Have Spacecat, Will Travel: And Other Tails

by John G. Hartness

  “Can girls really make money doing that here? Seems like there wouldn’t be enough people to keep y’all in business,” I said.

  “Honey, even with free porn all over the internet, you can never underestimate a man’s desire to have somebody’s titties bouncing off his nose.” Teenie looked at the whiskey bottle, shook her head, and reached into a red and white Igloo cooler on the floor behind the bar, pulling out a dripping wet plastic Coke bottle. She opened the soda and took a long drink.

  “Anyhow,” she continued. “It was a Sunday night during football season, so the place was pretty full. Big Baby had the smoker going out back with a pig on it, and the Redskins were kicking the shit out of the Browns, so everybody was having a good time. Chas was dancing, I figure her third or fourth set of the night when all of a sudden she looks down at a dude by the stage and freezes. Now Chas was pretty nearsighted, so she must not have recognized the guy when he first sat down. She had both arms wrapped around his neck and was giving herself a good wiggle when she got a good look at his face, let out a little scream, and ran off stage into the back room.

  “I grabbed my baseball bat out from under the bar and went after her, fully intending to beat the shit out of the guy if he touched her wrong or said something nasty or made her feel bad in any way. And I knew I had enough of my regulars in the place that they’d hold his arms while I played Whack-A-Mole with his nuts if I needed to. When I got back to the bedroom we use for a dressing room, Chas had a sweatshirt and jeans on already and was throwing clothes in a backpack, tears pouring down her face.

  “I asked her what was wrong, if the guy did something wrong, and she said, ‘Yeah, he left his wife and two kids alone on his daughter’s birthday to come out here to a titty bar.’ Turns out the guy was her first cousin, and she had turned down an invitation to his kid’s birthday party because she was working that night. Then she sees the dad at her job instead of celebrating with his family, and that, coupled with realizing her first cousin just saw her pretty close to stark naked, rattled her something fierce.”

  I thought about all my first cousins and how very little I wanted any of them to see me naked and nodded. “I can see how that would do it.”

  “Yeah, I got it, too,” Tina said. “We all got family issues, but ain’t never been any of them solved with a lap dance. I tried to calm her down, get her to stay back in the dressing room until her cousin left, but she was done. When the backpack got full, she threw the rest of her shit in a Walmart shopping bag and hauled ass out the back door. That was the last time any of us ever saw her. She dove her Mustang convertible off the side of the road on the way home to where she was sharing an apartment with a couple girls up in York. Went off the road in one of them deep gullies up on 49. Right close to where you found Pete’s car, I reckon.”

  “Pretty close,” I said, remembering a police report from two years ago about a fatality in a wreck that mentioned an Adler. It was the first in the string of deadly crashes along that stretch of highway.

  “Then it oughta all make sense to you now,” Tina said. She poured another slug of whiskey into her coffee cup, and I motioned for her to give me one. She did, eyebrows raised a little, and we clinked ceramic mugs and drank.

  “It does,” I said. “I know where we’ve got to go, and I know what we’ve got to do.”

  “I’m gonna guess this is going to be one of those things where I sit in the car a lot,” Willis said.

  “Unless you suddenly started seeing dead people, then yeah. Come on Willis, Pete. Let’s go see if we can get this young lady to let go of her anger and get y’all both some rest.”

  Teenie’s head jerked up. “Wait a minute. Did you say Pete? Is he here?”

  Pete, who’d been standing off to one side of the bar listening this whole time, gave her a little wave.

  “She can’t see you waving, Peter,” I said.

  “Where is he?” Tina asked, her head whipping around.

  I pointed to Pete’s translucent figure. “Right over yonder at the end of the bar.”

  Tina walked down to pretty close to where Pete stood and held up her mug. “You’ll be missed, Petey. You were a good dude, and a good tipper. You treated all my girls with respect, and we’ll miss you. Even if you were a no-count Steelers fan.” She raised her cup and drained the last of the whiskey. “So long, Pete.”

  “So long,” Pete replied, then looked over at me, tears as glowing trickles of light streaming down his face. “I’ll…meet you where I wrecked. Is that okay?” I nodded, and he vanished.

  “He said thank you, and goodbye,” I told Tina with a pat on her arm as I stood up and headed for the door. “Come on, Sheriff. We got us a ghost to whisper.”

  And that’s how, for the second time in twenty-four hours, I found myself standing on the side of Highway 49 on the northern edge of Union County looking for a ghost. “Come on out, Chastity. Let’s talk for a minute.”

  I felt a little stupid talking to thin air, then realized that’s what it looks like to people every time I’m talking to a ghost. It made a lot more sense then why they shunned me for so many years. When I was a kid, before I realized that not everybody’s life was surrounded by ethereal playmates, I wasn’t too good about not blurting out everything I saw around me. While this was cute in a four-year-old with her “imaginary friend,” it became less cute when the seven-year-old was still talking like her “imaginary friend” wasn’t imaginary. Fifty years later, the town caught up to my reality, but it still made for a lot of lonely school lunch periods.

  “Chastity, I need to know what you’re doing and why you’re hurting people. We need to work together to let you move on, so maybe people can drive home from the club without being scared you’re gonna run ‘em off the road somehow.”

  “Then they ought not be going out to a titty bar and leaving their wife and kids at home waiting for ‘em. ‘Specially not on their young’un’s birthday. Not when their wife’s pregnant, neither.” I turned and saw a shimmery young woman in a Gamecocks sweatshirt and blue jeans standing a few feet away from me. She hadn’t been there two minutes before, and besides, most living people are more opaque.

  “Hey Chastity,” I said, keeping my voice calm, like talking to a skittish animal. “I’m Lila Grace. You want to talk about what you’re doing?”

  “I’m punishing the unrighteous, just like my granddaddy said we ought to. He was a preacher. He knew about that kinda stuff.”

  “Well, I always thought it was God that was supposed to do the punishing, sweetheart, not us here on Earth.”

  “Sometimes God don’t take care of his own business, I reckon. Or maybe I’m doing the Lord’s work. You ever think of that? Maybe I’m the instrument of his righteous fury. What about that?”

  “I hate to tell you, honey, but I think God’s probably a Notre Dame fan,” I said, pointing at her sweatshirt. I smiled, trying to let her know my blasphemy was all in good fun, and she seemed to get the joke.

  “Yeah, I reckon leaving a strip club wearing a sweatshirt that says ‘COCKS’ across my boobs ain’t exactly a nun’s outfit, is it?” She gave me a shy little smile, and my heart broke for the dreams this little girl had that would never come true.

  “Can we sit down and talk for a minute, sweetie? These old knees ain’t what they once were.” I walked off the road a little ways to a smooth spot of grass, keeping Willis in sight. He was sitting in the car with his blue lights flashing, doing his best to stay visible and maybe get traffic to slow down a little bit. All we needed was a log truck to run off the road at just the wrong spot and make a couple more ghosts. Then me and Chastity would have more time to talk than we wanted.

  She sat down next to me and I looked over at her. She was a pretty child, bumping up against downright beautiful if I was being honest. Good skin, long, dark hair falling over her shoulders in waves, and a body that I would have killed for at her age. Hell, I’d maim for it now. But the sadness that hung over her was like a fog, permeating everything and
casting a chill around us both.

  “You’re mad about your wreck,” I said without any preamble.

  “If Jody had stayed home like he was supposed to and been at his kid’s birthday party, it never would have happened.” She sat down next to me and pulled her legs up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them and dropping her chin to her knees.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” I replied, earning myself a sharp look.

  “What are you talking about?” she snarled at me, and the air got markedly colder. “If it wasn’t for Jody, I wouldn’t have been driving so fast. I would have paid better attention. I would still be alive.”

  “Honey, I ain’t in the business of might have beens, but let’s be honest. You were eighteen years old driving around in a convertible sports car. You ain’t gonna honestly sit there and tell me you obeyed every traffic law. Hell, I drive an ‘86 GMC pickup and I run like hell on these wide, straight roads.”

  “Yeah, I drove fast. So what? I was crying so hard I couldn’t see straight. I was so ashamed of Jody seeing me like that, so scared he was going to tell my mama and she’d find out I didn’t have a job at Bowater like I told her, scared…”

  “Scared that she’d be ashamed of you,” I finished.

  “Yeah.”

  “Sweetie, I know how that feels. It hurts. It hurts a lot, and for a long time. But it beats the hell out of being dead. And it ain’t no cause for hurting other people.”

  “How would you know what it’s like? When did you ever dance in a strip joint?”

  “If I was ever as pretty as you, I probably would have. But I ain’t, and I wasn’t. I did have to grow up being the girl who talked to dead people. ‘Crazy Gracie,’ they used to call me. And not on account of anything I chose to do, but because I have the talent to do what we’re doing now—bridge the gap between the living and the dead. But because of that I been called heathen, and evil, and devil worshipper, and crazy my whole life. I had to see the look in my mama’s eyes every day as she worried if I was ever going to get married and live right, as she liked to say.”

  “Did you?” the girl asked, and some of the fire was gone from her tone.

  “Get married? No. But I ain’t dead, so there’s still time. Live right? I’ve done the best I could. That’s all any of us can do, sweetie—the best we can.”

  “Why ain’t those men doing the best they can, huh? Why ain’t they taking care of their families instead of—”

  “Instead of paying some girl more money than she could make at about any other job in thirty miles? Instead of helping put somebody through junior college in exchange for a little company on a lonely night? Maybe they ought to have been at home. Maybe they had a fight. Maybe they’d been underfoot all day and their wife told them to get the hell out of the house so she could get something done. Maybe it ain’t none of our business what goes on in anybody else’s home.” Okay, that last bit might have been a little much, because her head jerked back like I’d slapped her.

  In for a penny...I thought, and dove on. “Honey, it ain’t no more on you to decide if what they’re doing is right than it is on them to decide if how you made your living is right. You don’t have to approve of it. You don’t have to like it. Sweetie, my boyfriend over yonder likes to smoke a cigar every now and then, and I think they’re nasty as hell. But it ain’t for me to tell him not to smoke them. I can tell him I don’t like them, and not to try to love up on me after he smokes one of them nasty things until he takes a shower and brushes his teeth, but that’s it.”

  “But, I’ve just been so damn mad,” she said, turning to look at me. This time she didn’t look mad. For the first time since I saw her, the line of her jaw wasn’t locked with tension, and her eyes had widened and glowing tears threatened to spill over. “I was so close. I had enough money saved up for a year’s tuition, and after that I could apply for the Life Scholarship and that would pay for tuition and books the whole rest of the time I was at school, as long as I went to a state school. I was going to go to USC-Spartanburg and transfer to Columbia after two years. I had a plan. For the first damn time in my life, things were about to come together for me. Then Jody came in, and I got all freaked out, and I was driving too fast, and smoking, and I dropped the cherry off my cigarette in my lap and it started burning me, and I was trying to put it out, and I was still crying, and…next thing I knew I was here. I was here, and the only damn thing left of me was a white painted cross and some damn fake flowers!”

  She pointed over to a little hill right at the edge of the woods, and sure enough, there was a faded wooden cross, just a couple of broke off tomato stakes nailed together and stuck in the ground, with a tiny bouquet of silk flowers laying at the bottom of it.

  “So you figured out you could go back to the club…” I prompted.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I was mad. Hell, I stayed mad. But I got especially mad when I saw men I knew had families, and should be at home with them, and sometimes, well…I’d just stand in the road and concentrate real hard, right in front of where their car would be, and they’d see me. They didn’t all run off the road. I don’t even know if that’s what I wanted them to do, but…some of them did. Some of them did, and I didn’t stop. It felt…righteous. Like I was punishing somebody for what they did to me.”

  I didn’t say nothing, just looked her in the face. After a long pause, the fire in her gaze sputtered and went out, and she dropped her eyes. “They didn’t do nothing to me, did they?”

  “No, honey. They didn’t.”

  “Them men didn’t deserve to die, did they?”

  “I don’t know, sweetheart. It ain’t on me to decide who lives and who dies.”

  “Or me, I reckon?” The tears spilled over and ran down her cheeks as we looked at each other.

  “I reckon not, honey.” I wished I could hug her, but I knew that would be futile. We sat there together for a few minutes, her crying quietly and me just watching, feeling bad for her suffering but also for the families of the men she killed, and all kinds of conflicted about that.

  “What happens now?” she asked me after a long sniffle and a wipe of her face with her sleeve. For some reason I always find it funny to think about ghosts having snot.

  “I don’t know, darling. Do you still feel tied to this spot, or do you feel like you can move on?”

  “Where would I go? Do I go to Heaven, or…the other place?”

  “I can’t answer that, Chastity. I ain’t never died, and none of the people I talk to have ever been either place. I only get to see folks before they go wherever it is they’re heading.”

  “Well, I ain’t mad no more. I just…feel bad for hurting those men, and their families. I was so mad about what they were doing to their families that I couldn’t see that I caused them folks more pain than anything. Maybe I deserve to go to Hell?”

  “I think there’s probably forgiveness for people that are truly sorry for the pain they caused. I hope so, anyway. Otherwise there’s going to be a lot of people needing air conditioning in the Afterlife.” I gave her a little smile, which she returned as a wan, fleeting thing.

  “I guess…I guess it’s time for me to go find out,” she said, standing up and looking over to her left. “Are you here to take me on to the other side?”

  I followed her gaze and was stunned to see Pete Smalls standing there, wreathed in white light. He gave Chastity a gentle smile and held out a hand. “I am, sweetheart. I am.”

  “You look familiar,” the girl said. “Do I know you?”

  “We’ve met once,” Pete said, looking at me. “Real briefly. I didn’t know why at the time, but now I understand it. Yes, I’m here to take you home.”

  Pete smiled at me, and I wondered what kind of encounter he had between the time he left us at Pole Cats and now. Something sure changed about him. The sadness, the fear, the confusion were all gone. He just held out his hand to Chastity, love and kindness wrapped around him like a nimbus of light, and when she twined her fingers with his,
they were gone.

  I sat there for a long moment before I got up and walked to the car. Willis looked up at me, a gentle smile on his face. “You get it all taken care of?”

  “Yeah, I think,” I said. “Chastity passed on, and you won’t believe who showed up to escort her along. Pete Smalls.”

  “Who?” Willis said, no recognition at all on his face.

  “Peter Smalls. You remember, the man who died in the wreck last night. The man who left Pole Cats and drove down into the holler not two miles from where we’re sitting?”

  Willis just stared at me for a long moment, then said, “Lila Grace, are you feeling alright? There were no wrecks last night. No fatalities in Union County of any kind. It was just a quiet Sunday night. Now there’s been plenty of fatal accidents along this stretch of 49. It’s one of the most dangerous sections of road in the state, but nothing in the past month.”

  My head spun. What the hell was going on? “Then what are we doing out here on the side of the road at eleven in the morning? Why did I just talk to a ghost who’s been killing men for the past two years? How did I know any of this?”

  “Darling, I have no idea,” Willis said. “We went to the movies last night. I took you home, we had a couple drinks, and I went back to my place because I had to iron my shirt for this morning and I don’t have a spare uniform at your house. You called me an hour ago sounding like you’d just woke up, all upset and adamant that I bring you out here. You said there was somebody who needed peace, and you knew what to say. I picked you up, drove you here, and been sitting here for half an hour with my flashers on watching you talk to thin air. But there hasn’t been a death in a car wreck in Union County for three weeks, and I’ve never heard the name Peter Smalls before you just said it a minute ago.”