by Jeff Crook
But in all my years photographing the dead—for the police, for insurance companies, for lawyers—I’d seen plenty of suicides that didn’t make sense. The act itself contradicts all logic and reason. So what if they bought plane tickets they would never use, or called to complain about a credit card charge, hung up the phone, and shot themselves in the head? Something snapped inside. People who had everything to live for, but just couldn’t go on carrying all that hidden grief or buried pain or whatever it was that made them kick over the chair.
The only reason I didn’t believe Sam Loftin had killed himself was because of what I had seen on the levee. But that made all the difference in the world. My “gift” wouldn’t win Jenny Loftin that insurance money. Life insurance agents were funny that way.
I said, “I don’t know what you want from me.”
“I just wish you would talk to her. When you ran out the night of Sam’s wake, she said you’d be back. She said you promised to go to Sam’s funeral.”
“I had another funeral to go to.”
“I’m sorry. What it someone close?” He asked like he didn’t believe me.
“My mother.”
For once, he looked shocked. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
“It’s OK. We weren’t that close.” This wasn’t a lie, but I don’t know why I said it. A month had passed and still I had the feeling that something had been left unfinished. It wasn’t that I hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye to her. I didn’t know what was bothering me.
“You should let Jenny know about your mother. She’ll understand. And I think if you tell her what you really saw that day on the levee, she’ll understand that, too.”
People always say that if you have never seen war, you can never really understand what it’s like. It’s the same way with the dead. Deacon had seen war, and he said he had seen the dead, but I didn’t know whether to believe him. How would he like it if I tried to tell him how to feel about the war? “Do you really want Jenny to spend the rest of her life staring out that window, waiting for her dead husband to appear? How would you like to watch your wife drown over and over and over?”
“I didn’t think of it that way.”
“Most people think I’m crazy when I tell them I see these things.”
“I believe you.”
“Why? Because you see spooks, too? Because your guilty conscience fills your pews with the manifestations of your PTSD? Tell you what, preacher. Let me know next time you see him and I’ll tell you if he’s real.”
“I will do that.”
“When I do, maybe you can tell me why God’s plan included you blowing an innocent man’s head clean off. Because nobody asked that soldier if he wanted to be your final exam in Theology 101.”
“Why are you so angry all the time, Jackie Lyons?”
“Preacher, you don’t know jack about me.”
“I would like to, though. I wish you would tell me.”
“There’s nothing to tell. Now can I get back to my work? I got rent to pay.”
Why was I so angry? Because sometimes I felt like Deacon’s dead Iraqi—an object lesson in someone else’s life, with no other purpose than to get my head blown off to teach some holy fraud I didn’t even know a lesson I’d never be privileged to learn.
15
I WORKED ALONE UNTIL almost dark. I knew it was time to quit when the nail guns stopped spitting. A couple of old Mexican women were waiting for me on the porch. One handed me an envelope full of money. I didn’t count it in front of her. The other gave me a flashlight.
I thanked them and they left me alone on the porch. The beer Deacon had been drinking earlier still sat by the steps, nearly full. It was warm as spit but I drank it anyway, washing the dirt dobber nests out of my throat. The sun was going down quickly, the earth giving up its heat in a moist fume that smelled like rotting leaves and chainsaw smoke. I counted the money in the envelope by the light of the flashlight. Ten pictures of Andy Jackson so crisp and new they stuck together like refrigerator magnets.
I walked down through the woods, following the trail back to where I’d parked my car in front of Jenny’s house. I hoped I wouldn’t run into her there. When I got there, the only thing waiting for me was a tow notice from the neighborhood security guard taped to the driver’s-side window. Jenny’s house looked dark and empty, the house beside it brightly lit with a picturesque little old lady peeping through one curtain in an upper window. I guessed she was the one who called security.
I lit a cigarette and leaned against the hood of my car, watched some geese cross the purple velvet of the sky headed for the lake, the whoosh of their wings sounding close enough to touch, and thought about that day when I’d stood almost in this exact spot and watched a replay of the moment of a man’s death. I wondered if there were some way it could be conjured up like an instant replay, so that a person could review it from eighteen different angles to determine if the man was dead before he went in the water or if someone put him there.
I dropped my butt and got in my car, started the engine and clicked on the headlights. They shone across the field to the edge of the woods, where a little girl stood just under the trees. She was dressed in a little pink and white Cotton Carnival dress, all petticoats and bows with ribbons in her hair. She didn’t look like any of the kids at Deacon’s camp. She was too clean, too Caucasian, but maybe I had missed her in the crowd. There were a lot of people in that camp and I couldn’t have seen them all. I was afraid she had followed me.
I stepped out of my car. She half turned and edged back into the woods as though about to run away. “Hey kid!” I shouted, and started toward her, but she only retreated deeper into the woods. I walked faster, pushing through the tall, dry grass, trying not to break an ankle in the tractor ruts.
For a moment I lost sight of her behind a blackberry thicket. By the time I had cleared it, she was gone, replaced by a black figure like a dog, hunched over. It didn’t so much move as merge into the shadows beneath the trees, as though the darkness had opened up like a door and it had slipped in with the alien grace of an octopus, headfirst, drawing its long, thin tentacle limbs behind it. I felt myself go cold inside, a drowned-at-the-bottom-of-the-lake cold.
I looked back at the house and the little old lady peering out her window. She was either watching me through a telescope now, or drinking from a bottle of hooch. I doubted she was drinking hooch. If she had, I might have knocked on her door and asked for a swallow.
Then a little girl screamed and I was running. The headlights of my car cast my shadow huge before me against the wall of trees. I entered the woods, passing through the same dark door the creature had entered moments before.
The path seemed different than before. It twisted and turned in unfamiliar ways. I knew I should have crossed the log bridge at some point, but it never appeared. I shone the flashlight up the path and back the way I had come. With a shriek, the little girl crossed through the beam of my light about thirty yards away. Something large and dark coursed behind her, close on her shiny Little Bo Peep heels.
I dove off the trail into the underbrush, limbs whipping at my face, thorns ripping my flesh like mad weasels, chasing something. I didn’t know what it was. I don’t know what I would have done had I caught it. All I had for a weapon was a cheap plastic flashlight.
I saw them maybe twice more before I lost them completely. They didn’t so much escape or leave me behind as simply cease to be, as though they had never been there at all. Which they hadn’t. I should have recognized the little girl in her period dress and odd nocturnal behavior. She had probably died before I was even born. It had been several years since I let one trick me that way, not since my days as a vice cop for the Memphis Police Department, back before I traded my badge for a heroin spoon.
Deacon’s flashlight started to piss out on me as I headed back, but I had no idea which path would return me to my car before it ran out of gas. I knew the woods were bordered east and west by the highway an
d the lake, north and south by Stirling Estates. This wasn’t darkest Africa. If I started walking, sooner or later I had to reach the border of something resembling civilization.
I hadn’t gone very far before I stubbed my toe against an old piece of headstone leaning against a tree. Its outline was rough and the letters almost illiterate, crude as though scratched into the stone with a hammer and nail, not the fine chiseling of a professional monument carver.
Hyer lies Bob Wharton
Ded of Plursy
Janerary 7, 1932
I found another headstone sprouting from the other side of the tree. A group of cedars had nearly overgrown a small plot surrounded by a rusting iron fence. Everywhere the wavering beam of my flashlight fell, I saw another leaning, vine-draped headstone half buried in leaves. I realized I had stumbled into the middle of an old cemetery in the middle of the night.
And I wasn’t the only one there.
I saw a woman floating slowly among the graves. From behind, she looked about the same age as my mother, her gray hair piled up under an old-fashioned hat, and a long black dress with an enormous bustle and puffy sleeves that ended in lace cuffs. Her shawl was a net of spiderwebs drawn across her shoulders. I was starting to understand why Trey said you couldn’t pay him to walk through these woods at night.
I followed her until she entered a large stone crypt with the name “Stirling” inscribed above the severe bronze door. A tall black cedar leaned against one corner of the tomb, carpeting the ground with reddish-brown needles.
The door, mossy green with verdigris, stood partially open, as was the rusting iron gate beyond it. Another gate at the back of the crypt also stood open. Old caskets lined the walls; one or two had tumbled to the floor and cracked open, loosing scraps of faded silky rags, a scattering of dusty bones and a long spill of wispy gray hair. The nooks and corners were properly draped like a movie set with shrouds of cobwebs. The only thing missing from the milieu, other than my ghostly companion, was a rat crouched atop the cracked lid of a sarcophagus.
Beyond the second gate a stair led down into the earth. While I stood there wondering if this was the same tunnel Trey had found with his dowsing rods, the gate behind me swung shut with a shrieking clang of metal.
This was hilarious. Somebody was trying way too hard to scare me. The gate had no doubt been blown shut by some tornadic gust of wind supplied by props. The same wind had also locked it and rusted it shut. It looked like it hadn’t been opened in a hundred years. I didn’t bother shouting for help. The flashlight batteries were fading fast. I didn’t relish the idea of spending the night in this hotel, so I started down the stairs, hoping to find another way out.
Instead, I found myself in a narrow, coffin-shaped arch of brick supported every ten feet by crude columns. I picked up an old kerosene lantern lying on the floor just at the foot of the stairs, and a moth fluttered out and struck me in the eye. Probably the same thing had happened to whoever had dropped the lantern in the first place, because that’s what I did. It clanged on the bricks loud enough to wake the dead.
Having nothing better to do, I shook a little more light out of my dying flashlight and started down the tunnel. I hoped it would end in some forgotten basement in the house. After about fifty yards, the roof grew furry with roots, pushing the bricks loose in places and causing the ceiling to sag alarmingly. Broken bricks littered the floor, surrounded by little piles of pale dry dirt.
The tunnel ended at a brick wall, as good as nowhere at all. At that moment, my flashlight finally gave up its weak ghost and joined the heavenly torches triumphant. I tried clicking the button a couple hundred times, with the usual results.
The air was no stuffier than you would expect, being buried alive, but I quickly began to resent it. I could have gone back but I didn’t especially want to walk that tunnel in complete darkness, feeling the weight of the earth pressing down on the air, each breath smaller than the last until you’re not breathing at all. Buried alive, wryly biting back a histrionic scream. Buried alive!
In any case, the tunnel only led back to the crypt and its locked gate. I took my lighter out of my pocket and lit the flame, but there was no point standing there broiling my thumb just to look at a dusty brick wall.
I could have called for help, except my phone was receiving about as much signal as if I’d been at the North Pole. Whatever it was that jammed Trey’s frequencies was also jamming mine. I pushed every button on the phone anyway. After listening to my own heart pound in my ears for a couple of hours, I started seeing lights and hearing voices. The lights were like fireflies, floating down the tunnel toward me from the direction of the crypt, six or seven tiny dots fading and growing brighter and fading again though never disappearing altogether. If they were fireflies, I couldn’t see their wings when they flew close, nor feel the touch of their tiny feet when one landed on my outstretched hand.
The voices were indistinct at first, everywhere and nowhere, but gradually I was able to sift a word from the mumble, enough to realize they were speaking Spanish. I laughed at the horribleness of the pun and said aloud, “Spanish firefly.”
“Odio este lugar,” it answered. (I hate this place.)
Spanish ghosts, I thought. Two voices, both male. Maybe the ghosts of Hernando de Soto’s soldiers.
“Creo que la caja de fusibles está aquí.” (I think the fuse box is over here.)
Or maybe not. Conquistadores searched for lost cities of gold, not fuse boxes. They sounded like they were just on the other side of the brick wall.
“¿Está rota la linterna?” (Is the flashlight broken?)
“¡Mear sobre esta linterna!” (Piss on this flashlight!)
“Que brille la luz aquí.” (Shine the light here.)
Almost close enough to touch. I cupped my hands to the wall and shouted into the bricks, “Hola, amigos!”
“María madre de Jesucristo!”
“¿Ha dicho algo?” (Did you say something?)
“Yo no dijé nada.” (I didn’t say anything.)
“Hola, hombres! I’m over here.” I beat my flashlight against the wall until the cheap plastic case cracked in half and spilled its discount batteries on the floor.
“¡Es un fantasma!” (It is a ghost!)
“Vamonos!”
As I listened to their feet pounding up some stairs, I was starting to understand what it must be like to go through eternity invisible, only to have the one person who really can see you run away in terror. And I was starting to wonder if there had been a transition for me. Maybe I had fallen off the log bridge and my body was lying back there in the woods with a broken neck. What if they were right? What if I was un fantasma?
I put my hand against the brick wall, assuring myself of its cold reality. This was no satin-lined coffin. I counted the rows of bricks as high as I could reach. The lightning bugs drifted past me and landed by my hand.
Then a male voice spoke with authority, startlingly close, almost in the tunnel beside me: “In the name of the Lord God Almighty, I command you to reveal yourself.” A curious request, I thought. Your usual exorcist would have commanded me to begone, depart, go back to the darkness or walk into the light. Not being one to argue with the Lord, I answered.
“Jackie?” Deacon said, surprised for the second time this day.
“I’m here!” I picked up one of the flashlight batteries and beat it against the wall. It didn’t make much noise, but it was better than trying to chew my way through the bricks.
“Bring me a sledgehammer and a crowbar!” he shouted to his workers.
16
DEACON FELT COMPELLED TO WALK me back to my car. My explanation of how I got lost in the woods wouldn’t have convinced a civil jury I was competent to cross a parking lot without a Boy Scout holding my hand. “You were lucky your friend the dowser told me about that tunnel,” he said as he led the way. He wasn’t even using a flashlight to pick out the trail. The woods seemed to open a few feet before him and close a few feet behind m
e. “I sent two masons into the basement to look for it. We never would have found the entrance if you hadn’t been banging on the wall.”
“I’m surprised Mrs. Ruth never told you about it.” He held my hand as we crossed the log bridge over the dry creek.
“Maybe she didn’t know.”
We arrived back on the block a little before eleven. It had taken longer than I thought to dig me out. “My battery’s probably dead. I’m going to need a tow truck.”
“Looks like a tow truck has already been here,” Deacon said.
* * *
“That’ll be Doris Dye,” Jenny answered as she poured three glasses of wine. I washed my hands in the bathroom under the stairs. We had found her still awake with a book in her hand when Deacon knocked on her door.
She handed me a glass as I exited the bathroom. “That’s the lady I saw at the window?”
“Our neighbor. She probably called security as soon as you ran off.”
“Mrs. Dye takes it upon herself to keep out all the riffraff,” Deacon said from the den.
“She thinks we’re riffraff, too,” Jenny said. I followed her into the den, where Deacon was stretched out with his wineglass balanced on his stomach and his fingers laced behind his head. The television was on with the volume down, some preacher with a cheap felt banner hanging behind his head, proclaiming his church’s intent to conquer the world for Christ.
“It’s past your bedtime, Deacon,” Jenny said.
He yawned and nodded but didn’t move from the couch.
“There’s no point in walking back through the woods in the dark. We have plenty of room for you here.” She turned to me and smiled. “For both of you, of course.”
I would almost rather have spent the night back in the crypt than risk having a quiet heart-to-heart chat with Jenny about her dead husband’s ghost. “That’s really nice of you, but I should be going. If I could just borrow a phone book…”
“You’ll never get a cab out here this time of night,” Deacon yawned.
