When Ghosts Come Home

by Wiley Cash

  “Less traffic on Sunday,” he’d said.

  “No, James” was all his mother had said, not even raising her eyes from the baby’s face where he slept, cradled in her arms.

  Janelle’s husband, Rodney, had sensed his father-in-law’s restlessness and the strain it was putting on Janelle and her mother, so on Sunday, Rodney borrowed a jon boat from a friend and took Jay’s father fishing. Janelle had tried taking the family to the beach on Saturday, but that had been a challenge. The baby had cried in the sticky sand and hot sun, and Jay’s father had sat on a lawn chair, reading a newspaper he had folded into a tiny square to keep it from being rattled loose from his grip and carried away by the wind coming off the ocean, his only concession to his daily wardrobe being the shorts he wore. He still wore his same black work shoes, black socks, and long-sleeved shirt buttoned at the wrists, and, of course, his cap.

  They were the only Black family on the beach that day, and Jay could feel the eyes of the white tourists upon them, and he couldn’t help but remember what Kelvin had joked about white people doing to Black folks out in the country.

  Once he and Rodney had walked down to the ocean and crashed through the breakers and were floating far from the shore, Jay had asked him, “Where are all the Black people at?”

  Rodney had turned back toward the beach, its gray sand littered with pasty white bodies except for the dark clump where Jay’s mother and sister sat on beach towels and his father sat on his chair, fighting against the wind as he turned one of the pages of his newspaper. Rodney laughed and looked back at Jay.

  “Working,” he said. “Or hunting, maybe fishing.” He looked back at the beach. “None of those people on the beach are from here. People from here don’t come to the beach.”

  “What do they do?”

  “I don’t know,” Rodney said. “Same thing you do in Atlanta, I guess,” but Jay knew that couldn’t be true. In Atlanta, he played video games at Kelvin’s house, hung out at the mall, shot hoops on the court that was walking distance from his house. He looked at Rodney, who was now floating on his back, his eyes closed and his arms thrown wide as if welcoming the sunlight. Jay couldn’t imagine Rodney being a kid his age, couldn’t imagine him growing up in a place like this.

  And then Jay’s parents were gone, leaving him behind in a small house with a much older sister, who’d become a mother and who now felt more like a stranger than she ever had before. He was also left with a nephew who made him feel much too young to be called “uncle” and a brother-in-law whose cool, calm distance made him feel younger still.

  It was late June, and while Jay did not know how long he’d be staying with his sister and her family, the fact that Janelle took him to the mall in Wilmington to shop for a backpack and new school shoes gave him a good idea. And then, in early August when classroom assignments were released by the county schools, Rodney drove him over to South Brunswick High School, where his father, a gruff, surly old man who reminded Jay of his own father, had his father worn glasses and gone to college, gave him a long, nearly silent tour of the school.

  There wasn’t much to do during the bright, white-hot August days while Jay waited in dreadful terror for school to start. Rodney left for work at Brunswick Electric early in the morning, and by the time Jay left the guest room, Janelle would’ve already fed the baby and put him down for his first nap of the day. Jay would find bland, unexciting cereal in the pantry and milk in the refrigerator before sitting down at the small kitchen table and pouring himself a cold breakfast.

  Sometimes, Janelle had sat with him while he ate, and she’d ask about life back in Atlanta. How were Mom and Dad? What did he and his friends do when they weren’t robbing convenience stores? What did he like to study in school? Jay understood these questions as honest attempts to know him, but they merely pointed out the gulf in their ages and the fact that the two of them had been raised by two seemingly different sets of parents and that life had been and would be very different for them both as a result.

  In the instances in which he had been at the house alone, Jay had taken the opportunity to explore its contents, which meant he scoured the drawers and shelves in Janelle and Rodney’s bedroom. What he’d found there had embarrassed him: Rodney’s underwear; Janelle’s panties; a pack of condoms; and a bundle of love letters Rodney had written to Janelle that featured descriptions of sex that seemed more real and romantic, and therefore more embarrassing, than anything Terry had described to him and Kelvin back in Atlanta.

  Most often, Jay spent time in Rodney and Janelle’s narrow walk-in closet, where Rodney’s clothes hung on the left and Janelle’s on the right. Above the racks, shelves rose all the way to the ceiling, and it was there, on the top shelf above Rodney’s clothes, that Jay found the rifle.

  It was resting inside a hard, powder-blue case, but Jay knew what lay inside as soon as his fingers swept over the hard, plastic shell that was as finely dimpled as gooseflesh. He found the handle, and he lifted the case down and set it on the floor in the middle of the closet. When he opened it, he caught the scent of the rifle’s oiled metal barrel and its polished stock. The weapon was hard and cold and beautiful, and he imagined Rodney carrying it in the woods around Brunswick County, sighting down a deer or squirrel or rabbit or bear, whatever it was that men like Rodney hunted with a gun like this. Jay had grown up hearing his father tell hunting stories about his life as a country boy down in Norcross, Georgia, and Jay remembered that when Janelle first began dating Rodney, their father felt that he finally had someone with whom to share his stories, someone who would appreciate them in the same way their father did. Jay had felt left out, had felt that Rodney was just one more person who had more in common with Jay’s father than he did, but he’d also been certain that he could’ve never enjoyed hunting the way the two of them did. But now, gazing down at the rifle where it begged to be handled, Jay finally understood. He wanted to load it, aim it, and fire it, but it was weeks before he did any of that. In the meantime, he left the open case on the floor of the closet, never going farther away than Rodney and Janelle’s bed, never pointing the rifle at anything other than the image of himself holding a weapon in the bedroom mirror that hung on the wall above the dresser.

  When his sister had been home, there hadn’t been much for Jay to do aside from riding Rodney’s old bicycle up and down the hot, humid road past old, quiet houses or dribbling his basketball in the driveway, which, thankfully, was paved, unlike so many other driveways in the Grove, many of which were made of gravel and shells or white, powdery sand. He planned on trying out for the basketball team in the fall, aiming for varsity, but planning for JV. Rodney had told him that kids in the county took basketball seriously, but Jay figured none of them could possibly be as good as the kids he’d played against on the playground at school or at the boys’ club in his neighborhood. Even the white kids he’d played against at the YMCA on Saturday afternoons when he could convince his mother or father to drop him off had been good, all of them wanting to be Larry Bird, throwing elbows and camping out on the three-point line and clapping their hands at whoever had the ball.

  Jay had tried to model his game on the swift-footed guards instead of the lumbering post players: Isiah Thomas, Walt Frazier, and even Michael Jordan, the college kid at UNC who’d made a name for himself that spring after sinking the championship-winning shot against Georgetown.

  One hot afternoon when he was out in the driveway dribbling his basketball and thinking about the toll the cement was taking on the soles of his new black Adidas, he paused in his routine and detected the rhythmic thump, thump of a ball being dribbled somewhere close by. Then he heard the unmistakable clang of a ball bouncing around the inside of a rim before falling through the net. He walked to the end of the driveway, his ball held against his hip, and stood there, craning his neck to turn his ears in both directions up and down the otherwise silent street, searching for the source of the sound.

  Since moving into his sister’s house, he had s
een no other kids his age on her street, and he’d grown bored of his loneliness and equally fearful of the possibility of not laying eyes on another boy his age before school began at the end of August.

  A few houses down to his right, their road connected to a perpendicular road that led farther into the community. On his left, the road in front of Janelle’s house continued on past several houses before turning to dirt—sand, really—and disappearing into the woods. The sound of the ball bouncing and hitting against a rim seemed to be coming from that direction, so Jay set out in search of it, his own basketball still held to his hip as if he were holding a baby there.

  The noise grew louder and Jay more certain of its cause when the road turned from asphalt to earth. He had never walked or been driven this far. Up ahead he could see outbuildings and work equipment and cleared land, and he wondered if he’d stumbled upon some kind of farm. He continued walking past pine trees fronted by dense bushes clumped with Virginia creeper and thick, woody vines until a clearing gave way to a small, paved patch of land, where a white boy about Jay’s age stood, sinking bank shots against a wooden backboard on a goal that, just by looking at it, Jay knew was a few inches under regulation height.

  Jay stood there, watching, until the boy must have felt Jay’s eyes on him. He stopped shooting, picked up his old, dusty ball, and turned to face Jay. The boy’s eyes were big and dark; his brown hair was short but grew in a long tuft down the back of his neck. He wore black shorts and a black mesh tank top so dirty with dust that it appeared gray.

  The boy looked at the basketball that Jay held, and he nodded by way of hello. “Want to shoot?” he asked.

  Jay didn’t speak or move. He waited for the boy to turn his back and resume his jump shots, and then he left his spot by the dirt road and walked to the opposite side of the crude half-court from where the white boy stood, still shooting jump shots, the ball bouncing back to him as if its path were preordained.

  Jay took his first shot, and the ball hit just inside the rim and bounced around before popping out.

  “It’s a tight rim,” the boy said. “That’s why I bank them, get them to fall right through.”

  “It’s low too,” Jay said, the first words he’d spoken. “By a couple inches.”

  “Easier to dunk on, though,” the boy said. He hadn’t looked at Jay since inviting him to shoot, and he didn’t look at him now.

  Jay rebounded his shot and dribbled back out. He stopped and looked at the boy. “Can you dunk that?”

  “I might could,” the boy said. He paused and looked over at Jay. “Can you?”

  “I might could get the rim,” Jay said. He set his ball down, and then he stood straight. He charged toward the goal and sprang off his left foot and closed the tips of his fingers around the rim, pulling on it just enough for it to vibrate against the backboard. When he landed, he turned and looked at the boy, expecting something, but he didn’t know what.

  “Want to play 21?” the boy asked.

  “Yeah,” Jay said. “Let’s use my ball.”

  And they did. The boy was strong, stronger than Jay, and surprisingly so given his skinny arms and legs and what his mesh tank top revealed of his bony, bird chest. He was a good shot, but Jay was a little quicker and a better dribbler. But even with those advantages, the boys nearly played one another to a draw, with the competition going to a decisive third game, which the white boy won with free throws that took him to 21.

  The boy’s name was Cody, and he was fifteen and would be going into the tenth grade at South Brunswick, where his mother worked in the school cafeteria, doing what, Jay never asked and was never told. Cody’s father was a handyman of sorts, at least that was what Jay had been able to discern given the tools and unfinished projects strewn about the outside of the trailer where Cody lived with his parents, an only child, much like Jay now felt himself to be.

  They spent the last few weeks of summer in this manner, playing 21, with Cody pretending to be Larry Bird and Jay pretending to be Magic Johnson, which would have been more fun had he had a teammate to pass the ball to. Jay did his best to keep his new Adidas high-tops clean, the ones Janelle had bought for him at the mall using the money his parents had left her, but at least he was breaking them in before the season began, and he figured that, as the new kid on the court at school, it would be more important to be good than look good. Each afternoon, after walking home from Cody’s, Jay would stand at the kitchen sink and clean his shoes, wiping down the black leather with a damp paper towel. That was where Rodney had found him one evening when he’d arrived home early from work.

  Rodney had been holding the baby in his arms, jostling him gently and making funny faces at him. The baby’s wet, black eyes stared up at his father, his tiny fists curling and uncurling. Rodney turned his body so that Jay could see the baby as he cradled him. “Want to hold your little nephew?”

  “Nah,” Jay had said. He tugged on the hem of his damp T-shirt. “I’m all sweaty.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Cleaning my shoes,” Jay said. “Trying to anyway.”

  “You been shooting hoops with that Rivenbark boy at the end of the road?”

  Jay did not know Cody’s last name and had never asked it and had never heard him tell it, but as far as he knew, Cody was the only boy on their road aside from himself.

  “Cody?” he asked.

  “That white kid.”

  “That’s Cody,” Jay had said. “Yeah, we play ball sometimes.”

  Rodney had looked down at the baby, and then he’d looked up at Jay. Jay could feel his brother-in-law’s eyes boring into the side of his face.

  “Just be careful,” Rodney said.

  With what? Jay had wondered. Playing with a white kid? Playing with a poor kid? Getting injured before tryouts? He’d wanted to ask Rodney what he meant, but he hadn’t said a word, had just continued wiping down his shoes, squeezing the paper towel so that the dirty water dripped into the sink.

  “His folks,” Rodney said. He’d shrugged. “You know, just be careful.”

  The next day, when Jay came home from shooting ball at Cody’s, he’d found Rodney mixing cement in a wheelbarrow. He’d already used post-hole diggers to dig a hole to install the goal he’d purchased at the sporting goods store in Southport. The pole was lying on the grass, the shiny red rim already attached to the white fiberglass backboard where it leaned against Rodney’s truck.

  Rodney, the hose in his hand trickling water onto the powdery mixture in the wheelbarrow, had nodded at the collection of pieces spread out around him.

  “Pretty sweet, huh?” he’d said. He knocked the basketball out of Jay’s hands and shot it, one-handed, through the goal where it rested at almost ground level. “This old boy’s about to ball you up.”

  But Rodney never shot baskets with him after that. He had always left for work before Jay got up for school, and he’d come home in the evening just before dinner. Jay always had homework, and Janelle was insistent that he do it all without getting up from the kitchen table after they’d put everything away after dinner.

  Jay and Cody shot baskets and played one-on-one on the new goal, intuitively ending their play before Rodney came home from work, although Jay never mentioned why and Cody never brought it up. Janelle had never mentioned Cody either, and Cody never saw her, never stepped foot in the house, even leaving early one day to go home to use the bathroom, although Jay had invited him to use theirs. Jay went so far as to count the number of times Cody had watched him drinking water from the hose before he accepted Jay’s offer to take a sip. It had taken six days for Cody to say yes.

  Occasionally, Janelle had asked Jay if he’d made friends at school, and he had usually answered “Not really” or “Not yet,” which was true for the most part. Given their separate grades, he and Cody hadn’t really seen one another at school, but even when Jay had passed him in the hallway or stood near him on the blacktop after lunch, they had done little more than nod at one another bef
ore looking away.

  After basketball tryouts had passed and neither of them had made varsity or JV, Cody because he decided not to try out and Jay because the country boys who did were bigger, faster, and better than he had anticipated, they stopped playing basketball at either Cody’s house or Jay’s. Jay kept to himself, watching television as the days grew shorter and slightly cooler, occasionally riding Rodney’s old ten-speed into Southport to buy a Coke and a bag of chips at the convenience store if he had money or if Janelle was willing to give him some. She’d been gentle with him, and he’d known it was because she’d felt badly that he hadn’t made the basketball team and that he missed his friends and had not made new ones to replace the old. The kids in Brunswick County, whether they were Black or white, seemed suspicious of him and his closely shaved head and his long shorts and the quick way he spoke to them when and if they spoke to him. The kids he met at school walked and talked slowly, laughed quietly and rarely, and wore blue jeans and T-shirts no matter how hot it was outside.

  Rodney had seemed to sense Jay’s loneliness with more acuity than anyone, and it was clear to Jay that Rodney had tried to trace his disposition back to his not making the basketball team. “Look, man,” Rodney had said. “I didn’t make it my freshman year either. And then I played varsity for the next three.”

  Jay had shrunk down in the sofa cushions, shrugged his shoulders. “I ain’t going to be here next year,” he’d said. “So it don’t matter anyway.”

  “Well, Michael Jordan got cut his freshman year too,” Rodney had added. “And look at him now.”

  But Jay had known he was no Michael Jordan. He was a gangly teenager with no friends who’d already lost interest in basketball, who spent most of his time watching television and riding a dorky bike and the rest of his time handling his brother-in-law’s rifle in secret, trying to gather the nerve to load it and take it into the woods behind the house.