Ghost Story Read online

  Could she speak? Could someone in whatever sort of experience this was utter sentences, audible ordinary human sentences? Could you talk to the people you met in hallucinations, and would they answer back? He opened his mouth. “I have to”—to get out, he was going to say, but he was already back in the stalled car. A soggy lump that had once been two potato chips lay on his tongue.

  What was the worst thing you’ve ever done?

  The maps seemed to show that he was only a few miles from Valdosta. He drove unthinkingly on, not daring to look at the child and therefore not knowing if she were awake or sleeping, but feeling her eyes on him nonetheless. Eventually he passed a sign which informed him that he was ten miles from the Friendliest City in the South.

  It looked like any southern town: a little industry on the way in, machine shops and die-stampers, surreal groups of corrugated metal huts under arc lights, yards littered with cannibalized trucks; further in, wooden houses in need of paint, groups of black men standing on corners, their faces alike in the dark; new roads went scarring through the land, then ended abruptly, weeds already encroaching; in the town proper, the teenagers patrolling endlessly, vacantly in their old cars.

  He passed a low building, incongruously new, a sign of the New South, with a sign reading PALMETTO MOTOR-IN; he reversed down the street back to the building.

  A girl with upswept lacquered hair and candy-pink lipstick gave him a meaningless, dead smile and a room with twin beds “for myself and my daughter.” In the register he wrote: Lamar Burgess, 155 Ridge Road, Stonington, Conn. After he handed her a night’s payment in cash, she gave him a key.

  Their cubicle contained two single beds, an iron-textured brown carpet and lime-green walls, two pictures—a kitten tilting its head, an Indian looking into a leafy gorge from a clifftop—a television set, a door into a blue-tiled bathroom. He sat on the toilet seat while the girl undressed and got into bed.

  When he peeked out to check on her, she was lying beneath a sheet with her face to the wall. Her clothes were scattered on the floor, a nearly empty bag of potato chips lay beside her. He ducked back into the bathroom, stripped and got into the shower. Which blessed him. For a moment he felt almost as though he were back in his old life, not “Lamar Burgess” but Don Wanderley, one-time resident of Bolinas, California, and author of two novels (one of which had made some money). Lover for a time of Alma Mobley, brother to defunct David Wanderley. And there it was. It was no good, he could not get away from it. The mind was a trap—it was a cage that slammed down over you. However he had got to where he was, he was there. Stuck there in the Palmetto Motor-In. He turned off the shower, all traces of the blessing departed.

  In the little room, only the weak light over his bed to illuminate those ghostly surroundings, he pulled on his jeans and opened his suitcase. The hunting knife was wrapped in a shirt, and he unrolled it so the knife fell out on the bed.

  Carrying it by the chunky bone handle, he crossed to the girl’s bed. She slept with her mouth open; perspiration gleamed on her forehead.

  For a long time he sat beside her, holding the knife in his right hand, ready to use it.

  But this night he could not. Giving up, giving in, he shook her arm until her eyelids fluttered.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “I want to sleep.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Go away. Please.”

  “Who are you? I’m asking, who are you?”

  “You know.”

  “I know?”

  “You know. I told you.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Angie.”

  “Angie what?”

  “Angie Maule. I told you before.”

  He held the knife behind his back so that she could not see it.

  “I want to sleep,” she said. “You woke me up.” She turned her back to him again. Fascinated, he watched sleep settle over her: her fingertips twitched, her eyelids contracted, her breathing changed. It was as if, to exclude him, she had willed herself to sleep. Angie—Angela? Angela Maule. It did not sound like the name she had given him when he had first taken her into the car. Minoso? Minnorsi? Some name like that, an Italian name—not Maule.

  He held the knife in both hands, the black bone handle jammed into his naked belly, his elbows out: all he had to do was thrust it forward and jerk it up, using all his strength . . .

  In the end, sometime around three in the morning, he crossed over to his bed.

  4

  The next morning, before they checked out, she spoke to him while he was looking at the maps. “You shouldn’t ask me those questions.”

  “What questions?” He had been keeping his back turned, at her request, as she got into the pink dress, and he suddenly had the feeling that he had to turn around, right now, to see her. He could see his knife in her hands (though it was back inside the rolled-up shirt), could feel it just beginning to prick his skin. “Can I turn around now?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Slowly, still feeling the knife, his uncle’s knife, beginning to enter his skin, he turned sideways on the chair. The girl was sitting on her unmade bed, watching him. Her intense unbeautiful face.

  “What questions?”

  “You know.”

  “Tell me.”

  She shook her head and would not say any more.

  “Do you want to see where we’re going?”

  The girl came toward him, not slowly but measuredly, as if not wishing to display suspicion. “Here,” he said, pointing to a spot on the map. “Panama City, in Florida.”

  “Will we be able to see the water?”

  “Maybe.”

  “And we won’t sleep in the car?”

  “No.”

  “Is it faraway?”

  “We can get there tonight. We’ll take this road—this one—see?”

  “Uh huh.” She was not interested: she hung a little to one side, bored and wary.

  She said: “Do you think I’m pretty?”

  * * *

  What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you? That you took off your clothes at night beside the bed of a nine-year-old girl? That you were holding a knife? That the knife wanted to kill her?

  * * *

  No. Other things were worse.

  * * *

  Not far over the state line and not on the highway he had shown Angie on the map but on a two-lane country road, they drew up before a white board building. Buddy’s Supplies.

  “You want to come in with me, Angie?”

  She opened the door on her side and got out in that childish way, as if she were climbing down a ladder; he held the screen door open for her. A fat man in a white shirt sat like Humpty Dumpty on a counter. “You cheat on your income tax,” he said. “And you’re the first customer of the day. You believe that? Twelve-thirty and you’re the first guy through the door. No,” he said, bending forward and scrutinizing them. “Hell no. You don’t cheat Uncle Sam, you do worse than that. You’re the guy killed four-five people up in Tallahassee the other day.”

  “What—?” he said. “I just came in here for some food—my daughter—”

  “Gotcha,” the man said. “I used to be a cop. Allentown, Pennsylvania. Twenty years. Bought this place because the man told me I could turn over a hundred dollars’ profit a week. There’s a lot of crooks in this world. Anybody comes in, I can tell what kind of crook they are. And now I got you straight. You’re not a killer. You’re a kidnapper.”

  “No, I—” he felt sweat pouring down his sides. “My girl—”

  “You can’t shit me. Twenty years a cop.”

  He began to look frantically around the store for the girl. Finally he saw her staring gravely at a shelf stocked with jars of peanut butter. “Angie,” he said. “Angie—come on—”

  “Aw, hold on,” the f
at man said. “I was just tryin’ to get a rise out of you. Don’t flip out or nothin’. You want some of that peanut butter, little girl?”

  Angie looked at him and nodded.

  “Well, take one off the shelf and bring it up here. Anything else, mister? ’Course if you’re Bruno Hauptmann, I’ll have to bring you in. I still got my service revolver around somewhere. Knock you flat, I’ll tell you that for free.”

  It was, he saw, all a weary mockery. Yet he could scarcely conceal his trembling. Wasn’t that something an ex-cop would notice? He turned away toward the aisles and shelves.

  “Hey, listen to this,” the man said to his back. “If you’re in that much trouble, you can just get the hell out of here right now.”

  “No, no,” he said. “I need some things—”

  “You don’t look much like that girl.”

  Blindly, he began taking things off the shelves, anything. A jar of pickles, a box of apple turnovers, a canned ham, two or three other cans he didn’t bother to look at. These he took to the counter.

  The fat man, Buddy, was staring at him suspiciously. “You just shook me up a little bit,” he said to him. “I haven’t had much sleep, I’ve been driving for a couple of days . . .” Invention blessedly descended. “I have to take my little girl to her grandmother, she’s in Tampa—” Angie swiveled around, clutching two jars of crunchy peanut butter, and gaped at him as he said this—“uh, Tampa, on account of her mother and me split up and I have to get a job, get things put together again, right, Angie?” The girl’s mouth hung open.

  “Your name Angie?” the fat man asked her.

  She nodded.

  “This man your daddy?”

  He thought he would fall down.

  “Now he is,” she said.

  The fat man laughed. “‘Now he is!’ Just like a kid. Goddam. You figure out the brain of a kid, you got to be some kind of genius. All right, nervous, I guess I’ll take your money.” Still sitting on the counter, he rang up the purchases by bending to one side and punching the buttons of the register. “You better get some rest. You remind me of about a million guys I took into my old station.”

  Outside, Wanderley said to her, “Thanks for saying that.”

  “Saying what?”: pertly, self-assuredly. Then again, almost mechanically, eerily, ticking her head from side to side: “Saying what? Saying what? Saying what?”

  5

  In Panama City he pulled into the Gulf Glimpse Motor Lodge, a series of shabby brick bungalows around a parking lot. The manager’s lodge sat at the entrance, a separate square building like the others, with the exception of a large pane of plate glass behind which, in what must have been ovenlike heat, a stringy old man with gold-rimmed glasses and a mesh T-shirt was visible. He looked like Adolf Eichmann. The severe inflexible cast of the man’s face made Wanderley remember what the ex-policeman had said about himself and the girl: he did not, with his blond hair and fair skin, look anything like the girl’s father. He pulled up before the manager’s lodge and left the car, his palms sweaty.

  But inside, when he said that he wanted a room for himself and his daughter, the old man merely glanced incuriously at the dark-haired child in the car, and said, “Ten-fifty a day. Sign the register. You want food, try the Eat-Mor down the road apiece. There’s no cooking in the bungalows. You planning on staying more than one night, Mr.—” He swung the register toward him. “Boswell?”

  “Maybe as long as a week.”

  “Then you’ll pay the first two nights in advance.”

  He counted out twenty-one dollars, and the manager gave him a key. “Number eleven, lucky eleven. Across the parking lot.”

  The room had whitewashed walls and smelled of lavatory cleaner. He gave it a perfunctory look around: the same iron carpet, two small beds with clean but worn sheets, a television with a twelve-inch screen, two awful pictures of flowers. The room appeared to have more shadows in it than could be accounted for. The girl was inspecting the bed against the side wall. “What’s Magic Fingers? I want to try it. Can I? Please?”

  “It probably won’t work.”

  “Can I? I want to try it. Please?”

  “All right. Lie down on it. I have to go out to do some things. Don’t leave until I come back. I have to put a quarter in this slot, see? Like this? When I get back we can eat.” The girl was lying on the bed, nodding with impatience, looking not at him but at the coin in his hand. “We’ll eat when I get back. I’ll try to get you some new clothes, too. You can’t wear the same things all the time.”

  “Put in the quarter!”

  He shrugged, pushed the quarter into the slot and immediately heard a humming noise. The child settled down onto the bed, her arms fully extended, her face tense. “Oh. It’s nice.”

  “I’ll be back pretty soon,” he said, and went back out into the harsh sunlight and for the first time smelled water.

  The Gulf was a long way off, but it was visible. On the other side of the road he had taken into town the land abruptly fell off into a wasteland of weeds and rubble at its bottom bisected by a series of railroad tracks. After the tracks another disused weedy patch of land ended at a second road which veered off toward a group of warehouses and loading sheds. Beyond this second road was the Gulf of Mexico—gray lathery water.

  He walked down the road in the direction of town.

  * * *

  On the edge of Panama City he went into a Treasure Island discount store and bought jeans and two T-shirts for the girl, fresh underwear, socks, two shirts, a pair of khaki trousers and Hush Puppies for himself.

  Carrying two large shopping bags, he emerged from Treasure Island and turned in the direction that was downtown. Diesel fumes drifted toward him, cars with Keep the Southland Great bumper stickers rolled by. Men in short-sleeved shirts and short gray crewcuts moved along the sidewalks. When he saw a uniformed cop trying to eat an ice-cream cone while writing out a parking ticket, he dodged between a pickup truck and a Trailways van and crossed the street. A rivulet of sweat issued from his left eyebrow and ran into his eye; he was calm. Once again, disaster had not happened.

  He discovered the bus station by accident. It took up half a block, a vast new-looking building with black glass slits for windows. He thought: Alma Mobley, her mark. Once through the revolving door, he saw a few aimless people on benches in a large empty space—the people always seen in bus stations, a few young-old men with lined faces and complex hairdos, some children racketing around, a sleeping bum, three or four teenage boys in cowboy boots and shoulder-length hair. Another cop was leaning against the wall by the magazine counter. Looking for him? Panic started in him again, but the cop barely glanced at him. He pretended to check the arrivals-and-departures board before moving, with exaggerated carelessness, to the men’s room.

  He locked himself into a toilet and stripped. After dressing up to the waist in the new clothes, he left the toilet and washed at one of the sinks. So much grime came off that he washed himself again, splashing water onto the floor and working the green liquid soap deep into his armpits and around the back of his neck. Then he dried himself on the roller and put on one of the new short-sleeved shirts—a light blue shirt with thin red stripes. All of his old clothes went into the Treasure Island bag.

  Outside, he noticed the odd grainy grayish blue of the sky. It was the sort of sky he imagined as hanging forever over the keys and swamps much further south in Florida, a sky that would hold the heat, doubling and redoubling it, forcing the weeds and plants into fantastic growth, making them send out grotesque and swollen tendrils . . . the sort of sky and hot disk of sun which should always, now that he thought of it, have hung over Alma Mobley. He stuffed the bag of old clothes in a trash barrel outside a gun shop.

  In the new clothes his body felt young and capable, healthier than it had all through that terrible winter. Wanderley moved down the shabby southern street, a tal
l well-built man in his thirties, no longer quite aware of what he was doing. He rubbed his cheek and felt that blond man’s feathery stubble—he could go two or three days without looking as though he needed a shave. A pickup driven by a sailor, five or six sailors in summer whites standing up in the rear of the truck, drove past him, and the sailors yelled something—something cheerful and private and derisory.

  “They don’t mean no harm,” said a man who had appeared beside Wanderley. His head, with an enormous hair-sprouting wart dividing one eyebrow, came no higher than Wanderley’s breastbone. “They’s all good boys.”

  He smiled and uttered a meaningless agreement and moved away—he could not go back to the motel, could not deal with the girl; he felt as though he might faint. His feet seemed unreal in the Hush Puppies—too far down, too far from his eyes. He found that he was walking rapidly down a descending street, going toward an area of neon signs and movie theaters. In the grainy sky the sun hung high and motionless. Shadows of parking meters stood out, purely black, on the sidewalk: for a moment he was certain there were more shadows than parking meters. All the shadows hovering over the street were intensely black. He passed the entrance to a hotel and was aware of a vast brown empty space, a brown cool cave, beyond its glass doors.

  Almost unwillingly, recognizing a dread familiar set of sensations, he went on in the terrific heat: consciously he kept himself from stepping over the shadows of the parking meters. Two years before the world had gathered itself in this ominous way, had been slick and full of intent—after the episode of Alma Mobley, after his brother had died. In some fashion, literally or not, she had killed David Wanderley: he knew that he had been lucky to escape whatever it was that took David through the Amsterdam hotel window. Only writing had brought him back up into the world; only writing about it, the horrid complicated mess of himself and Alma and David, writing about it as a ghost story, had released him from it. He had thought.