American Ghost

by Paul Guernsey

  Fred stared at him. After all the pleading for writing help that Ben had done on my behalf, Fred couldn’t have expected this sudden lack of motivation, and he clearly was wracking his mind for something he could use as leverage. Finally he said, “I understand. I understand. But you know, I hate to see a couple of friends—you and Thumb, for instance—part on such bad terms. Why don’t you sit down here—” he swept his arm in the direction of the table and the candle—“and have a last conversation with him, then? A good, long one via automatic writing—much easier than you could ever have using your Ouija board. Tell him how you feel, and give him a chance to answer. Clear the air, why don’t you? Then, if you still don’t want to have anything to do with him, you’ll never have to talk to him again.”

  “What if he threatens me?”

  “Isn’t he more likely to threaten you if you just refuse to talk to him again? But anyway, if he menaces you, we could end the conversation. What really could he do to you? And, aren’t you curious? I certainly am. Aren’t you full of curiosity to see whether automatic writing would work for you?”

  Following another minute or two of urgent salesmanship on Fred’s part, Ben finally shrugged, drifted into the farrowing pen, and settled into Fred’s rolling chair. Fred took the folding chair on the opposite side of the candle.

  “All right, so hold that pen in your hand. Make sure you’ve got a comfortable grip. Let your hand rest on the open note pad, there. Good. Now I want you to stare into that candle.”

  “Are you trying to hypnotize me?” Ben’s eyes widened, and there was a note of alarm in his voice.

  Fred’s voice was quiet and even. “It is a hypnotic technique. But all it’s going to do is help you write. You can’t be made to do anything but write. Except for the hand you use to write, you will still have full control over every other part of your body. No one can make you do anything you don’t feel like doing. You’ll just feel very relaxed all over, and then when you’re ready to write the pen will begin to move.”

  “So, like, stare into the candle?”

  “Look into the candle, take a few deep breaths, and just watch the candle flicker. Concentrate on taking deep, even breaths. That’s right; just relax. Feel your neck relax, and your shoulder relax—all that tension going out of them—and down through your arms … and your chest … and your shoulders and your hips … and your legs. Feel your feet relax. Even your toes. And keep taking those deep, even breaths. That’s it; just like that. Keep looking into the candle, and then when they’re ready, when your eyes feel ready, when they’re tired enough, you can let them decide to close all on their own.”

  Ben’s face had gone slack. He blinked slowly, he swallowed, and then his eyes slid closed, his head tipping forward.

  “Good,” said Fred. “Your eyes decided to close all on their own. Now, concentrate on your hand—feel the pen in your hand. What will your hand decide to do? Just concentrate on your hand and your arm. Feel your hand and your arm—how light they are. Your hand and your arm are so light that if they wanted to, it would take almost no effort for them to lift into the air all by themselves.” Ben’s shoulder twitched, then his elbow lifted a couple of inches from the table.

  Fred said, “That’s right. Your arm, your hand, your fingers can move all on their own, independently of you. If Thumb spoke to you now, his words, each of his words, could go right through you and down through your arm and your wrist and into your hand to the nerves in your fingers, and your hand could write them on the paper. Just like electricity moving through the wires of a safe and helpful machine. So easy.” At this Ben’s forearm and hand lifted a little, then his fingers twitched and tightened. The pen Ben was holding made a zigzag scribble on the blank, blue-lined paper.

  By then I was curious myself about whether the whole hypnosis thing would work, so I leaned forward and put my mouth close to his ear just as I had that day in the old church, the first time he’d sat before the Ouija board.

  “Ben,” I whispered. “Hey, Ben.” His fingers squirmed, and he scrawled out onto the paper exactly what I’d said. No punctuation, no capitalization, but all the words. Fred grinned and silently clenched his fists in the air while I continued to speak. I spoke for about a minute and then I stepped back and waited. Soon Ben opened his eyes, blinked, and looked down at what we’d written:

  ben hey ben i wasnt lying when i said i didnt kill that goat i wouldnt have killed that goat im sorry those dogs killed it i really am your friend and id never hurt you either id try to protect you in any way i could and i need your help i need to get this thing written please help me finish it signed your friend thumb

  Ben stared down at the page. “Wow,” he said after a moment. He looked up at Fred. “He really does seem sorry, doesn’t he? Maybe he didn’t kill my grandmother’s goat…. ”

  Fred said, “How long would all that have taken you with the Ouija board?”

  “Five minutes, maybe,” Ben answered. “Or more. Depends.”

  “And you’ll be able to do that any time you want, now. Automatic writing. Anywhere, any time. The candle is just a prop; you don’t even need it. Just sit down with a pen, get relaxed, and invite Thumb to come along. Take a few deep breaths and close your eyes, if you like. That’s all it will take. No more Ouija board.”

  “Huh,” said Ben. He nodded. “It is kind of cool. I guess I’d at least like to try it again.”

  “Great,” said Fred. “A successful experiment, then.” He looked around as if suddenly realizing where he was. He slapped his knees in a gesture of finality and stood up. “Good job with the writing, friend. I’m actually envious that it works for you. I’m sure you’ve got places you need to be now…. ”

  Fred moved toward the gate to the farrowing pen and began unlatching it. Ben watched him, his face clouding at he realized the old man had merely been using him to satisfy his own curiosity and was now finished with him. He looked down at his hands for a moment, then stood and shuffled toward the now-yawning gate. He was halfway through it when he stopped, stood still for a moment, then slowly lifted his shoulders.

  “You guys do nothing but fuck me over,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You and Thumb. You treat me like a piece of shit. I’m tired of it.” He turned around and looked Fred in the eye. After a moment, Fred looked away.

  “Son,” he said, “I never asked you to come here.”

  “Not the first time. But then you had me bring you dope, and a gold coin. I could have kept that coin for myself, and I didn’t charge you anything for the dope. That’s a few hundred bucks, right there. And I bought these new clothes after you told me to, even though I knew it was just because you thought it was funny…. ”

  “All right,” Fred said, lifting his hands. “I still have the coin; I can give it back to you. You want me to repay you for the other stuff?”

  “I want you to do what you said and look at the writing.” Ben’s voice was shaking.

  Fred sighed. He lifted his eyes toward the ceiling. “To be honest, that’s a huge ask. A less-than-half-baked, hand-written book. I think I’d rather just repay you for the smoke.”

  Ben stared at him, not speaking. Finally Fred said, “Ah, shit. Do you have it with you? The so-called book?”

  “It’s in my gram’s car. I can get it.”

  “I hate to break it to you, but I’m likely to be unimpressed by it.”

  “The whole thing, Mr. Muttkowski. I think you owe me to read the whole thing. At least look through it all. Then if you think it sucks, just tell me, and I’ll never come back.”

  “All right then,” Fred said. “Get it. If I don’t like it, I’ll feed it page by page to the pigs.”

  After a moment, Ben nodded slowly. “I’ll come back next week to hear what you think.”

  Fred hesitated before saying, “Make sure you’re dressed appropriately.”

  *

  There were now two full notebooks and half of a third filled with my story, as transcribed
by Ben. It took Fred a couple of days to overcome inertia and open the first one, and as he did, he cringed, as if expecting a harsh sound to hurt his ears. It was early morning and the strong eastern light, filled with swirling dust, was pouring straight through the open barn and over the backs of piebald pigs. Fred stood outside his farrowing-pen office, apparently not even planning to sit down. After he’d flipped through the first dozen or so pages his face unclenched and he stood up straight and began to hiccup with laughter—a bad sign for me, it seemed, since I couldn’t remember dictating anything funny.

  But while he kept laughing and spitting out little blasts of incredulous blasphemy, he also continued to read. After ten minutes or so he let himself into the farrowing pen and settled into the rolling chair. A short time later he muttered, “Bikers. This kid does seem to know a little bit about them.” Fred’s computer and the notebook he’d shared with Ben were back at the house, but he scrounged a leaking pen from the floor, grabbed a wad of his old manuscript pages from the stone-weighted pile, and began to scrawl across the backs of them. Over the next couple of hours, he made several more trips to the manuscript pile, dipped in and out of my first notebook a number of times, and kept on writing until the bleeding pen died in his ink-stained fingers. At that point he got up and burst from the farrowing pen, his knees thudding against the rumps of slow-moving porkers as he rushed out to the pig run, where he stood looking around him, wide-eyed and seemingly out of breath. When he spoke, I knew he was addressing his gaggle of imaginary friends and adversaries.

  “I’m actually writing,” he said. “First time in months. Ghosts, bikers, and other complete bullshit, but I’m writing. This stupid, half-assed manuscript the kid brought—somehow it opens me up. It’s … I don’t know what it is, but”—he turned his eyes toward the sky—“thank you, whatever the hell you are, for giving me another chance.”

  He made a brief trip to the house and returned with Ben’s other two notebooks, a ream of clean, white paper and, instead of his laptop computer, an old manual typewriter. After setting all these things on the card table in the farrowing pen, he spent another half-hour flipping through the first notebook. Then he cranked a sheet of paper into the typewriter and began hammering away. He worked like that—moving from my story to his, pausing only to swear and separate type bars when they jammed—until sunset. When he was done for the day, he’d banged out a good twenty-five double-spaced pages.

  I have to admit that at the beginning I was dismayed at what I saw in this new draft. Fred was taking my autobiography as a ghost—what actually happened—and fictionalizing it in a way that, while still recognizable, was not exactly the way it had gone down, or what I’d wanted to emphasize. I’d done my best to relate history, facts, and details in just the order they happened, and now here was Fred, imposing a movieness onto the whole thing, with whole parts left out, other parts distorted—I suppose to give the book what he considered to be a better structure. For just one example, in my version, before I got to my death and my transformation into a ghost, I’d dictated a lot of important stuff about my father’s early years in Caracas, and how he gotten his start in the cartel, material that Fred seemingly had elected to ignore—so much so that my dad, rather than being central to my story the way he was when I’d started writing, now was no more than a ghostly presence at the beginning of the book.

  But Fred also was making me sound older and, I have to admit, smarter, than I actually was, and it was hard not to be flattered by that. In the end, I decided that since there was nothing I could do to change the way he was going about our business, I might as well try to appreciate the result.

  Fred finished working his way through Ben’s notebooks in about four days. He stopped writing, then—apparently couldn’t write, no matter how long he sat at his card table, staring at the typewriter. That was the closest I’d ever seen him to crying.

  When Ben returned at the end of week, Fred ignored the fact that he was dressed in his ordinary clothes, and not in a suit and tie as he’d been instructed. He met him in the driveway and yelled, “Great to see you, son. Did you bring me something to read?”

  *

  As for Ben, he was also newly inspired. He put away the Ouija board, and through automatic writing he and I churned out pages at nearly five times the speed of the past. A few weeks later, in the early spring, he traveled to the farm once more, two new spiral-bound notebooks riding the passenger seat of his grandmother’s car, and when he arrived Fred again seemed delighted to see him. As soon as Ben drove into the dooryard, Fred burst from the house clutching a thick sheaf of papers. Ben stepped out of the station wagon grasping our spiral-bound notebooks.

  “So, did you finish it?” asked Fred.

  “Not yet. I think we’re about two-thirds of the way through.”

  “We?”

  “Me and Thumb.”

  “Oh, yeah. Thumb.”

  “I brought you a bag of donuts, too.”

  “Fine,” said Fred. “I’ve been working on your story as well—just some light editing. And I also wrote an entire nonfiction book just for you; you and no one else. Let’s swap.” He relieved Ben of the notebooks while simultaneously shoving his own loose manuscript into Ben’s hands. Ben looked at the top sheet, which was a title page that read, “Practical Organic Pork Production: The Muttkowski Method.”

  “What’s this?”

  “I’ve got to go someplace. Where is my donut?”

  Ben reached back through the window of the car, came out with the Dunkin’ Donuts bag—he’d purchased the contents with a portion of my second, largest, and last buried treasure—and handed it to Fred.

  “Okay,” said Fred. “So, we’re all squared away, then. I’ve got to go back in and change my clothes, and then I have to leave. People to visit. I’ll see you in four or five days. Everything you need to know and a few things you don’t are right there in my textbook.”

  “Wait … ” Ben started to say. But Fred kept talking.

  “I’ve made things easy for you by reducing my herd to a minimum. There are only thirty head remaining: my two boars, Kilgore and Falstaff, eighteen sows, and ten nice gilts that I kept back for breeding. I’ll probably end up selling the gilts, but you never know.

  “As you’ll read in my book, you don’t have to worry about water, because I’ve got an automatic system, and they can get a drink any time they want. Just make sure you feed them the recommended amounts—no more, no less; you’ll find complete directions for taking grain out of the hopper and mixing in the diatomaceous earth, so they don’t get worms. Also, make sure you keep the main floor of the barn as clean as you can.

  “But don’t even think about trying to clean the boars’ pens; I’ll do that when I get back. As breeders go, they’re both easygoing boys, but they’d make mincemeat out of a tyro like you. Just feed them and—I shouldn’t have to tell you, but, just in case—do not let either one of them out of his pen. Ever.”

  “Mr. Muttkowski … ”

  “You can’t leave until I get back. Not even for an hour. There’s a cot just for you in the kitchen. Also a small refrigerator I put in there that has some cold cuts in it—a good variety, I must say—some bread, and a bag of carrots. Mustard and mayonnaise. Candy bars, because I’m a thoughtful guy. You’ll also find a sink, a roll of paper towels, and a bottle of hand sanitizer. You’ll need all of that. There’s a first aid kit somewhere in there, too.”

  “Mr. Muttkowki … ”

  “When I come back, we’ll spend some more time talking about this.” Fred gave the new stack of notebooks an enthusiastic shake. “I found some real promise in what you’ve already given me, so the future’s looking bright for us, my boy.” At that he turned and ran back into the house, leaving Ben standing stunned in the driveway. He reemerged some twenty minutes later looking clean-shaven, wearing a jacket and tie, and carrying a large suitcase. As he whooshed past to throw the suitcase into the bed of his nearby pickup truck, Ben detected a whiff of cologne. />
  “Mr. Muttkowski,” said Ben. “I can’t … ”

  “Yes,” said Fred. He fixed Ben with narrowed eyes. “It’s for the sake of our writing project. There’s a couple of people I need to talk to about it.

  “So, you can do this. You will do it. You’re a highly capable young man. I’ve got your … thing right here in my suitcase now.” He climbed into the pickup truck, started it, and rumbled out of the driveway.

  *

  At first, the sows and the gilts seemed disgruntled about having a substitute caregiver, and they hazed Ben unmercifully by shredding the legs of his pants and eating the tops of his sneakers. Luckily, before he was completely barefoot, he found a pair of Fred’s steel-toed rubber boots in one of the farrowing pens, and he made a swap. After that the pigs, apparently appeased by having Fred’s boots moving among them again, seemed to settle down.

  Halfway through his second morning at the farm Ben received a visit from Cici Muttkowski. She wore high heels and a long skirt whose fabric she clutched in her fingers, and she seemed ill at ease standing outside the pig fence. “Who are you?” she asked when he walked out of the barn.

  “I’m Ben,” said Ben.

  “Where is Frederick?”

  “I don’t know. He told me to take care of the pigs while he was gone.”

  “He told you to?”

  “He’s helping me with something I’m writing.”

  Mrs. Muttkowski seemed upset. “This isn’t like him at all,” she said.

  Ben, whose own experiences with Fred had taught him to avoid making predictions about the man’s behavior, merely shrugged.

  “When is he coming back?”

  “He said four or five days. Which was yesterday, when he told me.” I could tell by Ben’s expression that it had suddenly dawned on him there was no guarantee Fred would ever return at all.

  “Aren’t those Fred’s boots?”

  “Yes, they are. Only because the pigs ate my shoes.” Cici stared at him for a minute without speaking; finally, she turned and walked back to the house.