Phantom Nights

by John Farris

  Ramses stopped there, thinking as he had not thought for some time of Captain Jack. Who had, in addition to education, proclivities Ramses was willing to indulge in exchange for the tutorials he received. Already knowing it was a world of give and take. He was never abused. Shame or guilt didn't enter into Ramses's calculations of his personal worth. It was a thing of bodies that he also found gratifying most of the time.

  Nearing retirement and landlocked sunset years with his wife, Jack Marsh turned his cabin boy, now a mature French-speaking seventeen-year-old, over to a scion of the shipping line's founder in Marseilles. That young lady applied her own veneer of manners and polish to her pet Negro. When she became engaged to a wealthy older man, she recommended Ramses to a male cousin, a Parisian physician and drug addict who fell in love. Provided for Ramses in his will, money which came to Ramses only eight months later, when his benefactor was separated from many of his body parts in a motorcycle accident. The inheritance was sufficient to allow for a decent existence and put Ramses through medical school at the Sorbonne.

  He might never have left France, but a desire to present himself to the homefolks in the full dignity of his station prompted Ramses to return to the United States in 1920. He needed a radical change of pace and scenery after serving in the French Army Medical Corps for two and a half years, never far removed from the battlefields.

  Accustomed to the laissez-faire racial attitudes of cosmopolitan Paris, for Ramses traveling to West Tennessee was like being shipped to a penal colony. One week only and he would never return, Ramses vowed. Then, on a visit to Nashville for a series of lectures at Meharry Medical College, Ramses encountered an irresistible force named Dawn Bird Hollins.

  Alex Gambier walked slowly along the platform of the decrepit depot at Cole's Crossing, sane, he thought, but with a nervous apprehension muttering around his heart. Mally Shaw was beside him, out of touch but still a comforting presence like the soul of a candled saint, perfectly realized by her own mysterious light in the deep darkness around them.

  "You can't just leave here if you want to?"

  "No way that I know of," Mally said with the sorrowfully perplexed expression she'd had from time to time. When she was alive.

  "Have you tried?"

  "Oh, yes. Cemetery at Little Grove is as far as I get."

  "What stops you?"

  "Nothing I can explain. It's not like running into a wall. There's nobody with a stop sign like a crossing guard at school. I just feel the need to turn back."

  "But you've been to the cemetery."

  "Since my remains were taken away, yes, I did go."

  "Is something down there that I uh can't—"

  "No, sugar. There's just little shrunk-up corpses wearing the fine clothes they were laid to rest in. Souls have all moved on. Even my William's spirit, which I hope is not so tormented anymore."

  "Well where did they—"

  "This place is a Crossing between worlds, which is all I know about it so far. Maybe I ought to be someplace else already, 'stead of walkin' up and down this platform keeping you company because you don't seem to understand it is way past your bedtime."

  Alex snorted. "I stay up all night lots of nights. And this is . . . I mean, I don't want to go. You're here; it's the most incredible—"

  "Not going to pee in your pants again, are you?" she teased.

  "Hell no. Don't make fun of me! We've got to get to the bottom of this."

  "'Kay. I'm game if you are, and I don't have anything else to do."

  "I thought maybe you can't leave here for the same reason you can't touch me and I can't touch you."

  "I don't know," Mally said, shrugging as if she'd lost interest in phenomena. She had another interest, looking down at herself. "Wonder where did I get this dress from? And did you notice, Alex? My fingernails and toenails, they're done ever so nicely."

  "I noticed."

  "Well, and I did wonder could it be what Alex thinks or remembers about me or—wants me to be, that's how I'm going to look to both of us when I'm with him? Although you never did see me in my lifetime with my toenails done up." She smiled impishly. "You like women, girls, with their toenails painted? Your brother's cute wife? Might be you have a crush on her?"

  Alex looked uncomfortable. "I'm over that."

  "Oh, sure."

  "Sometimes I did think about her when I was—"

  Mally cut off his confession with a wave of her hand. "No need to be completely honest with me, Alex. Boys are gonna be boys, and there's no shame in it."

  She folded her arms across her breasts, frowning as if she felt a chill or sense of alarm, and darted a look over one shoulder.

  "What's wrong?"

  "Better had step away from the track. Train's coming in."

  Alex looked around too. "What train?"

  "There is one. But it might not stop here. Depends on who's waiting for it."

  She turned her face aside and hugged herself tighter, closing her eyes. This went on for at least ten seconds. Then she seemed to relax and stared at Alex.

  "I was right. Wasn't anyone here ticketed for that one." Alex grinned. "Come on. A train just went by us."

  "Baby, this has been a busy place for trains all night so far, and I don't count the Dixie Traveler that was a short whistle away from mowin' you down."

  "But I told you. I had it timed. I was gonna sprint across in front of it at the last second. It's how well you gauge the speed and depth perception and—"

  "And if you did chance to time it a little bit wrong, still you could call it a brave thing, die a hero's death? Oh, Alex. That was part of what was on your mind, sure enough. The rest of it was just wrong thoughts that are bad for your soul, whether you remember it all or not."

  Alex validated her slant on the matter with a shrug. He did know the mood he had been in at the time. Soreness remained in his heart, but the morbidity had gone away because of his intense excitement at being with Mally, an eerie buoyance that had him feeling as if he were floating in and out of a dream state. He didn't want to think about anything except being there with her, the wonder and delight of hearing his own voice. And of course, whenever he looked at Mally he was reminded of how much he hated Leland Howard.

  "I told Bobby how you got raped in your own house. But Bobby said—"

  Mally nodded wisely. "Said how he wasn't about to stir up a hornet's nest that could get him stung to death just on my account, 'cause what did it matter anyway if I was dead."

  "Yeah, but when I tell him what else went on up there at Howard's farm—"

  "Oh, you can't do that, Alex."

  "Like to know why not!"

  She gave him that deep, thoughtful look of hers, ending in a rueful smile.

  "There's a couple good reasons. Just where you gonna say you got that story from?"

  Alex had a familiar burning heaviness in his throat, as if he'd swallowed a handful of rock salt. He struggled to get words out, although he'd been fluent moments before.

  "Cuh-couldn't B-Bobby—"

  "Talk to me himself?" Mally gave Alex a meltingly sympathetic look. "Haul him down to the depot, say 'There's Mally, didn't I tell you; listen to what she has to say and then go 'rest Mr. Leland Howard?'" She smiled. "You can talk to your brother about Mally Shaw, but all he will ever see of her in his own life is what is left over at the funeral home. You can't show me to Sheriff Bobby or anyone else. We seem to have some sort of special arrangement ourselves, Alex. Maybe we'll know eventually how it happens, or did happen this one time who knows how long our 'arrangement' will last? Oh, the other reason you can't tell the real story how I came to the—nothing's changed for you. After you leave here tonight, you still won't be able to speak a word no matter how bad you need to."

  "Don't say that! How do you think you know so damn much!"

  Mally shuddered slightly and crossed her bare arms again.

  "Another train's coming. Maybe this will be the one." She walked a few steps away from Alex, walked back.
"No. Probably too soon for me. But the Crossing is busy tonight."

  "What do you mean, 'busy'?"

  "There are others here, just swarms of folks passing through. I can barely make them out myself. They ignore me. Guess we're all strangers everywhere, no matter what world we find ourselves in."

  Alex shook his head unhappily, looking around the platform, empty to his eyes. There were tears on Mally's face. He heard a dog barking, and it raised hair on his forearms, the skin goosing up.

  "We have to figure out what to do about Leland Howard."

  "He doesn't matter to me now."

  "That low-down polecat set his dogs on you! He deserves to be—I don't care if Bobby is scared to do anything; I'll do it myself!"

  Mally looked worriedly at him.

  "Your mind is tired, Alex. You've been through a lot this weekend. And it would be hard to beat what I suffered.

  Will you let me rest now? It's time for both of us to take a break."

  He wiped sweat from beneath his eyes, blinking. She was losing definition, like a streaky image on a rainstorm window.

  "I'm not tired," he said sulkily. "I don't want you to go. I'll never see you again."

  "Can't be sure of that, it's true. But for now, please let go of me."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I can't do this all by myself. Let go. Turn your back on me, walk away. Don't look around."

  "No, Mally."

  "Tomorrow night, then. Be waiting here when the Dixie Traveler returns. Stay away from it, hear? But take its power deep into the marrow of your bones. That's how you'll likely find me again."

  "I don't—"

  "And Alex?"

  "What?" he said despairingly.

  "Almost nobody ever scores even in a lifetime. Either you get better than you deserve or, like most folks, a whole lot worse. There's nothing you can do to Mr. Howard he won't do to himself eventually."

  Bernice Clauson came into the kitchen and said to Bobby and Cecily, who were going over household accounts and making out checks for the first-of-the-month bills, "There's a blind nigra man coming up your front walk. I think he must be blind. He has on those glasses they wear. A young man is with him, and he has a camera."

  Cecily looked at Bobby, who shrugged and got up to go to the front door.

  "Hello, Eddie," Bobby said, recognizing the Defender's man in Evening Shade as he walked outside on the porch. His hunch was that the older man was Mally Shaw's father with the French name from Nashville. He wore dark glasses all right, and his suit was too big on him.

  "Dr. Valjean? Can't tell you how sorry I am about Mally; she was well liked here in Evening Shade. It's a terrible tragedy."'

  "Thank you, Sheriff Gambier."

  "Acting sheriff is all, rest of this week and the next. Eddie, you doing a story? You know I don't care for having my picture taken out of uniform."

  "Yes sir, Sheriff Bobby, just carryin' it around gets to be a habit with me."

  "Hot night. Would either of you like a drink of water?"

  Ordinarily he wouldn't have made the gesture; Negroes didn't call socially on the Gambiers, and if there was some official although after-hours business to be done, it was a Sunday night and he didn't want them lingering. But under the circumstances Bobby felt that Dr. Ramses Valjean was deserving of the unusual courtesy.

  Ramses turned him down, however, with a curt shake of his head.

  "Well then, what's on your mind I can help you with?"

  "I've come to ask you to accompany me to the Godsong and Wundall funeral home," Ramses said.

  "Why should I do that, Dr. Valjean?"

  "To view my daughter's body."

  "Done that this morning."

  "Let me make the assumption that you have not seen all that there is to see; of course you could not, sir, further assuming that you have no training in pathology."

  "What are you getting at?"

  "Among other things, although there can be no doubt that she was mauled to death by dogs, Mally could not have been killed where her body was found."

  "How's that?" Bobby said, a moment ago feeling a little sleepy, now with a yellow caution light blinking in his head.

  "It is so obvious that her body was moved there from another site, and that an effort was made to make it appear as if she were attacked in the Little Grove cemetery—a poor effort, by the way—it surprises me that no one in the sheriff's department has raised any questions about the attempted deception."

  "Wait a minute." Bobby glanced at Eddie, whose eyes were wide, as if he were hearing Dr. Valjean's theory for the first time. "I was at Little Grove myself. Didn't see a thing would back up this sort of speculation. The ground had been trampled by dogs, and there was blood all over. Pieces of her clothing and—"

  Ramses nodded. "Yes. Pieces of her flesh. I found what your deputies may have missed."

  "Then what gives you any reason to suspect—"

  "I can prove what I suspect, if you will accompany me to the funeral home, and if you are willing to accept the truth of my observations."

  Eddie looked at Ramses and up at Bobby as if he couldn't believe this was going on, Bobby stone-faced now and certain he had just been called out by a new gunslinger in town, one who possibly held him in contempt. Colored man holding him in contempt. Eddie was forgetting how to breathe.

  Bobby said, "I'll go with you." He looked at Eddie. "Eddie, go on home."

  "All right, Sheriff Bobby."

  "One word of this shows up in any newspaper across the state, one whisper gets back to me at the courthouse, I'll put a kink in your tooter."

  "Oh no no no no. You can depend on me."

  "You been standing there too long already."

  "I'm gettin'," Eddie said, backing down the walk with a look of apology meant for Ramses. But Ramses seemed to have lost all awareness of him.

  "I need to sit down," Ramses said in a quiet voice, and did so without permission, right there on the second step up to the porch, taking off his blindman's glasses with shaking fingers. The orbs of his eyes were yellow as egg yolk. Some hidden catastrophe of the flesh was etched on his grave handsome old face; seeing it gave Bobby pause before he went back into the house to let Cecily know where he was going.

  When Bobby saw Ramses Valjean's hand go to the handle on the front door of the passenger side of Bobby's Packard station wagon he was about to say something like I don't drive colored folks around town in the front seat of my car. No temper, just a casual statement of fact, as if Ramses was befuddled by events of the day and hadn't realized what he was about to do. But he heard in his head what it sounded like before the words came out, and, curiously, it occurred to him how he would sound to Ramses. Never in his life had Bobby had second thoughts about how he spoke to Negroes. Or care what any damn one of them thought of him. Because, except for a couple of noncoms raised in Harlem who had some of that jive-stepping manner even Southerners generally were amused by and could excuse them for, Bobby had never met a colored man who needed instruction concerning who he was and how he'd been born to behave. This made him uneasy. Ramses Valjean was a man of medicine and had achieved distinction in his field; that, in Bobby's opinion, entitled him to more respect than the average indentured farmer or the courthouse janitor. And his daughter had died a cruel death.

  So what Bobby said was, as Ramses was opening the car door, "Like for you to take a seat in the back, Dr. Valjean."

  Ramses said alter a few seconds, during which he was motionless but not hesitant, "As you wish." Not much inflection in his cultivated voice, certainly not a trace of arrogance. But Bobby felt as if he had just been scolded. Made to feel a little foolish. Then Ramses said, "I have always found it easier to talk to a man when I am, more or less, face to face. And obviously you are interested in what I have to say."

  No denying. Sunday night, the Gambiers were as usual a little short of paycheck money to settle bills and would have to cash in another government bond before its time. Alex was giving him fits,
and now Ramses Valjean had showed up and dumped a mess of an unknown size and complexity on his doorstep. He was both afraid and eager to hear more about it.

  Bobby said wearily, "Okay, let's get this done," and nodded his permission for Ramses to occupy the front seat with him.

  The woman Leland Howard took back to his hotel in Kingsport, Tennessee's Fort Henry Hotel was a devoted campaign worker, a divorcee who earned her living in the Sullivan County Clerk's office. Leland's friend and mentor Estes Kefauver had recommended her highly for a night's entertainment. Her name was Bitsy Beauregard. Mid-thirties, five feet nothing with frosted blonde hair and a dazzling jut of teeth that prevented her lips from ever quite closing, which gave her a look of unquenchable avidity. She had a fund of tacky chatter and wouldn't shut up even while she was taking his pants down. She carried some extra weight on her hips, but her breasts had a nice blush and were firm as wax fruit.

  Bitsy proved herself to be sexually inventive, but to his mortification Leland just couldn't follow through. Both his mind and his blood were sluggish. Whenever Bitsy's sweaty efforts were about to pay off Leland would think of what had gone on between him and Mally Shaw less than twenty hours ago and his penis would slide limply away from Bitsy's fierce clutch.

  As Leland was phobic and never gave head, Bitsy finally left the suite determined to act cheerfully nonchalant about his bungled fuck. But obviously she'd got herself plenty worked up and was about to go nuts. He had always satisfied his women with the girth of his member and his stamina; this singular failure, which he alibied as exhaustion from the rigors of the campaign trail, depressed Leland. He hoped she wouldn't tell on him the next time she was intimate with Estes.

  He didn't have the stomach yet to take a drink. Figured a hot bath might relax him enough to sleep. He opened the taps and turned away from the tub to take a gloomy pee, and when he looked into the tub again he saw that the pipes had coughed rusty water like the color of Mally's blood washing off his own body the night before. It gave his heart such a wallop he nearly fainted.

  Leland turned off the bathwater. Catching sight of himself in the mirror of a half-opened cabinet door, he stopped and stared as if he were a case of mistaken identity, no longer solar in his status. He breathed through his mouth as he shuffled back to the bedroom. Heart going like kettledrums. The side of his head where he'd been hit by Mally ached ferociously. The more air he sucked in, the more starved for oxygen he was. He fell across the four-poster bed. Panicked. He needed a doctor! But in spite of sickening pain he was wary of calling down to the front desk. Word would get out. There'd be something in the papers tomorrow. Leland Howard stricken. Everyone would be thinking heart attack. His man Jim Giles was already on the road back to Evening Shade. His campaign manager was in Oak Ridge with the campaign's advance man. There was no one he could call on for help.