American Ghost

by Paul Guernsey

  Scratch let out a hoarse scream and let go of Pickle in order to pound the attacking dog in the ribs with his fist. The well-trained dog whined with each of his blows, but did not let him go; meanwhile the other two animals, in spite of my ongoing provocation, merely wheeled and barked but still held back from attacking. At the same time, Mantis and Fat Harold exchanged a glance, drew pistols from beneath their cuts, and began jogging toward Scratch and the dogs. Fat Harold paused for a moment to turn back to Chimp, who remained at the top of the hill, and yell, “Chimp! The cunt!” Then he continued his waddling run toward the battle below him. Chimp took off across the slope in Pickle’s direction, and it was obvious he would intercept her with little trouble.

  Angelfish said to me, “It won’t work if you don’t stop them from killing the dogs.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I will.”

  “I gotta go. Goodbye, Thumb,” she said.

  Scratch quickly gave up on beating the dog off of his arm and drew out his own semi-automatic handgun. After struggling to work the slide and safety with the thumb and forefinger of the hand that was being shaken by the pit bull, he placed the barrel just behind the dog’s shoulder and pulled the trigger. The dog flopped down and lay twitching in the grass.

  Pickle continued to make her awkward and painfully slow escape as Chimp closed in on her. Then, halfway between Chimp and Pickle, Angelfish blossomed on the hillside, fully visible to ghosts, mortals, and animals alike. In the twilight her naked body was blue-white and phosphorescent; her skin was puckered all over as if she’d lain for a week in a briny bath. Gleaming garlands of seaweed hung from her arms and her shoulders, and green crabs struggled in her matted hair.

  “Hi, Chimp,” Angelfish said. “Where’re you going?” He stopped with his hands open before him and stood staring at her. “You’re not on your way to murder your own baby, are you? Tell me you wouldn’t do such a thing.” She took a hop in his direction, and he turned and ran back toward Mantis and Fat Harold, who had almost reached Scratch and the two surviving dogs. Scratch continued to stand there without moving, gun in hand, seemingly in shock, blood from his shredded arm pattering onto the lawn.

  Chimp yelped wordlessly at Mantis and Fat Harold, and they looked up to see the spectral Angelfish approaching them like a puff of wind-blown smoke. “Hi, Harold,” Angelfish said. “Remember the time you told me that if only I didn’t belong to Scratch? You can kiss me now, if you want.” She paused to vomit a black eel onto the grass, where it writhed for a moment before vanishing. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and grinned. “We can do anything you want. And who’s your tall friend there? He’s kind of cute too; what do you think of a three-way, maybe?” By then I could tell she didn’t have much time left; she was fading quickly.

  Mantis and Fat Harold fired their guns at her. Then Chimp, Mantis, and Fat Harold all ran for the house, which was fortunate because no sooner were their backs turned than Angelfish silently burst into a rain of emerald sparks that almost immediately extinguished in the descending dusk.

  That left the badly bleeding Scratch, the two remaining pit bulls, and me—along with the steadily retreating Pickle, who, although almost a hundred yards away, was still a good eighth of a mile from the nearest house not infested by a motorcycle gang.

  “That fucking whore,” Scratch muttered as he came back into himself. He took a step in Pickle’s direction as if he were about to run after her again, but then seemed to reconsider. Wild-eyed, he looked around him, apparently bewildered at not finding any of his club brothers about; then he raised his gun toward Pickle, squeezing one eye shut as he aimed.

  I did not stop to think. I shoved my face through his outstretched arm, made myself fully visible to both man and beast, and in a voice any living creature could have heard I shouted, “Hit it, boy!”

  Everything after that happened within a handful of Scratch’s final heartbeats: The second black pit bull flew into my eyes to snap its jaws around Scratch’s elbow. Scratch screamed, fired a wild shot into the ground as the dog jerked his arm down, then fell to his knees on the grass. The gun dropped to the lawn, but Scratch had the presence of mind to lunge for it and cover it with his free hand, the hand on the arm that had been savaged by the now dead dog. I knew that if he picked up that gun he would shoot the black dog, and then probably the white dog as well just for safety’s sake, after which he would go staggering after Pickle and put a bullet between her shoulder blades. With my last bit of living energy—I was fading, and it felt as if I were being devoured by flames—I knelt and pushed my head through the back of Scratch’s skull until I masked his face with my own. Then I taunted the white dog.

  The dog leaped at me, looking as if it would swallow my head. Instead it closed its maw on Scratch’s throat, forcing his tattooed face skyward with his false-fanged mouth agape. For a moment, and seemingly inside of my own “ears,” which were still buried beneath Scratch’s skin and bones, I could hear the two of them breathing together in what seemed an almost obscene intimacy: I heard the man’s desperate, strangled wheeze overlaid by the wet, insistent suck of air pulsing through the dog’s flaring nostrils. A second later there came a muffled crunch, and Scratch stiffened and stopped struggling. After that the only breathing was the dog’s.

  Dying then, and on fire from the inside out, I stood up and drew away from them. Scratch, still on his knees with one dog gnawing his arm off at the elbow and the other hanging from his neck, followed me with his eyes. In his last moment, he lifted his shaking hand from the gun and raised it toward me. Then, his eyes glazing, he slowly lowered his hand, and sank.

  Around me, as I continued to burn, the world was dissolving to water. Something drew my attention up the hill to the house; I looked and, as if peering through a liquid prism, I saw Ben silhouetted against the last light of the western horizon. It was likely he could see me, too, just as the dogs, and as Scratch, had seen me.

  “Ben,” I yelled. “Get the hell out of here. Go now!”

  For a moment he stood without moving, and I was unsure whether he’d heard me. But suddenly he broke into a waddling run—not toward me, thankfully, but in the direction of the iron gate.

  And that was, as they say, all she wrote. I, everything, the world and its surrounding sky, we all finished our watery dissolution and swirled off into the ocean.

  CHAPTER 17

  So here I am finally, beyond the end of my time as an earthbound ghost. It is dark, without even the illusion of light. It is silent. I see nothing, I hear nothing. There is no up, no down, no hot, no cold, no air, no movement, no sensation of any kind. And I am utterly alone. At this point, I don’t know how long I’ve been here, but as promised by the first messenger who came to me in the underground river—Gib, pretending to be something scarier—I do indeed “feel the crawl of every moment,” my apparent punishment for the specific transgression of having intentionally caused a death, which I was warned against by that other, much later, messenger. My ghostly hope is that there remains some mercy in the universe, some compassionate intelligence out there beyond the coldness of starlight that might consider the reasons behind what I’d done, and that in spite of what I’ve been told, my sentence will not last for eternity.

  The only thing that remains to me—that remains of me—is imagination. I use much of my endless time to picture Angelfish in a better place than this. She was an authentically good person, a hero, even, and she deserves more of her afterlife than eternal darkness.

  As for me, what do I deserve? I imagine Ben and Fred meeting in the back of Fred’s barn to discuss that very question. For I am fairly sure that, undetected amid the chaos surrounding Scratch’s death, Ben managed to escape and survive. Despite his clumsiness, he would have waddled right back out of the Blood Eagles’ compound the same way he’d gotten in, however that had been, unscathed but not untraumatized. No doubt he still would have been disheveled and shaking a few days later when he went to talk to Fred, and Fred would have grown increasingl
y impatient at the way he stuttered out fragments of our story. And of course Fred would refuse to accept as literal any of the more fantastic parts—Angelfish materializing as a sea demon, or me stepping out of Scratch’s dying body to yell at Ben. But he’d doubtlessly interpret these portions of the narrative as imaginative illusions such as he himself frequently experienced, and having heard the news reports of Scratch’s gruesome death, he would believe that, not only had Ben actually witnessed Scratch torn to the ground by his own dogs, but that Ben himself had been in mortal danger from the other bikers. He’d be relieved that Ben had made it out alive.

  The two of them likely would have a brief discussion about whether Ben should offer himself to the police as a witness—and they’d quickly decide that, not only was there very little that Ben could contribute to a justice that had already been served, but the fact that he’d been at the clubhouse in the first place would be impossible to explain without getting himself into trouble with authorities and the surviving Blood Eagles alike. Far better to let the dead dogs lie.

  As for me, what would they decide? Fred would likely come to the conclusion that, in spite of the fact that the unholy ghost of Thumb Rivera was nothing more than the product of Ben LeBlanc’s subconscious mind, readers of the book they were writing would not be satisfied until they were told what “really” happened to him. An ending was required, and my disappearing into thin air after killing Scratch just would not turn the trick. So the question remained, what would be a fitting conclusion for me? What did I deserve?

  I imagine Ben saying, “Well, we can’t just make something up. That wouldn’t be right. But maybe if we look back over who he was and what he did, we can guess about where he probably ended up—whether after he died for the second time, he went down, up, or sideways.

  “One thing good he did was, he helped save Pickle’s life. And her baby. And he may have helped me by telling me to get away from the Blood Eagles’ clubhouse before they killed me—but I think I would have figured that out on my own.

  “Then again, I still think maybe he killed my grandmother’s goat. And also he could be a real asshole, sometimes.”

  To this I imagine Fred responding, “Well, if being an asshole got you sent to hell, I’d be headed that way myself. You too, for that matter. But the way we’ve written him, he was a guy who all his life seemed to think mostly of himself. Back in the day when there really was a hell, that’s one of the things they sent people there for.

  “Beyond that, he also peddled drugs that must have hurt or even killed some people. Left some kids without their parents, no doubt. Not the pot he grew, necessarily, but the meth business and the pill repackaging he was a partner in. Plus, he stole his best friend’s woman, which is no small thing—and he patronized that strip club where all the girls were little more than slaves.”

  By this point, I knew Ben would start to feel guilty about hanging me out to dry—literally helping to damn me. He might then try to rebalance the scales in my favor, but likely would be able to come up with nothing more persuasive than, “Well, he liked dogs.” To which I imagine Fred snorting and shaking his head—a rebuke that would bully Ben into rejoining him on the “fuck Thumb” side of the argument. I imagine Ben getting legalistic about it then, saying, “Well, the answer’s in the book. I think we have to go back to what they told him when he first started thinking about killing Scratch, and stick with that. Remember what it was? That if he scared somebody to death, or if he caused somebody’s death by scaring someone else—no matter how much they deserved it—then he’d end up in a dark place forever. I think we can include scaring those dogs—making them kill Scratch by scaring them and pissing them off. Thumb has to follow the rules, otherwise his story makes no sense.”

  Fred, slightly annoyed and also not trusting Ben’s memory of their collaborative text, would then want to be reminded of what, exactly, my messenger had said to me. He’d lift the typewritten manuscript from the card table in the farrowing pen and flip through the first few pages to read aloud the messenger’s admonition to me as we tumbled together in the underground river: I’ve been told to warn you. If you cause a death out of revenge, you will remain a ghost forever. A solitary ghost who wanders in the dark.

  I imagine Fred peering at Ben through his glasses and from beneath the brim of his filthy baseball cap. “Revenge. So you tell me now, genius—and I’ll take your word for it, since you’re the one who thinks he knows him: Did he do it out of revenge, or did he do it because he really wanted to help that girl? If it’s the latter, we could probably let him off with a lighter sentence.”

  Together, they’re quiet for a time, and in my imagination all I hear is the soft sounds of pigs snuffling and shuffling about the barn. Ben finally breaks the silence: “How could we know what he really was thinking? I don’t believe it’s possible.”

  “That’s right,” says Fred. “It’s not—not unless you’re willing to admit you made the guy up, that he’s a creation of your mind, in which case you get to decide why he did what he did. Otherwise, as with anybody, you might think you know what was in his heart, but you don’t really know. Bad things done for good reasons; good things done for bad. Sometimes that’s the way it is even with somebody you’re close to.”

  “So what if it’s a mixture? What if he did kill Scratch partly out of revenge, but might have stopped himself if Pickle wasn’t there to save?”

  Fred gives him a crooked smile. “That’s more likely than not. What you’re describing there are the motivations of a human being—the way a human being ends up doing almost anything that matters, you and I included. It’s a fucking mess.”

  “Well, so, what then, Mr. Muttkowski?”

  Still smiling, Fred says, “I’ll tell you what, college boy. He’s your invisible friend, so I’ll leave it up to you. All I care about at this point is that we get the book published, and I think the ending will work either way.”

  “I don’t know,” Ben says. “I don’t know. Help me out.”

  “What I can tell you is that what you’re trying to figure out, you’ll never know for sure. All you’ll ever have is this: Is the world now a better or a worse place because he was here?”

  THE END

  … I saw bright sky from which the sun was absent, and above which I could somehow make out every sharply glittering star. I seemed to be lying weightlessly on my back in the tall grass. Beyond me I heard the silky, timeless rush of a river, along with a strange thunder that rolled and trembled in a higher register than any thunder I had ever heard. I also made out a murmuring babble of human voices.

  A pair of huge woodpeckers, male and female, flapped their way across my blue field of vision. I thought they were pileateds, but there seemed to be something not quite right about them. Soon another pair went over on a similarly flat trajectory, and I realized they weren’t rising and dropping as they flew the way pileated woodpeckers would do. Then I noticed the white trailing edges on their wings.

  “Those are ivory bills,” I said aloud. “Which would mean this isn’t earth anymore.”

  “So, like, are we on another planet?” It was Angelfish, speaking from nearby. I saw that she was lying not far off in the endless meadow. She wore jeans and a loose shirt, and she was barefoot, with her pink-painted toenails peeking above the grass.

  I sat up and saw that not far off was the bank of the smoothly rippling river I had heard; it was so wide that its far shore could not be seen through the curtain of mist that rose from the water a far distance out. There was no way to know whether this was the same river in which I had so often swum as a ghost—just farther downstream, perhaps, and beyond the underworld’s deepest shadows—or part of an altogether different drainage.

  All along the riverbank, as far in either direction as I could see, ran two other broad streams, these made up of the spirits of people. Thousands of souls were eddying upriver, while about as many traveled with the flow. Still other spirits were leaving the river altogether, and in column
s, threads, small clusters, and even on their own, they struck out across the green plain toward a distant forest and the still more distant mountains that defined the horizon. There was, of course, great variety among all these ghosts; almost none were as pale as Angelfish, and most were darker, even, than I. Many of them wore different types of robes, and some even walked naked along the bank of the river, or toward the far-off mountains. Meanwhile, out on the river were many small boats. They were being rowed by …

  “Yo, Thumb,” said Angelfish. “I asked you a question.” She was now sitting up.

  “Oh, yeah. Another planet. I don’t know. Where the hell is the sun—or any sun? For all I know this could be the Elysian Fields.”

  “Elysian Fields. What’s that?”

  “It’s just some ancient Greek stuff. Kind of like heaven, but underground.”

  “What happened to Pickle? I didn’t get to see if she got away.”

  I smiled at her. “I’m sure she did get away. I think you bought her the time she needed. And didn’t you scare the piss out of those three assholes?” I laughed. “Come here, Fat Harold, and suck an eel out of my mouth!”

  “Oh, nice!” Angelfish said. “And, so, in my whole life, next to having Chelsea, that’s one good thing to my credit—even though I had to die before I could do it.”

  “That’s more good than most people do, I think.”

  “What about Scratch?”

  “Scratch is dead, dead, dead.”

  “Shut up!”

  “No, really. I was there to see it. That white dog got him by the throat and crushed his windpipe.”

  “Wow. Yuck.”

  “Yeah.” I wondered if she would start to feel bad about that.