20th Century Ghosts

by Joe Hill

  He turned, took Max’s arm and thrust him towards the top of the steps.

  “No!” Rudy screamed, getting up, lunging for the stairs.

  The handle of the hatchet got caught between his feet, though, and he tripped on it, crashed to his knees. He got back up, but by then their father was pushing Max through the door at the top of the staircase, following him through. He slammed it behind them. Rudy hit the other side a moment later, as their father was turning that silver key in the lock.

  “Please!” Rudy cried. “I’m scared! I’m scared! I want to come out!”

  Max stood in the kitchen. His ears were ringing. He wanted to say stop it, open the door, but couldn’t get the words out, felt his throat closing. His arms hung at his sides, his hands heavy, as if cast from lead. No—not lead. They were heavy from the things in them. The mallet. The stakes.

  His father panted for breath, his broad forehead resting against the shut door. When he finally stepped back, his hair was scrambled, and his collar had popped loose.

  “You see what he make me do?” he said. “Your mother was also so, just as unbending and hysterical, just as in need of firm instruction. I tried, I—”

  The old man turned to look at him, and in the instant before Max hit him with the mallet, his father had time to register shock, even wonder. Max caught him across the jaw, a blow that connected with a bony clunk, and enough force to drive a shivering feeling of impact up into his elbow. His father sagged to one knee, but Max had to hit him again to sprawl him on his back.

  Abraham’s eyelids sank as he began to slide into unconsciousness, but they came up again when Max sat down on top of him. His father opened his mouth to say something, but Max had heard enough, was through talking, had never been much when it came to talk anyway. What mattered now was the work of his hands; work he had a natural instinct for, had maybe been born to.

  He put the tip of the stake where his father had showed him and struck the hilt with the mallet. It turned out it was all true, what the old man had told him in the basement. There was wailing and profanity and a frantic struggle to get away, but it was over soon enough.

  BETTER THAN HOME

  My father is on the television about to be thrown out of a game again. I can tell. Some of the fans watching at Tiger Stadium know too and they’re making rude, happy noises about it. They want him to be thrown out. They’re looking forward to it.

  I know he’s going to be thrown out because the home plate umpire is trying to walk away from him but my father is following him everywhere he goes. My father has all the fingers of his right hand stuck down the front of his pants, while the left gestures angrily in the air. The announcers are chattering happily away to tell everyone watching at home about what my father is trying to tell the umpire that the umpire is working so hard not to hear.

  “You just had an idea from the way things were going that emotions were sure to boil over sooner rather than later,” says one of the announcers.

  My aunt Mandy laughs nervously. “Jessica, you might want to see this. Ernie is getting himself all worked up.”

  My mother steps into the kitchen doorway and sees what is happening on the television and leans against the doorframe with her arms crossed.

  “I can’t watch,” Mandy says. “This is so upsetting.”

  Aunt Mandy is at one end of the couch. I’m at the other, with my feet under me and my heels pressed into my buttocks. I’m rocking back and forth. I can’t stay still. Something in me just needs to rock. My mouth is open and doing the thing it does when I’m nervous. I don’t even know I’m doing it until I feel the warm dribbling wetness at the corner of my mouth. When I’m tense, and my mouth is stretched open like that, water runs out at the corner and eventually leaks down my chin. When I’m wired up tight with nerves like I am now, I spend a lot of time making these little sucking sounds, sucking the spit back into my head.

  The third-base umpire, Comins, inserts himself between my father and Welkie, the home-plate umpire, allowing Welkie the chance to slip off. My father could just step around Comins, but he does not. This is an unexpected positive development, a sign the worst may yet be averted. His mouth is opening and closing, the left hand waving, and Comins is listening and smiling and shaking his head in a way that is good-natured and understanding yet firm. My father is unhappy. Our Team is losing four to one. Detroit has a rookie throwing the ball, a man who has never won a major league game in his life, a man who has in fact lost all five of his starts so far, but in spite of his well-established mediocrity he now has eight strike-outs in only five innings. My father is unhappy about the last strike-out, which came on a checked swing. He’s unhappy because Welkie called it a strike without looking at the third-base umpire to see if the batter checked his swing or not. That’s what he’s supposed to do, but he didn’t do it.

  But Welkie didn’t need to check with Comins down at third base. It was obvious the batter, Ramon Diego, let the head of the bat fly out over the plate, and then tried to snap it back with a flick of his wrists, to fool the umpire into thinking he didn’t swing, but he did swing, everyone saw him swing, everyone knows he was fooled on a sinker that almost skipped off the dirt in front of home plate, everyone except for my father, that is.

  At last my father says a few final words to Comins, turns, and starts back to the dugout. He’s halfway there, almost free and clear, when he pivots and hollers a fare-thee-well to home-plate umpire Welkie. Welkie has his back to him. Welkie is bent over to brush the plate off with his little sweeper, his broad asscheeks spread apart, his not inconsiderable rear pointed my father’s way.

  Whatever it is my father shouts, Welkie wheels around and goes up on one foot in a jiggling fat man’s hop and punches his finger into the air. My father whips his cap into the dirt and comes back to home plate in a loping run.

  When it happens the first thing that goes insane is my father’s hair. It has spent six innings trapped in his hat. When it springs out it is lathered in sweat. The gusting wind in Detroit catches it and messes it all around. One side is flattened and the other side is sticking up as if he slept on it wet. Hair is pasted damp against the sunburned and sweaty back of his neck. Hair blowing around as he screams.

  Mandy says, “Oh my God. Look at him.”

  “Yes. I see,” says my mother. “Another shining moment for the Ernie Feltz highlight reel.”

  Welkie crosses his arms over his chest. He has no more to say and regards my father with hooded eyes. My father kicks loose dirt over his shoes. Again Comins tries to get in between them, but my father kicks loose dirt at him. My father rips off his jacket and hurls it on the field. Then he kicks that. He kicks it up the third-base line. Then he picks it up and tries to throw it in the outfield, though it only goes a few feet. Some Tigers have collected out on the pitcher’s mound. Their second baseman quickly puts his glove over his mouth so my father will not see him laughing. He turns his face into the loose group of men, his shoulders trembling.

  My father leaps into the dugout. Stacked on the wall of the dugout are three towers of waxed Gatorade cups. He hits them with both hands and they explode across the grass. He does not touch the Gatorade coolers themselves, which some of the guys will be wanting to drink from, but he does take a batting helmet by the bill and he flips it out over the grass where it bounces, and rolls to the third-base bag. My insane father screams something more to Welkie and Comins and then crosses the dugout and goes down some steps and is gone. Except he isn’t gone, he is suddenly once more at the top of the steps like the thing in the hockey mask in all those movies, the wretched creature you keep thinking has been destroyed and put out of the picture and his misery, but who always lurches back into things anyway to kill and kill again, and he pulls an armful of bats out of one of the deep cubbyholes for bats and throws the whole crashing heap of wood onto the grass. Then he stands there screaming and shouting with spit flying and eyes watering. The bat boy has by this time retrieved my father’s jacket and brought it
to the dugout steps, but is afraid to come any closer, so my father has to climb up to him and yank it from his hands. He shouts a last round of endearments and puts his jacket on inside out with the tag waving at the back of his neck and disappears now once and for all. I let out an unsteady breath that I didn’t know I was holding.

  “That was quite the episode,” says my aunt.

  “Time for that bath, kid,” says my mother, coming up behind me and pushing her fingers through my hair. “Best part of the game is over.”

  In the bedroom I strip to my underwear. I start down the hall for the bathroom but when the phone rings I veer into my parents’ bedroom and throw myself belly first on the bed and scoop the phone off the end table.

  “Feltz residence.”

  “Hey, Homer,” my father says. “I had a free minute. I thought I’d give a call and say good night. You watching the game?”

  “Uh-huh,” I say, and suck a little drool.

  It’s not the kind of thing I want him to hear but he hears me anyway. “Are you okay?”

  “It’s my mouth. It’s just doing it. I can’t help it.”

  “Are you getting yourself all tied in knots?”

  “No.”

  “Who are you talking to, honey?” my mother calls out.

  “Dad!”

  “Did you think he broke his swing?” my father asks, shooting it to me point-blank.

  “I wasn’t sure he went around at first, but then I watched it on the replay and you can tell he went.”

  “Oh, shit,” my father says, and then my mother picks up the extension in the kitchen and joins us on the line.

  “Hey,” she says. “It’s a call from the Good Sport.”

  “How’s it going?” my father says. “I had a free second, I thought I’d call up and say good night to the kid.”

  “From where I’m sitting it looks like you ought to have the rest of the evening free.”

  “I’m not going to tell you I think I was appropriate.”

  “Inappropriate, maybe,” she says. “But inspiring, absolutely. One of those special baseball moments that make the human spirit sing. Like seeing someone jack a big home-run, or hearing the third strike smack into the catcher’s glove. There’s just something a little magical about watching Ernie Feltz calling the umpire a butt-sucking rat-bastard and getting dragged off the field in a straitjacket by the men in white coats.”

  “Okay,” is what he says. “I know. It looked really bad.”

  “It’s something to work on.”

  “Well, goddamn it. I’m sorry. I mean that. No kidding—I am sorry,” he says. “Hey, but will you tell me something?”

  “What?”

  “Did you see the replay? Did it look like he went around to you?”

  THE LEAK I get at the corner of my mouth when I’m feeling tense, that isn’t the only thing I’m struggling with, just one of the more obvious things, which is why I go see Dr. Faber twice a month. Dr. Faber and me get together to talk about strategies for coping with the things that stress me. There are lots of things that stress me; for example, I can’t even look at tin foil without going weak and sick, and the sound of someone crunching tin foil brings on an ill ache that goes all through my teeth and up into my eardrums. Also I can’t stand it when the VCR rewinds. I have to leave the room because of the way the machine sounds when the tape is whining backwards through the spools. And the smell of fresh paint or uncapped Magic Markers—let’s not even talk about it.

  Also nobody likes that I take apart my food to inspect the components. I mostly do this with hamburgers. I was deeply affected by a special I saw on television once about what can happen if you get a bad hamburger. They had E.Coli on; they had mad cow; they even showed a mad cow, wrenching its head to one side and staggering around a pen bawling. When we get hamburgers from Wendy’s, I have my dad unwrap it from the foil for me, and then I lay all the parts out and discard any vegetables that look suspect, and give the patty a good long sniff to make sure it isn’t spoiled. Not once but twice I’ve actually discovered a spoiled one and refused to eat. On both occasions my refusal precipitated a royal screaming match between my mother and me over whether it was really spoiled or not, and of course such meetings of the minds inevitably can end in only one way, with me doing the kicking thing I sometimes do, where I lay on the floor and scream and kick at anyone who tries to touch me, which is one of what Dr. Faber calls my hysterical compulsions. Mostly what I do now is get rid of the hamburger in the trash without discussing it and just eat the roll. It isn’t any pleasure, I can tell you, to have my dietary problems. I hate the taste of fish. I won’t eat pork because pork has little white worms in it that boil out of the raw meat when you pour alcohol on it. What I really like is breakfast cereal. I’d have Kix three times a day if it was up to me. Cans of fruit salad also go over well with me. When I’m at the park I enjoy a bag of peanuts, although I wouldn’t eat a hot dog for all the tea in China (which I wouldn’t want anyway since for me caffeine triggers shrill, hyper behavior and impromptu nosebleeds).

  Dr. Faber’s a good guy. We sit on the floor of his office and play Candy Land and hash it out.

  “I’ve heard crazy before, but that’s just nuts,” my psychiatrist says. “You think McDonald’s would serve spoiled hamburger? They’d lose their shirts! You’d sue their ass!” He pauses to move a piece, then looks up, and says, “You and me, we got to start talking about these miserable feelings that come over you whenever you stick lunch in your mouth. I think you’re blowing things out of proportion. Letting your imagination freak you out. I’ll tell you something else. Let’s say you did get some goofy food, which I claim is very unlikely, because the McDonald’s chain has a vested interest in not getting their asses sued, even if—people do manage to eat some pretty foul stuff without, you know, death.”

  “Todd Dickey, who plays third base for us? He ate a squirrel once,” I say. “For a thousand dollars. It was back when he was in the minors. The team bus crunched it backing up and he ate it. He says people where he’s from just eat them.”

  Dr. Faber stares at me dumbly, his round, pleasant face struck blank with disgust. “Where’s he from?”

  “Minnesota. Pretty much everyone there lives on squirrel. That’s what Todd says. That way they have more money for the important things at the supermarket—like beer and lottery tickets.”

  “He ate it—raw?”

  “Oh no. He fried it. With canned chili. He said it was the easiest money he ever made. The thousand dollars. That’s a lot of money in the minors. Ten different guys had to pony up a hundred dollars apiece. He said it was like getting paid a grand to eat a Whopper.”

  “Right,” he says. “That brings us back to the McDonald’s issue. If Todd Dickey can eat a squirrel he scraped up out of the parking lot—a menu I can’t, as your doctor, recommend—and suffer no ill effects, then you can handle a Big Mac.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  And I see his point. I really do. He’s saying Todd Dickey is a strapping young professional athlete, and here he eats all this awful stuff like squirrel chili and Big Macs that squirt grease when you bite into them and he doesn’t die of mad cow disease. I’m just not going to argue after a certain point. But I know Todd Dickey, and that’s not a guy who is all right. Deep down something’s wrong with him.

  When Todd gets into a game and he’s out on third he does this thing where he’s always pressing his mouth into his glove and it seems like he’s whispering into the palm of it. Ramon Diego, our shortstop and one of my best friends, says that he is whispering. He’s looking at the batter coming to the plate and he’s whispering:

  “Beat ’em or burn ’em. They go up pretty quick. Beat ’em or burn ’em. Or fuck ’em. Either way. Either way beat ’em burn ’em or fuck ’em, fuck ’em, fuck this guy fucking fuck this guy!” Ramon says Todd gets spit all over his glove.

  Also when the guys get talking about all the ball-club groupies they’ve made (I’m not supposed to hear this kind o
f talk but just try being around professional athletes and not catching some of it), Todd, who is one of these big ballplayers for Holy Everlasting Jesus!, listens with a face that seems swollen, and a weird intense look in his eyes, and sometimes without warning the muscles in the left side of his face all at once will start jumping and rippling unnaturally, and he doesn’t even know his face is doing what it’s doing when it’s doing it.

  Ramon Diego thinks he’s weird and so do I. No parking-lot squirrel for me. There’s a difference between being a stone-cold Colt .45–drinking hayseed redneck and being some kind of whispering psycho killer with a degenerative nerve condition in your face.

  MY DAD DEALS really well with all my issues, like the time he took me road-tripping with him and we stayed at the Four Seasons in Chicago for a three-spot with the White Sox.

  We settle into a suite with a big living room, and at one end is a door into his bedroom, and at the other is a door into mine. We stay up until midnight watching a movie on hotel cable. For dinner we order Froot Loops from room service (his idea—I didn’t even ask). He sits slumped low in his chair, naked except for his jockey shorts, and the fingers of his right hand stuck in under the elastic waistband as they always are except in my mother’s presence, watching the television in a drowsy, absentminded sort of way. I don’t remember falling asleep with the movie on. What I remember is that I wake up when he lifts me out of the cool leather couch to haul me into my bedroom, and my face is turned into his chest, and I’m breathing in the good smell of him. I can’t tell you what that smell is, except that it has grass and clean earth in it, and sweat and locker rooms, and also the inherent sweetness of aged, lived-in skin. I bet farmers smell good just the same way.

  After he’s gone I’m laying alone in the dark, as comfortable as can be in my icy nestle of sheets, when for the first time I notice a thin, shrill whine, bad like when someone is rewinding a tape in the VCR. Almost the instant I’m aware of it I receive the first sick pulse in my back teeth. I’m not sleepy anymore—being carried has jostled me partly awake, and the cold sheets have shocked me the rest of the way—so I sit up and listen to the light-starved world around me. The traffic in the street whooshes along and horns bleat from a long distance off. I hold the clock-radio to my ear, but that isn’t what’s doing it. I hoist myself out of bed. On with the light. It has to be the air conditioner. In most hotels the air conditioner is usually a steel cabinet against the wall beneath the window, but not the Four Seasons, which is too good for that. The only air conditioning component I can track down is a slotted gray vent in the ceiling, and standing beneath it I can hear that this is the culprit. The whine is more than I can stand. My eardrums hurt. I snatch a hardcover I’ve been reading out of my tote and stand beneath the vent throwing the book up at it.