "If I could, I would," I told her emphatically. "But I can't."

  As fate had planned it, the very next day the catalog pile produced a curious little brochure printed in black-and-white on cheap newsprint called Uncle Milton's Thousand Things You Thought You'd Never Find.

  A manual chicken beak blunter was something I'd never thought about finding, but if I had thought about a manual chicken beak blunter, I bet I would have found one somewhere, so Uncle Milton may have been overpromising, but that's salesmanship. Anyway, it was an interesting collection and I skipped my next round of pills so I wouldn't fall asleep while reading it.

  One device was a doorstop made to resemble a dead rat. It was quite realistic. Uncle Milton certainly had me on that one, because I couldn't possibly imagine there being a market for such a thing, especially at twenty-nine ninety-five, plus shipping.

  Other novelties were truly one of a kind, such as the 3D glasses for dogs ("guaranteed to work or you should get a different dog") and the miracle spray solution that would repel mosquitoes, stop rust, and attract fish all at the same time ("a must for the serious fisherman").

  There was an upside-down chair that I seriously considered ordering. You attach it to your ceiling with its supersuction feet and invite your guests to make themselves comfortable. ("A million laughs," Uncle Milton promised.)

  But it was the item in the upper-right-hand corner on page thirty-two that really got my attention. Not the full-length whoopee cushion that fits under an entire row of outdoor bleachers such as you might find at a minor-league baseball game, but the one next to it:

  "Ghost Camera Takes Pictures of the Past," Uncle Milton's caption read. "This is no ordinary time-lapse camera. This is a real, working time machine. Uses ordinary film to capture images from both the recent and the distant past. Non-programmable. Batteries not included. Use at your own risk."

  What risk? I wondered.

  Hands Across the Sea

  HOW MUCH MONEY something is worth depends largely on how much money you have.

  At four hundred and ninety-five dollars and ninety-five cents plus insurance and shipping for a ghost camera, Uncle Milton might as well have been offering to sell an authentic orbiting space satellite. There was no way I could ever buy it. But since I already had a camera that seemed to possess some of the same characteristics as his camera, I wondered if a letter to Uncle Milton asking about his experience with such matters might be in order.

  I skipped my next round of pain pills in order to compose a letter that struck just the right tone.

  Perhaps, I thought, if I also enclose an unusual item as a gift, he'll be more inclined to cooperate.

  But what?

  A board from a tumbledown building in Paisley?

  Who'd want it?

  A baby pumpkin?

  Not very hard to find.

  My talisman! Definitely one of a kind, and just the sort of half-art, half-magic item that Uncle Milton seemed to delight in.

  Surely Chief Leopard Frog would understand.

  According to the fine print at the bottom of the inside front cover, Uncle Milton's Thousand Things You Thought You'd Never Find is not an American publication but is, in fact, the product of an enterprise headquartered in the Cayman Islands.

  Off the top of my head I was unable to picture just where the Cayman Islands might be, but I sensed that it was a far cry from Paisley, Kansas—or Davenport, Iowa, for that matter.

  Perhaps if I weren't being homeschooled, I would know. But maybe not, for as I recall, geography is a delicate subject for public school Kansans, who if they learn too many facts about the world might be tempted to leave.

  Uncle Milton's Thousand Things You Thought You'd Never Find was edited by Milton A. Swartzman, Jr., who gave as his address P.O. Box 1991 GT, Grand Cayman, the Cayman Islands. There was no Zip Code or even a hint of what country might be involved in overseeing Mr. Swartzman's activities.

  Apparently in his search for things you'd never expect to find, he was as free as a bird.

  Dear Mr. Swartzman, I began.

  I am a great admirer of your catalog of useful and unusual objects. It must have taken you a long time to assemble such a magnificent collection. As a token of my esteem, I enclose a hand-carved talisman from an authentic though admittedly imaginary Kansas Indian chief. It is reputed to bring luck to the bearer, and as I lie here in my nest of quilts with my broken collarbone and swollen leg and the back of my head lumped out like a Colorado boulder, I can certainly attest to its powers. It was my own medical doctor, a man named Dr. Appletree, who told me how lucky I was. Imagine how things might have turned out if I hadn't possessed the talisman!

  And yet, I offer it to you in exchange for information.

  Specifically, I refer to the ghost camera that you advertise on page thirty-two of your most recent catalog, just opposite the grandstand whoopee cushion. I think I may possess a camera with similar features. I was hoping that you could explain how yours works and if you have sold many of them over the years and what your customers report about them.

  Any information you can provide would be appreciated. Please note that I am a homeschooled, housebound Kansas teenager, many miles from the nearest living soul except my mother and becoming increasingly desperate about my plight. Thus, I must depend upon the kindness of people of achievement such as yourself in order to learn anything at all.

  Thank you for your kind consideration.

  Sincerely,

  Spencer Adams Honesty

  General Delivery

  Paisley, Kansas 66085

  P.S. If you don't want the talisman, feel free to send it back.

  SAH

  That night, instead of lying around my room, I hobbled into the kitchen and had dinner with my mother. While waiting for the entrée to be served, I took a close-up photo of a black-eyed pea.

  A fortnight passed without incident. The pumpkins grew in size, variety, and number, as did the spiders that had appointed themselves to guard them.

  One day, a letter arrived, not typically a noteworthy event at a post office, but this letter bore a stamp with a painting of a menacing-looking bearded pirate dressed in boots, pirate hat, leather breeches, and a gold-buttoned coat. In his right hand he was holding aloft a scimitar, raised toward a symbol of a crown and the official mark of the queen of England. In his left hand he pointed a blunderbuss toward the words CAYMAN ISLANDS.

  In the background of this scene, a complex and colorful painting no bigger than a single exposure on a roll of film, two tough-looking brigands appeared to be burying (or digging up) a pirate chest, while near the horizon a pirate ship lay at anchor, above which was the designation 10c. Most surprising of all, the stamp was affixed to a letter addressed to me.

  It's from Uncle Milton! I thought immediately.

  Developing a Concept

  "THIS IS SO COOL!" I exclaimed. "I actually got a letter from Uncle Milton!"

  "Who's Uncle Milton?" Chief Leopard Frog wanted to know.

  "He
's just this guy," I replied. "A publisher."

  "Poetry?" Chief Leopard Frog inquired.

  "What?" I asked.

  "Does he publish poetry?" Chief Leopard Frog repeated.

  "I don't know," I answered. "Maybe."

  "Well, if he does, I have a few verses I'd like to send him," Chief Leopard Frog said.

  "Do you mind?" I said, annoyed. "I'm kind of busy here."

  "I'll go find those poems," Chief Leopard Frog said.

  "Good idea," I replied as he left the room.

  Dear Kid, the letter began.

  Please don't do me any more favors. I carried that so-called lucky talisman around for one day, which was all it took for me to fall into an open manhole and break my leg. And get this—the doctor who set it for me? He said, "You were really lucky this time. " What a putz! Anyway, I passed your talisman on to some schmuck who deserves it more than you and I do. Can you guess who? Right. The bone doctor.

  About the camera. I don't know much about it, to tell the truth, something I'm not particularly comfortable doing. I bought it from the widow of a witch doctor in Haiti a few years ago, along with a bunch of other stuff, like loaded human bone dice, a chicken-bone reproduction of the Eiffel Tower, the combination flyswatter-spatula (the Flatula®), and bomber jackets made from bats' wing membrane—I'm sure you saw them in the catalog. Neat stuff. Anyway, back to the camera: All I can tell you is that she said, "Never use it to take a picture of yourself." If you really want it, I can let you have it for 10 percent off retail, but you still have to pay shipping, insurance, etc.

  Adios,

  Milton Swartzman

  President and Publisher, Uncle Milton's Thousand Things You Thought You'd Never Find.

  Well!

  You could have knocked me over with a spider!

  This was the most interesting letter I had ever received. And so well written, too, with its disarmingly chatty style, cozy, informative, yet never losing sight of the need to sell. This Milton Swartzman had a gift, no doubt about it. Unfortunately, even with his generous discount, I still was in no position to purchase his camera, and neither was I ever likely to be, but the witch doctor's widow's warning he passed along about the operation of ghost cameras in general I would take to heart.

  Why take chances?

  Too bad about the talisman. I planned to ask Chief Leopard Frog to whittle me another one whenever he had time.

  Meanwhile, I put the letter, the envelope, and, most important, the pirate postage stamp into the wooden cigar box where I'd begun to store my pictures.

  I had some film left in the camera. I had run out of ideas about tiny things to photograph. The close-up perspective is interesting when you first see it, but art, I think, demands that the artist address grand themes.

  For example, one spider, close up, may be a swell photo, but fifty different pictures of fifty different spiders, each composed with care and lit dramatically, and seen in its natural environment, well, that would be an artistic achievement.

  Patience and effort.

  You could do the same thing with, say, a dog's eyeballs, or out-of-state license plates, or the hair that grows from old men's ears and noses. You are limited only by your imagination. Unless, of course, you're stuck in an empty place called Paisley, Kansas, where there are no dogs, no old men, and no vehicles from anywhere, other than my mother's postal truck, which she drives with an expired license plate inasmuch as there is no law enforcement within miles.

  That's when the idea returned to me. I'd photograph all the townspeople, every one, no matter how long it took. I'd stand in front of each house with the ghost camera, take a close-up or two of a doorknob or doorbell or house number, then stand back and shoot the whole house. Surely that would capture whatever essence the residents were percolating about.

  I did the math.

  When Paisley folded its tent, so to speak, there had been three hundred and fifteen full-time residents, not counting the parttime migrants who worked at the plant to help get ready for the Christmas season, or the proven idiots (methamphetamine manufacturers) who could hardly be designated as human.

  There are twenty-four exposures on a roll of film. Let's say that with my amateur skill and general guesswork about ghost pictures I could get eight former Paisleyans per roll, if I was lucky. That's three shots each, so I would need to buy forty rolls of film.

  Wal-Mart sells thirty-five-millimeter film for less than two dollars a roll, so that would mean around eighty dollars for film and another, say, twenty for batteries, and then there would be the processing charges at Sparkle Snapshot, which had been running nearly five dollars a roll, so that's another two hundred bucks, easy.

  Whew! I thought. No wonder so many artists apply for government grants.

  Where would I get the money?

  Deal with the Rich

  MONEY! It's the grease for everything from art to business to space exploration.

  The only thing of value I owned was my father's camera.

  Disconsolate and discouraged, I set the lens for macro and aimlessly aimed my camera at my bare toe, the little one on the left foot, the one that curves to fit neatly into the row with the others, the one with only a tiny sliver of a toenail, the baby piggy that cried, "Wee, wee, wee," all the way home.

  Or possibly it was "Oui, oui, oui."

  One never knows the origins of those odd old stories.

  Sighing, I examined the image before me with little interest and snapped the shutter.

  Instantly, my toe disappeared.

  Holy smokes! I thought, recalling the Haitian witch doctor's widow's warning: "Never use it to take a picture of yourself."

  That lady wasn't kidding!

  My financial dilemma remained unresolved for days. I continued to study the catalogs.

  Who knew there were so many different kinds of stemware, vacuum cleaners, toilet seats, rubber bands, and chickens? You name it and there's somebody out there somewhere who's put together a catalog with a hundred variations on it.

  One day, I was delighted to receive the latest edition of Uncle Milton's Thousand Things You Thought You'd Never Find. On page two it carried a two-line message inside a thick-bordered black box that read, "In Memoriam. Felix D. Katz, M.D."

  Hmm, I thought. Could Dr. Katz have been the one who got my lucky talisman?

  On page three was featured the Paisley-made joke-telling fish key chain that I'd gotten so long ago at Wal-Mart (for the price of a roll of film, I now realized!).

  Uncle Milton's price was nine ninety-five.

  That's a lot of money for a key chain, I thought.

  That was when it dawned on me that Uncle Milton Swartzman must have a lot of money!

  From there, the next thought was easy: Write to Uncle Milton and ask him to underwrite my art project.

  Dear Mr. Swartzman, I wrote.

  I'm so sorry to learn about your friend. Was it sudden? I hope he didn't suffer. Was it the lucky talisman?

  The purpose of my letter is this: I am embarking on a major artistic undertaking involving the use of my own (presumed) ghost camera. I have calculated my expenses at three hundred dollars. Where I come from, that's a lot of money. I was wondering if you'd be willing to assist me. You are the only rich person I know. Otherwise, I wouldn't bother you. Actually, you are one of the few people I know, period, but that's another story.

  Thanks for considering my request.

  Sincerely,

  Spencer Adams Honesty

  PS. Where are the Cayman Islands?

  PIPS. I enclose three poems written by my Indian friend. It wasn't my idea. He insisted.

  Instead of having to wait a fortnight, I received Uncle Milton's reply at the end of the week, delivered right to my front door by FedEx. This in itself made for considerable excitement. Strangers rarely came to Paisley.

  "I would have been here yesterday," the driver explained, "but I had trouble finding your town. Then, when finally I did find it, I took a look around and said, 'Cri
miny, what's the rush?'"

  "Would you care to stay for dinner?" my mother asked. "It's fried chicken."

  "I'd love to, ma'am," he said, "but I've got to get back to Kansas City to reload."

  "I understand," my mother replied, disappointed.

  Dear Kid, Milton Swartzman wrote:

  I don't hand out money to anybody. It goes against all my principles, which are principally about my money. I will make you a deal, however. I will pay you five bucks apiece for as many of those bad luck amulets as you can talk your Indian pal into carving. They ll be a great addition to my catalog. That doctor had just stepped outside the hospital when a grand piano fell on him from five stories up. Splat! Just like that. Unfortunately, with my bad leg I was unable to recover the talisman. So you guys get busy and get me some more. You know, in a funny way, it's lucky you live in such a hard luck place. You could make some real dough.

  Very truly yours,

  Milton Swartzman

  President and Publisher, Uncle Milton's Thousand Things You Thought You'd Never Find

  P.S. The Cayman Islands are located in the Caribbean Sea between Cuba and Honduras.

  P.P.S. Your friend carves knickknacks a lot better than he writes poetry.

  P.PP.S. The nurse came into my room to tell me about the doctor's accident and said, "In a way, he was very lucky."

  "How's that?" I asked.

  "Well," she replied, "it was a Steinway. That's the best there is."

  I folded the letter carefully and slipped it back into the colorful FedEx cardboard envelope.

  So here was the deal: By exporting Paisley's bad luck to the Cayman Islands one notched bee burl at a time, I could soon have the three hundred dollars I needed for my ambitious Paisley memorial photo-art project.

  The big question now was how to convince Chief Leopard Frog to carve sixty more talismans. That's a pretty big order for an otherwise idle whittler.

  Walking on Eggshells

  I FOUND CHIEF LEOPARD FROG on the porch swing, feeding Cheetos to a squirrel.

  "You're making his face orange," I observed.