Goodlow's Ghosts (5 page)

"What?" he called back, because he hadn't heard what she'd said, and he realized with a little tremor of annoyance that she was all but lost in the tall grasses. "Wait up," he hollered.

He got no reply.

"Stevie?"

"C'mon," he heard.

The tall grasses hid her completely now.

"I can't see you," Jack called. "Where are you?"

 
"Here," he heard.

"Stevie, dammit, I don't like this." He hadn't moved since she'd told him she could smell the ocean. "Stevie, why don't we just forget this? It's not important." He glanced at the gray overcast that seemed to have come in
in
the last few minutes. "Stevie, I think it's going to rain again."

She reappeared from the tall grasses. To his surprise, she was only a few yards off. She looked peeved. "There's nothing here that'll bite you, Jack. Don't be such a baby. Don't be such a
stiffneck
."

He looked at her. He thought that there was something different about her, though he wasn't at all sure what. He said, "Are you all right?"

She looked more peeved. "Jack, if you don't come in here now, I'll see to it that something
does
bite you."

It was a joke, he thought, although he wouldn't have been able to tell by the angry look on her face.

"Okay," he said, "I'm coming." He started after her.

She smiled, turned away from him again, and disappeared into the tall grasses.

"Dammit, Stevie," he called, "will you please stay where I can see you?"

"I can't," he heard.

He stopped walking. "What do you mean you can't?" he called.

"I can't," he heard again.

He was getting very annoyed. He supposed that she might be playing some stupid, childish game with him. Heaven knew that her emotional age had yet to catch up with her chronological age. "Stevie," he called, "let's just keep walking on the path, all right. This really isn't necessary. It's someone else's property."

He heard her voice but could make out no individual words.

He sighed, whispered a curse, and pushed through the tall grasses toward where he had last seen her.

"Stevie, for Christ's sake!" he called.

And, in reply, he heard her voice again, though it was still unintelligible.

Then, what he had assumed was a hunter's cabin was before him. It had no windows. It was made of weathered gray wood, like barn wood, and appeared to be little more than ten or twelve feet wide on each side.

Stevie stood in the doorway. She smiled at him as if she'd been playing a joke. "You should see this place, Jack," she said with enthusiasm.

Then she turned and went inside.

"Dammit to hell!" Jack whispered, went up to the door, which was closed, hesitated, called to Stevie again and, getting no reply, pushed the door open and went inside.

The gray daylight did not easily penetrate the small structure's interior. Jack could see his wife, but she looked amorphous, tentative, and he wasn't sure that it was
she
he was looking at.

He said, "Stevie?"

"Isn't it wonderful, Jack?" he heard. Her voice sounded oddly distant.

"Isn't
what
wonderful?" Jack said. The room appeared to be unfurnished, except for a large overstuffed chair near Stevie; the chair was little more than a beige lump in the near-darkness. Jack said, "Why don't we just get out of here—"

"You can leave," Stevie cut in.

He laughed quickly.

"It's not a joke," she said.

He took a step closer to her. His eyes hadn't adjusted to the dim light yet and she was still hard to see. "Why would you want to stay in here by yourself, darling?" he asked.

"You call me
darling
when you're being parental," she said.

He smiled. "I become parental when you act like a child."

"Asshole!"

He bristled. "I do not like you to use such language, Stevie!" He glanced about.
Why hadn't his eyes adjusted to the darkness?
he wondered. It was as if this place ...
stole
the light. "And I don't much like it here," he went on. He held his hand out to her. "C'mon, let's just continue our walk. You can make us both some tea when we get home."

"Make your own goddamned tea. I'm staying, Jack!" Her words were clipped, harsh.

He sighed again. "You're making me very annoyed, Stevie. I'm sure you don't want me to become annoyed."

"Then you can leave," she said.
 

"I'm not leaving without you."

"Then you'd better stay."

He let his hand drop. "For what?" he asked.

"For the hell of it," she answered, and laughed quickly.

He remained quiet a few seconds, then he said, "Is this some kind of stupid, childish game you're playing, Stevie?"

"I don't think so."

"Then can you tell me what the hell you're doing?"

She came forward. She stopped very close to him. He could see her face clearly, now.

He didn't recognize it. The features were the same—round blue eyes, small nose, full mouth, high cheekbones—but he knew that this woman standing before him was not his wife. This woman even had a different smell. She smelled musty.

He backed up a step.

"Who . . . are you?" he stammered.

The woman shrugged. She looked suddenly confused, uncomfortable. She said nothing.

He saw faces behind her in the darkness. He saw hands working, mouths grinning as if at the prospect of hunger being satisfied. "What in the name of God . . . ," he whispered.

He glanced quickly at the open door behind him, then at the woman again. She had backed away from him and was once more in shadow.

The other faces were gone, the hands reaching were gone.

"Where is my wife?" Jack pleaded.

He saw the form in the shadows move slightly and he guessed that she had shrugged again.

"Goddammit,
where
is my wife?"

The room was empty.

The headline on the front page of the
Enquirer
at Hearst's A&P, two blocks from Ryerson's town house on Market Street, read:

BIGFOOT GIVES BIRTH TO ELVIS'S BABY ON BOARD UFO

Ryerson chuckled when he read the headline. The chuckle quickly became a belly laugh, two belly laughs, three, until it was continuous.

He couldn't stop laughing. People ahead of him at the checkout stared at him, and people behind stared at him, but he couldn't see them through his laughter.

"What's so funny?" asked a woman in front of him.

He nodded toward the
Enquirer
. "That!" he managed.

BIGFOOT GIVES BIRTH TO ELVIS'S BABY ON BOARD UFO, she read.

"That's not funny," the woman said. "That's sick!"

"What's sick?" a man behind Ryerson asked.

"This headline," the woman said. "They're always saying these awful things about Elvis, and I wish they wouldn't. Now they're saying that he had sex with Bigfoot, and Elvis simply wouldn't
do
that. It's sick to even suggest it!"

"Bigfoot Gives Birth to Elvis's Baby On Board UFO," read the man behind Ryerson. He looked puzzled; Ryerson continued laughing. The man said to himself, "But that's not possible. UFO's aren't real."

A young woman behind him said, "It's
Bigfoot
that isn't real.
UFO's
are real. I've seen them."

Someone else said, "If it wasn't true, then they couldn't print it."

"They might have exaggerated," observed someone else. "You know, maybe this Bigfoot baby just
looked
like Elvis, so they assumed—"

Ryerson, chuckling now, bagged his own groceries as they were rung up, and left the store.

~ * ~

On the south side of Boston, in a bar called Sid's, a man named Bernie was coming on to a woman who told him her name was Bernice. Bernie exclaimed that the similarity of their names was a wonderful coincidence, that it was probably fate that they'd met, and when Bernice responded with only an "Uh-huh," he got onto another subject.

"I don't do this a lot," he said. "Drink in the middle of the day, I mean."

Bernice glanced at him. She had black, shoulder-length hair, was thin, large busted, and wore a green silk-look dress that was hiked up to
midthigh
. "Just needed to wet your whistle, huh?" she said, and sipped her white wine. Other than the bartender, who was paying them no attention, she and Bernie were the only people in the small, dimly lit bar.

Bernie nodded. "Yeah, wet my whistle. And you?"

Bernice shook her head. "I come in here every day. I stay here all day sometimes."

"What,
drinkin
' that stuff?" Bernie said derisively, and nodded at the white wine. He was tall, stocky, thick necked, and his face was flushed from high blood pressure and too much alcohol. His eyes were small and muddy.

Bernice shrugged. "I get sick from booze."

Sid's was on the first floor of an apartment building that had seen its last regular tenant move out a decade before. The building was a big, square, red brick structure. Grinning cement gargoyles perched on the four roof edges, embossed, horn-blowing cement cherubs hovered under each of the two hundred windows, and bunches of cement grapes had been stuck over each window. The building was a monument to mid-Victorian bad taste.

Bernie said to Bernice, "Listen, I don't believe in
foolin
' around, you know. Why don't we go somewhere and screw each other till we drop." Bernie had used this line on a number of women. He thought it was direct and honest.

Bernice said, frowning, "You think I'm a whore? I'm not. I come in here to drink wine." She tugged the hem of her green silk-look dress to below her knees.

Bernie asked, "Did I say anything about
paying
you? All I said was why don't we go
somewheres
and get it on. I know you're not a whore."

Bernice said, "It ain't the middle of the day, anyway. It's supper time." She grinned oddly, which made Bernie uneasy, and finished, "And I'm very hungry."

"We'll eat first," Bernie said.

"I know just the place," Bernice said, got off her stool, took his hand, and led him to a stairway at the back of the bar.

"Up there?" he asked. He didn't want to go up the stairs.
 
It was dark and the odor of mildew wafted down to him.

"Sure," Bernice answered, and surreptitiously rubbed her breasts against his arm. "I live up there. I got an apartment. We'll have something to eat." She smiled playfully.

Bernie looked at her. She wasn't particularly pretty. Her nose was big and her eyes were a little crooked, her skin had a sad gray cast, and she looked tired. But her breasts were large, and this was what had interested him in the first place.

"You go ahead of me," he said, and she nodded, took his hand, and led him up the stairs.

~ * ~

Sam
Goodlow
hated doctors. He had no regular doctor and hadn't had a checkup in over a decade. He secretly supposed that there were many things wrong with him. High cholesterol, high blood pressure, and low stamina were chief among his worries, so he had lately been eating more chicken and less pork and crabmeat (to combat his supposed high cholesterol); he had been trying very hard to keep his emotions from bubbling over (because of his supposed high blood pressure); and he avoided doing anything that required too much effort. Hill climbing was out. Marathons were out. Kama Sutra–type sexual athletics were out.

He also slept as much as he could. He liked to sleep because his dreams were vivid and colorful and he often looked forward to them.

When he woke this morning, however, he thought that he had not dreamed at all. This disappointed him.

Stress, he decided, had deprived him of his dreams. He'd been under lots of stress lately. This new job gave him stress. The new
client
gave him stress—she'd stress anyone. Christ, she'd stress a dead man.

His phone rang. He looked at it. It was across the room, on his desk. "Shit!" he muttered. He didn't want to deal with anyone before he'd had his coffee.

The phone rang once more. He cursed again, got up from his cot, crossed the room, put his hand on the receiver.

The phone lay silent.

Whoever had been calling had let the phone ring only two times. "Asshole," he muttered.

He looked at his cot. He was still tired. He thought that he had never been so tired.

~ * ~

Bernice led Bernie down a wide, dimly lit hallway with very high ceilings. The woodwork was dark and had ornate leaf-motif scrollwork in it. Light in the hallway was provided by bare bulbs attached to what had once been gaslights.