by Robert Gipe
I said, “I guess it is.”
That Woman’s sister knocked the billboard off her, sat up, hung her legs off the side of the scaffold, said, “Seriously. What are you doing up here?” She looked at me and wouldn’t stop.
I told her about my idea to fix the sign. She said, “You want some help?”
I said, “Well, I wadn’t going to do it tonight.”
She said, “Why not? You’ll chicken out if you don’t.”
People will tell you all kinds of things about ghosts, but if all ghosts are like the ghost of Tricia Jewell, there aint no point being scared of ghosts, cause she was way nicer as a ghost than she had been as a person—or at least way nicer than the person I had known.
The ghost of Tricia Jewell helped me fix up them letters. She could make herself glow, which we used for light. She held the chunks of plywood while I unscrewed the screws and held the screws for me while I moved things around. She helped me rearrange the pieces and pointed out how if I would trim this piece here and that piece there that it would look smoother, better, that it wouldn’t look so cobbled up. She made that whole thing look a whole lot better.
When we got the letters fixed, she helped me hang the vinyl back and rig up the rope to pull to get the vinyl to fall away. When we got done with that, she ran got me a pop out of the cooler and set and watched me drink it, both of us hanging our legs off the scaffold. I told the ghost of Tricia Jewell me and Brother were supposed to take the scaffolds down in the morning and she smiled at me and all the teeth she’d had pulled come back in her mouth and she turned the rest of her glow off—she went dark except for her teeth, lit up and glowing blue-purple, lit up the color of the hydrangea blossoms and then the rest of her lit back up and she didn’t have no clothes on and her body wasn’t young but it was very beautiful, her curves like a stand-up bass, her skin mostly blue, the streams of wrinkles between her breasts more purple.
She pushed me at my shoulders, pushed me back on my back there on the scaffold. Then she climbed astraddle me, on her knees towering over me. She took my hand and put it on the hair at her middle, and my fingers slipped inside her and she smiled. She was cool inside. And slick. She unloosed my belt and took my pants down and let my man business out in the night air then she set on my belly and her behind so round and smooth was just the best feeling.
She lay her hands on my shoulders and leaned down towards me, her hair brushing my face, and I breathed so short couldn’t catch my breath to save my life and I thought I was going to have to throw her off, but she leaned over and put her lips to mine, parted my lips with her tongue, and she breathed into me, and I caught my breath, breathed easy, and I let her do what she was going to do, which was to slide herself onto my man business.
She rocked her hips back and forth on me in a way that made me feel so natural and real. I joined in with her, rocking my hips too. She glowed a little brighter and never quit smiling but closed her eyes and I put my hands on her hips and we sailed along like that a good while and I thought about my family and squirrels and owls and big old deer and she opened her eyes just as I was finishing, just as them minnows went leaping out of me, and she watched me from on high, watched me in my pleasure, and when I calmed she put her hands to my cheeks, and she rose off me back on her knees astraddle me and she went dark again and her hands come off my cheeks and then she came off of sitting astride me and set down beside me and she said out of her darkness, “That’s a good thing.”
I said it was.
She said, “Why do you think I did that?”
I said I didn’t know, but wondered did it have something to do with her sister.
She lit back up and sat up beside me, her arms around her knees, her face resting on them. She said, “Strange about dying the way I did. The thing in you that would have regrets and would make you wish you’d done different than you did—that part of you don’t carry over. Fear is gone. Dread is gone. Worry is gone. Guilt is gone. And really, it aint better or worse. It just is what it is. And you can see everything happening but you can’t change anything.”
I said, “I think I’m going to have to change my drawers.”
She laughed and rubbed her fingers in the man cream wet spot around the fly of my drawers. She put her fingers to her lips and said, “That’s for you to decide.” And then she said, “Come on,” and fixed my pants and took me by my hands and stood me up and we had that scaffold took apart and stacked up in short order.
I WAS afraid I might be a witch or want to drink blood or something. None of that happened, but I did feel different. I thought I was changed. I think that’s why I jumped in that lake to try and save Calvin. I thought that ghost sex would make me to where I couldn’t drown. But that turned out not to be true. Maybe I wasn’t changed.
After I done that to them letters, I never did go back to Canard County. I never saw That Woman again. I didn’t have no call to. No urge to.
But to be honest, I did go back. I was there the day the letters got shown. But I didn’t have no interest in that. I went back to get Calvin. I caught him getting in his Bonneville at the Kolonel Krispy parking lot and I went and got in the other side.
He said, “Hello, Gene,” which was the first time in his life he’d ever got my name right.
I said, “Hey Calvin.”
He said, “For a second I thought you were a ghost.”
I asked him why.
He said cause of my white pants and T-shirt and cause he said my hair’d got whiter since we’d been in Tennessee together.
I said, “Calvin, it was you killed Tricia.”
He said, “Yes, it was.”
I said, “And you told Dawn Jewell you was going to turn yourself in.”
He said, “Yeah. You were sitting there when I told her.”
I said, “Yeah, I was.”
We set there quiet for a minute. Then I took Calvin’s face in my hands and kissed him. Right on his lips. Then I set there. Calvin put his hands on the steering wheel.
He said, “Will you go with me?”
I said I would.
Calvin started the Bonneville and drove over to the sheriff’s office and told the little boy they had sitting there he’s the one killed Tricia Jewell. Said he’s the one dumped her body down by the riverbank like she was a bag of garbage. Then Calvin set down and that little fellow arrested him and handcuffed him to a hot water pipe.
I walked out of the sheriff’s office and down the old courthouse steps, left out of there,
12
WHERE WITCHES COME FROM
DAWN
I drew a picture of Nicolette turned into a flying fish on the hood of June’s car. I drew it with my finger in the yellow dust June carried home from the West Virginia strip jobs where she’d been raising a ruckus. In the picture, Nicolette leapt out of the ocean towards a spaceship. The spaceship was shaped like a fish too.
My phone rang. I answered and Nicolette said, “Hi, Mommy.”
I said, “Hey, baby. How are you?”
She said, “Good. Where are you?”
I said, “I’m with Aunt June. At her new job.”
Nicolette said, “When are you coming home?”
I said, “I don’t know, baby. When we get everything straightened out here.”
Nicolette said, “How long is that?”
I said, “Not long.”
I said, “You know I love you, don’t you baby?”
Nicolette said, “I know, Mommy.” Said, “I love you too.”
I said, “I know, baby.”
Nicolette said, “Tell Aunt June I love her.”
I said, “I will, baby.”
“Bye, Mommy.”
“Bye, Baby.”
It was hot and bright in the mostly empty community college parking lot. The car hood burned my finger. June walked up, a bag of papers on her shoulder. She walked slow and crooked, smiling like a guy just had his first kid. She come up to me and sighed. I wiped my finger on my pants.
; I said, “Did they fire you?”
She said no. Said, “You want to see my new office?”
We walked between the buildings on the college campus, went in the art building. A nice lady behind a half wall said hi, and we went in June’s office, which had windows on two sides, a desk with cabinets, a round table for people to sit. The chairs were solid. Everything matched.
I said, “This is yours?”
She said yeah.
I said, “All to yourself?”
She said yeah.
I said, “Dang.” Said, “They weren’t mad about the sign?”
June said, “They knew that wasn’t my fault.”
I said, “Well.”
June said, “It didn’t hurt either I’d got that grant.”
I said, “How much is the grant?”
She said, “Four hundred thousand dollars.”
I said, “And that sign is already took down.”
June said, “That’s right.”
I looked around at the bookshelves bolted to the wall on either side of the windows. Two dogs licked themselves outside. I said, “Well. This is nice.”
June said, “You ready to go?”
We left and went back to Momma’s. On the way, June asked me did I want to go with her and Kenny to Johnson City to see a bunch of guys with long beards play music. I said no.
Nicolette was still with Willett. Willett was still in Tennessee. I was still in the soup. I was in a giant cookpot treading soup, wishing there was a giant floating potato for me to grab onto. Or maybe a dumpling I could stretch out on. But there wasn’t. There was just me in soup getting hotter all the time. I was like the rat that fell in my friend Pete’s soup one time at an interstate restaurant, the one with the checkerboards and rocking chairs. The rat fell in the soup and nobody noticed, and they put the lid on the pot, and the rat cooked, and they put the rat in Pete’s soup bowl. That was me, drowning and boiling in the dark. Soup in my rat lungs and eyes and ears. It sucked.
When June left to go to the concert with Kenny, I was in the house by myself. I sat on the air conditioner stairs and called Hazel. It was the end of the month, and I’d promised her I’d come to her house. Pharoah lay sleeping on the top step above me. She hung close after everybody died. She knew. She wasn’t a stupid dog.
It was the last day of July, 2004. The three main females in my life all died in the same month in the same year.
Hazel said, “What time you coming, baby?”
I said I didn’t know. I didn’t say it, but I didn’t want to go at all.
Hazel said, “Baby, I aint going to lie to you. I’m down in the mouth.”
I said, “I know, Hazel.”
She said, “Don’t know how I’m going to make it.”
I said, “I know.”
I heard somebody stirring downstairs. I told Hazel I’d be there around dark. Told her I’d be glad to stay over. And I reckon I was.
Hubert and Albert sat at the kitchen table acting hungry. I asked them did they want something to eat and they said, “What do you have?” And I said, “Baloney. Peanut butter. Cereal.” Albert asked did I have Lucky Charms and Hubert asked did I have ham, and I told them both no. They both said they’d take baloney sandwiches. So I fixed them baloney sandwiches. Hubert’s with tomato and mayonnaise. Albert’s with mustard and double baloney. Everything seemed so shrunk up. Back to normal. But tiny.
Hubert and Albert told me Evie had been wearing a recorder and working with the police to get out of trouble. She ratted out Sidney. She ratted out Groundhog and Fu Manchu. But she wasn’t trying to rat out Hubert. She was trying to get dirt on him so that she could make him quit drug dealing. She also was going to turn Albert in if he didn’t stop using and selling. That’s what Hubert and Albert said. Hubert said Evie had been trying to get him to stop for months. Albert said Evie flushed his pills down the commode. Hubert said she was going to get herself killed doing that shit.
When he said that, we just sat there. I thought Albert was going to cry. Pharoah came down the steps, her needing-cut nails clicking on the stairs. She lay down under the kitchen table, right in the middle of us, like she didn’t hardly ever do.
* * *
I’D BEEN thinking about Belinda Coates since Dollywood. I was worried about her. It didn’t even feel strange to worry. I thought about her with her twelve-year-old self with its broke arm in Corbin. I thought about what all must have been going through her head when she threw my bicycle in the river. It crossed my mind maybe Belinda Coates had liked me in sixth grade.
Anyway. I lay around the house, read a comic book about Amazon lady warriors in ancient Greece, drew pictures in a notebook I found, one June gave me when I was in eighth grade. I hadn’t drawn in it since tenth grade. I thought about my dream of becoming a tattoo artist. It seemed far away. It seemed unreal. I didn’t know who would talk me into doing it.
Decent Ferguson called. She asked me how I was doing. She called me darling. I asked her how you got to be a tattoo artist. She told me about a friend of hers who had written her master’s thesis on tattoo artists someplace where there was a lot of navy ships, and sailors, and because of that a lot of tattoo artists. Decent said she’d been meaning to call that woman anyway. She said she’d call her for me, find out how to be a tattoo artist.
About five o’clock, I asked Pharoah did she want to go to Hazel’s. She wagged her tail when I said “go.” So we got ready and went. I stopped first in Tattletown and got beer. I got a fifth of vodka and some Sunny D, because vodka and Sunny D was what Evie liked to drink.
When Momma first started getting in trouble with the law, and the judge first started sending her to Straight Like Jesus, which was a Christian twelve-step program, me and her both thought the judge had a crush on her. Whether that was right or not, one night me and her and Evie were out on the Trail, out on Long Ridge, and we ended up in the judge’s backyard, ended up bouncing on his trampoline, all three of us, holding hands and bouncing till the floodlights came on at every corner of the house, and we three scattered in three different directions. That was the last time we all three did something partyish together. We were drinking vodka and Sunny D that night.
Me and Pharoah got to Hazel’s house way before dark. Hazel’s house was blue with black trim and sat notched into the hillside. Cats lazed on the porch rail, watching the traffic on the two-lane below. Twenty wind chimes made of hammered-out forks and spoons jangled on twenty J-hooks lining the porch. Salvaged lumber piled up on top of a wringer washing machine on the side of the porch facing the road.
I had Pharoah on a leash cause June lost her mind if you didn’t keep Pharoah on the leash. Hazel had a fair number of crazy dogs, but she had them in a pen beside her house, big chain-link setup with blue tarps to keep the sun off them and dog food scattered everywhere on the concrete pad amidst flipped-over dog bowls and poop.
Sunlight filtered through oak and maple and fell through the open front door. Balls of dust and dog hair rolled across the dull pine floorboards. Sylvester Stallone shot up a village in shades of pink and orange on the hand-me-down television across the fireplace. A yellow bedsheet printed with faded flowers covered the couch. The ashes of a cigarette piled around the opening in the top of a Pepsi can. The can sat on top of a cutoff notice from the power company. The notice sat on top of a stack of library books and DVD cases. A fly fizzed in and out of the kitchen. Except for the sunlight and Sylvester Stallone, there was no light in the room. Hazel told us to come in and make ourselves at home, but Pharoah wouldn’t settle down. I said,
She acted like she believed me, but she never would totally relax. Hazel set back on the couch and breathed out, her cheeks puffing full of air. She played a song on her tape player she said was called “Darn Well.” Hazel said the song was done by an outfit called Linnie Walker and Black Merda. The song made me feel better. Hazel sat up and opened a wooden box sitting on the table. She took out a jar of weed. She took out a pipe. She smoked a bowl. She asked m
e if I wanted some. I took some. I don’t much like pot, but I wanted to feel different than I did. I wanted to feel different than beer or vodka or Sunny D could make me feel. So I smoked a bowl with Hazel.
I asked Hazel could we call Belinda Coates, see if she wanted to come hang out with us. Said we maybe even could go to Causey if Hazel didn’t care.
Hazel looked at me and said, “Lord, honey. You aint heard.”
I said, “Heard what?”
Hazel said, “Belinda Coates is in the hospital. And jail.”
I said, “Both?”
And Hazel said, “Yep.”
I asked what happened and Hazel told me the day we went to Dollywood, Belinda and that bunch she was running with had gone shoplifting and stolen a bunch of pocketbooks in Pigeon Forge and then went to West Town Mall and stole a bunch of cosmetics, stuck them down in the pocketbooks they’d stolen in Pigeon Forge, not even pulling the tags off the pocketbooks when they were stealing the makeup. When they got out in the parking lot, they got to fighting about how to divide the stuff, and somehow Belinda got beat up and woke up in her car the next morning at West Town Mall, getting arrested with a whole car full of drugs and stolen stuff. And her buds were nowhere in sight. Hazel said both her eyes were black, her nose was broken, a bunch of her ribs and fingers were broken, she was missing teeth, and her lips were all busted and bloody. And now she was looking at being in jail a while, Hazel said.
“Jesus,” I said.
Hazel said, “I couldn’t do to a dog what them girls did to her.”
I felt bad about all the ill feelings I had about Belinda Coates over the years. I told Hazel so and me and her smoked another bowl. Rambo was still shooting up villages on the TV. The sound was off and more soul music played on Hazel’s cassette player.
Hazel said, “Rambo is a buzzkill.”
I nodded.
Hazel said, “I wonder why Sylvester Stallone never made no outer space movies?”
I said, “He didn’t?”
Hazel said, “I never seen one.”