The Saturday Night Ghost Club: A Novel

by Craig Davidson

  I’d never hit anyone before, let alone a budding sociopath like Percy. It felt good, really good. Billy and I hightailed it out of there. Billy’s house was closer but I was worried about the blowback, so we agreed to split up.

  “You sure you’re okay, Jake?” he asked.

  “I’m okay.”

  Billy gave me the BB. He was still a bit stunned. “I can’t believe you…holy shit.”

  Once I got back to my house I phoned my father at work.

  “Calm down, sport, tell me what happened.”

  When I told him that I’d been in a fight, he chuckled disbelievingly. Then I told him about the pellet gun.

  “That boy shot you?” My father’s voice held a quivering edge.

  “Only with a BB, but—”

  “Sit tight. I’ll be right home.”

  Ten minutes later, my father’s car slewed into the driveway. He got out and rolled up his shirt sleeves. He tilted my chin in his hands to inspect the mark on my neck: a purpling bruise with a nugget of crusted blood in the centre. I handed my father the BB. Dad held it in his palm, the metal ball still red with my blood.

  “Where does this boy live?” he asked in a stilted monotone. “I ought to have a—a little chat with his father.”

  As it turned out, my father wouldn’t have to make the trip. The creech of tires came to us over the maples and soon a land-whale of a car was tear-assing down our road. The driver hammered on the brakes, leaving strips of smoking rubber on the street.

  “Hey!” a man said, getting out. “Hey, you, goddamn it!”

  Percy Elkins’s father looked nothing like his son: he was hulking where Percy was scrawny, flushed where Percy was milk-pale. He wore a button-up shirt like my father’s, except the sleeves were short. On his feet were workboots instead of penny loafers. I remember Percy boasting that his dad was a construction foreman, which I figured meant he sat in a trailer on construction sites eyeballing blueprints and long rows of numbers.

  “You the one?” he said, pointing a hairy-knuckled finger at me. “You the little bastard who busted my window and my boy’s nose?”

  He advanced like a runaway locomotive. What I was aware of even more, however, was my father’s reaction—which was no visible reaction at all. His arms hung loosely at his sides and his expression remained the same except for a vague contraction at the corners of his eyes. He looked bored, actually, like a man waiting for a bus to arrive.

  Mercifully, it was over fast. Mr. Elkins swung at my father with a fist roughly the size of a summer squash. My dad didn’t bother to dodge. He let a 250-pound man hit him in the face. He rocked back, his knees unhinging, and touched the driveway with his ass—then just as fast as he’d fallen he was back up, resurrected, pinioning off the tarmac with one arm, already working the violent impulse into his body, his knees flexing, spine whipsawing to generate momentum.

  My father brought his fist down in a chopping motion like a man slamming a trap door. His knuckles hit flush on Mr. Elkins’s chin. The big man fell forward and just kept falling, as if his soul had suddenly been sucked out of him. He hit the driveway face first.

  Dad said, “Get some ice, Jake. He’s going to wake up with a headache.”

  By the time the cops showed up, Mr. Elkins was slumped behind the wheel of his car with a broken nose. He made a matching pair with Percy, who sat in the passenger seat. Percy’s father had accepted the bag of ice from my father with whipped-dog gratitude. I had the bruise on my neck and Dad’s eye was puffed up—but overall, you had to chalk it up as a win for the Baker clan.

  Sitting on that bench in the police station later that afternoon, Dad threw an arm around my shoulders. “I’m glad you hit back,” he said, one eye puffed so completely shut that it looked like he was tipping me a gruesome wink. “Tell you this—you’ll suffer less in life if you swing back. Only if you’re pushed to it, of course. And I’d say someone pegging you with a BB is a mighty big push. Give as much as you get. Doesn’t matter if you fall. All that matters is, you get up again.”

  The legal matter was resolved quickly. No charges were laid, and Mr. Elkins was on the hook for his own window. My mother showed up as we were signing the witness papers, all set to give us hell—until Mrs. Elkins came through the door. A woman of imposing carriage, she carried a purse as big as a grocery sack. Seeing her beside Mr. Elkins, I wondered how Percy could have ended up as such a sparrow-chested, noodle-armed bonerack.

  “Our son’s nose is broken,” Mrs. Elkins said to her husband, as if this might come as news to him. “The doctor says he’ll have a bump the rest of his life.”

  She wheeled on my family, purse swinging on her arm. Something rattled inside it and I imagined Tic Tacs: boxes and boxes of Tic Tacs, the nasty orange ones.

  “Our son’s nose is now ruined,” she said to my mother, “at your son’s hands. And then your husband attacks my husband like some kind of crazed animal.”

  Mr. Elkins, his own nose in a splint, laid a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “Dora—”

  Mrs. Elkins shrugged her husband’s hand away and rose menacingly over my mother.

  “Well? What about my son’s nose?”

  Mom, who’d come into the situation cold, glanced at me with my bruised neck and my father with his purpled eye. She calmly addressed Mrs. Elkins.

  “Honestly, my dear, I find myself struggling to care.”

  Even the cops had a laugh at that.

  ii.

  That night, pebbles struck my bedroom window. A pinworm of dread threaded into my heart. Maybe it was Percy down in the yard, and the pebbles would be followed by bricks.

  I sat up in bed and cracked the window open. Dove stood in the shadow of our backyard hemlock.

  “Hey.”

  “Hay is for horses,” she whispered. “The moon’s up and so am I. Come with me, child. Fulfill your destiny and become a creature of zee night.”

  “Come with you and do what?”

  She shrugged, leaving it up to me. Moonlight fell through the hemlock and shone off the mirror of her hair…and I found myself very much awake.

  I pulled on my clothes, crept down to the garage and pushed my bike out. Dove put her hand on the side of my face, rolling my chin to inspect the bruise Percy’s BB had left.

  “Yow,” she said. “Billy said it was bad. Look on the bright side—not many guys can get shot in the neck and then knock out the guy who shot them.”

  “I didn’t knock him out.”

  “Give you a tip, Jake.” Her fingers hadn’t left my neck. My pulse quickened under her touch. “Anyone else asks, tell them you knocked the little bastard out. Because if nobody can prove it didn’t happen, hell, it may as well be true. Never wake the dreamers from their dream.”

  We rode through the suburbs, the ticking of our gears the only sound. I’d rarely been out this late, and never without my parents. Everything lay in a wrap of shadows. I felt an ownership of the night, and perhaps a whole world that didn’t exist in daytime.

  We cut down a path tapering through the woods. The forest was alive with movement—I glimpsed the furred rump of a raccoon bumbling into a thicket—which would have petrified me under normal circumstances, but now, with Dove, and after the day I’d had, that fear was absent. The path spat us onto the public golf course. We biked over the eighth fairway, skirting the sand trap, following an alloyed moon. We had to hop off our bikes and squeeze through a gap in the railing near the Pro Shop, riding up a gravel drive that led to Stanley Avenue.

  The oaks of the Niagara public links rose like broken fingers against the street-lit sky. The expensive hotels rose in columns of cold light to the south, and beyond them the falls were lit by green spotlights, the water rushing endlessly, siphoning away those precious tourist dollars.

  The local marine theme park, Land of Oceans, lay across the road. The parking lot was empty save for a lone camper van with Texas plates. We rode along the fence till we reached the staff entrance and hopped the locked gate, following
a path behind the deer park.

  “Let’s check out the whales,” Dove said.

  We cut through the picnic area and over the train tracks, our reflections travelling the panes of glass of the Happy Manatee restaurant. The water of the killer whale pool lay black behind the two-inch-thick spectators’ glass. The sickle of a whale’s dorsal fin slit the water. Then the whale glided past, the white patch surrounding its eye glowing like a lantern in a cave.

  Dove threw open the gate that led to a footbridge spanning the pool.

  “I’m going, that’s it, I’m doing it.”

  Her voice ascended on the second-to-last word, elongating it—I’m dooooo-ing it—as she skipped lightly across the bridge. Before my mind could catalogue the risks, which included but were not limited to tripping and falling into a pool containing two enormous unpredictable mammals, I was following her.

  Imagine trying to hold the tail of a comet as it blazes across the heavens. It’s burning your hands, eating you up, but there’s no malice in it; a comet can’t possibly know or care about you. You will sacrifice all you are or ever will be for that comet because it suffuses every inch of your skin with a sweet itch you cannot scratch, and through its grace you discover velocities you never dreamt possible. You will love that comet, but part of that love—a percentage impossible to calibrate—is tied to your inability to understand it. How can that comet burn as it does, pursue the trajectory it does? It confuses you, because the comet disguises itself as a human girl. But make no mistake, the girl contains fire to evaporate oceans, light to blind minor gods. If I could freeze her in the heartbeat where she skipped across the footbridge, carve her out of time and fix her in the firmament…in the deepest chambers of my heart, I know that nobody, not another soul on earth, will ever be as purely astonishing as Dove Yellowbird was in that moment.

  My reflection quivered in the water under the bridge and then, miraculously, I was over. Dove danced across the show stage. A whale bobbed up at the pool’s edge, its head sleek as a ballistic torpedo.

  Dove said, “Every year in Slave Lake they string nets across the river during the salmon run. I’d sit on the banks watching them leap. Almost all of them jumped into the net, but every so often one made it over. I felt happy for it, until I stopped to think. All that salmon’s family and friends were back in the net, right?” She gestured at the whales. “These guys are the ones who got caught in the net. Their families are out at sea.”

  The whale’s mouth yawned open to reveal teeth blunted with age and disuse. Dove reached down—

  “Dove!”

  Her fingertips grazed the whale’s chin, its skin scuffed from rubbing against the sides of the pool. The whale flicked its head and dipped below the water.

  “We should set them free.” Dove laughed, presumably at how silly the idea was: freeing a pair of whales trapped in a tank two thousand miles from the nearest ocean. “Is that crazy?”

  “Maybe so.”

  She grabbed my hand. Contrails of comet-heat smoked in her eyes.

  “Crazy or not, you’d help me, wouldn’t you?”

  Of course, Dove. Anything you ever ask.

  We crossed back over the bridge, heading towards our bikes. There were rumours that the owner of Land of Oceans often circuited the park at night in his truck. He had a shotgun and would shoot whatever he found on his premises. Raccoons, possums…kids?

  “I like you, Jake,” Dove said abruptly. “You don’t put on any kind of act. You’re not cool and you don’t think you are.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I don’t mean it like that, dummy. I’m just saying that you’re real, y’know? And believe me, you’ll get tired of me before I get tired of you.”

  “I don’t think so,” I mumbled, making it sound more a question. I don’t think so?

  She laughed. “If you could, like, slap a tag on me and put me on a shelf—you know what that tag would say?”

  “What?”

  “ ‘Somewhat damaged.’ ”

  Even back then, in my confusion over this strange new bend in our conversation, I’d thought, Who of us isn’t damaged?

  “And if you don’t get tired of me, Jake, your folks will put an end to it.”

  “Why would they?” I said.

  “Haven’t you figured it out yet? I’m the girl your mother warned you about.”

  Neither of us heard the growl of the engine until the truck swung round almost directly behind us. Its lights snapped on, pinning us like moths on a sheet.

  “Run, Jake!”

  We sprinted into the rides area. The Viking Ship rose two hundred feet away. Behind it lay scrubland thick with trees. Dove ran hard, flinging her head back, her mouth open to the sky. Despite the panic her eyes were bright and she was smiling.

  I was scared—with that crystalline, childish fear of being caught and punished. That fear thrashed behind my rib cage like a bird in cupped hands, perhaps the last truly childlike instance of that emotion I’d ever feel. That fear is a kind of magic. As you get older, the texture of your fear changes. You’re no longer afraid of the things you had absolute faith in as a child: that you’d die in convulsions from inhaling the gas from a shattered light bulb, that chewing apple pips brought on death by cyanide poisoning, or that a circus dwarf had actually bounced off a trampoline into the mouth of a hungry hippo. You stop believing in the things my uncle believed in. Even if your mind wants to go there, it has lost the nimbleness needed to make the leap. That magic gets kicked out of you, churched out, shamed out—or worse, you steal it from yourself. It gets embarrassed out of you by the kids who run the same stretch of streets and grown-ups who say it’s time to put away childish things. By degrees, you kill your own magic. Before long your fears become adult ones: crushing debts and responsibilities, sick parents and sick kids, the possibility of dying unremembered or unloved. Fears of not being the person you were so certain you’d grow up to be.

  Looking back, I wish I’d relished those final instants of childish fear: that saccharine-sweet taste of terror curdling like sour milk in my mouth.

  We’d nearly reached the Viking Ship. We redlined for the final kick. Dove arched her spine and craned her neck in the posture of a marathoner snapping the tape at the finish line. The safety of the trees loomed. I imagined I heard a shotgun breech being snapped open over the roar of the truck’s engine—

  We raced into the bushes. The truck’s headlights washed the foliage as we backed deeper into the cover of the trees. The door opened. Boots pink-pinked on the cobbles. A shape stepped in front of the headlights as a flashlight swept left to right. Dove yanked me down. The earth had a mulchy-sweet smell. The flashlight flicked off. The owner retreated to his truck and drove off.

  “The winners.” Dove raised her arms like a triumphant boxer, making the noise of an appreciative crowd. “Raaaah, raaaaaaah.”

  We walked to a clearing where the grass stood washed in moonlight. We collapsed on the ground and lay side by side, still breathing hard.

  “How do you want to be posed in your coffin?”

  “What?”

  Dove rolled over to face me. A maple key was stuck to her cheek. I wanted to pluck that key off but couldn’t quite find the courage.

  “Like, yeah, when you die,” she said. “Most people go for this one.” She demonstrated, lying flat on her back with her hands crossed over her chest in a classic Nosferatu pose. “But I want something rock ’n’ roll, like this.” Arms still crossed, she flipped the bird with both hands, mouth set in a Billy Idol sneer. “Like that, right? Screw you, Reaper, I’m still cool as balls.”

  I laughed and said, “You’d have a rocking funeral.”

  “What about you? Show me.”

  I experimented with a few poses before settling on one where my hands were clawed in front of my face, which was set in a rictus of stunned terror.

  “What the hell happened to you?”

  “Got buried alive.”

  “Oooh, primo. Someone’s gett
ing fired, big time.” Dove shrugged. “Somebody told me that morticians wouldn’t be allowed to twist our faces and pose us that way.”

  I could smell her breath: Dentyne cinnamon gum and something else, something electric. I thought she was going to kiss me. I’d never been kissed except by my parents and old aunties. I thought, Maybe this is how it happens. It felt like it ought to happen, if only because I wanted it so badly.

  “I’ve got to get out of this city, Jake. Hook up with some guy with a motorcycle and long hair. I’m flexible on hair length but the motorcycle is a must. No offence, but this place bores me to tears.”

  I blinked. My whole body blinked. Was this girl—who’d recently stuck her hand in a killer whale’s mouth—telling me she was bored? Worse was the fact that she wanted to blow town in the company of a ponytailed biker. She must’ve read my thoughts when she opened her eyes and saw my face. Her own features projected shock, which softened into concern.

  “Oh, Jake.”

  Oh, Jake. Guilty, regretful. Jake, you glad-hearted fool.

  “Oh, no, it’s just…” She smiled pacifyingly. “The things I want from life are different from the things you want.”

  “I want the same things you do,” I protested.

  But something so ineffably hurt and broken crossed her face that I didn’t say anything more. Taking my hand, she said, “This much is true: I could pass into the long dark with you.”

  “The long dark?”

  “That’s what my setsuné called it. Death. She never talked about it that way to Billy, Billy’s too sensitive, but that’s how she saw it. Blackness smooth as oil, stretching into forever. She said you got to think hard about whose hand you’re holding when that darkness takes hold. Someone strong, solid, with a good heart.”

  “So, you want me to hold your hand when you die?”

  Squeezing my hand tighter, she said, “Will you hold me as I die, Jake…wait, what’s your middle name?”

  “Clarence.”

  “Clarence?”

  “My uncle’s middle name.”

  “Calvin Clarence?”