The scream woke him. The kid’s scream.
Chicago Mike pulled himself up straight, grabbed his light and shone it on the kid.
The way the kid looked, the way he was shaking, the way his face gleamed with sweat and his eyes were wide with frantic fear... Chicago Mike could pretty much guess what had happened.
He stood up and walked the length of the rocking car. He moved slowly, his busted-up knee and all. The kid opened his mouth a couple times, as if he was going to tell Chicago Mike to stay away, but he ended up not saying anything at all.
Chicago Mike sat down next to the kid and handed him the pint of cheap whiskey. The kid took it and gunned himself three quick drinks.
“What kind of trouble you in, son?”
The kid just glared at him. “I didn’t ask you to come over here, old man.”
“No, I reckon you didn’t.”
“And I don’t want you hangin’ around.”
“All right, son, if that’s the way you feel.”
Chicago Mike started to push himself to his feet, arthritic bones cracking. The kid grabbed his arm.
“I shouldn’t be in the trouble I am,” he said. “I just meant to rob the place is all.”
“But somethin’ else happened, huh?”
The kid looked miserable, lost. “Yeah, somethin’ else happened, all right.”
Chicago Mike knew not to ask any more questions. The kid would tell him what he wanted to tell him. Nothing more.
“And then I had this — nightmare, I guess you’d call it,” the kid said. “Just now, when I was asleep. She — the black woman — she was in it and she was trying to get me to come with her. You know — to die.”
The kid leaned his head back against the wall. Closed his eyes. The door was partly open so you could smell the cold autumn night and see the quarter moon above the cornfields. The kid said, “But that wasn’t all. When I woke up — I could smell her perfume. I still can.” The kid sat up and looked at Chicago Mike and said, “You know what that means? That I could smell her perfume?”
“What?”
“She was here. Right in this boxcar.” He trembled. “Right in this boxcar, tryin’ to get to me.” He paused. “Her ghost.”
“You think ghosts still have their perfume?”
“Hers did.”
The pint of whiskey sat between them. Without asking, the kid picked up the pint and drained off a couple more good ones. “I appreciate it.”
“My pleasure.”
“You mind if I ask you to go back now?”
“No problem.”
“Thanks again.”
Somewhere in the night, somewhere near the Nebraska border, another scream woke Chicago Mike. But this time when he woke up, he saw the kid standing up and walking across the swaying boxcar.
“Leave me alone! Leave me alone!” the kid was shrieking.
And then he was firing the gun in his hand.
Chicago Mike had to put it together fast. Kid sees the ghost again. Grabs his gun. Starts firing. Two things wrong with that, one being that there’s no way you can kill a ghost, the other being that the kid, not seeing what he’s doing, is firing right at Chicago Mike.
“Kid! Kid!” Chicago Mike shouted, trying to free the kid from his nightmare. “Quit firing your gun!”
But the bullets kept coming. Chicago Mike rolled to his right, grabbing his .38 as he did so.
The kid couldn’t have many rounds left but he continued to fire right at where Chicago Mike was. The kid was screaming at the ghost all the time. Telling her to leave him alone. Telling her it was an accident. Telling her he was sorry. All the time firing.
“Kid! Kid! Quit shooting at her!”
A bullet took a piece of fabric off Chicago Mike’s jacket. And then he knew he had no choice — he had to fire back, injure the kid enough to disarm him.
But just as he fired, the train rolled around a long, steep bank and Chicago Mike’s shooting was thrown off: He’d meant to hit the kid in the arm. Instead, the bullet moved over and took the kid in the heart.
The kid went over backwards, kind of a Three Stooges thing actually, bouncing off the wall only to pitch forward, arms windmilling, to run head first into the other wall as the train continued to curve around the steep bank. Then he did a little pirouette in the middle of the car, and fell forward. And died.
There would be too many questions if Chicago Mike was found in a box car with a dead young man. Somewhere near Plattville, Chicago Mike pushed the kid out the door. He watched as the body hit the side of the tracks and sprawled on its back.
He’d seen it before, Chicago Mike, how a kid’s first encounter with a ghost made him literally crazy. He didn’t understand that the ghost didn’t have any power to kill him. She was just angry that he’d killed her. Her soul hadn’t passed over yet. That would happen in a day or so and then she’d forget all about him.
Chicago Mike remembered the first time he’d seen a ghost. What a wondrous experience that had been. It’d happened right after the old ’bo had taught him how to summon.
As Chicago Mike was doing right now.
He felt plain terrible about having to kill the kid. He needed a gentle and loving person to talk to.
And so he summoned. Closed his eyes as if in prayer and said the words the old ’bo had taught him.
And when he opened them again, there she was, pretty as she’d been back in 1958, the year he’d married her. His lovely wife Kitty.
She knelt next to him and kissed him and then just held him for a long time. He told her about what he’d been doing and how awful it had been accidentally killing that young kid, and then they just sat together holding hands and listening to the train spectral as the night itself, rushing into the solace of darkness.
That Day at Eagle’s Point
The day was dark suddenly, even though it was only four in the afternoon, and lightning like silver spider’s legs began to walk across the landscape of farm fields and county highways. It was summer, and kids would be playing near creeks and forests and old deserted barns, and their mothers would see the roiling sky and begin calling frantically for them, trying to be heard above the chill damp sudden wind.
The rains came, then, hard slanting Midwestern rains that made me feel snug inside my new Plymouth sedan, rains making noises on the hood and roof like the music of tin drums.
That was the funny thing, I told Marcie I was buying the Plymouth for her, and she even went down and picked out the model and the color all by herself, but even so, a couple of weeks later, she left. Got home one day and saw two suitcases sitting at the front door, and then came Marcie walking out of the bedroom, prettier than I’d seen her in years. “I’m going to do it, Earle,” was all she said. And then there was a cab there, and he was honking, and then she was gone.
I didn’t handle it so well at first. I just read and reread the letter she left, trying to divine things implied, or things written between the lines, sort of like those Dead Sea scholars spending their whole lives poring over only a few pages.
Her big hangup was Susan Finlay, and how I’d never really gotten over her, and how there was something sick about how I couldn’t let go of that gal, and how she, Marcie, wanted somebody to really love her completely, the way I never could because of my lifelong “obsession” with Susan Finlay.
That was a year ago. She only called once, from a bar somewhere with a loud country-western jukebox, said she was drunk and missed me terribly but knew that for me there’d never be anybody but Susan, and she was sorry for both of us that I’d never been able to love her in the good and proper way she’d wanted.
Another thing she hadn’t liked was my occupation. Over in Nam, I was with a medical unit, so when I got back to New Hope, the town where I was raised, I just naturally looked for work at the hospital. But the hospital per se wasn’t hiring, so they put me in touch with the two fellows who ran the ambulance service. I became their night driver, four to midnight, six nights a week. The benefits were good, and I got to learn a lot about medicine. In the beginning, Marcie was proud of me, I think. At parties and family reunions, people always came up to me and wanted to know if I had any new ambulance stories. Old ladies seemed to have a particular fascination with the really grim ones. Marcie liked me being the one people sought out.