20th Century Ghosts

by Joe Hill

  “Do you want to play cards with us?” the girl asked, and held up a deck.

  “I just want to get home. I don’t want my parents worried.”

  “Sit and play with us,” she said. “We’ll play a hand for answers. The winner gets to ask each of the losers a question, and no matter what, they have to tell the truth. So if you beat me, you could ask me how to get home without seeing the boy on the old bicycle, and I’d have to tell you.”

  Which meant she had seen him and somehow guessed the rest. She looked pleased with herself, enjoyed letting me know I was easy to figure out. I considered for a moment, then nodded.

  “What are you playing?” I asked.

  “It’s a kind of poker. It’s called Cold Hands, because it’s the only card game you can play when it’s this cold.”

  The boy shook his head. “This is one of these games where she makes up the rules as she goes along.” His voice, which had an adolescent crack in it, was nevertheless familiar to me.

  I crossed to the log and she retreated on her knees, sliding back into the dark space under the plywood roof to make room for me. She was talking all the time, shuffling her worn deck of cards.

  “It isn’t hard. I deal five cards to each player, face-up. When I’m done, whoever has the best poker hand wins. That probably sounds too simple, but then there are a lot of funny little house rules. If you smile during the game, the player sitting to your left can swap one of his cards for one of yours. If you can build a house with the first three cards you get dealt, and if the other players can’t blow it down in one breath, you get to look through the deck and pick out whatever you want for your fourth card. If you draw a black forfeit, the other players throw stones at you until you’re dead. If you have any questions, keep them to yourself. Only the winner gets to ask questions. Anyone who asks a question while the game is in play loses instantly. Okay? Let’s start.”

  My first card was a Lazy Jack. I knew because it said so across the bottom, and because it showed a picture of a golden-haired jack lounging on silk pillows, while a harem girl filed his toenails. It wasn’t until the girl handed me my second card—the three of rings—that I mentally registered the thing she had said about the black forfeit.

  “Excuse me,” I started. “But what’s a—”

  She raised her eyebrows, looked at me seriously.

  “Never mind,” I said.

  The boy made a little sound in his throat. The girl cried out, “He smiled! Now you can trade one of your cards for one of his!”

  “I did not!”

  “You did,” she said. “I saw it. Take his queen and give him your jack.”

  I gave him the Lazy Jack and took the Queen of Sheets away from him. It showed a nude girl asleep on a carved four-poster, amid the tangle of her bedclothes. She had straight brown hair, and strong, handsome features, and bore a resemblance to Jane’s friend, Melinda. After that I was dealt the King of Pennyfarthings, a red-bearded fellow carrying a sack of coins that was splitting and beginning to spill. I was pretty sure the girl in the black mask had dealt him to me from the bottom of the deck. She saw I saw and shot me a cool, challenging look.

  When we each had three cards, we took a break and tried to build houses the others couldn’t blow down, but none of them would stand. Afterward I was dealt the Queen of Chains and a card with the rules of cribbage printed on it. I almost asked if it was in the deck by accident, then thought better of it. No one drew a black forfeit. I didn’t even know what one was.

  “Jack wins!” shouted the girl, which unnerved me a little, since I had never introduced myself. “Jack is the winner!” She flung herself against me and hugged me fiercely. When she straightened up, she was pushing my winning cards into the pocket of my jacket. “Here, you should keep your winning hand. To remember the fun we had. It doesn’t matter. This old deck is missing a bunch of cards anyway. I just knew you’d win!”

  “Sure she did,” said the boy. “First she makes up a game with rules only she can understand, then she cheats so it comes out how she likes.”

  She laughed, unpolished, convulsive laughter, and I felt cold on the nape of my neck. But really, I think I already knew by then, even before she laughed, who I was playing cards with.

  “The secret to avoiding unhappy losses is to only play games you make up yourself,” she said. “Now. Go ahead, Jack. Ask anything you like. It’s your right.”

  “How do I get home without going back the way I came?”

  “That’s easy. Take the path closest to the ‘any-where’ sign, which will take you anywhere you want to go. That’s why it says anywhere. Just be sure the cabin is really where you want to go, or you might not get there.”

  “Right. Thank you. It was a good game. I didn’t understand it, but I had fun playing.” And I scrambled out over the log.

  I hadn’t gone far before she called out to me. When I looked back, she and the boy were side-by-side, leaning over the log and staring out at me.

  “Don’t forget,” she said. “You get to ask him a question too.”

  “Do I know you?” I said, making a gesture to include both of them.

  “No,” he said. “You don’t really know either of us.”

  THERE WAS A JAG parked in the driveway behind my parents’ car. The interior was polished cherry, and the seats looked as if they had never been sat on. It might have just rolled off the dealership floor. By then it was late in the day, the light slanting in from the west, cutting through the tops of the trees. It didn’t seem like it could be so late.

  I thumped up the stairs, but before I could reach the door to go in, it opened, and my mother stepped out, still wearing the black sex-kitten mask.

  “Your mask,” she said. “What’d you do with it?”

  “Ditched it,” I said. I didn’t tell her I hung it on a tree branch because I was embarrassed to be seen in it. I wished I had it now, although I couldn’t have said why.

  She threw an anxious look back at the door, then crouched in front of me.

  “I knew. I was watching for you. Put this on.” She offered me my father’s mask of clear plastic.

  I stared at it a moment, remembering the way I recoiled from it when I first saw it, and how it had squashed my father’s features into something cold and menacing. But when I slipped it on my face, it fit well enough. It carried a faint fragrance of my father, coffee and the sea-spray odor of his aftershave. I found it reassuring to have him so close to me.

  My mother said, “We’re getting out of here in a few minutes. Going home. Just as soon as the appraiser is done looking around. Come on. Come in. It’s almost over.”

  I followed her inside, then stopped just through the door. My father sat on the couch, shirtless and barefoot. His body looked as if it had been marked up by a surgeon for an operation. Dotted lines and arrows showed the location of liver, spleen, and bowels. His eyes were pointed toward the floor, his face blank.

  “Dad?” I asked.

  His gaze rose, flitted from my mother to me and back. His expression remained bland and unrevealing.

  “Shh,” my mother said. “Daddy’s busy.”

  I heard heels cracking across the bare planks to my right and glanced across the room, as the appraiser came out of the master bedroom. I had assumed the appraiser would be a man, but it was a middle-aged woman in a tweed jacket, with some white showing in her wavy yellow hair. She had austere, imperial features, the high cheekbones and expressive, arching eyebrows of English nobility.

  “See anything you like?” my mother asked.

  “You have some wonderful pieces,” the appraiser said. Her gaze drifted to my father’s bare shoulders.

  “Well,” my mother said. “Don’t mind me.” She gave the back of my arm a soft pinch and slipped around me, whispered out of the side of her mouth, “Hold the fort, kiddo. I’ll be right back.”

  My mother showed the appraiser a small, strictly polite smile, before easing into the master bedroom and out of sight, leaving the
three of us alone.

  “I was sorry when I heard Upton died,” the appraiser said. “Do you miss him?”

  The question was so unexpected and direct it startled me; or maybe it was her tone, which was not sympathetic, but sounded to my ears too curious, eager for a little grief.

  “I guess. We weren’t so close,” I said. “I think he had a pretty good life, though.”

  “Of course he did,” she said.

  “I’d be happy if things worked out half as well for me.”

  “Of course they will,” she said, and put a hand on the back of my father’s neck and began rubbing it fondly.

  It was such a casually, obscenely intimate gesture, I felt a sick intestinal pang at the sight. I let my gaze drift away—had to look away—and happened to glance at the mirror on the back of the dresser. The curtains were parted slightly, and in the reflection I saw a playing-card woman standing behind my father, the queen of spades, her eyes of ink haughty and distant, her black robes painted onto her body. I wrenched my gaze from the looking-glass in alarm, and glanced back at the couch. My father was smiling in a dreamy kind of way, leaning back into the hands now massaging his shoulders. The appraiser regarded me from beneath half-lowered eyelids.

  “That isn’t your face,” she said to me. “No one has a face like that. A face made out of ice. What are you hiding?”

  My father stiffened, and his smile faded. He sat up and forward, slipping his shoulders out of her grip.

  “You’ve seen everything,” my father said to the woman behind him. “Do you know what you want?”

  “I’d start with everything in this room,” she said, putting her hand gently on his shoulder again. She toyed with a curl of his hair for a moment. “I can have everything, can’t I?”

  My mother came out of the bedroom, lugging a pair of suitcases, one in each hand. She glanced at the appraiser with her hand on my father’s neck, and huffed a bemused little laugh—a laugh that went huh and which seemed to mean more or less just that—and picked up the suitcases again, marched with them toward the door.

  “It’s all up for grabs,” my father said. “We’re ready to deal.”

  “Who isn’t?” said the appraiser.

  My mother set one of the suitcases in front of me, and nodded that I should take it. I followed her onto the porch, and then looked back. The appraiser was leaning over the couch, and my father’s head was tipped back, and her mouth was on his. My mother reached past me and closed the door.

  We walked through the gathering twilight to the car. The boy in the white gown sat on the lawn, his bicycle on the grass beside him. He was skinning a dead rabbit with a piece of horn, its stomach open and steaming. He glanced at us as we went by and grinned, showing teeth pink with blood. My mother put a motherly arm around my shoulders.

  After she was in the car, she took off her mask and threw it on the backseat. I left mine on. When I inhaled deeply I could smell my father.

  “What are we doing?” I asked. “Isn’t he coming?”

  “No,” she said, and started the car. “He’s staying here.”

  “How will he get home?”

  She turned a sideways look upon me, and smiled sympathetically. Outside, the sky was a blue-almost-black, and the clouds were a scalding shade of crimson, but in the car it was already night. I turned in my seat, sat up on my knees, to watch the cottage disappear through the trees.

  “Let’s play a game,” my mother said. “Let’s pretend you never really knew your father. He went away before you were born. We can make up fun little stories about him. He has a Semper Fi tattoo from his days in the marines, and another one, a blue anchor, that’s from—” Her voice faltered, as she came up suddenly short on inspiration.

  “From when he worked on a deep-sea oil rig.”

  She laughed. “Right. And we’ll pretend the road is magic. The Amnesia Highway. By the time we’re home, we’ll both believe the story is true, that he really did leave before you were born. Everything else will seem like a dream, those dreams as real as memories. The made-up story will probably be better than the real thing anyway. I mean, he loved your bones, and he wanted everything for you, but can you remember one interesting thing he ever did?”

  I had to admit I couldn’t.

  “Can you even remember what he did for a living?”

  I had to admit I didn’t. Insurance?

  “Isn’t this a good game?” she asked. “Speaking of games. Do you still have your deal?”

  “My deal?” I asked, then remembered, and touched the pocket of my jacket.

  “You want to hold onto it. That’s some winning hand. King of Pennyfarthings. Queen of Sheets. You got it all, boy. I’m telling you, when we get home, you give that Melinda a call.” She laughed again, and then affectionately patted her tummy. “Good days ahead, kid. For both of us.”

  I shrugged.

  “You can take the mask off, you know,” my mother said. “Unless you like wearing it. Do you like wearing it?”

  I reached up for the sun visor, turned it down, and opened the mirror. The lights around the mirror switched on. I studied my new face of ice, and the face beneath, a malformed, human blank.

  “Sure,” I said. “It’s me.”

  VOLUNTARY COMMITTAL

  I don’t know who I’m writing this for, can’t say who I expect to read it. Not the police, anyway. I don’t know what happened to my brother, and I can’t tell them where he is. Nothing I could put down here would help them find him.

  And anyway, this isn’t really about his disappearance…although it does concern a missing person, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think the two things had anything to do with each other. I have never told anyone what I know about Edward Prior, who left school one October day in 1977, and never arrived home for chili and baked potatoes with Mom. For a long time, the first year or two after he vanished, I didn’t want to think about my friend Eddie. I would do anything not to think about him. If I passed some people talking about him in the halls of my high school—I heard he stole his momma’s weed and some money and ran away to fuckin California!—I’d fix my eyes on some point in the distance and pretend I was deaf. And if someone actually approached and asked me straight out what I thought had happened to him—now and then someone would, since we were known compañeros—I’d set my face into a rigid blank and shrug. “I almost think I care sometimes,” I said.

  Later, I didn’t think about Eddie out of studiously formed habit. If anything happened by chance to remind me of him—if I saw a boy who looked like him, or read something in the news about a missing teen—I would instantly begin to think of something else, hardly aware I was even doing it.

  In the last three weeks, though, ever since my little brother Morris went missing, I find myself thinking about Ed Prior more and more; can’t seem, through any effort of will, to turn thoughts of him aside. The urge to talk to someone about what I know is really almost more than I can bear. But this isn’t a story for the police. Believe me, it wouldn’t do them any good, and it might do myself a fair amount of bad. I can’t tell them where to look for Edward Prior any more than I can tell them where to look for Morris—can’t tell what I don’t know—but if I were to share this story with a detective, I think I might be asked some harsh questions, and some people (Eddie’s mother, for example, still alive and on her third marriage) would be put through a lot of unnecessary emotional strain.

  And it’s just possible I could wind up with a one-way ticket to the same place where my brother spent the last two years of his life: the Wellbrook Progressive Mental Health Center. My brother was there voluntarily, but Wellbrook includes a wing just for people who had to be committed. Morris was part of the clinic’s work program, pushed a mop for them four days out of the week, and on Friday mornings he went into the Governor’s Wing, as it’s known, to wash their shit off the walls. And their blood.

  Was I just talking about Morris in the past tense? I guess I was. I don’t hope anymore that the ph
one will ring, and it will be Betty Millhauser from Wellbrook, her voice rushed and winded, telling me they’ve found him in a homeless shelter somewhere, and they’re bringing him back. I don’t think anyone will be calling to tell me they found him floating in the Charles, either. I don’t think anyone will be calling at all, except maybe to say nothing is known. Which could almost be the epitaph on Morris’s grave. And maybe I have to admit that I’m writing this, not to show it to anyone, but because I can’t help myself, and a blank page is the only safe audience for this story I can imagine.

  MY LITTLE BROTHER didn’t start to talk until he was four. A lot of people thought he was retarded. A lot of people around my old hometown, Pallow, still think he was mentally retarded, or autistic. For the record, when I was a kid I half-thought he was retarded myself, even though my parents told me he wasn’t.

  When he was eleven, he was diagnosed with juvenile schizophrenia. Later came other diagnoses: depression, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, acute depressive schizophrenia. I don’t know if any of those words really capture the sense of who he was, and what he struggled with. I know that even when he found his words, he didn’t use them that much. That he was always too small for his age, a boy with delicate bones, slender long-fingered hands, and an elfin face. He was always curiously affectless, his feelings submerged too deeply to create a stir on his face. He never seemed to blink. At times, my brother made me think of one of those tapered, horned conch shells, with a glossy pink interior curving away and out of sight into some tightly wound inner mystery. You could hold your ear to such a shell and imagine you heard the depths of a vast roaring ocean—but it was really just a trick of acoustics. The sound you were hearing was the soft, rushing thunder of nothing there. The doctors had their diagnoses, and when I was fourteen years old, that was mine.

  Because he was susceptible to agonizing ear infections, Morris wasn’t let out in the winter…which by my mother’s definition began when the World Series ended and ended when the baseball season began. Anyone who has ever had small children themselves can tell you how hard it is to keep them happily occupied for any real length of time when you can’t just send them outside. My own son is twelve now and lives with my ex in Boca Raton, but we all lived together as a family until he was seven, and I remember just how draining a cold and rainy day, all of us stuck inside, could be. For my little brother, every day was a cold and rainy day, but unlike with other children, it wasn’t hard to keep him busy. He occupied himself, descending into the cellar as soon as he came home from school, to work with quiet industry, for the rest of the afternoon, on one of his immense, sprawling, technically complicated and fundamentally worthless construction projects.