“Is this our destination?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Dirt. “This is it. My job’s done; I can leave you here now.”
“It’s a strip club.”
“No shit, Thumb. You’re supposed to go inside.”
“But not you?”
“I think you’re meeting somebody here.”
“Do you know who it is?”
He hesitated. “Maybe I do. But you’ll find out soon enough. Now adiós, asshole. I hope to never see you again.” As he started back toward the river, the woodpecker let out a couple of sharp beeps as if to say goodbye. I called Dirt’s name, and reluctantly he stopped and turned.
“I was there when you died; I don’t know if you remember. In the rooming house. Needle in your arm and everything.”
He seemed a little surprised at this but then he shrugged. “Okay. Whatever the fuck. I’m just as dead.”
“It’s not like there was anything I could have done, or I would have.”
He shrugged again. “You finished?”
“Someone else was leaving your room just as I got there; I didn’t get to see him. Do you remember who it was?”
After a moment he answered, “It was Mantis. Why?”
“Mantis was in your room when you OD’d?”
“He came to visit. He brought the shit I used.”
“He brought you the shit? Did he use any himself?”
“I don’t know what he did. We had one needle, and I went first. I don’t remember anything after that.”
I spent a moment trying to calm myself so that I wouldn’t shut him down with a too-eager tone. “So you think maybe Mantis cooked up a hot load for you? Do you think your OD wasn’t an accident?”
Dirt grinned, exposing his terrible teeth; he looked happy for the first time since he showed up at my haunt. He stopped slouching and jabbed a finger at me. “You know what? Fuck you, Thumb. I don’t owe you nothing. I may know some shit, but I don’t have to tell you shit. Other than bringing you here I don’t have to help you work out your atonement, and I ain’t going to. Go talk to that bitch in the titty bar; maybe she can help you. But for my part, the only thing I have left to say to you is fuck you.” He turned again, began whistling, started walking, and suddenly looked back at me. “By the way, there’s one thing I will tell you. Your old lady? Cricket? I saw her not long ago. She was pushing a baby carriage.” He grinned again before turning for the last time and heading off through the fog.
*
The Hat looked about the same as I remembered it: A long bar running down the left side as you entered from the parking lot, tables filling most of the space between the bar and the far wall, and at the back, a square, velvet-skirted stage with a pair of polished chrome dancer’s poles. At the moment I drifted through the doors, two girls in thongs and high heels were twining themselves around those poles to the thumping beat of a hip hop song as a dozen hunched men seated around the cockpit at the base of the stage watched them work. Though not completely packed, the place was busy; about half the tables, half the bar stools, and two-thirds of the chairs in the cockpit were occupied, and during lulls in the music, the air droned with the murmur of men’s voices. The female bartender was pouring drinks nonstop while a waitress shuttled continuously between the bar and the tables with her glass-laden tray.
I spotted the ghost immediately. She was a young woman who perched as lightly as a cloud on a bar stool not far from the door. This attractive spirit wore her blonde hair pinned back tightly against her head, and she was attired in a white blouse and a pleated skirt—not an outfit you would normally see in a downscale strip club. As I nodded to her, she smiled and widened her brown eyes.
“Well now,” she said. “Look at you! You’re a major improvement over the last dude who came in here.”
“The last ghost, you mean?” Just then, a man in a leather jacket stepped between us, plunged his arm to the elbow directly through her chest, hauled from her breast a brimming beer stein that had been waiting on the bar behind her back, and walked away. But the gorgeous ghost paid him no more mind than if, of the two of them, he, not she, were the invisible, immaterial being; she kept her eyes on me the entire time.
“I hate calling us ghosts. Ghosts are too much like zombies; they’re mean. What we are is ethereal people.”
I laughed. “Okay, then. We’re ethereal people. My name is Thumb.”
“I already knew your name; the other ethereal dude told me about you the last time he was here. He said he was supposed to bring you around. I’m Angelfish.”
I froze. I stared at her. After a moment she began laughing; it must have been my expression. Finally I was able to say, “You’re Angelfish? I already know you then.”
“You do? I don’t think so, dude.”
“From the river?”
“What river?” I had called it that for so long that I’d forgotten other ghosts might have other ways of looking at it—other names for it.
“You know, the place we go when we’re not haunting the world. You were my messenger down there. First you said you needed my help. Then you said you needed my help to save a baby. Then you said …”
“In the cave, you mean? No, I don’t remember talking to you there. I don’t remember taking you a message.” Her eyes were bright with amusement and she was on the edge of laughing again.
“Give me a break. How could you not?”
She shrugged and bowed her mouth in a comical way. “Maybe it was a different ethereal girl named Angelfish. Maybe it was actually a dude who was pretending to be an ethereal girl named Angelfish. Or what if—” she blinked at me “—maybe it was me, but a future me, which would make it impossible for me to remember it now because it hasn’t happened yet. Is that clear? Maybe that explains it.”
After a moment I said, “You’re just fucking with me.”
She shrugged again. “You’re gonna believe what you want to believe.”
“So, the whole baby thing … ”
“Or, maybe I’m being honest with you now, but I was fucking with you then.”
“I’m not going to get anywhere, am I? You’re a strange lady.”
“Not you though,” she said. “Not strange at all. You’re straight up and down.”
I stared at her. Finally I said, “Okay. You win. Angelfish, anyway; that sounds like a road name—but you don’t seem like the type to have one. In fact, I’d peg you more for a Lisa, or a Wendy; you don’t look very roady to me at all. Did you change your appearance, post-mortem, maybe?”
Angelfish’s smile widened. “I shucked my tats, is all. Other than that, except for the clothes, I’m pretty much the same. People always did tell me I cleaned up well when I wanted to.”
“I’d have to agree,” I said.
“Here, Ethereal Thumb, I bought you a drink.” She indicated two full shot glasses standing side by side on the wooden bar top. “Jack Daniels. Bottoms up.”
I laughed. “What are you talking about? We can’t … ”
“We can do what we can do,” she said. “Observe.” She pretended to grasp one of the glasses and pantomimed lifting it to lip level; of course, the actual drink remained unmoved. “Cheers,” Angelfish said, and with her pinky finger curved in the air she tilted her hand as if to swallow the whiskey. I was about to humor her by mimicking her motions when two fat dudes in dress shirts and loosened ties stepped into us, one of them passing his beefy shoulder right through Angelfish’s face, and the other enveloping me almost entirely within his sweating frame.
“Hey, fuck off, jackass,” Angelfish snarled at the man who had unwittingly invaded her space. The two of them picked up “our” drinks, clinked them together, and gulped them down. When they were done, they hammered the empty glasses back onto the bar top, grabbed the two fresh beers that the bartender had just set down for them, and turned to head toward the stage, where the pair of hip hop pole dancers were making their exit to a smattering of applause. The amplified, disembodied voice of DJ Dave
broke through to announce that it was time for a straight set of tunes by ZZ Top, along with a Texas “hoe down” by cowgirls Crystal and Tiffany, to which the clientele clapped with increased enthusiasm.
“Go, Crystal!” yelled Angelfish. She whistled as she made devil horns of the fingers on both her hands and pumped them into the air.
“Do you know her?” I asked, watching as the opening chords to “La Grange” twanged through the sound system and two girls in denim mini-skirts, red suede waist-jackets with fringes hanging from the arms, and white cowboy boots and hats strutted out one behind the other through a set of curtains and down a short runway onto the stage, where they began to dance as the men in the cockpit howled.
“Yeah! That’s what I’m talking about!” Angelfish shouted, alternately poking one set of devil horns higher than the other to the beat of the music. “Thumb baby, why don’t you buy us another drink?”
“We’re ghosts; we don’t get to buy drinks anymore.”
“You’re no fun.”
“And I asked, do you know her?”
“I used to work with her. In fact, she’s the last of the girls I knew. All the rest are new.” I should not have been at all surprised by this, knowing as well as I did not only that appearances were almost always deceiving, but that a ghost’s appearance was never anything but illusion—deception by another name—no matter how innocently intended.
“So you were a dancer. And you worked here.” It occurred to me then that I might have seen her perform at one time or another. However, it was no wonder that she did not look familiar: While some guys would get all hung up on individual girls in a place like this, I’d always considered exotic dancers to be entirely interchangeable. In addition, most of my Magic Hat time was spent conducting business and networking, rather than watching the performances.
Angelfish lowered her hands to her lap. “I was. I did. I was good, too.”
“Of that, I have no doubt.”
“Would you like me to dance for you?” Although her eyes were still flirtatious, her smile had taken an ironic tilt.
“I think there’s plenty of dancing going on in here already. And what would be the point of that, anyway? A private dance for another ghost? It’s not like we can even touch ourselves, never mind each other, so it’d end up in nothing but frustration.”
“Ethereal,” she said, correcting me. “I’d never dance for a nasty ghost. And like I said before, we do what we can to keep our spirits up. Now, how about that dance, lover boy? Do you want it, or not?”
“Did Dirt mention that I was murdered?”
“Who?”
“The other ghost. The ugly guy.”
“Dirt!” she said, and laughed. “Dude had the dumbest parrot on his shoulder; it couldn’t say a word. Yeah, Dirt did tell me that, actually. By the Blood Eagles, he said.”
“Do you know the Blood Eagles? I used to come in here with some of them.”
She hesitated before saying, “I did know some of them, yes.”
“So, how about you? You’re young; how did you happen to … get here?”
“How did I become ethereal? It was easy: I stopped breathing, then I made a noise like this—” here, with her eyes bulging and her mouth stretched in an O, she gave a ghastly, unnerving impression of a death rattle “—and then my heart stopped beating.”
“Okay. I don’t blame you for fucking with me now. It’s a personal question, I know. I’m sorry.”
“Then I tumbled in a river until it poured me out through a crack in the wall of the dancers’ dressing room.”
“A river? You said it was a cave before.”
“Did I? It’s kind of like a river in a cave.”
“Anyway, so this is your haunt? When you’re not bouncing along the bottom of the river?”
“So to speak. This place can get depressing during the day. Nights are lively though.”
“I am sorry about getting all nosey on you. Even ghosts like to keep some things to themselves.” The second song of the ZZ Top set, “Pearl Necklace,” was now ending, and except for boots, hats, and thongs, Crystal and Tiffany were already entirely nude and completely a-jiggle. The next song was “My Head’s in Mississippi,” which, as you may know, is the one about that naked cowgirl who was “floatin’ across the ceiling.”
Angelfish pursed her lips and began bobbing her head in time to the music. She said, “This is kinda my song. I made a lot of money on this song. The dance, baby. The dance is the thing. If you’ll excuse me.” She rose from the bar stool, twirled around, and suddenly was no longer dressed in her relatively prim attire. Instead, she was costumed like a revved-up version of an 1800s dancehall girl in a low-cut, lace-frilled red corset, black heels, and fishnet stockings whose garters climbed beneath a black leather miniskirt. She wore bicep-length black silk gloves from which her fingers, with red-painted nails, popped through, and on her head was a bowler derby that sported a scarlet ostrich feather sticking up from one side.
“Dude,” I said. “Whoa. Wait a minute.”
But Angelfish ignored me and swung directly into her cocky dance. Swaying from side to side, she would prance toward me on those snapping heels and then quickly spin away. In one moment, she was giving me a direct and hungry look as she flicked the hat from her head and freed her hair from its prison of imaginary pins to cascade down the middle of her back; in the next instant, she had turned away to bend her supple upper body halfway to the floor, a single, smiling eye peeking back at me across the top of her shoulder as she lifted her skirt. After the surprise wore off, I found myself shaking my head.
“That’s great, but do you mind stopping now? I’ve got a few more questions.”
The fingerless gloves quickly went the way of the hat and then, after tousling her hair and flipping it all around so that it veiled most of her face, she teasingly loosened her corset, one by one unsnapping the black garters from its bottom fringe and slowly peeling it up her well-toned torso and over the top of her head. She then tossed the illusory corset, which disappeared as soon as it left her hand. Naked from the waist up—and quite breathtaking, I have to say—she was no longer smiling; her mascaraed eyes were fiery slits, her lips were peeled back in a gleaming snarl, and her dance movements had become abrupt, combative rather than sensual.
“Really, this is weird,” I said. “Can you just talk to me?” I had by then lifted a hand to my forehead as if to shield my eyes.
Her response was to laugh—a sound like breaking glass—and she didn’t stop, not even when the song ended and another ZZ Top number began. She danced toward me until she was almost touching my knees with her own—I was by then hovering on a bar stool with my back against the bar—and she began unzipping her skirt, inch by teasing inch drawing it down over her hips.
“That’s enough, now, right?” I said. “Come on.”
After a moment, as the leather skirt continued its mesmerizing, disturbing southerly slither, I saw the tops of some blue-ink letters emerging on the taut skin of her lower belly.
“What’s that?” I said. “I thought you told me you got rid of all of those.”
“Did I say all? I meant all but one, which I kept as a reminder.”
“A reminder of what?” She just grimaced and kept lowering her skirt. In a moment there appeared a line of two blue words tattooed on her in a Gothic font:
PROPERTY OF
I glanced at her face, and as soon as I looked back down, Angelfish let go of the skirt, which plunged past the waistband of her thong and vanished against the floor. Suddenly she was no longer dancing. The remainder of the message said:
BLOOD EAGLES, MC
Unlike the rest of the text, the “C” in “MC” was neither Gothic nor blue, but was tapered at the top and banded in black, red, and yellow like the tail of a coral snake, and instead of ending at its bottom serif, the semi-serpentine letter continued on and curved away to bury its unseen, reptilian head beneath the thin, string-strapped strip of Angel’s thong.
“Holy shit,” I said. She seemed unembarrassed to be standing before me, naked.
“What’s the matter, Thumb? Lost your wood?” When I did not immediately respond, she said, “Thing is, I wasn’t always a dancer. It wasn’t exactly my greatest ambition, you know? But when hard times hit, we needed some new flows of cash because of the big mortgage Scratch had taken out to buy the clubhouse. Almost a million and a half dollars, with no way of selling it again for anywhere near the same amount, and the people holding the note weren’t any ordinary bankers; they were some Chinese dudes not even a biker on bath salts would want to fuck with. So, among other things we all had to do—and dancing was by far the least of it—I started working here.”
I looked up at her again. “When was all this?”
“Nearly four years ago, now. Almost as soon as we moved into Maine to get the new chapter started. Funny thing about the dancing, though; as you could probably tell, I got so I almost enjoyed it.”
“Listen. Do you know a ghost path to get to the clubhouse? I’ve got to go there. Can you show me?”
Instead of answering she said, “That tattoo down there—you can’t imagine how funny it looked when I was pregnant, all stretched out and distorted, like words on a balloon. Everyone thought it was hilarious.”
It seemed like maybe she was finally finished hiding behind her own smoke. I found myself nodding. “You had a baby.”
“A little girl. Chelsea—although I don’t know what her name is now; her new parents probably call her something else. She just turned two and a half. I can keep track, because the girls always have a calendar tacked to the wall back in the dressing room.” Suddenly, Angelfish was no longer nude, but was wearing the same modest clothes she’d had on when I first came in. Her hair, however, continued to hang down past her shoulders.
American Ghost Page 23
