Pennies for the Ferryman - 01

by Jim Bernheimer

  “What’s Mitch going to say about all this, Bobby?” I asked. I didn’t tell him that Bebo sounded like some kind of clown name.

  “He keeps goin’ on about how I done left him in the woods and all that, so I reckon he’ll be happy. He done told the girl he was seeing on the side that they was through and now he’s angry cuz he done did the right thing by Emily but she thinks he’s a no good cheater who left town and shacked up with some other woman. He wants his name cleared.”

  “Fair enough. Look, we can’t do this tonight. I’ve been through a lot and so has Jenny. We need to head back to Rockville tonight, but we can come back down maybe not this weekend, but the next one if that’s okay with Jenny?”

  The petite brunette chimed in, “Sure! It sounds like fun, but let’s do it this coming weekend?”

  Even Bebo looked at her like she was crazy.

  “Well I’m sure if you just explained to Bebo that you wanted to go up to Gettysburg and see if you could find Darren Porter’s ghost he would have understood.”

  “I was trying to get out of doing it altogether!”

  Jenny looked at me somewhat puzzled, “Why?”

  “Because I don’t know if I want to become some kind of freak. I didn’t believe in ghosts and now I see them all the time! It was bad enough when people were looking at me just because of the patch.” I also was beginning to think that we were “safer” with the one-eyed guy and his somewhat expired driver’s license behind the wheel than with me shifting for her, so she could use the uninjured arm to drive. Jenny’s mom might have created her fair share of accidents, but it looked like Jenny was either used to it or had her own particular death wish when she’s driving.

  “But you have a gift!” Jenny exclaimed.

  “Do you know how cliché that sounds? Gift is a four letter word and not all gifts are good. I’ve got bruises and blotches all over my body. Sure I beat up on those two, but I didn’t exactly come through all nice and squeaky clean. Your mom took a damn rolling pin to my arm!” I emphasized my point by holding up my left arm with the nice deep muscle bruise on it.

  Jenny dismissed all my rational arguments. “You’re just looking at the downside.”

  “So tell me, what’s the upside?”

  “You can talk to ghosts! Think about it! If you went to England and you found Princess Di’s ghost, you could find out what really happened! You could meet up with Kurt Cobain and maybe have him write a hit song from the grave. How cool would that be?”

  The little lane changing maniac was scaring me on so many levels it wasn’t funny. I finally asked her to slow down as I sought for a nice way to answer her question. I couldn’t come up with one, so I settled for answering her harshly.

  “There are two possibilities to the princess, car accident or conspiracy. If it was a car accident, so what? If it’s a conspiracy, I’m guessing the people behind it might not like me spilling a whole bunch of nasty secrets. As for Cobain, I never liked Nirvana or his skanky wife and my life’s aspiration is not becoming a sideshow freak!”

  That seemed to break through her excessively perky outlook on life. She actually looked disappointed.

  “So that’s it then? You’ll just go on about your business while all these people are being harassed by ghosts when you’re the only one who can do anything about it?” Jenny asked. She had a great future as a mom; her guilt trips were well refined.

  “Jenny, I’m still trying to piece my life back together. I volunteered for one war already and paid the price – a messed up eye, no hearing in one ear, metal rods in my leg, aches whenever the weather changes, and a bunch of scars on my face. Right now, I need to figure out what all this means and get some answers and not go wandering around in the woods of western Virginia looking for a body while simultaneously convincing the police that I’m not a whack job or the guy responsible for the murder.”

  People who know me understand that I have a bit of a temper. Jenny didn’t know me that well. Yelling at Jenny was pretty much the equivalent of kicking a puppy dog. She got real quiet for awhile and didn’t say anything. I stared out the window until I heard the first sniffle and I realized that she’d been on an emotional roller coaster tonight as well.

  “Don’t cry, Jenny.”

  “But you’re mad at me!”

  She started to blubber which, given her already dubious driving skills, suddenly decreased my life expectancy. For both our sakes, I tried to reassure her.

  “I’m not mad at you. You didn’t give me this and you’re trying to show me all the things I could do with it. I’m just worried what’s going to happen next time and it’s not like I’ve had time to think this through. Let’s just get back home and get a good night’s sleep and things will be better in the morning.”

  “Really?”

  I borrowed a tired line from one of the Shrek movies, “Really, Really.”

  About 10:30 pm Jenny’s cell phone rang. She was safety conscious enough to pull off to the side of the road to answer it. Either that or she knew that driving with one arm and a phone conversation was beyond her limits. What followed was a rather terse exchange with her aunt concerning Jenny’s whereabouts.

  Despite Jenny’s efforts to break the sound barrier, we wouldn’t be back until at least 12:30 am. From there, I needed to get home and Jenny couldn’t shift after she dropped me off, so it looked like a late night bus ride for me. In Montgomery County, only the finest characters are found on the buses after midnight. Jenny’s aunt sure didn’t sound like she’d be willing to give me a lift.

  “She sounded pretty angry.” It didn’t sound like this was the first time they’d had this discussion before. I heard the phrase, “I thought you had changed, but I see I was wrong,” come out of her phone.

  “Yeah, back when I first moved in with them, I was a bit of a wild child. It took me some time to get my act together, by then my grades weren’t salvageable. Montgomery College was about the only school I could get in to.” Jenny confessed before she turned up the radio, apparently pretending that the conversation with her aunt hadn’t happened. I could tell even then, that Jenny was an impulsive girl used to getting her way.

  It’s sort of funny, but no one really refers to an eighteen to twenty year old as a “man” or a “woman.” It’s always “boy” or “girl.” I’d never really thought about that before. Although I was only a couple of years removed from that age myself, my own fire and certainty about how I was going to change the world took a beating. My life plan boiled down to enlisting in the Army as a way to claw my way out of poverty, but one bad minute in the Iraqi desert smacked me right back down.

  Now, I was important again. I wasn’t just a broken-down soldier. I was special. I could do something probably no one else in the world could do. The question was, what would I do with it?

  It was closer to 1:00 am when we pulled into Jenny’s driveway. There was an awkward moment between us where I thought she was going to kiss me. Her aunt barreled out the door, so there wasn’t a whole lot of time for heartfelt thanks.

  I escaped with only a cursory interrogation from Shannon Wycheck. She was in her early fifties and I vaguely recalled meeting her in the Montgomery College administration office. It was a good guess that my student file would be opened up, first thing tomorrow.

  The bus ride home was everything I dreamt of: a “working girl,” several incoherent bums, a handful of working class schmucks returning from late shifts, a pair of wannabe “gang bangers,” and a nut job who can see dead people.

  Jenny caught up to me the next day and said that her argument with her aunt would blow over, eventually. I almost hoped she would tell me that our weekend trip back to Roanoke was off. Sadly, it was still on.

  After picking up our ghost, I hoped that it would be a quick and easy afternoon. I’ve since learned to lower my expectations. Our first mistake was going to the Roanoke City Police Department. After explaining our situation to the guy working the desk and getting the expected guffaws and a requ
est for hot lottery ticket numbers, they were more than happy to put a call into the Roanoke County Sheriff’s Department explaining that it was out of their jurisdiction.

  I guessed that there was a bit of a rivalry between the county and the city. I later learned that the city and the county are pretty much two completely separate entities. Naturally, Jenny remembered this little tidbit twenty minutes too late to save us from any embarrassment.

  About an hour later, I was beginning to give up when a female shaped deputy came in, looking rather flustered. She must have drawn the short straw and been the one stuck with dealing with the crazy Yankees.

  I’ve always had a thing for a woman in uniform. Nurses, policewomen, hell, even a meter maid. I hold the firm belief that a gal in a uniform is at least twenty-five percent “hotter” than that same girl without the uniform – unless, of course, she’s naked. That usually trumps my uniform fetish. I will say that it made my time in the Army rather pleasant.

  “Okay, I’m Officer McKenna, which one of you is the psychic? C’mon, I ain’t got all day! So, let’s just cut through all this horse…Wait a second! You look familiar. Where do I know you from?” She said in an overly cute southern accent as she pointed at Jenny.

  Jenny gave the woman a questioning look. “Candy? It’s me, Jenny.”

  “Lil’ Jenny! I haven’t seen you in years!”

  “You went into Law Enforcement! Wow, I would have never guessed that in a million years!”

  I let this go on for a minute or two before clearing my throat, which got Jenny’s attention. “Oh, sorry. Mike Ross, this is my cousin, Candy McKenna.”

  She held out her hand, “I go by Candace now. Nice to meet ya.”

  The strawberry blonde eyed me like a hunk of meat, pondering whether she should salt me before throwing me on the grill. I was already a bit on the self-conscious side because of the whole “psychic boy” thing. Candace was attractive and apparently in her mid-twenties. A quick, furtive check told me that there was no wedding band on her left hand.

  On the way out the door, I motioned for Bobby Joe. He hadn’t wanted to hang out in police station any more than I did. Mitch joined him. It was going to be crowded in the car.

  Mistake number two was getting into a conversation with the two ghosts about what they can do. I watched as Mitch swiped his hand through Jenny’s chest and then ogling her response to a sudden cold draft. Not to be left out, Bobby Joe gave Officer McKenna the treatment as well.

  I was pretty certain that Jenny pieced together what happened, which of course led to mistake number three as she caught me appraising her cousin’s reaction. It was par for the course, the redneck doofuses were behind the ladies waving their hands in the air while I’m the one with egg on my face for sneaking a look.

  By the time we got out on the highway things in the patrol car were getting worse. Jenny was in the front seat, which left me in the back with the two ghosts who would occasionally bump me, which of course led to the electric shock that I was becoming accustomed to. Then of course there was the flawed assumption that Jenny and Candace actually were fond of each other. That “honeymoon” lasted all of fifteen minutes before I noticed the claws come out.

  I would say I was beginning to regret coming out here, but I was way past that point. Mitch tried to answer some of my questions about what he could do. He could do things like move small objects and if his wife lost something, he could stand next to it and scream and jump up and down. All that commotion would sort of make his widow notice it. Mitch joked about how he’d turned off Bobby Joe’s alarm, hidden his car keys, and knocked the phone off the hook.

  This led to a fight in the back seat between the two ghosts, who didn’t get along that well to begin with.

  “Goddammit! Stop!” I shouted as the two guys started pushing at each other with me in the middle. Naturally, the officer driving thought I meant her and she jammed on the brakes.

  You know that wire mesh they put up between the front seat and the back seat? It hurts when you smack your face into it. There wasn’t much need to keep count after that. The entire day was one long, continuous mistake!

  The second argument between the dead guys started over directions, and stopped just short of a brawl. We ended up going with Mitch’s, because he told me that a ghost can always go to where he is buried. That explained how Jenny’s mom arrived at the cemetery long before we did.

  When we finally arrived at our destination we got out of the patrol car. Candace put away her claws and simultaneously put on her face of intimidation. “Alright, I’ve humored y’all, but you’d better be able to show me something.”

  I yelled to the two ghosts. “Hey guys, do you reckon that you could pick me up. Listen, we’re here in the middle of nowhere, right? I don’t have any hidden wires or anything. Ow!” I grimaced in pain as Bobby Joe came up behind me and put me in a full nelson and Mitch lifted my legs off the ground.

  I’m sure it must have looked pretty wild. It was painful enough alright. Both Jenny and her cousin looked suitably impressed. From the looks of things, Officer McKenna was on her way to becoming a believer.

  “You were just kinda floatin’ off the ground there. So, there really are two ghosts right there?”

  I nodded, though Bobby Joe was back to staring down the deputy’s shirt. Candace handed me a shovel and got out a camera from the trunk of her patrol car. That’s when I realized that I’d just volunteered to dig up the body.

  Fortunately, one of my ghostly friends was as lazy when he was living as he was in the afterlife. Mitch’s grave was pretty shallow. When I started finding bones, it kind of hit Jenny pretty hard and she sprinted back to the patrol car. That was enough evidence for Candace. She marked the area and called for the coroner to dispatch a unit.

  “So, how long have you and Jenny been dating?” she asked.

  “We’re not dating. We go to school together and I spotted her mom making her life miserable.”

  Candace didn’t look very surprised as we pushed our way into the little area where Bobby Joe stashed the Ford F-150 pickup with a faded sign on the side for Mitch’s Plumbing. “Aunt Rose? Yeah, I could see her doing that. I reckon when you start headin’ back to Maryland Jenny’s gonna start tellin’ you what a no good little bitch I am.”

  I asked her why. She gave me a sly smile, tilted her head, and pulled down her mirrored sunglasses enough for me to see her green eyes, “Because she grew up watchin’ me, darlin’. That’s exactly what I’d do.”

  She snapped off a few pictures of the truck and pulled on a pair of gloves. I watched her dust for prints on the steering wheel and so forth. In a way, it was pretty cool watching her do her thing. Another fight broke out between the two ghosts when Mitch found out that Bobby Joe stole sixty-three dollars out of his wallet. Turns out Bobby Joe walked away with the deer Mitch killed as well.

  I wasn’t really tempted to break it up, even though Mitch was beating the tar out of his killer until the fat ghost vanished, leaving the angry plumber in his wake. I was busy describing all this to the laughing deputy.

  “I suppose this means that if we’re idiots here, we’re the same idiots on the other side?” Candy asked.

  “Looks that way, but none of the ghosts I’ve talked to know what comes next. My grandpa believed he was finally going to be reunited with his wife.”

  “Well I guess there are things to look forward to. The good news is that I can put you in for a Crime Solvers reward. It might make your trip down here worth it.”

  That was the first positive thing out of what was otherwise a nasty, ugly day. When Candy wasn’t looking, I helped myself to one of Mitch’s cast iron pipe wrenches. As I figured it, it beat carrying a frying pan around and wouldn’t look nearly as stupid if it was dangling from a tool belt. Further conversation was cut short by the approaching lights of several emergency vehicles.

  Four hours and a few official statements later, Jenny and I were back on the road, headed north. With some luck there wou
ld be a check in the mail from Roanoke County in the next week. Candace slipped me her number in case I was, “ever down in this neck of the woods again.”

  Mentally, I was picturing what I would tell my mom, if she asked me what I did today, “Drove four hours, dug up a dead body, answered a few questions, and drove back, so not much. How was your day?” when Jenny started in on Candace. “So, did Candy ask you out?”

  “Is that important?”

  “Unless you’d like to walk home, yes, it is.”

  “Not really, but she gave me her number.”

  My driver looked momentarily angry. “You wouldn’t really go out with her, would you? She may call herself Candace now, but all the boys used to call her Candy, because she was ‘sweet, cheap and easy to get,’ if you know what I mean?”

  “I know what you mean, but I probably wouldn’t go out with her anyway. She lives over four hours away. I still can’t drive until my vision is good enough to get my license back.”

  “Suppose she lived closer?”

  “Why are we having this discussion?”

  “I’m just curious what kind of girl interests you, Ross.”

  A word of caution, it’s never a good sign, when a girl calls you by your last name.

  “I don’t think she’s my type, even if she lived closer.”

  “Good.” That lie seemed to satisfy Jenny and she put her claws away. She seemed rather pleased with herself after that. Truth be told, I wouldn’t have minded going out with Officer McKenna. I hadn’t been on a real date, since my deployment. There’d been a girlfriend back in Texas, but we broke it off before I left for Iraq. Frankly, if we were matching reputations, I’d wager that Candace from Roanoke would have come out better than Heather from Kileen. She and Don Hodges’ wife, Sonya, used to dance at some piss-hole club near Fort Hood and yeah, there’s a reason mothers warn their little boys to never date strippers, though there are far more reasons that those little boys never listen…

  Jenny’s second trip back to Roanoke went over even better than the first one and despite the fact that her aunt and uncle came up with something that needed to be done the following weekend, she managed to get out of it and drive me up to Gettysburg.