“Is that why Ganek got his family out? Was she haunting them too?”
Boyle’s words grew louder as his footfalls moved closer; he was pacing now, on his way back. No. Deidre knew Dave. She was friends with his wife, liked his kids. In this state, we tend to be passive, content to subsist in shadow—as long as things are calm and to our liking. But Dave’s family is gone now, and there are strangers in our home. And your perception’s gotten stronger since we started chatting, Clay. That means Deidre’s more aware of you, like you’re more aware of us. Then she sees you strumming my guitar—like Rooster used to when he came here uninvited. Boyle sighed, before deciding, And if she’s mistaken you for Rooster, she’s not going to like you any time soon.
“Then could you do me a favor and talk to her?”
Boyle pivoted and paced away. When I said I haven’t been in the house, I didn’t mean voluntarily. I mean I can’t. I reside here. It’s where I died. It’s my anchor to this existence.
Clay groaned, feeling lightheaded with blood lose. Before long he was going to have to Uber to an ER. “Then I hope you like my company because sooner or later there will be three ghosts haunting this place.”
Hard for me to imagine, Boyle said, more to himself. Deidre never had a violent bone in her body.
“Well, I can fucking imagine it.” Clay lifted the two stiff fingers that had gotten in the way of the oncoming door, wagged them at the empty room. “Help me out. Don’t you have any insight?”
I haven’t been to any white-glowing castle with harps playing, if that’s what you’re getting at. You’d be surprised how many questions I still have. If anything, it feels like I know less. Boyle paused, pacing back. In the short time they’d been communicating, Clay had come to understand that ruminating pauses happened when Boyle’s brain—or however it worked when you were a non-corporeal spirit—sparked brightest. Something brilliant typically followed. At least when they wrote songs together.
You’re gonna have to put her down, he said at last.
Clay stood up a little straighter. “I have to… kill a ghost?”
Not kill. I believe she and I are beyond that mortal consequence. But you could force her into a… sort of… peaceful hibernation.
“Okay. And how does one do that?” The lack of blood was making Clay giddy-scared in a way he didn’t like. “Chase her around with a crucifix and a Dustbuster?”
I was thinking a bottle, Boyle replied, his voice as deadly serious as a doctor diagnosing cancer. You ever play Farewell Ghost, Clay?
Slowly Clay walked to the stairs, sat down, and reclined his head until it touched one of the higher steps. “I’m glad you think I’m cool enough to know what that is. But I’m just a friendless geek who lives with his daddy.”
Boyle chuckled. I figured a guy who dabbled in Ouija boards might’ve played other paranormal games too.
“No. Believe it or not, I didn’t even think ghosts existed a week ago.”
In life, I’d’ve had my doubts too—if I didn’t meet a ghost early on. After I ditched Chicago to ride the rails, I traveled awhile with this blues guitarist who called himself—
“Hollis Sapphire. I know. It’s in your biography.”
Biography?
“The first was published about a month after your death. There’s at least six more now.”
Boyle mumbled something that Clay didn’t catch, something about shameless capitalist greed, so Clay declined to mention the greatest-hits album and the live performance box set that had been released within a year of his demise. He set up a ride-share on his phone and while they waited, Boyle told him, I doubt the rest of this is in those chapters, but feel free to stop me anytime….
Hollis and I were cruising the Union Line out of Knoxville. I don’t remember the month, but it was summertime. Humid as hell, no relief. After we’d hopped aboard, we realized we weren’t alone in the boxcar. There was this other tramp in the shadows, bearded guy who went by Smiles. Well, we were a little messed up on Holl’s firewater, so it maybe took awhile to realize the guy wasn’t actually there. Bodily speaking. Unlike me, Smiles was a fully formed spirit—meaning he could be seen and heard. And you think I like to talk? All across the Volunteer State, Smiles rattled our ears about his trumpet playin’. Best in the land, no equal on earth, so on and so forth. In life, he’d crisscrossed the U.S., busking in subway stations and town squares and fairgrounds. Said his horn was plenty good enough to keep food in his belly—even woo a lonely lady or two. One night Smiles followed a groupie back home, not knowing she had a violent ex. At least till the guy was cuttin’ his throat in his sleep. The ex made the groupie swear not to tell or she’d be next, and he drove Smiles away in the trunk of his shitty DeVille. Laid him out, like a suicide, on the tracks outside Memphis.
“Shit. Did you report this?”
Who’d have believed us? Coming from where I did, it wasn’t the first murderer I saw get away. Ghosts like to confess things, I’ve learned—but who ever heard of one testifying in court?
Anyway, Hollis was sloppy-drunk and he started hee-hawing, like Smiles was puttin’ us on. So the ghost moved into the sun and lifted his beard, and that’s when we saw Smiles’s other smile. The guy was torn open one ear to the other.
I can still hear him telling me—here, Boyle’s voice took on a deep southern drawl—“Worse part was bleedin’ out while dat bastard tol’ me he was gone pawn my horn and whore wid duh profits.” It was a lousy way to go out and Hollis and I were sympathetic… the first five or nine times he told the story. For all his life adventures, though, Smiles was a one-hit wonder in the story department.
Despite himself, Clay laughed at the idea of growing bored with a ghost. “I’ll take a repetitive storyteller to a head-whooping poltergeist any day.”
We finally switched trains. But our friend had taken a liking to us, so he followed. I guess his anchor to this world were the tracks themselves ’cause each time we’d sneak off, there was Smiles again, waiting in the next car. Apparently we’d been too considerate, listening to him—most others just leapt off the second they realized he was a ghost. So he haunted us, to the end of the line and back again.
Boyle started pacing anew. That’s when Hollis explained about Farewell Ghost. This part isn’t in any biography. I’ve never told anyone—and a drunk driver got Hollis years before the rope got me.
Smiles told me when his grandmother was a girl in the bayou, there was this swamp spirit that wouldn’t quit harassing her. Lifting her dress up and so on, and it was her grandmother that taught her how to be done with him. It went by a different name than Farewell Ghost back then—some complicated Creole thing I’m not gonna attempt. But the concept is the same: It requires a vessel to trap the spirit, preferably something they’d loved in life. I don’t remember what the grandmother used for Swampy, but Hollis suggested we hunt down Smiles’ trumpet.
It was a long shot in a pile of long shots, but we were desperate, and magic things happen on the road, Clay—you’ll find out one day. Our third pawn shop in Memphis, the trumpet was hangin’ behind the counter. It wasn’t hard to miss ’cause Smiles told us he’d painted the horn to look like an open mouth, with a pair of lips and teeth and a real clit-tickler of a mustache at the top. And there it was, this side of our price range, if Holl and I combined worldly funds.
We brought that horn back to the train yard, and when we were underway we gave it to Smiles. The ghost was so grateful we felt bad for wantin’ to ditch him. He said, “Can’t play wid my mouth no mo’, on ’count of dis steady sore throat, but lemme try sumptin’ new.”
And his whole body just… went up. Like a magician’s smoke effect. The trumpet jerked in my hands and the brass valves started jumpin’ on their own. Smiles saluted us with Freddie Hubbard all the way out of Memphis that day. He really was pretty fantastic, a shame we couldn’t have jammed in life. But soon as the train slowed again, we plugged the horn and mouthpiece with newspaper, sponges doused in glue. Hollis dug a shallo
w grave in the weeds near the tracks and I placed the trumpet inside and swept dirt over top.
For a while we could still hear that horn going, through the balled-up paper, earth, and all. I hope he’s still there, sleepin’ the Big Sleep in a vessel that meant the world to him. But Heaven help the patience of anyone who digs him up.
Clay waited for more, but Boyle’s monologue had run its course.
“So you want me to use Farewell Ghost to lay Deidre to rest?”
The longer she stays in the house, the more she suffers. And the more you suffer.
Clay sighed through his teeth. Sweat leaked down both armpits at the very idea. “What would I put her in?”
Boyle paced to the loose plank that had concealed the guitar a few nights before and it lifted on its own. Take a look. A better one than you did last time.
The shirt still pressed to his head, Clay hunkered down on all fours and crawled over to stare into the cobwebbed crawl space. In the dim, invading light, he could just make out something else in residence. A brown leather sleeve. Clay recognized the jacket from photos snapped late in Boyle’s life.
Inside the pocket.
Even before he could pull the jacket through the narrow gap, Clay felt the hard glass pressing through the leather. He reached into the interior pocket and his injured fingers touched the neck of a long bottle. It was old, the glass opaque and smooth, the mouth stopped with a cork.
Deidre and I found that on the beach in Cabo. A message in a bottle spit from the sea. Except there was no message inside. We brought it home and I used to leave poems and quotes for her in there. I was afraid Dave’s wife would chuck it with the rest of my shit, so I worked on my ghostly ability to hold a nail, then a hammer, and so on, till I had skill enough to hide my stuff under the floor and nail it down.
“And I should do what? Leave the bottle on my nightstand and hope she crawls in?”
Wherever you put it, Deidre is bound to notice. The real trick will be to cork it the second she’s inside. Let her fall into a deep slumber. Let her pain be over.
“And if she escapes before I seal it and launches me out a window?”
I’m rootin’ for that not to happen.
“You’re not as good a comedian as a guitar player.”
If things go south, just get out like you did today. We’ll think of something else.
Clay lifted the bottle so he could stare down its neck. His phone binged, his ride to the ER here. “I’ve got to go.”
He bit his tongue a moment before asking the question, the one really playing on his mind: “What happened that night, Rocco? Why are you and Deidre still here?”
But, in fact, Boyle wasn’t there. A moment prior, Clay had felt him like a physical presence, a mass of energy filling the space immediately to his right, and now that feeling dissipated faster than water down a drain. Boyle had departed before he’d heard. Or he’d dodged the question entirely.
8
QUEEN BITCH
Clay’s snore caught in his throat and his eyes snapped open to find the bottle six inches from his nose, unmolested on the nightstand. Despite his agitated nerves, shivering like summer birds on a winter wire, despite overdosing on Mocha Frappuccinos, Clay had fallen asleep on his nocturnal vigil. Doesn’t look like I missed much.
Except something was happening now. Something had awoken him—
Footsteps. Moving swiftly down the hall toward his bedroom. Angry footsteps.
His door banged as the visitor met the lock—which he’d engaged, uncertain if it would stop Deidre or not—and Clay gasped audibly.
Peter spoke up: “Open. Right now.” And the edge in his voice had Clay casting off pillows (his would-be shield against objects thrown at his head) and jumping out of bed. His father’s eyes were waiting on the far side of the door. “Is there an issue you’d like to discuss?”
“What time is it, Dad?”
“What the hell is the matter with you?”
“Is it as early as it feels?”
“You couldn’t have called me up and cursed at me like an adult?”
“What are you talking about?”
At such a profession of innocence, his father bore his crowned teeth. “Are we five years old again? Writing on the goddamn walls?”
Clay only stared back.
“You don’t remember breaking that either?” Peter nodded at the spiderwebbed fractures across Clay’s window. “And Christ, how’d you get the caterpillar over your eye?”
As if to remind himself, Clay touched the stitches on his forehead. That was another question he couldn’t quite answer. I spent four hours at Providence St. Joseph because a ghost slammed a door on my face?
His father took the silence as incrimination. He studied the room like a prison guard, taking in the discarded piles of clothing, the Rickenbacker on its stand, sniffing at the musky tang of deodorant and old pizza. Finally, Peter’s gaze fell on the empty bottle, and in that moment his face betrayed something else. Not outrage at all, Clay realized, but something deeper, and harder to disregard. Concern.
An empty liquor bottle. A head wound. Destructive tendencies. Peter was honestly concerned for a son he didn’t know or understand. Because Peter Harper loved his son. And maybe now he was a little afraid for him too.
Clay’s stomach filled with acid at the thought, and he got moving, hurrying past Peter and down the hall to the master suite, where Essie was lingering, looking startled and amazed at the terrible debris around her.
A hurricane might have been kinder. Peter’s mattress had been separated from the box spring and stuffed into the adjoining bathroom. His antique highboy had been flung across the room like a weightless thing, and the teak bookcase was unburdened of every last one of its law texts. Copious pages had been torn loose, shredded, balled up, and strewn across the room, along with half of Peter’s pinstriped wardrobe and bits and fragments of a shattered antique lamp (a hundred-year-old Harper heirloom). But the coup de grâce, what really gave Clay a fright, was that the vandal had found a vial of lipstick (Essie’s presumably) and drawn a stark portrait of a woman with her fingernails bent into murderous claws, eyes slitted with ill intention, hair flying around, mouth agape in a mute shriek of rage.
“For the record,” Peter grunted behind him, “I don’t think it looks a thing like Essie.”
No. Although it’s a spot-on Deidre McGee, Clay thought. She had, after all, gone to CalArts on Boyle’s dime, exhibited at MOCA and other LA galleries. Did I sleep through all this? Or did she redecorate while I was at the hospital?
“We came here because Essie thought you’d be lonely if we didn’t have breakfast with you. If I even suspected you’d embarrass me like this…” Peter bit it off, too disgusted to finish.
“Petey, don’t get so bent out of shape,” Essie said softly. That she thought he’d trashed the room because of her only made Clay feel more awful. “It was probably an accident.”
“An accident!” Peter’s voice cracked with pubescent rage. “A broken glass is an accident. This, this is insanity.”
“Well, I’m a pretty good judge of character,” Essie insisted. “If it wasn’t an accident, it’s certainly a misunderstanding. When we calm down a little, maybe we’ll grasp the whole story. Am I right, Clay?”
Clay nodded dutifully.
“Nevertheless,” Peter said, “I made an appointment with your therapist. This morning.”
“Okay,” Clay managed, if only to end his silence.
“And we’re going to talk to him about that”—Peter gestured at the shrieking figure, then spun and fingered the wall behind Clay. “And that!”
Clay didn’t want to look. Slowly he turned to discover additional lipstick. Large slanted letters. And while they might have had context if Clay had been the vandal, he didn’t understand the message coming from Deidre. suck the mans dick!, it read, and Clay bent his head, embarrassed and incensed.
And behind him, Essie made a small sound. Almost like a laugh.
Reclined in his La-Z-Boy, Clay shut his eyes and let the rant go on.
“I knew he was upset, and sure, it wasn’t the best decision to have Essie over without telling him first. But to come home to such a tantrum—your mother raised you better, Clay.”
“Yes, my mother. Who’s cooling in her grave while you’re screwing the flower lady.”
It was a cheap shot, but Clay couldn’t help himself.
“I never planned for it to happen,” Peter sighed. “Essie just makes me feel alive, and I want to feel alive again. I loved your mother, always will—but life has to go on eventually.”
“Payton, just the other day my dad warned me not to get involved with a girl too soon,” Clay said. “Why does he get to live by a different standard?”
“I was talking about that girl. That group of people. And by the look on your face, you didn’t take my advice. Is that who put you up to destroying my room? Her and her gangster brother?”
Payton’s eyes had drifted to the buoyant peace of his aquarium. “Let’s focus on the two of you for now.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m trying to give my son a chance out here,” Peter said. “He had this girlfriend back in Philadelphia. Renee. He fell head over heels. She snapped her fingers and Clay literally jumped. Then his grades slipped and he quit varsity track and debate and she convinced him to start experimenting with drugs.”
Clay sat up in his recliner. “You knew?”
Again that expression stole over Peter’s face: Concern barely concealed beneath the anger. As if he saw the whole sorry tragedy of his son’s life laid out before him and could do nothing about it. “I told you, Clay, I know what a— what someone using drugs looks like. It’s just that when it’s your own child you don’t want to believe, no matter how clear it is. Your mother wanted us to sit you down together, but I knew you’d listen to her if it was a secret between you two. When I get involved, you shut down. And it worked, didn’t it? Mom told everyone you were in Europe and shipped you to rehab. You got rid of the drugs, and Renee—and short of a lack of academic ambition, things have been pretty okay with you… until now.”
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