When We Were Ghouls

by Amy E. Wallen

  My dad gave James a hard time about how we were leaving the country the next day, so “borrowing” the money was probably a misnomer, while I tried to wrap my mind around the father in the fridge. Dad pushed James almost to begging, then handed him twenty pounds, and sent him off to have the funeral for his father, a funeral that needed to happen as soon as possible, according to Muslim custom.

  After he was gone, my father explained the concept of dead bodies on ice: the morgue. “Their bodies start to stink,” my dad said, “even more than they do alive.” He thought he was funny. I couldn’t quit picturing how to fold a body to fit in something like the frost-free freezer we had in Ely. I also couldn’t quit thinking about how James would have to take him out, how James would have to put his father in the ground. How James would have to go on without his father.

  My eighty-two-year-old dad has two brand-new knees. When he passes through the metal detectors at the airport security, he must show a special card from his doctor, because the stainless steel and titanium that replaced his joints and kneecaps will set off the security alarms. He loves his new knees.

  We, he and I, are walking around the one-mile track at the Kroc Center, a senior center gymnasium near his home in Texas. He can make it around the track one time, at a slow amble. Better than the last few years before his new knees, when he could barely make it up a curb. It pains me to watch him now, when in his much younger days he used to chop wide swaths through the jungles as he explored the geography and topography, searching for oil. My liberal politics make me cringe when I think of his career, but it’s not the job listed on his business cards, Geophysical Field Operations, that I am most curious about.

  As we walk, he’s telling me about his friends, the men who worked with him in the bush of Nigeria and jungles of Peru and Bolivia. He tells me about Bob, a chemist who worked for the same oil company selling fertilizer, who worked for the CIA on the side.

  This is how my dad tells the story:

  “In his office he had big bags of fertilizer piled against the walls. ‘Bob,’ I’d say, ‘you even know how that fertilizer is applied?’ and Bob would say, ‘I think there are instructions on the side of the package.’ And we would have a good laugh about it.” My dad’s laughing now as he tells the story. So am I because I know Bob, a longtime family friend. His wife was my mom’s good friend. Jan had been Miss Jan on Romper Room.

  But I didn’t know Bob was a CIA operative. I didn’t know his job was just a front for his real job. Until now I have pictured my dad and Bob drinking scotch and waters on the deck of a boat on the Niger Delta while they talk. Bob is large and jovial; he likes to sing the Nigerian National Anthem when he’s tipsy. He and my dad cook chili together and drink beer in the garage. I wonder if my dad worked with Bob and the CIA. I’ve wondered this most of my adult life. I think my dad’s about to tell me.

  He often repeats the same stories. I could tell them just as well as he does I’ve heard them so many times. But today’s stories are new. He’s confiding something.

  I asked once years ago whether he worked for the CIA. Although a consistent jokester, he answered my question with a terse negative. But on this walk, the retirement community’s pool and outdoor exercise facility in the background along with the giant McDonald’s PlayPlace in primary colors, my dad reveals his past to me. Now at eighty-two years of age, he begins to give me the story.

  Before we had left the house to go on this walk, my dad and I and his two new knees, I had asked him to tell me about his first days arriving in the bush in Nigeria. He regaled me with many stories about the bush, the Brits, and the bugs. Again stories I’d heard him repeat at dinner parties and among gatherings of old friends. He added a new detail this time—how he always carried, in a small case the size of a short cigar, his own personal radio crystal in his shirt pocket, the diode necessary for direct transatlantic communication. My dad told me he could switch out the diode in a two-way radio and call headquarters. This is how they communicated from the jungles to the United States. My radio frequency engineer husband explained to me later that this crystal diode is for direct private communication into which no other radio transmitter or operator can break. James Bond, I imagine, has a radio crystal such as this one, in its own protective case that he carries in his shirt pocket as my dad did.

  We are coming near the end of the track. Dad finishes another round of stories about more of his friends, the men in collusion with the secret spies. So I ask again, “Were you in the CIA?”

  “Nope,” he says, and then he responds with a quiet comment, “I don’t know why they never asked me to work for them.”

  Do I really feel sad? My reaction surprises me. I think it’s not fair, he’s always been a hard worker. We come from blue collar stock and believe hard work deserves a reward. I’m feeling sorry for my dad not being in the CIA?

  His friends, he tells me, had four to five thousand dollars transferred to special deposit accounts each month. “In addition to the regular salary we all received,” he adds. My dad likes to earn a decent paycheck, so I know this hurts him. He also hates to be left out, just as I do. But I wonder why his friends would tell him the dollar amount. Just plain bragging? If it’s so undercover, why would they reveal it to him? Four thousand dollars in 1972 was a lot of money.

  My father retired early on full pension. So he’s not revealing all, I tell myself. He’s telling me about the others, but not telling me about himself. He’s still covering up the truth. I don’t want him to have been left behind.

  Do I want him to be a secret stealth spy on dangerous missions so badly that I add to the stories in my head? Do I like the mystery surrounding the possibilities? Wouldn’t it be so much more romantic to know that my father had a job in special intelligence—a spy rather than a man reading maps and rocks and pillaging the earth for fossil fuels?

  As my father with his new knees huffs along the gravel track, he doesn’t so much walk as shuffle. A young woman jogs toward us and passes. “We’ll catch you on the next round,” he teases her. She laughs in the cold air, puffing out warmth in a cloud. He’s always one to get a smile. I also know that we both extend this joviality because we want people to like us. We want to make others happy, so they won’t leave us. Won’t leave us behind. This is why I know it would be hard for my dad not to be included in the collusions with the special agencies. That and the money.

  We have finished the one-mile loop. “I made it the whole way without even being out of breath,” my dad says. I praise him, “You’re doing great.” Inside he gives me a tour of the facilities. He knows everyone on the staff. “Hey, Jim,” they all wave and smile as we pass. Except the seventeen-year-old barista at the coffee shop—she’s new. “This here’s my daughter,” he tells her. “She lives in California but came out to visit me.” She’s shy and waits with pencil in hand for our orders. He looks at the tag on her uniform’s lapel, “Trainee” it reads, only he pronounces it, “Tra-nay” like Renee. “Great name,” he says. She giggles, and I know he will make her laugh every morning, and soon she too will know him by his name.

  We get our coffees and sit at a table by the window, looking out at the giant gerbil tunnels in red and yellow, the oversized blue slide into the Olympic-sized swimming pool. “I never use that stuff out there,” he tells me. “I just walk the track and do some weights.”

  I have one more question I want to ask. Over the years and suspicions, I actually came to believe it was not the CIA he was involved in, but the Drug Enforcement Agency. Based on the locales we lived in and The Butcher story.

  “What about the DEA?”

  “What about them?” He glances out the floor-to-ceiling windows, sipping from his cup of hot coffee.

  “Weren’t they also involved?”

  “No.” He’s returned to his negative, abrupt stance. The curtain has been dropped again. Our stroll has ended, and soon we will be back in his pickup driving to the house. I know he won’t talk about this in front of my mother. We do
n’t have much time left.

  “What about The Butcher?” I ask. This was my best evidence of all.

  He loves this story and nods with a smile. “He told me I’d never see him again, and I never did.”

  “Wasn’t he DEA?” I ask again.

  “No,” he responds. No expression other than pursed lips blowing on his hot drink.

  That’s odd, I think, the DEA would be prominent in drug countries like Peru and Bolivia where coca grew thick like the black jack oaks in Oklahoma.

  My dad flexes his newest knee, the left one, to show me how it clicks. “Hear that?” he asks. I don’t hear anything the first time, so he bends the joint again. Through his khakis I hear a grating noise, like when brake pads have worn down and rub against the disk, metal on metal. He smiles when he sees I’m a little queasy. “A loose screw,” he says. “They left it in there.” I laugh, and this pleases him. I want to ask whether he’s joking or not, whether there really is a screw tumbling around on the other side of his kneecap, but I don’t. One way or another, his story is true.

  The Vestibule

  “As my wise friend Didi has more than once observed about life’s passages, every departure entails an arrival elsewhere, every arrival implies a departure from afar.”

  —Claire Messud, The Emperor’s Children

  We were London-bound, our European stopover on our way to the States to visit family and get more inoculations. Then we were off to our new country, new continent, new hemisphere.

  The next thing I remember was waking up in a dreamy sweat. Everything was white. And soft. I couldn’t untangle myself from the cloud I roiled around inside.

  “Amy,” my mom said, holding me still. “You need to wake up.”

  When I opened my eyes, the only thing I recognized was her.

  “You have jet lag,” she said. “You need to wake up.” But I only felt like sleeping. The air outside this big blanket cloud was bitter cold.

  “Where am I?”

  “We’re at the Betteridges’,” she said. “In Swindon. England.”

  “What is this blanket?” I tugged at the white, airy cloud tangled around me that kept me so warm.

  “It’s a down comforter,” Mom said.

  “Can we get one?”

  “We won’t need them where we are moving to,” she said. “It’s warm in Peru. Not hot like Lagos. But warm. Now get dressed. We’re going into London for the day.”

  She left and I lay very still trying to keep my eyes open and feeling the fluff of the comforter floating on top of my body. I could hear voices in the distance. The kitchen maybe? I heard dishes clinking and smelled eggs.

  Who would watch me in Peru? Nobody gave hugs like Alice’s soft, pillowy ones. I already missed Alice. And Philip, Pious, and James.

  My head out of the covers, I let myself cry, but just a little in case someone came in the room and caught me. When Mom caught me crying she would say I didn’t have a good enough reason to cry. And maybe she was right. In comparison to so many, I had a good life.

  We’d been to London before, on the way to Lagos, a year before. We’d shopped in stores where long strings of beads hung in the doorways, and the clerks wore miniskirts. We had still been a family of five then. We were rarely five all at once anymore.

  We were like an unsolvable addition problem that had a quadratic equation stuck in the middle of it. 5a2 − 2(2 − 3b)2 = c where c equals 1.

  This second trip to London was different. This trip we already knew about tea and Nice biscuits and the funny black taxicabs with the doors that opened backward. A year before on our first trip to London at the Kensington Hotel, we had learned about bidets and ate curry for the first time. This trip we stayed outside London with our friends, the Betteridges. This time it was just me with Mom and Dad.

  Today I would go into London with the adults. I thought of myself as one of them. I was often told I “behaved so adult.” I couldn’t wait to grow up, to be a true grown-up doing grown-up things on my own. Hanging out with grown-ups. I was tired of being a little girl who had no say. I just didn’t know what to say.

  The typical London, drizzly and gray; I shivered in the frigid air with no African sun radiating my skin. An adult’s borrowed heavy wool coat hung on my shoulders as we meandered the sidewalks. Our feet were weary. We all complained. We all wanted to relax.

  We tried to go inside the pub together, but the man behind the bar pointed at me and shook his head. So we backed through the swinging doors into the vestibule.

  “What should we do?”

  “A beer sure sounds good.”

  “Too good to pass up.”

  “Think it’s okay to leave her?”

  “We’ll just have one.”

  “Wait here,” I was told. “We won’t be long.”

  “We’ll just have one,” someone else said. “Come on. It’ll be just a minute.”

  “Look, there’s a bench. You can sit there, Lamb.”

  All of it delivered with smiles. I suppose that relieved them, to be able to say it with smiles. Being appeased was something I was good at, and so I smiled back and watched them go. Not a whimper or a whine from me. No one would ever say I was a bad kid. I would guilt them into coming back sooner, that was my strategy. A lousy strategy, but all I knew. Maybe if I had shown how upset I was, how sad to be left alone, they would have come back sooner? Doubtful.

  A tiny tornado could have been created from the hot and cold colliding in that vestibule. This passage between the rain and the beer was where folks slipped out of the cold and into the warmth on the other side of the swinging doors. The wooden bench felt sticky; above my head hung fuzzy wool coats and about my feet large adult galoshes sat in puddles.

  When someone came through either set of doors, to the inside or the outside, I had to scooch over to let them find their galoshes or hang up their coat. As the groups of patrons came from the outside, groups of friends, they’d sometimes take notice of me: nod, smile, then pass on through. I smiled back.

  Sometimes someone would ask, “Does anyone know you’re here?” And I would nod, smile, and say, “They’ll just be a minute. They’re just having one.” The person would nod again then hesitate before going either in or out. The dark wood paneling became darker, and the air around the wooden bench felt too thick to breathe.

  Who noticed me coming, who noticed me going, and who didn’t notice me at all? Who came in alone, then left coupled? I watched their faces, their moods. Everyone’s breath was warmer when they left. The air in the antechamber filled with cold, anxious coming-in breath and warm, relaxed going-out breath.

  If a group of friends too big to fit in the vestibule at one time came through, they’d hold open the outside and inside doors simultaneously, letting the drizzling cold from one direction and the boisterous noise and yeasty smells from the other collide right where I sat among all their laughter. Sometimes if the doors were held open long enough, I could get a good long glimpse of the crowded interior of the pub. I had a direct shot at the grouchy bartender, but he quickly disappeared behind all the customers bellied up at the bar. Standing on the other side of the vestibule, I could see the tables. Once, I thought I saw my mom’s frosted head of hair and Mrs. Betteridge’s reddish bob. But too many people walked back and forth, blocking a clear shot, and then the doors shut, so I went back to my bench.

  A man leaving sat next to me, reached down and grabbed his rubber shoes to put on. “You waiting for someone?” he asked me. His white beard had yellow-tinged edges like the snow in Nevada where our dog had peed.

  “My mom and dad,” I said.

  “It’s busy. It might be awhile. Especially if they’re having fun.” I wasn’t sure whether he told me this to reassure me that time would continue to pass slowly, but they would return eventually, or whether he was warning me. I tried to recall that glimpse I had caught of my parents—did they look as if they were having fun? I got up and stood on the other side of the entry, pushing against the wall with my
back. The next person to come through, when they opened the door to the inside, would allow me a good long glance inside. Then I could confirm whether it was my folks and whether or not they were having a good time. This would give me some estimation of how long I’d have to wait. But when someone did open the door, I didn’t see a woman with frosted hair. I didn’t see anyone I knew anywhere in that room. I scoured wall to wall. When the door swung closed, I hopped down and pushed it open to peek. Just strange bodies in wool. Had they gone out? Had I missed them? I couldn’t think of what to do. I started to panic.

  Should I go outside to look? But if I weren’t in the vestibule when they came through, they might forget about me altogether and walk off. No, I needed to stay so they’d see me. I wanted to smell their yeasty breath and see their eyes glittery like the other patrons. My little heart raced. What if it became closing time, and I still hadn’t found them? What if they had completely forgotten they brought me? What if they were having fun somewhere else and didn’t think about me until tomorrow? Or ever!

  I hid inside the wet coat bottoms, peeking out just enough to see whether anyone I knew passed by, but not so that I had to engage with any of the strangers who were coming and going, going and coming, bringing the outside in, and taking the inside out. I didn’t want to have to explain anymore why I sat there. I didn’t want to have to say, “They’ll be out in a minute. They’re just having one.” I wasn’t very good at lying.

  I disappeared.

  I stood up on the bench, tucked myself behind the woolliest coats, the rough wool scratching my face. The dim overhead light was blocked by the coats, and only the light from inside the pub flashed when the door opened and closed. The dark felt safer. No one could see my shoes, no one knew I was there. I remained invisible to anyone coming into the vestibule. I pretended I was somewhere else. Somewhere warm, like the downy cloud blanket, where the cotton smelled of eggs and in the distance breakfast dishes clanked. The pub noises matched the breakfast noise, and I was in Swindon, Mom and Dad just downstairs.