He looked into the kitchen to see how Mikhail was getting along. Mikhail was stripping the leaves from a head of white cabbage, and looked up at Jack as if he would like to be doing something similar to his head, instead.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Slovak recipe. Tomato. Paprika. Phaugh!’
Jack walked out to the narrow yard in back of the restaurant where his black ’98 Camaro was squeezed in between the trashcans and the wall. The space was so tight that he could barely open his door wide enough to climb in. He was halfway in and halfway out when a voice called out, ‘Jack! Jack! Wait up a second! Jack!’
It was Bindy from the bookstore next door. She was small and excitable, with rimless spectacles and wildly curly brown hair and she always reminded Jack of a hyperactive Disney animal. She was wearing a baggy mustard-colored dress and at least five strings of amber beads.
‘Hi, Bindy. Sorry – I’m kind of in a hurry here. I have to pick Sparky up from school.’
‘Oh, OK. I just wanted to tell you that we have Tamara Thorne coming to the store on Wednesday.’
Jack was still uncomfortably jammed in the half-open door of his car. ‘Tamara Thorne? Is that somebody I should know?’
‘Tamara Thorne, Jack! The medium! She wrote How to Talk to the Loved Ones You’ve Lost.’
‘Oh, yes. You gave me a copy, didn’t you?’
‘That’s right. You can bring it along and she’ll sign it for you. But the main thing is, she’s going to be holding a séance. She’s going to try to get in touch with people who have passed beyond.’
‘Bindy, I’m really pushed for time here. I’ll come in and talk to you about it later, OK?’
‘OK, Jack. Just thought that you’d like to know. Maybe you’d like to try and contact Aggie.’
Jack didn’t say anything, but gave Bindy a fixed grin and forced himself down into the driver’s seat. Bindy gave him a little wave and went hurrying back to her bookstore. Jack adjusted his rear-view mirror and looked at himself. The last thing he wanted to think about right now was getting in touch with the dead.
Von Steuben High School, 5039 North Kimball Avenue, Chicago
Jack parked outside the school’s front entrance. It was unusual for Sparky to be late: he was usually standing on the sidewalk, patiently waiting.
Nearly five minutes went by, during which time Jack kept a sharp lookout for parking attendants. Chicago’s parking attendants were notorious for slapping tickets on anything on wheels, even if a meter still had time left to run, or it was two minutes after nine p.m. Eventually, Sparky came down the steps of the red-brick building on his own, carrying in his arms a celestial globe, or what looked like a celestial globe. He was frowning, for some reason. He was blond-haired, like his mother had been, and he always looked pale, even when Jack had taken him on vacation to Florida and he had spent all day in the sun. He was wearing a maroon T-shirt and flappy brown cargo pants, and his shoelaces were undone.
He opened the door, folded the passenger seat forward, and carefully stowed his celestial globe in the back.
‘What’s that?’ Jack asked him, as he climbed into the car and closed the door.
‘It’s an astrological globe,’ said Sparky, pronouncing his words very clearly, as if he were talking to somebody of limited intelligence. ‘Mrs Hausmann said I could borrow it for the weekend, so long as I drew her star chart for her.’
‘That’s what it does, then?’ asked Jack, as he pulled away from the curb and headed back up North Kimball Avenue. ‘Tells fortunes?’
‘It helps an astrologer to work out which astrological houses are going to be affected by which planets, and when.’
‘Oh. I see. That’s cool.’
‘Yes. Mrs Hausmann said I could borrow it because she’s never come across anybody who can accurately tell fortunes like I can.’
‘Well, it’s just a talent you have. I never believed in it myself until you started doing it.’
Jack turned right at the Shell gas station into West Foster Avenue.
‘Apart from that, how was your day?’ he asked Sparky. He knew exactly what Sparky was going to say next, and he was trying to put it off.
‘It was OK. We had Mr Kaminski for algebra and that was OK. I had a cheeseburger for lunch and that was OK. I took out the tomato.’
‘You and Mikhail ought to get together. He hates tomatoes, too. He says they’re Slovak.’
‘Actually they first came from South America. The first people to eat them were the Aztecs.’
‘Oh, right. The Aztecs, huh?’
‘Yes. They called them xitomatl.’ A pause, then, ‘Dad … where’s my Oh Henry bar?’
‘I’m sorry, Sparks. I guess I forgot to bring it.’
They were crossing the north channel of the Chicago River, and the afternoon sunlight momentarily flashed from the surface of the water on to Sparky’s face, bleaching his skin so that it looked even whiter, and making his hair shine in fine gold filaments.
‘You never forget to bring it. You always give it to me when we go past Jimmy John’s.’
‘I know. But I was in kind of a hurry today. I forgot it.’
Jack glanced across at Sparky and saw that Sparky was staring at him with those stonewashed blue eyes as if he didn’t believe him for a moment.
Sparky said, ‘It’s happened, hasn’t it?’
‘What? What are you talking about? I forgot your candy bar, that’s all. I’m sorry. You can have it as soon as we get home.’
‘It’s Malcolm, isn’t it?’
‘Malcolm? What about him?’
‘He’s dead. That’s why you didn’t bring me my Oh Henry bar.’
‘Sparky – how can you possibly know that? Malcolm is away on a scout camping trip in Michigan.’
‘I told him not to go,’ said Sparky, clenching his fist and beating on his knee for emphasis. ‘I told him and I told him and I told him and he still wouldn’t listen.’
Jack reached across and laid his hand on Sparky’s skinny arm.
‘He is dead, isn’t he?’ said Sparky.
‘Yes, he is. I don’t know how the heck you knew about it, but yes.’
Sparky’s eyes suddenly filled with tears, and he shook his head from side to side in grief and frustration. ‘I told him not to go. I could see it in his stars. All the signs pointed to it. I even drew his chart for him, and I showed it to him.’
‘I’m really sorry, Sparks. I don’t know what to say to you. You guys were so close.’
Sparky sniffed and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘He wanted to prove to everybody that he was tough. I told him it didn’t matter what everybody else thought about him. But he said if he went to Owasippe and showed everybody that he could swim and light fires and tie knots and all of that scout stuff, they wouldn’t call him a geek any more.’
‘But you did his star chart for him, and that showed you that he was going to die?’
Sparky nodded, his mouth puckered in misery.
Jack said, ‘I have to tell you that they all died, not just Malcolm. The whole troop, fifteen scouts and seven leaders. Sally came round and told me, but it’s probably going to be shown on the news, later.’
‘All of them? I didn’t see that in the stars. Not all of them. Only Malcolm. They weren’t murdered, were they? What happened to them? It wasn’t like Friday the Thirteenth, was it?’
Jack hesitated, and then he said, quietly, ‘They killed themselves, Sparks. They all committed suicide, including Malcolm. That’s what Sally said, anyhow.’
‘I saw Castor in his chart,’ said Sparky. ‘Castor is a fixed star and that usually means a head or a neck injury which could be serious enough to kill you. The Sun was in Aries, and it was squared by Mars and Saturn. That was almost the same chart that Henry the Second of France was given in the year 1554. Five years later, when he was jousting, a lance went right through the eyehole in his helmet and into his brain.’
Jack glanced at Sparky again. Although his voice sounded flat,
tears were still rolling down his cheeks. Jack was used to this apparent contradiction. Sparky always spoke as fluently as somebody twice his age, and with very little emphasis in his voice, almost as if he were reading from a prepared script. But Jack knew how emotional he could be. The first time Sparky had witnessed Malcolm being bullied at school, he had come home trembling with rage and frustration.
Jack said, ‘Malcolm’s mom has asked if we could go with her to Muskegon tomorrow – you and me. She has to identify Malcolm formally and the police are going to take all of the next of kin to the spot where they died. When something like this happens, some people find it pretty hard to get to grips with it, and I guess they think that might help.’
‘Does anybody know why they all killed themselves?’
‘I’m not sure. They might have left suicide notes, but if they did, Sally didn’t mention it.’
‘I don’t want to go.’
‘Are you sure about that? I think Malcolm’s mom could really use our support right now.’
‘Something made him do it and I don’t want to meet that something.’
‘I don’t get you. He committed suicide, Sparks. They all did. It’s not like Jason Voorhees came out of the woods in his hockey mask and killed him.’
‘I don’t want to go.’
They had reached the Nostalgia Restaurant. Jack stopped outside the front entrance to let Sparky out, because his parking space in the back yard was so tight that Sparky wouldn’t have been able to open the Camaro’s door wide enough to lift out his astrological globe.
‘OK,’ said Jack. ‘If you really don’t want to go, I’ll call Sally and tell her we can’t do it. I did warn her that it might be too upsetting for you. Listen – you go inside while I park the car. Are you hungry?’
Sparky shook his head. Jack put his arm around him and hugged him. ‘I’m so sorry, Sparks. I really am. I know how close you were, you and Malcolm.’
Sparky whispered, ‘I told him not to go. I told him. He just wouldn’t listen.’
Corinne Calls
By the time Jack had parked his car and squeezed out of it, Sparky had taken his astrological globe up to his bedroom.
‘What is the matter with young Sparky?’ asked Saskia, as Jack came into the restaurant. ‘He just go straight upstairs and he don’t even say hallo.’
‘Looked to me like he’d been crying,’ put in Jean.
Jack briefly told them what had happened. Jean pressed her hand against her forehead and then said, ‘Oh, no! My friend Ruby – her son Jimmy belongs to that same scout troop. I hope he wasn’t one of them!’
‘Why don’t you call her, just to make sure?’ Jack suggested. ‘Go ahead – do it now. You don’t want to spend the rest of the evening worrying about it.’
Jean went to make her phone call while Jack went through to the kitchen. Mikhail’s two sous-chefs had arrived and were busy prepping for the evening. Piotr was furiously chopping up potatoes to make dumplings, while Duane was mixing a thick stuffing of mushrooms, walnuts and horseradish.
Piotr was short and chunky, with buzzcut hair. He had recently come to live in Chicago from Lublin, in Poland, but Duane, a tall young African-American with a bald head and large gold earrings, had lived in Chicago all his life. For some reason, he had a talent for cooking authentic Polish food. Even Jack’s mother said that Duane’s zrazy were to die for.
‘What’s Sparky having tonight?’ asked Duane.
‘I don’t know. He’s kind of upset. I’ll tell you why later. Maybe some soup.’
‘The soup tonight is zhurek. Otherwise there’s borsch, or cherry soup.’
‘Thanks, Duane. Everything OK, Mikhail?’
Mikhail had his back turned but he lifted his hand to show that everything was under control. Jack didn’t say anything about tomatoes.
He went up the narrow back stairs to the three-bedroomed apartment over the restaurant. The apartment was large, with high ceilings, although it was mostly furnished with old-fashioned couches and armchairs which Agnieszka had inherited from her parents, and its heavy brown velvet curtains gave it an Eastern European gloom, like the restaurant below.
He went to Sparky’s bedroom door and knocked. ‘Sparks? You OK? You want anything to eat?’
There was no answer so he opened the door. Sparky was sitting at his desk with the astrological globe in front of him. Through the window, Jack could see the brown brick wall of the building next door. It had a large hoarding on it with a stylized picture of a ram’s head, and the words Capricorn Hardware. It had always struck Jack as one of life’s coincidences that Sparky should have an astrological sign staring into his bedroom window, especially since Sparky was a Capricorn.
Jack sat down on the end of the bed and watched Sparky turning the globe around and around – occasionally stopping to jot down figures and symbols on a notepad.
‘So what are you doing now?’ he asked.
‘Looking back,’ said Sparky. ‘Trying to find out what happened.’
‘Looking back? I thought astrology looked into the future.’
‘Unh-hunh. The stars can show you the past as well. Just because nobody took any notice of their stars at the time, that doesn’t mean that the warnings weren’t there. I looked back at President Kennedy’s stars for November twenty-second, 1963, and if anybody had drawn him a star chart, he would never have driven through Dallas in an open-topped limo. The third degree of Gemini was rising, and the Moon had reached the square of Mercury.’
‘Sparky,’ said Jack, standing up and laying a hand on his shoulder. ‘Maybe you should give this a rest for now. Come down and help me in the restaurant.’
Sparky didn’t turn around and look up at him, but Jack could tell that he was silently crying. ‘No, Dad,’ he said. ‘I have to do this. I want to.’
Jack waited for a while, with his hand still on Sparky’s shoulder. Sparky was wearing a Chicago Bears T-shirt now, and around his neck hung the greenish-blue metal pendant that his late mother always used to wear, in the shape of a large teardrop. The goat on the brick wall opposite stared at him with yellow-eyed malevolence, more like a demon than a goat.
‘OK,’ he said at last. ‘Come down when you feel like it. Duane’s made cherry soup, or zhurek, if you’d prefer it.’
He went back downstairs. As he crossed the restaurant, the front door opened and Corinne Cusack walked in. Oh shit, he thought. And I haven’t even called Sally yet, to tell her that Sparky and I won’t be coming to Muskegon.
‘Jack!’ called Corinne. She was quite tall, nearly as tall as he was, and she had a fashion-model figure, flat-chested but with very long legs, although she always seemed to walk in an uncoordinated way, like a new-born foal. Her long reddish hair was tied back with a gray silk scarf, and she wore a loose gray silk sweater and a black knee-length skirt. Her face was long and narrow, with hooded green eyes. She was wearing no make-up.
‘Corinne,’ said Jack. He came over and embraced her. Underneath her sweater she felt unbelievably thin and bony. ‘I don’t know what to say to you. I’m so sorry for your loss.’
‘He was looking forward to it so much,’ said Corinne. ‘Especially since it meant that he could take a week off school. Do you know what he said to me?’
‘Corinne, please. Why don’t you sit down? Can I get you a drink? A cup of tea, maybe?’
They sat on stools at the bar, Corinne awkwardly crossing her legs. She looked up at all the bottles behind the bar and said, ‘Maybe a vodka-tonic. No ice.’
Henryk the barman hadn’t started his shift yet so Jack poured the drink for her, with Polish vodka, and a Jack Daniel’s for himself. Ordinarily, he didn’t drink alcohol when he was at work, but today was no ordinary day.
‘He said he was going to go to camp like Clark Kent and come back like Superman,’ said Corinne. Her green eyes were sparkling with tears. ‘He was scared to go. I knew he was scared. But he felt so much that he had to prove that he was tough. I think he wanted to prove it to me much
more than the boys at school. He wanted to prove that he could take care of me.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Jack.
Corinne took a tissue out of her pocketbook and wiped her eyes. She took a sip of her vodka-tonic, and then she said, ‘Detective Faulkner asked me if I knew anybody who could come to Owasippe with me. I hope you don’t mind but I said you, and Sparky. I couldn’t think of anybody else, and Malcolm and Sparky were such good friends.’
‘Yes, she told me. The only problem is … well, you know that Sparky has Asperger’s?’
Corinne nodded. ‘That was what made it so amazing, that he helped Malcolm so much.’
‘The problem is, Corinne – he doesn’t want to go. It’s irrational, I know, but he thinks that something killed Malcolm and, whatever it is, he’s scared of it. I’m sorry.’
‘I just can’t make sense out of any of this,’ said Corinne. ‘I know Malcolm was being bullied at school, and he was grieving for his dad … but why? I was always there for him. And all of those other scouts killed themselves too. Why did they do it?’
‘I really don’t know, Corinne. I’m just sorry that we can’t come with you. I would, myself, but I can’t leave Sparky here on his own. My mother keeps an eye on him, usually, when I have to go away, but she’s in Florida right now, visiting my aunt, and she won’t be back for a couple of days.’
‘It’s OK. I understand. It was presumptuous of me to ask, really. It’s just that I didn’t know who else to turn to.’
Jack said, ‘You have family, don’t you, back in – where was it?’
‘Seattle. Yes. But we never got on too well. Jeff was about the only real friend I ever had.’
She finished her drink while Jack sat and watched her. He didn’t know what else to say to her. She seemed to him to have a conflicting personality, needy but remote – lonely, but wary of allowing anybody too close to her. It could be grief, he guessed, for her recently deceased husband. As his mother had once said to him about his father, you don’t stop loving somebody just because they’re dead.
Forest Ghost: A Novel of Horror and Suicide in America and Poland Page 2
