by M Dressler
A fine plan it is. “And the Berringers?” I want them brought to justice.
“My hunch is when we push back, they’ll threaten to tell the state. They’ll say we’ll all be thrown in jail, and hounded by devils. But we won’t believe it. The Berringers aren’t going to want to end their days locked up themselves or in a town with an ugly reputation no one wants to come to anymore. They’ll want to go on believing they’re special. Power comes from pretending to what you don’t really have. They’re pretending to be powerful people.” She paces again. “They think they’re gifted. They aren’t. They’re just people who inherited some sick traditions and think it takes talent to keeping them going. It doesn’t. It’s all shit pretending to be gold. No, it’s worse, it’s banking human souls, and acting like it’s diamonds and not corpses you’re wearing around your neck.”
Oh, what a marvelous thing it is to see good, living anger, and the person feeling it not afraid to be seen feeling it.
“And Pratt, too,” I insist.
“Absolutely. That’s why you have to hide, Rose. Because I’m going to say, I’m going to convince the Berringers to say and everyone to say—hold onto your hat here—that you were, are, the ghost. I know, it sounds insane, right—but hear me out. You just showed up out of nowhere, right? Nothing bad started happening till you arrived. You were in the museum the day Ruth fell. You fled the scene when Seth came in. And I’ve been looking into this Pratt fellow. Turns out he’s obsessed with what he thinks is the world being taken over by ghosts that look like living people. He’s looking for some sort of zombie, he’s got some sketch up on the internet he’s trying to get people to take seriously. And get this: it looks just a little, maybe just enough, like you. I think it’ll be easy to convince everyone, even the Berringers, to go along with this ploy of saying, ‘It’s Rose you need to go after.’ All they want is for Pratt to leave. They’ll be perfectly happy to put the blame on you, they’d rather keep their own ghosts and not lose one of them. I’ve been up all night thinking about this. It’s really a miracle you showed up, because the only thing that could have shot the idea down was you not knowing about it. But now here you are! And after Pratt’s gone, boom! You emerge, you’re not a ghost, you’re everyone’s hero, even the Berringers’. We can even say it was your idea. And by that time, with Martha and all the rest, we’ve gotten the real revolution underway, to make this town a good, a better place. What do you think? It’s just fantastic enough,” she says, breathing out, “that it could work.”
If I make myself the target; if I let them pretend that I am what I really am. That’s what she’s asking, and doesn’t know it. I must make myself the bait.
“He can’t hurt you—Pratt—is the good thing. And I swear to you I’ll never let a bad thing come to you out of all of this. I’ll take all the heat, if it comes to that. I’ll be the bad arty girl who dreamt all this up. I’ll do whatever it takes to protect you.”
Long ago, when I was alive, I had a best friend. Her memory is still dear to me. Now it seems the best can be born again. When you don’t expect it, a soul rises to remind you what a fighter, what spit, really looks like.
“I’m in,” I say. “There’s one spot of trouble, though.”
“You mean more than illegally impersonating the dead in order to launch a bloodless coup in a remote mountain village?”
Spit and fight. “Only this.” One important, secret thing. “What if a ghost did startle Ruth? Ruth could describe them. He—or she—could be out there loose for Pratt to find.”
“I’ve been thinking about that, too. It is possible. I think it could have been Longhurst that scared her in the jailhouse. Though that doesn’t make sense. The way I understand it, he has his own prisoners. He gets to keep them, have power over them. That’s another sick part of the arrangement. It’s all so sick. I have to wonder, though, if it was one of the children who scared Ruth . . . If it is, then the teacher has to get them back in line. That’s how this all works. Like a pyramid. He keeps them in line, and the town, the bargain keeps him safe in power in the schoolhouse.”
“If Pratt comes after any of them,” I say quietly, “I’ll take care of it.”
“How will you do that?”
“I’ll leave some ghostly-looking clues to fool him.”
“Brilliant.”
“But there’s something you need to know about him.”
“So you’ve been boning up on this guy, too?”
For a long time, now. “He has a sixth sense. He’s not like other hunters.” He uses the same tricks, I tell her, the cruelty they all use to anger the dead and make them appear. But he has more than that up his sleeve. Pratt raises his hand to his heart when he picks up the sensation of a careless soul. He’s been doing it since he was a boy, he claims. He’s not easily fooled, nor easily put off.
“He doesn’t stop,” I finish, standing.
“I was reading about just how tenacious he is. He basically bullies ghosts into the ground, they say. Sometimes he doesn’t even have to fire a weapon.”
But in the end, he always does fire it. Imagine that.
“How does he do that, you think?” she asks, puzzled. “Get ghosts to put themselves down?”
“He gets them to give up.”
“But how?”
“By making a ghost feel worthless—worse than cursed. By getting a ghost to believe that everything the ghost touches becomes cursed. So that a soul begins to worry: might it be true?”
“Jesus, Rose. That’s some insight. But we can beat him, right? We’ll start in the morning. I’ve got a loft up here you can sleep in tonight. Nice and warm under the rafters. You’re still chilly, I can see. That’s your core temperature knocked down. We’ve got to get it up. I’m surprised you’re not shaking like a leaf. Come on up with me.”
She pulls back sheets for me on a low bed surrounded by small pictures in metal frames.
“But this is your room, Su.”
It’s a room with us they’re most after, Pratt said.
“No biggie. I’ll sleep on the couch in my office downstairs.”
“No, no.”
“Shut up about it, Rose. We need you healthy for what’s coming. Lie down.”
“Who are the people in these pictures?” A family.
“My mom and me. The frames were some of my first designs. I don’t do small things anymore, though I’m still proud of these. I go big these days. I make and sell great big things, and I send them out into the world and never see them again. It’s the making that matters, as well as the bigness. And being willing to let go of, to lose what you love.” She looks at the woman in the picture. “Go big or go home, you know what I mean? Sleep well. Coup starts in the morning.”
A ghost doesn’t sleep or dream. But she can lie very still and listen and picture the storm’s size outside, and tally the odds, and wish, and place her bets.
19
In the morning, my friend—is it fair to call Su Kwon that, now, when I know what she is, but she doesn’t know me?—moves quickly. When I come down to her, she’s having her breakfast, reading, and dressing all at once. Her gallery is filled with a sudden, clear light. I go toward the window, though keeping back from it, and see why.
The Bar is completely buried in white. Snow has filled the streets around the square, swaddled the cars up to their cheeks, circled the ankles of the statue of the Prospector, and leveled the porches. So that the earth seems, suddenly, even.
“Snow’s stopped,” Su says. “For now. The passes are still open, apparently. I’m glad. We want to make sure Pratt can find his way home, wherever that is.”
“I don’t know that he has a home,” I say. In that much, at least, we are alike. “They travel, these hunters. They move from place to place.” Like locusts. Ah, but what happens to an insect, in the cold?
“He’ll have fun moving around today, unless he’s with someone on a snowmobile. The Berringers told Pete not to plow the roads. They want to control where Pratt
goes. Okay.” She pulls the shades down over the gallery windows. “You hide out here. Make yourself at home. Make some breakfast. I’ve texted and volunteered my services as a guide to Pratt. The Berringers are very happy about that, about how on board I am. He wants to go to the museum first, to see where Ruth fell. If it seems perfectly natural, as though the idea’s just occurred to me, I’ll start dropping a few mentions about a visitor who passed through here and how strange it was that she disappeared right when Seth arrived. Not too much, you know. I’ll need to play dumb a bit, let him think he’s the one starting to put the pieces together. God, I hate playing dumb with men.” She looks in a mirror beside her desk, adjusting her scarf. “Even in a good cause.”
“You’re getting him in your sights,” I tell her. “You’re the hunter.”
“Right on.” She puts on her gloves, pulling her sleeves over her wrists. “You know what pisses me off? Have you ever seen one of their weapons, that tech they wear, the cuff?”
“I have.”
“It’s made of an alloy and etched with all these lofty symbols, and made to look artistic, like—what?—like shooting something that can’t shoot back is so damn creative?”
We look at one another, Su and I, before she goes.
She says, “Will you be okay here?”
Other than the fact that Pratt’s to be told I’ve been in White Bar, and that soon I’ll be described to him in great detail, I’m in fine fettle.
“It’s not my first trick-or-treat,” I say. “You go on now, Su.”
“When I’ve planted the hook in Pratt, and he’s seems to be taking it, I’ll fill the others in.” She goes to the back of the gallery. “Here’s how you lock this back door. Don’t let anyone in. I’ll leave the workshop unlocked. There shouldn’t be any reason for you to leave the gallery, but if you get uncomfortable or worried for some reason, there are lots of places to hide in out there. Just be sure no one sees you crossing the alley.” She takes a pair of metal baskets from the wall and begins attaching them to her boots. They make her look tangled in two nets, like a caught animal.
I don’t like the feeling I have, suddenly. I’m worried. Is she doing too much?
“Also, there’s extra snowshoes in the closet there, if you need them. All right. Wish me luck.”
“I wish you every good thing in the world.”
“If only we didn’t have to slog through so much shit to get to it, right?”
She goes, pulling the door tight behind her.
I don’t like what I’m feeling. Pratt can do her no harm with his weapon. She’s on the bright side of the line, the side of the living—it isn’t that. It’s that the boundary where the dead meet can be treacherous.
You are a curse, Pratt once cried out to me, and curse everything you touch.
No. I mustn’t believe it.
Though I wear the body of a woman who died while Pratt and I fought.
Among the metal artworks hanging from the walls around me is a mirror framed with salvaged wheels and gears. I go and stand in front of it. The face I see might be one I willed and shaped out of misfortune and terror, but the misfortune wasn’t my doing, I tell myself, and the terror wasn’t at my hand. I put a hand up to the glass, this soft palm pressing against its reflection, and press this forehead, too, against the slippery coolness. All I wanted, when I took this body, was to try some new way to outlast pain and injustice. Then along comes the world, and wants to punish you for the trying. For wearing this sleeve on your heart.
“I won’t have it,” I say aloud. “I won’t be called a devil for finding my way out of hell. And listen to me, Ola, fellow spirit,” I call out, for we must find a way to each other again. “I know what it means to lose even while you last. I know you lost someone dear to you. I know about the red hobbyhorse.” I must get her to trust me for my plan to succeed. “You’re not alone in your sorrows. I’m here. I’m looking for you. I want to find and help you. But we must be quick. The teacher is looking for you. Another is on the hunt as well. You needn’t fear me. I’m all alone here. I wait for you. I wait for you, and no one else.”
Beneath the palm of this hand, I feel the mirror warming. Burning. I lift my forehead away from it, yet leave my fingers against the glass.
A mirror is also a door.
“You burned. But before that,” I say, “you were alive and strong. I saw you be strong. With the horse in your hand. Can you see me?”
A hand presses behind the reddening glass—as it did the first time we met.
This time, I don’t hesitate, I don’t fear. I make sure my hand stays steadily against hers.
Her face and body appear on the other side.
Now, I hear her voice say, I will tell you.
20
My name is Ola Varga. I am not from this place.
I wasn’t born here. I came across the Great Salt Desert with my parents. I had a little brother, Karl, who didn’t survive the trail. We stopped the wagon and buried him under a little pile of stones, in the middle of an empty plain.
My mama, she broke that day. She said to my father, if we don’t become rich in California, then our Karl has died for nothing.
The way she said it, I knew it wouldn’t matter if we found all the gold of all the kings. She would never forgive my father for reading a newspaper story about the riches in the West and selling our farm and taking us to the Rush.
Later on, when she was cruel to him, I understood the devil hands a broken heart the hammer that smashed it, then tells it to smash the next heart closest.
We came to California and tried to make what in Hungary my parents called tiszta lappal, a clean sheet, a fresh start. Our cabin was at the edge of the camp and had only a canvas roof, with no windows. It was hot in summer and cold in winter. We worked very hard no matter the color of the mud. It was a long walk upriver, each day, to the piece of streambed Papa bought from a man who said it would pay well but who hadn’t stayed to work it himself. My father and mother dug and shoveled and I carried the dirt by bucket to the river and the long-tom. My eyes learned to pick out the tiniest flake in the slurry.
Mama’s eyes were always hungry. At the end of every day, she would ask, What do we have? At the end of every week, she would ask, What do we have now? We might have an ounce, sixteen dollars, but eggs were five dollars, a bag of flour three, and lumber and nails swallowed most of the rest. By the end of the year, we had only enough to winter through to the next spring. I begged to go home, but Mama said no, we must work harder, harder, dig more, buy another claim. My father could find none to buy until some foolish men grew drunk. They thought there was gold underneath the river, and when they died by dynamiting it, my father took one of their claims and called it his own and said the man who could die so foolishly was too weak to find the “color.”
Then it was two claims we worked. Mama and me at one, Papa at the other. The camp was no longer called Eno Camp, but to honor the men who died called White Bar, for the rushing falls they made. I thought it a poor thing to name a town after men who were drunk and stupid. My father said to hush about it. There was nothing more to be done, and I shouldn’t say anything like that at the diggins or in the square or in the mercantile. The men had erred and that was that, and we should be grateful we had profited from some misfortune without being the cause of it.
It was then I knew my father, and my mother, too, were not the same people they had been in Iowa. They were hard people now, and hungry, and frightened that they would have nothing to show for my brother’s dying.
That was in our second year, the year I stopped begging them to go home. I had grown stronger by then, and bigger, and was less afraid than when we first came. Though the work was hard, I slowly came to like it better than my farm chores. You never hope for gold to fall out of a cow’s teat. Slow though it was, I grew to like the life of the camp, for there were things you could never see on a farm, like a bear being led down the street on a leash, or a picture-taker with his velvet cape, or a
passing preacher jumping onto a whiskey keg to give his sermon about damnation, or drunken men dancing together on Independence Day.
The one happiness I missed from the old life was going to school. But then came some good news. My father came home from the saloon and said men had cleared out that part of the camp where the drunken men and others had lived, and scraped it clean and made of it a meadow, and there they were building a schoolhouse, for now we are a town and are like to have some of the things a good town has. Wouldn’t you like going to school again, Ola?
I said very much. Papa said I could go as long as I helped at the claims in the morning and after. And so I came to the school in the meadow with the few other children of the camp.
It was nothing like the school at home, being a cabin of logs with a short steeple and a kettle fixed with a clapper for a bell. You stepped on a crate to go inside; to your right hung the rope from the belfry tied to the wall, and then in front were three rows of desks the brothers Huellet had ordered made, and then the stove for heat and the teacher’s desk. There were four who came along with me to school. They were so much younger. I felt at first stupid and backward, like I had missed some chance and it had come around again but too late and wearing a coat too small.
Yet soon enough I liked my schoolmates. I still missed my brother Karl, and until then had spoken to few people excepting my parents. So I was sure to be friendly with the others. I liked Will because he was like my brother had come out from under the pile of stones where we left him. I liked Anton because he made me think of what Karl might have been had he lived. I liked Addy because even though she looked so fine in her blond curls, she was kind to Jack, who might as well have come out from under stones, so bruised he was. Once I asked him why he was so marked, and he said he helped his father work a claim and it was hard work and not for layabouts. I told him I worked hard, too, but not in a way that turned me black and blue. After that, for a time Jack didn’t speak to me. I had made some mistake I didn’t understand. But then I gave him my turn to ring the school bell at the end of the day, and that made him happy.
