Ghost Boy Page 3

“It was just a crummy old stick,” he said.

  “And why is that? Huh?” Mrs. Beesley tugged at her dress; it was stuck to the steps with sweat. “Because you lost your good one. You lost your reel and your knife and your net.” She counted the things off on her fingers, whapping her hand with the paper. “Two pairs of shoes and eight pairs of mittens over the winter. Where have they gone? Huh? Where have they gone?”

  Harold shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. It wasn’t a lie. Everything she’d named had been snatched away; he didn’t know where they were.

  “You don’t know nothing,” she said. “I should send you out like Farmer Hull’s old beat-up Dodge, all tied together with bits of string and wire.”

  He couldn’t help it then. He started to cry, and the tears rolled out from under his little dark glasses. He missed his father terribly, his father and his brother. They had never shouted at him, and in those days neither had his mother. Hopalong John was right; the war had ruined everything, and the war had made her crazy.

  “And what’s that in your hand?” she asked.

  Harold looked at the paper as though he had never seen it before. “A ticket,” he said. “To the circus.”

  “Huh!” she cried. “And I suppose you caught that while you were fishing.”

  “I was given it,” he said.

  “Well, if you think you’re going off to the circus, you’ve another think coming,” said Mrs. Beesley. “Your father’s not going to stand for your going to the circus.”

  Harold said stubbornly, “He isn’t my father.” Then he climbed up the steps and went right past his mother, into the house and through to the kitchen. Honey went behind him.

  Strips of brown tape hung from the ceiling, matted with the bodies of flies. They spun slowly in the drafts of warm air that came through the window screens. Harold filled Honey’s water dish and watched for a while as she drank. Then he opened the white slab door of the refrigerator and found a jug of iced tea inside, with wedges of lemon and lime bobbing on the surface.

  “I wondered how long it would take you to sniff that out,” said Mrs. Beesley, suddenly filling the doorway. “Now you just keep out of that icebox, you hear.”

  “It’s a refrigerator, Ma.”

  “Oh!” she said. “Well, you just keep out of it, because that iced tea’s for your father, you hear? He’s going to be hot, and he’s going to be tired, because he’s out there in this devil’s heat searching all of God’s acres for you.”

  Harold didn’t answer. He closed the door with his hip.

  “And here he is now,” she said, hearing his step on the porch. She fussed at her dress, at her tangles of hair. Suddenly she was smiling. “Oh, all right,” she said. “You can have one glass. A little one, mind. And bring a large one for your father.”

  Walter Beesley had blisters on his feet and a mass of burrs clinging to his pants. “I walked right to the Rattlesnake,” he said. “Clear to the Rattlesnake.”

  “You poor thing,” said Mrs. Beesley. She sat him down in the big armchair, beside the card table covered with his albums and stamps. She knelt on the floor and untied the laces of his banker’s shoes.

  He leaned back, exhausted. He could barely lift an arm to take the glass from Harold. “Well, at least the boy’s here,” he said. “Doesn’t seem any worse for wear.”

  “He claims he was fishing,” said Mrs. Beesley. She pulled off the shoes and arranged them beside the chair. “He claims he was down at the Rattlesnake.”

  “In this heat? And the sun like a blowtorch?”

  Mrs. Beesley nodded. “He claims he was fishing,” she said again. “But he came home with a ticket to the circus. He came home not half an hour ago, all het up about going to the circus.”

  Harold stood and watched as they talked about him, the boy who wasn’t there.

  “I know a thing or two about circuses,” said Walter Beesley. “And they’re dens of evil, that’s what they are.” Walter held the glass of iced tea against his forehead. “They’re the haunts of Gypsies.”

  “You tell him,” said Mrs. Beesley.

  Walter rolled the glass back and forth across his brow. “I know a thing or two about Gypsies. And there’s nothing good to be said in that department.” He flexed his toes in his thin black socks. “No, I think the circus is not a fit place for a boy like you. A gullible boy.”

  Harold felt very small. He felt too small to answer.

  Mrs. Beesley glared at him. Her fat white fingers kneaded at Walter’s feet. “You hear that?” she said. “Your father’s made a decision.”

  “And stay out of the sun,” said Walter. He shook a thin finger at Harold. “A boy like you, you’re different from the others. The sun will kill you, don’t you know that? It’ll burn you like old, dry grass. It’ll make a blind man of you before you’re twenty-one.”

  Mrs. Beesley smiled. “You see?” she crowed. “There’ll be no more fishing. No more gallivanting across the countryside.”

  Harold felt smaller and smaller and smaller.

  “I’ve tried,” said Walter Beesley. “Lord knows how much I’ve tried.” He turned his eyes to the ceiling. “I’d hoped to interest you in philately, in books and accounting, in pursuits more apt for a boy like you. I know a thing or two about albinos, and I’ll tell you this: They spend their lives inside. They don’t go traipsing around the country.”

  Harold thought of the Cannibal King. On his first world tour.

  “You’re not a normal boy,” said Walter Beesley. “You’re not like the others, who can go off playing for hour after hour. You’re—” He raised his voice. “Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

  Harold turned his head away, looking sideways at his stepfather to keep his vision focused.

  “Look at me!” shouted Walter.

  “I can’t,” Harold cried, and fled to his room.

  From the window there he watched the sun go down. He saw the smears of color changing and looked forward to the darkness. He liked the shadows more than light, the coolness more than heat. What Walter had told him was true; the sun did terrible things to his skin and made his eyes burn with unbearable pain.

  The shadows thickened and filled around him. The huge, flat horizon of the prairies turned to purple and then to black. And Harold sat in a silence so oppressive that he heard the ticking of the clock in the room below his own and the squeaking of the hinges in Walter Beesley’s rickety folding table.

  He stared through the window, over the roof of the station, and saw the circus big top glowing with light. Then, so very faint that they were hardly there, came the first wheezy notes of the calliope. It was a cheerful song, whistled the way his father would have whistled it among the shelves of Kline and Sons. The music swelled and filled the air, and a swarm of fireflies rose from the garden, twinkling in the hoot and shriek of the song. And then the people started passing, streaming down to Batsford’s field, and he watched them from above, the little children holding hands with parents as the calliope played them to the circus.

  Chapter

  6

  Harold lay on the bed on his back, gazing up at a jagged, toothy line of baseball pennants. Beside him was a gun rack holding Louisville Sluggers instead of rifles. And beside that was a shelf eight feet long crowded with trophies, with a catcher’s mitt stuffed inside a mask, a fielder’s glove bound by string around an oversized softball that was painted red and yellow.

  They were David’s; everything was David’s. “Don’t cry because I’m going,” he’d told Harold the morning he left for the war. “Ghosts never cry,” he’d said, and punched Harold’s arm lightly.

  “I’m frightened,” Harold had said. “I’m scared you won’t come back.”

  David had laughed. “Of course I will. And we’ll get a couple of horses and follow the Oregon Trail like Dad always talked about doing. We’ll see the ocean.”

  “And the mountains?”

  “And the forests,” David had said.

  “And we’l
l live like mountain men?”

  “Sure.” David had laughed once more. “On the weekends we’ll ride down to the ocean.”

  Then David had put on his soldier’s cap and picked up his duffel bag. “Look after Ma,” he’d said. “And don’t go touching my junk.” And Harold never had. Every week he dusted, whisking at the pennants and the trophies with a big feather duster, taking great care that nothing was moved.

  Only one thing was gone: the top bunk of the pair. His mother had taken it away more than a year ago, but still it was strange for Harold to look up from the bed and see the ceiling high above him instead of the boards of his brother’s bed.

  “He’s gone,” his mother had said. She was just starting to change then, getting fat, going crazy.

  “He’s not,” he’d said. “He’s missing, that’s all. Just missing in action.”

  “But he’s not coming back,” she’d told him. “And it’s high time you faced up to that.” Then she’d taken the bed in pieces because Harold wouldn’t help—the headboard and footboard, and then the big hollow base that boomed on the stairs as she dragged it down by herself.

  Harold gazed at the pennants. He watched them flutter in his poor, weak eyes. And he waited, and the calliope played.

  At ten o’clock there were heavy thumps in the hall as his mother went off to her bed. At eleven Walter went too.

  Harold got up. He pulled his pillow out of its slip and stuffed the bag full of clothes. He worked as quietly as he could, glancing at Honey to see that she didn’t come awake. He stepped around her, back and forth, sorting out socks without holes, the best of his shirts, the cleanest of his underwear. From the shelf he took the fielder’s glove, knowing that David wouldn’t mind; Harold had worn the glove as often as his brother. “I’ll never make the majors,” David had said. “But you might, Harold. You’re a natural.”

  A natural. Even then, Harold had known he wasn’t that. David had got the biggest ball he could find—a softball, the sissy’s ball—and painted it as yellow as sunflowers. Then on top of the yellow he’d painted red stripes, so that even Harold could see it. And then he’d spent hours pitching the ball as slowly as anyone could—never laughing, never getting angry—until Harold learned to catch it and hit it as well as anyone else.

  Now the paint was cracked, the white of the softball showing through the yellow. It nestled in the glove like a colorful egg about to open. Take it, David’s voice said. It’s yours. Just take it.

  Harold shoved the ball and the glove into the pillowcase. He squashed it down and tied a knot with the corners, and it weighed half a ton with all the things he’d packed. So he stepped across Honey one more time and took a bat from the wall to slip through his knot for a handle. Then he stood at the door, staring back at his dog.

  She slept in a ball, her head on her paws. One hind leg was crooked out behind her like a frog’s, but she had slept that way ever since Harold could remember. He watched her breathing, her eyelids just barely fluttering. And he smiled at her, aching to touch her again. “So long, old girl,” he said. “You be a good dog, you hear?” Then he turned the knob as slowly as possible, listening through it for sounds from his mother’s room. With a tiny click the latch sprang open.

  And Honey came awake.

  Her feet tangled in the blanket and scratched against the floor. Maybe the sight of the baseball bat made her young again; maybe it was just the open door and the sense of excitement that came through it with a faraway drumroll—faint as crickets—beating from the circus. But she bounded across the floor like a puppy and banged against Harold. And in her eagerness she barked.

  Across the hall, bedsprings squeaked.

  “Hush!” said Harold. He blocked the door with his leg, and again she barked. “Oh, Honey,” he whispered. “You have to be quiet.”

  “What’s going on out there?” asked Walter Beesley from the bedroom.

  “Nothing,” said Harold. He stood half in the doorway and half in his room, the pillowcase at his feet with the bat resting across it. Honey sniffed and whined, then raised her head.

  “Don’t bark,” whispered Harold.

  Her chin quivered. And he hit her.

  It was the first time he had ever hit her, and he heard her teeth knock together as his fingers slapped her nose. She reeled away as though he’d done it with a sledgehammer, slamming her head against the door. It rattled on its hinges, and she barked again, and yelped. And Mrs. Beesley, half asleep, said: “Get that fleabag back in bed!”

  Honey cowered on the floor, and Harold threw himself down beside her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Oh, I’m sorry.” He put his hand out to stroke her, but she cringed away, her eyes flickering shut, fearful he would hit her again.

  “Oh, gosh,” he said. “Gosh, I was frightened, that’s all.” He stretched out on the floor, the same height as Honey. He threw an arm across her back; he pressed his cheek against her nose. “I’ve got to go,” he said in a whisper. “I’ve just got to go, and I can’t take you with me. I wish I could, you bet I do, but I can’t, you poor old thing.”

  Honey shuddered under his arm. She whimpered, almost like a baby.

  “Oh, don’t cry,” he said. “Don’t cry because I’m going.”

  He stroked her in all the places she liked to be stroked. He told her he’d be back, that David would come and they’d I go out to Oregon. But he couldn’t help thinking he was seeing her for the last time.

  There was white and gray in her muzzle. Her eyes were clouded, crusty in the corners. There were pink warts on her paws that were spreading, month by month, across her back and shoulders. She lifted her head and gazed at him. And he blinked his eyes; he fussed with her blanket, pressing it around her, making a pillow of folds for her chin.

  “I love you, Honey,” he whispered. And once more he patted her. “You be a good dog, you hear?”

  Then he sniffed; he wiped his nose on his sleeve. “And don’t go touching my junk.”

  He didn’t look back. He went to the door and pushed the pillowcase out with his foot. He listened for a while to the sound of his mother breathing—almost snoring—in her bed. And he wished not that he could go and say goodbye but that he wanted to say goodbye.

  He closed his bedroom door. He padded down the stairs, through the living room, out to the porch and the summer night.

  White and helmeted, Harold the Ghost stole through the darkness. He hurried from house to house, from walls to fences to hedges. The bat on his shoulder, the bag against his back, he made his way to Main Street and the row of buildings there.

  He stopped and listened. But there was no calliope music, no murmur of a crowd.

  From the prairie to the west came a single spot of light growing larger on the road, then the rattle and bang of an old truck. Harold waited at the side of May’s Cafe as it came steadily toward him, not slowing for the town. Bits of stone and gravel shotgunned off the sides; dust rose up behind the light. And Farmer Hull went hammering past in his truck with one headlight and no fenders, intent on his driving, hunched over the wheel. Then Harold the Ghost crossed the road, passed the station and made his way to Batsford’s field.

  He found it empty; the circus was gone.

  There were long, greasy ruts in the grass, like the faint tracings of the Oregon Trail. Everywhere lay ticket stubs and candy wrappers. Crows pecked at chewed-away corncobs and hamburger wrappers, and Harold the Ghost put down his bundle. He sat on the grass in a thin circle of sawdust where the big top had been.

  The moonlight shone down on him, a little white dot in the vast, empty field.

  Across it came the horseman, the old Indian, his feathers fluttering and the fringes of his buckskin tapping on the horse’s hide. He came up beside Harold.

  “What was it?” he asked. “What sort of fish did you catch?”

  Harold looked up. “A sucker,” he said.

  The old Indian nodded. He looked to the west. “Do you want to ride with me?” he asked.

  Harold p
assed up his bundle, and the old Indian balanced it on top of his own, on the cream-colored mane of the horse. He held a big red hand toward Harold, and the boy climbed up behind him. Then the horse started forward, across the field and onto the prairie, down the grown-over path of the Oregon Trail.

  They didn’t talk. Harold slumped down until his head was on the old Indian’s shoulder, his hands resting lightly on buckskin-clad hips. The crickets chirped and the horse swayed along. The grass whispered past, and soon Harold was sleeping.

  When he woke again, he was twenty miles from Liberty.

  Chapter

  7

  The old Indian built a fire by a little stream. He made it out of sticks and grass, and the smoke went up in a spiral. From his bundle he got a pot that he filled with water and set by the fire to boil.

  He had taken off his headdress and left it lying across the horse. His hair was gray and very long, tied in double braids. He crouched by the fire and the smoke wrapped around him, thick as woolen blankets. It covered him completely, then drifted on and up.

  “How old are you?” asked Harold.

  “Very old.” He looked all around, across the stream and across the prairie. “There’s nothing you can see that was here when I was born.”

  “The grass?” asked Harold.

  “It burns and grows again.”

  “The river, then,” said Harold.

  “It rises from a pond that was dug by cattle herders. Fifty years ago it wasn’t here.”

  “The Oregon Trail,” said Harold. “The ruts the wagons made.”

  “I remember when they passed.” The old Indian smiled. He threw a bunch of yellow grass onto the fire, and the smoke came up through the stems. “I saw them from a distance. I thought they were clouds floating on the ground.”

  Harold squinted at him through his round glasses. “That was more than a hundred years ago.”

  “It seems like yesterday,” said the old Indian.

  Harold stood up to see farther. Bands of grass, one after another, rolled for miles around him. There were clouds far to the west, low in the sky, like enormous sheep grazing beyond the horizon. And the faint lines of the Oregon Trail led toward them like a mystical road.