Ghost Town (2 page)

Maureen was a cute girl. She had freckles that I liked. They weren't just on her face, either, as I found out that day to my delight. They were all over. A girl covered from stem to stern with polka dots.

How lucky for her,
I thought.

Now that she's gone, I think about her more than I probably should.

It gets hot in Kansas in the summertime.

The rain can wait months to return.

Fields wither. Insects buzz. Creeks shrink down to shards of pottery.

If you were foolish enough to sit down in the tall grass you would get up with ticks on your legs—or worse. That night, you would use tweezers and rubbing alcohol to carefully pull them out of your skin.

Ticks are nasty little animals, yet they seem to be doing better in Paisley than the rest of us.

Tim Balderson liked to hunt for frogs. After he'd find one, he would kill it, usually by throwing it like a baseball against a rock or a tree.

Horrified, I'd ask him, "Why do you do that?"

"I don't know," he'd answer. "It's just the hunter in me, I suppose."

There is no hunter in me. I figure life is too precarious to add my influence to who is going to be lucky and who isn't.

Chief Leopard Frog agrees.

He'd agree even if his last name weren't Frog.

"Let it be," he once told me in no uncertain words. "We're all equal in this world."

Maureen Balderson's nipples were tiny and pink. I wish now that I had taken a picture of her.

In fact, I wish I had a picture of everybody who has lived in Paisley, Kansas, since the day I was deposited here by the stork. At one time or another, they were all my friends.

But it's too late now.

Now, it's all in my mind.

HERE'S AN INTERESTING FACT
that says a lot about the way our government operates: Even though there was no one left in Paisley but my mother and me, and thus no one to deliver mail to but ourselves, my mother continued to be paid the same as always.

So she didn't feel awkward about receiving the money, she busied herself in the morning pasting forwarding stickers on the few letters that still arrived. Other mail, such as advertising circulars and catalogs, she put into a bin for paper recycling. Some of the envelopes and packages she stamped
RETURN TO SENDER
. But even when she took her time and tidied up after herself she was always finished before noon.

We had a lot of time on our hands, but although we are closely related and have deep affection for each other, I'm sure, our interests have always been dissimilar. For example, she likes to watch TV.

I can't sit still that long.

Long before the Baldersons moved to Kansas City, getting supplies had become a problem in Paisley. The nearest supermarket was an hour's drive. The nearest town with lots of stores and a movie theater and a hospital was more than two hours distant. So trips for food and household necessities generally happened only once a week, and we were careful to prepare a detailed list.

Chief Leopard Frog suggested that I begin a project, something that I could do with my hands.

"Like what?" I asked.

I'd already built a hideout, and there's very little that one boy can do to rescue a big, rocky, weedy farm.

"Consult your talisman," he instructed.

I reached into my pocket. The smooth, hard rabbit fit into the concave of my palm as if tailor-made for its folds and creases.

When I made a fist, the talisman disappeared inside, yet it filled all the available space.

This is an ingenious bit of woodcarving,
I started to tell Chief Leopard Frog.

But when I looked up to speak to him, he was gone.

Initially, Chief Leopard Frog appeared to be right about the power of the talisman. It directed me between that period when I was deep in sleep and that sudden moment when I was fully awake, not with spoken words, but using silent communication, broadcasting only during the divide between life's two unequal worlds, transmitting extrasensory messages from the fragile, shrouded land of drifting images and distant music, that nocturnal interlude called middle dreams.

Take my picture,
the talisman suggested.

After breakfast, I went out to the workshop to search through my father's things. It didn't take me long to find it. It was right there next to his rusty tackle box, a big, box-shaped bag of tan imitation leather, and both containers covered with a layer of gritty dust and dead roly-polys.

Inside were lots of loose parts, extra lenses, a couple of rolls of unspent film, a compact, collapsable tripod, circular metal pieces with a purpose I couldn't discern—some sort of hood, perhaps?

But there it was, floating in the middle of all these accessories, my father's old thirty-five-millimeter single-lens reflex camera.

When I picked it up, it felt like a serious tool, not like the lightweight miniature digital cameras people use these days.

This one had actual moving parts assembled by hand, and its lens, while maybe not as fine a lens as money could buy, was certainly as fine as my father could buy at the time.

It was also a versatile lens. At the flip of a thumb switch, it would convert from a focus of short telephoto range to macro mode. In other words, unlike with most snapshot cameras, with this one I could make photographs both at a distance and in extreme close-up.

Small things, like talismans and spiders and red clover flowers, were within my realm.

Naturally, the battery was dead and the film in the bag had long since expired. And doubtlessly, the camera needed a cleaning.

But it was a start.

As Chief Leopard Frog might have said but, to his credit, didn't,
A collection of a thousand bug pictures starts with a single caterpillar.

Our next trip to town was two days away. I used this time to prepare the camera and to read the soiled manual that came with it. Frankly, I found many of the operating instructions confusing. While the camera imitates the physical structure of the human eye, it sees things differently.

Learning these differences and how to manipulate them can become a lifelong obsession.

Like painting, sculpture, dancing, writing, and music, if it takes constant practice and the exclusion of all else to get things right, then it qualifies as art.

And as the life of every great artist proves, once you've finally got it right, you've long since gone crazy.

GOING CRAZY
.

Is it something that happens to artists because they are obsessed with a subject that's not "real"? Or is it because while they're pursuing their art, they're alone?

I thought about this while walking through the fields of August, occasionally stopping to pull a bur from my ankle or duck an aggressive grasshopper.

When you do stop to think about it, everybody lives alone, even the people who are jammed together in cities. I think that's why my mother watches TV all afternoon and into the night.

She doesn't want to admit that she's alone.

I found myself becoming somewhat excited about the project that lay ahead. The talisman, or the spirit behind the hand that carved it, had suggested that I begin to notice small things.

This was ironic, I thought, because here I was in a vast, empty place that stretched in every direction like the Milky Way, with rarely a living soul in sight.

One small boy in an entire abandoned town.

One small planet in a solar system.

But not Pluto, of course. They fired Pluto.

What jerks!

(To their credit, though, the astronomers who made the final, fateful decision to downgrade Pluto's former status as the outermost planet in our solar system to that of a wandering dirty iceberg at least had the decency to wait until the Kansan who discovered it had died.)

As I frequently say, our lives hang by a thread, even after death, apparently, and so, too, do the lives of entire towns.

This recurring thought brought to mind one of the more outstanding failures in Kansas, a ghost town called Silkville. It is a true story that I read in one of the books left to me by Mrs. Franks.

Located in Franklin County, Silkville was the brainchild of an unpopular but very rich Frenchman who in 1870 acquired three thousand acres on which he built mansions and factories and planted orchards and grapes and mulberry trees—silkworm food—and to which he persuaded forty families to cross the Atlantic to join him in a vast silk-producing enterprise. For a time his silk business was a major factor in the world market. But bad luck, the bane of all existence, eventually reduced the Frenchman's grand scheme to rubble. Today, all but a few ailanthus trees are gone.

What remains is less than a memory.

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
—Percy B. Shelley

Easy come, easy go.
—Chief Leopard Frog

Hey, don't look at me. I didn't do it.
—Spencer Honesty

Today, the world's greatest empire is Wal-Mart, and it was to one of the thousands of emporiums of that grand enterprise that I traveled with my mother to obtain camera batteries and film.

"We're running out of Windex anyway," she said. "And I'm sure I can always find a few other things we need."

No kidding!
I thought as I looked around the place, stuffed to the gills with more than forty thousand items.

Every kid in China must be working day and night to keep Wal-Mart filled with "a few other things we need," a few of which, it turns out, we don't really need at all, like the fish-shaped key chain I bought.

When you push a button on its right fin, it tells redneck jokes. This extraordinary item on the clearance shelf was only two dollars, and I saved at least that much on the film, specially packaged in a
BUY FOUR, GET THE FIFTH ROLL FREE
wrapper. The batteries, on the other hand, seemed pretty expensive by comparison.

I suspect that Wal-Mart knows this.

Anyway, it was good to get away from the house for a while, and my mother seemed pleased with her purchases. On the long drive home we talked about some of the families who'd moved away.

"I think the last straw was when they closed the school," my mother observed. "They might as well have ordered every family out of town right then and there. Of course, the handwriting was on the wall the day they closed the factory."

"What did they make at the factory?" I asked.

I was too young to recall Paisley's heyday.

"Plastic novelties," she answered. "You know, what some people call five-and-dime items. Imitation flowers, loaded dice, talking key chains, an eight-ball that tells your fortune when you turn it upside down—things like that. At one time, Paisley Plastics was the biggest plastic novelty manufacturer in the world."

"Things change," I observed.

"Mmm-hmm," my mother responded, switching on the radio, an indication that our conversation was over.

After a couple of false starts, I managed to make a photographic exposure of my talisman. The eyepiece of the camera shows exactly what the lens sees, so while I composed my shot, I was captivated by the object's detail. It was sort of like looking at pond water through a microscope. I saw things that I would never notice otherwise.

This was one fine piece of work.

Quite an achievement for an imaginary friend.

THROUGH THE MACRO LENS
of my late father's camera, the rabbit talisman was a wonder to behold.

Chief Leopard Frog had carved my name in tiny letters underneath the rabbit's right paw (albeit with a minor typo, "Spender" instead of "Spencer"), and its nose, previously the rounded tip of the burl, was polished smoother than a cat's-eye marble.

Tiny whiskers no bigger than a human eyelash were suggested by a few carefully placed, nearly invisible scrapes.

Honestly, the more I examined my talisman, the more impressed I was with Chief Leopard Frog's talent.

With the ability to see into a fairy world, I had no need to travel far to exhaust a twenty-four-exposure roll of film.

I shot the star-shaped flowers in the pumpkin patch close enough to get their bright yellow powdery pollen on my face.

I took a picture of the marigold growing by itself near the front step. Its tiny overlapping petals filled the frame from edge to edge.

Just for the heck of it, I photographed a gum wrapper that had lain undisturbed on the ground for months, its letters faded, like Paisley itself, but still legible. I planned to title that one "Gum, but Not Forgotten."

Caterpillars had decimated the tomato crop. From a normal perspective, they looked like ugly lime green slugs, but when I saw the first one through the macro lens, I discovered that it had a stumpy red tail, curved like a hornet's stinger, ten suckerlike feet, such as an octopus has, plus half a dozen extra little sucker hands positioned just behind its big cabbage-colored head, pale oval eyes that seemed painted on like cartoon eyes, and sixteen bigger, darker fake eyes along both sides of its body.

If such a creature had stepped from a spacecraft and said, "People of Earth, we come in peace," I could not have been more astonished.

I shot several pictures from many angles.

Soon I began to enjoy the reassuring
click-thunk
sound that the big camera made each time I took a shot. Through my fingertips, I could feel the lens open and shut. Because it invisibly captured whatever it was aimed at, the camera reminded me of the mechanical ghost-catching device in the movie
Ghostbusters.
Only later, after it was properly emptied, would I find out what was inside.

Little did I know how prescient was my fleeting choice of metaphor.

My new hobby required patience.

Since Paisley had all but disappeared and Wal-Mart was an hour away—a destination limited to weekly trips—I figured the best way to get my pictures processed was through the mail.