American Ghost Read online

  Cricket nodded slowly, and I was gratified to see a wet line creeping down from one nostril. Almost angrily, she scrubbed it away with the back of her hand, then she reached into her jacket pocket and came out with a dense, dark chunk of a cannabis bud in a zip-lock plastic sandwich bag. She said, “This is the last of what he gave me for my birthday.”

  “That’s what he gave you? Dope? For your birthday?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “He said it was the most perfect small bud he’d ever grown. He said it reminded him of me.”

  Mantis said, “Well, if anybody could grow a perfect bud.” Then he threw an obvious card on the table: “And he was right; if anybody’s like a perfect little bud … ” But she quickly brushed him off.

  “It was sweet,” she said, and rubbed her nose again. “Let’s smoke some.”

  “What’ll we do if the cops decide to bust in here right now with that search warrant?”

  Cricket almost smiled. “I can swallow pretty fast.”

  She opened the bag and drew it to her nose for a moment, inhaling deeply with her eyes closed. Then she reached in and pinched a piece off of that gorgeous fragment of bud. Holding her hand above the table, she rolled the nugget between the balls of her thumb and slender forefinger to crumble it into resinous flakes, after which she packed it into the bowl of the little brass pipe that Mantis offered to her after pulling it from the pocket of his greasy jeans. Thick smoke rose languidly once the pipe was lit; I longed to catch a whiff of it, but, apparently, I no longer had a sense of smell. Maybe I really was in hell.

  Mantis ended up smoking nearly the entire bowl by himself. Cricket took just one little toke, which was unusual for her—she may not have even inhaled—and after that, she waved him off every time he offered her the pipe.

  When they were finished smoking my stuff, they settled back into the couch. They were silent for a long while, then Mantis started moving his tongue around the inside of his mouth in an experimental manner before finally sliding his reddened eyes in Cricket’s direction. In a croaking voice, he began, “So, Crick, whadya say? You wanna … ”

  If I’d had a heart, it would have skipped a beat.

  “No,” she said, cutting him off.

  I was afraid he might decide to press the issue—what would I do then? What could I do?—but he just shrugged and slumped.

  After a minute Cricket said, “So, in his room, what were you looking for?”

  Mantis shrugged again. “Whatever we might have missed the first time around. Any little scrap of his that could connect us to the business. The tone the cops were taking when I talked to them made me paranoid, I guess.” He looked at her. “What about you?”

  “Same,” Cricket said, after a pause. A moment later, she added, “If they’re coming, I think the shed might be a problem. He wrote stuff on the walls.”

  “Yeah? Does it mean anything? I always thought that was just a bunch of his usual crazy-genius bullshit, scribbled all up in there. Stuff about birds, maybe.”

  “Some of it was poems and stuff,” Cricket confirmed. “One of them he said was all about how he felt about me. But there was other stuff too; he put it in code, and I think it was about how much fuel the generator was using, and maybe notes about different types of smoke he was growing. You know how some of them had, like, girls’ names, and some were musical instruments? But I think cops could figure all that out if they wanted to.”

  “Fuckin’ Thumb,” said Mantis. I was touched to detect a note of wistful affection in his voice. Then he gave Cricket a direct look and smiled. “A poem on how he felt about you. How’d that one go?”

  Cricket shrugged. When she spoke, it was with a slight catch in her voice. “I don’t know. I’d go out there and try to read it sometimes, but I couldn’t understand it. I don’t think he really wanted me to.”

  After a moment Cricket took an audible breath and continued, “So I think maybe we should paint those walls out there.”

  “Nope. Won’t work, and will just look suspicious. If they want to know what’s under the paint, they can get it off easy enough. If you’re really worried about it, the shed should probably just burn down.”

  She reached and settled her hand on the inside of his thigh. He slitted his eyes, slid them to the hand that was resting on his leg, and then widened them at her.

  “Well then, why don’t you take care of that for us?” she said. “For all of us, Thumb included?”

  “Okay,” he said slowly, and nodded. She gave his leg a gentle double squeeze.

  “I mean, you should check with Chef first, but I think it’s the thing to do.”

  “All right.”

  “Make sure you get a fire permit from the town office, though. Otherwise, we’ll have the fire department here, not to mention the sheriff. If they ask, tell them we want to burn some construction debris.”

  “Not a problem, Sugar. She burns before the sun sets.”

  Quite willingly, even eagerly, I retreated to my corner above the door. In fact, I dove right through into that darkness on the other side.

  CHAPTER 3

  In both of the college writing classes I took, the instructors told me, “Write what you know.” As I’ve mentioned, that’s part of the reason I left college to live and work with Chef, grow weed, and hang out with bikers: I wanted to know something aside from the second-hand glory of my father’s abbreviated criminal career and my own life as a privileged student. And maybe the book I wrote as a result would have been a decent one. But now that I’m dead, I’ve got a story that’s much more appealing than that, and so I’ve switched my focus. What I now know gives me the unique opportunity to be the first person ever to write a book from beyond the grave. That’s important, because one of the things that haunts me the most is the fact that, in twenty-two years on planet earth, there’s nothing else I really accomplished. I’d like my life (and death) to have had some meaning.

  As for discovering the missing details of my murder, not only is this something I’ve apparently got to accomplish in order to move on in the afterlife, but along with my natural curiosity about how it all went down—wouldn’t you want to know what happened, if it happened to you?—it will help give some narrative shape to the otherwise shapeless experience of being dead.

  All of this leads to something else I need to talk about at this point, because you’ve undoubtedly heard that dead men tell no tales, and you’re doubtlessly wondering how it is that I’m able to tell you mine. Well, there’s an answer, but it’s a little complicated. In fact, the voice you’re hearing right now as you read this is not entirely mine. In order to write my account from beyond the grave, I’ve had to work with a couple of living people—a kind of ghostwriting team. The first of these people I will tell you about is Ben, a spiritual medium a little younger than myself who often gets confused about what, exactly, I’ve dictated to him.

  When things are going well, this is the way we work: Ben sits with his pudgy fingers resting on a Ouija board planchette, the Ouija board planchette on the Ouija board, the Ouija board itself on the cluttered card table in his little bedroom at the back of his grandmother’s trailer, and he waits for me to spell my story, which he then enters sentence by sentence into a spiral-bound composition book. Of course, spelling everything out completely would take a God-awful amount of time—Ben might die of old age before we finished—so we’ve worked out a system to make it go faster. We use phonetics as well as first and last letters for names and frequently used words, and in dictation I drop out most of the vowels, which Ben fills in afterward; but there’s more to it than that. We’ve developed a code that is a sloppy stew of familiar text-messaging acronyms and abbreviations combined with pidgin English and our own idiosyncratic set of shortcuts.

  You probably remember that “official” Parker Brothers or Hasbro Ouija board from your childhood: The alphabet; a row of numbers, zero to nine; “Yes” in the upper left; “No” in the upper right; “Good Bye” at the bottom. A heart-shaped pla
stic table with a round window in the middle—the planchette—which glides around the board on little felt feet. In our work, Ben and I use “Good Bye” like a space bar on a keyboard; it separates words, which is especially important when you’re employing severe abbreviations which otherwise would make no sense.

  For instance, the letter G by itself stands for “ghost;” GS is the plural. DD is dead. AFL is “Afterlife.” “MC”: motorcycle.

  “Cricket” is CCT; “Thumb” is “TM;” “Mantis,” MTS; “Dirt,” DRT. “Harley-Davidson”: HD. “Ben” is just “B.” And Fred—you’ll hear more about him later—is “F.”

  As for the smaller, frequently used words, T is “the.” “HR” and “TR”: “here” and “there.” N does double duty as “in” and “and.” Z is “is,” and S stands for “said,” or “says.” Just as in text-messaging, R is “are” or “our,” and YR is “your” or “you’re.”

  Regarding punctuation, other than two quick “Good Byes”—a bounce of the planchette at the bottom of the board—to end a sentence, there is none, and it’s one of many problems we won’t solve for a while. Three Good Byes is my way of asking Ben to start a new paragraph, which he sometimes does, and sometimes doesn’t do. Another problem is that when I’m dictating an especially long sentence, Ben will sometimes forget the beginning before I’ve reached then end. Then he’ll take the liberty of writing his own inferior approximation in the blue-lined notebook, forcing me to let it stand, or insist that he start all over.

  Here’s a brief example of how it comes together when it’s going well. Say I dictate the following to Ben:

  1S (Good Bye) YR (Good Bye) DD (Good Bye) GS (Good Bye) R (Good Bye) EVRYWR (Good Bye) (Good Bye)

  On that second Good Bye—“Bye” is what I actually say to him—Ben picks up a pen and in our blue-lined composition notebook scribbles, “Once yr dead ghosts r everywhere,” the opening line to this story.

  Although it’s still not a fast system in spite of our shortcuts, once we get warmed up and in synch, we can move along more rapidly than you might think.

  *

  Ben: a twenty-year-old rural Maine dude who, apart from his exotic ability to communicate with a dead guy—me—is a fairly typical product of his time, setting, and circumstances. A few decades back, by this point in his life he probably would’ve been working more or less contentedly in a shoe factory or a paper mill. But Maine mills of any kind now are almost extinct, and dependable employment for guys like Ben is hard to come by. He did manage to graduate from high school a couple of years ago, and if either of his long-divorced parents had any money he’d probably be enrolled with others of his kind in some third-rate college somewhere. As is, he lives in his grandmother’s trailer along a stretch of winding, backwoods road, works with enthusiasm whenever work is available, and to his credit, never gives up hope that he one day will luck into a gig that enriches him enough to buy a car, move out on his own, maybe have a live-in girlfriend. He even entertains a few vague dreams that are grander than all that.

  Ben spends a little of his time each week wandering the county like a dogged wraith as he hunts for the permanent job he probably never will find. Most potential employers barely give him a look before dismissing him as a lost cause—a country loser without even a car he can call his own. Once a month or so, he’ll hook up with a team of amateur “paranormal investigators,” a group of misfit nerds that travels northern New England in a van trying to capture electronic evidence of supernatural occurrences. In fact, it was during one of these dorky ghost-hunting missions that he and I first connected.

  However, in spite of his frequent forays, whenever I’m looking for him odds are I’ll find him holed up in his room at the back of his grandmother’s trailer, where he plays endless fantasy-based video games on his laptop computer. Over time I’ve decided that it is these games and his passion for them that are the key to who Ben really is—by which I mean the person he imagines himself to be, and fantasizes he will one day become, just as soon as a handful of favorable circumstances rains from the sky to shower him in silver coins waiting to be spent. Ben views his video games as preparation for the real challenges he often dreams of facing, and in these games he invariably casts himself as the hero he believes lies trapped beneath his doughy skin. The roles he chooses are those of a man—decisive, swift, agile with a sword—who is able to rescue beautiful women from terrible men and monsters. In his games he is an invariable righter of wrongs, a changer-for-the-better of other people’s lives, a man worthy of great respect. On the computer screen, as well as in the future he imagines for himself, Ben matters.

  I know all this not only because I’ve been able to observe him closely in his most unguarded moments—when we’re not working with his Ouija board, he often forgets that I might be there—but also because he will sometimes tell me things that he might never confide in anyone else. Of these probably the most important is that he’s got a couple of young twin half-siblings, a boy and girl, three years old and living in another state, whom he worries about a great deal because of a series of awful experiences—he’s disclosed some of these to me, but refuses to let me share them with you—that he’d had as a child with one or both of their parents. Of all his heroic fantasies, undoubtedly the most practical is to move closer to these kids in order to shield them from the sorts of abuses that had happened to him. And to do that he needs some money, a working, road-worthy vehicle, and a little more of just about everything than he now has.

  I think that, even as the novelty of having me for an invisible friend begins to wear off, and in spite of his general misgivings about taking dictation from a ghost, these distant hopes and unformed ambitions are what keep him working with me. He’s smart enough to realize that my brand of enchantment, dark and soiled as it is, probably constitutes the only real magic that will ever come his way, and as such, even though he can’t quite imagine when and how his payoff will arrive, may well represent his one chance to realize his full, heroic potential. In Ben’s own wise words: “I don’t know where I’m going, but I seem to be getting there.”

  Here I have to add that Ben’s pretensions to heroism, while in general useful to me, occasionally impede my progress, because instead of sticking with my narrative, which is all I need him to do, he sometimes will argue about what could, would, should be, or should have been done about something I’ve been telling him. He even second-guesses some of my actions that aren’t what he imagines he himself would do. For one example, when I first told Ben about the ghost girl who one day reached out to me in the underground river, he became agitated. He started to nag me about her. He thought we should “help.”

  That ghost girl: there I was, toppling in the darkness of the underground river when out of nowhere she seemed to spiral all around me. Otherwise invisible, she arrived in shifting ribbons of light like the aurora borealis, and she was so close I imagined her wet skin brushing against me. I could sense that, like me, she’d died young. But in spite of being lonely past the point of anguish, I dreaded hearing what she had to say. I assumed that as a messenger she carried some harsh new warning I had to heed; either that or there was a grim job I was expected to do under pain of an even deeper damnation.

  It was at least a small relief that she spoke in an ordinary woman’s voice rather than one that echoed death with the sound of gurgling water or the rasping of rocks. She said, “Thumb! Is it you? Is your name Thumb?”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Angelfish. I need your help.”

  “Help to do what?”

  “You’re the one who can do it! You’re the only one! Thumb!” She sounded frantic, and her dancing lights were beginning to fade.

  “What is it? I don’t think I can do anything. What can I do?”

  “Look for me! Keep looking! I’m Angelfish!” And with that she was gone, seemingly swept far past me in the river, which in her wake returned to blackness.

  At this point in my narration, Ben sat up straight, hi
s face flushed and his eyes wide, and he took his hands from the planchette. The romance of a hot girl in desperate need of help—even a dead girl—had obviously inflamed his imagination, and perhaps other parts of him as well. He said, “Angelfish. Would that be a biker chick’s name?” He put his fingers back on the planchette.

  CD B NO IDEA

  “Did you end up helping her?”

  HW CD I SH WNT AWA

  (How could I she went away)

  “Dude, so you never heard from her again?” Ben sounded upset.

  I hesitated before spelling.

  NO I HRD 2S MO FM HR LTS GT BK 2 WRK

  (No I heard twice more from her let’s get back to work)

  “Really? So what happened? What did she say? What trouble was she in?”

  SH S

  (She said)

  … then I reconsidered and began again.

  B STP

  W HV 2 RT EVRYTG N T RT ORDR R MY STRY WL GT FCKD UP

  (Ben stop. We have to write everything in the right order or my story will get fucked up.)

  “Yeah. Okay. But just tell me what she told you. I really want to know.”

  B SHS A G N WV GT LTS MO GS 2 RT ABT 1ST

  (Ben she’s a ghost and we’ve got lots more ghosts to write about first)

  “It wouldn’t kill you to tell me,” Ben said in a petulant tone, his hands now tucked beneath his armpits. “I wouldn’t even need to write it until later.” I was tempted to tell him about the other two underwater encounters I’d had with Angelfish, just to make him happy. But finally I decided against taking the chance of having those episodes shuffled into my book in the wrong places, thereby screwing everything up, so I just stayed silent until he quit sulking and was ready to move on.

  *

  After seeing Cricket and Mantis, the next time I returned from the Great Wherever I found the house empty again except for Tigre, who was snoring on the floor in my recently rifled bedroom. Nothing remained of my generator shed but a mound of ashes and blackened debris. The many words I had scribbled on those walls—all the things I’d thought of and dreamt—might as well never have been written, or dreamed. The sun was shining, but I could neither feel its rays nor sense how warm the air might be; it was now clear that I was completely cut off from the heat of life itself, a fact that I found dispiriting to the point of despair. Out of a desperate urge for rebellion—although rebellion against whom or what, I was not sure—I decided then that I would make a run for it, right through the high, wooden fence that separated our backyard from the woods and the abandoned trailer that had served as Chef’s kitchen and, beyond where the trees ended, a desolate hayfield. Where I would go after that, I didn’t know; escape itself was my only goal.