Have Spacecat, Will Travel: And Other Tails

by John G. Hartness

  “Who are you? Can you speak to me? Do you need help crossing over?” I usually try to avoid sounding like one of the ghost hunters on TV, but sometimes I can’t help it.

  “Sssspeeeeak tooooo meeeee.” The hissing came from right behind me, but when I turned around, there was nothing there.

  “Okay, look. I get it. You want something. I can try to help you get it. But you’ve got to give me a sign. Something to go on. Let me know what I’m working with here. I can’t help you if you don’t give me a clue.”

  I felt a pressure on my shoulders, like a pair of frigid hands pressing down with great force. I tried to stand against it, but the cold was too fierce. I dropped to my knees just as I picked up the faint click-click-click of a pair of dress shoes walking down the hall. I pressed my body all the way to the floor and scooted over to the wall as a beam of light shone through the window in the library doors.

  I didn’t see a person, but I heard a faint voice saying, “I could have sworn I saw a light…” then the shoes clicked along down the hall, and the wayward guard was gone.

  Huh. I guess Eddie upgraded security for this weekend’s show. Whatever else my cold-handed friend wanted, he didn’t want to see me go to jail, so that was definitely a mark in the “friendly” column. I wasn’t ready to call him a full-on Casper yet, but he was getting there.

  I sat up, my back to the wall, and looked out into the library. “Okay, pal. I don’t know what’s going on, but you did me a solid, and I appreciate it. Now I just need to know why you’re hassling the library folks. They’re just doing their thing, trying to educate the kiddies. So why do you have to bug them?”

  No answer. Of course not. I didn’t give him anything cool to echo. I don’t know why I was calling the ghost a “he,” it hadn’t done anything to indicate a gender, just…there was something about the energy of the thing that felt masculine somehow. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it certainly felt like whatever was in the room with me was male.

  “Okay, let’s try this again. One more time, then I’m either going to figure out how to help you cross over, or I’m getting in my truck and driving back to Rock Hill. It’s been a shit night, and I’m not even going to Waffle House with the boys like I usually do after these shows, because I’m hanging out in here with a dead guy. So give me something to let me know why you’re moving shit around in the library. What is it that’s got you all knotted up about this place?”

  No response. Well, no sound, anyway. But there was a reply. Kind of. I sat there for a few minutes, then got up and turned to go. As soon as I turned around, a blast of cold hit me in the face so hard it made my teeth chatter.

  “D-d-dammit! What the hell was that for?” I turned around, and as soon as I did, the cold abated. Huh. That was weird. I turned to the door again. Same thing, cold air right in my face. I turned away, and I got warmer. Is this how he’s going to communicate? I turned to my left. Nothing. I turned to the right. Cold air, like somebody blowing a hair dryer through an ice block.

  I turned back to the left and took a step. No cold. Another step, deeper into the library. Nothing. I walked about five yards into the room before I got another ghostly snowball in the face. I stopped dead in my tracks and backed up a step. I felt a slight cold breeze on my face, more like a draft than anything. I turned left, and it intensified. I turned right, and it went away altogether.

  Yep, the ghost was definitely telling me when I was getting warmer or colder from whatever he wanted me to find. I walked toward a set of display cases along the wall, adjusting my course slightly whenever I felt a draft. The ghost steered me with icy air whenever I went off track, and after thirty seconds or so, I stood in front of a locked glass curio cabinet full of knickknacks. The big placard on the wall next to the cabinet proclaimed them “Artifacts of Education,” and described the process of saving these key pieces of Chester County educational history from the old high school before it was demolished.

  The crap in the cabinet was mostly just that—crap. But there were some neat things. There was a pair of eyeglasses on a chain that were supposedly worn by the school’s first librarian. There was a diploma from the first African-American student to graduate after desegregation. I even saw a pair of cleats that claimed to be from Marion Campbell, who was an NFL player and coach, at least according to the card. I looked around and got no indication from my unseen guide as to which of these artifacts I was supposed to care about, so I took out my pocketknife and jimmied the cheap lock.

  I reached inside the case and lightly touched the cleats. Cold air. I passed my hand over the glasses. Cold air. I brushed the spine of a stack of yearbooks. Cold air. I kept getting blasted with cold air on the back of my neck as I touched each object in the case one after another. It went on so long that I almost didn’t notice when the ghost didn’t freeze-blast me. Then I moved to another item, and got another shot of cold, this one much harder than before. That’s when it hit me—there was no cold air a moment ago.

  I looked at the last thing I touched, a pipe leaning up against a well-worn wooden paddle with holes drilled in the surface. The pipe, according to the note, belonged to Colvin Stephenson, long-time principal of Chester High, who passed away in 1987 in his office at the old high school. I picked up the pipe, and still no cold air.

  “Is this what I’m after?” I asked the air. “Did they find your pipe in your old office and bring it here, Mr. Stephenson?” This time the air that surrounded me was warm, and I knew I had the right idea.

  “Okay, what do you want me to do with it?” I asked. “The old school was torn down, and I think there’s a used car lot on the grounds now. I don’t think you want me to bury your pipe under a Chevy, do you?”

  Apparently old Colvin didn’t have much of a sense of humor about his remains, because he let loose with a blast of air that put frost in my eyebrows. “Okay, I got it! Do you want me to take it to the cemetery where you’re buried?”

  No cold, so that must have been the right answer. Now to figure out where he was buried. These small southern towns have more churches than houses, sometimes. I guess it was just going to be process of elimination. I closed the cabinet, scrawled “the pipe was haunted” on a notecard, slipped that under the librarian’s door, and slipped out into the hall.

  “Are you Baptist?” I asked. Cold blast. I crept down the darkened hallways toward the exit nearest my truck. I didn’t expect to run into anyone, but it paid to be careful. Eddie had already surprised me once tonight with his heightened security measures. More like some random guard who wanted to burn one in his old Algebra classroom, but whatever.

  “Are you Methodist?” Cold air.

  “Presbyterian?” Cold.

  “ARP?” Nothing. Okay, so I needed to find the Associate Reformed Presbyterian cemetery in an unfamiliar town, bury the pipe of a long-dead principal in the middle of the night, and manage to avoid getting arrested as a grave robber. Yeah, sounds about as easy as walking a rookie through his first battle royal. And at least as painful.

  The school was completely deserted, and the crash bars weren’t tied to an overall alarm system. At least, not one that was loud enough to worry me as I hightailed it across the parking lot to my truck. Fortunately, Eddie and his wife’s brother’s nephew or whoever the stupid kid I’d had my shitshow of a match with earlier hadn’t broken a window or flattened my tires. There might have been a new scratch in the paint from somebody’s key, but let’s be honest, on a twelve-year-old pickup, how the hell would I notice?

  I pulled out my phone and looked up the location of the nearest church that matched Mr. Stephenson’s preferred denomination, and drove over there, hoping it didn’t have a parking lot that doubled as a popular make-out spot for local kids, and therefore was a popular destination for the local po-po. It looked pretty deserted when I pulled up, which was good. But it also earned me a blast of icy air on the back of my neck from my dead-ass passenger, which was less good.

  There was another ARP church on the o
ther side of town, so I turned the truck around in the driveway and headed that way. At the rate I was burning gas on this trip, it wouldn’t take me much more than buying a happy meal on the way home to use up my payday for the match. But that’s the life of an indie wrestler—get paid next to nothing, work shitty venues, and get your ass kicked for years, all in the hopes that one day the right person will see your match and you’ll end up on TV. It happened to Cedric Alexander. I wrestled that kid in crappy gyms and armories all over the Carolinas, and now he’s working every week on network television.

  I don’t have any illusions about hitting the big time. I’m too old, for one thing, and I’m not big enough, or talented enough to get there. I’m a middle of the road guy, barely making ends meet driving a forklift all week stacking tires. And on weekends I jump around in my underpants with other dudes, and then hunt ghosts in my “free time.” Yeah, my life is weird. I blame my grandpa, but that’s a whole other long-ass story.

  I pulled into the church parking lot, and it was appropriately deserted. It oughta be, it was well after two in the morning, and this was a church-going town. Everybody was supposed to be in bed, already praying for forgiveness for the trouble they’d got up to the past two nights. I wanted to be in bed, too, with a couple of beers and maybe a sandwich in my belly. But here I was, tromping through the graveyard with a pipe in one hand and a shovel in the other, letting a dead high school principal direct my steps by blowing in one ear or the other. It was not my greatest Saturday night ever.

  But it was quick. It only took me ten minutes to find the tombstone, dig a small hole, and drop my cargo in. As I covered up the scrimshawed pipe, a final blast of cold air rushed up out of the grave, and a hazy form took shape in front of me. It was a man, about six feet tall, with a big pot belly and a salt-and-pepper beard. He stood before me for a moment, looking me up and down, then nodded, took the hazy pipe from his mouth, and waved goodbye. He turned and walked away, and as I watched, a trim woman stepped out of the mists to join him, twining her fingers with his and leading him off into a tunnel of pale white light.

  I watched them go, then patted the little hill of dirt down smooth with my shovel and headed back to the truck, thinking that maybe my gig wasn’t so bad after all. I tossed the shovel in the truck bed, slid behind the wheel, and drove off home, with visions of lifelong love dancing in my head.

  14

  Death of a Small-Town Sports Hero

  The middle-aged high school football hero

  stood on the fifty-yard line and looked around

  at the wreckage of his adulthood

  scattered in the laurel wreaths of his youth

  as trophies and whiskey bottles and wedding rings

  glinted in the grass while the dew

  slowly soaked the cuffs

  of his bulging size 48 elastic waistband slacks

  and ruined his expensive Italian shoes.

  He stood there swaying to the deafening chants

  of the nubile cheerleaders that still sucked his dick

  on the hood of his dad’s Chevy behind the field house

  in the shards of his bourbon-hued memories.

  The golden boy turned used-car-huckster

  with bad knees and failed hair replacement

  sat down in the middle of the field,

  wrapped his arms around the broken pieces

  of the state MVP trophy,

  that plastic and lead painted pinnacle of his life

  and kissed goodnight to the Saturday Night

  Special.

  15

  Walk the Dinosaur

  A Bubba the Monster Hunter Short Story

  I stepped off the airplane and wobbled a little, but I didn’t fall down. I also didn’t drop to my knees and kiss the tarmac, although I can’t say the thought didn’t cross my mind. I stood there for a minute, blinking against the bright sun pounding through my sunglasses, and waited for my stomach to settle.

  “Rough flight?” asked the man sitting on the tailgate of a rust-and-blue GMC pickup truck, maybe a ‘70 or so model.

  “What makes you say that?” I asked. I was pretty proud of myself for not puking, but I did want to know if I was particularly green.

  “I’ve seen a lot of people fly into here, and I never seen Randell puke before.” He pointed off behind me, and I turned. The pilot was bent over by the front of the plane, revisiting the pizza he’d put down in Atlanta just before we took off.

  “Yeah, there was a little thunder boomer a ways back,” I said. “The landing wasn’t the smoothest thing I’ve ever seen, either.”

  “Well, you know what they say about landings,” the man said. I took a better look at him, now that the horizon had stopped swaying. He was a tall fella, big, rangy, John Wayne-looking dude with deep valleys around his eyes from squinting into the sun for years and years. His skin had that rough, reddish tone that comes from a lot of wind and sun, and his hands were big and looked solid. He wore a faded chambray work shirt, sleeves rolled up to show some cheap homemade, or maybe prison tattoos, and his jeans were also faded and worn thin at the knees. He wore a battered brown cowboy boot on his right foot and a blue walking cast on his left.

  “I reckon you’re Tyson,” I said, walking over and shaking hands with the injured Hunter.

  “What gave it away? My rugged good looks, devastating smile, or the footwear?”

  “Might have something to do with you being the only person anywhere around this shitheap airport not wearing coveralls and driving a fuel truck.” I swept the area with my gaze, but the little four-seater plane I’d arrived in was the only thing that looked like it had moved any time recently.

  “You okay over there, Randell?” Tyson hollered.

  “Kiss my ass, you old gimpy bastard!” the pilot yelled back.

  “He’s fine,” Tyson said. “Get your crap and let’s roll. I’ll fill you in while we drive.”

  I walked over to the side of the plane and opened the back door. I grabbed a small backpack with my clothes in it and two duffels full of weapons. I tossed the duffels in the back of the pickup, pitched my backpack on top of them, and then reached into the cockpit to grab Bertha from where she hung on the back of my seat. I slipped the shoulder rig on and fastened it to my belt, checking to make sure the Desert Eagle was snapped in and secure. I did not want any fifty-caliber surprises coming at me if I had to move fast.

  “Thanks for the ride, Randell,” I said, waving to the pilot. “Sorry about your shoes.” He looked down at the vomit on his right foot and set off into a fresh tirade. I laughed under my breath and walked over to the truck.

  I pulled out my phone and turned it on, then pressed the button to wake up the Bluetooth transmitter in my earbud. “Skeeter, you there?”

  “Yeah, I’m here, Bubba. How was your flight?”

  “Shitty. Dumbass Randell drove us right through that thunderstorm you warned him about. Some crap about not wanting to add any more time onto the journey.”

  “That dipshit,” Skeeter’s shrill voiced laughed in my ear. “How many times did you throw up?”

  “None, thank you very damn much,” I replied. “I drank a bottle of Pepto in the airport before we left Atlanta. I won’t poop for a week, but I didn’t paint the inside of the plane, either.”

  “I reckon we can call that a win. You met up with Tyson yet?”

  “Yeah, just got into his truck.”

  “Put me on speaker, then.” I pulled out my phone, and Tyson pointed to a mount set into the dash. I slid my phone into it and pressed a button on the screen.

  “Alright, Skeeter, you’re on speaker.”

  “Hey, Tyson,” my technical expert and best friend since middle school said. “Pleased to kinda meet you.”

  “Pleasure’s all mine,” Tyson said.

  Skeeter continued. “I’ve got our giant friend here wired up to a satellite phone connection, and I pretty much don’t ever break it, unless I need to sleep or he feels the need to go to a str
ip club, which happens way more often than I like. So if you need anything researched or the big guns called in, y’all just let me know.”

  Tyson chuckled and looked over at me. “You’re saying you’ve got some bigger guns than this giant?”

  Skeeter’s shrill laugh about made my ears bleed. “No, but I’ve got a few that bring even bigger guns. Anyway, if you need anything, I’m never further away than Bubba’s Bluetooth. You need me, just holler.”

  “Will do,” Tyson said.

  “I’m gonna go back to watching Hap & Leonard on Netflix. Bubba, try not to get dead.” He beeped off, and I put the phone back in my pocket.

  “Let’s roll,” Tyson said. He clicked his seatbelt into place and put the truck in gear. We didn’t move; he just sat there staring at me. I took a minute to figure out what he wanted, then I put my own seatbelt on. Once I was properly restrained, he took his foot off the brake and started driving toward the exit of the Grant County Airport, south of Hurley, New Mexico. It was a little one-runway job that looked like it might see ten planes a week if it got real busy.

  Once we got out of the airport gate, Tyson continued. “I appreciate y’all helping me out while my foot heals. Damn Gila bastard almost took it off, but I got him good.”

  “You said it was a were-lizard?” I asked. “I ain’t never heard of such a thing.”

  “I don’t know if it was technically a lycanthrope, or maybe some variant on a skinwalker, or just some type of shapeshifter. I can’t rightly tell you since there wasn’t but the one, and he wasn’t too talkative when I was done with him. All I know is it was the biggest damn lizard I ever seen, and I’ve lived out here my whole life. No way in hell that thing was natural. I put him down, but he got one good bite in, right through my damn boot, and that venom has completely wrecked my foot. I’ve got a healer coming in from one of the reservations twice a week working with me on it, and he says it oughta be back right in another four or five treatments, but for now I can’t run, jump, or climb anything.”