20th Century Ghosts

by Joe Hill

  She hadn’t ever looked at him much when he mowed her lawn, either. He remembered one time, after he finished in her yard, he had let himself into the house, through a sliding glass door into the living room. He had been cutting her lawn all morning—she was rich, her husband was an executive with a company that sold broadband capacity, she had the most yard on the street—and Wyatt was sunburned and itchy, grass stuck to his face and arms. She was on the phone. Wyatt stood just inside the door, waiting for her to acknowledge him.

  She took her time. She was sitting at a small desk, twirling a coil of yellow hair with one finger, rocking back in her chair, laughing now and then. She had credit cards spread out in front of her and was absentmindedly moving them around with her pinkie. Even when he cleared his throat to get her attention, she didn’t so much as glance at him. He waited a full ten minutes, and then she hung up and swiveled to face him, instantly all business. She told him she had been watching him while he worked, and she wasn’t paying him to talk to everyone who went by on the sidewalk. Also she had heard him go over a rock, and if the lawn mower blade was chipped, she’d make sure he paid for a new one. The job was twenty-eight dollars. She gave him thirty and said he was lucky to get any tip at all. When he went out she was laughing on the phone again, moving the credit cards around, pushing them into a pattern, the letter P.

  There wasn’t much left of Wyatt’s cigarette, but he was figuring one more and then he’d go in, when the door opened behind him. Mrs. Badia stepped out, dressed only in her black sweater and the white vest with the name tag pinned to it, Pat Badia, Manager. She grimaced at the cold and hugged herself.

  “Sarah told me what you said,” Mrs. Badia began.

  Wyatt nodded, waited. He liked Mrs. Badia okay. He could kid her sometimes.

  “Why don’t you go home, Wyatt,” she said.

  He flipped his butt onto the blacktop. “Okay. I’ll come back in and make up my hours tomorrow. She isn’t working then.” Gesturing towards the store with his head.

  “No,” Mrs. Badia said. “Don’t come back tomorrow. Come back next Tuesday to pick up your last check.”

  It took him a moment to figure that out, for some reason. Then he got it, and felt an unwholesome heat rising to his face.

  Mrs. Badia was talking again. She said, “You can’t threaten the people you work with, Wyatt. I’m sick to death of hearing people complain about you. I’m tired of one incident after another.” She made a face and glanced back at the store. “She’s going through a hard time right now, and you’re in there telling her you’re going to rip her tongue out.”

  “I didn’t say—it was the pin in her—do you want to know what she said to me?”

  “Not particularly. What?”

  But Wyatt didn’t reply. He couldn’t tell her what Kensington had said, because he didn’t know, hadn’t caught all of it…and he might not have told Mrs. Badia even if he did know. Whatever she had said, it was something about how he couldn’t read. Wyatt always tried to avoid talking about the trouble he had with grammar and spelling and all the rest; it was a subject that inevitably brought more embarrassment than he could stand.

  Mrs. Badia stared at him, waiting for him to speak. When he didn’t, she said, “I gave you as many chances as I thought I could. But at a certain point, it isn’t fair to the people you work with, to ask them to put up with it.” She stared a while longer, sucking thoughtfully on her lower lip. Then she cast a careless glance at his feet, and as she turned away, she said, “Tie your shoes, Wyatt.”

  She went back in and he stood there, flexing his hands in the frigid air. He walked slowly along the front of the video store, around the corner, to the side of the store that couldn’t be seen from the street. He bent and spat. He tilted another cigarette out of the pack, lit it and inhaled, waited for his legs to stop shaking.

  He had thought Mrs. Badia liked him. He had stayed behind late sometimes to help her close up—something he didn’t have to do—just because she was easy to talk to. They talked about movies, or about weird customers, and she listened to his stories and opinions as if she were really interested. It had been an unusual experience for him, to get along with an employer. But now here it turned out to be the same old crap in the end. Someone had a personal grievance against him, an axe to grind, and there was no due process, no effort to hear everyone out and get all the information. She said, I’m sick to death of hearing people complain, but not which people or what complaints. She said, I’m tired of one incident after another, but didn’t you have to judge this incident on its own merits, and all the other so-called incidents on theirs?

  He flicked his cigarette away—it hit the asphalt and red sparks jumped—turned and started moving. He came around the corner at a fast walk. The windows had a lot of movie posters taped in them. Kensington was staring out at the parking lot through a gap between posters for Pitch Black and The Others. Her eyes were bloodshot, a little unfocused. He could tell from the moony expression on her face that she believed he was long gone, and before he could stop himself he lunged at the glass and banged his middle finger against it, right up against her face. She jerked back, mouth opening in a shocked O.

  He spun away and lurched across the parking lot. A car swung in suddenly from the road, and the driver had to slam on the brakes to keep from hitting him. The driver gave his horn an angry poke. Wyatt lifted his upper lip in a sneer, flipped him off too. Then he was on the other side of the parking lot and plunging into the scrubby, littered woods.

  He made his way along a narrow path; it was the way he always went home when he didn’t have a ride. Among the trees were rotting, water-logged mattresses, filled-to-bursting bags of trash and rust-streaked kitchen appliances. There was a little freshet which had its headwaters at the Queen Bee Car Wash. He couldn’t see it, but he could hear it trickling through the undergrowth, and the smell of cheap car wax and cherry-scented carpet-shampoo was occasionally very strong. He was moving more slowly now, head hunched between his shoulders. In the gathering dimness of early evening, it was hard to see the most slender branches that stuck into the path, and he didn’t want to walk into one.

  The trail came out at the dead-end of a dirt lane which curled along one side of a shallow, famously polluted pond. The lane would take him out to 17K, and a short distance along that was the road into Ronald Reagan Park, where Wyatt lived alone in a one-story no-basement ranch with his mother, his father having run for the hills years before and good riddance. The lane was weedy and disused. People parked there sometimes, though, for the reasons people usually drove to such spots, and as Wyatt rustled through the last of the undergrowth, up towards the road, he saw there was a car there now.

  By then the shadows beneath the trees had massed together into a darkness only a few degrees from full night—although when he looked straight up he could still see some color in the sky, a pale violet shading into an apricot yellow. The car was on a slight rise and he didn’t recognize it until he was close. It was Mrs. Prezar’s station wagon. The driver’s side door was cocked open.

  Wyatt hesitated a few paces away from it, the wind catching strangely in his lungs, he didn’t know why. At first, he thought the car was empty. No sound came from it, except for some soft ticking noises beneath the hood, as the engine cooled. Then he saw the black-haired four-year-old in the back, still strapped into the baby seat. The boy’s chin rested on his chest and his eyes were shut. He looked asleep.

  Wyatt glanced around for Mrs. Prezar, for Baxter, scanned the trees, the edge of the pond. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would leave the boy asleep there like that. But then, when he glanced back at the car, he saw Mrs. Prezar. She was in the driver’s seat, but hunched over, so that from where he stood, only the crown of her shiny blonde head was visible above the steering wheel.

  It was a moment before he could move. He found it hard to start forward again, was badly unsettled, for no reason he could pinpoint, by the scene before him. The little boy asleep in the backse
at frightened him. In the twilight, the kid’s face was fat and tinged faintly blue.

  He stepped carefully around to the side of the car and stopped again. What he saw drove the air out of him. Mrs. Prezar was rocking back and forth just slightly. Baxter was face-up in her lap. His eyes were open and staring. He had lost his Twin City Pizza cap somewhere. His head was shaved to a fine, colorless bristle. His lips were so bright red, he might have been wearing lipstick. Baxter’s head was tipped back so he appeared to be staring at Wyatt. Wyatt saw the slash in his throat first, a glistening black line in the approximate shape of a fishhook. There was another wound in his cheek. It almost looked like a long black slug resting on his very white face.

  Mrs. Prezar’s eyes were open wide, too, and they were red and raw with tears, and yet she made no sound as she wept. There were four long smears of blood on the side of her face, marks left by a child’s fingers. She took one long, shuddering breath after another.

  “Oh God.” She was whispering on each exhalation. “Oh Baxter. Oh God.”

  Wyatt took a step back, unconsciously recoiling, and put his foot down on the plastic lid of a discarded soda cup, heard it splinter under his heel. Her shoulders jumped in a reflexive shrug and she cast a wild look up at him.

  “Mrs. Prezar,” he said, in a voice he hardly recognized, hushed and gravelly.

  He expected wailing and cries, but when she spoke it was in a benumbed whisper. “Please help us.” For the first time he noticed her purse was on the ground, by the car door, some of the contents spilled out into the mud.

  “I’ll go get someone,” he said, and he was already twisting at the waist, preparing to turn, to fly up the lane. He could be at 17K in a minute, could flag down a passing car.

  “No,” she said in a tone of sudden, frightened urgency. “Don’t go. I’m scared. I don’t know where he went. He could still be somewhere nearby. He might of just gone to wash himself off.” Throwing a panicked look at the pond.

  “Who?” Wyatt asked, glancing over at the pond himself—the steep embankment, the close stands of ratty little trees—with a withering feeling of alarm.

  She didn’t answer him, said, “I’ve got a cell phone. I don’t know where it is. He took it, but I think he dropped it on the ground next to the car. Oh God oh God. Will you look for it? Oh God please don’t let him come back.”

  Wyatt was dry-mouthed and his insides felt sick, but he moved forward automatically, gaze sweeping the area around the dropped purse. He crouched, in part so he could see the ground better, and in part so he would be invisible to anyone approaching the car from the other side, the side facing the pond. Some papers and a tangle of scarf had fallen out of her bag. One end of the scarf—silk, shimmers of yellow and red—was floating on a puddle.

  “In your purse?” he asked, pulling it open.

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  He dug through it, found more papers, a lipstick, a compact, little brushes for her face, no cell phone. He dropped the purse and stared intently along the length of the station wagon, but it was difficult to make out much of anything in the early evening shadows.

  “He walked towards the water?” Wyatt asked, his pulse banging steadily in his throat.

  “I don’t know. He got in at the stoplight. When I was waiting for it to turn green at the corner of Union. He said he wouldn’t hurt us if I did what he said. Oh God, Baxter. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry he hurt you. I’m so sorry he made you cry.”

  At the mention of Baxter’s name, Wyatt glanced up, was helpless not to, could not hear the boy mentioned without feeling a dreadful compulsion to look at him again. He was surprised at how close Baxter’s face was to his own. The boy’s head was hanging over his mother’s thigh, less than a yard away from him. Wyatt was seeing Baxter’s face upside down, the dark stab wound in his cheek, the clown-red lips—red from the Twizzler, not the blood, Wyatt realized, in a sudden flash of remembering—the wide, stricken eyes. Baxter was gazing blankly past Wyatt’s shoulder with glazed eyes; then those eyes twitched slightly and fixed on him.

  Wyatt screamed. He lurched to his feet.

  “He’s not—” Wyatt said, gasping, his lungs sucking at the air. It was hard to get enough oxygen to speak. He swallowed, tried again, “He’s not—” and he looked at Mrs. Prezar and stopped once more.

  He had not, until now, been at an angle to see her right hand. It rested on Baxter’s leg. It was closed around the handle of a knife.

  He thought he recognized it. They had a couple clear plastic cases of them in Miller’s Hardware, on a counter to the left of the door, just past the racks of camouflage jackets. Wyatt remembered one in particular, with a ten-inch blade, one edge serrated, the steel polished to a mirror-brightness. Wyatt had been in there looking once, he had noticed it. He might even have asked to see it. It was the first one anyone would notice. And he remembered the way she had come out of Miller’s, how she held one arm clutched stiffly across her overcoat, how she came out without a bag.

  She saw him looking at it. She glanced away from him, and stared down at it herself for a moment, looking at it with an expression of bewilderment, as if she had no idea how such a thing had come into her possession. As if, perhaps, she had no idea what such an instrument might even be for. Then she looked back.

  “He dropped it,” she said, staring at Wyatt with a look that was almost pleading. “His hands were bloody and he got it stuck in Baxter. When he tried to pull it out, it slipped out of his hands. It fell on the floor and I picked it up. That’s why he didn’t kill me. Because I had the knife. That’s when he ran away.”

  The hand closed around the Teflon grip of the knife was stained deeply with blood; blood darkened every groove across her knuckles, the cuticle around her thumbnail. Drops of blood were still falling off the waterproof sleeve of her jacket, dripping onto the leather seat.

  “I’ll run and get help,” he said, but he wasn’t sure she heard him. He spoke so softly he could hardly hear himself. He was holding his hands up in front of him, the palms turned outward, in a defensive gesture. He didn’t know how long he had been holding them that way.

  She put one foot out on the ground, started to rise. The sudden movement alarmed him and he staggered back. And then there was something wrong with his right foot, he was trying to take a step back, but it was pinned to the ground somehow, wouldn’t move. He glanced down in time to see he was standing on an untied shoelace, and then he was tottering off balance, pitching backwards.

  The impact was hard enough to drive the breath out of him. He sprawled on his back across a moist carpet of fallen leaves. He stared up at the sky, which was now a deep violet hue, and scattered here and there with the first and brightest of the early evening stars. His eyes watered. He blinked and sat up.

  She was out of the car, a yard away from him. She held his sneaker in one hand, the knife in the other. He had come right out of his shoe. His right foot was clad now only in a gray athletic sock, and was cold in the frozen damp.

  “He dropped it,” she said. “The man who attacked us. I wouldn’t. My babies. I wouldn’t hurt them. I just picked it up.”

  He scrambled up off the ground and hopped a step away from her, putting very little weight on the right foot, to keep it from sinking into the cold mush of the leaves. He wanted the shoe back before he ran. He looked at the sneaker—she was holding it outstretched towards him—and then at the knife. Her right hand, with the knife in it, hung limply at her side.

  Once again she followed his gaze, looked down at the knife, looked back. She shook her head slowly from side to side in some kind of mute denial.

  “I wouldn’t,” she said, and dropped the knife. She leaned towards him, holding out the shoe. “Here.”

  He edged a step closer to her, and took the shoe and tugged on it, only she wouldn’t let go of it at first, and then she did, but only to grab his arm. Her fingernails sank into the soft underside of his wrist, digging painfully into the skin. It frightened him, how suddenl
y she grabbed him, how tightly she had hold of him.

  “I didn’t,” she said. He tried to wrench his arm free. Her other hand was grabbing at the front of his open jacket, at his sweater, smearing blood on him. She said, “What are you going to say to people?”

  In his panic, he wasn’t sure he had heard her right and didn’t care. He wanted her to let go. Her fingernails were biting painfully into his flesh, but worse than that, she was getting blood on him, all over his hand, his wrist, his sweater. It was sticky and unpleasantly warm and more than anything he didn’t want her streaking it on his bare skin. He grabbed her left hand at the wrist, and tried to make her let him go, squeezed until he could feel the bones in her wrist separating from their joints. She was blubbering, crowding him. Her right hand closed on his shoulder, fingers boring into the socket, and he struck her arm aside, and shoved her, not hard, just to drive her back. Her eyes flew open and she made a horrid, choked little cry. Her right hand flew up and suddenly she was scratching his face, he felt her fingernails laying him open, felt the hot sting of blood in fresh cuts.

  He grabbed the hand raking at his cheek, and bent her fingers straight back until they were almost touching the back of her hand. Then he punched her in the breastbone and heard the air gush out of her, and as she bent forward he hit her in the face, a driving downward blow that split his knuckles. She staggered drunkenly forward and grabbed his sweater and when she went down she pulled him down with her. She still had him by the wrist, her fingernails tearing at him. More than ever he needed to make her let go. He grabbed some of her hair and yanked her head straight backwards, twisted it back until she was baring her neck to him, until her head couldn’t be forced any further back. She gasped and let go of his wrist and tried to slap at his face and he punched her in the throat.

  She choked. He let go of her hair and her head fell forward. She held her neck in both hands and sat there on her knees, her shoulders hunched, and her hair hiding her face, breathing raggedly. Then her head swiveled. She looked at the knife on the ground behind her. She let go of her neck with her right hand and started to reach for it, but she was slow, and he shoved himself past her and snatched it off the ground. He turned and hacked it in the air to warn her away.