American Ghost

by Paul Guernsey

  Chef shrugged and gave a snort. “Up to you,” he said.

  Dirt’s prominent Adam’s apple bounced, and from deep within his throat there came an involuntary noise, almost a whimper. He turned abruptly and left the kitchen to head out to the street. After he’d been gone a few seconds, my mother suddenly bared her teeth, nearly bumped Chef as she stalked to the window, and used both hands to spread the metal blinds with a crashing sound. Watching as Dirt slouched across the road toward the seated silhouette on the other side, she declared in a raised and slightly quavering voice, “I may go talk to Scratch.”

  “No!” Cricket, Mantis, and Chef all barked at once.

  She turned back to them with an open mouth, clearly startled if not shaken by their reaction. When she had recovered sufficiently, she gave a single nod. “I see,” she said, in a quiet tone that nevertheless suggested all her suspicions had been confirmed. She almost smiled.

  Dirt returned, pale beneath the dark stubble on his face, and went directly for his Twisted Tea, which he raised to his mouth with a shaking hand. After a moment, he turned to say something to Cricket—but Cricket was already gone. I tried to follow her, was desperate to do so in fact, but just as when I had been following Chef, I lacked the ghostly strength to push myself through the front door.

  Anyway, I probably would not have learned much because a minute later, Scratch’s bike gave a series of powerful, throat-clearing coughs before popping into gear, carving a muttering U on the blacktop, and exploding back down the road toward Riverside.

  Cricket returned to the house wearing her best Sunday smile. “Now,” she said. “That’s over with. And, where were we?”

  Everyone, including my mother, seemed to relax after that. Cigarettes were lit, fresh drinks were opened, and my mother’s cloudy water glass was refilled with wine. The strange stench of fresh vinyl released its grip on my memory. When Chef made up something funny I’d supposedly said, there was relieved laughter all around. My housemates filled plates with food and ate ravenously, as if they’d been through some grueling physical ordeal. Even Mom stabbed a rolled slice of turkey with a plastic fork and nibbled on it.

  At one point, while the five of them were still milling about the kitchen, eating, drinking and talking, Mantis passed behind Cricket and gave her ass a secret squeeze. Cricket remained expressionless, but she rocked her hips almost imperceptibly to show that his touch was not entirely unwelcome. This sight was so painful to me that, if my mother hadn’t been there, and had I not been worried that I might never see her again, I would have fled back to the watery underworld.

  After the feeding frenzy was over, Cricket took my mother by the arm and led her through the living room to the double windows that overlooked the backyard. She said, “I just want to remind you that Danny did have a real love for certain things.” She waved a finger at the miniature ghost town of my bird-feeding station, some components of which had been blown from their hangers by the wind and were now lying among the fallen leaves. Unburdened by the weight of seeds and suet, many of the hanger posts leaned at drunken angles, and without a single bird in attendance the collection of weathered plastic dispensers was a sorry sight. Still, Cricket was obviously hoping my mother’s imagination would allow her to envision the bygone glory. “Do you see all those birdfeeders?” she said, forcing a tone of wonder into her voice.

  But Mom’s eye had been caught by something else. “Why, there is a child here!” she exclaimed. “Or, there was. Whose is it?”

  “What?” said Cricket, giving her a puzzled smile. “I don’t understand.”

  “That small tire, hanging from the tree. Danny had a tire-swing just like it when he was little. His father put it up for him.”

  “Oh. No. Thumb put it up there, but it was for Tigger. To exercise on.”

  Mom gave her an incredulous look. “The dog used a swing?”

  Dirt, holding a cigarette and a fresh bottle of Twisted Tea, had come up from behind and was standing near them now. “Well, he don’t sit in it,” Dirt said, and laughed. “Only a cartoon dog can do that. It’s for jaw strength and endurance. What Tig’d do is he’d leap up, clamp onto that tire with his mouth, and then just hang there till Thumb told him he could get down.

  “Sometimes Thumb would put him up there and then come back into the house and leave him there for a half-hour or so. Every so often he’d open one of these windows right here and he’d yell out, ‘Shake it, boy! Give it a shake!’ and then it’d be the funniest damn thing you ever saw: Tigger’d start dancing and singing and twisting all around in midair like a fish on a line, and whining away like he thought he stood a actual chance at tearing a piece out of that steel-belted tire.”

  Mom asked, “And what was the purpose of all this, again?”

  “Well, that’s just how you train a fighting dog,” said Dirt. “That and road work. Some of your more hardcore dudes’ll even put the dog on a treadmill, and then they’ll take a cat in a harness and they dangle it … ”

  “So, you’re telling me Danny was training his pet to fight other dogs?”

  “No!” Cricket broke in. “He was a guard dog, is all! Jesus, Dirt! Why don’t you go get another drink? No, Thumb just wanted Tigger to be in good shape to protect us all. He trained him hard, and he had a knack for it, but he would never make him fight another dog.”

  Mom looked at Dirt, who was now holding his cigarette at eye level, staring at is trailing a corkscrew of ash as if willing it to break off and fall to the floor.

  “Is that true?”

  “Well,” said Dirt, clearly offended by Cricket’s interruption, “I never said nothing different.”

  Cricket shook her head in disgust. She said to my mother, “But what I wanted you to see was the birdfeeders. Even though they’re all empty now, you can see that he had different types of them for different kinds of seeds and other food, and he kept track of all the different birds that came. Those long ones are thistle feeders—you can see one of them on the ground over there—and they’re for the finches; the things that look like little cages there, is where he’d put suet, and those red ones, in summer he’d fill them with a liquid that brought the most beautiful hummingbirds around—they looked like fairies. Part of what we’ll send to you in Florida are the notebooks he kept on the birds.”

  Dirt, having abandoned his apparent telekinetic experiment and flicked his ash to the floor, said, “And, if you knew what was good for you, you did not mess with Thumb’s goddamn birds.”

  “Dirt!” said Cricket in a warning voice.

  “Hey, Dirt,” said Chef, and headed toward us from the kitchen. But Dirt ignored them both.

  Looking directly at my mother, he began, “So, one day last summer, there I am sitting in the backyard having a cocktail and a little smoke, when suddenly this giant bird as long as my arm soars in from nowhere like a pterodactyl and lands upside-down on the trunk of that big tree right there. It don’t even waste a second before it scrambles down and starts banging away on that big branch with its beak. Big red head and a mouth on it the size of a pickaxe. Thumb said later it was called a double-plied woodpecker, but in my state of mind, you know, I thought it might not even have a regular name, because I couldn’t believe there might be another one just like it someplace.”

  Chef had moved in among us by then and he seemed eager to change the subject. But when he tried to talk, my mother, who had given me my first Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds long ago, cut him off. “Pileated woodpecker, you mean?” she said. “That’s what Danny would have told you. They’re large—second in size only to the ivory-billed, which is now extinct, of course—but they’re hardly as long as your arm.”

  “Whatever. Anyway, I’m sitting there watching all these huge wood chips flying through the air and showering down on the ground in like slow motion, buckets and buckets of them coming down like pieces of the sky, and that’s when I start to get scared, like maybe I ought to do something. Like maybe, he’s gonna peck right through that br
anch and make it crash down onto the house. Maybe even kill somebody inside.”

  “That’s a very thick branch. And it doesn’t look like it would fall anywhere near the house,” my mother observed.

  “Well, with leaves on it, it does,” Dirt insisted. “But anyway, luckily I had my Glock lying right there under the lawn chair, and I was able to put a stop to it. He fell out of that tree and hit the ground in a big plop of feathers. Like watching a turkey fall face first out of a airplane.”

  My mother squinted as if she were having trouble visualizing such an improbable scene. She said, “You shot the woodpecker out of the tree? You were drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana in your backyard with a loaded handgun under your lawn chair, and you … ”

  “Next thing I know, Thumb comes busting from the house and drags my ass right out of the chair. Chair goes crashing away. I wasn’t even ready for him, or I would’ve kicked his ass right then; I thought he was playing around, and I’m all like, ‘Hey, Thumb, what’s up?’ But then he cracks the top of his head against my forehead, then he hits me in the stomach, and then the next thing I know, I got a mouthful of his knuckles, and I’m flying across the lawn. When I come to, I’m at ground level, staring right into the big red eye of that dinosaur-bird I shot. Out of the corner of my own eye I see the clip from my gun go sailing over the fence back there, and a second later a swarm of bees that turns out to be my bullets follows it over, and then the gun flies over, too. There’s blood running down my chin, and then I feel something in my mouth, and when I spit it out and clean it off a little on my shirt, wouldn’t you know it? It’s my tooth.” He gave my mother a mirthless grin and stuck a forefinger into the gap at the front of his mouth.

  “Right there,” he said in a sudden quaver, wiggling his finger as if she wouldn’t have seen it otherwise. “The other tooth, I think the nerve is dead, and it might have to come out, too.” He had begun to shake, anger and injured pride filling his normally empty eyes. He had never dared express those feelings to me while I was alive; instead, in his clown-like fashion, whenever the woodpecker incident came up, he played it for laughs. But now here he was, letting his cowardly rage glare through for my mother to see. Right then, if I’d had the power, I would have beaten the shit out of him all over again.

  Visibly upset, my mother turned away from him and looked back out the window. “Well, he shouldn’t have done that,” she said. She drew a tissue from her pocket and lifted her glasses to dab the corner of an eye.

  “No, he damn well shouldn’t of,” Dirt said, his fingertip still plugging the hole in the front of his face. “And, what a way to thank a guy who’s only protecting your house.” By then, Mantis had him by the shoulders and was pulling him away from behind. As soon as he was gone, Chef stepped in next to my mother. He placed his meaty hand in the middle of my mother’s back.

  “Of course he should of,” Chef insisted. “When you got a drunken meth-head shooting randomly in your backyard, somebody has to stop him. That’s what Thumb did. That’s all he did. What else are you gonna do?” A few moments later, we heard Dirt’s motorcycle bark to life in the driveway and go roaring off toward town. Mantis came back inside and closed the front door.

  Cricket said, “Dirt doesn’t have any sense. The real story is a little different than he told it, and anyway Thumb was just protecting the rest of us. He was a good protector.”

  “He was a good man,” said Chef. “A good friend.”

  Mantis, who was standing behind them, added, “He led a good life.” With that comment he once again went too far, and my mother snapped her head around to glare at him.

  “I hope you don’t really believe that,” she said. She looked back at Chef, and Cricket, and then at Mantis again. “I loved him, of course; I’m his mother, and I gave birth to him and I raised him. And he did have some good qualities. But for your sakes, I hope you realize how wrong that is.

  “You all must understand that his was a wasted life.”

  CHAPTER 5

  A blood eagle is not a bird.

  During the raiding and slaving days of the predatory Norsemen, it was a legendary form of gruesome torture and execution. The Vikings called it carving the blood eagle, and it supposedly involved holding a dude face-down on the ground, slicing the flesh from his upper back so that the ribs were exposed—and then hacking away the ribs and pulling out the lungs from behind. Those lungs, still attached to their tubing, were spread across the guy’s bloody shoulders like a pair of stubby “wings.” A blood-eagle sufferer who survived all the chopping and tearing would have quickly died of suffocation, since human lungs, hauled like trout from the sealed well of the chest cavity, can breathe no better than any other fish out of water. But it’s more likely that by the time any of the dude’s organs had been touched by the red light of a Nordic midnight, he would have already gone ghostward from shock and loss of blood.

  If, in fact, anyone actually was killed that way; there is some doubt. At least a few historians say that while the blood eagle was carved—it was only on the backs of guys who were already dead, having either been killed in battle, or else executed in some less elaborate manner. Still other writers claim that the entire ritual was just a fantasy—something teenage Norsemen imagined might be cool to do to somebody, if only all that thrashing, screaming, and slippery, spurting blood didn’t make it likely you’d slice off your own hand.

  Anyway, that is where the Blood Eagles Motorcycle Club took the inspiration for their name as well as for the design of the insignia patches which, when stitched onto the back of a denim vest, comprise the “colors,” or “cut,” worn by any full-patch club member. Following are the specs for the Blood Eagles colors, as described in the original club charter:

  Against a field black as death, a grinning death’s head crowns a set of human ribs that sprout crimson eagle’s wings from the shoulders. From the bottom of the ribcage, skeletal talons descend to clutch a sword. One talon clutches the handle, the other clutches the blade, and the one that clutches the blade drips blood. The eyes in the death’s head are blue.

  The Blood Eagles MC motto—cribbed, probably unwittingly, from the poet, e.e. cummings, by someone who no doubt picked it up in an otherwise long-forgotten high school English class—provides the final touch. Expressed in the form of an upward-curving rocker patch positioned beneath all the others, it reads:

  MR. DEATH’S BLUE EYED BOYS

  *

  Attending the last part of my own memorial observance, together with witnessing Scratch’s performance of a funeral fly-by “in my honor,” seemed to provide just the shock I needed to help me recall many details of my final day as a breathing being. The next time I came around into the world, it was with the clear memory of having driven into Riverside and crossed the long, iron bridge to the southern bank near the river’s mouth where the Blood Eagles MC—Maine Chapter—ran their operations out of a sprawling old ship captain’s house. I had gone to the clubhouse to meet with Scratch in order to work out a deal for his group and mine to continue coexisting.

  Yeah, I knew the Blood Eagles occasionally murdered people. In fact, that was part of the thrill. But, in going to visit them, I was not being suicidal or even especially reckless; I just did not judge the jeopardy in which I was placing myself as being especially acute. I was, after all, smarter than they were; I knew I could handle them, and I couldn’t think of anything that would make them want to mire themselves in the risks and complications of killing me. Also, I already was acquainted and on friendly terms with most of the Blood Eagles, having spent time with them on their side of the river, drinking and shooting pool in the gin mills and strip clubs that stood among the warehouses and the abandoned factories. They all knew I was a producer and they were familiar with the quality of my product, which I was always happy to share with them. When Scratch invited me to their headquarters to talk a little business, I took it as proof that they trusted me.

  The mansion stood on an isolated point of riverbank surr
ounded by a marshy no-man’s land separating the city’s old industrial zone from the residential neighborhoods that rolled down toward the seashore, the houses becoming larger and better-kept the closer they were to the ocean. I stopped my pickup truck before a closed wrought-iron gate that blocked the Blood Eagle’s private road a good distance from their house. From both sides of the gate spread an iron fence topped with spikes and completely interwoven with trees and overgrown hedges, which made it impossible to see any part of the house except for random patches of peeling white paint and a slate-gray roof. It was no wonder the club had chosen this location; not only was it well concealed, but there were no neighbors close enough to complain about the inevitable noises—revving, inadequately muffled engines, howls, and the occasional gunshot—that would naturally escape from the outpost of a motorcycle gang.

  I had always wondered how they’d been able to afford such a large and developable piece of property right on the river and so close to the coast. It certainly was true that times were hard and real estate prices were in the toilet—but then, Scratch and company had bought in at the height of the market, just before the big crash. In addition, while it also was a fact that the East Coast Blood Eagles enjoyed a decent cash flow from the sales of narcotics and firearms, most of which they laundered through a chain of bars and motorcycle repair shops back in the Midwest, I figured the big house would have set them back well over a million dollars. Lacking legal sources of credit, they would have had to pay most of it in cash.

  A Blood Eagle I knew as Chimp stepped out from a concealed position and opened the gate for me. He waved me in, closed the gate behind me, and came to the window of my truck. Chimp was a blue-eyed, dark-haired man of about my age who was the best-looking of all the Blood Eagles; he was clean-cut for an outlaw, and he had a quick smile and an easy way about him that women in bars found appealing. But he was nobody to mess with. For one thing, I saw right away that he was wearing a semi-automatic handgun in a holster on his hip. For another, in spite of his easygoing nature I knew that the collection of patches on his cut included one very small but extremely significant one that read “ITCOB,” which stood for “I Took Care Of Business”—an indication that he had killed someone on the club’s behalf.