Paper Ghosts

by Julia Heaberlin

  Andy wouldn’t use the very common GPS device I’d found on the truck. I’d seen the sophisticated devices casually strewn in the drawers of his apartment; he’d be the shoe-and-dental-floss guy. So who, then?

  My donut, half-finished and melting on its cheap, floppy paper plate, looks like something I threw up. I turn on my phone.

  This time, there’s a message. My throat constricts. I recognize the number. Daisy’s. My fingers fumble to find voicemail. It feels like a fifty-fifty shot that I will hear Daisy’s voice. I expect Carl’s. He might tell me he’s taking Daisy out for a Whataburger. He might tell me she’s already buried.

  I think she would have fought.

  When Daisy begins her cheerful ramble, the pounding in my ears is so loud I have to replay the message. She’s at Disney World. A family reunion. Sorry she didn’t get back to me sooner. She sure hopes I find Mr. Smith soon. How’s Barfly?

  Solace, but it’s fleeting. Already I’m picturing other, faceless girls straying into Carl’s path. Red dots I put into play as soon as I walked into Mrs. T’s and told a lie.

  The physical warning signs are sudden, like always. The dread gathering like a biker gang in the center of my chest. The deep, surging flush. My right temple, pounding. It’s been happening at least three times a year since I was fourteen.

  Every table around me is full. No one looking my way. No one cares. Just Barfly knows. He is whining softly at my knee. “It’s OK,” I whisper.

  My high school counselor, the stupid therapist, my mother, my trainer, Andy, know-it-all Google—they all offer a comforting, scientific explanation.

  As for me, I’m certain that for a few minutes, four tops, I live Rachel’s terror.

  We breathe together, shiver together, sweat together. When it’s over, I almost wish it weren’t.

  * * *

  —

  The interlude with my sister took three minutes and five seconds.

  Barfly and I begin the trek back to the side street where I’d had to park the truck. A hundred feet away, I see pieces of paper fluttering under the windshield wipers.

  My heart begins an idiotic dance. I think of Andy, deciding to leave a goodbye note after all, or Carl, laying out a more specific route after deciding I was a less agile opponent in our game than he’d thought, or maybe someone else.

  I pull Barfly’s leash a little tighter and sweep my gaze. Aging fences lean on both sides of the street. Big teeth gaps to wriggle through and hide. Knotholes for spying. Beater cars are parked nose to butt on the curbs. I feel for my gun before I remember I left it in the console.

  The only thing moving is a lithe figure in UT burnt orange running steadily away from me. Alone in broad daylight, just like my sister on the day she was taken. Bright sun, every corner exposed, is never a comfort to me.

  “Stay,” I order Barfly. I have to stand on the running board to reach the first piece of paper. It tells me that a local band is debuting tonight at a bar on Sixth Street. I stretch for the other—a flier for a three-legged fat black cat named Baloney who is “free to takers, declawed, and hits the cat box.”

  The papers are just windshield litter. Ironic for a town that outlaws plastic grocery bags and wants to fine anyone who won’t compost.

  I don’t know what I’m feeling more—relief or disappointment—as I settle Barfly in the back and slip into the driver’s seat. At straight-up noon, the truck is broiling. Once more, I flip the air conditioner to full blast.

  Perspiration sticks like apple juice behind my knees and stains the back of my shirt. Like always, my sister left me soaked, with the slightest of headaches. Carl liked to keep his conditions in the glove compartment, within easy reach. I pull them out. The single piece of yellow legal paper is folded, creased many times. At various intervals, Carl had manipulated it into a paper airplane, a paper football, and a little yellow sailor hat, which he had managed to balance on his head once for two hours while he napped in the car.

  It concerns me that he left something so freakishly important to him behind. I have to gamble that Carl’s brain hasn’t erased this. I know by now that the things he cares about remain in his head on a loop. He’d bugged me relentlessly about his conditions—new ones, old ones—at least ten times a day.

  The black leather seat is still so angry from a persistent beam of sun that I’ve slid down so my bare thighs hang off the edge.

  How many minutes does it take on a 90-degree day for the temperature in a car to reach 160 degrees? a) two hours b) forty minutes c) less than ten minutes.

  C, less than ten minutes. I’d aced my trainer’s written final.

  The electronic readout on the dashboard declares today’s temp close to 100. I turn to check Barfly. He’s perfectly happy, his nose inches from a vent, ears blowing.

  I mindlessly flatten and smooth the list on the steering wheel. I stare at the collection of words, numbers, and letters that tumbled out of Carl’s brain, and try to decide the best way to approach it.

  I remind myself that everybody’s lists are inscrutable. We all have a personal shorthand. It was almost impossible to decipher my mother’s grocery lists unless you knew things like t.p. meant toilet paper and b.p. meant big potatoes and d.p. meant dill pickles. No one would ever figure out some of the lists filed tidily in my storage unit at Fred’s.

  Lightly, I cross off all of Carl’s conditions I’ve already met: Camera, sweet tea, Dairy Queen, Whataburger, new nail clippers, 100 percent feather pillow, and CFS. CFS was chicken-fried steak, and he’d eaten it twice.

  I run another line through Bible. Carl had snatched one from the drawer in one of the motels.

  The New York Times. A near-impossible find at a Texas truck stop.

  I mark through almost everything that can be eaten or swallowed. I pause at 1015s.

  A 1015, I’m sure, is not a tax form. It refers to the popular super sweet Texas onion, named for its planting date of October 15. Most Texans don’t know this. Carl, being a farmer’s grandson, probably does. And Ruby Red is not a stripper; it’s a grapefruit.

  The three books——11/22/63, Lonesome Dove, and Ulysses—are listed one under the other. All of them seem meaningless other than as a way to pass the time.

  Ten items left. I narrow more, penciling a star beside the generic items that seem a little ominous to me in a list made by a serial killer. It’s why I hadn’t bought them.

  Hiking boots, rope, shovel, waterproof watch (resistant @ 300 meters), flashlight, WD-40.

  Glad Press’n Seal.

  I see it over a nose and a mouth.

  Just three things remain:

  Baby Head

  Muleshoe

  Mystery Lights

  They are all destinations. Carl has made three X’s, Austin being one of them. I spread the map across my lap.

  Baby Head is a cemetery six hours southeast of Muleshoe—a few dozen forlorn graves that are a blur outside the window. Indians kidnapped a young white girl in the 1850s and stuck her head on a pike at the bottom of a mountain to warn settlers away. That’s the lore.

  The reason I even know Baby Head exists is because Carl took a photograph of the cemetery’s historical marker with plastic baby doll heads dangling off it like cans on a honeymoon car. Not Carl’s doing, I learned while researching. He was merely documenting a local tradition.

  There is no X near Baby Head.

  But there are X’s close to the other two.

  Muleshoe is the West Texas town near where Carl’s grandfather ran his farm.

  Marfa is the town closest to the desert phenomenon of the Mystery Lights.

  Carl had shot a photograph of the strange lights in the sky and lived to tell. He made it the opening picture in his Time Travel book.

  He also tucked a picture of a girl on parched desert land in his suitcase. He wears her necklace with a ke
y around his neck. The desert girl means something to Carl, too.

  I shift the truck in gear. I’m heading to the Mystery Lights. I can spend the night in Marfa. If he isn’t there, I’ll drive to his grandfather’s farm.

  Carl has no idea how far I am willing to go. No one but me does.

  TITLE: MYSTERY LIGHTS

  From Time Travel: The Photographs of Carl Louis Feldman

  Marfa (off Highway 90), 2000

  Hasselblad 50mm, tripod

  Photographer’s note—I’ve always been a skeptic about the ghost lights, the Mystery Lights, the Chinati lights, the Marfa lights—whatever the natives want to call them. On my West Texas jaunts, I’d occasionally see them jitterbug in the sky like aliens as I looked across Mitchell Flat toward the Chinati Mountains. Until this night, I’d left documenting them to the tourists who draw up here right after sunset. Scientists debunk them as high-energy particles or electromagnetic currents, or even bouncing headlights. Believers will remind you that Indians talked about these “ghosts” long before cars existed. On this night when I pointed my camera at the stars, six round orbs appeared, floating in a straight line across the flat. They collided into a bright balloon that began to speed toward me. I ran. My camera was on a timer or this shot wouldn’t exist.

  49

  I’m only an hour out of Austin when Carl crawls into my brain.

  If he were sitting in the seat beside me, he’d have his head out the window, snapping his real or imaginary camera at the puffy Toy Story clouds, begging me to stop for peach stands or roadkill, insisting he pan for gold every time we cross the meandering Pedernales.

  He’d be sneering as we pass a town called Hye and a winery named Fat Ass.

  I don’t miss him. It would just be nice if he were keeping me awake.

  It will take about seven hours driving straight through to the Mystery Lights. That’s going to be my first stop. The “official” viewing area used to be pretty much just a turnout on a desert road until a rich Texas ranch family helped legitimize the phenomenon with a small parking lot and bathroom.

  I’m limiting myself to three pit stops to pee and water Barfly and to comply with my gas-tank-never-less-than-half-full rule. My company on the drive is eighty percent pickup trucks, at least half of them white. I try to keep an eye out for Carl, but I’m not the only Texan hiding behind tinted windows and sunglasses.

  I’m feeling more vulnerable and insignificant as the bowl of Texas sky expands and I shrink. Somebody once described this piece of earth as The Big Empty, and nothing was ever so aptly named.

  The rolling green Hill Country has transformed sharply in the last half-hour to scrubby brown desolation and cacti with stiff arms.

  The irritant keeping me alert at the moment is an old blue VW Bug driven by a woman with stringy blond hair that hangs out of a red baseball cap. Her car windows are wide open, which in a Texas July means she’s as poor as the dirt flying in.

  There’s either an animal or a furry blanket on her lap. She weaves and dawdles outside the lines. She passes me. I pass her. We do this dance four times before I decide enough. The gas stations are getting sparser every mile, the trucks fewer.

  The blue VW charges past me as I pull off at a run-down gas station sporting a pole with a Texas flag big enough to wrap the whole place like a present. The sign planted in the pale dust outside: Don’t Die a Virgin: Terrorists Are Up There Waiting for You.

  No other vehicles. Bars on the windows.

  I decide something cold to drink is worth venturing inside. As soon as I push open the door, I’m hit with a chilly blast of window air-conditioning, the smell of tamales, and the jangle of Tejano music.

  I say, “Dr Pepper,” and the teenage boy in the Houston Astros cap behind the counter points to a tub of beer. He looks too young to be selling alcohol but I’m guessing his customers aren’t complaining. The Dr Pepper bottle caps are deeply embedded in ice with a selection of Corona and Ozarka water.

  Only three drink choices in the whole store because the owner knows his audience. I grab two glass bottles of Dr Pepper, Carl’s high-end, pure-sugar kind from over the border. I pick up a string of beef jerky and the last five tampons in an open box that are being sold as singles for $2 apiece. The owner knows his desperate market, too.

  While I’m paying the kid, including for the high-dollar gas I’m about to pump, I notice through the dirty fog on the door that the blue Volkswagen is pulling in. The boy hands me my change, barely glancing at me. Good, because I made no effort at disguise or makeup today.

  When I push open the door, the blue Beetle is nowhere in sight. I suck down the Dr Pepper and toss the bottle and the receipt into an old plastic bin marked Recycling. It feels liberating not to subtract this spree from my budget. Since Carl took off, I’m not counting. Not money, not steps.

  I yank on the pickup door.

  The woman from the Volkswagen is sitting in the truck’s passenger seat, facing forward, as still as a crash test dummy, like there’s a gun leveled at her head on the other side. I see a slice of profile, a baseball cap, and caramel blond hair that’s the matted, tangled texture of an old Barbie doll’s.

  Now she’s turning, removing the hat and hair simultaneously.

  Carl.

  “Funny, huh?” He’s grinning. “It’s all one piece. I bought it at the Goodwill on Lamar. It’s an old Six Flags Over Texas souvenir.”

  “Where have you been?” My voice is angry, but the relief is seeping into every pore.

  “I thumbed a ride with a pair of girls going back to Austin.”

  “And then.”

  “Don’t know. Think I lost a little time.” He taps his forehead. “And then I got a car. I found you on Guadalupe. Thought you saw me. Anyway, I followed you to the donut place. Thought I’d wait until you looked a little less pissy.”

  I scan the front of the store. No blue Volkswagen. “Did you steal the car? Where is it?”

  “Parked behind the store. Keys inside.”

  “You took off on me, Carl. We had a deal. Conditions.”

  “The girls were cute. A little high.” He tosses the cap into the backseat. “Go ahead. Ask. I can see it on your face.”

  “Did you…hurt them?”

  “I certainly did not.” Emphatic. Enjoying himself. I want so badly to believe him.

  I fill the tank, $50 worth, and climb back into the cab. Carl has taken my beef jerky out of the bag and is tearing his teeth into it. The extra Dr Pepper I left in the cup holder is half-gone.

  I reach into the seat behind me for my backpack. I don’t want Carl to see the bag of loose tampons. Instead, my hand brushes against something soft.

  I know the smooth blanket feel of Barfly, and this isn’t it. I flip around. The dog is stretched out in the back, unfazed, with company.

  “There’s a cat in here.”

  “Baloney. He does better than I thought he would on three legs.”

  Baloney. The cat pictured in the flier that was stuck under my windshield wipers. The handicapped one that hits the litter box every time.

  “We don’t have a litter box,” I murmur.

  “What did you say?”

  “Carl, we can’t keep the cat.”

  “I’ve heard that before.” He swallows the last dreg of Dr Pepper. “Which dead girl are you on now?”

  50

  Carl won’t confirm why he drew his second X in the middle of the desert near the Mystery Lights. He’s noncommittal about the importance of driving there. I spread out the map in the cab to show him.

  “Who drew all those lines?” he demands. “It’s confusing. By the way, Walt’s upset you didn’t say hello.”

  I tamp down my frustration and remind myself that we are not necessarily on a journey to a grave but to that place in Carl’s head where he keeps his secrets. Our trip, as much as
I want it to be, might not be a physical destination.

  And it isn’t just about my sister—it’s about all the girls. Not just Vickie and Violet and Nicole, not just the little Marys or the lady in the rain or the one in the desert, but every other murdered or lost girl whose name I ever wrote down on a list.

  I know I’m teetering, that my boots are over the edge of the same pretty precipice as the desert girl in the picture and if I don’t pull back soon, the canyon will slam up to meet me.

  But I also know the truth. No one else but me will ever carry it this far.

  Jack Kevorkian was a lunatic who assisted suicides in the back of his van before it was ever considered humane. A principal contributor to the first Oxford English Dictionary was a patient in an asylum for the criminally insane after killing a father of six. The mathematical genius Pythagoras had an aversion to beans because he thought part of the soul exited the body with every fart.

  Crazy people get shit done.

  There has to be a reason why Carl kept that picture of the girl in the desert with the little key around her neck. Somewhere in this vehicle, her photograph is still riding along in his suitcase. That same key is still hanging off Carl’s neck, hidden under his shirt. The sun reflected off it when he bared his chest at the beach.

  “First stop,” I tell Carl firmly, “the Mystery Lights.”

  He shrugs. “You’re the boss.”

  Carl naps most of the ride. As the sun drops and his chest rises and falls in steady rhythm beside me, I imagine how it would feel to stop the truck, pull my gun out of the console, and shoot him in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert. I’d watch his blood land like black raindrops on the dark leather. It could be the most satisfying second of my life—the price maybe being every single second afterward.

  When I wake him at our destination, it’s gently. We’re standing on the dark side of a road, waiting for aliens or ghosts or swamp gas or whatever it is to prick Carl’s conscience.