Too Many Ghosts

Submitted when I received the NEA grant in 1978.  Published in The Madison Review, Black Jack and Three Border Stories, a chapbook (Wowapi Press)

Too Many Ghosts

by

Jack Steele

     It’s late.  Molly’s been asleep a long time, sealed off in her own air-conditioned room, a sheet pulled up to her chin, her bottle under one arm and her doll under the other.  And Sue’s in the ice box, also under the sheets, but tonight she has the table lamp on and she’s reading a mystery.  Here in the front room I can’t open the window more than a few inches or all my papers will blow away, so I sweat a lot and look at my reflection in the window glass, in a room that died thirty years ago.

     We rent a house that used to belong to an old maid schoolteacher, and I can still smell the moth balls that preserved her Sunday hats and her shoes.  The faded print curtains are still up, along with the faded wallpaper and plaques that talk about “Love” and “Friendship.”  We even kept some of the furniture, a severe wooden rocker and a cedar chest, because we’ve got nothing to replace it with and no money to get anything.

     Sue thinks that a ghost lives in this room, and she tells me every night to leave the doors open while I’m in here and to be sure and close them when I come to bed.  She doesn’t mind the ghost, but she hates to think of it wandering around the house.  Tonight when I close the doors it’ll be for the last time.  I’m done with it, and only came in tonight as a kind of farewell, and to see if I could put this thing down.

     It’s so hot in here I know why the animals and Mexicans sleep in the middle of the day.  If the white man didn’t have air-conditioning and had to dig dirt with a shovel, he’d be sleeping too.  Of course a lot of them do it anyway, take me for example.  The air isn’t fit to be awake in after ten in the morning, and thank goodness Molly takes two naps, morning and afternoon, or one of us would have to stay up and make sure she didn’t crawl into a rattlesnake’s mouth or get carried away by coyotes.  Which makes a person wish he was married to to a little Mexican slave girl who’d let him sleep right through lunch and get up in the cool of the late afternoon when the beans were ready, but I had to go off and marry an educated neurotic white girl with fair hair and pale blue skin who likes to sleep as much as I do, and then still not satisfied, go off and get her pregnant just to make sure that my life would be complicated enough.

     I’ve been told that the Mexicans of fifty years ago built their houses out of caliche so that even in August at noon the inside was just as cool as a wine cellar, without windows or fans or central air-conditioning, unlike this place that’s half window so that you’re either hot as hell or damn near blown away.  But of course we’ve got a three quarter ton window unit in our bedroom so when we get Molly down in the morning Sue and I pull down all the shades and strip our clothes off and get under the sheets.  It’s like being in a refrigerator.

     If we could be totally nocturnal that would be fine.  I mean we really thought about fixing it so that Molly sleeps all day, and we do too, and then just go about our business in the dark.  But nothing’s open at night around here.  Except for Chester’s café, Winona pretty much shuts down by seven.  We can’t even go grocery shopping at night unless we drive forty miles to do it, much less pick up the unemployment check, which we always have to get first.  And the goddamn liquor store closes at nine.

     Now it looks like I’m going to have to go back to work, and there ain’t many construction companies around here that have a night shift.  Actually, there aren’t many construction companies around here at all, which was okay when I didn’t really want a job, but I guess I’ll find something, even though thinking about getting up at five in the morning to go pound nails all day kind of keeps me up at night, pound nails or work a shovel or muck concrete.  It all makes me want to climb under the bed.  It’s awful:  that empty feeling you get in the pit of your stomach on a Monday morning when you stand in front of the bathroom mirror with the toothbrush in your hand and it’s not even light outside.

     I get up at five now but it’s not the same because I’m going out after rabbits and get back around eight for a big breakfast and more hot coffee and Sue and I sit around the table and talk about things while Molly toddles off to the back yard to play in her sandbox.  I usually come back with two or three rabbits, which we freeze, and sometimes a rattlensnake hide.  I’m trying to get enough to make a jacket.  There’s an old man in town says he can do it.

     Sue isn’t crazy about the idea of a rattlesnake jacket.  She says people will think I’m a snake, or want to be like one.  They’ll start associating me with a rattlesnake.  I said, “What’s wrong with that?”  And she said, “I just don’t like it.  Do you want to be a snake?  Is that what you want?”  And I said, “Wouldn’t you kind of like to have a rattlesnake in bed with you if you knew it wasn’t poison and wouldn’t bite too hard?”

     She didn’t like that and wouldn’t speak to me for about two hours, which is a long time for us.  Neither of us can keep our mouths shut for that long usually.  We’re screamers, not sulkers.  And we can’t hold grudges.  This time she cheated because she went to the bedroom and got under the sheets, and I sat on the back steps and watched Molly play with the water hose.  I drank several cans of beer, in the heat of the day when you can see the air writhing under the sun as if it were chained to the ground, my shirt off and beads of dry dirt sticking to my neck and flies landing on my back, the mesquite’s fern-like leaves chalky with caliche dust, looking as if the sun had faded them, and Molly instinctively staying close to its sparse shade.  She has skin like her mother’s, pale and blue, and the same yellow hair.

     I lasted two hours and then put Molly to bed and snuck into the dark cool bedroom and climbed in under the sheets behind Sue and made her giggle.  She has a fine intelligent nose that I like to kiss and firm educated lips and stringy yellow hair that seems to be connected to a plump and eager ass, and she kept her eyes closed, having hidden behind those green tinted lids something wet and cool.

     I spend a lot of time at night out on the front porch and listen to coyotes while I wait for an armadillo to come along.  Luis taught me how to use a knife on an armadillo so I don’t wake up anybody and I can still kill them right near the house.  You have to be quick:  grab their tails and cut their throats almost in one move.  They have wicked tails.  I hear it can feel like an iron bar on the side of your head.  Might even break an arm.

     Luis and I spent a lot of nights on the porch, watching Winona ten miles away and several red lighted radio towers.  In the daytime it is blue sky and clouds and mesquite and prickly pear rolling away, and in the late afternoon, looking east, with the air cooling off rapidly and a southeast breeze, the sky changes colors every few minutes into deeper blues and the whole sky, from east to west, is such a variety that it’s like shades of a blue rainbow, and the brush gets greener and the dirt browner and the air itself seems to take on color, quite often a gentle transparent yellow; and it seems quieter, though it isn’t really because all the animals are just now beginning to go about their business, but there is an illusion of peace, which hangs on in spite of the yelps of a pack of coyotes.

     One evening when Luis had his whole family out here, barbecuing tripas for us, kidneys and intestines, and his three kids were outside the fence playing along the edge of the brush, we heard the coyote pack and the kids came running to us as if a hundred coyotes were right on their tails.  All three were out of breath and the youngest one had tears in his eyes.  Luis picked up the youngest and laughed at all of them and told the two oldest to run on.  Then he gave the little boy he held in is arms a bit of kidney and a swig of beer and he seemed to be all right.

     Luis doesn’t look old enough to be the father of three children.  He has wary eyes and brown well-oiled skin, a slim angular build that is almost feminine.  He wears sunglasses a lot, all the time when he hunts, and he can walk thorugh the brush without making a sound.  He’s a dope dealer and sometime construction worker.

     We met his wife, Lucy, for the first time the night they brought out the tripas.  Sue said they talked a lot when they were alone in the kitchen, but when the four of us got together Lucy didn’t have much to say.  She sat dircectly across from me in the back yard when we ate.  We sat in wooden chairs, resting paper plates on our laps and eating mainly with our fingers.  The only light we had came from the two kitchen windows and from a bright full moon.

     She never looked at me.  I’d noticed earlier that her legs were skinned up like a schoolgirl’s.  Her eyes and fingernails were the same color, a deep greenish black, and she wore a plain gray dress.  I watched her tear at the kidney and then wash it down with orange drink from a paper cup.  Behind her in the dark was a mesquite tree, and further back was a big butane tank and back of that was an old broken down shed.  Off to the right I could see the moon, and from that night on Lucy had a place in my dreams, just me and her in the yard and behind her the old shed and the moon, and her eyes shining in the dark, and me wavering between fear and lust, not knowing exactly what she was.

#

     It’s late.  Molly’s been asleep a long time, sealed off in her own air-conditioned room, a sheet pulled up to her chin, her bottle under one arm and her doll under the other.  And Sue’s in the ice box, also under the sheets, but tonight she has the table lamp on and she’s reading a mystery.  Here in the front room I can’t open the window more than a few inches or all my papers will blow away, so I sit here and sweat and look at my reflection:  sucked up, sitting here under a harsh overhead light in a room that died thirty years ago, not my room at all, not even my house.  The house of a schoolteacher who liked hats and shoes and print curtains and plaques that talk about “Friendship.”  Everything is faded, even the wood.

     The first omen that I really noticed came about a month ago, about this time of night and I was in bed with my back to Sue trying to get to sleep and she was propped up on her pillows reading.  She said, “I’m going to find a job.”  I said, “Okay, what about Molly?”  “You can keep her.”  “Okay.  We can use the money.”  I was willing to leave it at that, but Sue went on.  “I have to.  I’m stagnated here.”  “Fine.”  “I don’t feel like I’m doing anything.”  “Okay.  Don’t rub it in.  I’m trying to go to sleep.”  “Don’t you want to talk about it?”  “No.”  “Well I do.”

     I turned over, sighed and told her to give me a cigarette.  I put the ash tray on my stomach.  I said, “Okay, talk.”  “Well, it’s just that it’s fine here for you.  You go hunting all the time and out with Luis and his friends drinking beer, but all I’ve got is this house.  You and Molly, and I know that’s a lot, but I need more.”  “Good.  I wouldn’t love you if you didn’t.”  “You’re not going to feel that way after you keep Molly for a while.”  She was right.  I said, “Okay, look for a part time job.”  “That won’t be enough,” she said.  “And you’ll have to go back to work and that’ll just be worse.”  “So what do you want me to do?” I asked.  “You’ve just given us a problem I can’t solve.”  “Maybe we can find a Mexican lady to keep Molly?”  “For less than you can make?”  “I can find a job in Corpus.  They pay better.”  “Not that much better, counting gas.  And I wouldn’t have a car all day.”  She didn’t say anything, just smoked her cigarette faster.  I looked up at ther eyes and they were full of determination.  “We’ll figure out something,” I said.  “Let’s sleep on it.”  “I want to figure it out now.”

     A week later she got a job waiting tables in Winona.  From six to ten in the morning, four days a week.  Twenty dollars a week plus five to ten in tips.  Coffee and doughnuts and ham and eggs to quilt-faced, khaki outfitted ranchers, biscuits with beans and egg and chorizo tacquitos to the workers, running around in a short white dress, her stringy hair pinned up and her educated mouth alternately smiling and cursing.  It would do us, I thought, until I had to go back to work.

#

     Luis was dealing dope in the Impala Club, selling lids and hoping to make forty dollars on a pound before closing time.  We were sitting at a table watching the Saturday night dancers gallop around the floor to the Mexican swing on the jukebox, and talking to Victoria, the owner of the place.  She had a crush on Luis, and she was fat and had just one good eye.  The other one was yellow and aimed high and off to the side.  She was wearing a blue sweater that would’ve fit an elephant and dancing with her was like holding a sack of oranges.  Her face was puffy and marked up with old battle scars, and one sharp look from her good eye seemed to tell her everything she needed to know about a person.

     She and Luis had lapsed into Spanish when Air Force came over and asked politely if he could take a moment of our time.  Luis sat back in his chair and eyed him without a word.  Air Force didn’t look too bright.  His eyes were bloodshot and half closed and traces of acne covered his face.  He wore a dark heavy sport coat and a white shirt open at the collar, and his black shoes were super shined.  I said, “Sure.”  As he pulled up a chair, Victoria left to take care of some customers.

     “Where do you fellows work?”

     I was looking past him at Victoria’s helper.  Tall, slim legs and big breasts.

     “We try not to,” I said, and heard Luis laugh.

     She was serving beer at a table right next to ours.  It was a table full of men and all of them had something to say to her.  She smiled and joked with them.

     “Have you ever thought about the Air Force?”

     “In relation to what?”

     Air Force spoke good formal English but he didn’t know what I was talking about.  I don’t think Luis did either, but when I looked at him he was grinning.

     “The Air Force is a very good career.  It can make a man out of you.”

     Up close she looked good but not quite as pretty as at a distance.  There was a cheapness about her, in the tight fit of her dress, and in the heavy makeup she put around her eyes.  She had green eyes, always alert and bright, and they could change from good natured to suspicious in an instant.

     Luis leaned over the table and said in Spanish, “I’m not a man?”

     Air Force flinched, but not much.  He answered in English.

     “What I mean is that the service is a good job.  I used to hang around bars all day and get into trouble—I was always in trouble—but now I make good money.”  He fingered his lapels when he said this.  “And it’s easy work.”

     Luis shrugged.  “I do all right,” he said, leaning back in his chair as if the conversation were over.  He motioned to the girl for another round.  She walked very upright, almost abnormally so, as if he had a book balanced on her head.  Her dress was navy blue with little white polka dots and ruffles down the front.  The kind of thing you see at a flea market, which probably explained why it was a little too tight and too short.

     Air Force started looking at me even though I was looking right past him.  He said, “Where else can you make eight hundred dollars a month in less than two years and have a month’s vacation?”

     “California,” I said.

     When the girl leaned over to pick up our empty cans, I noticed a lot of scar tissue on the back of her neck, probably from a burn.  And when she bent over the dress was so tight that her belly stuck out a little, but I thought it looked good.

     Luis said, “Your name Villanueva?”

     Air Force said it was.

     Luis cocked his head to one side and gave  him an ominous stare.  Air Force didn’t look at him.

     Finally, Luis said, “You’re Richard’s brother?”

     Air Force nodded.

     Luis didn’t say anything but he kept on looking ominous.  Finally, Air Force shrugged and got up and left. 

     Luis said, “He and his brothers castrated one of my cousins.”

     “Castrated?”

     Luis nodded. 

     “My cousin had gone out with his sister while she was supposed to be engaged to someone else.  They met  him outside of a dance.  I saw him right after it happened.  He bled to death.  No one could help him.  We couldn’t get him to the hospital fast enough.  This guy didn’t actually do it.  His brother Richard had the knife.  But he was there.”

     “Nice guy.”

     Victoria came over and asked me to dance.  It was a slow song.  She danced very close, pressing her fat hips into me.

     I said, “What is the girl’s name?”

     “Maria?”

     “Yes.  Does she dance?”

     “I don’t let her.  Too many fights.”

     “Does she have a boyfriend?”

     Victoria leaned back and looked at me disapprovingly, but with a slight grin on her face.  She shook her head at me.

     When I got back to the table, Luis was selling his last lid, making arrangements for delivery.  Victoria stood behind me and when Luis’s customer was gone, she said, “You going to buy dinner for me tonight?”  It was after midnight.  Luis looked at me and I said, “We’ll do better than that.  We’ll buy for you and Maria.”  Victoria hit me on the shoulder with the palm of her hand, a little harder than playfully.  She walked off laughing.

#

     Sometimes I dream that Air Force is with us.  We’re in a large room on the second floor with polished wood floors and bright glaring lights.  There is nothing in the room except a jukebox playing Mexican music and a few mattresses on the floor.  He is making a pass at Maria and getting further than me because he speaks Spanish.  I sit beside them on the mattress for a while, feeling very uncomfortable and then go look out a window at a big green neon sign that says EAT and flashes on and off and gives me a headache.  I usually wake up after that dream with a headache.

     And sometimes I’m with Sue and she knows Spanish, which she really doesn’t, and I don’t, and the same thing happens.  Only Sue is a more cheerful and flirtatious, and more bitchy than Maria, and occasionally she says something to me in Spanish and laughs when I don’t understand.

     Luis said nothing was wrong, but you just don’t make it with a Mexican girl the first time you meet her.  He said I’d have to start hanging out in the place and sooner or later she’d be ready.  Although, he couldn’t promise anything with this one.  In fact, Victoria would probably fire her prety soon because she was too pretty.  Too many people wanted to fuck her and she wouldn’t fuck anybody.

     After we ate eggs and tacos in Winona at Chester’s, we took the women outside of town, out by an old creekbed and a family cemetery.  We parked not far from an abandoned car, a ’55 Chevy.  There wasn’t much left of it but the body and it was banged up pretty bad.  Victoria tried to make out with Luis and he went along with her more or less.  Maria and I sat in the back seat and tried to think up something to talk about.  I tried several times to kiss her but had no luck.

     Right before we went home she said she had to pee.  Luis had some vodka and she’d been hitting it pretty hard.  It didn’t loosen her up much, but it made her kind of woozy and glassy-eyed.  As she got out of the car, I said, “Don’t let a snake bit you.”  She said, “Oh, don’t scare me.”  It was a full moon that night and I watched her walk up to the tall grass that bordered the cemetery fence.  And I watched her pee.  While Luis was kissing Victoria’s bowling ball tits.

     Victoria had something to do with Luis’s dope supply.  He had to keep her happy.  That idea went through my head while I watched Maria squat in the grass.  I felt like a frustrated sailor, but it was good to know that Maria wasn’t a whore, wasn’t totally out of reach.

#

     I spend my life fading in and out like the image on a faulty television picture tube.  I feel that ghost tonight, and it’s hard to imagine the days when the deep colors start coming in.

     I had to go into Winona to get some lumber and things to fix a part of the front porch that had rotted out.  The landlord said he’d take it off the rent.  Sue got back from work around half past twelve and I left right after lunch.  I had several errands to do besides get the lumber, so I told her not to expect me back until around suppertime.  There’s two caliche roads into Winona and I took what we call the back way.

     Five miles down the road I had a flat.  I was on a dry dusty hill and might have fried under the sun if I hadn’t had my old cowboy hat.  It took me a quarter of an hour just to get the goddamn spare out from under the bed of the pickup.  When I got it on it was too flat to do me any good.  I kicked it a few times, gritted my teeth and threw the car tool several yards down the road.  I yelled a lot and banged on the side of the pickup until my hands got sore.  Finally, though, I took the .22 rifle I always carried in the gun rack and head down the road back towards the house.  I had another tire, on a wheel, stored in the garage, and I was pretty sure it had air.

     Walking back I saw a five foot rattler hung over a barbed wire fence, its rattlers and head gone and the buzzards doing a fast job of taking the rest.  I took a couple of wild shots at the buzzards as they took off, just for the hell of it, and I wasn’t fifty yards down the road before they were back on the fence.

     When I got to the gate I felt really drained and disgusted.  I couldn’t see myself that afternoon pushing a goddamn tire five miles down the road.  The heat had gotten to me enough so that as I walked up the hill the house and mesquite trees around it seemed to wave and swish, not unlike a flag in a breeze.  And when I saw Luis’s old beatup Pontiac in the driveway, I was a little pissed because I was left without an excuse for putting off the chore until the next day.  Molly’s tricycle was turned over in the mud where she’d been playing with the hose under one of the mesquites.  The back screen door wasn’t latched, had been left open a few inches and some bees and a lot of flies had gotten into the kitchen.

     I walked into the back room with the rifle still in my hand.  The cold air hit me pleasantly like a light slap on the face with a wet rag.  I wish I’d had a shotgun, or at least I did then.  Shooting off a shotgun in a room is like throwing a stick of dynamite.  Luis was already off the bed but still stark naked.  Sue was flat on her back and my impulse to look at her saved Luis his life.  The sheet covered her up to her waist and her tits glistened with saliva.  She’d opened her eyes wide but hadn’t moved her head, as if something had woken her up and she was afraid to look.  Without worrying about his clothes, Luis dove head first through the window, scattering glass everywhere.  I shot at him too late and dove right through after him.  By the time I got up he was almost in his car and I shot too quick and missed.

     When I’d pumped the gun again he was behind the wheel and I shot right through the windshield but it didn’t seem to faze him or the glass and I flattened one of his tires but he kept right on going.  The gate was closed and he drove through it.  I pulled the trigger until all the bullets were gone.

     Sue was sitting up in bed, propped up on half a dozen pillows, smoking a cigarette.  I put the gun down, leaning it in a corner.

     “You aren’t going to shoot me?”

     When she lifted her cigarette to her mouth her hand was shaking.  I sat down in a chair a few feet away.  I looked at the blond hair and the pale bluish skin.  In fact, with the shades drawn everything in the room looked pale and blue.  She had pulled the shade back down over the broken window and wind blew it a little.  I must have been hallucinating:  inside the room it looked like dusk.

     “Did he do it?”

     “Do what?”

     “Fuck you.”

     She looked at me like she couldn’t believe her ears.

     “Why?”

     “I just want to know.”

     “But why?  I mean, it wasn’t rape for chrissake.”

     “Okay, skip it.”

     She shook her head at me like I was an idiot.

     I said, “By the way, I didn’t get him.”

     “I know.  I could hear the car.”

     A long moment passed.  Then she said, “You going to shoot me?”

     “No.”

     “You still love me?”

     “Yes.”

     “You’ve done it, haven’t you?  I mean, you’ve fucked some Mexican girls?”

     “Sort of.”

     “What does that mean?”

     “Yes.”

     “This will change everything won’t it?”

     “I won’t be seeing Luis as much.”

     “That’s not what I mean.”

     “We’ll see.  I don’t know.”

     “But you do still love me?”

     “Yes, goddamnit.”

     She closed her eyes and let her cigarette burn down in the ash tray.  I watched her, and the room for a while seemed to fade from dusk into night, the lamp by her bed becoming tiny like a slit of light through a closed door, but then it would brighten up again.  And I became very conscious of the hum of the air conditioner.  And then a little later I heard Molly gooing and shaking her bed in the next room.

     I said, “It didn’t wake her up.”

     Sue nodded, but didn’t open her eyes.

     “I thought about that, too,” she said.