Ghost Town (9 page)

After that, I got lonelier and lonelier. Sometimes I just sat outside for hours on the swing suspended from the walnut tree, doing nothing but watching chipmunks and birds. Interestingly, this passivity paid off, for it wasn't long before they let me take their pictures without scurrying away.

One day, a red fox family wandered through the yard, a mother and four kits. They looked at me as if I were a rock or a tree and kept going.

Chief Leopard Frog asked about the mail every single day.

He had become a real pain in the butt.

"These things take time," I reminded him.

"It's my first book," he reminded me. "Understandably, I'm anxious."

I got a postcard from Maureen. It showed a picture of a herd of buffalo. On the back of it she wrote:

Dear Twerp: Thanks for the swell bug pix. Dang, they're ugly! Kansas City is a big place. It has more than two hundred McDonald's restaurants. Can you imagine? As long as you 're taking pictures, will you break in to my house and take some pictures of my room? I miss it. I even miss you from time to time, but not that much. Sincerely, your pal, MO.

P.S. My brother is a nuisance. I'm not telling him anything.

I can't tell you how much this postcard cheered me.

I felt as if I'd won a prize or something. I felt excited, liberated, connected to a real world, in touch with a person who knew me and understood me, an individual whom, as fate would have it, I found attractive. I carried that buffalo photo with me for days until it became sweat stained and the message on the back turned blurry.

Reluctantly, lest it disintegrate entirely, I put it into the cigar box with my other prized possessions, including Maureen's key chain.

Here's a special message for everybody who's thinking about killing himself: What's the rush? Not only will things change, but they often change suddenly. This is true even when you live in an unlucky town.

The next morning when I went out to the pumpkin patch I found waiting for me a fully formed pumpkin that was a dead ringer for Oprah Winfrey.

I called my mother immediately

"Look at this," I commanded excitedly. "Who does it look like?"

"My God," she said. "It's Oprah."

Immediately, we packed it up and shipped it to Milton Swartzman the fast way.

I enclosed a note

There's lots more where this came from,
I claimed optimistically.
Please pay shipping and the fifty bucks you promised and I'll keep 'em coming.

The following week the FedEx man (whose name turned out to be Dwight Earl) stopped at the house with a letter and inquired about the possibility of a meal.

My mother turned off the television, ran into the bathroom to brush her hair, then raced downstairs to the kitchen to begin melting Crisco.

Heck, it wasn't just
my
luck that was changing. It was everybody's—even Dwight Earl's.

THE OPRAH LOOK-ALIKE
pumpkin had done the trick!

Inside the FedEx letter pack was a check from
Uncle Miltons Thousand Things You Thought You'd Never Find
for eighty-nine dollars and fifty-five cents, representing the cost of shipping the pumpkin plus fifty dollars.

Dear Kid,
Milton wrote.

Now we're talking. Your Oprah pumpkin is already in the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum in Branson, Missouri, where it is drawing very large crowds, I hear. Good job. The talismans are selling well, mostly to a regional voodoo group, but business is business. The poetry book (what a mess!) will be out soon. I may only keep five copies for the catalog, now that I've read it. You can have the rest. Tell your Indian friend to take his time writing a sequel.

Yours truly,

Milton Swartzman

President and Publisher,
Uncle Milton's Thousand Things You Thought You'd Never Find

P.S. I sold the camera to a guy in Egypt who plans to use it to photograph pharaohs who may still be drifting around ancient tombs. Whatever! To repeat myself, business is business.

P.P.S. Thanks for sharing the monster insect photos. Have you ever considered putting them all together into a book? I like the title "As Cute as a Bugs Ear. " It's an old-fashioned expression, but the grannies will go nuts for it.

Dwight Earl really enjoyed the fried chicken dinner. My mother even made him a blueberry pie. After dinner he took her for a ride in his truck. Then she took him for a ride in her truck. I found it interesting that they had so much in common.

While my mind was on other things the landscape of Paisley once again was changing. Overnight, it seemed, the abandoned pastures were filled with bright yellow sunflowers, a gnarly, weedy creation that for a few weeks when fall approaches bursts into a sunshine yellow sea. Along the fallen fencerows, trumpet vines bloomed, mauve, pink, brick red, and violet fairy hats surrounding the sunflower celebration. Mailbox posts and utility poles hoisted blue-eyed morning glories up into the sky, where some bloomed triumphantly all day long.

Together they turned Paisley into baroque music, into a French impressionist painting, into a sight to take your breath away, all without the assistance of a single Paisley resident, except myself, to pause and take it all in.

I shot lots of pictures of this piece and that piece, but with my camera it is impossible to capture the vastness, the riot of color, the majestic glory of all of Paisley, Kansas, in the cusp of fall.

With a fresh source of funds, I could afford more film and processing. After returning from a trip to Wal-Mart with my mother and Dwight Earl, I sauntered over to the Balderson house next door.

There was a
FOR SALE
sign out front, but, like the flowers in the fields, no one had seen it but me. Already it had begun to rust and was tilted precariously like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Three white mushrooms—the deadly poisonous
Amanita muscaria
—sprouted at its post, as if some unseen force was warning would-be buyers away.

For Maureen's amusement, I took a picture

Her house was locked, as I expected it to be. I knew better than to break anything. For one, it's not neighborly. For another, broken locks and windows are not easily fixable when there are no handymen left in town.

Her room was on the second floor at the back. I'd already had some experience as a second-story man, and it had been a disappointing experience, at best.

I walked around to the back to evaluate the situation, which is where I found Chief Leopard Frog whittling yet another bee tree burl amulet.

"Hey," I said.

"What's up?" he replied.

"I was trying to figure out how to get upstairs to take some pictures," I told him.

No sense lying any more to Chief Leopard Frog.

"Why not take the stairs?" he asked.

"The place is locked up tight," I replied.

"Not if you hurry," Chief Leopard Frog said.

At my touch, the back door swung open.

ONCE INSIDE THE BALDERSON HOUSE
, I ran up the stairs to Maureen's room. I knew it was hers because it had posters on the wall of boy bands that nobody but Maureen had ever heard of: The Riffs. The Ruffs. The Riff-Raffs. The Rough Roofs. The Rafters. The Raptors.

You get the idea.

There was also a stuffed bear in a corner, a little multicolored threadbare bear, as if inadvertently left behind in the rush to leave, but nevertheless an artifact with the appearance of personal importance.

I set my camera carefully. I took pictures of everything that seemed to matter, including a butterfly sticker on a wall switch, a telephone number scrawled in ballpoint pen on a white window-sill, a carpet stain created by spilled nail polish, a hair clip in a dusty corner.

On my way out I nabbed the bear and took a picture of the door, closed, as a way of saying goodbye.

Back downstairs, I found Chief Leopard Frog continuing to whittle.

"All done?" he asked.

"I guess so," I answered.

"She's older than you," he observed.

"I'm just trying to be friends," I said.

"She lives very far away," he added. "Three days' walk for an Indian. Many more for you."

"I'm just doing a favor for a friend," I explained.

"Here," Chief Leopard Frog said. "Take this. It may come in handy."

He handed me the talisman he had just completed. It was in the shape of a tiny alligator. I was somewhat reluctant to accept it, knowing what Uncle Milton had reported about Chief Leopard Frog's "good luck" pieces, but I pocketed it nevertheless, believing that in the same way rock breaks scissors, scissors cut paper, and paper covers rock, friendship overwhelms bad luck.

A fortnight later I received a package from Sparkle Snapshot of St. Louis containing prints and negatives from several rolls of film.

There were many lovely compositions featuring flowers and mushrooms and mailboxes; a rather formal portrait of the Shiba Inu family standing on their front porch without a single smile among them; a couple of action shots of the Foos engaged in repairing a vacuum cleaner; and a full roll of exposures of Maureen.

That's when I knew for a fact how terribly lonely I was.

That night, as I sifted through the twenty-four photos of my former next-door neighbor, I cried myself to sleep, and not just manly sniff-sniff all-choked-up crying, either, or stiff-upper-lip eyes welling up with tears, but real, all-out, pillow-watering, chest-heaving blubbering.

I had been overwhelmed by photographs of Maureen talking on the phone, Maureen stretching her foot to the end of the bed, Maureen picking up something to put into the wastebasket, Maureen drying her hair, Maureen brushing her teeth, Maureen changing a CD, Maureen exercising on the floor, Maureen eating a cup of Jell-O, Maureen putting on a nightgown, Maureen practicing ballet, Maureen staring out the window, Maureen, her head on her pillow, fast asleep.

Damn you, ghost camera!
I thought.
If it weren't for you I might have forgotten her by now.

The next day Dwight Earl brought a box from the Cayman Islands. He stayed for supper. Catfish and hush puppies. While the thick chunks of breaded catfish sizzled in the pan, my mother quickly changed into her Sunday best.

The box was quite heavy. With Dwight Earl's help I carried it upstairs to my room.

"What's in it?" he asked.

"Aren't you guys supposed to keep mum about the contents of what you deliver to people?" I asked. "Like the relationship between a lawyer and his client, or a priest and a petitioner?"

"Nobody ever told me that," Dwight Earl said. "I like to know what's inside. It's like Christmas. Heck, if I weren't worried about getting fired, I'd open 'em all."

"That's the trouble with this country," I observed, cutting the tape along the top with a blunt pair of scissors. "Nobody can keep a secret."

Dwight Earl peered over my shoulder.

"Well, you'd better go find Chief Leopard Frog," I announced, "because it looks like his opus has arrived."

"Who?" Dwight Earl asked.

"Never mind," I said. "It's just a box of books."

"Too bad," Dwight Earl replied, leaving the room. "I was hoping for something edible."

Chief Leopard Frog was furious with me.

"How could you let this happen?" he hollered.

If he'd had a tomahawk on him, I suspect he might have used it on me.

"This is a travesty!" he continued. "It's worse than not publishing them at all."

"Oh, I don't know," I said, leafing through the flimsy newsprint pages. "It's sort of interesting—in a quirky way."

"Who needs quirky?" he demanded. "Certainly not a first-time author! My career is over before it's begun, and it's all your fault!"

The words echoed in my head:

"It's all your fault!"

CHIEF LEOPARD FROG
had a right to be upset, all things considered.

In his effort to restore the poems to their original, pristine, pre-torn condition, Uncle Milton apparently also recovered a handful of catalog pages that got mixed in with the poems much as if you'd put all the words together into a poppy red KitchenAid twelve-speed blender.

For example, one of Chief Leopard Frog's thoughtful observations on the south wind pushing incessantly across the dry Kansas plain was merged with text from a Japanese soap manufacturer to create such phrases as "The softly swirling dry heat on which crisp grasshoppers take flight closes pores and raises mountainous thunderheads to burnish the flat landscape into a more resilient, more radiant, younger-looking you."

Another one somehow mixed the smoothness of a flat rock at the bottom of a Colorado stream with the outstanding fuel efficiency of the new Toyota Highlander.

My favorite, called "Death of a Harmless Varmint," described the unfortunate demise of a young prairie dog at the hands of the government in the context of a Cuban seed cigar wrapped in a green candela wrapper "just like the young shock-haired president enjoyed after the Cuban embargo."

But the real clincher was the page from the sex toy catalog that got merged with Chief Leopard Frog's sentimental remembrance of his late mother. This one he could not possibly forgive me for, not that I could blame him.

Indeed, the least offensive phrase, "Tickle her fancy until her fancy can't stand it anymore," was juxtaposed with a detailed description of the dry earth "hitting her coffin one shovelful at a time to make a sound like lamentations emitted by a buckskin drum."

Well, at least they'd gotten the title right.
BURL HIVES
, it said in big block letters on the cover.
POEMS BY CHIEF LEOPARD FROG, SAC AND FOX TRIBE, PAISLEY, KANSAS
.

But then Uncle Milton Swartzman, ever the salesman, had gone on to phony up a cover quote:

The world of poetry will never be the same
now that one daring Native American
has so boldly wrested control from
the insensitive white man.
—Carl Sandburg