Breathing Ghosts, page 6
“Grateful.” I narrowed my eyes at her. “You know this is probably never going to happen, right?”
Again her face grew still but this time so did her hands, which were working to pin down the heart of Arizona, and her lungs, the strand of hair fluttering by her mouth falling limp.
I could say that I was only joking, that I hadn’t meant it. But I know I did. That was my problem.
She exhaled, looked right at me. “Maybe not for you.”
Chapter 11
33.5° N, 86.8° W
I spent the last nine hours driving past a yard full of leaping whale statues near Tallahassee, a town called Two Egg with nothing but two road signs and an abandoned general store, a giant golden peanut, and a rooster made out of car bumpers. Doodles on Nia’s map that devolved to flashes in my rearview mirror the second I saw she wasn’t there.
It’s dark now and the rest of the Alabama landscape is a shadow. I pass truck stops and closed convenience stores, dim lights barely visible behind the dense trees. I pull to the side of the road, trying to get a better look at where Nia’s pen trails off the highway. There are no exit signs or road markers, just sporadic breaks in the tree line and I’m not even sure if the truck will fit down most of these dirt roads.
I crawl up and down one stretch of highway, letting the headlights swell over every opening in the trees. I could turn around. I could go on to the next one. The light glints across a low structure and I press on the gas. But again, no signs, no gate, nothing to indicate that this is some kind of roadside attraction.
But what if she’s there?
I turn onto the dirt road, truck scraping past trees, tires slipping in and out of the ditch. I come to a clearing and I cut the engine. There are no lights and all I can see are these long shadows, moonlight carving a miniature cityscape.
I sit there for a minute. It’s dark. Really dark. My hands are sweating and I grip the seat. I think about all of the things I can’t see from here. All of the things that might be waiting for me in those shadows. A serial killer who’s wearing his most recent victim as a parka. A hoard of zombies, mouths watering. Or maybe just a senile hillbilly who’ll mistake me for a coyote and fire a round right into my backside.
Or Nia.
I step out of the truck, listening. Everything is quiet. The place, whatever it is, seems closed and I’m a little relieved. I make my way across the field, the soft tick of the engine cooling growing faint behind me.
I come to something like a gate, tall and iron, the painted letters covering the surface stark beneath the moonlight. I squint and tilt my head, trying to make out the words. On the left looks like some bible verse, the thick white letters yellowed and petrified in long drips and on the right is a bunch of dates, locations, and death tolls. All of it followed by the word Revelation.
I glance back at the truck, still not sure if getting out was the best idea. But I did. I’m here and I can’t go running scared now. Even though I want to. Even though that’s what I would usually do. But then again, running away from home, stealing Jack’s truck and 2K from a bunch of skinheads isn’t something I would usually do either. So I step through the gate, ushered by the wind as it slices past me.
Corroded hubcaps, glinting shrapnel, wicker rakes, and the blunt ends of farming equipment jut up from dry yellow grass like some kind of deadly yellow brick road. In the dark, manic shadows twist into the sky and all I can make out are the sharp corners. Great, a fucking junk yard.
But then I come to a rusting stool topped with an old Christmas wreath and a plastic doll, naked and lying in the center with its arms outstretched before a mock nativity scene. A painted sign below it reads, peace on earth goodwill to all.
I keep walking, sidestepping over rusting car parts and pieces of trash. I spot something long and sprawled on the ground, dark limbs strewn across a series of wooden boards like a human. But then I see the face, a mask of The Hulk jutting up from the neck of some kind of makeshift suit, the fabric stuffed with everything from grass to empty laundry detergent bottles—all giving it this grotesque girth that I can’t tear my eyes away from.
I reach for the Hulk mask, finger trembling against the cold plastic and something comes loose, a handful of the guy’s mechanical insides spilling onto the ground. Okay Nia, you can hurry up now. I take a step back, knocking into a rusting windmill and it spins. It grinds to a stop and I see that there are words there too.
At first glance everything here looks haphazard but as I take a few more steps, slipping between a pile of old mattresses and an aluminum trash can spray painted with yet another bible verse, it’s obvious that none of this—not the piles of trash or the narrow path beneath my feet—are random.
And in the dark it goes on forever. I come to sculptures so intricate, the steel obviously twisted by hand, that I wonder how they aren’t in some kind of museum. But then I see others—doll heads fixed to broken lampshades and dirty socks hanging from black fishhooks that I’m afraid to find out who created them. And the words. They’re everywhere. Bleeding across almost every surface, moonlight trapped in every letter and symbol and setting them on fire.
I think about what this place must look like as people come up the road. If I’d seen it rising there at the end of the pasture, sunlight glinting off every mangled surface, I would have thought it was just some place the city dumped its trash. But up close, as I look past the sharp corners and harsh angles to the little house at the edge of the field, a dull light flickering in the window, I realize that it’s not a wasteland at all but it’s someone’s home. This is the island of misfit toys and apparently the misfit toys are evangelical Baptists.
I know what this is. I know what having an obsession looks like and so did Nia. I watched her mull over that map for years, feeding it with her dreams. But all of that planning and waiting, it was all for nothing.
And this. Why? What’s going to happen to all of this stuff when the person who built it is gone? I can see some of it sinking, dry grass and dirt rising up as if it’s already accepted it as part of the landscape. But it won’t last. It can’t. Nothing does.
I hear the soft clank of chimes, the sound ricocheting off the metal structures and my bones go cold. I wait, listening. Hoping for Nia. The sound swells, coming closer, and I search the darkness for movement. A shadow swells along the grass, shuddering as it slides from surface to surface, the night cutting it into pieces.
Shit, shit, shit. I shouldn’t have come here. I shouldn’t have gotten out of the truck. But just as I'm on the verge of shitting myself, the old man trudges into the open, a large staff jangling in his grip and I'm frozen.
I watch him and he watches me. But I know there's no hope of him mistaking me for one of his crude sculptures. My skin is so pale it might as well be phosphorescent. I could run, I think. I should run. But I don't move.
"You one of those kids from the high school?” He blinks, waiting.
"No, sir," I answer.
"Let me see your hands."
I hold them up, palms facing him.
"Clean," he says. "Pockets?"
"Empty," I say, pulling at the seams so he can see them.
"If you're not some kind of vandal then why you here boy?"
And maybe it's the relief behind every word or the harsh slope of his back in the dark. Or maybe it's just the sight of him, his vulnerabilities jutting up around us, splayed for the world to see, and him, old and slight and ready to defend them. But when I open my mouth, I do it without thinking, not a contrived word on the edge of my lips and I tell the truth.
***
The map is sprawled across Joe's workbench, his fingertips gently wrangling the ends. He's hunched over it, eyes swelling over every landmark and stray note but he's not trying to decipher it. He's not trying to make sense of it at all. He's just looking at it, reading it. Slow and careful.
I lean against the open door, watching him, waiting for him to speak. I don't know what I want to hear. That he would do the same thing, that I'm not crazy, that I'm not lost. Because even with Nia still pulling the strings that's how I feel. Maybe that's why I told the truth. Because this man seems to know what to do with things that are lost.
"You come a long way, kid," he says. "You got a long way to go."
I wait for the word long to mean something, for time to mean something. But it's still as nonexistent as it was yesterday and the day before that.
Joe tilts the light toward the far end of his workshop. It's a miniature of his village outside, the same metal carnage piled in twisting heaps along wooden tables and makeshift shelves, all lying in wait.
"You could make her something," Joe says.
He moves toward one of the tables, picking things up, putting them down. I hover at his side as he reaches for a small fan blade, his thumbnail scraping off some of the chipping paint before he sets it back down. He holds up a lone brass candleholder, the dim light caught in its dull sheen. He moves to a shelf near the door and I hang back, getting a closer look at the piles in front of me. I'm afraid to touch anything, as if it's all been strung together, the slightest disruption unraveling everything.
My fingers brush the tattered end of an American flag before fumbling across a mound of corroded screws and rusting nail heads. I wonder what sort of monster Joe would have been able to create with that box in the back of the hardware store and I can't help but picture them all strung from some makeshift sky, glinting in the night like stars.
Joe has something flat against his forearm. At first glance it looks like a piece of driftwood but there's a gloss finish and something twisting up like vines. Petals fall in folds along the edges, rose buds carved into the wood.
"That one," I say. "I think she would like that one."
Joe lays it under the lamplight before snapping the dried lid off a can of paint. He finds a small paintbrush, the ends splayed and wiry, and slides it into my hand. The grain is cold as I run my fingers along the petals and I don't know where to start.
Joe sees me hesitating and he clears his throat. “Don’t think too hard, now.”
“No?”
“It don’t have to be perfect.”
“She was.” My throat is raw. “She liked to make things. But I don’t know…”
“Makin’ things ain’t about being right or wrong. Makin’ things is about takin’ a piece of you and leavin’ it for the rest of us to find later. Tell ‘em you was here. That’s it.”
I let the tip of the brush fall limp in the paint and I trail it onto the wood, pale drips crawling to the center. And then I don't think; I don’t try. I just let my wrist maneuver everything.
Joe leads me back through his village past a wire hanger installation and through a meadow of coke cans refashioned into daisies. I see it rising into the sky, branches hanging at our feet, the only other living thing on the property besides the two of us. The tree is a giant knot, bark twisted, the roots wrung up from the ground. It's grotesque and wild and beautiful just like everything else here.
Joe hands me the nail head and I pierce the wood, roses flush to the bark. He hammers it in, five deep knocks careening into the darkness and I take a step back, reading the sign, the only words not found in the Old Testament, the only declaration here without an ounce of hope of being true.
Nia was here.
Chapter 12
Fall
Her hip knocked against mine, jolting me. My hand wafted there between us but she was clutching tight to her sketchbook, the brads leaving a faint imprint along her forearm. The Pontiac was out of commission or in other words I was out of gas and wouldn’t get paid for another forty-eight hours. I’d only had the thing for three months but Nia’d already had us all over central Florida. Until I ran out of money that is.
But it was nice walking her home, familiar, the way we used to in middle school when her hand brushing mine was the peak of my day. Only then I wasn’t looking over my shoulder every few minutes. I wasn’t peering down every alleyway and memorizing every license plate. I wasn’t afraid for her to walk home alone.
But there’d been three robberies in the past month, the bright orange graffiti on the other side of I-4 and the junkies that came with it starting their slow descent on the neighborhood I grew up in.
I noticed something slumped behind a dumpster, moving. Nia nudged me and I shrugged, hoping it would satisfy whatever question I hadn’t heard because I was too busy sizing up some hobo.
“There’s tigers there, you know.”
Nia’d spent the last two hours trying to convince me to go to Siberia with her. Yes, Siberia. The day before it’d been Chile to see some prehistoric lake and the next day it was no doubt somewhere in Africa—the Sahara, the Congo—places you only go to die.
“It’s a wasteland,” I said.
“You say that about everywhere.”
“And I’m usually right. Do you remember that one time you wanted to steal your mom’s car and drive to that county fair in the middle of nowhere? It’ll be an adventure, you said. It’ll be fun, you said. There’ll be food, you—”
She stopped me. “There was food.”
“Oh, right. Jackrabbit on a stick and warm beer we weren’t even old enough to buy. Not to mention the hour we’d spent waiting in the car for the place to open.”
“I told you the website must have been wrong. But it worked out anyway. We got there so early we didn’t have to pay.”
“Yeah because the carny taking tickets was still asleep in his trailer.”
“It was…”
“Don’t say fun. Do not say fun.”
“It was interesting.”
“Interesting. Like the time we climbed the lighthouse and that hobo tried to kill us.”
“He didn’t try to kill us,” she snapped.
“He charged me with a knife. I’d say he was trying to kill us.”
“We snuck up on him.”
“Right. Because you wanted to stand in front of the beam and see if our shadows would reflect in the sky.”
“Yeah, like Batman.”
“Who isn’t real.”
“I know Batman isn’t real,” she huffed. “That wasn’t the point.”
“What was the point then?”
She grew quiet, ignoring me. I counted the standard fifteen seconds and then she inhaled.
“What about India?” she said. “We could see the Taj Mahal.”
“Great. A giant tomb.”
“So? You’d never want to see it?”
“I don’t know. India…isn’t it hot there?”
“We live in Florida.”
“I know but at least we have air conditioning.”
“It’s not some pre-historic civilization,” Nia corrected. “They have air conditioning. I mean some places, I’m sure.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “You’re sure? Because you know what happened the last time you thought you were sure.”
She rolled her eyes. “What’s with the spontaneous trip down memory lane?”
“You know what they say. Hindsight is twenty-twenty.”
We were nearing the edge of Nia’s street and my fingers curled around her wrist. It was Friday and she’d be going down to Miami that weekend to see her grandparents. I sifted through my memory, not ready to let go of her.
“What about a few weeks ago when you made me play human paintbrush for that art competition you were doing and you covered me in that blue, supposedly washable paint, that ended up staining my skin and turning me into a smurf for four days? You thought you were sure then.”
I thought about my hoodie pulled low over my face, jeans and long sleeves covering ninety percent of my body while I tried to slip into class without anyone noticing.
It worked for a little while until the teacher would ask me to take off my sunglasses and then everyone would turn to look at my blue raccoon eyes. And all so Nia could spend three weeks in Tennessee at some art camp.
“Ah yes. Exploding man,” she mused.
She’d submitted my smeared silhouette to a panel of judges over the weekend, the result of her throwing buckets of paint on me and me lying flat on a long strip of canvas. She won. Next summer she’d be up near Nashville picking up all of those pretentious artist habits: drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, swearing off red meat. She’d be gone for three weeks—this quick trip to Miami multiplied by fourteen.
I slid an arm around her waist. “Or how about a few weeks ago when you left me that note to meet you at that address in St. Augustine? Only it was the wrong address and I spent three hours melting in the Pontiac and leaving you voicemails because your phone was dead like always.”
“It’s not my fault you didn’t think to roll down the windows.”
“And that time you dragged me to that concert at that abandoned warehouse and we got robbed.”
“Correction,” she said. “You got robbed.”
“Exactly. Me. Your misadventures only ever have one casualty and it’s always me.”
“Come on. What about that time I got stung by a jellyfish and you had to pee on my leg? That was pretty traumatic.”
“That’s called the universe finally making amends. You get to cover me in paint, drag me all over the city, get me robbed and almost killed, break my nose—”
“That was an accident.”
“Feed me cake until I puke—”
“You’re the one who wanted to have a cake eating contest.”
“Tar and feather me—”
“Okay now you’re just making stuff up.”
“And I get to pee on you.”
She narrowed her eyes. “So we’re even?”
I leaned in. “Not even close.”
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