The Poor and the Haunted

by Dustin McKissen

  He had a theory. It was an idea he long ago dismissed as the thoughts of a young boy trying to rationalize an event lacking any rationale at all. His theory, crazy as it was, brought more comfort than the idea he shared DNA with a ticking time bomb whose last will and testament bequeathed a ninety-day late notice from Oklahoma Gas & Electric and a lifetime of bad memories.

  The theory revolved around two facts:

  First, his father was physically weak, despite his constant bragging about kicking someone’s ass. Ronnie avoided any labor he wasn’t paid to do, and his laziness showed in his concaved chest and nonexistent triceps.

  Once, during a checkup at the free county health clinic for a potentially sprained ankle his senior year, Jimmy asked the doctor, “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s sort of strange. The question I’m about to ask.”

  The physician, a youngish man with Chandler Bing’s haircut and Danny Devito’s stature, rested his clipboard on the counter across from the bed Jimmy sat on, and said, “You’re in luck. All we get are strange questions.”

  “Okay. How strong would someone have to be to stab themselves in the eye hard enough to fracture their skull?”

  Jimmy’s doctor smiled and looked him in the eyes.

  “I have to give you credit. That’s a weird way to mess with your doctor.”

  “I’m not messing with you. It’s a real question.”

  The doctor stopped smiling.

  “Why are you asking? Jimmy, have you thought about hurting yourself?”

  “No. My father committed suicide by stabbing himself in the eye in our barn. He—we lived on a farm. A dairy, actually. When I was a kid.”

  “I’m sorry, Jimmy. I think I remember reading something about that.”

  The doctor noted Jimmy saying, “When I was a kid.” It was clear this young man experienced far more, and far worse, in just eighteen years than most people do in a lifetime.

  “It’s okay,” Jimmy said. “I just needed…I just have always wondered.”

  “Okay. Well. The human body…every human body is different, but I will say it would not be an easy thing to do. First of all, your body has a natural protective instinct when it comes to your eyes. We have eyelashes and eyebrows to protect the eye from foreign objects. Being able to swing a sharp object at your eye and penetrate it, without stopping yourself before it enters, is surprising. I’ve never heard of anyone committing suicide like that.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Did your father have problems with drugs or alcohol?”

  “Vodka…and crystal meth.”

  “Stabbing yourself in the eye sounds like a crystal meth thing, but even then, I haven’t heard of it,” the doctor said. Jimmy looked at his nametag. Dr. Paul, it said. Jimmy didn’t know if that was his first or last name and didn’t want to ask. “Anyway, he got it in there hard enough to fracture his skull?”

  “Yep. Went in at an angle. Fractured right here,” Jimmy said, knocking on the right side of his skull, above his ear.

  “I guess with momentum he could do it, in theory. But it would take some strength. Some significant strength.”

  Strength Jimmy believed an atrophied addict and alcoholic did not have.

  “Thank you, doctor.”

  “Jimmy, do you need to talk to someone? We don’t have a counselor here at the clinic, but I can make a referral, pull some strings.”

  “Thank you, but I’m okay. I have this under control. I just needed to know.”

  “Sure? It’s not a problem.”

  “No, I’m good.”

  Dr. Paul’s questions made Jimmy feel less like the confident, capable young man he tried to project to the world. He felt more like the lost little boy he was.

  “Gotta go,” Jimmy said, and limped out of the clinic. He took Dr. Paul’s prescription for Vicodin out of courtesy, knowing he would throw it in the trash as he exited the clinic. Tossing the script for high-powered pain killers in the trash was fifty percent self-preservation, fifty percent self-awareness, and one hundred percent fuck you to his greedy, chemically addled mother.

  The doctor couldn’t do much for his ankle, but he confirmed what Jimmy already thought he knew: His father likely wasn’t strong enough to kill himself in the manner he chose.

  The second leg of Jimmy’s theory was the choice of method. To Jimmy, there was suicide—and there was murdering yourself. Suicide was a relatively peaceful exit. It was a belt tied to the rack in your closet, a closed garage door and a running car, a bottle of pills, a bullet to the head. Murdering yourself was something else: An act of rage taken out on your physical being, in some ways no different than killing someone else.

  Ronnie Lansford didn’t commit suicide.

  Ronnie Lansford murdered himself.

  So, Jimmy thought, why would anyone murder themselves? And in such a barbaric way? When he was eighteen, Jimmy thought he knew, but thinking about possession made Jimmy feel like just another lunatic Lansford.

  Now, he wasn’t so sure his theory had been crazy. Now he thought there might be something to the idea that the devil had a favorite family. Just as he grabbed the bag containing his father’s note, the overhead bulb flickered twice and burst. Tiny shards of glass showered his unit like rain in Don Decker’s Pennsylvania living room.

  There was static in the air, the feeling of a television on with no sound—and no light. The hair on his neck and arms rose. The moisture in his nose and throat evaporated. His eyeballs felt like they would pop, their capacity to ingest the darkness around him expanding as his pupils breached the borders of his sockets.

  “Hello?” Jimmy asked, his voice echoing in the dark space.

  “Hello?”

  He reached for the wall and grasped nothing but a fistful of vacant black.

  “Who’s there? Hello?”

  The concrete floor beneath his feet suddenly gave way.

  Jimmy floated up and up. Though he could not see any of it, he felt the storage unit, his home, his adopted city, his family, the hand towels and fresh organic soaps of his bathroom, his daily run, his beautiful carefully constructed storefront of ordinary disappear in the miles and then planets and then universes beneath him. Jimmy rose and rose and rose and rose until even a father with a rusty knife for an eye and an Oklahoma possum carcass for a heart became less than the speck of dust Carl Sagan spoke of.

  He floated out past the light of the last star, out past the edge of God’s creation where the only thing left to see are memories careening off the interior edges of your skull, a mad pinball game that requires no quarters and never ends.

  Jimmy stretched his jaw, gathering the air in his organs and torso to scream his way back to the bright—and with his mandibles stretched wide and the scream racing upward past the red fibers of his heart, he felt the ground beneath his feet solidify.

  He reached for the door, and found what he needed:

  A little bit of light.

  ***

  There were security cameras all over the halls of the storage facility, but none in the units themselves. Still, despite the lack of cameras, just off Deer Valley Road in North Phoenix, a man was observed in a single small storage unit repeating the words, “Hello” and “Who’s there?” before standing for some time in the darkness, his mouth open wide as he swallowed the dark. He left, carrying a bag containing a piece of paper, still crunchy from dried blood two decades old.

  The man left the storage unit and returned to the suburban home where he lived with his wife and two children. After dinner, the man was observed going back to his car and grabbing the
bag he brought home from the storage unit. He placed it on a high shelf inside the garage, where his children could not reach it. He opened the door that connected the garage to the rest of the home and returned to his family for their Thursday night sitcoms.

  As the door closed with a soft click, the man’s observer placed its form against the door, sensing the trees that birthed the wooden particles surrounding the brass handle, the machine-cooled air inside the home, the carpet thick like the fur of the four-thousand-dollar puppies purchased in pet stores in upscale malls just a few miles away, the four people on the couch, their skin, the red and white cells traveling their veins, double-helixes half-borrowed from damaged generations before, hopefully diluted and diluted and diluted and diluted and diluted and diluted and diluted and diluted until all that was left was built here, in this new and still blank part of the country, on this couch, in interlocked fingers and pink-socked feet propped on thighs and the sound of laughter from the throat of the man who, for a moment, on a Must-See-TV Thursday night, forgot the need for a scream so deep it would leave his vocal chords ruptured like strings on an abused guitar.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1998

  Three weeks after Ronnie Lansford died, Diane, Jimmy, and Kelly moved into a rundown two-bedroom government-subsidized home not far from Derry’s Ice Cream Shop. Despite what had happened at the dairy, they didn’t choose to leave. The Torrances told them they couldn’t afford to keep the family on the property without Ronnie Lansford’s labor.

  “We feel for you,” said Jim Torrance, standing on the porch of the farmhouse. “We really do. Just, you know, the economy. There was that whole meltdown in Asia…you saw, right?”

  Torrance looked at Diane and away from the children while he said it, assuming the ragged band of leftover Lansfords would take his word for it. Jimmy knew better. He read the USA Today in the school library as often as he could. He knew the economy was fine. The Torrances wanted crazy Diane and her damaged offspring gone, and if it took implying a raft of porchfront bullshit about how collapsing share prices of cell phone companies in Thailand impacted milk futures in the American Midwest, they would do it. Jimmy couldn’t stop them, nor did he really want to. He was done with life on the dairy—but he didn’t have to buy an excuse premised on the idea that wearing secondhand shoes and being ignorant are the same thing.

  While Kelly and Jimmy were happy to move back into town, the downside was sharing a bedroom—something unnatural for even the closest of opposite sex twelve- and fifteen-year-old siblings.

  They made do and told no one at school they shared a room.

  Detective Mike Carlisle was somewhat of a regular at Derry’s, which wasn’t surprising given his frequent visits to the Section 8 part of town. He pulled a few strings—small business owners in the bad part of town understood the value of a friendly relationship with the police—and got Jimmy an afterschool job running an ancient milkshake machine and learning how to turn a vanilla ice cream cone upside down and dip it in chocolate without dropping the whole thing.

  His job at Derry’s made Jimmy the sole worker in his home.

  Diane qualified for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, though the new law passed by the government two years prior meant her time on welfare was limited, and the state required her to actively look for a job or attend classes. Of course, the government could pass legislation, conduct a ceremonial signing, pat itself on the back, and point to success stories of mothers who found a place behind a McDonald’s counter—women who, according to the politicians, felt the enormous pride that comes with earning a minimum wage income and teaching your children to survive almost exclusively on dried noodles heated in a microwave. But when it came to sheer creativity, all the congressmen in the world were no match for Diane Lansford’s ability to eke out a living while never crossing paths with a timecard.

  Jimmy dug up and read through the TANF papers his mother brought home and threw in the trash. Reading the fine print, Jimmy understood he and Kelly were on a ticking clock. That was why, with few exceptions, Jimmy saved nearly every penny he earned.

  He did not buy a car.

  He did not save for college.

  He did not tell his mother where he kept his money, despite her incessant, nagging requests to borrow just a few dollars.

  “Can I borrow some money, please, baby?” Diane would ask, squeezing her breasts together and leaning toward Jimmy, as though he were a part-time welder with an uncashed $300 scratchers ticket in his pocket and not her own son. “I promise I’ll pay you back.”

  Jimmy played this game before. He knew how his money would get used. Every dollar his mother could get her hands on went straight into a glass pipe.

  “No, mom. Don’t ask again,” he said, keeping his eyes off her toxic leopard print.

  Once rejected, she lost the flirty act and became the Diane he knew.

  “Fucking ingrate,” she would say.

  TANF, food stamps, and Section 8 vouchers covered their rent, utilities, and what little food they kept in the house—but anything else was a luxury.

  Jimmy tried to make do. His growing stardom in cross-country meant no one mocked his cheap running shoes. They were all he could afford—until one day he came home to a new pair of Nikes so clean and new they hurt to look at.

  “Detective Carlisle dropped them off,” Kelly said, her smile as bright as the new shoes sitting near his pillow. “Said he read about you in the paper and thought you might need them.”

  It was true; there was a story about Jimmy in the local paper, complete with a black-and-white photo of him holding a small trophy. He asked Brian if he could keep the trophy at his house. Jimmy was afraid Diane would believe it was real gold and attempt to pawn it or trade it for drugs. Brian said yes, though the trophy wasn’t kept in his best friend’s closet.

  Brian’s mom placed it on their mantle, right next to Brian’s honor roll plaques and DECA trophy.

  Jimmy was pretty sure it wasn’t the last trophy he would hide from his mother. The first time he ran a mile in freshman PE, Jimmy discovered the lump in his throat—the lump threatening to escape as he looked at his new shoes—could be pushed down and out the bottom of his feet. When that happened, not even memories could catch him.

  What their various forms of government assistance wouldn’t pay for was the meth and Milwaukee’s Best his mother consumed on a regular basis. He learned, a few months after they moved to their new home, how his mother earned her crystal money.

  Jimmy was spending the night at Brian’s house when Brian’s mom knocked on her son’s bedroom door. While the dairy was outside of town, it was part of the same school district Jimmy and Kelly always attended. Moving back to town didn’t mean changing schools. Not having to change schools—even though it meant attending class with people who knew what a freakshow his family was—and being closer to Brian were two bright spots in an awful year.

  It was past 11:00 PM when Brian’s mom knocked on the door. Julie Lucido didn’t walk around with exposed cleavage, dyed blonde hair, and jeans so tight you could see geometry normally reserved for doctors and husbands. Julie wore flannel pajamas, was thick in her middle section, worked as an accountant, knew how to make homemade chocolate chip cookies, and wasn’t shy about telling Brian how much she loved him. As best as Jimmy could tell, her favorite sentence was, “I love you, Bri.”

  After his sister, Brian’s mom was the most beautiful woman Jimmy knew. Even in her flannel pajamas.

  “Jimmy, Kelly’s on the phone for you,” Julie said from the doorway.

  He had been lying on the floor, playing with Brian’s old Gameboy. Jimmy secretly hoped Brian’s new PlayStation meant he would get the Gameboy, just like the time Brian let him take the Walkman. Unlike the Walkm
an, if Brian gave him the Gameboy, Jimmy would be careful not to smash it.

  Jimmy stood up and took the phone. Julie ruffled his hair, like she always did.

  “Hey, Kelly. Everything okay?”

  “I think someone is in our backyard. Inside mom’s car,” she said, her voice cracking and fading like a radio losing its signal. “I can see someone out there, and it isn’t her.”

  “You sure? Where is mom?”

  “I have no idea. Jimmy, I looked for her before I called you.”

  “What do you mean someone is in the car?”

  In the middle of their overgrown backyard sat Diane’s Pontiac Firebird, the passenger side window a spiderweb of broken glass, the bird on the hood long faded. The house had a driveway, but their mother could drunkenly weave the car down the alley and into their backyard without hitting the mailbox and coming face to face with a stack of past-due bills.

  “I can see people in the car, and it’s moving. I don’t want to be here alone,” Kelly said.

  “Okay. I’m coming home. Lock the doors, and don’t open them for anyone.”

  “Even mom?”

  “Yes, even mom.”

  Especially mom, he wanted to say.

  “Kay.”

  “Look under my bed. That’s where I keep my weight plates. Get the ten-pound one.”

  “Kay.”

  “And where do you aim if someone breaks in? What did I tell you to do?”

  “Hit them across the nose. With the weight plate. Let my wrists do the work.”

  “I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

  “Kay.”

  “Kelly, lock all the doors. And do not let anyone in that isn’t me.”

  “Kay.”

  “Bye.”

  “Jimmy?” Kelly asked before hanging up.

  “Yeah?”