20th Century Ghosts (18 page)

I don't know why North Altamont. When Aunt Mandy talks about it, she always talks about going up to "
do
Lincoln Street," as if Lincoln Street in North Altamont is one of those famous places everyone knows about and always means to
do
, the way when people are passing through Florida they
do
Walt Disney World, or when they're in New York City they
do
a Broadway show. Lincoln Street is pretty, though, in a quiet little New England township kind of way. It's on a steep hill, and the road is made of brick, and no cars are allowed, although people walk horses right up the middle, and there are occasional dry, green horse-turd pies scattered over the road. I mean—
scenic
.

We visit a series of poorly lit patchouli-smelling shops. We go into one store where they're hawking bulky sweaters made out of Vermont-bred llama wool, and there's this music playing down low, some kind of music that incorporates flutes, blurred harpsichord sounds, and the shrill whistles of birds. In another store we peruse the work of local artisans—glistening ceramic cows, their pink ceramic udders waving beneath them as they leap over ceramic moons—while from the store's sound-system comes the reedy choogling of the Grateful Dead.

After a dozen stores I'm bored of it. I have been sleeping badly all week—nightmares, plus the shivers, and so on—and all the walking around has made me tired and grouchy. It doesn't help my mood that the last place we go into, an antique shop in a renovated carriage house, has on neither New Age music or hippie music, but more awful sounds yet—the Sunday game. Here is no store-wide sound-system, only a little table-top stereo on the front desk. The proprietor, an old man in bib overalls, listens to the game with his thumb stuck in his mouth. In his eyes is a stunned, hopeless daze.

I hang around by the desk to listen in and find out what all the misery is about. We're at the plate. Our first guy pops out to left, and our second guy pops out to right. Hap Diehl comes up planning to swing and racks up a couple strikes in practically no time.

"Hap Diehl has been just
atrocious
with the lumber lately," says the announcer. "He's hitting an
excruciating
.160 over the last eight days, and when do you have to start questioning Ernie's decision to leave him in there day after day, when he's just getting
killed
at the plate. Partridge sets now and delivers and—oh, Hap Diehl
swung
at a
bad one
, I mean
bad
, a fastball that was a
mile
over his head—wait, he fell over, I actually think he's
hurt
—"

Aunt Mandy says we'll walk down to Wheelhouse Park and have a picnic. I'm used to city parks, open grassy areas with asphalt paths and Rollerblading girls in spandex. Wheelhouse Park is
dimmer
somehow than a city park, crowded with great old New England firs. The paths are of Rollerblade-unfriendly blue gravel. No playground. No tennis courts. No ballpark. Only the mysterious pine-sweet gloom—in under the overspreading branches of the Christmas trees there is no real direct sunshine—and the sometimes gentle swoosh of wind. We pass no one.

"There's a good place to sit up ahead," my aunt says. "Just over this cute little covered bridge."

We approach a clearing, although even here the light is somehow obscured and dimmish. The path wanders unevenly to a covered bridge suspended only a yard above a wide, slow-moving river. On the other side of the bridge is a grassy sward with some benches in it.

One look and I am not a fan of this covered bridge, which sags obviously in the middle. Once a long time ago the bridge was a firetruck red, but rot and rain have stripped most of the paint away and there has been no effort to touch up, and the wood revealed is dried-out, splintery, and untrustworthy in character. Inside the tunnel is a scatter of garbage bags, ruptured and spilling litter. I hesitate an instant and in that time Aunt Mandy plunges on ahead. I straggle along behind with such a lack of enthusiasm that she is soon across, and I have not even gone in.

At the entrance I pause once more. Sickly sweet smells: the smell of rot and fungus. A narrow track passes between the heaps of garbage bags. I am disconcerted by the smell and the sewer gloom, but Aunt Mandy is on the other side, indeed, already gone on out of my direct view, and it makes me nervous to think of being left behind. I hurry on.

What happens next, though, is I get only a few yards, and then take a deep breath and what I smell makes me stop walking all at once and stick in place, unable to go on. What I have noticed is a rodent smell, a heated dandruffy rodent smell, mixed with a whiff of ammonia, a smell like I have smelled before in attics and basements, a rank
bat stink
. Suddenly I'm imagining a ceiling covered with bats. I imagine tipping my head back and seeing a colony of thousands of bats covering the roof in a squirming surface of brown-furred bodies, torsos wrapped in membrane-thin wings. I imagine the faint bat squeaks so like the sub-audible squeak of bad air conditioners and VCRs on rewind. I imagine bats, but cannot make myself glance up to look for them. The fright would kill me if I saw one. I take a few tense mincing steps forward and put my foot down on some ancient newspaper. There is an unfortunate crunch. I jump back, the sound giving my heart a stiff wrench in my chest.

My foot comes down on something, a log maybe, that rolls beneath my heel. I totter backwards, wheeling my arms about to catch my balance, and at last manage to steady myself without falling over. I twist around to look at whatever it is I just stepped on.

It is not a log at all but a man's leg. A man lays on his side in a drift of leaves. He wears a filthy baseball cap—Our Team's cap, once dark blue, but now faded almost white around the rim where it is blotched by dried salts left by old sweats—and denim jeans, and a lumberjack's plaid shirt. His beard has leaves in it. I stare down at him, the first thrill of panic shooting through me. I just stepped on him—and he
didn't wake up
.

I stare at his face and like in the comic books I am tingling with horror. A little flicker of movement catches my eye. I see a fly crawling on his upper lip. The fly's body gleams like an ingot of greased metal. It hesitates at the corner of his mouth, then climbs in and disappears and
he does not wake up.

I shriek; no other word for it. I turn and run back to my side of the bridge where I shriek myself hoarse for Mandy.

"Aunt Mandy, come back! Come back
right now
!"

In a moment, she appears at the far end of the bridge.

"What are you screaming your head off for?"

"Aunt Mandy, come back, come back,
please
!" I suck at some drool. For the first time I am aware of drool all down my chin.

She starts across the bridge, coming at me with her head lowered as if she were walking into a bitter wind. "You can stop that screaming right now. Just stop! What are you yelling about?"

I point. "Him!
Him!
"

She stops a quarter of the way across and looks at the stiff old goner lying there in the garbage. She stares at him for a few seconds, and then says, "Oh. Him. Well, come on. He'll be all right, Homer. You let him mind his business and we'll mind ours."

"No, Aunt Mandy, we have to go! Please come back, please!"

"I'm not going to listen to a second more foolishness. Come over here."

"No!" I scream. "No, I
won't!
"

I pivot and run, the panic swelling through me, sick to my stomach, sick of the garbage smell and the bats and the dead man and the terrible crunch of old newspaper, the stink of bat piss, the way Hap Diehl was swinging at shit and Our Team was going into the toilet just like last year, and I run gushing tears, and wiping miserably at the spit on my face, and finding that no matter how hard I sobbed I could hardly get any air into my lungs.

"Stop it!" Mandy hollers when she catches up to me. She throws our bagged lunch aside to have both hands free. "You stop it! Jesus—
shut up!
"

She captures me around the waist. I flail about, shrieking, not wanting to be lifted, not wanting to be handled. I snap back an elbow that cracks sharply against a bony eye socket. She cries out and we both go staggering to the ground, Mandy on top of me. Her chin clouts the top of my skull. I scream at the sharp little flash of pain. Her teeth clack together and she gasps, and her grip goes loose. I leap and almost get free but she grabs me with both hands by the elastic band of my shorts.

"Goddamn it, you stop!"

My face glows with an infernal heat. "No! No I won't go back I won't go back let me go!"

I surge forward again, coming off the ground like a runner jumping from the blocks and suddenly, in an instant, I am out from under her and tramping full-speed up the path, listening to her squall behind me.

"Homer!" she squalls. "Homer, come back here
right now!
"

I have gone almost all the way back to Lincoln Street when I feel a gush of cool air between my legs and look down and observe for the first time how it is that I have escaped. She had been holding me by the shorts, and I have come right out of them—shorts, Mark McGwire Underoos, and all. I look down at my male equipment, pink and smooth and small, jouncing from thigh to thigh as I run. The sight of all this bareness below gives me an unexpected rush of exhilaration.

She catches me again halfway to the car on Lincoln Street. A crowd watches while she yanks me off my feet by my hair and we wrestle together on the ground.

"Sit down, you weird shit!" she shouts. "You crazy little asshole!"

"Fat bitch whore!" I yell. "Parasitic capitalist!"

Well, no. But along those lines.

I don't know but it might be that what happened up at Wheelhouse Park was the last straw, because two weeks later, when The Team is taking an off-day, the folks and me are driving to Vermont to tour a boarding school called Biden Academy that my mom wants us to look at. She tells me it's a prep school, but I've seen the brochure, which is full of code words—special needs, stable environment, social normalization—so I know what kind of school we're really going to look at.

A young man in a worn blue shirt, jeans, and hiking boots meets us on the steps in front of Main Building. He introduces himself as Archer Grace. He's with admissions. He's going to show us around. Biden Academy is in the White Mountains. The breeze swishing in the pines has a brisk chill to it, so that although it is August, the afternoon has the exciting, chilly feel of World Series time. Mr. Grace takes us on a stroll around the campus. We look at a couple of brick buildings smothered in fresh green ivy. We look inside at empty classrooms. We walk through an auditorium with dark wood paneling and a bunch of heavy crimson curtains hanging around. At one side of the room is a bust of Benjamin Franklin chiseled in milky blond marble. At the other, a bust of Martin Luther King in dark onyxlike stone. Ben is scowling across the room at the reverend, who looks as if he has just woken up and is still puffy with sleep.

"Is it just me or is it really stuffy in here?" my father asks. "Like, short on oxygen?"

"It gets a good airing out before the fall semester begins," replies Mr. Grace. "There isn't anyone here hardly except for a few of the summer-program kids."

We perambulate together outside and into a grove of enormous trees with slippery-looking gray bark. At one end of the grove is a half-shell amphitheater and terraced seats, where they have graduations and occasionally hold productions or shows for the kids.

"What's that smell?" my father asks. "Does this place smell funny?"

What is interesting is that my mother and Mr. Grace are pretending not to hear him. My mother has lots of questions for Mr. Grace about the school productions. It's like my father isn't there.

"What are these beautiful trees?" my mother asks, as we're on our way out of the grove.

"Gingko," Mr. Grace replies. "Do you know there are no trees in the world like the Gingko? They're sole survivors of an ancient prehistoric tree family that has been wiped completely off the earth."

My father stops by the trunk of one of them. He scratches a thumb along the bark. Then he gives his thumb a sniff. He makes a disgusted face.

"So
that's
what stinks," he says. "You know, extinction is not always a bad thing."

We look at a swimming pool. Mr. Grace talks about physical therapy. He shows us a running track. He talks about the junior Special Olympics. He shows us the ballpark.

"So you get a team together," my father says. "And you play some games. Is that right?"

"Yes. A team, a few games. But this is more than just play, what we're doing out here," Mr. Grace says. "At Biden we challenge children to squeeze learning out of everything they do. Even their games. This is a classroom too. We see this as a place to develop in the children some of the most crucial life skills, like negotiating conflict, and building interpersonal relationships, and releasing stress through physical activity. It's like, you know that old cliche—it's not whether you win or lose, it's what you take away from the game, how much you learn about yourself, about emotional growth."

Mr. Grace turns and starts away.

"What did he just tell me?" my father says. "That was like in a different language."

My mother starts to walk away too.

"I didn't get him," my father says. "But I think he just told me they have one of these pity-party teams where no one ever strikes out."

Mr. Grace takes us last to the library and it's here that we meet one of the summer-session kids. We enter a large circular room, with rosewood bookcases wrapped around the walls. A distant computer clickety-clicks. A boy about my age is lying on the floor. A woman in a plaid dress has him by the right arm. I think she's trying to get him on his feet, but all she's managing to do is drag him around in circles.

"Jeremy?" she says. "If you won't get up, then we can't go play with the computer. Do you hear me?"

Jeremy doesn't respond and she just keeps dragging him around and around. Once when she has him turned around to face us, he looks at me briefly with vacant eyes. He has the leak too—drool all over his chin.