Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 12 Read online

  "Well, suffice to say, the guy feels like a first-class bastard and adopts the dog with no further questions, plus a nice little donation to the Humane Society.

  "So, they get the dog home, walk him around the block, have dinner and turn in. They figure that the dog will settle down to sleep upstairs, maybe in one of the kids’ bedrooms, maybe in the master bedroom—hell, maybe even try to get into one of the beds."

  "Dogs are like that,” I said, thinking of a mutt named Butter I'd had for almost thirteen years before I had to have him put down last spring. “If they've been let to sleep in a bed in the past, it's hard to break them of it.” Butter slept curled behind my knees, every night for seven years, after Janey's mom passed on in ‘93. And then it dawned on me, if this fella hadn't been around—probably went off to college somewhere, and is just back visiting his folks or something—he might not know about Janey. It'd be an awful thing, not getting the proper chance to pay your respects to a classmate. Especially if they'd dated. . . .

  The kid turned to look at me, then broke into a wide, honest grin. Gosh, I wish Janey'd stuck with this guy—whatever the hell his name was. Rod? I hated knowing I had to break the news to such a sweet kid . . . and I couldn't even remember his name. You'd think a father would remember the nice ones, but in the end, you don't. In the end, it's the bastards that brand themselves in your memory.

  "Sure,” he said, “Sure! But, these folks don't mind. They're sorta looking forward to sharing some space with that musky, loyal weight. It can be reassuring for a dog to be curled up on your feet. You know that. These are the sort of folks who crave that kind of reassurance.

  "But the dog, he doesn't set himself up in any of the bedrooms, doesn't even come upstairs. He stays down in the TV room. A few minutes after lights-out he takes to whining. I dunno if you've ever heard a beagle, but they whine—Jesus, it's an awful sound. They get to sorta hyperventilating, and each puff of breath is this screech, like a bad windshield wiper. Really unbearable.

  "But the family, they're gritting their teeth and sticking it out. The guy doesn't want to give in—you know, the way some people are about toddlers crying in the night. He wants the dog to get used to the dark, or to figure out to come upstairs. He wants to force it to get comfortable on its own. I mean, it's a dog, for God's sake—no reason to jump when it says frog, right?

  "The guy hears one of his kids leaving her room. He hops out of bed and catches her at the stairs, explains the situation, and then gets all three of them together and explains again, to make sure they're all with the program: ‘No going to the dog. Let him come to you. We're the masters.’ The older two kids understand—they don't like it, but they understand the importance of not making the dog boss, and return to their rooms. But his daughter, she's the youngest—not to mention being a girl—so the whole matter doesn't sit well with her, and when she finally does go back to bed, she's in tears.

  "Just for the record, I think the girl was right.

  "Of course, soon enough, the beagle graduates up from whining and takes to baying. You ever heard that sound?"

  Rita, the bartender, set a fresh beer down and gave me this queer look—probably because the kid was gabbing, but not drinking. “No, but I imagine it's like a wolf. You want a beer or something?” Christ, I wished I could grab his name. Rob? It was driving me nuts.

  "Me? No thanks. Don't drink."

  I shrugged and tipped Rita double.

  "But the baying—it's not like a wolf at all. A wolf, that's a scary sound, but this, it's . . . mournful. Overpowering. Really. They make like a trumpet of their mouths and just let loose. The sound is low and open and empty and long—it's a broken-hearted sound. But strong, like a hammer. It hits you like a melancholy sack of quarters.

  "To their credit, the family hangs tough, doesn't budge all night. After hours—literally hours—the dog gives out and takes back to this low whimper, like he's crying. The family gets a little sleep that night. A little.

  "It goes on this way, of course. Night after night—the dog refuses to come upstairs, just curls up on the couch and whines and bays and weeps. The dog is fine when people are with him, during the day, but when they leave him alone at night it's Heartbreak Hotel in scenic Sorrow City, No Vacancies."

  I laughed at that—couldn't help it—and the kid's eyes sparkled. A natural storyteller, this one. Probably studying theater, I figured, or maybe working already, selling cars—a clean-cut kid like this one could rake it in working in sales.

  "Then, one night, in the middle of the night, the dog stops baying. Really, he doesn't just stop—he cuts out, like someone pulling the plug on a CD player. At first the guy lets out a big, cleansing sigh. Finally, he figures, the dog's adjusted, acclimated. But as the silence stretches out he begins to worry. Now the dog's too quiet. And, for that matter, he didn't like the way it just cut out, like he lost his power. Or his air. Had the dog gone into a seizure? Maybe he's choking on his tongue. The last thing this guy wants to do is come down for breakfast the next morning and find his family hysterical over a dog corpse. He hops out of bed and quietly—quietly but quickly—slinks down the stairs."

  "Hold up a second, son. Listen, I feel just awful about this, but firstly I can't even remember your name—"

  "It's OK, Dan, I haven't told you—"

  "—and secondly, I've got some sad news that I need—"

  "No, Dan. You need to listen. I'm mid-story here, OK?” He said that little piece conversationally, quietly. Nothing forceful, in his tone, in his words, but I couldn't conceivably have gone on interrupting him, not even to say the bar was on fire or Christ had come back in a pink evening gown. Not for anything. His eyes were so cold, so solidly on me. “My story is true, Dan. You need to understand that. Do you get it?"

  "Yeah . . ."

  "So the guy, he comes down the stairs, and freezes at the door to the TV room—you with me, Dan?"

  "Yeah,” my lips were numb—all of a sudden I was sorta scared of this kid. I never paid much attention to the guys Janey brought home, but maybe she let this one go for a reason. He ran so cold so fast—but then, by the time I'd worked all that out in my head, he was already warmed up again. Friendly again.

  "—and there's this kid on his couch, sitting with the guy's dog. A naked kid. A kid who isn't one of his kids. A sobbing boy, not more than thirteen years old, petting old Ski Boot—who's happy as a clam, wearing one of those big, stupid, flop-tongued dog-grins.

  "The guy tries talking to the kid—you know, ‘Whatsa matter, son? How'd you get in here? Blah, blah, blah'—but the kid won't answer, won't even acknowledge the guy's presence. Just keeps stroking the dog. The guy comes right up to the kid, right up to the arm of the couch. He reaches out to grab the boy, then thinks better of it.

  "You know how when you've got a radio with a bad grip on a station, you can make the reception go clear or fuzzy just by reaching towards the radio? You know how that is? You ever notice that you get that feeling off of people, too?"

  "Like auras?” I asked, but I knew what he was talking about already. About the radio reception, at least. “That psychic stuff they have TV specials on sometimes?"

  "No, not that fakey-fakey TV crap. I mean for real. Try it some time—get your hand close to someone, and you'll just about always be able to feel . . . like, a . . . well, like a buffer of sorts. I don't know what it is, scientifically, maybe just the warm air around their body—that personal atmosphere—or some sorta static electricity or electromagnetic fields. I don't know. I just know it's there. You can feel it.

  "But when this guy's fingers get close to the kid, there's nothing, nothing at all, and he knows that he doesn't want to know what would happen if he kept reaching.

  "Also, the kid's crying pretty hard, right? Almost wailing, his mouth bent into one of those awful upside-down clown faces that kids make when they're really pitching a fit—but there's no sound. There are still regular night sounds: the mantle clock ticking, the dog grunting, the springs in the co
uch squeaking, but the kid isn't making any sound. Not anything.

  "The guy, he's a horror-scifi fan, he's read his Fantasy & Science Fiction and watched his Twilight Zone; he figures that maybe Ghost World is just like the Real World, but out of phase—just a little out of alignment, enough so that usually there's no passing through. Maybe this kid had somehow gotten racked into focus—not all the way into focus, but closer to being in the guy's world. Or the guy, could be he'd been racked into focus with Ghost World—literally one foot in the grave.

  "He doesn't know, he doesn't want to know. If this was a movie or a story—a made-up story—then the guy probably would've started doing experiments, started trying to figure out what the deal was, how it worked, like in Poltergeist or Hellraiser.

  "But this is real life, and all the guy wants is for his dog to sleep quietly and the ghost boy to go away. He backs out of the room, creeps up the staircase and pulls the covers over his head, sure that the kid will Just Go Away.

  "The next morning the guy comes down to breakfast and finds his family quietly sitting around the table, munching Rice Krispies. The only sounds in the room are the kids chewing, the cereal snapplecracklepopping and the dog's tags clanking against his metal dish as he crunches his kibble. The ghost boy is sitting on the floor, watching Ski Boot eat and running his hand in long, deliberate strokes down the dog's back. His tears have dried up, but he still doesn't look happy.

  "That's how things go for the family. The boy follows the dog around the house, and no one really talks about it. In fact, even though the ghost kid—the naked ghost kid—follows the guy when he walks the dog every morning and night, no one mentions the kid. At all. Not even his children's friends, who get really good at making up excuses not to come over after school. No one broaches the subject with the family. Sure, they probably talk about it among themselves—'So I says to Mabel, I says, what's it with that bluish naked kid following Earl Hugus around the block?, and she says blah, blah, blah'—"

  I laughed again, hard. That voice he'd conjured up, a braying Chicago granny leaning out her first-floor window, was a scream. I laughed and he smiled, eyes sparkling—we had this terrific rapport going, and I couldn't believe that this same guy had put such a scare into me a few minutes earlier.

  "My point is that no one asks, because no one wants to know.

  "On the one hand, the guy is relieved that nobody asks, because he certainly doesn't have any answers. But it makes him nervous, too. What if it's some sort of group hallucination? You know, like the French Revolution. What if his family is being poisoned by something in their bread or water or Krispies, and they're starting to wig out?

  "But, when push comes to shove, these are small worries—middle of the night worries, like worrying that a plane'll hit the house, or that you'll look out your bedroom window and see a vampire-chick floating there, ready to bust through. Or worrying about finding a corpse hanged in the attic.

  "After a while the rest of the family lets it go—they learn to ignore the kid, ignore him completely—ignore him to the point that he isn't there for them at all anymore—like Auschwitz, right?"

  "What?” I asked.

  "Auschwitz, the Nazi death-camp in Poland? It was right near a little town, right? Like, almost right in it?"

  "Yeah. OK. I get it.” And, strangely, I did get it: I'd seen a documentary on the History Channel that had gone on for a while about Auschwitz. It seems that the camp was almost smack dab in this little town called Oswiecim, and in the camp they had the big crematory ovens where they destroyed all the corpses. When the camp was liberated, the soldiers asked the townspeople, How could you not know this was happening? Good Christ, the stink's incredible—it hangs all over your town right now, and the villagers said, The Germans told us it was a pork sausage factory, and we believed them. This was at the end of the war, after months of living in the lingering, wispy smoke of burnt human carcasses. There was practically a famine behind Nazi lines then, everyone was rail-thin, and these folks watched the smoke billow out of those stacks, watched the trucks and trains bring in load after load of bone-skinny “workers"—and never a single pig—but persisted in their desperate belief that Auschwitz was a sausage plant and nothing more. A huge sausage plant that no pigs entered and no sausages left.

  "My point is that all that's left of the ghost kid, for these kids, is a vague sense of relief when they're invited to stay over at a friend's house.

  "But the guy, he can't leave it alone. He calls the Humane Society again and gets a hold of the attendant who'd given them Ski Boot. He presses the guy, who finally ‘fesses up: He doesn't have a clue where the dog came from—his story, about the old man, was total BS. Folks want to hear cutesy stories about devoted dogs, and all he wanted to do was not waste a perfectly good pure-bred in the doggy gas chamber. So he lied. What's the big deal? Had the dog eaten his kid's face or something?

  "The guy says ‘no’ and apologizes, says there isn't a problem, and promises to send in a donation post-haste.

  "But, like I said before, this guy is a sci-fi fan, a horror fan. He knows the ghost-story formula backwards and forwards: Ghosts stick around because they've got business left in this world. Help them settle up their tabs, and they'll fade into the ether.

  "So, he starts talking to the kid when they're alone, talking to him in that sorta absent way you talk to a lugnut you're trying to loosen, or the way you mutter to the spices while cooking. That kinda talking that, in a pinch, you can pretend isn't really talking. He sits up late at night, lights off, watching cable with the boy, the dog sitting between them.

  "'You lost?’ he asks, eyes glued to the tube, watching Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in The Abyss, swimming for their lives through the Deep Blue Nuthin'. ‘Not sure how to, you know, ‘Walk into the light, Carol Anne'? Was this your dog, once, and you've still got a last goodbye you need to say? Maybe you can't let go.’ Flicking the channels, stopping at infomercials, the Iron Chef, rap videos—stopping for anything that will inject a little noise into the room. ‘Are your folks still looking for you? Do you need someone to tell them that you've, um, bought your ticket? Are they dead, too, but you don't know where to find them? Are you waiting in a ditch somewhere, waiting for a proper burial? Or are you in a shallow grave, broken and . . . and alone?'

  "The guy spends a lot of nights like that, flicking the channels, petting the dog and asking questions. Sometimes he goes for hours without even thinking about it, the questions pouring out of his mouth like rain out of a downspout. Other times the questions come as slow and hard as passing a kidney stone. A lot of the time he cries, thinking about the boy's corpse, cold and alone and forgotten, trapped in a junkyard fridge, dumped at the bottom of a ravine, stuffed into a hot, dry crawlspace.

  "'Are you sad? Are you lost? Were you wronged? Do you have a message?'

  "But the kid just sits there, eyes down, petting the dog. Until, one night, the kid finally turns to the guy and says: ‘Jesus, mister, shut up. Can't you just shut up and leave me alone.'

  "The guy is flabbergasted.

  "'When did you start hearing me?'

  "'I always heard you. I don't want nuthin'. Shut up.'

  "'But, what can I—how can I make you go away?’ The guy leans forward, not breathing, not even thinking. Just waiting."

  He turned to me, held me in his gaze, “And the kid tells him: ‘You can't.’”

  We sat there, staring at each other, and I waited for him to go on. But he didn't. He turned around, looking into the crowd, and picked up his gloves as if to go.

  I almost reached out and grabbed him. Almost. “Wait,” I was nearly yelling. “What kinda ghost story is this?"

  He glanced over his shoulder. “It's a true one, Pops."

  "That's the end?"

  "Yeah, that's it. Stick a fork in me, I'm done."

  "You can't do that! Stories don't end that way—the ghost has got to want something, and then the guy—"

  "Listen,” he said, sitting
back down, “I already told you: this isn't a fake ghost story, this isn't a campfire ghost story. This is a true ghost story."

  I sputtered, “But—"

  "Danny Boy, don't ‘but’ me. Those ghost stories you always hear, those are a load of crap. In real life, it isn't like folks wander the earth on some big ole quest. I mean, come on."

  "But, then why'd the kid come back? What'd he want?"

  "He didn't want nuthin',” the kid snapped, “I mean, what do you want right now? Why are you talking to me? Why'd the beagle bay and weep over being alone? We're just two guys sitting at a bar, taking advantage of the Happy Hour Specials. You don't know me from Adam, I don't know you from Cain. Just two guys, but we're talking, right? We're doing what people do, we're passing the time together, we're pushing away the dark and cold, the Alone, just like those old Vikings in their longhouses, with the face-freezing blast knocking at the walls, with monsters skulking in under the clouds to tear them apart. That's what people do: we clump together to chase away the cold of being alone."

  He was so angry—it was scary. And, as I looked at him, something in his face changed, hardened, and I knew that he knew that I didn't believe him, didn't believe him about any of it.

  "Touch me,” he said.

  "What?"

  "Touch me."

  "Listen, fella, I don't know who you are—"

  "Jesus! I'm not asking you to grab my johnson, Dan! Just here, just touch my hand."

  "Son, I don't—"

  "Touch it, touch my hand, you old puss. It's my hand, it's nothing. Touch it."

  "Fine,” I reached out and grabbed him, awkwardly, around the right hand, “There. Happy?” And my God, it was cold.

  He didn't answer, just looked at me, watching.

  "So what? So your hand's cold. My kid brother, he had hands and feet as cold as blocks of ice, even in the summer. Just bad circulation."

  "Yeah, OK. Touch me here then, on my neck. Hunh, feel that?"

  I didn't want to do it, but I did. My God, it was like clay in November. It was like touching a corpse out of one of those lockers they have in morgues.