20th Century Ghosts

by Joe Hill

  A tractor-trailer thundered past below us, engine barking as the driver shifted into a lower, noisier gear. Black diesel-smelling smoke swirled up through the snow, which was falling in big, curling flakes. When had it started to snow? I wasn’t sure.

  “How’d you do that to your eye?” I tried again, surprised at my own nerve.

  He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He was still grinning. “Fuckin bag of shit my mom is going out with caught me lookin in his wallet. Like I was going to steal his food stamps or something. He’s going to bed early, he’s got to leave for Kentucky before sunup, so I’m just staying out of the house until—oh wait. Look. Oil tanker comin.”

  I glanced down and saw another big semi booming towards us, pulling a long steel tank behind it.

  “We got one chance to blow it up,” Eddie said. “Four ounces of C-4. We hit this motherfucker just right we’ll take out the whole road.”

  There was a brick on the wall, right in front of him, and I waited for him to put his hand on it and shove it off onto the oil tanker as it passed below. Instead, though, he put his hand on top of mine, which was still resting on the other brick. I felt a little pulse of alarm, but made no effort to pull my hand free. That’s probably a fact worth underlining. What happened next I let happen.

  “Wait for it,” he said. “Steady. Don’t miss. Now.”

  Just as the oil truck started in under the footbridge, he gave my hand a shove. The brick struck the side of the oil tank below with a ringing ke-rang! It took a hard bounce and flipped sideways, away from the truck and out across the passing lane, where at that moment, a red Volvo was just pulling abreast of the rolling tanker. The brick crunched into the windshield—I had time to see a pattern of spiderweb fracture lines shooting out across the glass—and then the car disappeared under the footbridge.

  We both spun around and jumped to the opposite railing. My lungs seized up, for a moment I couldn’t force any air up out of my chest. When the Volvo came out from under the footbridge, it was already veering to the left, across the shoulder of the road. It left the highway a moment later and went down the snowy embankment at around thirty miles an hour. In the shallow valley at the bottom of the embankment were a few whippy maple saplings. The Volvo hit one with a brittle crack. The whole shattered windshield fell out in one glittering piece and slid across the hood, then dropped into the snow.

  I was still struggling to inhale when the passenger side front door sprang open. A blond, matronly woman in a red overcoat, belted at the waist, clambered out. She was holding a mittened hand over one eye. She was screaming, yanking at the back door.

  “Amy!” she screamed. “Oh God, Amy!”

  Then Eddie had me by the elbow. He turned me around, shoved me at the path. He yelled, “Fuck outta here!”

  He shoved me again as we came off the footbridge and onto the trail into the park, shoved me so hard I fell to one knee on the crushed blue stones—sharp darts of pain shot into my kneecap—but then he was wrenching me up by the elbow again and rushing me on. I didn’t think. I ran. With blood thudding in my temples, and my face burning in the cold air, I ran.

  I DIDN’T START to think until we reached the park, and slowed to a walk. We were moving, without discussing it, in the direction of my house. My lungs hurt from the effort of running in snow boots, and from hauling in chestfuls of frozen air.

  She went around to the back door, shouting Oh God, Amy! Someone in the backseat, then, a little girl. The tall, heavyset blonde was holding a mitten over her eye. Did she get a shard of glass in it? Had we blinded her? Also: the blonde spilled out of the passenger seat. Why didn’t the driver get out? Was he conscious? Was he dead? My legs wouldn’t stop shaking. I remembered Eddie pushing my hand, remembered the brick slipping out from under my palm, tumbling end over end, and then the way it banged off the side of the oil tanker and flipped into the windshield of the Volvo. I couldn’t take it back. I saw that then, the thought struck me like a revelation. I looked down at the hand that had shoved the brick, and saw a photo in it, Mindy Ackers probing the triangle of cotton between her legs. I didn’t remember picking it up. I showed it to Eddie, wordlessly. He looked at it, his eyes foggy, baffled.

  “Keep it,” he said. It was the first either of us had spoken since he yelled Fuck outta here.

  We passed my mother on the way into my house. She was standing next to the mailbox, making small talk with our next-door neighbor, and she absentmindedly touched the back of my neck as I went by her, a flitting, intimate brush of the fingers that caused me to shudder.

  I didn’t say anything until we were inside, taking our boots and coats off in the mudroom. My father was at work, I didn’t know where Morris was and didn’t care. The house was darkened and silent, had about it the stillness of an empty place.

  As I unbuttoned my corduroy jacket, I said, “We should call someone.” My voice seemed to come from somewhere else, not from in my chest and throat, but from the corner of the room, under the pile of hats that were laying there.

  “Call who?”

  “The police. To see if they’re all right.”

  He stopped pulling off his denim jacket and stared at me. In the poor light, his black eye looked like a tragic accident with mascara.

  I went on talking for some reason. “We could just say we were standing on the footbridge and we saw the accident. We don’t need to say we were the ones who caused it.”

  “We didn’t cause it.”

  “Well—” I started, and then didn’t know what to say next. It was such a baldly false statement, I couldn’t think of any way to respond that wouldn’t come off like a provocation.

  “The brick took a bad spin,” he said. “How could that be our fault?”

  “I just want to make sure everyone is all right,” I said. “There was a little kid in the back—”

  “Fuck there was.”

  “Well—” I faltered again, then forced myself to continue. “There was, Eddie. Her mom was calling for her.”

  He stopped moving for an instant, studying me carefully, a look of unhappy, truculent calculation on his face. Then he lifted his shoulders in a stiff shrug, and went back to kicking off his boots.

  “If you call the police I’ll kill myself,” he said. “Then you can have that on your head, too.”

  It felt as if there was a great pressure weighing down on my chest, compressing my lungs. I tried to speak. My voice came out in a whistling whisper. “Come on.”

  “I mean it,” he said. “I would.” He paused again, then said, “You know how I said my brother called me that time about all the money he was making ripping off cars in Detroit?”

  I nodded.

  “That was bullshit. Remember how I said he called to tell me about fucking redheaded twins while he was out in Minnesota?”

  After a moment I nodded again.

  “That was bullshit too. It was always bullshit. He never called.” Eddie took a long breath, which shuddered just slightly on the inhale. “I don’t know where he’s at, or what he’s doing. He only called me once, while he was still in the Juvie. Two days before he broke out. He didn’t sound right. He was trying not to cry. He said never do anything that will get you in here. He made me promise. He said they try and make you faggot in there. There’s all these Boston niggers who act faggot, and they gang up on you. And then he disappeared and no one knows what happened to him. But I think if he was okay somewhere he would’ve called by now. Me and him were tight. He wouldn’t just make me wonder. And I know my brother, and he wouldn’t want to be someone’s faggot.” He was crying by now, soundlessly. He swiped at his cheeks with the sleeve of his sweatshirt, and then fixed his fierce, watery stare on me. He said, “And I’m not going to Juvie over some stupid accident that wasn’t even my fault. No one’s going to turn me homo. I already had something like that happen to me once. That fucking smelly shit, my mother’s fucking Tennessee shithead—” He broke off, tore his gaze away, gasping slightly.

  I
didn’t say anything. The sight of Eddie Prior with tears soaking his face took away any arguments I might’ve made for going to the police, silenced me completely.

  In a low, shaky voice, he went on, “We can’t undo it. It happened. It was a stupid accident. A bad ricochet. It’s no one’s fault. Whoever got hurt we just have to live with it now. We just have to sit tight. No one’s ever going to figure out we had anything to do with it. I got the bricks from under the footbridge. There’s a bunch of them coming loose. Unless someone saw us, no one will ever know it didn’t just fall. But if you really got to call someone, just let me know first, because I won’t let them do to me what they did to my brother.”

  It was several moments before I could collect the air to speak.

  “Forget it,” I said. “Let’s just watch some TV and cool out.”

  We finished pulling off our winter clothes, and stepped into the kitchen…and I almost walked into Morris, who was standing at the open door to the basement, with a reel of brown packing tape in one hand. His head was tilted to the side, in a listening-to-the-spheres pose, his eyes wide with their usual empty-headed curiosity.

  Eddie bumped me aside with his elbow, grabbed the front of Morris’s black cord turtleneck, and slammed him into the wall. Morris’s already wide eyes flew open even wider. He stared with blank, dumb confusion into Eddie’s flushed face. I grabbed Eddie’s wrist, tried to pry his fingers free, couldn’t break his grip.

  “Were you eavesdropping on us you little retard?” Eddie asked.

  “Eddie—Eddie—it doesn’t matter what he heard. Forget it. He won’t tell. Let him go,” I said.

  And just like that Eddie released him. Morris gazed into his face, blinking, mouth hanging open and slack. He took a brief sideways peek at me—what was that all about?—then moved his shoulders in a little shrug.

  “I had to pull apart the octopus,” Morris said. “I liked all those arms streaming to the center. How they were like spokes on a wheel. But no matter where you climb in, you always know where you’re going and not-knowing is better. Not so easy to do but better. I have new ideas now. This time I’m going to start from the center and work out, same as spiders do.”

  “Wicked,” I said. “Go for it.”

  “My new design will use the most boxes ever. Wait’ll you see.”

  “We’ll be counting the minutes, won’t we, Eddie?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “I’ll be downstairs working on it if anyone needs me,” Morris said, and he slipped through the narrow gap between Eddie and myself, clunked off down the basement steps.

  We made our way into the living room. I put on the TV, but I couldn’t focus on what we were watching. I felt removed from myself, felt as if I were standing at the end of a long corridor, and at the far end I could see Eddie and me sitting together on the couch, only it wasn’t me, it was a hollow wax figure cast in my image.

  Eddie said, “Sorry I freaked out on your brother.”

  I wanted Eddie to go away, wanted to be by myself, curled up on my bed in the quiet, restful dark of my bedroom. I didn’t know how to ask him to go.

  Instead, I said, through just slightly numb lips, “If Morris did tell—and he won’t, I swear—even if he heard us, he wouldn’t understand what we were talking about—but if he did tell someone—you wouldn’t—you—”

  “Kill myself?” Eddie asked. He made a rough, derisive sound in his throat. “Fuck no. I’d kill him. But he won’t tell, right?”

  “No,” I said. My stomach hurt.

  “And you won’t tell,” he said, a few minutes later. The day was growing late, the light draining away all around us.

  “No,” I said.

  He pushed himself to his feet, swatted my leg on the way out of the room. “Got to go. I’m eating dinner with my cousin. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  I waited until I heard the door close in the mudroom as he went out. Then I came to my feet myself, light-headed and woozy. I reeled into the front hall and started upstairs. I almost fell over Morris. He was sitting six steps up from the bottom, his hands on his knees, his face a tranquilized blank. In his dark clothes, only his waxy pale face was visible in the dim of the front hall. My heart lurched when I saw him there. For a moment I stood over him, staring down at him. He stared back, his expression as alien and unreadable as ever.

  So he had heard the rest of it, including what Eddie said about killing him if he told. But I really didn’t think he could’ve understood us.

  I stepped around him, and went up to my room. I shut the door behind me and crawled under the blankets, still dressed in my clothes, just as I had imagined doing. The room tilted and swayed around me until I was almost overcome with seasickness, and had to pull the covers over my head to block out the senseless, disorientating motion of the world.

  I LOOKED IN the paper the next morning for some information about the accident—little girl left in coma after overpass ambush—but there was nothing.

  I CALLED A hospital that afternoon, and said I was wondering about the accident on 111 the other day, the car that went off the road, the windshield fell out and some people were hurt. My voice was unsteady and nervous, and the receptionist on the other end began to interrogate me—why did I need to know? who was I?—and I hung up.

  I WAS IN my room a few days later, feeling through the pockets of my winter coat for a pack of gum, when I came across a sharp-edged square of some slippery, plastic-like material. I pulled it out and stared at the Polaroid of Mindy Ackers fingering her crotch. The sight turned my stomach. I pulled open the top drawer, flung it in, and slammed the drawer behind it. It made me feel short of breath, just to look at it; remembering the Volvo crashed into the tree, the woman spilling out, mitten over her eye, Oh God, Amy! My memories of the accident were growing uncertain by then. Sometimes I imagined there had been blood on the side of the blonde’s face. Sometimes I imagined there had been blood dappling the broken glass of the windshield in the snow. And sometimes I imagined I had heard the teakettle shrieking of a child crying out in pain. This was an especially hard conviction to shake; someone had been screaming, I was sure of it, someone besides the woman. Maybe me.

  I DIDN’T WANT to have anything to do with Eddie after that, but he couldn’t be avoided. He sat next to me in classes and passed me notes. I had to pass notes back to him so he wouldn’t think I was brushing him off. He showed up at my house after school, without warning, and we sat in front of the TV together. He brought his checkerboard and would set it up while we watched Hogan’s Heroes. I see now—and maybe I saw then—that he was consciously sticking close to me, watching over me. He knew he couldn’t allow me to put a distance between us, that if we weren’t partners anymore, I might do anything, even confess. And he knew too that I didn’t have the spine for ending a friendship, that I couldn’t not open the door to him when he rang the bell. That it was in me to just go along with the situation, no matter how uncomfortable, rather than try and change things and risk an upsetting confrontation.

  Then, one afternoon, about three weeks after the accident out on Route 111, I discovered Morris in my room, standing at my dresser. The top drawer was open. In one hand he had a box of X-acto knife blades; there was a whole pile of junk like that in there, twine, staples, a roll of duct tape, and sometimes if Morris needed something for his never-ending fort, he would raid my supplies. In his other hand was the Polaroid of Mindy Ackers’s crotch. He held it almost to his nose, stared at it with round, uncomprehending eyes.

  “Don’t go through my stuff,” I said.

  “Isn’t it sad you can’t see her face?” he said.

  I snapped the picture out of his hand and tossed it in the dresser. “Go through my stuff again and I’ll kill you.”

  “You sound like Eddie,” Morris said, and he turned his head and stared at me. I hadn’t seen a lot of him the last few days. He had been in the basement even more than usual. His lean, delicate-boned face was thinner than I remembered, and I was uniquely
conscious in that moment of how slight and fragile, how childlike his build was. He was almost twelve, but could’ve easily passed for eight. “Are you and him still friends?”

  I was ragged from being worried all the time, spoke without thinking. “I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you tell him to go? Why don’t you make him go away?” He stood almost too close to me, staring up into my face with his unblinking saucer-plate eyes.

  “I can’t,” I said, and turned away, because I couldn’t bear to meet his worried, mystified gaze. I felt stretched to the limit of what I could take, my nerves worn raw. “I wish I could. But no one can make him go away.” I leaned against the dresser, rested my forehead against the edge of it for a moment. In a rough whisper that I hardly heard myself, I said, “He can’t let me get away.”

  “Because of what happened?”

  I shot him a look then. He was hovering at my elbow, his hands curled against his chest, his fingertips fluttering nervously. So he understood…maybe not all of it, but some. Enough. He knew we had done something terrible. He knew the strain of it was pulling me apart.

  “You forget about what happened,” I said, my voice stronger now, edged almost with threat. “You forget about what you heard. If anyone finds out—Morris, you can’t tell anyone. Not ever.”

  “I want to help.”

  “I can’t be helped,” I said and the truth of this statement, said just in this way, hit me hard. In a lame, unhappy tone, I finally added, “Go away. Please.”

  Morris frowned slightly, and bowed his head, seemed briefly hurt. Then he said, “I’m almost finished with the new fort. I see it all now. How it will be.” Then he fixed his arresting, wide-eyed stare on me once again. “I’m building it for you, Nolan. Because I want you to feel better.”

  I let out a soft breath that was almost a laugh. For a moment we had almost been talking like any pair of brothers who loved and worried about each other, talking like near-equals; for a few seconds I had forgotten Morris’s delusions and fantasies. Had forgotten that reality, for him, was a thing he only glimpsed now and then through the drifting vapors of his waking daydreams. To Morris, the only sensible response to unhappiness was to build a skyscraper out of egg cartons.