Ghosts of Bergen County

by Dana Cann

  Ferko slugged his beer, which he’d already hoisted by the time the bartender had asked his question. There was no need, really, to wait. He wasn’t sure when he’d ever drunk a beer that tasted so good.

  “Jen.” He licked his lips. “Yoder. She comes in here sometimes.”

  The bartender waited for more, but there was no more. “A lot of people come in here,” he said.

  Ferko made a show of glancing around, at the empty stools and tables, at the empty chairs. Even the card game in the corner had been put on hiatus in favor of low conversation.

  “Sometimes,” the bartender said.

  Maybe he was clever after all. And maybe Ferko was, too. And would be, always, through his association with Jen.

  “You know her,” Ferko said. “She makes her presence known.”

  The bartender watched him, expecting, perhaps, a physical description. But providing one would have made Ferko sound like a detective on a bad TV show. Or a stalker.

  “Why don’t you call her?” the bartender asked. His eyes danced in the dim light.

  “I have.”

  Ferko looked away. He knew the bartender’s next line—Maybe she doesn’t want to be found. Ferko didn’t want to hear it. He drained his beer and slapped a twenty on the bar and hopped off the stool, dizzy with fatigue and withdrawal and two glasses of beer drunk in rapid succession.

  “If I happen to see this Jen Yoder,” the bartender called after him, “who should I say was looking for her?”

  The kids in the corner looked up. They were Ferko’s past; he was their future. He pushed open the glass door and ducked beneath the low, leaden sky.

  Jen powered on her phone. Then she thumbed her dad’s number with one hand while she covered the screen with the other. “I don’t feel well,” she said when he picked up.

  “Well, hello to you, too.”

  An obvious response eluded her.

  “Headache?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What else?”

  “Chills.” She left out nausea.

  “Fever?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, which was true.

  “You’re not going to come and see me,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “When you were in kindergarten you got the flu on picture day.”

  She remembered the event, and she knew the story, which he’d told her, directly or indirectly, dozens of times since. She tightened her blanket around her shoulders and put her head on a pillow while her body shuddered.

  “We sent you to school anyway,” he continued. “Your mom dressed you in the clothes she’d picked out. A pink-and-white dress.”

  “And white tights,” she said. “And black shoes.”

  “I don’t know about those.”

  “Dad, I know the story.” A wave of nausea rose up inside her, then stilled. She needed the call to end.

  “Oh, you do?” he asked. “So, what’s the point?”

  A month later the picture had come. Jen looked like a ball with the air let out—miserable and defeated. The doctor and his wife had made their sick daughter go to school on picture day, and here was the proof. It had sat on the desk in her dad’s study, like some kind of warning, propped against the cup that held the sharpened pencils. It was probably still in the study somewhere.

  “They have picture makeup days,” she said.

  “They do?”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  She waited for him to say more. She lacked the energy herself.

  “The point is to stay home, rest, and drink plenty of fluids.”

  “Okay.”

  “Clear fluids. And I don’t mean gin or vodka.”

  “Ugh.”

  “You take care. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  The earpiece clicked, and she powered off her phone and set it facedown on top of her nightstand, then thought better, the phone being too great a temptation within arm’s reach, so she mustered the energy to walk the phone to her bureau and bury it deep in the sock drawer. Then she flopped back down on her futon, spread-eagle, in her shorts and T-shirt. The air conditioner rattled in the window. A car horn honked from the street. She considered turning on the radio, something talky, but decided against it. Best not to let in any signals. Thus, the phone off and buried in the sock drawer. The shades were drawn and the lights were out. How long could one last like this? She had food in the fridge and the cupboard, toilet paper in the closet. The postman delivered her mail, and when her box was full he’d slip in a note to let her know they were collecting the rest, which she could pick up by presenting the note and a government-issued picture identification to the clerk at the post office.

  She’d call in to work this week. The flu. She had some sick time.

  Eventually, someone would worry. All those unanswered texts and messages. Someone would come by. It was nearly Saturday night. It could happen at any moment. Someone like Amy or Nick or Larry or Gordon—it didn’t matter who—would wander by and buzz her from downstairs, maybe even piggyback in and start banging on her door and calling her name, and, despite her best efforts to check the signal, the signal would have found her, and she’d have to ignore it in a more active way.

  There was a reason people fled town to kick. Everything here was a habit. The frequency, for instance, with which she checked her laptop and her phone. The texts she sent, the food she ate, and the beer she drank. The dope she copped.

  Even the dogs on their leashes peed on the same trees and poles, day after day, around the block, clockwise or counter, at the whim of the walker. Jen had done her share of dog walking. Rectangles were best—four left turns or four right being the only variable.

  Now she concentrated on the sound made by the window unit. How many times, she wondered, did its fan turn in a second, a minute, an hour? Each revolution was a milestone, an accomplishment, because each revolution consumed some increment of time. Her quest was monk-like—stay put. She’d succeeded for sixty-eight hours. She figured by ninety-six the worst would be over. Thus far, the pull had been steadily stronger. She felt it wash over her now until she concentrated again on the sound of the fan in the window unit, spinning fast enough, she imagined, to appear transparent without its casing. It stirred the air in her monk’s cell.

  Queenie still hadn’t called, but Solomon DeGrass had updated his home page. New office hours, links to the four courses he was teaching this semester. It was time, Jen had told herself. First kick, then confront, then call Queenie. She liked the alliteration, the aggression imbued in the k and the hard c, in the active nature explicit in the verbs themselves. She’d written them in large capital letters on blank sheets of printer paper and taped them to the back of her closed door. Then she’d numbered them:

  1. KICK

  2. CONFRONT

  3. CALL QUEENIE

  It was a get-your-shit-together call to action. She had food enough, an air conditioner, electricity. When Monday morning came, she could turn on her phone long enough to call in sick.

  Kick, confront, call Queenie. Jen controlled her own destiny.

  The buzzer sounded, jerking her upright. It sounded again. Someone was downstairs on the sidewalk wanting to party. She’d done the same thing herself. It was Nick or Amy or Larry or Gordon. Maybe Jane. Jen had to get the word out. She needed a confidant. She wasn’t looking to party. Nor was she blue-lipped on her couch. She’d underdosed. It wasn’t a bad word. It made her think underfed, and she realized she’d skipped lunch.

  The buzzer buzzed, insistent. She put her pillow over her head, and braced herself for the next call.

  Ferko stood in front of Jen’s place, finger on the gray button. He pressed it and held it. Let it go. Pressed it again, and waited. Fat raindrops fell, half-dollars on the sidewalk. Jen’s entry had no cover. He could find one that did—some narrow vestibule—within eyeshot of her place. It was like a stakeout, but more desperate. Now the sky opened, and he had no choice but
to sprint down Twelfth Street. He ducked under an awning, from which rain ran in a single blurry sheet and splashed the cuffs of his khakis. The window told him it was a sewing machine repair shop. Could such a business still exist? Maybe it was a front for a drug dealer. But the place was dark. The sign on the door said it had closed at one, and wouldn’t reopen until ten on Monday morning.

  The rain fell, and sent up a roar, like an adoring crowd after the last note had rung. He enjoyed live music. He wished to hear some tonight—with Jen and a head full of dope. Rain slapped the asphalt and concrete. It puddled and formed rivulets. It beat the canvas awning under which he stood. Even the occasional car coasting down Twelfth Street was hushed by the notes ringing off its rooftop and hood. One rolled past now, a steel drum, its music mixed with new notes, familiar ones that had him reflexively reaching for the phone in his pocket.

  It was ringing.

  Two-one-two, but not Jen’s. Still, he tasted the cool drip of dope in the back of his throat.

  “Hello.”

  “Gil.”

  “Lisa.”

  “Don’t sound so disappointed.”

  “I was expecting someone else.”

  “Next stop, Ho-Ho-Kus?”

  It was a name she liked to say. The town had a pub he and Mary Beth used to go to. A deli. A Chinese restaurant. No dope.

  “I’m still downtown.”

  “Prauer’s on his way.”

  Ferko tried to process this information. To his surprise, he found he could. “How much?” he asked, meaning, how much did Greg think Prauer should pay for Grove.

  “A billion-one.”

  “That’s a lot,” Ferko said, because it seemed like a conclusion he could make. He hadn’t been paying much attention to the details, though.

  The rain fell harder now, if that was possible. Lisa said nothing, unless he missed it in the roar.

  “It’s pouring,” he said, to fill the void. It felt comfortable to backpedal, to talk about something as obvious as the weather.

  “It’s dry up here in the clouds,” she said.

  The sky flashed, and thunder pealed off the sides of apartments as if off the walls of canyons.

  “Whoa. Seriously, it’s doing nothing here. Are you under cover?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Get a cab and get back here.”

  “It’s pouring,” he repeated, meaning that any prowling cab had been hailed by now. It didn’t help, of course, that he was east of First, in front of a closed sewing machine repair shop. But he wasn’t going to tell her that.

  “Call a car,” Lisa said.

  When he didn’t answer, she said, “Do you want me to call one?”

  “No.”

  It was a betrayal—Greg calling Prauer. Yet Ferko could marshal none of the requisite outrage. He stood under the awning, soaked and indifferent, contemplating his next move, knowing it had nothing to do with Lisa Becker or Greg Fletcher or Bill Prauer or Grove Department Stores. Sometime later—maybe days or weeks or months or years—he’d blame drugs for this lapse, for going out in absentia instead of in a blaze of fucked-up glory, complete with technical errors and social gaffes. He’d always imagined his undoing would be to lose Prauer a ton of money. The truth was more tedious: Ferko had been pushed aside and didn’t care. Grove had led Greg to Ferko; Greg had led Ferko to Jen. Things had been heading here since the first meeting with Grove two months ago, when Greg had sat across the conference table from Ferko, the way he might have in sixth grade, at the long lunch tables in the Edgefield cafeteria. Ferko wondered whether the seed of this betrayal had been planted then.

  “Gil,” Lisa said.

  “I’m here.”

  “Well, we’re here.”

  Ferko remembered, or tried to, the point he’d made to Jen about fate weeks before at Café Ivy. He’d been high. He’d made sense. So much so that his chest had swelled—in concert with his heady arguments and the dope in his blood—with a warm flush of invincibility. Now he tried to summon a similar case, to justify, if only in his head, his indifference. He was missing the dope, of course, if not the logic. He wasn’t always this morose.

  “Hold on,” Lisa said now, “here’s Greg.”

  “Dude,” Greg said, “get back here. We’re a team. I take that seriously.”

  Rain drummed the awning over Ferko’s head.

  “We’re in this together,” Greg pleaded. He actually pleaded, and, while Ferko processed what it meant that Greg Fletcher was pleading for his return, a memory seized him. He was on the blacktop, in this memory, at his elementary school in Edgefield, before the morning bell. All around, kids ran in flocks, while Ferko and Greg Fletcher faced each other, talking about something of rapt interest to Ferko—television, probably. Ferko looked up at Greg, who was always taller. Then other boys joined them, flanked Greg and Ferko, though not actually part of the conversation. More and more boys, a sea of faces, a who’s who of fourth grade. Then, just as Ferko was about to say something to move the conversation forward, to make a point, to express a like or dislike, Greg stepped forward and pushed Ferko over the back of another boy, who’d sneaked up behind Ferko and gotten down on all fours. Ferko fell. The boys ran. The bell rang. Later, in the boys’ room, he pinched a disc of dried blood the size of a quarter from the hair on the back of his head.

  “This is your deal,” Greg said now. “Prauer will be here in an hour. You’re presenting.”

  “I’m presenting?”

  There was movement on the other end—fierce and quick, the phone conveyed from room to room. “I did this for you.” Greg’s voice held an urgency Ferko had never imagined Greg could muster. Maybe in the huddle on fourth and ten, but Ferko had never been in that huddle.

  “For me?” Lightning flashed. He braced for a thunderclap that never came.

  “Prauer will be here in an hour. What do you want me to tell him?”

  He considered a smart-ass reply, but coming up with one was beyond his mental, emotional, and physical capacity.

  “I don’t feel well,” he said, which had the advantage of being true enough.

  A couple across the street caught his eye. They were small, thin, walking with a singular purpose, without umbrellas or raincoats, their hands stuffed into front pockets of black jeans. They wore T-shirts and sneakers, black or soaked black by rain. The landscape was colorless—wet asphalt and gray concrete and stone, the rain that filled the gray sky—except for the couple’s hair. There was a glint of red in the woman’s and purple in the man’s. They were friends of Jen’s, the couple who’d joined them at Ivy’s once, a few weeks before.

  He hung up and stowed his phone and leaped over the gutter, where rainwater collected from the streets and sidewalks and flowed toward the river. There were no cars. The couple on the other side stopped and turned. All he could think of to say was “Hey!” He couldn’t remember their names.

  “Hey,” they said in unison, without a glint of recognition, unfazed, it appeared, by the pounding rain, by the water that dripped from their chins and noses and the knobby bones protruding from their wrists.

  “You’re Jen’s friends,” he said with a surplus of hope, enough, perhaps, to turn a dead-end statement into a question awaiting reply. “Jen Yoder,” he added, conscious of landing the last syllable. He tapped his toe on the pavement to add a period.

  “Yeah,” the guy said anyway, answering the question that hadn’t been asked. His hair was black with a purple stripe. Matted and soaked, he looked like a sad pet with a distinctive mark. His name was Dave, Ferko remembered. And the girl was Tina.

  “Ferko!” she said. Her eyes flashed in the gloom.

  “Have you seen our girl?” Ferko glanced across the street toward Jen’s building, the steel door, the rusted mailboxes and buzzers flanking it.

  Dave’s eyes raked the building’s face. His long lashes blinked in the deluge. “Her lights are out,” he said.

  “It’s daytime,” Tina said.

  “It’s raining.”r />
  “It’s pouring.”

  “The old man is … ” Dave sang.

  She turned to Ferko. “Text her.”

  “… snoring.”

  “I have,” Ferko said. “Texted, called, buzzed.”

  “Napping,” Dave said.

  “We’re copping,” Tina said. “You in?”

  Ferko’s gait matched theirs, stride for stride, hands in front pockets. He remembered he had an umbrella, one that folded and telescoped—an amazing feat of engineering—into a baton in his bag, but he left it there. Best to follow Tina and Dave’s lead. They walked east, then south, then east, block after block. Ferko’s blue shirt turned translucent. “Cop spot,” Dave said at one corner, and Ferko followed his eyes to a form in a black poncho under an awning across the street, but they turned the corner and walked east. By Tenth Street the deluge had tempered. By Ninth it had nearly stopped. Drops fell into puddles and made tiny wakes, like stones lobbed from the shore of a still lake.

  They came across a guy in a red anorak, a hood pulled over his head. Tina stopped. Dave and Ferko with her. This was the first person they’d seen since the guy in the poncho, and Ferko realized they were the only ones out in the rain. Buyers and sellers. It was that easy.

  “Hey,” Tina said.

  “Hey.” The guy studied the three of them. He had a red beard that looked a few days old. A freckled face. A disinterested gaze.

  “Ferko,” Tina said, “how much do we have?”

  “What do you—” Ferko started to ask, but then thought better. “I don’t know,” he said. It occurred to him she was asking about money. He knew what he had—a little more than a hundred—but he didn’t know what she or Dave had.

  “Do we have sixty?” she asked, and Ferko got it. His heart beat harder and filled his arteries. He felt grateful. With Greg and Lisa in the Riverfront conference room, Ferko had had no role. So he’d bailed. Now he had one, an important one, a role he knew how to fulfill. He was buying. For the three of them. It was a magnanimous gesture, their bringing him here. It was Ferko’s turn to reciprocate.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Pay Red, then.”

  Ferko fished three twenties out of his wallet, then folded and wedged them between the knuckles of his first and second fingers, like a magician with a handkerchief, some sort of sleight of hand, and Red produced a handful of glassine bags, each with a portion of white powder, from the unzipped pouch of his anorak. He exchanged the money for the bags in a single, fluid motion. Ferko closed his fist. Then opened it.