Paper Ghosts

by Julia Heaberlin

  We stare up at the giant handfuls of shiny sugar tossed into a wasteland of night, the most stars I’ve ever seen in my life. The desert and its shadows stretch all the way to the rippling muscles of the Chinati Mountains.

  We’re a little late for prime-time viewing. There’s no free show tonight, no kaleidoscope of lights dancing around. There is never any guarantee the lights will materialize.

  I think that tonight it is maybe more profound without them. The air is expectant. There’s a deep spiritual stirring in my gut, even with Carl at my side. Maybe even more because of him.

  I’m holding hands with the past—the stars above me that died light years ago, the dinosaurs and Indians who are cobwebs in the sand, the girls Carl killed.

  The light tickle of laughter floats from two couples leaning against a car behind us, drinking wine.

  “I saw the picture of the girl in your suitcase,” I tell Carl. “Did you take that out here? It’s beautiful. Why didn’t you put her in your book?”

  “You’re a goddamn snoop. There are thousands of pictures I didn’t put in my book. Dozens of girls.”

  “This one must mean something special.”

  “I don’t know why you just don’t straight up ask if I killed her, too.”

  “You marked an X here,” I persist.

  “I marked the X because it’s one of my favorite spots. I want to be buried around here.” And then he mumbles, “We’re nothing but exploded matter.”

  Tell me something. Anything. Please. It’s the first time I’ve pled with him, even in my head.

  “The lights aren’t coming tonight,” Carl says curtly. “I don’t feel it.”

  Carl heads back to the truck. One more time, I’ve learned nothing. I linger a little longer, waiting, wondering if Rachel is out there somewhere in the dark.

  * * *

  —

  We slide onto the barren streets of Marfa, population 2,000-minus, around 9:30 P.M. No people. No other cars. Flickering streetlights.

  The town is so desolate, so dusty and dreamlike, we could have time-traveled to the empty set of some zombie Western. It is like we are the last living things on earth—killer, cat, woman, dog—all crammed in the cab of this truck.

  Carl is chattering away about Dostoyevsky, of all things. My brain feels like it might burst if he doesn’t shut up.

  My own head jibbers away, too. Where the hell is this old hotel with the Spanish stucco that Carl’s been talking about for twenty miles? How many waters are left in the cooler? How am I going to get rid of the cat?

  Is a point-blank shot to the head the most efficient way to kill a cowboy zombie?

  “Marfa was a railroad hub in the 1880s. There are still conflicting stories about whether the town was named for a character in The Brothers Karamazov or the Jules Verne book Michael Strogoff,” Carl is saying. “Are you listening?”

  “Yes,” I say, while my head pounds. “Keep going.” Keep the peace.

  “A railroad executive’s wife who settled here picked the name out of a book. But no one is sure which book the lady was reading.”

  This, Carl can remember.

  “Turn right up here,” he instructs impatiently. Since I climbed back in the truck eight miles ago, Carl has been offering rambling directions to the Paisano, a historic hotel close to the town’s courthouse. He’s insisting on staying there tonight, one of his haunts on photography pilgrimages.

  Now he’s pointing. Sure enough, an oasis of white lights is interrupting the dark. “Hotel Paisano will be my treat.” Carl delivers this with a completely straight face. “And let me work at getting Barfly in the door. Trust me. You’ll get a good night’s sleep. You’ll love Marfa in the morning.”

  I don’t tell Carl I’ve already been to Marfa, little desert city of the surreal. I’ve read all about its artsy hipster personality in Texas Monthly and The New York Times, a paper I will likely finally find here for Carl in the morning in some shop that will offer Viva La Feminista coffee.

  I know all about the minimalist art movement ignited by Donald Judd in the 1970s when he abandoned New York and began installing his large-scale art projects in the Texas desert.

  His rows and rows of aluminum boxes transform into abstract, shimmering beauty depending on which way the brutal Texas sun falls on them through the windows of an old artillery shed. They’ve been playing with the blinding light here for almost fifty years.

  I know all about the Prada store erected in dusty nowhere, handbags and a lineup of right-footed shoes in the window, that is really not a store but a sculpture meant to degrade into the natural landscape.

  It’s profoundly creepy.

  So is the expression on Carl’s face right now. He’s fiddling with his Nikon even though it’s pitch black in here except for the blue glow of the dashboard.

  “Please don’t shoot me,” I say.

  * * *

  —

  The boyfriend who said I had suicidal tendencies brought me to Marfa once on the way to Big Bend National Park. He was interested in Donald Judd’s titanic sculptures and hiking, but not at all in what he called the pagan lights or prissy lattes.

  We stayed in a colorful, retro trailer park outside of town, where the rental campers sat like pretty pastel blocks on a dusty floor. By then, I’d already taken a few secret lessons with my trainer, and my boyfriend had noticed the new bruises.

  He was on the brink of breaking up with me because I wouldn’t explain. Halfway up a mountain in Big Bend, I told him a small portion of the truth, and he screamed at me that I had a death wish. It echoed. It still does.

  My trainer, of course, had highly approved of a week traversing scorching sand and tricky canyons. He’d told me to lug a gallon of water a day if I wanted to survive.

  That seems like centuries ago. I’m inexplicably passive as soon as I park the truck on the street looking into the courtyard of the Paisano, twinkling away. Carl maneuvers Barfly in, no problem, by laying out three hundred-dollar bills in front of an assistant manager and saying “my daughter’s poor dog was shot in the ass.”

  There’s only one room left: the Rock Hudson Suite. We are perfunctorily told that the movie star used to hang out in the hotel during the filming of Giant in 1956. Barfly and the cat will be allowed to sleep outside the suite on a shared second-floor patio that extends from its French doors.

  The hotel manager doesn’t care. It’s a slow night. I’m sure that way out here, Carl and I are on the low end of weird.

  The suite itself is a little dated but in a pleasantly retro way. A massive old white-bricked fireplace dominates a wall. A tinge of ash sits in the air. There’s a small kitchen we won’t use, two baths, and one bedroom without a lock on the door.

  Before I can bring it up, Carl announces that he and Walt are camping out with the animals on the patio, in the sleeping bags.

  “Lock us out, if you want,” he says. “I’m sure you will.”

  As soon as he shuts the French door behind him, I feel desperately alone. The Chihuahuan Desert is 200,000 square miles, most of which extends south over the border. I have limits. Not many. But letting Carl’s memory lead me around a desert with two handicapped animals in tow is an absurd journey I’m not going on.

  Through the glass, Carl’s shadow is bustling around, laying out the sleeping bags. Finally, his shadow stills in one of the patio chairs. A tiny familiar glow begins to float up and down. I don’t have to ask where Carl bought more pot. He was hanging in Austin, Pot Paradise.

  I wonder how much of my money he has left and how hard it will be to steal it back. I did have the sense to sneak away the extra set of keys from Carl and hide them in the wheel well.

  I take a deep breath and grab some peanut butter crackers and two apples out of a bag.

  I open the French doors to a serene milieu. The lights from the cou
rtyard are shooting their warm glow upward. The cat is perched on the ledge, peering over at things only cats can see in the dark. Barfly is curled up on one of the sleeping bags.

  Carl heard the creak of the knob as soon as I turned it. He has kicked out a chair beside him for me to sit, which I do without saying a word. He offers me a toke, and I offer him some crackers. I lean back and suck in.

  “This weed is called White Widow,” he says. “She’s very nice.”

  I don’t question why I can’t stand to touch Carl’s skin but I’ll put his spit, his wet DNA, to my lips. Why I keep feeding and watering him like a nice plant.

  Two puffs, and my head tumbles in a new orbit.

  “We sometimes encounter people,” Carl remarks, “even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.”

  I want him to shut up.

  I close my eyes and float. I see Carl behind the trees as the lady in the rain runs by. The pretty desert girl asking for a ride. Two little girls disappearing into the forest. Nicole pushing her small son on the park swing. Vickie’s blood on the walls of an abandoned Victorian house. Violet’s footprints along the ocean.

  My sister, straddling her bike, turning to smile. She was such a cynical sweetheart.

  The toke drops from my hand to the floor. Carl bends to pick it up.

  “That’s Dostoyevsky,” he says. “Crime and Punishment. Good line. Kind of my motto. It’s how I choose. How I decide who is special enough to live forever. On paper, of course.”

  51

  Like always, Carl shuts down. After sucking the life out of his toke, Carl is not so much hazy as ravenous. Says he isn’t talking anymore until I provide real food. Crackers and an apple aren’t going to cut it. He insists he knows a place open after 10 P.M. in Marfa, a town that operates on its own bizarre and unpredictable sleeping schedule.

  My high has already crash-landed by the time we get to Carl’s “place,” a picnic table under a tree at an outdoor beer garden with the name Planet Marfa.

  The other seating options are inside an old bus or in an underground area covered by a lighted teepee. We order a plate of cheese nachos with a side of extra jalapeños and two Coors. Carl’s treat.

  Half the plate of nachos has disappeared before he notices the book I’ve placed in the center of the table. His book. Pink Post-its stick out of the specific pages I marked before we left the hotel.

  He runs a finger along the duct tape and traces the title, lingering over the words Time Travel. “Where’d you get this?” he asks.

  “Where I got the book is not important. When I was eight, I found a copy of one of your photographs hidden under the staircase in my house.”

  He glances up, eyes sharpening. “Well, isn’t that a pip. Why didn’t you mention this before? Now we’re getting somewhere. Maybe you open up a little, I open up. You ever think of that? Which photograph? What house?”

  “I’ll get to that. It depends on how you do.” I’m enjoying a bit of control. I think about pretending to ask Walt to play, too, but Carl and I seem to have a flow going.

  Carl runs his finger lightly over the duct tape on the spine. “You know I’d be happy to sign my book for you if you’ll agree to take better care of it.”

  “I’ve looked at it almost every night for the last six years, trying to figure you out.”

  “Honored.”

  “I’m going to show you a selection of photographs in here. You just say the first word that comes to mind.”

  He silently stacks seven jalapeño slices into a little silo on top of a single nacho.

  “Memory is processed more clearly if there is an old emotion connected with the picture,” I say formally.

  At first, I had thought when I laid out real pictures of victims and their families, he just didn’t remember or was lying. But maybe the problem is that he felt no emotion at all. Maybe he was just that cold. What could move him more than his life’s work—photographs he captured in his mind’s eye before he snapped and dodged and burned?

  “Just one word?” Carl asks.

  I nod.

  I open the book to the picture of the lonely white cross peeking out of the weeds under the 17th Street bridge in Waco, where cops searched for Nicole Lakinski’s dead body. “First word that comes to mind,” I command.

  “Barfly. I hope he’s isn’t howling his head off on top of the Paisano roof right now.”

  “Barfly is your answer?”

  “Yep. It’s where we found him. I love Barfly. Got lots of emotion about that. Final answer.”

  “Did you kill Nicole Lakinski?”

  “They declared me not guilty.”

  I flip several pages to his portrait of the decaying Victorian house in Calvert, where Vickie Higgins was murdered, then hauled away by her killer.

  “Skeleton,” Carl says, stuffing in another nacho. “How am I doing?”

  “Are you talking about Vickie Higgins’s body?”

  “I am not.”

  I flip again, to the orbs of light exploding over the desert.

  Carl hesitates at this one.

  “We were just there,” I say impatiently. “First word.”

  “If I’m being honest?” Carl drawls out. “Bullshit. Is that one word or two?” Now he’s grinning.

  “Did you bury the girl in the desert out here? The one whose key you wear around your neck?” Anyone else?

  “I did not. I didn’t know you knew about the key. This game is kind of fun.”

  My fingers fumble for the next one. The screaming face swirling in the water off of Galveston. A hundred years after the Great Galveston Hurricane, Violet Santana came to this beach to play. She never left.

  “Sad,” Carl says. “That’s my word. Hard to imagine just how sad. Tell me, what’s the saddest thing that’s ever happened to you?”

  “Did this dress belong to a girl named Violet?” I can’t resist sidestepping the rules of the game.

  “How would I know? It’s a found object. I made quite a few dollars off this shot. So much, I felt a little guilty. I donated most of it to the Galveston Historical Foundation for restoration. They get the royalties now.”

  Guilty. It’s almost midnight. I leaf through a few more pages to Lady in the Rain.

  “First word,” I say.

  “First.”

  “Yes. The first word. Just like you’ve been doing.”

  “First is my word. She was the first. Well, the first that I cared about. It’s probably why she shows up to bug me every now and then. She’s up on the patio right now, drying out, talking to Walt. One of the reasons I needed to get out of there.”

  Carl pushes the plate of nachos in front of me. Five are left. He reaches across and dumps a heap of fiery jalapeños on top of them.

  “Now it’s my turn,” he announces. “I’m going to call my game Truth or Nacho. You don’t answer, you eat a nacho. Use as many words to answer as you like. Are you ready?”

  “I’m not done with my turn.”

  “Too bad. Why do you tell everyone you’re my daughter?”

  I shrug. “It was the best way to get you out of Mrs. T’s. It’s a good cover for the road.”

  “Truth or Nacho. How did your sister die? Was she shot? Knifed? Choked? Drowned?” He enunciates every word.

  “We never found her.” It comes out in a whisper. Why am I answering?

  “That’s a damn shame.” He slides the book back at me. “Which photograph is the one you found in your house?”

  An opening. I fumble with the pages and prop up the book on the picnic table, facing it toward him.

  He’s silent for a few seconds.

  “The Marys,” he says grimly. “Of course.”

  “What do you mean ‘of course’?”

/>   “Did you love your sister?” he fires at me. “Truth or Nacho: Did she ever make you mad?”

  “Stop it, Carl.”

  “Truth or Nacho. Truth or Nacho. Did your sister ever make you mad?”

  “Yes, Carl, I loved her. Yes, she made me mad sometimes.” Rachel liked to take everything to the edge.

  “Why?”

  “Everyone thought…Rachel was the brave one.”

  “That’s a pretty name, Rachel. Is that the real reason for this little road show? So you can prove yourself to Rachel?”

  I glare at him furiously.

  I pick up a nacho and let it explode in my mouth.

  He slams the book shut.

  52

  We’ve exited Planet Marfa by silent mutual agreement. I’m halfway across the street to the parked truck, ten steps or so in front of Carl, when the car swerves around the corner, lights off.

  Carl calls out a warning a millisecond before I figure out what is happening. I dive forward toward the curb. The car squeals by, inches from striking me.

  Never fall on your dominant hand. I remember that in the flash before I hit the concrete and a bone snaps in my left arm like a piece of dry wood.

  The pain, excruciating. A shapeless black shadow hovers in my vision, a familiar indicator that I’m going to faint. I turn my head and can barely make out Carl furiously waving his arms in the middle of the street, mouth open wide.

  Whatever he is yelling is at the top of his lungs, but I can’t hear him. The contents of my purse litter the street. The book of photographs is lying at my ankles, once again split in two.

  The white noise in my head is deafening. I throw myself into a sitting position on the curb in case I have to defend myself. Two women are running at me from the direction of the bar; one is punching numbers into a cellphone.

  As soon as they reach me, the one without the phone drops to her knees, places her hand gently on my shoulder, and speaks, pointing to both of them, mouthing something. I shake my head. I wonder if my brain has finally imploded. So much noise.