Phantom Nights

by John Farris

  Neither Alex nor Bobby Gambier had been big on churchgoing since the cruel death of their parents. Just the way it was.

  Bobby came outside with a cleaned-up and freshly diapered Brendan and put him down to crawl in the grass. He put a booted foot up on one of the painted wagon wheels, covered with climbing roses, on either side of the walk. He had a smoke, compounding his spiritual felonies on the Lord's day.

  Alex parked his bike against the low rail-and-lattice fence and came over, reeking of dried sweat. Bobby offered him a drag.

  "Now get inside and wash. Change your clothes and don't leave a mess. I'll wait for you on the porch; we've got serious talking to do."

  Alex shook his head, held up two fingers together, nodded toward the house. Brendan scrambled toward him and latched onto an ankle, began pulling himself up Alex's leg.

  "What do I need to go with you for?" Bobby asked.

  Alex gave him a steady look. Because.

  Bobby shrugged and looked at Brendan. "Want to carry him?"

  Alex nodded.

  "You two get along, don't you?" Alex lifted Brendan and swung him onto his shoulders. Bobby followed them into the house and up the stairs. Alex's shoulders were getting tired. He handed Brendan over to Bobby and went into the bathroom. Bobby dangled Brendan upside down for a few seconds, which he never did when Cecily was watching, then turned the baby right-side up. They both laughed. "Remember how I told you your eyeballs would fall out if I did that?" Bobby said to Alex. "You believed me too."

  Alex had other matters on his mind. In the bathroom he pointed at the tub, then pointed to himself and shook his head vehemently.

  "So you didn't do it."

  No.

  "Guess it must have been Rhoda or maybe the Antichrist then?"

  Alex took a shaker of talcum powder from a shelf and got down on one knee to spread the powder on an eight-by-eight dark blue tile. He wrote in the powder with a forefinger, She did it dumbass.

  Brendan wanted to get down and play in the powder too. Bobby draped him casually over one shoulder, holding him by the ankles, forgetting that Brendan had just had his lunch.

  "Bernie, you mean."

  Alex looked up, nodded.

  "I can hardly wait to tell that one to Cecily. 'Hey Cece, your mom greased the tub so she'd slip and bust her head open.'" Bobby grimaced after he'd spoken, and he looked away from Alex, staring through the opened windows above the tub, higher than mosquitoes ordinarily traveled.

  Alex knew the look on Bobby's face. He got up and dusted his hands on his shorts, unbuttoned his fly, and stood over the toilet. He looked back at Bobby while he was whizzing.

  "No, guess that's not why she would've done it," Bobby said, swinging Brendan back and forth like a pendulum.

  Brendan squealing with delight until he spit up. Bobby held him upright again and wiped Brendan's mouth on the sleeve of his old Evening Shade High athletic jersey. Dancing school, Bobby thought. Over my dead body; he's a football player.

  Alex flushed the toilet, let his shorts drop. As usual in summer, he wasn't wearing undershorts.

  "Bigger than when I saw it last," Bobby commented. "About to beat me out there, you know that?"

  Alex smiled a little self-consciously, kicked off his moccasins and stripped his polo shirt.

  Bobby held Brendan against his chest and gave him some sugar.

  "Don't be calling me dumbass ever, or I'll kick your skinny butt sideways. I already figured it had to be Bernice. I've always been knowing you better than that, and even Cecily needs to admit her mother's got sneaky ways."

  Brendan was pushing himself around on the porch in his baby walker when Alex came outside eating a roast beef sandwich he'd made for himself in the kitchen. Bobby sat in a lawn chair with his back to the painted cement steps to keep Brendan from pushing himself off the porch. Alex sat on a swing and looked at his brother.

  "There isn't anything I can do about it," Bobby said. "Because it puts you and me against Cecily and Bernice, and I'm not about to let that happen."

  Alex chewed slowly, swallowed, looked at the floorboards and shrugged dispiritedly.

  "But Bernie's not coming into my house full-time, made up my mind about that."

  Alex looked relieved, for the moment.

  "Made up my mind about something else too," Bobby said. "This is about you. You're not a kid anymore. Few more years and you'll be a man. I wouldn't be any good to you as a brother if I didn't think about that. You and me communicate okay, but how do you communicate with other people? Write down everything you feel or want to say? Easier just to pass on by, isn't it, ignore anyone who looks the wrong way at you. Well, you're going to be fourteen. Bad news for you. Life just gets harder. It's already past time when you ought to be learning the language of others who don't hear, can't speak. There's good schools where they'll teach you sign language. Closest one is Louisville. I want you to go there, Alex, because otherwise you won't stand a cut dog's chance. You've got to become part of the world, always improving yourself, not just drifting and living on the edge of things. You can't speak, but there's plenty worse things can happen. The Forney kid is in an iron lung for as long as he lives because he can't do his own breathing. Compared to him, you're lucky. You can see, hear, run, play ball. You're not shut off from two-thirds or all of the world. The world's waiting on you, Alex, to get the chip off your shoulder because you got bad cards once. If it's up to me, which it is, what Cecily thinks or wants doesn't enter into my decision: You're gonna pitch in and get on with life."

  Alex sat with his head down, lips parted, breathing through his mouth. Then he gave Bobby a look dense with fear, loathing, and despair. He raised both hands and began waggling fingers in a parody of sign language, grinning hatefully. Bobby stared him down.

  "You're scared to be called 'dummy.' But the only way you'll get over it is to share what you're afraid of with others who are like you. You're going to Louisville, Alex. I'm driving us there to the school Monday week, get you signed up, settled in."

  Bobby looked at Brendan, who was sagging over in his walker, eyes closing. Nap time. Bobby picked him up and carried him into the house, glancing at Alex, at the back of his head. Feeling a little shaky himself, sympathetic, but glad he had got it over with. Now it was time for Bernie to write that check. Thinking she'd won something. But the answer to that might be in Cecily's belly this minute. They were going to need a lot of room in their house, all the room they had, for boys and girls to grow up. Bernice could spend her winding-down years with men and women her own age, once her arthritis got so bad she couldn't feed herself or brush her teeth.

  When he went downstairs again after putting Brendan in his crib, Alex was gone, off somewhere on his blue-and-white Schwinn. But Bobby had expected that. His brother had thinking to do, reality to confront. Grow up a little. Bobby smiled (I've been wrong, but now I've got it right), took a deep breath, and saw a sheet of paper under a windshield wiper of the Packard station wagon in the drive. He went down the steps and across the lawn to retrieve the obvious message: "Screw You," probably.

  The paper had been folded small enough for Alex to carry in his back pocket. It was a campaign flyer he had pulled off a telephone pole, Leland Howard's smiling, confident face on one side. Leap Ahead with Leland! There was, of course, a lot of talk about the young candidate from courthouse loafers and pundits in an election year, the consensus being that Howard was a comer, and if ever a post-Reconstruction Southerner had a chance to be elected President, then—

  Bobby turned the flyer over. On the blank obverse, Alex had printed in red crayon:

  I SAW HIM RAPE

  MALLY SHAW LAST NIGHT!!

  WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?

  Along with a few other passengers, Ramses Valjean got off the 4:10 from Nashville at the Frisco Railway's depot two blocks from the courthouse square. Ramses wore a red polka-dot bow tie with his dark blue sharkskin suit, which appeared to hang on him as if his weight had crash-dived in recent wee
ks. The trousers were held up by red suspenders. His hat was a twenties-style cream-colored straw fedora with a wide black band. He was not a sightless man, but he wore the glasses of the blind, little round lenses dark as India ink to fit the orbits of his eyes. Ramses had a lion's head on his gaunt body and sported a short beard with a pure-white crest in it. He carried a pigskin valise in one hand and a black medical bag in the other.

  He set his valise down on the station platform, took off his glasses, and rubbed coalsmoke-sensitive eyes with thumb and forefinger while he waited, like a man of import, for the crowd of mourners who had met the train to come to him. There were relatives of all ages, such as Mally's second cousin Verona with her brood, friends like Herschel "Poke Chop" Burdett, and a son of one of the owners of the funeral establishment, a plump, dapper young man named Dorsey Wundall, equally as well dressed, if in a more somber tone, as Ramses.

  He had been away for a long time: since the early thirties. Most of the faces he recognized, some only at second glance. A couple of great aunts plucked at Ramses's sleeves while weeping, but no one embraced him. Ramses did not have the bearing of a man given to embraces in public.

  He thanked them for coming. Dorsey Wundall introduced himself with appropriate condolences. Ramses looked sharply at him.

  "Did your father receive my telegram?"

  "Yes, sir. May I drive you to—"

  "I would first like to see where it happened. Then you can take me to my daughter."

  Ramses handed his pigskin valise to the undertaker and looked in annoyance at another young man, this one standing apart from the circle of mourners with an eager expression. He was wearing a hard-crown straw boater with a press card in the ribbon headband, holding a Speed Graphic camera in both hands.

  "Dr. Val Jean, I'm Eddie Paradise Galphin from the Tri-State Defender. Reckon could I get a—"

  "It's Val-zhon. I don't want to be photographed." Ramses took off his straw fedora as if to shield his face should the young man ignore his wishes. Hatless he showed a full head of relaxed, pomaded hair that he dyed black and wore styled like Ellington's.

  "Well then, if I could talk to you for a few minutes about your—"

  "This is a sorrowful day," young Wundall snapped at the Defender's man. "Show some respect for a bereaved father."

  "Yes, respect his privacy," one of the elderly aunties said.

  A few of the mourners accompanied Ramses and Wundall to the mortician's Cadillac as if to protect him from further indignities proposed by the presence of a reporter. Eddie Paradise Galphin remained on the station platform smoking a cigarette; when Wundall drove Ramses away from the depot, Galphin hurried to his own car, a vintage rumble-seat roadster, and followed them.

  Sheriff's deputy Olen McMullen had been on duty at Little Grove Holiness Church since about nine-thirty that morning, keeping everyone who attended the Sunday service and later the morbidly curious away from the cemetery hollow where Mally Shaw's body had been discovered at dawn by Ike Thurmond. McMullen was tired, surly, and bored stupid while waiting on a relief dep. He had read the sports pages of the Sunday Tennessean three times. Much of the sports was devoted to the Summer Olympics that were about to get underway. Few people in Evening Shade cared anything about the Olympics; and where the hell was Finland anyway?

  The two-car procession, one highly polished Cadillac and one dilapidated roadster driven by Eddie Paradise Galphin, newshound, arrived, and both cars parked on the Yella Dog side of the road opposite the church and not far from Mally Shaw's Dodge. Wundall the mortician remained by the Caddy while Ramses, carrying a brown paper sack, made his way along the gravel path to the cemetery gates. There was no wall around the cemetery, only a pair of wrought-iron gates with hinges rusted open.

  Deputy McMullen wiped his brow again with a soggy handkerchief and sauntered over to intercept Mally's father a few feet from the gates.

  "What can I do you for, uncle?"

  Ramses paused, and his bearded chin came up in the manner of a thoroughbred horse confronted by a broken-down old plug.

  "I am Dr. Valjean. My daughter, I have been given to understand, was found here this morning, slaughtered—according to a preliminary investigation—by wild dogs. I have the permission of acting sheriff Bobby Gambier to view the general area."

  "Oh uh yeah—I heard you might be coming. But I should warn you it ain't a pretty—"

  "I am a doctor of pathology. I now teach at Meharry Medical College after many years as chief of staff at Hubbard Hospital in Nashville. I have, you might say, seen almost every terrible thing, that can be visited upon a human being. Has anyone other than law-enforcement personnel come through here since Mally's body"—here he faltered, but only for an instant—"was removed?"

  "No uh, sir," Olen McMullen said, the first time in his life he had ever sir'd a Negro. And looked around guiltily as if he was afraid he'd been overheard.

  Ramses looked at the deputy's perspiring red face and smiled sympathetically.

  "It's very hot, isn't it? Have you been here long?"

  "Practically the whole friggin' day," McMullen said.

  Ramses opened his paper sack. "Well then, it was fortunate that I stopped at the mercantile back up the road. Would you care for a Coke or perhaps Grapette?"

  "Ohhh—sure, wouldn't mind at all. You said grape?"

  "Yes." Ramses handed the bottle of soda to the deputy, reached into a coat pocket for a large staghorn knife which contained, in addition to two sharp blades, an assortment of gadgetry that included a bottle opener. He popped the tops on the bottles, and they drank together, McMullen sighing with enjoyment, the surly knit of his brows relaxing.

  "Real nice of you, Doc."

  "My pleasure." Ramses took out his gold pocket watch. The time was a few minutes before five p.m. That left him, he calculated, half an hour at best before he would need to seek isolation and refuge. He closed the watch. "Now, if I may—"

  "Surely," McMullen looked up to the road. "Who's that with the camera?"

  "A representative of the press. If you wouldn't mind asking him to keep his distance for now while I am—engaged in prayerful solitude, then I may agree to have my picture taken next to the church. I believe that should satisfy his mania for, ah, 'getting the story.'"

  "Okey-dokey."

  Ramses set his Coke bottle down as the deputy walked toward the road. He removed his suit jacket, folded and laid it on the front seat of the sheriff's car parked beside the gates. Then he walked the gentle downslope of the wide path into the burial ground. He could see just where the carnage had taken place while he was still a hundred feet away. A headstone with torn-up turf around it was splashed with blood that still attracted flies.

  Ramses approached the site, where for several minutes he was motionless, moving only his head as he surveyed every inch of a gruesome scene. He heard a train whistle; soon a long freight rumbled by a hundred yards north of the cemetery. He felt the ground tremble beneath his shoes. When the train had passed, he noticed a boy on a bicycle riding along the platform of the abandoned Cole's Crossing depot. A white boy.

  He returned his attention to the death scene, where he slowly began to walk around, sometimes dropping to one knee for a closer study. Sniffing deeply a few times. Carefully parting tufts of grass. His mind was fully in clinical mode as he repressed all emotion. He saw clots of blood, insects, pieces of a dress. There was a vase with spilled and wilted flowers not far from the blood-soaked headstone. It was still possible, to his trained eye, to tell where Mally's body had lain and in what position. Around the beaten-down grass and pods of dried mud there were paw prints and men's footprints. Five or six different men. There was a chewed sandal in grass and weeds ten feet from the vase and flowers.

  Ramses kept his back to the gates and the deputy who was with the mortician and the reporter. He pulled on a pair of white cotton gloves and began to pick up bits and pieces of things that interested him. He wrapped each separately in tissue paper he'd also purchased at the
general store and placed everything in the brown paper sack.

  Before leaving he picked up Mally's sandal, holding it by a torn strap. The leather was darkly dappled with blood. He was interested in what was on the sole. He carried the sandal out of the cemetery and met Deputy McMullen coming down from the road.

  "I wonder why this wasn't removed along with my daughter's remains?"

  "Prob'ly they just overlooked it this morning."

  "If you think it would be all right, Deputy, I'd like to take it with me."

  "Much as it was your daughter's, can't see no reason why not." McMullen looked at the folded-over paper sack in Ramses's other hand but didn't say anything else. He was curious, though, when Ramses took time to study tire tracks both on and off the pea-gravel path.

  Ramses retrieved his jacket from the sheriff's car. "Thank you for your kindness, Deputy."

  "Well, it were a terrible thing happened, and I feel right sorry about it. Those pack dogs been a problem 'round these parts since I was a kid. Killed a old woman over to Palermo, let's see, four-five years ago, believe it was. Just have to track 'em down and shoot 'em."

  Ramses nodded, looking as if the heat and horror of what had befallen Mally had worn away his defenses. There was a trudge to his step as he went up to the road and beckoned Eddie Paradise Galphin over for a brief conversation. McMullen watching and thinking that here was some nigger all right; not like any other buck or uncle he had run across in Evening Shade or the military service. If there was a difference to most of them it was the difference between dirt and mud in McMullen's estimation; but Ramses had disturbed this complacent equation in the deputy's brain and he wasn't happy with the suspicion that forevermore he might have to deal with it.

  Every place of business in Evening Shade was shut tight on Sundays except for the Tropical Breeze ice-cream stand that was open summers only and Pee-Wee's Good Eats, both across the road from the brick factory where eighty-odd local people were employed making Hanes-brand underwear. Pee-Wee almost never closed except for Christmas day; he lived in two rooms in the back of his café and if you were hungry at two a.m. you could go around and rap on the back door and if he knew you and thought you might have some fresh gossip to reward him, Pee-Wee would get up and put the coffee on.