A couple of hours earlier, the pimply stylist at Supercuts had warned us about the tornado watch as he cropped Carl’s hair. So did the Walmart checker, a woman perking up her middle age with red-striped readers, peering through them to admire my new polka-dot clip-on phone case, Carl’s large box of Whitman’s chocolates and bag of sour gummy worms before dropping them into a plastic bag: “Must literally be Christmas in July at your house.” It came out litterly.
“What a lucky dog,” the checker had said as she swiped the bar codes on the cans of Purina wet food, the jerky treats, and the “extra cushiony comfort” reflective dog collar Carl insisted on. He had fingered the silvery choke chains first.
“How would you like a shot in your ass?” Carl had responded.
Click. Click. Click. I swirl around to find Carl and his imaginary camera only a few feet behind me. He’s snapping his tongue against the roof of his mouth. How did he get here so fast? He must have run those two hundred yards across the field, yet he’s not out of breath.
He’s bouncing, kneeling, popping back up, shooting the names carved into polished stones of white, red, pink, brown. Stones the color of skin, blood, and skeleton. Stones dug up from this piece of land, according to the legend on the brick. His eyes are glittering over the coins as if he would like to steal them.
He pauses his frenetic activity and lets the invisible camera drip free off the invisible strap around his neck. His pantomime is so real I almost see it. He points to the field. “My brother stood over there. Watched it burn. Took less than thirty minutes.”
A brother. I knew he had one, who’d died of cancer. Surely he was not a cop or a David Koresh follower.
“Norm was part of the volunteer firefighter crew from Axtell,” Carl continues. “They were called too late and then forced to stand back. By the time the FBI let them in there with hoses, it was all bones. House bones, people bones. My brother couldn’t shut up about it for a year. He liked to watch things burn.”
“I wasn’t born yet,” I stutter. Just conceived. The age of “Fetus Gent,” so named on the memorial. I’d learned about this cult standoff with the FBI in a religious studies class. Two images had stuck, the before and the after. A compound built on the cheap, mass scale of fair-weather apocalyptic architects, and a billowing, tangerine blaze.
“What a politically correct piece of garbage memorial this is.” Carl sneers. He nods again to the vacant field where the complex used to stand. “Did you know the FBI cut the power on the fiftieth night of the standoff?”
I shake my head.
“Twenty degrees outside. Thirty-mile-an-hour winds. They ran spotlights on the compound like it was a car sale. Blasted them with recordings of screaming rabbits being slaughtered, dentist drills, Tibetan chants. There were children in there. They used tear gas. Goddamn machines of war to ram their home. No wonder these religious nuts thought it was the end of the world. The FBI fulfilled the goddamn prophecy of David Koresh, a dumb-ass bastard named Vernon who came out of a fourteen-year-old mother. If people are not in their right minds, you gotta know better than to push, right? Police don’t get this.”
Carl appears lucid with an edge of crazy, the man with a graduate degree in art history, the documentarian, hell-bent about his opinion.
Except I think the crazy part of him is making things up. Trying to scare me. Screaming rabbits. The first thick drop of rain splashes on my wrist. My hair’s slapping across my eyes, sticking to my lips. Carl slowly lifts his hands to his face and snaps a figment of me.
A jagged piece of hail stings my skull. Another hits my neck.
Even in the trial records, Carl’s childhood was sketchy. If his brother lived around here once, maybe Carl had, too. Maybe he’d spotted Nicole Lakinski years before the prosecutor even dreamed. I will be sure to put a few of her photos from the green Tupperware container in the mix again tonight. The pinched little face of her son, Alex, is still on top.
“My brother bid on Koresh’s 1968 Camaro on the Internet,” Carl says. “Too rich for him in the end. Sold at thirty-seven thousand.”
“Why did you bring me here, Carl?”
“Wasn’t it your idea?”
“You are the one…” I catch myself. “Let’s head back to the car before it pours. Find a motel.”
Carl has stepped aggressively close, his hands up at his face again. He towers over me.
I picture myself in his close-up. Wet clothes clinging to my breasts and hips. The faint white scar between my eyes, more pronounced as the rain filters away my makeup. The one eyebrow that hikes a little higher, the flea of a mole right above my lip, the tiny diamond stud in my left nostril. Hair roots that already need touching up. I shouldn’t have chosen the color Cherry Cola for my disguise just because I liked the sound of it.
No one will recognize me in the computer morgue of missing people. My mother could wait for days, maybe forever, to find out what happened to me. Just like she is doing for my sister.
His brother liked to watch things go up in flames.
I think Carl has been here before.
My thoughts churn chaotically. I lurch backward, my hand pressing against my hip for a gun that is still in my suitcase.
Click, click, click goes Carl’s tongue.
Mrs. T is right. I shouldn’t buy him a camera.
I do not want to be another still life he leaves behind.
Carl drops his hands again, his attention suddenly diverted. “We can’t take her with us,” he whines, his face twisted in irritation. “No room.”
It’s getting much easier to play hopscotch with his brain. “I’m glad you agree about…Barfly. We’ll find a good place.”
“I’m not talking about Barfly,” he snaps. “Barfly’s a condition. Barfly’s a boy. I’m talking about her.”
He points behind me to insanity and air.
17
The thunder crack feels like it might split me in two. I shudder, but Carl remains stick-still. I wonder if Carl can see the pulse in my neck pumping like a tiny frog and wants to reach his two fingers over to press the spot still. He continues to point to nothing at all.
“What’s her name?” I ask cautiously. Whatever the hell is happening right now, I don’t want to screw it up.
“She never says.”
“So you’ve known her…a while.” She’s not a child from this wall? Not Startle Summers or Serenity Sea or Little One Jones?
“Sure. I told her five times she couldn’t come. She’s always soaking wet.”
“Has she been standing here…long?”
“How the hell do I know? I’ve been out there in the field. Ask her. And tell her to stay in her damn picture.”
My clothes are riveted like body armor. Mud is caked up the ankles of my jeans. I remember running in wet clothes, being timed with a stopwatch, and how many precious seconds wet clothes take away when seconds count. I remember one of Carl’s most beautiful photographs—a woman fleeing in the rain, her sopping dress draped around her legs, a goddess cut out of marble. Carl titled her Lady in the Rain. Does he believe she jumped out of his photo into this field? Did he kill her, too?
I glance past Carl to the property’s gravel entry. Little rivers are already running toward the cattle gate, our exit. Carl seems to be waiting for me to speak while water pours off both our faces. “Let’s…all go to the car,” I urge. “It’s dangerous by this tree. We’re getting drenched.”
“That’s one of her problems. She never dries herself off or changes clothes. Drips all over everything. Smells like mildew if she hangs out for more than a few days. And there’s no room in the car.”
“Come on, Carl.” I beckon at the emptiness, at his ghost. “You, too.”
“Don’t even pretend you see her. She’s already up there at the gate. When she runs, she’s almost impossible to catch.”
18
As soon as we get in the car, my body turns on me, teeth clacking like I’ve been pulled out of ice water. I try three times to grasp the keys in the ign
ition.
Carl finally reaches over and turns the car on himself, his elbow lingering on my breast. In my shivering panic, I barely feel it. But I know. It is a profound line crossed that I can never get back.
Outside, the storm is a maniacal bully, whipping the trees, nudging the car just because it can. Inside, with tight inches between us, I feel the bully beside me deciding. Should he kill me and call it a day? Or is this all just too much fun?
I have one shaking hand on the wheel and one in my pocket, furiously rubbing the black-and-white die. The storm blew it off the ledge right before I ran. It feels slick. Cool. A gift from the Rachel on the wall.
Carl is perfectly composed. No shivering. He’s using one of the washcloths from the backseat to towel-dry his hair. He tosses the other one at me from the passenger side. He runs his cloth over the inside of the windshield, begins to fiddle with the buttons on the dash to try to defog the window.
According to Carl, the ghost has slithered into the backseat. Carl’s hallucination, so why can I feel her presence? Smell her mustiness? You have to scoot over, he’d said to her.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Carl asks me. “You need me to drive us out of here?”
If I let him, it is over.
Deafening machine-gun hail pounds the car like we’re Bonnie and Clyde under fire, an old game of pretend with my sister while we waited out a storm. Under the covers, she once showed me a library book with the old police photo of pretty Bonnie Parker, a bloody rag doll, shot to shreds by the Texas state police in a 1934 Ford V8. She was almost twenty-four, the age I am now. People say she had a death wish, too.
The sky is a giant bruise, a peculiar, apocalyptic shade of yellow-gray.
Carl is reaching for the door handle on his side, impatient, ready to run into the storm, jump in on the driver’s side, drive us to a new bloody dot in hell.
It hits me then, how very stupid I am. The very large piece I’ve been missing.
Carl, opening the door to the backseat every time we get in the car, just being polite, he’d said.
Don’t mess back there, he’d growled at me by the bridge.
Other odd bits of conversation since we left Mrs. T’s chatter away in my head.
Jesus Christ, I’ll listen to country crap if you insist. Just shut up about it already.
You’re sweating like a pig.
Those times, he wasn’t talking to me.
We can’t take her with us, he’d insisted a few minutes ago. No room.
That’s because she isn’t our only invisible passenger.
The lady in the rain makes two.
19
I’m on the edge of the bed, drying out, rolling the die between my fingers while Carl talks to his ghosts in the adjoining motel room and the wind howls. The die feels fortuitous. The rain swept it to my feet. It had rolled to a five. My lucky number is three. My sister’s was six. I had picked it up anyway.
I put the die back in my pocket and begin to search the contents of the Walmart bags scattered on one of the two double beds. I try not to think about what would show up on the blue-flowered granny bedspreads under ultraviolet light.
I find what I’m looking for in the third bag: the Door Jammer, my most inspired idea of the trip so far, which got a no comment from the Walmart checker. No comment’s a comment, Carl had snapped at her.
Back in the car, while rain whipped, it was like someone reached a hand through the murky windshield and delivered a hard crack across my face.
Stay in the car, I had ordered Carl when we pulled up to the registration office of the first cheap motel that twinkled off an exit. I’d driven straight into blackness to flee that spot in the road with the nuclear sky. The hail eased the farther we traveled back toward Waco, but the rain wouldn’t even stop to suck in a breath. The first thing I did when we pulled into the motel parking lot was assess my appearance in the rearview mirror.
Mascara streaked like charcoal tears down my cheeks. I pulled on Carl’s new hoodie sweatshirt from Walmart that had been sitting like a dividing line between the two ghosts in the backseat. It neatly covered my Cherry Cola hair, two shades darker because it was wet.
I slumped my shoulders as I entered a lobby decorated with old posters of a beach a thousand miles from here. I slumped because my sister taught me one Halloween that posture reveals everything. Age, beauty, spirit. You want to be an old witch? Hunch. You want to limp? Drop a few pebbles in your shoe. Tuck a ruler up your pants and tape it to your leg.
I’d babbled to the skinny Indian kid behind the desk with the Artie name tag that I needed two rooms, one for my husband and me and one for his brother who snores like two pigs full of snot, which is at least half the reason his wife left him last month.
The fact is, the best way to disappear is to blend into the usual, irritating stream of creatures. The silent, frightened girl—she sticks out. She gets carded every time.
So I kept laying it on. I said that we were driving to a funeral for their Aunt Barb in Dallas, that she’d probably died of eating too many sour cream potato chips, that some asshole almost ran us off the road in the rain a little while ago and took us straight to see her. That the men had been arguing for five minutes over who had to get out of the car to book the rooms so I just did it myself.
I thickened my drawl for Artie, apologized for my muddy footprints, watched his big brown eyes begin to gloss over at asshole. I think of all those times I watched Rachel command a high school or college stage, all those times I’d watched her spin a teenage lie to my parents.
I was surprisingly good at this part, at lying.
I’d signed in with my left hand and a license plate number I made up on the spot, paid $126.42 in cash, and raided the office vending machine for peanut butter crackers, Snickers, and pretzels for our dinner. As for the license plate, I didn’t figure the proprietor of Motel Casa Blanco would be out on a rainy night scouring cars in the lot to make sure they matched his registry.
Something brushes against the connecting door between Carl and me. I hadn’t officially acknowledged the existence of Carl’s other ghost, although he had mumbled about “him.” And I’d decided to wait to ask more details about the wet one when I wasn’t exhausted and Carl’s eyes weren’t starting to glaze.
They don’t like his weird friends. That’s what Mrs. T said about why Carl’s fellow boarders avoided him. She didn’t find it important to clear that up for me.
The TV, on mute, shows an angry weather map, another red squiggle approaching, and another, abstract art come to life. In the hall outside, an unhinged vending sign clanks mercilessly, metal scraping metal. Inside, in the glow of the TV and 40-watt lamp bulbs, I’m a furtive shadow on the wall.
I dig a pair of scissors into the thick plastic packaging for the heavy fire-engine-red device that is going to slide under the door and barricade me from Carl tonight. I weigh it in my hand. Heavy. Looks like a car jack of sorts. Only $19.95 plus tax, a small price to pay for a good night of sleep. That said, I feel the money slipping away. Another $88.21 dropped at Walmart. In less than forty-eight hours, I’ve spent almost $800. For now, I slide the Door Jammer under my bed.
I rap on the adjoining door. There is no chain on this one, just the scratched memory in the upper right corner where it used to be. “Carl, did you get your clothes together for me?” I rap again. “Carl?”
The door opens four inches. A hand thrusts out a pair of jeans and a shirt, the day’s bloody, filthy clothes. No underwear. For that, I’m grateful.
“Thanks.” Almost before I get the word out, Carl’s hand disappears and he’s clipped the door shut. “Take your pills!” I yell. No response. Sifting through the thin door, the ding, ding, ding and chortling laughter of a game show. Probably just as well if Carl and I don’t meet again tonight.
I’d divided the vending machine supplies between us already. We’d swiped a Coke and a beer each from the cooler in the trunk, more of our Walmart loot. I don’t feel like going t
hrough the motions of laying out the snapshots for him tonight. He hasn’t said another word about Nicole. I want to crawl into that unforgiving sponge of a bed and drift into black.
But first, the clothes. I’d shed my own on the bathroom floor right before a lukewarm shower. As I retrieve them, I catch myself in the cheap full-length mirror tacked to the back of the door.
I wouldn’t be scared of me.
Shoes off, without lifts, 5'2". Stripped of makeup, hair pulled into a messy bun, seventeen, eighteen years old at most. Slightly rounded cheeks. The tiny nose ring that says just starting to rebel. A Columbus Zoo T-shirt with a panda because pandas are cute and because I have no ties whatsoever to Columbus, Ohio.
Shorts cut right below the curve of my butt, revealing fading bruises on both knees. Ant bites peppering my ankles.
A vulnerable-looking girl is in that mirror, which is good because it’s better if people don’t know what’s coming at them. Some people would say I’m taunting Carl on purpose. That I should cover up at all times. That I would half-deserve what I got.
Before I go, I wrap my body in a black garbage bag and arm myself with a Ziploc bag of quarters. I feel for the die in my pocket. I grab the pepper spray out of my purse. I leave the gun.
20
It’s an uneasy little walk, even though the motel laundromat is only six doors down, in Room 18, just like the clerk said. The slight awning is no protection. On one side of me, rain slaps at my garbage bag raincoat; on the other, room windows gape black and lifeless.
I pass one lonely cell where a lump in bed is watching porn in the dark with the shades pulled tightly up so everyone can see. Only two other vehicles are parked near our rooms—what I’m guessing is the porn freak’s old Toyota Camry and a red Audi rental that doesn’t belong. The Audi seems vaguely familiar, like we passed it on the highway a couple of times. Or I saw it in a Super Bowl commercial.
Paper Ghosts_A Novel of Suspense Page 7
