The Haunting of James Hastings

by Christopher Ransom

  My feet left the ground first. I thought I had been hit by a truck. The force against my back was too great to be anything less. And then we were flying forward double-decked until I slammed into the asphalt, his two hundred and forty pounds smashing me flat as my left arm folded back, something in my shoulder popped and my face skidded across the road. I screamed and tried to roll him off.His knee staved my sacrum and sent an explosion of pain in all directions. Something crawled into my hair as I thrashed. My head was yanked back like a roped calf’s. A nasty wasp stung my neck, very deeply, and I coughed out what little air remained. Heat swam into my throat. I could not breathe. The sunny morning shimmered and turned black.

  SHE WHO

  The last summer their two families spent August together at the lake house in Colorado, James and Stacey drove his dad’s van out to Gerald’s corn stand. His mission was two dozen ears of Silver Queen and Stacey rode along in the passenger seat, quiet as a field mouse. They followed the nameless gravel road from the driveway to the end of the lake and turned left on Anchor Lane, then on past the subdivision on the other side of the lake, up to Highway 287. A few miles later they made the light at Highway 52, turning left, and stayed northbound for fifteen miles, past tree farms and a gravel quarry and out into open prairie. They coasted for another two miles or so until they hit the four-way stop, where they were surrounded by acres of corn on three corners, and a white farmhouse with a dairy facility and grain silo behind it on the last corner. James backed into the driveway and parked in a wide patch of dirt next to a giant willow tree with a rusting, pea-green Ford F-150 in its shade.

  ‘Where’s the corn stand?’ Stacey said.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe they closed up early this year.’ James got out of the van and walked around, opening the door for her.

  ‘So what are we supposed to do, just go knock on the door?’

  ‘Maybe holler. Keep your eyes peeled for Malachai.’

  As she climbed out, the ratatat and squeaking bark of air-compressor powered tools echoed from behind the house. James followed the sound and Stacey followed him. They passed a small stack of hay and the scent of manure was strong as the wind blew over the dairy building off in the distance.

  ‘Watch your step,’ James said, weaving through stagnant puddles in the dirt drive that wrapped around the house. Flies and small clouds of slow mosquitoes jumped and followed their feet.

  ‘It stinks, James.’

  ‘It’s a farm.’

  On the backside of the house, the drive petered out into a broad oval of trampled grass. Two children, a boy of ten or eleven and a girl half his age, were playing on an abandoned tractor with tires taller than Stacey. Gerald’s grandchildren both had thin black hair and wore dark jeans, collared plaid shirts and newer cowboy boots, as if dressed for church or class picture day. They stared at the young couple, the boy from the tractor’s seat, the girl sitting on the ground with her legs splayed out and folded back like wings.

  ‘Hello,’ James said, loud enough for their parents to hear, should they be in earshot. Stacey smiled at them uncomfortably, as if embarrassed to be trespassing. ‘Is your grand-dad around?’ he said.

  The girl pointed to the open barn.

  ‘Grandpa!’ the boy shouted, then hopped off the tractor and went trotting into the barn, slipping into darkness.

  Stacey said, ‘There’s no corn. Let’s go home.’

  ‘Don’t you want to see the rabbits again?’

  Stacey shifted her weight, smiled a little. She remembered them, and though she was getting a little old to be charmed by them, there was some little girl in her yet. It was an old tradition on these corn runs.

  James turned as a short man wearing matching green work pants and shirt came out of the barn with an air filter in one hand and a red, oil-stained rag in the other. He was bow-legged, with flat shoes and fewer teeth than he had four years ago, but he looked as innocent and dippy as always, his boyish black hair sweeping over his brow in an almost handsome wave. He carried himself lightly, as if he were ready to jump to the next task. He looked at each of them and tilted his head in polite curiosity.

  ‘Hi, Gerald,’ James said, remembering to pronounce it with a hard G. ‘I don’t know if you remember us. I’m James Hastings, this is Stacey. We usually come with our parents every couple years.’

  Gerald squinted. ‘Tulsa?’

  James nodded, smiling.

  ‘I remember your ma,’ Gerald said. ‘And the Oklahoma plates. Had a cousin in Tulsa who works for Shell. Your ma didn’t know him, but she always asked how he was doin’. Nice woman.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ James said.

  ‘You all rentin’ the summer house up in Loveland again?’

  ‘Gaynor Lake, actually. But I’d drive from Loveland for a bag of your Silver Queen.’

  ‘Gaynor, that’s right,’ Gerald said. He glanced at Stacey and frowned slightly. ‘Sold off all my corn acreage across the road there, though, sorry to say. Closed the stand last year. We just do the cheese and some soybean now, but I’m fixing to sell off the soy parcels and switch over to goats next spring.’

  ‘Goat cheese, then?’

  ‘That’s what people want. I gotta compete with the organic farmers now. God damned Boulderites want everything organic, don’t realize most of it still gets shipped up from Mexico. Hell, I can put a label that says local on anything you want, don’t make it so. Except, in my case, I guess it do make it so.’

  He laughed. James laughed. Gerald Zurfluh had been bitching about the People’s Republic of Boulder since James was eleven.

  Gerald blew into his air filter, producing a tiny brown cloud out the other side. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, Jeff. King Soopers back in Longmont’s got pretty good corn now, or did anyway last time I was in. Wouldn’t recommend the beef, though.’

  ‘Oh, that’s no problem,’ James said. ‘I just thought we’d say hello since we were out this way.’

  ‘’Preciate that,’ Gerald said. ‘How long you and - Stacey, is it?’ He looked at Stacey. Stacey nodded. ‘How long you kids plan on staying this year?’

  ‘We should probably go, James,’ Stacey said.

  ‘Just a minute, sweetie.’ James stepped closer to Gerald, until they were about ten feet apart. The daughter was hugging Gerald’s leg and sucking her thumb, swiveling on the heels of her boots. ‘I don’t mean to interrupt your work, but I was wondering if you still have that condominium hutch. Out back there,’ James pointed. ‘Behind the barn?’

  ‘Condominium?’

  ‘James,’ Stacey said.

  ‘That’s what we called it when we were kids,’ James said. ‘That was the tallest hutch I ever saw. You had ramps and little carpeted stairways. Loops and wheels. Remember, Stace? It was like bunny Disneyland.’

  ‘Oh, ha ha, yap.’ Gerald nodded. ‘You got a good memory. Didn’t know I showed you them. I built that for the kids long time ago. Don’t have the hutch no more. Hell, I didn’t know nothing about farming rabbits back then. Them’s was just pets.’

  ‘Grandpaaaaawww,’ the little girl whined, tugging on Gerald’s pant leg.

  ‘Hush now, Deanie-Beanie,’ Gerald said gently, scratching the top of her head with his red rag. ‘Take your brother inside and fix yourself an ice cream.’

  ‘I hate ice cream,’ Deanie-Beanie said.

  ‘Oh, you do not,’ Gerald said.

  Stacey said, ‘He’s busy, hon. Come on.’

  ‘Aw, that’s all right, Tracy,’ Gerald said. ‘She always gets upset but she don’t know nothin’ about it.’ He faced James, a sly grin playing across his lips. “Mom-back. I’ll show you our new set-up. Not quite Disneyland. Maybe more like rabbit suburbia - ha!’

  James followed and Stacey lagged behind.

  ‘Grandpa!’ Deanie-Beanie wailed. ‘I said nooooo!’

  Gerald whirled on her, his face contorting in real anger. ‘That is enough, young lady. I tol’ you not to get attached! Now git in there ’fore I beat yo
ur bottom!’

  Deanie-Beanie burst into tears and ran into the house.

  Stacey watched her go. She looked like she wished she could go inside too, maybe to have some ice cream, but probably just to cry.

  ‘Don’t mind her,’ Gerald said.

  ‘Come on, Stace,’ James said. ‘You used to love this.’

  Gerald’s grandson jogged ahead and then turned back, walking on his heels. ‘Can I take out Bronco?’

  ‘Long as you don’t drop him,’ Gerald said. The boy ran off and disappeared into the barn. Gerald looked over his shoulder at them. ‘You ever seen a Flemish Lop? Damn things get as big as a coon you feed ’em right. Ears long as socks. Bronco took first prize up the State Fair last September. Kyle’s old enough he understands, but that little one, she still thinks they’re all talking pets right out of her storybook.’

  ‘What exactly do you do with them?’ Stacey said. They had entered the barn. The space was dark except for a single propane lamp beside the Toyota parked a little ways past the doors. The hood was up, the air filter canister open. A tire was off, a jack raising the truck, with a rolling cart of tools beside the passenger side fender. The barn was clean, mostly empty except for the six or eight pallets of feed pellets stacked at the far end. Each pallet held something like fifty bags.

  ‘Helluva thing,’ Gerald said, walking toward the door. Though he wore a belt, the seat of his pants sagged as if he had crapped in them an hour or two ago. ‘If you’d a told me ten years ago I’d be farming rabbits, I’d a told you you were shit nuts. Beauty of it is, not so much what do you do with ’em, but what can’t you do with rabbits.’

  Stacey took James’s hand and squeezed it twice, then just clamped down on it as they reached the end of the barn and the door leading to the attached building.

  ‘Italian restaurants,’ James said. ‘Rabbit’s gourmet, isn’t it, Gerald?’

  Gerald stopped at the door. ‘Rabbit might be gourmet, but I’m full up of it. I like me a porterhouse with that ah juice. Anyways, fella comes to me a few years ago and says, “I hear you got rabbits.” And I says, “Sure, I got rabbits.” And he says, “I’ll take all you got.” Well, hell, I told him I only had a few dozen, but they’re coming on strong. “What do you want ’em for?” I says. He says, “I specialize in meat, but I got connections in fur, show bunnies, feet, pelts, gut string, bone meal, you name it.” He says, “We use the whole rabbit.” And by God he do use the whole rabbit. By God he do. We get three bucks per week up to twenty-four weeks, breeders and show ears go for more. A lot more. Rabbits what bought me that new truck there, and put the mortgage to bed for good. Yes, sir.’

  Gerald held the door open and Stacey went stiff. James pushed the small of her back and she went forward grudgingly. He followed her, and the door closed. James thought immediately of plant nurseries, foggy white and half as long as a football field. But instead of plants and misting sprinklers, Gerald’s nursery was lined with wooden hutches, a three-story Alcatraz with units ranging in size from shoebox quarantines to eight-foot breeding pens. The floors of the hutches were grated, and the pebbles fell through into steel troughs that were much cleaner than James expected. Behind the troughs and walls of cages, spaced out every ten feet or so, was a giant exhaust fan. It was like walking in a wind tunnel, but quiet enough to hear the rabbits nuzzling, the scamper of their feet.

  The rabbits were white, black, black and white, brown, tan, cinnamon, spotted, roan, every color and pattern James could imagine. Rows and rows of red-eyed albinos. Some of the hutches contained whole litters, others had mating pairs, and others still were private residences for the prize adults, some of which looked freakish, not much like rabbits at all.

  ‘Oh, man,’ James said. ‘This is a serious operation.’

  Stacey had let go of James’s hand and now walked to the opposite end, and he was so enchanted with all the floppy ears and strange, twitching and toggling eyes that followed his every movement, James forgot about her for a moment.

  ‘Eleven hundred seventy-seven by last count,’ Gerald said. ‘But that was this morning.’ He laughed. James laughed.

  Stacey laughed too, harder, and her laughter went on longer than either of theirs, echoing back. She laughed and laughed and Gerald stopped and at stared at her. She was standing sideways facing the cages as Kyle rounded the corner at her end with Bronco in his arms. By the time she turned and saw that Flemish Giant out of his cage, her laughter had gone straight into hysterical screaming.

  34

  I woke to her screaming.

  My first sense was one of being safer indoors, that I had found a haven from the monsters lurking in the desert. I had been dreaming, except that the dream had been a continuation of something we had shared, a single pearl set in a necklace of memories stringing back toward the lake house - and something beyond it that Stacey wanted to show me. Something to do with the rabbits. But I couldn’t remember what happened - in either the dream or the real memories - and it was driving me insane that I couldn’t remember, driving me out of sleep in a depleted panic.

  The world I awoke to was gray, a dim room, still blurry and soft but taking shape, hardening over a period of minutes. For a moment - before I saw the wood paneling and the bar off to my left - I thought I was back in the hospital. I was very weak, as if I had been sleeping for days without food. I was warm, supine, thirsty.

  No, not the hospital. I was on the tiger couch. In the Rick Room.

  I felt no pain, and even my dream-state panic was fading quickly. Surely Detective Bergen would arrive any minute now to comfort me, tell me to keep my chin up and send me home.

  He drugged me. He drugged me good. Well, at least he didn’t kill me.

  I looked down to find myself enveloped in a bright red blanket, velveteen. I squirmed, just to get a feel for my body again, and the blanket slipped against my skin. I was naked - no, just stripped to my shorts, I realized, feeling the waistband. My vision sharpened.

  No, not a blanket.

  I was wearing a red tracksuit. So shiny it seemed wet, a skin of blood. Ghost’s signature threads, available in limited editions for nineteen hundred and eighty-eight dollars at Neiman Marcus, smoother than satin panties.

  This is going somewhere bad. To a place we might not come back from.

  I wasn’t confined or bound, but my body felt as though it weighed six hundred pounds. Small patches of my arms and face burned coolly, not unpleasantly, the scent of menthol wafting from the collar of my zipped jacket. My feet were bare except for the smaller bandages around my toes. After prodding around for another minute, the first tendrils of pain radiated out of my shoulder, and from my lower back, and I stopped fussing. It didn’t hurt as long as I remained very still.

  A clinking noise directed my attention to the left, across the room. Rick was behind the bar, mixing something in a tall glass of bobbing ice. He stirred the concoction with a glass swizzle and carried it to me. He appeared nine feet tall.

  ‘Drink this.’

  My mouth was dry. The fluid was milky yellow with little white crystals eddying to the bottom. Rick was pale and showered, his curly red hair wet swept back. He was dressed in all black, the shirt something of a mock turtle-neck, black jeans, a black leather belt with rows of holes and a buckle of silver nails. He seemed uninterested in me as he lowered the glass. I accepted it and sat forward to sip it, which took a long time. It was marvelously cold and bittersweet.

  ‘Whazzit?’

  He made a little ‘up’ motion with his hand. I guzzled the rest, spilling around the corners of my mouth. I wanted more.

  Rick took the empty glass. ‘Lemonade, vodka and valium. Best thing in the world for pain.’

  I took a long look around the room. His display case of knives and Kung Fu weapons and guns had been emptied, of course. He had taken necessary precautions.

  Rick pulled an ottoman over from the rest of the wild kingdom and sat facing me, elbows on his knees. In the dim light his red hair and mustache
shined like amber and his eyes were dilated, the corneas thin rings of green around swamps of black. His rage had been sheared away, revealing something slow and dangerously resolved. He must have gone through a lot for her, I knew then. She was all he had.

  ‘You love her,’ I said.

  He studied me for a moment. ‘She’s my sister.’

  ‘Annette Butterfield,’ I said, testing it out.

  ‘Mmm-hmm, at first,’ Rick said. ‘Later, Salvaggio. Annette, Arthur and Aaron Salvaggio.’

  Salvaggio. Even in my haze, the name sounded an alarm in my memory. Salvaggio, Salvaggio, where had I heard that recently?

  News headlines swam up from the depths. The scrapbook. The Ghost headlines. Salvaggio death ruled a suicide, wife blames housing bubble for husband’s depression. I had been scanning the article when the noises in the hall began, just before Aaron, or something in his bedroom, cut my wrist.