When Ghosts Come Home

by Wiley Cash

  Terry had told them both that girls liked MD 20/20, which he called Mad Dog, especially Banana Red and Electric Melon. Terry had told them both that if a girl drank Mad Dog, she’d let you kiss her and touch her wherever you wanted to touch her. Jay had never kissed a girl before, and he didn’t know what to think about that advice, but Kelvin said he’d kissed a bunch of girls, and he knew that what Terry was saying was true. Kelvin said he’d hooked up with Robin Francis, a tall, skinny girl with buck teeth and braces who lived down the street from him. He’d told Jay they’d take the Mad Dog to Robin’s house next time she had a friend over. He’d said Jay would see.

  “I’ll take Robin,” Kelvin had said, “depending on what friend she’s got with her.”

  “I ain’t kissing Robin,” Jay had said, mostly to sound defiant, but also because he couldn’t imagine kissing anyone, much less someone taller than him with braces on their teeth. “I don’t want those big old buck-toothed braces in my mouth, clacking against my teeth.”

  Kelvin had laughed. “Come on, man,” he’d said. “Pecking on those teeth is just like pecking on a typewriter.” He raised his hands as if placing his fingers on the keyboard, and he began typing. “Click, click, click, ding!” he’d said. At that sound he thrust his hips forward before beginning to type again. Jay had laughed. “Come on, man,” Kelvin had said again. “You’re going to love it.”

  Alone in his bed at night, Jay had stared up at the ceiling, listening to the sound of the Braves game on the television in the living room, the squeak of his father’s leather recliner as he leaned toward the side table and poured salted peanuts into his hand from the jar of Planters he always kept there. Later, he would hear the clap of his mother closing her book and getting up from the sofa to go into their bedroom, his father following behind her not long after. Once the house had gone quiet, Jay had lain there and imagined kissing Robin Francis, her breath warm and sweet with what Terry had promised would be the fruitiness of the Mad Dog, her braces shiny and sharp. Click, click, click, ding! he’d thought.

  But once he was inside Mr. Wright’s store, all the doubts he’d had about Kelvin’s plan, his story of kissing Robin Francis, and the promise of the sugary sweetness of the MD 20/20 and all the things Terry had said it would get the girls to do, suddenly rose up in his chest like a sickness he feared would spill from his mouth.

  After Jay had made his way to the back of the store and was standing in front of the drink cooler as if unable to decide what kind of soda to choose, he’d looked up at the convex circular mirror that hung above him in the corner of the store. In the mirror, he could see Kelvin standing by the magazine rack as if having the same trouble selecting what to read that Jay was having selecting what to drink. He could also see Mr. Wright in the mirror’s reflection, at least he could see his hands where they rested on the counter by the cash register. From this angle—the angle at which the mirror hung and the angle at which Jay was standing—Mr. Wright’s face was obscured by the bank of cigarettes that hung from the ceiling within easy reach of Mr. Wright’s fingers. Jay had seen him find a pack of cigarettes for a customer without even raising his eyes from where his other hand accepted the bills before pecking away at the cash register and making change once the drawer opened.

  Jay didn’t need to see Mr. Wright’s face to be reminded of what it looked like. He was Jay’s father’s age, good friends with Jay’s father, actually. He had medium brown skin and a thin mustache and a head full of hair. Jay had grown up seeing Mr. Wright and his father and other men from the neighborhood sitting in his parents’ driveway beneath the carport on Saturday afternoons, smoking cigarettes, telling stories, drinking beer, and talking about whatever it was they were always doing together: bowling or playing cards or fishing; the kinds of things men did when they got off work and got away from wives and kids. Those driveway sessions were just about the only times Jay saw his father smile. He’d even laugh. In fact, sometimes he’d laugh until he cried, tears glistening on his smooth, dark skin, his cap coming off and revealing his bald head whenever he removed it to slap his knee with it or use it to pop one of his friends in the chest as they laughed together, hunched over in their chairs, stomping their feet.

  Jay had stared at the mirror and waited to hear Kelvin’s voice speaking to Mr. Wright to distract him from what they were—from what Jay was—about to do. But Jay stared into the mirror and watched Kelvin just stand there by the magazine rack without saying a word. Mr. Wright’s hands had disappeared from view, and without turning around Jay was unsure of what the man was doing.

  He looked at his own face in the mirror and saw himself for what he was: a lanky, skinny kid with a smooth face, skin and eyes just as dark as his father’s. His face looked scared no matter how much he tried to keep it from appearing that way. He didn’t want to steal from Mr. Wright or drink Mad Dog or feel Robin Francis’s buck teeth and braces in his mouth. But going through with the plan, even if the plan hadn’t quite gone into effect just yet, was easier than saying the truth out loud, especially if he had to say it to Kelvin.

  Jay’s father’s name was James, and Mr. Wright had always called Jay “Little J,” and he’d always called Kelvin “Little K,” although Jay had no idea what Kelvin’s father’s name was. He didn’t know anything about Kelvin’s father aside from the fact that he didn’t live with Kelvin and Terry and their mother. Kelvin didn’t really want to talk about his father, and Jay didn’t push it. He understood. He didn’t want to talk about his own father either.

  It wasn’t that Jay didn’t love his father or that he thought his father didn’t love him: quite the opposite. Jay knew he was loved, especially by his mother in her quiet, gentle way. She was a librarian, and throughout his life Jay would think of libraries when he thought of his mother: the fresh, clean smell of books in their bindings; the whispered voices; the confidence that whatever you needed or wanted could be found provided you had the time and the patience to wait for an adult to find it or to look for it on your own.

  Jay’s father’s love was different, grumbling and marked by qualifiers like “because” and “but.” Boy, I’m doing this because I love you and Son, I love you, but. Jay’s sister, Janelle, had already been everything he knew his father now wanted him to be—smart in school, good at sports, self-possessed and certain—and by the time Jay was born, when Janelle was almost thirteen years old, Jay figured his father had spent one whole childhood confident that he had done the best he could and had, in fact, done well. And then Jay came along, and his father just didn’t know if he could do it again. It’s not that his father was an old man; he was only forty-eight, not that that really meant anything to Jay. But he did seem old. While other parents listened to Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie, Jay’s father listened to the Temptations, the Platters, and the Supremes and kept the radio on all day in the carport, especially when his buddies were over, telling their stories on Saturday afternoons.

  Jay lifted his right hand and put it on the handle of the glass door that covered the refrigerated drinks. He kept it there for a moment, his fingers closed tight around the handle, waiting to hear Mr. Wright call out from the front of the store: “Little J, what you doing back there?” But he heard Kelvin’s voice instead.

  “Mr. Wright,” Kelvin said, “how much is this magazine?”

  “Which one?” Mr. Wright asked. Jay had wanted to look up into the mirror again, but doing so would’ve required him to step away from the cooler, and he was already standing in front of it, had his hand on it, in fact, and he knew he couldn’t turn back now without drawing attention to himself.

  “Which one?” Mr. Wright asked again.

  “This one here,” Kelvin’s voice said.

  “What’s that, a MAD magazine?”

  “Yes, sir,” Kelvin said.

  Jay opened the cooler door, felt its cold air pour out and wrap itself around his fingers. He stepped forward and let the opened door rest against his right hip. He reached for a bottle of Mad Dog wit
h each hand. He grabbed one of Banana Red and another bottle—he was never able to discover what kind—and then he lifted the front of his shirt and stuffed the bottles into the waistband of his jeans. His hands were shaking, and he was trying to unfasten his belt and cinch it tighter when Kelvin shouted, “Thriller! Thriller!” before Jay heard the crash of the door being slammed open and the bell atop it being rung and the sound of Kelvin’s feet pounding across the sidewalk and into the parking lot at a sprint.

  Jay had turned away from the cooler, his hands jostling the bottles stuck in his waistband, and made a break for the door. He ran up the aisle by the front windows, his peripheral vision noting the shape of Mr. Wright as he came out from behind the counter. Jay had his shoulder against the door when he felt Mr. Wright’s powerful grip clench itself around his left forearm. He pulled Jay back toward him, and Jay let go of the bottles, which had worked themselves up from his waist to his stomach, where he’d clutched them to his body. One of the bottles came loose and shattered on the linoleum, splashing neon pink liquid across the floor and all over Jay’s and Mr. Wright’s pants.

  “Jesus,” Mr. Wright said, momentarily relinquishing his grip on Jay’s arm.

  Jay felt the slackening of Mr. Wright’s fingers, and he tore his arm free and stepped toward the door, but his shoe slipped on the wet floor, and he found himself on his back, flailing in the nauseatingly scented liquor and bits of broken glass. Mr. Wright bent down and helped him to his feet, his strong fingers once again closed around Jay’s arm.

  “Come on, Little J,” he’d said. “Come on. Let’s stand you up.”

  The first call Mr. Wright had made had been to Jay’s mother.

  “I should call the police,” he’d said to Jay, the phone pressed to his ear while he waited for someone at the library’s circulation desk to answer. Jay, the back of his shirt and blue jeans soaked through with Mad Dog, sat on the wooden stool Mr. Wright kept behind the counter. Mr. Wright stood, his back leaning against the window that looked out on the gas pumps and the otherwise empty parking lot. “You better be glad I know your daddy,” he’d said. “And you’d better be glad I ain’t calling him right now.”

  But Mr. Wright had ended up calling Jay’s father anyway because his mother had been in a meeting and wasn’t able to leave work to come pick him up, and Mr. Wright refused to let him leave the store without talking to one of his parents. But he’d looked just as worried about calling Jay’s father as Jay was. His father worked as a mechanic for DeKalb County, and Jay pictured his father being called out from under one of the county’s cars that he had up on a lift, tools in hand. Jay knew his father would raise his head at the sound of his name, set down his tools, and wipe his hands on the towel he always kept hanging out of his back pocket regardless of whether he was at work or at home. He would walk across the garage, pick up the phone, clear his throat, and then have one of his best buddies tell him about the awful thing his only son had just done.

  “J,” Mr. Wright said, “it’s Connie down at the store. I got Jay here with me. I’m going to let him talk to you.”

  Jay had refused to turn rat on Kelvin, even though he knew that Mr. Wright knew that the boys had been in it together, even though he knew that Mr. Wright would tell his father exactly what had happened.

  And that was why Kelvin’s comment—the one about white folks eating him—really pissed Jay off.

  “Man, it’s your damn fault I got in trouble with my pops.”

  “Shoot,” Kelvin had said. “Nobody held no gun to your head. Nobody told you to drop that bottle and make it look like you pissed yourself with Mad Dog.” They’d been having this same argument for weeks since the event, but the part about Jay pissing was new.

  “You shouldn’t have run out on me,” Jay said. “A friend wouldn’t have done that.”

  “He was coming.”

  “He was coming because you acted a fool and hollered crazy shit and ran out.”

  “Shoot,” Kelvin said.

  “If you’d have stayed cool, we’d have been sipping on that Mad Dog with Robin and one of her girls, and then ‘you-know-what.’ But you acted a fool instead.”

  “Shoot,” Kelvin said again.

  But Jay couldn’t imagine it, neither the “you-know-what” nor the sipping on the syrupy, caustic-smelling liquor. The smell of it had baked itself into his nose, and no matter how many times he had washed his clothes he’d still been able to smell it, and that seemed fitting, because the smell of the Mad Dog made his stomach feel the exact way the memory of that day still made him feel: sick, nauseated, alone.

  The ride home in his father’s truck had been quiet and uncomfortable.

  “Can’t believe you’d steal from Connie like a damn thug” was all his father had said. Instead of saying more, he’d lit a Winston Light and cracked the driver’s-side window. The only other thing he’d said was when Jay had turned the radio on, the tinny jangle of the oldies station crackling through the truck’s old speakers. “Turn that off,” his father had said. So Jay had turned it off.

  The decision had been made swiftly and quietly and without Jay’s input. His mother and father had been planning a trip to North Carolina in June to see their new grandbaby for the first time, and while Jay had never been left home alone and figured he was expected to go along, he knew for certain they would not leave him home alone now after what had happened. And then, one morning a few days before school let out for the summer, Jay and his father were sitting at the breakfast table when his father closed the newspaper and looked across the table at Jay, where he sat pushing scrambled eggs around on his plate with a piece of toast that had nearly gone soft.

  “Go ahead and pack you a good suitcase for when we go to Janelle’s,” his father had said.

  “What’s that mean?” Jay asked.

  “You’re going to be staying awhile.”

  Jay looked to his mother where she stood at the counter with her back to them. She was pouring coffee into a thermos for his father’s lunch.

  “Mom,” Jay said.

  “Listen to your father,” she said.

  Jay turned back to his father. “How long?” he asked.

  “Long enough to learn not to steal,” his father had said. He sat back and crossed his legs, flicked the newspaper open again. “Or until I can find Kelvin and kill him.”

  “James, it took two to tango,” Jay’s mother said. She had turned around, and she was standing with her arms folded, looking at Jay’s father. “Kelvin’s not one bit more guilty than Jay is.”

  “I bet he ain’t being sent out to the country,” Jay had said.

  “You probably right,” his father had said. “And that’s why you’d better thank God you ain’t Kelvin.”

  “It ain’t fair,” Jay said. He tossed the toast on his plate and slammed his back against his chair.

  His father closed the newspaper slowly, deliberately, as if he was putting off something he either didn’t want to do or perhaps wanted to relish. “Boy, you break that chair I’m going to break your ass.” He laid the newspaper across his knee, raised his closed fist so Jay could see it. “I’ve got three jobs when it comes to you, and ain’t none of them to be fair to you.” He unfurled his index finger. “Job number one: Keep you safe, which also means keeping you alive. Job number two.” He extended his middle finger. “Keep you healthy: Feed you. Give you a roof. Keep clothes on your back.” His ring finger slid free next. “Three: Keep you happy.” He sat back in his chair and picked up the newspaper. “And I ain’t really interested in keeping you happy anymore.”

  “It still ain’t fair,” Jay said.

  His father set the newspaper by his hat where it rested on the table. He stood. Jay inhaled deeply as if his body were warning him that he may need extra oxygen for flight. His father had never hurt him, but Jay had never done anything this bad. He could remember his father whacking him on the back of his legs with a belt when he was a young boy, but it had never really hurt, and even then Jay knew
those punishments were designed to instill fear instead of pain. But now, if his father hit him, with either an open hand or a closed fist or a belt, pain would be the only goal.

  His father loomed above him.

  “Your mother and I work too hard to worry about what you think is fair. Connie Wright works too hard to think about it too. You have stolen from all of us, Jay, and we are deeply, deeply ashamed of you.” He stood there for a moment, and Jay feared he would say more. But instead of speaking he raised his hand and touched the breast pocket of his county work shirt as if making sure his packet of cigarettes was where it always was, alongside his various pens and a shiny, metal tire pressure gauge. He snatched his hat from the table and slapped it onto his head.

  His father picked up his lunchbox from the counter and walked out of the kitchen, but Jay could hear the crinkling plastic of the pack of cigarettes as his father shook one loose, followed by the sound of a lighter being struck. His father opened the front door and stepped outside, leaving behind a nearly undetectable remnant of smoke. Jay heard him start his truck and back out of the driveway.

  His mother was still standing with her back against the counter, arms still folded across her chest. When Jay looked into her eyes, he knew what his father had said about his being deeply ashamed was true for his mother as well.

  What Jay also discovered to be true was that his parents did not care about whether or not he was happy, because the prospect of living out in the country in Southport, North Carolina, did not make him happy.

  As to their visit, his parents only stayed at Rodney and Janelle’s house for a long weekend before heading back to Atlanta without him, although Jay knew his mother had wanted to stay longer to make sure Janelle and the baby were settled, but his father had never been one for vacations, which really meant that he’d never been one to allow himself to take any time off work, and by Saturday he was openly questioning whether or not he and Jay’s mother should just leave on Sunday afternoon instead of Monday morning.