Ghost Story

For Valli Shaio and Gregorio Kohon

The chasm was merely one of the
orifices of that pit of blackness
that lies beneath us, everywhere.

Ghosts are always hungry.

I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me ... the most dreadful thing ...

In West Virginia, he came awake with a jerk and realized that for some seconds he had been driving in his sleep. "We're going to pull up and take a nap." He left the freeway outside of Clarksburg and drove on a state road until he saw against the sky a red revolving sign with the words PIONEER VILLAGE on it in white. He was keeping his eyes open only by will power. His mind did not feel right: it seemed that tears were hanging just behind his eyes and that very soon he would involuntarily begin to weep. Once in the parking lot of the shopping center, he drove to the row farthest from the entrance and backed the car up against a wire fence. Behind him was a square brick factory which manufactured plastic animal replicas for display—for Golden Chicken trucks. The factory's asphalt yard was half-filled with giant plastic chickens and cows. In their midst stood a giant blue ox. The chickens were unfinished, larger than the cows and dully white.

Before him lay this nearly empty section of the lot, then a thick cluster of cars in rows, and then the series of low sandstone-colored buildings which was the shopping center.

"Can we look at the big chickens?" the girl asked.

He shook his head. "We're not getting out of the car, we're just going to sleep." He locked the doors and rolled up the windows. Under the child's steady unexpectant gaze he bent over, felt under the seat and drew out a length of rope. "Hold your hands out," he said.

Almost smiling, she held out her small hands, balled into fists. He pulled them together and wound the rope twice about her wrists, knotted it, and then tied her ankles together. When he saw how much rope was left, he held out the surplus with one arm and roughly pulled the child to him with the other. Then he wound the rope about them both, looping them together, and made the final knot after he had stretched out across the front seat.

She was lying on top of him, her hands bunched in the middle of his stomach and her head on his chest. She breathed easily and regularly, as if she had expected no more than what he had done. The clock on the dashboard said that it was five-thirty, and the air was just beginning to turn cooler. He hitched his legs forward and leaned his head back against the headrest. To the noises of traffic, he fell asleep.

And awakened it seemed immediately, his face filmed with sweat, the faintly acrid, greasy odor of the child's hair in his nostrils. It was dark now; he must actually have slept for hours. They had gone undiscovered— imagine being found in a shopping center parking lot in Clarksburg, West Virginia, with a little girl tied to your sleeping body! He groaned, shifted himself to one side and woke the girl. Like him, she came immediately into wakefulness. She bent back her head and regarded him. There was no fear, only intensity in her gaze. He hurriedly untied the knots, dragged the rope from around them; his neck complained when he sat upright. "You want to go to the bathroom?" he asked.

She nodded. "Where?"

"Beside the car."

"Right here? In the parking lot?"

"You heard me."

He thought again that she nearly smiled. He looked at the girl's intense small face, framed in black hair. "You'll let me?"

"I'm going to be holding onto your hand."

"But you won't look?" For the first time, she showed concern.

He shook his head.

She moved her hand to the lock on her door, but he shook his head again and took her wrist and held it tightly. "Out on my side," he said and pulled up his own lock and got out, still clutching the girl's bony wrist. She began to edge sideways toward the door, a girl of seven or eight with short black hair, wearing a little dress of some thin pink material. On her otherwise bare feet were faded blue canvas sneakers, fraying at the tops of the heels. Childishly, she put one bare leg down first and then wiggled around to swing the other out of the car.

He pulled her around to the factory fence. The girl bent her head back and looked up. "You promised. You won't watch."

"I won't watch," he said.

And for a moment he did not watch, but let his head roll back as she stooped, forcing him to lean sideways. His eyes drifted over the grotesque plastic animals behind the fence. Then he heard some fabric—cotton— moving over skin, and looked down. Her left arm was extended so that she was as far from him as she could get. The cheap pink dress was pulled up over her waist. She too was looking at the plastic animals. When the girl was finished, he took his eyes from her, knowing that she would glance at him. She stood up and waited for him to tell her what to do next. He pulled her back toward the car.

"What do you do for a living?" she asked.

He laughed out loud with surprise: this cocktail-party question! "Nothing."

"Where are we going? Are you taking me someplace?"

He opened the door and stood aside as she climbed back into the car. "Someplace," he said. "Sure, I'm taking you someplace." He got in beside her, and she moved across the seat to the door.

"Where?"

"We'll see when we get there."

"It's a city."

"Like New York?"

"Yes."

"Like Clarksburg?"

He nodded.

"Are we always going to sleep in the car?"

"Not always."

"Can I play the radio?"

He said yes, and she leaned forward and twisted the knob. The car was invaded by static, two or three voices speaking at the same time. She punched another button and the same crowded hiss erupted from the speaker. "Twist the dial," he said. Frowning, her face concentrated, she began slowly to turn the selector. In a moment she had locked onto a clear signal, Dolly Parton. "I love this," she told him.

So for hours they drove south through the songs and rhythms of country music, the stations weakening and changing, the disk jockeys swapping names and accents, the sponsors succeeding each other in a revolving list of insurance companies, toothpaste, soap, Dr Pepper and Pepsi-Cola, acne preparations, funeral parlors, petroleum jelly, bargain wristwatches, aluminum siding, dandruff shampoos: but the music remained the same, a vast and self-conscious story, a sort of seamless repetitious epic in which women married truckers and no-good gamblers but stood by them until they got a divorce and the men sat in bars plotting seductions and how to get back home, and they came together hot as two-dollar pistols and parted in disgust and worried about the babies. Sometimes the car wouldn't start, sometimes the TV was busted; sometimes the bars closed down and threw you out onto the street, your pockets turned inside out. There was nothing that was not banal, there was no phrase that was not a cliche, but the child sat there satisfied and passive, dozing off to Willie Nelson and waking up to Loretta Lynn, and the man just drove, distracted by this endless soap opera of America's bottom dogs.

Once he asked her, "Have you ever heard of a man named Edward Wanderley?"

She did not reply but regarded him levelly.

"Have you?"

"Who's he?"

"He was my uncle," he said, and the girl smiled at him.

"How about a man named Sears James?"

She shook her head, still smiling.

"A man named Ricky Hawthorne?"

Again she shook her head. There was no point in continuing. He did not know why he had bothered to ask in the first place. It was even possible that she had never heard those names. Of course she had never heard them.

—Asshole, that's not your girl, who is that girl?

Then they would put him in a cell and begin to beat him, working on him methodically with nightsticks, turning his skin purple ...

But none of that happened.

She woke as he was watching her. "I have to go to the bathroom again," she said.

"Are you okay? You're not sick, are you?"

"I have to go to the bathroom."

"Okay," he grunted and moved to open his door.

"Let me go by myself. I won't run away. I won't do anything. I promise."

He looked at her serious face, her black eyes set in olive skin.

"Where could I go, anyhow? I don't even know where I am."

"I don't either."

"So?"

It had to happen sometime: he couldn't hold on to her at every moment. "You promise?" he asked, knowing the question was foolish.

She nodded. He said, "All right."

"And you promise you won't drive away?"

"Yes."

She opened the door and left the car. It was all he could do not to watch her, but it was a test, not to watch her. A Test. He wished overwhelmingly that he had her hand trapped in his fist. She could be scrambling up the bank, running off, screaming ... but no, she was not screaming. It often happened that the terrible things he imagined, the worst things, did not occur; the world gave a hitch and things went back to the way they had always been. When the girl climbed back into the car he was flooded with relief—it had happened again, no black hole had opened up for him.

He closed his eyes and saw an empty freeway, divided by white lines, unreeling before him.

"I have to find a motel," he said.

She leaned back into the seat, waiting for him to do whatever he wanted. The radio was turned low, and sounds from a station in Augusta, Georgia—a silky, lilting guitar—drifted out. For a moment, an image leaped to his mind—the girl dead, her tongue protruding, her eyes bulging. She gave him no resistance! Then for a moment he was standing—it was as if he were standing—on a street in New York, some street in the East Fifties, one of those streets where well-dressed women walk sheepdogs. Because there was one of those women, walking along. Tall, wearing beautifully faded jeans and an expensive shirt and a deep tan, walking along toward him with her sunglasses pushed to the top of her head. A huge sheepdog padded beside her, wagging its rump. He was nearly close enough to see the freckles exposed by the undone top buttons of the woman's shirt.

Ah.

But then he was right again, he heard the low guitar music, and before he switched on the ignition he patted the top of the girl's head. "Have to get us a motel," he said.

For an hour he just continued, protected by the cocoon of numbness, by the mechanics of driving: he was almost alone on the dark road.

"Are you going to hurt me?" the girl asked.

"How should I know?"

"You won't, I think. You're my friend."

Then it was not "as if' he were on the street in New York, he
was
on that street, watching the woman with the dog and the suntan come toward him. Again he saw the little random scattering of freckles below her collarbone—he knew how it would taste if he put his tongue there. As often in New York, he could not see the sun, but he could feel it—a heavy, aggressive sun. The woman was a stranger, unimportant ... he was not supposed to know her, she was just a type ... a taxi went by, he was aware of iron railings on his right side, the lettering on the windows of a French restaurant on the other side of the street. Through the soles of his boots, the pavement sent up heat. Somewhere above, a man was shouting one word over and over. He
was
there, he
was:
a portion of his emotion must have shown in his face, for the woman with the dog looked at him curiously and then hardened her face and moved to the outer edge of the sidewalk.

Could she speak? Could someone in whatever sort of experience this was utter sentences, audible ordinary human sentences? Could you talk to the people you met in hallucinations, and would they answer back?

He opened his mouth. "I have to"
—to get out,
he was going to say, but he was already back in the stalled car. A soggy lump that had once been two potato chips lay on his tongue.

What was the worst thing you've ever done?

The maps seemed to show that he was only a few miles from Valdosta. He drove unthinkingly on, not daring to look at the child and therefore not knowing if she were awake or sleeping, but feeling her eyes on him nonetheless. Eventually he passed a sign which informed him that he was ten miles from the Friendliest City in the South.

It looked like any southern town: a little industry on the way in, machine shops and die-stampers, surreal groups of corrugated metal huts under arc lights, yards littered with cannibalized trucks; further in, wooden houses in need of paint, groups of black men standing on corners, their faces alike in the dark; new roads went scarring through the land, then ended abruptly, weeds already encroaching; in the town proper, the teenagers patrolling endlessly, vacantly in their old cars.

He passed a low building, incongruously new, a sign of the New South, with a sign reading PALMETTO MOTOR-IN; he reversed down the street back to the building.

A girl with upswept lacquered hair and candy-pink lipstick gave him a meaningless, dead smile and a room with twin beds "for myself and my daughter." In the register he wrote: Lamar Burgess, 155 Ridge Road, Stonington, Conn. After he handed her a night's payment in cash, she gave him a key.

Their cubicle contained two single beds, an iron-textured brown carpet and lime-green walls, two pictures—a kitten tilting its head, an Indian looking into a leafy gorge from a clifftop—a television set, a door into a blue-tiled bathroom. He sat on the toilet seat while the girl undressed and got into bed.

When he peeked out to check on her, she was lying beneath a sheet with her face to the wall. Her clothes were scattered on the floor, a nearly empty bag of potato chips lay beside her. He ducked back into the bathroom, stripped and got into the shower. Which blessed him. For a moment he felt almost as though he were back in his old life, not "Lamar Burgess" but Don Wanderley, one-time resident of Bolinas, California, and author of two novels (one of which had made some money). Lover for a time of Alma Mobley, brother to defunct David Wanderley. And there it was. It was no good, he could not get away from it. The mind was a trap—it was a cage that slammed down over you. However he had got to where he was, he was there. Stuck there in the Palmetto Motor-In. He turned off the shower, all traces of the blessing departed.

In the little room, only the weak light over his bed to illuminate those ghostly surroundings, he pulled on his jeans and opened his suitcase. The hunting knife was wrapped in a shirt, and he unrolled it so the knife fell out on the bed.

Carrying it by the chunky bone handle, he crossed to the girl's bed. She slept with her mouth open; perspiration gleamed on her forehead.

For a long time he sat beside her, holding the knife in his right hand, ready to use it.

But this night he could not. Giving up, giving in, he shook her arm until her eyelids fluttered.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"I want to sleep."

"Who are you?"

"Go away. Please."

"Who are you? I'm asking, who are you?"

"You know."

"I know?"

"You know. I told you."

"What's your name?"

"Angie."

"Angie what?"

"Angie Maule. I told you before."

He held the knife behind his back so that she could not see it.

"I want to sleep," she said. "You woke me up." She turned her back to him again. Fascinated, he watched sleep settle over her: her fingertips twitched, her eyelids contracted, her breathing changed. It was as if, to exclude him, she had willed herself to sleep. Angie— Angela? Angela Maule. It did not sound like the name she had given him when he had first taken her into the car. Minoso? Minnorsi? Some name like that, an Italian name—not Maule.

He held the knife in both hands, the black bone handle jammed into his naked belly, his elbows out: all he had to do was thrust it forward and jerk it up, using all his strength ...

In the end, sometime around three in the morning, he crossed over to his bed.