The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin (4 page)

I stare at the words on the page. It is as if a unicorn has entered my room. Is Will “Dummy” Halpin a relative? My great-grandfather? Why hadn’t I heard this story before? How could a ghost story be so famous that it found its way into a history textbook but remain a secret from me, the ghost’s namesake?

I head up to the computer to do some research. I spend time online every day, usually goofing around on message boards. I love to start flame wars, firing up strangers just for fun. I argue the other side of some issue everyone agrees on, make bizarre allusions and overblown statements, attack people in strange ways—anything as long as I cannot be ignored. Stuff like “Attention, vegetarians: vegetables have feelings too!! Stop the slaughter of innocent radishes!” I just like getting a reaction, I guess. I never engage in the actual fight. That is key. After the first post, I just hang around, watching, waiting, haunting. Like a ghost. A family trait?

I log on to my mail. Oy. A message from Ebony. I should delete it without reading it. I don’t want to know what’s happening at my old school. Must live in the present. But I open it up. Of course!

Why do girls break up with you and then worry that you’re missing them? Is it because they’re totally unfathomable? Ah, the classic freshman-into-the-teachers’-lounge move. Well, fun stuff has been happening at CHS too, I think. Shoot. I’m famous! I type “Will Halpin” into a search engine:

Whoa. My dad’s name is Kenneth.

On the newspaper’s Web site, there is an option where you can request a copy of the original newspaper obituary with a picture and everything. It costs a few bucks, but luckily I have my mom’s credit card number memorized. Have my parents intentionally hidden this fact from me? Is he really our relative? I fill in the request. I can’t believe it: Will Halpin is a sort-of-famous dead guy.

My parents rarely mention their extended families. On both sides, most are either dead or in Florida—arguably the same thing. From what I am able to piece together—our family tree looking most like a dying sapling—it seems logical that Dummy would have been my grandfather’s uncle. The Ken mentioned in the obituary would have been my great-grandfather, Kenneth Halpin Sr.

Why do I have to learn about my own life this way? Personal history found through Google? Traditions passed down on Web pages? While I sit there wondering what it all means, an instant message window pops up on my screen. The name: Smiley_Man3000. Devon starts chatting like we are old friends. Give the guy an
O
for optimism.

This grabs my attention. Of course it
would
be Pat Chambers who’d have a party that the A.J.’s of the world would get their BVDs in a bunch about.

I press Enter, letting the message sit there for a minute. Letting Devon sweat. Even
he
knows more about what is going on at school than I do.

He must have been typing at the same time I was, because his message appears a split second after I press Enter. It has a carefully placed comma and exclamation point.

I wait for him to get my second message.

He apologizes again. Then something clicks from before: A.J. said, “Playing card in his playing face.”

Devon could kill all fifty-two people and still not get invited to clean up after the party. He has as good a chance of getting a playing card as I do. Which is about as good a chance as me getting invited as one of the showgirls. Which is too bad, because I can really fill out a halter top. Sexy.

I sign off without saying good-bye, feeling somewhat satisfied that my questions were answered. Maybe Smiley_Man3000 is good for something after all. …

“Who is Will Halpin?”

I ask Mona this question the moment she comes in the front door. (Note: Sign language doesn’t translate like regular speech. For example, there is no past tense. I must always live in the present. But I hooked you up. You’re welcome. Please send checks. Interpreters make, like, fifty bucks an hour. You know where to find me.)

Mom gives me a confused, head-tilting look and begins fumbling with her satchel-type thing and the two coffee mugs she is carrying. My mother is an angular woman, with a constantly worried expression on her narrow face. She looks even more frazzled than normal when I greet her this way. It’s not that she doesn’t understand. She is very good at sign language, the result of years of long hours studying with me and a few months of intensive training one summer at Camp
Arrowhead, where I was the only kid rooming with his mommy.

A second later Dad is right behind her. They’ve been car-pooling ever since she hired him at the insurance company. I hate to admit it, but he looks just like me. He is round with the same big baby blues and the annoyingly ironic (in my case anyway) oversize ears. He is heavily bearded and not deaf, although he pretty much lives in a little cocoon anyway. He hardly ever says anything.

“What?” Mom asks. You need both hands for this sign, so she just gives up and drops her stuff. She knows I prefer sign language, so she never makes me read her lips, even though it would be easier for her.

“Who is Will Halpin?” I repeat.

“Wow,” she says. “They have you doing some heavy studies in that school. Is this from a philosophy class? Who am I? What does life mean? Things like that?”

“It’s from history,” I answer bluntly, slapping my fingers.

She gives me her extraquizzical wrinkly eyebrow face.

“I do not follow,” she says. There are several different signs for “history,” so I try another. Dad is trying to keep up, but we are using words like “philosophy” that don’t come up very often. He never attended Camp Arrowhead. He heads into the kitchen, presumably to drown his sorrows in ice cream. It is another thing we share.

I motion for her to come over. My finger jams into the paragraph, leaving a little indentation in the offending page. I poke
the words “Dummy Halpin” over and over again. Dummy Halpin. Dummy Halpin. Dummy Halpin.

“Ken,” she says, calling to my father in the kitchen, “would you look at this?”

After a second Ken comes in, double-chocolate swirl dripping from his beard. I have no idea what he says because his mouth is full and he’s always mumbling.

Mom turns her back to me, presumably to fill him in. I grunt.

“Do not turn your back on me,” I sign to her when she returns to face me.

“Sorry, it is just … I do not…,” she says. And then she stops. Dad mechanically spoons ice cream into his hairy mouth, gazing off into the unknown. “I don’t know who this is.”

Dad stares at the page, reading the short paragraph. It takes him forever to do anything. He looks up at me with a smile. He does a sign everyone knows: that thing where you make a circle motion with your finger while pointing to your head. Crazy. It
is
crazy.

“What do you know about this?” I ask.

She shrugs. “He’s not your grandfather. Maybe an uncle?”

“Can’t we learn more?” I ask.

“Let it go,” she says. “Don’t go digging up ghosts.”

But I don’t want to let it go. I want to dig up every ghost.

Dad gives me a conspiratorial look. Maybe he knows something more?

“Can I go to the library? Do some research?” I ask. Normally, a parent would love that, right?

“It’s getting dark,” she says, making a scared face as she shades her eyes from the light.

I make the face that means “So what?”

“It is not safe. It is our job to protect you,” she says.

When she does that, makes that sign for “protect,” holding her hands up, warding off an unseen enemy, I get pissed. I am so
tired
of being protected. It isn’t just the stupid library. It isn’t just stupid Dummy Halpin. It’s everything unspoken in my whole silent life. I feel my face go bright hot. I storm downstairs to my room. I slam the door behind me over and over again, hoping the noise hurts their damn ears. And then, to prove how seriously irked I am, I go to bed without any dinner.

It is about 1:30 a.m
. I am wide awake. And starving. What was I thinking? I tiptoe to the kitchen for a snack. Mom has saved that night’s dinner, lasagna, on a plate wrapped in tinfoil. She even wrote a note: “You’re the only Will Halpin for us!” The
i
in “Will” was dotted with a smiley face. I
really
love lasagna, but I can’t eat that just on principle. Instead, I eat a weird dinner of cheese slices, cashews, salt and vinegar potato chips, and heaping handfuls of chocolate chips. Then I try to go back to bed, but my stomach is unsteady, and more than that, my brain is itchy. I try counting sheep, deer, cows, and every other stupid animal I can think of. The bovines get spooked, haunted by a coal-smeared Dummy Halpin laughing in the darkness.

I lie on my side, staring at the sick blue glow of my giant alarm clock. It’s huge—a special industrial “alarm clock for the
deaf (it actually says that on the box) that shines a bright light and literally shakes you awake in the morning.

So restless. I think about sneaking up to the computer room, spending some time online, maybe haunting some message boards, taunting a few environmentalists or religious conservatives or religious environmentalists, but, no, I need to move. Nothing crazy, just a walk. To watch. To haunt. Be ghostly.

I know it will be risky to sneak out, but at least I have an easy escape route. My basement bedroom has a half window above my bed, just big enough to slide out of. It opens easily from the inside. I worry that it might make a noise when I pop the rusty latch, so I wait after prying it ajar, give Mom and Dad a few minutes to come check on me. I’ll just tell them I need some air if Mom comes down in her pink robe or Dad saunters down in his matching blue one. But there comes no terry cloth sentry. Ten minutes tick (another offensive term) by on my alarm clock. I pull myself out of the window quick like a cat (or pretty darn rapidly for a fat bear), thrilled to feel the fresh air in my lungs. I keep one eye on the house, checking for lights flicking on or the panicky sweep of a flashlight. Nothing. I proceed, with no real idea where I am headed, out into the night.

It is misty and cool. The streetlights are a waste of electricity, pointless Q-tips of fuzzy light eaten by the fog well before reaching the ground. It is, I think, not unlike a ghost town. I walk across the yard, careful to avoid our gravel driveway. A stupid conversation about this driveway comes to mind.

“Why do we have the only unpaved driveway in town?” I had once asked in a friendly way. “What, are we stuck in the
1800s?” In fact, we
are
sort of stuck in the 1800s—our house is an ancient farm cottage in a little swath of town as of yet untouched by the modernizing influence of big homes and new money.