Ghost Town (4 page)

It's strange to see one's father after so many years.

Surprise!

It soon became apparent that my mother's concept of home-schooling was for me to stay home from school while she did her paperwork and watched TV. Apparently, if any schooling was to take place, I would have to school myself.

Since I'd hit a dead end on my investigation of bees, I decided to concentrate on finding a logical explanation for people from my past appearing at random among my photographs.

Someone at Sparkle Snapshot was deliberately enclosing these pictures for me, or there was supernatural interference taking place during the fortnight's journey to and/or from St. Louis.

Tampering with the U.S. mail is a serious offense, whether performed by the living or the dead.

I mentioned this to Chief Leopard Frog. He seemed unfazed.

"Not everything has a logical explanation," Chief Leopard Frog advised. "Some things just happen."

"The only reason some things have no logical explanation," I argued, "is because we haven't figured out the answers yet."

"You are an optimistic boy," Chief Leopard Frog observed.

I began my investigation with an examination of the negatives.

Negatives are returned to the customer packaged with the positive prints—the snapshots. They are cut into consecutively numbered strips consisting of five images each.

If the mystery pictures had corresponding negatives, I reasoned, that would suggest that the photos came from my camera. If not, then it would mean that somebody—or something—had deliberately mixed the ghost pictures in with my order.

I held the first strip up to the light and squinted.

Negatives for color print film are ruby-colored with darks and lights reversed, so it's a world of distorted perception that takes getting used to.

Still, there she was, in a neat rectangle right next to a giant caterpillar with a single horn, my ex-neighbor, the attractive, flirtatious older teen, Maureen Balderson.

In the next packet, I found Ma Puttering adjacent to a ladybug, its pale spots as big as Chief Leopard Frog's namesake's namesake.

The clincher was in the third packet: two pictures of my ghost father, side by side, sharing a five-image strip of red celluloid with a bumblebee, a sweat bee, and a wasp.

Not only had these images been exposed using my camera, but they had been exposed during the time that I was taking the other pictures.

Where is the logical explanation for that?

"Look at it this way," Chief Leopard Frog suggested. "At least you've ruled out your mother as a suspect."

"I didn't know she was a suspect," I said.

"Good heavens, Spencer," Chief Leopard Frog responded. "She handles every piece of mail coming in and out of Paisley. Of course she was a suspect."

YOU MAY THINK
that I was bored, but this was not the case. You may reasonably suspect that I was lonely, but except for wishing for a dog, I wasn't.

Not particularly.

I did find everyday life to be a strange experience, like being shipwrecked, or left behind on the moon when the last spacecraft departs for earth, but I kept myself busy, walking through the fields and observing all the subtle changes as summer gave up its last great blast of hot air while the animals who knew the drill were preparing for the hard times to come.

Winter on the prairie is like death.

Autumn, which can be gorgeous, is no time to stop and smell the sunflowers. For those in the know, it's the busy season.

I wondered about the kids at school.

Were they having lunch now? Were they cutting up and carrying on and laughing? What kind of shoes was everybody wearing this year? Last year, it was black basketball shoes. This year was bound to be different.

I think my mother has never gotten over the loss of my father.

I think that's why she sits around and watches TV

I took a picture of a baby pumpkin. It looked like an acorn, except it was much bigger and green. There is no logical explanation for how a single pumpkin seed becomes a jungle littered with fat, heavy orange orbs.

Oh, I know that scientists say they've figured it out. I know about photosynthesis, and cell division, and all of that. But really now. One little seed the size of a fingernail becomes a huge, wild thicket of ropelike vines? Orange, basketball-size fruits that contain ten thousand or more copies of the seed that started them?

A scientific explanation, perhaps.

But logical?

I think not.

Perhaps, I reasoned, there is some connection between my camera and my dreams.

My dreams are populated with people from Paisley. Neighbors, shopkeepers, teachers, kids, bus drivers, waitresses, pizza delivery-men—even babies and dogs. Over the course of time, they all show up in my dreams.

In my dreams, Paisley lives.

The camera, too, is a way to hold on to the past, in a fragmentary, visual, dreamlike way. More than extension of memory, as I had previously observed.

A giver of life.

Could the logical explanation have something to do with this?

I'm not lonely. But sometimes after I dream about a particular person or event, I wake up crying.

I wish I could tell someone.

I wish I could step back into the dream and keep it going.

I wish I didn't have to let go of everything I've ever known.

Chief Leopard Frog was only part right. I needed something to do not only with my hands.

I needed something to do with my thoughts.

Tremendous thunderstorms rolled through one night, the kind that explode like mortar shells, tilt pictures on the wall, and rattle windows. By morning, the prairie was as squishy as a bathroom sponge and the pumpkin patch looked like the creature from the haunted lagoon, its dangling ringlet tendrils grasping for the paint-chipped windows of the house.

Leaping expertly from a single silk tightrope, a spider as fat as a California grape ducked behind a leaf when it saw me coming with my camera. Filtered through gauzy cloud cover and illuminating a newly refreshed world, the sunlight itself was green, causing Paisley to glow like the Emerald City.

My destination this time was Crossroads Circle.

According to a stapled-together sixteen-page pamphlet from the Franks collection, published by D. Potts Small Town Histories, Davenport, Iowa, Crossroads Circle in Paisley was once a busy intersection of two rural highways, with an elevated walled circle in the center in which was planted a colorful garden of pansies, or zinnias, or mums, depending on the season, and from which rose a flagpole bearing the proud if somewhat overdesigned banner of the United States of America.

"Stars AND stripes?" the anonymous author had opined. "One or the other, but not both."

Because most people don't expect to encounter a traffic roundabout way out in the country, virtually every vehicular accident that ever happened in Paisley happened here, including a single-vehicle crash involving a street sweeper.

Once upon a time, it was a busy place.

Around the circle, shops congregated shoulder to shoulder, harmoniously, like dairy cattle gathered around a feeding station.

Some shopkeepers sold fresh meat. Some sold homemade candy. Some sold goat's milk soap. Some, as I've mentioned, such as Mrs. Franks, sold books.

One place that I remember myself sold original yard art created from rusted farm implements and kitchen utensils. My favorite was the armadillo family made from airtight Tupperware bowls.

Crossroads Circle was the heart of Paisley, where the people whose front yards were measured not in feet but in acres came to spend a little time with people like themselves—or not, as the case may be.

Mankind wasn't meant to live alone.

God had that figured out right after he created Adam.

Spencer Adams Honesty.

The last kid in Paisley, Kansas.

IN MY SHORT LIFETIME
, T. J. Heath's General Merchandise Emporium was one of the first stores in Paisley to give up the ghost.

Mr. Heath sold everything. Hardware. Clothes. Lip gloss. Jams and jellies. Livestock water troughs. Skunk repellent. Deer jerky. Udder balm.

Everybody went to Mr. Heath's store because Mr. Heath had something for everybody. But one day, a couple of months after the Paisley plastics plant closed and the Wal-Mart Supercenter over in Coy opened up with a ribbon-cutting ceremony presided over by the lieutenant governor and his pretty third wife, Mr. Heath spent an entire day without a single customer.

Disgusted, he went out back to his little lumberyard and got some boards and nailed up all the doors and windows, never to return. The stuff that was on the shelves he just left there, where, over time, the once valuable inventory was inherited by moths and mice and rust, and, of course, the ever-present spiders.

I peeked through gaps in the boards. A foul scent of rodent droppings, decay, and mildew wafted through the cracks. Inside were bags of seed and cornstarch and flour that had rotted apart or been torn open by vermin, the contents scattered like muddy puppy paws across Mr. Heath's once spotless, highly polished hardwood floors.

Clothes that had been hung neatly on plastic hangers now dangled precariously from the remnants of rotted seams. Bottles of soda and syrup and cooking oil had fallen to the floor and broken, combining to form a tiny tar pit in which a thousand flies had lost their troubled lives.

Labels had disappeared from cans. Small appliances, such as toasters and waffle irons, had succumbed to tarnish and rust; home electronics, once the latest thing, had passed into obsolescence.

The scene before me might have been a museum, a snapshot in time, a three-dimensional picture of Paisley's past, except that in its present condition it more closely resembled a shipwreck, as I would imagine the interior of the doomed
Titanic
at the bottom of the sea.

A shopwreck with no survivors.

I positioned my lens between two hammered-up boards, carefully sighted through the viewfinder, made note of the sunlight streaming through a hole in the roof, adjusted my exposure accordingly, set my legs apart to form a human bipod, and snapped the shutter.

Some, who live in cities, with vast forces of police, and homes and businesses protected by alarm systems, and surveillance cameras, and guard dogs, may wonder why no one has ever broken in to Mr. Heath's abandoned store.

The answer is uniquely Paisley. First, it was because the people who lived here, all of whom knew one another by sight, were basically honest. After that, it was because no one lived here at all.

Can a thief break in if there are no thieves around?

Before Kansas was Kansas, there were no towns, but there were plenty of people. Today these people are called Native Americans and few of them are left.

Before I began being homeschooled—that is, left to figure out things for myself—I learned from my teachers that during the days of the European settlement of America these people were called Indians.

Indians were largely treated as inconvenient savages whose presence impeded progress.

European settlers brought with them the idea that land was something a person could own. This was contrary to the Indians' point of view. They believed that the land, like the air and the rain and the sun and the stars, belonged to everybody.

With the notion of ownership of land came the idea of towns, each staked out into adjacent rectangles with "lots" for sale or for claim to those who would "improve" them by building structures—houses, businesses, and factories.

Encouraged by the United States government, people came from all over the eastern United States, and parts of western Europe, Scandinavia, and even eastern Europe to "tame" the Kansas territory.

Many people became rich convincing others who were less informed to come to Kansas to settle a town. Many other people died broke and brokenhearted trying to do just that.

Consequently, in the nineteenth century, hundreds of towns in Kansas came and went.

Today there are places that are simply ruts in a pasture that once were home to hundreds, even thousands, of optimistic Scandinavians and Germans.

Two of the most influential factors in determining whether a town would prosper or wither were the owners of the railroads and the politicians who determined the locations of the county seats, the various headquarters for local government.

Corruption among these people was rife.

Heck, they didn't even consider their underhanded shenanigans to be corrupt. They saw themselves as being savvy enough to outsmart the next guy, a desirable American trait.

In the D. Potts pamphlet about Paisley, the author rages about these dishonest practices, terming them "unchecked hucksterism."

I just call it human nature.

LUCK HAS A LOT TO DO WITH
the success of a town. But so do the schemes of strangers.

For example, if the railroad decided to build a station in your new town, business would boom and your town would grow rapidly. If the railroad decided to lay its tracks five miles away, for whatever reason—carelessness, stupidity, or most often some form of kickback or bribery—your town was doomed.

Similarly, if the elected officials in the state government decided that your town should house all the county records and contain the county courthouse, your town would be a magnet for visitors for all the years to come, and would thrive.

If these politicians decided against your town and chose another, where perhaps they themselves had made investments, your town's luck had just run out.

Add to these capricious man-made threats the fierce climate of the prairie, which has been known to wipe out entire communities with grass fires, tornadoes, or drought, or clobber thousands of head of cattle at a single blow with a sudden, blinding blizzard, and you can see that there is nothing especially permanent about a Kansas town, which the Indians, a race of experienced people who followed opportunity as opportunity shifted, knew all too well.