Hole: A Ghost Story

by Rod Redux

  “He’s having a seizure!” his mother yelled.

  They laid him on the parking lot. He drummed his heels on the tarmac. He looked up, saw the moon and stars, saw the trees on the far side of the parking lot, and then the darkness closed in on him.

  It was like falling down a rabbit hole.

  18.

  Hhheeesss commiiinnnggg toooooo

  Hank woke to find himself on a lumpy tan and green striped couch in the funeral director’s office. His mother was sitting beside him, dabbing his forehead with a moist cloth. Standing around him, looking down with concern, was his stepfather and brother-in-law Steve and his cousin Billy Joe. Billy Joe’s wife and kids were clustered in the doorway, the kids tussling with one another to get the best view possible of the freakshow in the funeral director’s office. Mr. Kelley, the mortician, was fidgeting near his desk, chewing on his cuticle with a dismayed expression on his careworn face.

  “Whuh?” Hank croaked groggily.

  “Take it easy now,” his mother said as he sat up suddenly, blinking at the small crowd surrounding him.

  “What happened?” he asked, then he touched his throat with a wince. It hurt to speak.

  “You got in a row with your brother-in-law,” his stepdad answered, not bothering to conceal his consternation. “You got so worked up, you passed out.”

  Hank glanced guiltily toward Steve. If Steve was disappointed or angry with him, he didn’t show it. He just looked miserable and frightened, even a little ashamed. He met Hank’s gaze, then looked quickly away.

  “Hank, what happened? How could you do such a thing?” his mother asked.

  “Where is he?” Hank demanded, instead of answering her. He was becoming more clear-eyed, and the heat had returned to his voice.

  “Hank!” his mother gasped, appalled.

  “Now, you just settle down, cowboy,” Trent drawled.

  “They left,” Steve said, and he blushed when everyone turned to look at him. He must have felt like a Hatfield in a room full of McCoys, Hank thought. “Mother and Dean were pretty upset. They all jumped in their cars and took off.”

  “Of course they’re upset,” Hank’s mother said apologetically. “This is all just so terrible and embarrassing. Hank, please, tell me what’s gotten into you. This is your wife’s funeral, for goodness sake! I’ve never seen you act this way!”

  Hank pushed aside the rag she was still trying to dab against his brow, gentle but firm. “I’m sorry, Mom. I lost my temper. You don’t know everything that’s gone on between us, and when I heard what he was saying about Mary, I just lost my temper.”

  “What did he say?” several people asked at once.

  Hank could feel his face getting hotter and redder. He was becoming furious all over again. “I… that’s between me and him. I don’t even want to repeat it.”

  “Oh, Hank…!” his mother sighed.

  “I just want to go home,” he said. He sounded sullen, even to himself, like a spoiled teenager who hadn’t gotten his way. “I apologize to all of you. I’m sorry, Mr. Kelley. I’ve made an ass of myself tonight, but it’s over now, and I just want to go home.”

  “Oh, my… Well, I know this is a trying time, but… this isn’t going to happen tomorrow, is it?” Arthur Kelley stammered.

  “I don’t want him at the funeral tomorrow!” Hank said fiercely.

  “Hank! That’s his sister!” his mother exclaimed.

  “I don’t care!” Hank hissed. “I don’t want him there! He doesn’t deserve it! Not after everything he’s done!”

  Steve was staring at him with wide, terrified eyes, his lips pressed tight together. Even later, as he drove Hank home, he maintained his frightened silence.

  Hank tried to engage him in conversation with little success. Steve would speak only reluctantly, and even then his responses were brief. Hank felt terribly ashamed, not for what he’d done—no, that bastard deserved what he got and more—but for how he’d made everyone feel. The funny thing was, Steve acted as if he was afraid for Hank, not of him. It was strange, because Hank had been the aggressor.

  Rubbing his sore throat, Hank said, “I really am sorry, Steve. I broke my promise. I know that. Worse, I’ve put you in the middle of it. You must feel like you’re being torn in two directions at once.”

  Steve’s eyes were very wide in the green glow of the dash lights.

  “I wish you’d say something. I feel like a complete dick.”

  “There isn’t anything to say, Hank,” Steve answered tersely. “What’s done is done. I just hope…” But there he broke off, shaking his head.

  “Just hope what?”

  Steve sighed. “You don’t know the whole story, Hank.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  “Both.”

  Hank chuckled. “That clears things up.”

  Steve drove, staring at the road winding ahead. His eyes didn’t so much as flick toward Hank. His hands on the steering wheel were corded with tension.

  “All right,” Hank sighed. He rolled down the window and leaned into the flow of night air rushing past. They were almost to his house. The landscape rolling by was dominated almost entirely by agricultural fields and narrow stands of windbreak forestry. The night air was cool and humid. It felt like a blessing on his cheeks.

  Steve turned, then turned again, and then they were crunching up onto the driveway. Steve parked beside Hank’s Mustang. Mary’s car, a white Chevy Cavalier, was parked in the garage, beside all the boxes and big plastic totes filled with the bric-a-brac of their twenty year marriage.

  Steve killed the engine. They sat in the dark. The only light was the bulb by the kitchen door, casting a yellow radiance across the back patio. A thin gauze of fog floated in the yard, glowing in the moonlight. Hank listened to the crickets and frogs for a while, then turned to Steve and said, “If you don’t want to stay here tonight, I understand. You’re welcome to stay, though. I… hope you will.”

  Steve nodded. Smiled. “Yeah. Sure. Of course. I’m not mad at you, Hank. I’m just worried, is all. I know how crazy Dean can get, and you’ve really... provoked him.”

  Feeling relieved Steve had not turned against him, Hank said, “Let’s not worry about Dean anymore tonight. Come on, little brother. Let’s go inside and get out of these monkey suits.”

  Steve laughed and agreed, but he didn’t look very comforted, not when Hank looked into his eyes. He looked scared, and Hank couldn’t help noticing, as they walked to the back door, that Mary’s brother kept looking nervously to and fro across the darkened property.

  What did he expect? Hank wondered. Dean to come running around the side of the house with an axe?

  He would remember that thought later, when the killing was done, and he would think, If only…!

  19.

  Standing naked in the upstairs bathroom, fresh from a shower, Hank appraised himself in the mirror above the sink. What the hell? he thought, his eyes roving up and down his body.

  He was covered in bruises.

  There were red marks around his neck as if someone had tried to throttle him. His biceps were faintly purpled, and his chest had a bluish bruise that looked for all the world like a misshapen hand. He touched his jaw and winced. If he shaved his beard right now, he wondered if he would uncover a bruise there as well, hidden beneath the hair.

  “That’s just not possible,” he said to himself in a low voice.

  He recalled the brief fight he’d had with his brother-in-law in the funeral home’s parking lot, but it all seemed dreamy and disjointed now. The thing was, he didn’t remember Dean hitting him back. He remembered getting in a few licks. He knew for sure he’d bloodied the man’s lips because he remembered how Dean had held his palm toward him, as if the little smear of blood there was some kind of condemnation. Had Dean’s oldest boy jumped into the fight? Struck him in the jaw from behind, choked him even? It was dark when they had gotten into it an
d Hank was not exactly thinking rationally at the time. Still, the whole confrontation was damn strange, with Dean spitting Bible scripture and blood at him.

  Not that he bought into Dean’s whole spiritual snake oil show. In Hank’s experience, the majority of Christians were simply wolves in sheeps’ clothing. What better way to get a leg up on your fellow man than beat them onto their knees with your own purported righteousness?

  Hank had found that when most men talked about God this and God that, they were really just speaking for themselves. What more authority could you attach to your own opinions?

  A good Christian man didn’t condemn. The Bible said “Judge not, lest yet be judged.”

  A good Christian man didn’t beat up his brother. Jesus said, “Turn the other cheek.”

  A good Christian man didn’t rape his brother and sister the whole time they were growing up, then browbeat them into silence for the rest of their lives. He was no expert on the bible, but he knew public confession and heartfelt repentance were the only ways to get expiation for such terrible sin. Denial only heaped lie upon the fuck.

  Are you any better? Hank asked himself. Adulterer. Bad husband. You got into a fight at your own wife’s funeral. It doesn’t get any more white trash than that!

  At least he wasn’t a hypocrite.

  Hank sighed and exited the bathroom, shutting the light off. He walked to the closet and threw on some pajamas, then trotted down the stairs into the dining room.

  Steve was in the kitchen, speaking in a low fast voice on his cell phone. He looked angry and scared at the same time. He was sweating, his hands shaking.

  Feeling guilty, Hank hurried past the doorway. He had only come downstairs to turn off the central air unit for the night. It was cool out and he wanted to open the windows. The fresh air might do him some good.

  “No, Mother, I’m not going to tell him any of that!” Steve whispered.

  Hank pretended he couldn’t hear.

  “I need to go. Bye!”

  Steve snapped his cell phone shut and sighed.

  “I guess I’ve made a lot of trouble for you,” Hank said, ambling into the kitchen to join his brother-in-law.

  “I wish you hadn’t said you were telling everybody what he did,” Steve said regretfully. “Dean is crazy as it is, but that is the one thing that sets him off the worst. I could tell you stories that would make your hair stand up.”

  Hank crossed his arms, leaning in the doorway. “Well, why don’t you? I’m listening.”

  Steve looked at him, his eyes shadowed… haunted. “I can’t,” he finally whispered.

  Hank threw his arms out to his side. “What kind of fucking hold does that cocksucker have on you two?” he asked hotly.

  Steve quailed back from him, clutching the edge of the counter in fear, and Hank felt instantly ashamed of himself. “I’m sorry. Look, I’m sorry, okay? I’ll drop it.”

  After a moment, his brother-in-law relaxed, then nodded. “Okay. Thanks.”

  Hank looked around the kitchen. The counters were almost completely covered with dishes. Casseroles, cakes, pies. The fridge was packed with cold cuts and perishables. There were sandwiches and dips and salads. What was it about death that brought the Julia Child out in women? Hank wondered. Whatever it was, he was not ungrateful. He hadn’t eaten since noon and he was a little lightheaded.

  “You want to make a plate and have a late dinner? Watch a little television before we go to bed?” he asked.

  Steve shook his head. “I’m not hungry.”

  Fetching a paper plate from the cabinet, Hank said, “You need to eat something. You get any skinnier, and we’ll be able to fly you like a kite.”

  Steve laughed. “Okay, Hank. Maybe a sandwich.”

  “You want some chips?”

  “Yeah.”

  Later, sitting in front of the TV, eating off dinner trays while they watched a late night talk show, Hank recalled all the nights he and Steve had done this very thing: munch on leftovers while watching David Letterman. This was back when he and Mary were first married and Steve was not even twenty yet, a skinny, quiet boy who was sweet and helpful and affectionate. Hank had always liked Mary’s younger brother. He’d suspected, even back then, that Steve was gay. He sometimes caught the boy checking out his package— Hank was much trimmer then and had yet to sprout the first gray hair in his beard—but it never bothered him much, and he’d even stood up for the lad a couple times when other people tried to make an issue of it. Steve had sometimes stayed with them for weeks at a time in those days. He was good company for Hank. Mary had always been an early riser, ready for bed by ten. Hank was the night owl.

  Hank laughed and Steve glanced over at him.

  “I can almost pretend that Mary’s upstairs sleeping,” he said. “Any minute now, she’ll get up to pee and she’ll come down here and say, ‘Oh my God! Are you boys still up? You have to go to work tomorrow, Hank!’ Remember that?”

  Steve chuckled and nodded. “I remember,” he said.

  Still smiling, Hank sniffed and wiped his cheek. He looked down at his plate. There was a tear glinting next to his chips. On the TV, Letterman was doing his top ten schtick. Hank stuffed the last of his tuna salad sandwich in his mouth.

  Any minute now… he thought.

  20.

  He dreamed early that morning, with the windows open and the damp night air tossing the curtains, that Mary had stolen from the bathroom to join him in bed. He wasn’t sure when he drifted off, the dream was that vivid. It seemed there was no intervening period of unconsciousness between the time that he lay down to sleep and the moment when Mary slipped sinuously from the dark throat of the bathroom. He could point to no particular moment and say, Here! This is where I fell asleep! But it must have been a dream, because otherwise he was crazy or haunted—and neither was a prospect he cared to examine too closely.

  He would go back over it again and again in his mind, trying to find the moment that reality gave way to fantasy. Had the room changed inexplicably? Had furniture vanished, or strange new ones appeared? Had the room’s geometry shifted, or the patterns on the walls softened and run down the paper like melted crayon?

  But he could recall nothing that betrayed his mind’s inventions.

  He had watched TV with Steve for a while, then retired upstairs. He felt like he was wearing an lead vest, he was so tired. He shut off the light and slipped under his covers and lay listening to the crickets chirring outside the window, exhausted but suddenly restless-- what Mary had always called “overtired”-- thinking that the bed was too big and empty now, and wondering how he was ever going to get used to the empty space beside him after his wife had filled it for so many years.

  After tossing and turning for a time, he placed a pillow where Mary normally lay, and let his hand rest upon it, like he used to rest his hand upon her hip, the slow curve of her body, waist to thigh, more than familiar to his touch after so many years, but always a comfort.

  The pillow was a pale substitute. It taunted more than it consoled.

  He stared up at the ceiling, watching the light from the window shift across its popcorn textured surface. All those little lumps cast their own tiny shadows. It was really quite vivid. He studied the inverted landscape of tiny mountains and craters, fascinated.

  Surely that was when he must have fallen asleep, because Mary slipped out of the dark bathroom not long after, silent, obscured by the dark. He watched as she crept across the room, the faint light coming from the windows only hinting at her form—the stroke of her breasts and shoulders, the dark smudge of her hair. He imagined she glanced at him, her eyes winking for a moment in the dark pools beneath her brows. They flicked toward him, then ticked down to the edge of the bed.

  He lay paralyzed, not with any kind of fear, for either his sanity or his safety, but afraid that if he did anything-- if he moved, if he spoke-- the spell would be broken and he would wake up alone in his bed.

  He watched as she pulled back her side of
the covers and then eased onto the mattress beside him. He felt the bed give beneath her weight, heard the faint squeak of the brass frame. She took the pillow he’d laid in her spot and placed it under her head.

  He dared to breath, though he did not dare yet to speak to her.

  Mary rolled over and put her palm to his chest. Her touch was cold and slick. He felt icy fluid dribble down the side of him, tickling his ribs. Her blood, he thought, yet it did not disgust him. It was a part of her, so he relished it.

  “Are you a ghost?” he whispered in the dark.

  He didn’t think she would answer him, but she did… with the same question. A dream answer.

  “Are you a ghost?” she asked. Soft. A lover’s whisper.

  “I’m dreaming, I guess,” he said, exhaling shakily in the dark.

  “I guess I’m dreaming, too,” she sighed.

  “I love you,” he told her, and his heart raced as he waited for her reply. It had raced just the same when he asked her to marry him, the first time they kissed, the moment he realized when they were dating that she was going to make love to him.

  Mary laughed softly and raised up to kiss him. She pulled his face to hers when he didn’t rise to her lips, her hand insistent upon his cheek. He felt the cold smear of her blood on his flesh. She pressed her mouth to his.

  He didn’t care that she was cold. He didn’t withdraw from the coppery taste of her. Her touch defeated him. He was shattered.

  He rolled toward her, curled his arm around her, pulled her close to him. He kissed her back with all the passion he could muster, groaning as he smashed his mouth to hers. She returned his ardor, whining softly, the sound of her surrender. She pulled him atop her then, opening her thighs to him, not just willing, he judged by the firmness of her nipples, but eager. Hungry.