by Jeffrey Ford
Two days later, I was in the park, pushing baby Jack in his stroller, when I saw this guy running in the afternoon heat, shirtless but wearing jeans and work boots. As we headed across the sunburned lawn toward the pond, I saw him dashing beneath the trees all along the perimeter of the park. Otherwise, it was high noon and the place was deserted. I sat on my usual bench, Jack next to me in the stroller, beneath a giant oak that could catch a breeze even on the hottest days.
We sat there in silence for a long time and I told Jack to watch the sunbeams on the pond. I closed my eyes for a second, feeling as if I could just doze off, but then felt something move on the bench beside me. I opened my eyes and saw the runner. He was sitting there lighting a cigarette. He had curly hair and his muscled arms were loaded with tattoos. When he saw I was awake, he put his hand out toward me to shake. “You met my cousin the other day,” he said.
I shook his hand. “Who?” I asked.
“Gil,” he said.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “He lives right behind me.”
“He told me you took him down into Camden the other night.”
“I did.”
“Don’t ever do that again,” he said. “I know where you went. On that street, you’re lucky somebody didn’t walk up behind you and put one in your skull.”
“It didn’t look so great,” I said.
“Yeah, don’t go back there. That house is a meth lab run by bikers.”
“Thanks,” I told him.
He crushed out his cigarette and stood up. “Back to work,” he said.
“It’s a hot day to be running,” I said.
“I’m trying to get clean,” he said. “I need to sweat.” He took off, jogging at first, and eventually broke into a full run.
Thursday night, I went over to Gil’s to play poker. When I arrived, Gil let me in and put a beer in my hand. His cousin Bobby was there and Ellis was sitting on the couch.
“I heard you met Bobby,” said Gil.
“Yeah,” I said, nodded, and waved to Ellis. Bobby came up beside me and pointed to an elderly Asian gentleman, sitting in the corner. “That’s Ming the Merciless,” he said. The old man laughed and made his big cigar into a smoking middle finger. He wore suspenders and a rumpled white shirt.
We got down to playing cards at the dining room table. Gil dealt first. I was good at drinking beer but lousy at cards. Before the deck made the rounds twice, I was out a pocketful of nickels.
During a beer break, Gil had gone to the bathroom and Bobby was in the kitchen. Ellis sat on one side of me and the old man on the other. Ming asked me for a light, and I asked him what his name was. “It’s not really Ming, is it?” He smiled and shook his head, but at the same time told me, “What difference does it make?”
I broke a dollar bill and lost it all, a nickel at a time. Ellis told everybody about a dream he’d had a lot recently.
“Every night almost, a winged creature,” he said.
“A winged creature?” said Bobby and laughed.
“I heard there’s a vitamin you can take for that,” said Gil.
“Fuck you,” Ellis said.
Ming smiled and laid out a full house like he was opening a fan.
Bobby told Gil about an old friend of theirs, Pussy, who was in some motorcycle gang called the Grim Business. He’d recently been shot dead in a tattoo parlor in South Philly. Ming folded for the night, and as we played on, quietly told us a story about his restaurant, the Golden Dragon, which stood across the street from the house Lynn and I rented. He swore that Marilyn Monroe had stopped there one night for dinner.
“Ming, come on,” said Gil, smiling. “Wasn’t she dead before you opened that place?”
“His bullshit is merciless,” said Bobby.
The old man smiled and continued describing Monroe’s yellow dress with the plunging neckline and how her breasts had hypnotized him. “She ordered the moo goo gai pan,” he said. I pictured her on the wide sidewalk in front of the restaurant, oak roots rumpling the concrete and leaves shading the place. She smoked a cigarette, standing beneath that painting of a dog-headed dragon in gold leaf and fire-engine red.
The restaurant was boarded up now, but Ming said he and his wife still lived there. The fancy red lacquered architecture had rotted and every now and then a chunk of the facade would just fall off onto the sidewalk. Since the beginning of the warm weather, wasps had invaded the rotting beams, and I could hear them buzzing all the way across the street through the screen of my bedroom window.
I lost about eight bucks that first night of cards, drank too much, and smoked too much weed. After Bobby and Ming left and Ellis went off to bed, I said to Gil, “You mean to tell me that guy Ming and his wife live over there in that fuckin’ restaurant?”
Gil nodded. “He doesn’t even have electricity. I’m not sure if they have water.”
“That’s messed up,” I said. “He’s no spring chicken. How do they get by?”
“I don’t know,” said Gil. He took a drink of beer and then told me, “Things went in the toilet when Mrs. Ming got some weird virus. Ming doesn’t know what to do. In the beginning when she wasn’t completely out of it, she’d whisper orders and recipes from a cot in a back room. Me and Bobby’d go over there for dinner occasionally. After a while, though, she just shrieked in pain and that’s when the workers split on him. The customers never came back.”
That night I awoke around three a.m. and went downstairs for a glass of water. When I returned to the bedroom, I looked out the window and saw a shadow across the street, pacing slowly back and forth in front of the boarded-up entrance to the Golden Dragon. Every now and then, the glowing cherry of a cigar ash flared.
I made the mistake of telling Lynn that Bobby and Gil used to be heroin addicts. She said she didn’t want either of them around the house and wished I wouldn’t go over there on Thursday nights. I told her both of them were clean and weren’t using. She didn’t look convinced. “You have responsibilities,” she said, referring to the fact that it had fallen to me to watch baby Jack because she had to go to work. “Hey, I’m on it,” I said. I spent my days pushing a stroller, doling out the oatmeal and mashed peas, and playing a game Jack and I made up called Paradise Garden. I’d shown Jack the sign above the restaurant on one of our walks, and we pretended that there was a golden dragon that owned the garden.
One night, after Lynn got home from work, put a chicken in for dinner, and was playing with Jack on the living room rug, a call came through from the hospital. There’d been a big accident on Admiral Wilson Boulevard and they needed extra nurses. I told her I’d take her, worried about her driving through Camden alone in the dark. She had a glass of wine and then went to put her uniform back on. A half hour later, we got in the car, baby Jack in his car seat in the back. There was a traffic jam where Harris Avenue met Route 130, detour traffic from the big accident. We sat in that for a long time before things started moving.
Jack and I finally arrived back home after dropping Lynn off. As I opened the front door, I could see all the way into the kitchen through living room and dining room, where Bobby and Gil were sitting at the table. When they saw me, they waved. I walked back there, wondering how they’d gotten in with the doors locked. I was a little scared. On the way, I put Jack down near his toy box in the dining room. When I hit the kitchen, Bobby said, “Dinner time.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“There was a chicken in the oven,” said Gil and they both stood up.
I then noticed a faint smell of smoke and saw the open oven door and window.
“We were sitting over at Gil’s and saw the smoke coming out from under the door,” said Bobby. “We ran over, but your door was locked. So we broke in through the window. Check it out,” he said, and waved over his shoulder for me to follow him out the back door. On the little metal table where Lynn kept her gardening tools sat a roasting pan with a perfectly blackened chicken in it.
Bobby stuck his finger into the bird an
d it shattered. “I think it’s done,” he said.
After Lynn heard about the chicken incident, Thursday night poker was no longer an issue. It was a good respite for me from the parenting life, interacting with adults for a few hours each week. It didn’t hurt anything. I usually won a little money, had a few beers, smoked a joint, and stumbled home before 1:30. Gil came to the back fence one afternoon when Jack and I were outside, and asked me if I’d hold the extension ladder for him so he could pull some bird’s nests down from the eaves of his house. The sound of their chirping was freaking Ellis out. I put the baby in his playpen near the garden, straddled the low picket fence, and grabbed the rungs of the ladder. He hobbled up thirty feet with his bum leg and started dislodging handfuls of hay and twigs, shredded cigarette filters, and bits of string. The detritus rained down, dreamlike. But right in the middle of the slow falling—plop, plop, plop—three sightless baby birds hit the ground like ripe fruit.
I took Jack inside, but watched from the open kitchen window as Gil dug a hole. I couldn’t see because of the fence, but I knew when he scooted them, writhing and chirping, into their grave.
“This is really fucked,” I heard him say to himself. He shook his head, and then he put the dirt in. We heard them from underground for the rest of the afternoon and so did their mother, who landed in the lilac and frantically called. “I oughta kill her too,” he said to me later as we had a cup of coffee in my kitchen, “but then where would it end?”
The next night, the old man Ming came late to the poker game. He remained standing quietly by the door in his overcoat and hat. One by one, each of us at the table stopped talking and drinking and looked over at him. There was a long silence, and then he said, “Would one of you accompany me back to the Golden Dragon? I believe my wife has died.”
“Why don’t you call the cops?” said Gil, pointing to the phone.
“I don’t want the cops,” said Ming.
“I’ll go,” said Bobby. “Let me just get the flashlight.”
“My wife’s a nurse,” I said.
“Okay,” said Ming. “Meet us.”
Trying to explain the whole thing at once to Lynn wasn’t easy, but luckily baby Jack was asleep in his crib, and she didn’t mind running across the street to check things out. She knew Ming from occasionally talking to him on the sidewalk, and he’d always been nice to her.
Bobby signaled to us with the flashlight from the alley between the Golden Dragon and a defunct dance studio. He was holding the black metal side door open. We stepped in.
He said, “Check this out,” and put the light up to a giant glass globe that was the top of a penny gum ball machine. I noticed that it was a beautiful antique, and then I saw what he meant. Within the bubble, a thousand roaches scurried away from the light, around and between faded gumballs.
“That’s gross,” said Lynn.
Bobby laughed. “This way,” he said.
It was pitch-black inside, and we had only the single beam of light to guide us. From the little I saw of the painted Buddhas, silent fountains, and empty fish tanks, it was clear that the Golden Dragon had once been an opulent place.
We went through a hallway, and then Bobby said, “Okay, watch your step, we’re going down.” He showed us to a set of metal stairs that descended into the basement. At least down there I could see a little light shining. In the corner of a large dark expanse, Mrs. Ming lay on a kind of army cot with small tea candles set on stands at each of the four corners. She was emaciated, her skin stretched taut across her ribs and skull. Her complexion was silver and her naked body was contorted so that she looked as if she’d been frozen in the act of falling. Her hair had shed off all over the pillow. Ming stood next to his wife and swept his hand in front of him, indicating that Lynn should approach.
To Lynn’s credit, she didn’t flinch but stepped right up and leaned over the body.
I gagged.
“Has she expired?” asked Ming, holding his hat in his hand and turning it by the brim.
“Definitely deceased,” said Lynn, still bent over the body. Abruptly, she stood up, turned to Ming, and put her hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said. He nodded. “You’re going to have to call an ambulance or at least the police,” she said.
I was surprised when Ming returned to the poker game the following Thursday night. We avoided the subject of Ming’s dead wife, and I talked about my mother-in-law for comic effect. Somewhere around eleven p.m. the cards lost their luster. We switched over to just drinking. Ellis rolled a fat joint and we burned it. When things got so quiet we could hear the parrot on the front porch next door imitating the sound of a ringing phone, Ming shook his head and told us that his wife had come back from the dead to haunt him.
“What are you talkin’ about?” said Gil.
“Shit, my ex hasn’t even died and she haunts me,” said Bobby.
Ming’s hands were trembling and there was sweat on his razor mustache. “She gets in bed beside me. The covers move and then she’s there. Her touch is so cold. All night long she whispers through my dreams a story about her and me setting sail on an ocean liner made of ice. The captain gives us a tour all the way down to the very bottom of the ship. Then a man enters the chamber, screaming, frantic to tell us that the ship is sinking and water is coming down the passageway. In the morning…”
“B complex to counteract depression,” said Ellis.
Ming made no reply but, out of the corner of his eye, nervously studied the stream of smoke curling up from the tip of Gil’s cigar.
“She’s cursed me,” said the old man.
“Why would she do that?” asked Bobby.
“There was another woman, some years back,” he said. “I saw her until my wife found out, and then I broke off the affair. Out of spite, my lover put a spell on my wife. And now that she’s passed on, my wife haunts me.” Ming looked exhausted, on the verge of some disease, himself.
“Vitamin B,” said Ellis. “And some fish oil.”
Ming sighed.
“Are we on the verge of some ancient Chinese secret?” asked Bobby.
Ming cracked a smile. “I’m not Chinese,” he said.
“How can you have a Chinese restaurant?” asked Ellis.
“Around here?” said Ming. “Think about it.”
“Is this more psychological or like physical stuff?” I asked.
“Last night,” said Ming, “while I was sleeping, she materialized and stuck her finger up my ass. Like a crooked icicle. The cold scorched me to my heart.”
“What kinda deal is that?” said Gil.
“That’s pretty psychological,” said Bobby.
“As usual, I dreamed we were on a cruise,” said Ming and tears formed in his eyes.
“Easy, easy,” said Gil.
“You know it all comes out of your head,” said Gil. “You’re getting over on yourself.”
“Don’t tell me about ghosts,” whispered Ming.
“Here’s a proposition,” said Bobby. “I’ll play you in a game of cards for your ghost. A hand of poker, five cards, suicide jacks wild.”
Ming grinned and dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand.
“Say he wins and you get the ghost?” asked Ellis.
“He wants the ice finger,” said Gil.
“We should play,” said Bobby. “As an experiment, that’s all.”
“Oh, it’s real,” said Ming, and his grin disappeared. He held his empty glass out to me. I filled it with beer from the quart I was working on.
“Humor me,” said Bobby.
Ming finished the beer in two long swallows. He finally nodded. “If you lose, you get my ghost,” he said. “If I lose, what do you get?”
“If you lose, you get to whip us up a batch of Chinese food next Thursday night. Moo goo thy pants, a platter of it,” said Bobby.
“In other words, there’s no way you can win,” said Ming.
Gil dealt. It took only minutes and Bobby’s three queens lost to Ming
’s royal flush. The second he saw that he’d lost, Bobby suddenly raised his eyebrows and said, “I feel a draft in my asshole.” Ming laughed harder than anyone.
Ming never came back for poker. I saw him on the street one day and called over to him. He waved and said hello. Then he was gone, somehow leaving a message for us with the parrots. “Going home,” the birds repeated in the old man’s weary voice.
“Where’s home?” asked Gil when we discussed the whole saga on the following poker night.
I guessed Korea, Gil guessed Japan, and Ellis was sure it was Mongolia. Bobby said, “Where the heart is.”
When the ghost grabbed Bobby it had nothing to do with his job, which was snorkeling in the Delaware River, cutting brass off sunken ships with an acetylene torch. How fitting would it have been, keeping in mind the dream that Ming’s wife had spun for her husband, if Bobby’d drowned? He didn’t, though. What he did was fall off the wagon.
When I asked Gil where his cousin was, he told me, “He’s living in a trailer down by the river. I went to see him the other night.”
“How’s he doing?” I asked.
“He’s speedballing,” said Gil, shaking his head. “He’s the walkin’ prince of Death.”
Bobby attacked an old woman—busted her in the face and stole her purse. He got caught, was sentenced to ten years as a repeat offender, and got sent to prison. The night that Gil told us about it, we didn’t play cards but just sat in the living room and drank. On the next Thursday, when I went to Gil’s the lights were out and no one answered the door. After that, on Thursday nights, I’d sit out back by the dying garden, smoke, and drink a few beers by myself. Summer slipped into autumn, but until it got too cold for them to be outside, I’d hear those parrots, in the distance, still channeling Ming.
During the first snowstorm of that year, the Golden Dragon caught fire, and from the front window, Lynn and baby Jack and I watched the old restaurant turn to ash. I noticed a figure standing outside on the sidewalk also watching the blaze. The strobe from one of the fire engines passed over him, and I recognized Gil, momentarily bathed in red. I hadn’t seen him in weeks. I went out to the porch and called to him. Gil waved, came over, and climbed the steps, and I let him in.