20th Century Ghosts

by Joe Hill

  “Be quiet! Shut up! Stop it! No more!” I hit the vent a couple good shots with the book, too—clang! whang! A screw pops out of one corner and the whole vent falls loose at one side, but no luck—not only does it still whine but now it is also sometimes producing a delicate buzz, as if a piece of metal somewhere inside has been knocked loose and is shuddering a little. A cool wetness trickles at the edge of my mouth. I suck spit and give one last helpless look at the busted vent, and then I go into the living room with my fingers jamming my ears to get away from it, but the whine is whining even worse in there. There is no place to go and the fingers in my ears are no help.

  The sound drives me into my father’s bedroom.

  “Dad,” I say and wipe my chin on my shoulder—my jaw is slathered in spit—and go on, “Dad, can I sleep with you?”

  “Huh? Okay. I got the farts, though. Watch out.”

  I scramble into his bed and pull the sheets over me. In his room too there is of course the thin piercing whine.

  “Are you all right?” he asks.

  “The air conditioner. The air conditioner has a noise. It’s hurting my teeth. I couldn’t find how to turn it off.”

  “Switch is in the living room. Right by the front door.”

  “I’ll go get it,” I say and I skitter to the edge of the bed.

  “Hey,” he says and clasps my upper arm. “You better not. This is Chicago in June. It was a hundred and three today. It’ll get too stuffy. I mean it, we’ll die in here.”

  “But I can’t listen to it. Do you hear it? Do you hear the way it’s making that noise? It hurts my teeth. It’s as bad as when people crunch tinfoil, Dad, it’s as bad as that.”

  “Yeah,” he replies. He falls quiet and for a long moment seems to be listening to it himself. Then he says, “You’re right. The air conditioner in this place sucks. It’s a necessary evil, though. We’ll suffocate in here like bugs screwed into a jar if we don’t have air conditioning.”

  It has a steadying effect on me, the sound of his talk. Also, although when I climbed into the bed, the sheets had that crisp hotel room cold to them, by now I have warmed back up, and I’m not shivering so badly anymore. I feel better, although there are still the steady shoots of pain going through my jaw and up into my eardrums and then into my head. He has the farts, too, just as he warned me, but somehow even the reeky yellow smell of them, even that seems vaguely reassuring.

  “All right,” he decides. “Here’s what we’ll do. Come on.”

  He slips out of bed. I follow him through the dark to the bathroom. He clicks on the light. The bathroom is a vast expanse of beige-colored marble, and the sink has golden faucets, and in the corner is a shower with a door of rippled glass. It is pretty much the hotel bathroom of your dreams. By the sink is a collection of little bottles of shampoo and conditioner and skin lotion and boxes of soaps, a plastic jar of Q-tips, another of cotton balls. My father pops open the jar of cotton balls and crams one into each ear. I giggle at the sight of him—the sight of him standing there with a loose fluff of cotton hanging out of his big sunburned ears.

  “Here,” he said. “Put some of this in.”

  I force a few cotton balls deep into my ears. With the cotton in place, the world fills with a deep, hollow rushing roar. My roar, a steady flow of my own personal sound, a sound I find exceedingly pleasant.

  I look at my father. He says, “Homkhmy chmn yhmu sthmll hhmhrmr thrm hrrr chmndhuthmmnhar?”

  “What?” I yell happily.

  He nods and makes an O with his thumb and index finger and we both go back to bed, which is what I mean about how my father deals really well with my issues. We both have a great night of sleep and the next morning my dad makes room service bring us cans of fruit salad and a can opener for breakfast.

  NOT EVERYONE OUT there deals so well with my problems, case in point my aunt Mandy.

  Aunt Mandy has tried her hand at a lot of things, but none of it has gone anywhere. Mom and Dad helped to pay for her to go to art school because she thought she was going to be a photographer for a while. After she gave that up, they also helped her start an art gallery in Cape Cod, but like Aunt Mandy says, it never gelled, it didn’t come together, the click never clicked. She went to film school in L.A., and had a cup of coffee as a screenwriter—no dice. She married a man she thought was going to be a novelist, but he turned out to just be an English teacher, and furthermore not a very happy one, and Aunt Mandy had to pay him alimony for a little while, so even being a married person didn’t come together so well.

  What Aunt Mandy would say about it is that she’s still trying to figure out what it is she’s supposed to be. What my father would say is Mandy is wrong if she thinks the question hasn’t been answered yet—she already is the person she was always sure to become. It’s like Brad McGuane, who was the right-fielder when my father took over managing the Team, who is a lifetime .292 batter but who only hits about .200 with men in scoring position and has never had a postseason hit, in spite of about twenty-five at-bats the last time he got to the playoffs. He’s a meltdown case—that’s what my father calls him. McGuane has drifted from team to team to team and people keep hiring him because of his good numbers in general and because they think someone with such a good bat is bound to develop, but what they don’t see is that he did develop, and this is what he developed into. His click already clicked and it sure seems that there are not many fresh clicks out there for those sweet young men who find themselves in the game of baseball, or for middle-aged women either who marry the wrong people and who are never happy doing what they’re doing but can only think of what else the world has to offer that might be better, or for any of us really, which I suppose is what I’m afraid of in my own case, since I think it’s pretty clear despite what Dr. Faber says about it that I’m not really a lot better but actually about the same as I’ve ever been which we all can safely say is not the ideal.

  Needless to say, as you would guess based on their differences of philosophy and world view, et al., Aunt Mandy and my father don’t really like each other, although they pretend otherwise for my mother’s sake.

  Mandy and I went up to North Altamont just the two of us on a Sunday, because Mom thought I had spent too much of the summer at the park. What really bothered her was that The Team had been pounded five straight and Mom was worried I was getting all wound up about it. She was right as far as that goes. The losing streak was really getting to me. The leak had never leaked so much as during the last homestand.

  I don’t know why North Altamont. When Aunt Mandy talks about it, she always talks about going up to “do Lincoln Street,” as if Lincoln Street in North Altamont is one of those famous places everyone knows about and always means to do, the way when people are passing through Florida they do Walt Disney World, or when they’re in New York City they do a Broadway show. Lincoln Street is pretty, though, in a quiet little New England township kind of way. It’s on a steep hill, and the road is made of brick, and no cars are allowed, although people walk horses right up the middle, and there are occasional dry, green horse-turd pies scattered over the road. I mean—scenic.

  We visit a series of poorly lit patchouli-smelling shops. We go into one store where they’re hawking bulky sweaters made out of Vermont-bred llama wool, and there’s this music playing down low, some kind of music that incorporates flutes, blurred harpsichord sounds, and the shrill whistles of birds. In another store we peruse the work of local artisans—glistening ceramic cows, their pink ceramic udders waving beneath them as they leap over ceramic moons—while from the store’s sound-system comes the reedy choogling of the Grateful Dead.

  After a dozen stores I’m bored of it. I have been sleeping badly all week—nightmares, plus the shivers, and so on—and all the walking around has made me tired and grouchy. It doesn’t help my mood that the last place we go into, an antique shop in a renovated carriage house, has on neither New Age music or hippie music, but more awful sounds yet—the Sunday game. Here is n
o store-wide sound-system, only a little tabletop stereo on the front desk. The proprietor, an old man in bib overalls, listens to the game with his thumb stuck in his mouth. In his eyes is a stunned, hopeless daze.

  I hang around by the desk to listen in and find out what all the misery is about. We’re at the plate. Our first guy pops out to left, and our second guy pops out to right. Hap Diehl comes up planning to swing and racks up a couple strikes in practically no time.

  “Hap Diehl has been just atrocious with the lumber lately,” says the announcer. “He’s hitting an excruciating .160 over the last eight days, and when do you have to start questioning Ernie’s decision to leave him in there day after day, when he’s just getting killed at the plate. Partridge sets now and delivers and—oh, Hap Diehl swung at a bad one, I mean bad, a fastball that was a mile over his head—wait, he fell over, I actually think he’s hurt—”

  Aunt Mandy says we’ll walk down to Wheelhouse Park and have a picnic. I’m used to city parks, open grassy areas with asphalt paths and Rollerblading girls in spandex. Wheelhouse Park is dimmer somehow than a city park, crowded with great old New England firs. The paths are of Rollerblade-unfriendly blue gravel. No playground. No tennis courts. No ballpark. Only the mysterious pine-sweet gloom—in under the overspreading branches of the Christmas trees there is no real direct sunshine—and the sometimes gentle swoosh of wind. We pass no one.

  “There’s a good place to sit up ahead,” my aunt says. “Just over this cute little covered bridge.”

  We approach a clearing, although even here the light is somehow obscured and dimmish. The path wanders unevenly to a covered bridge suspended only a yard above a wide, slow-moving river. On the other side of the bridge is a grassy sward with some benches in it.

  One look and I am not a fan of this covered bridge, which sags obviously in the middle. Once a long time ago the bridge was a firetruck red, but rot and rain have stripped most of the paint away and there has been no effort to touch up, and the wood revealed is dried-out, splintery, and untrustworthy in character. Inside the tunnel is a scatter of garbage bags, ruptured and spilling litter. I hesitate an instant and in that time Aunt Mandy plunges on ahead. I straggle along behind with such a lack of enthusiasm that she is soon across, and I have not even gone in.

  At the entrance I pause once more. Sickly sweet smells: the smell of rot and fungus. A narrow track passes between the heaps of garbage bags. I am disconcerted by the smell and the sewer gloom, but Aunt Mandy is on the other side, indeed, already gone on out of my direct view, and it makes me nervous to think of being left behind. I hurry on.

  What happens next, though, is I get only a few yards, and then take a deep breath and what I smell makes me stop walking all at once and stick in place, unable to go on. What I have noticed is a rodent smell, a heated dandruffy rodent smell, mixed with a whiff of ammonia, a smell like I have smelled before in attics and basements, a rank bat stink. Suddenly I’m imagining a ceiling covered with bats. I imagine tipping my head back and seeing a colony of thousands of bats covering the roof in a squirming surface of brown-furred bodies, torsos wrapped in membrane-thin wings. I imagine the faint bat squeaks so like the sub-audible squeak of bad air conditioners and VCRs on rewind. I imagine bats, but cannot make myself glance up to look for them. The fright would kill me if I saw one. I take a few tense mincing steps forward and put my foot down on some ancient newspaper. There is an unfortunate crunch. I jump back, the sound giving my heart a stiff wrench in my chest.

  My foot comes down on something, a log maybe, that rolls beneath my heel. I totter backwards, wheeling my arms about to catch my balance, and at last manage to steady myself without falling over. I twist around to look at whatever it is I just stepped on.

  It is not a log at all but a man’s leg. A man lays on his side in a drift of leaves. He wears a filthy baseball cap—Our Team’s cap, once dark blue, but now faded almost white around the rim where it is blotched by dried salts left by old sweats—and denim jeans, and a lumberjack’s plaid shirt. His beard has leaves in it. I stare down at him, the first thrill of panic shooting through me. I just stepped on him—and he didn’t wake up.

  I stare at his face and like in the comic books I am tingling with horror. A little flicker of movement catches my eye. I see a fly crawling on his upper lip. The fly’s body gleams like an ingot of greased metal. It hesitates at the corner of his mouth, then climbs in and disappears and he does not wake up.

  I shriek; no other word for it. I turn and run back to my side of the bridge where I shriek myself hoarse for Mandy.

  “Aunt Mandy, come back! Come back right now!”

  In a moment, she appears at the far end of the bridge.

  “What are you screaming your head off for?”

  “Aunt Mandy, come back, come back, please!” I suck at some drool. For the first time I am aware of drool all down my chin.

  She starts across the bridge, coming at me with her head lowered as if she were walking into a bitter wind. “You can stop that screaming right now. Just stop! What are you yelling about?”

  I point. “Him! Him!”

  She stops a quarter of the way across and looks at the stiff old goner lying there in the garbage. She stares at him for a few seconds, and then says, “Oh. Him. Well, come on. He’ll be all right, Homer. You let him mind his business and we’ll mind ours.”

  “No, Aunt Mandy, we have to go! Please come back, please!”

  “I’m not going to listen to a second more foolishness. Come over here.”

  “No!” I scream. “No, I won’t!”

  I pivot and run, the panic swelling through me, sick to my stomach, sick of the garbage smell and the bats and the dead man and the terrible crunch of old newspaper, the stink of bat piss, the way Hap Diehl was swinging at shit and Our Team was going into the toilet just like last year, and I run gushing tears, and wiping miserably at the spit on my face, and finding that no matter how hard I sobbed I could hardly get any air into my lungs.

  “Stop it!” Mandy hollers when she catches up to me. She throws our bagged lunch aside to have both hands free. “You stop it! Jesus—shut up!”

  She captures me around the waist. I flail about, shrieking, not wanting to be lifted, not wanting to be handled. I snap back an elbow that cracks sharply against a bony eye socket. She cries out and we both go staggering to the ground, Mandy on top of me. Her chin clouts the top of my skull. I scream at the sharp little flash of pain. Her teeth clack together and she gasps, and her grip goes loose. I leap and almost get free but she grabs me with both hands by the elastic band of my shorts.

  “Goddamn it, you stop!”

  My face glows with an infernal heat. “No! No I won’t go back I won’t go back let me go!”

  I surge forward again, coming off the ground like a runner jumping from the blocks and suddenly, in an instant, I am out from under her and tramping full-speed up the path, listening to her squall behind me.

  “Homer!” she squalls. “Homer, come back here right now!”

  I have gone almost all the way back to Lincoln Street when I feel a gush of cool air between my legs and look down and observe for the first time how it is that I have escaped. She had been holding me by the shorts, and I have come right out of them—shorts, Mark McGwire Underoos, and all. I look down at my male equipment, pink and smooth and small, jouncing from thigh to thigh as I run. The sight of all this bareness below gives me an unexpected rush of exhilaration.

  She catches me again halfway to the car on Lincoln Street. A crowd watches while she yanks me off my feet by my hair and we wrestle together on the ground.

  “Sit down, you weird shit!” she shouts. “You crazy little asshole!”

  “Fat bitch whore!” I yell. “Parasitic capitalist!”

  Well, no. But along those lines.

  I DON’T KNOW but it might be that what happened up at Wheelhouse Park was the last straw, because two weeks later, when The Team is taking an off-day, the folks and me are driving to Vermont t
o tour a boarding school called Biden Academy that my mom wants us to look at. She tells me it’s a prep school, but I’ve seen the brochure, which is full of code words—special needs, stable environment, social normalization—so I know what kind of school we’re really going to look at.

  A young man in a worn blue shirt, jeans, and hiking boots meets us on the steps in front of Main Building. He introduces himself as Archer Grace. He’s with admissions. He’s going to show us around. Biden Academy is in the White Mountains. The breeze swishing in the pines has a brisk chill to it, so that although it is August, the afternoon has the exciting, chilly feel of World Series time. Mr. Grace takes us on a stroll around the campus. We look at a couple of brick buildings smothered in fresh green ivy. We look inside at empty classrooms. We walk through an auditorium with dark wood paneling and a bunch of heavy crimson curtains hanging around. At one side of the room is a bust of Benjamin Franklin chiseled in milky blond marble. At the other, a bust of Martin Luther King in dark onyxlike stone. Ben is scowling across the room at the reverend, who looks as if he has just woken up and is still puffy with sleep.