RIGHT FOOT NAILED to the juice, needle jammed in triple digits, running full bore and pointblank, I made Mason City in about forty minutes. Given my punky reflexes, to justify flying like that was difficult, but it was a question of paying attention either to haul-ass driving or the wharf rats chewing on my nerves. I was, however, hanging on – like an old toothless hound with a gum-lock on a grizzly’s ass, perhaps, but hanging on nonetheless. Two cold beers helped, the alcohol numbing the rawer edges while the liquid replenished my parched cells. I would’ve downed two more if I thought I could’ve opened the cooler without jumping the bottle of speed; yet another obstacle of my own devising, almost enough to make me curl up on the floorboards and weep. But that I was standing fast against the howling neural need for chemical refreshment made me believe I had a chance – slim, for sure, but gaining weight.

I didn’t have a plan, though, which was just as well, since I lacked the sustained coherence to carry one out. However, in a typical burst of perversity I recalled all the recent stern injunctions to be careful, attend to details, assess the full range of possibilities, and generally keep in mind that fortune favors preparation – though it seemed to me that both mind and fortune were drunk monkeys in the tiger’s eye. Startled by the Mason City city limits sign, I decided to at least lunge at the basics, so I made a jangled survey of the essential steps: eat; fill the Caddy with high-test; buy some white gas; and find out as exactly as possible where the plane had gone down. I did briefly consider how to get myself and my gear back from the crash site after burning my ride, but I figured a phone call to Yellow Cab could cover that. The first thing was to deliver the gift; then I’d worry about slipping away.

My first stop was the Blue Moon Cafe for an order of bacon, eggs, a short stack of buckwheat cakes, and some information. They had everything but the information, but one waitress conferred with the other, the other waitress queried the cook, and then the three together quizzed the other four patrons. The consensus was that Tommy Jorgenson was the person most likely to know exactly where the plane hit ground, and that I could probably find him at the Standard station eight blocks down on the left.

I finished what I could of my breakfast, left a $10 tip, and humped back out to the Caddy through the stinging cold. I’d overheard a ruddy-faced guy in a John Deere cap trying to sucker the Blue Moon’s cook into betting that it wouldn’t snow before dark, and as I fired up the Caddy I wished the cook had jumped on the wager. Not that I would’ve – you could feel snow gathering in the air. I just hoped it held off for a couple of hours. I didn’t need to get sideways on a snow-slick road and wrap the Caddy around a power pole a few miles short of my destination. I’d come too long and too hard for that kind of cruel irony. Once the Caddy was warmed up, I drove downtown to the Standard station at nary a quiver over the posted 25 mph.

Tommy Jorgenson surprised me. I suppose his name had made me expect a tall, slowly thoughtful Scandinavian instead of what I got, a short wiry guy with spring-coiled black hair and intense brown eyes that never quit moving even when he was looking straight at me – one of those restlessly kinetic people who wash their ceilings every week just to burn off the energy. Until you get to know them, you suspect they’re secretly banging speed. But they don’t need it. They run off their own systems, DC; they’re just naturally wrapped tight.

I told Tommy to fill ’er up, then got out and followed him around as he put the nozzle in the tank and started on checking the oil and cleaning glass. I introduced myself as a reporter for Life magazine and told him I’d been on vacation visiting my sister in Des Moines when I’d gotten this wild idea about doing a major feature on the three musicians who’d been killed in the plane wreck – sort of a retrospective memorial piece – and that I was interested in visiting the crash site.

Tommy shot me a glance as he wiped the dipstick. ‘Isn’t there no more.’ He dropped the dipstick back into the hole.

‘What do you mean,’ I chattered, ‘it’s not there? It has to be there. It’s a place, a site, a point in fact – even if it’s been paved over for a parking lot, it’s still there.’ The cold was numbing.

Tommy pulled out the dipstick and held it up for my inspection. It was a hair under full. I nodded rapidly, as much to move some blood to my brain as to indicate that the oil level was fine.

Tommy said a bit sharply, ‘Of course nobody’s moved the place. I meant there’s nothing left to see. They had the wreck cleaned up right away and the field was plowed and planted the next spring.’

‘Now we’re talking.’ I grinned.

‘You still want to check it out?’ Tommy replaced the dipstick and dropped the hood.

‘You bet.’

‘Why?’

‘Good question.’ I stalled, thinking to myself, Fuck good questions. What I need are good, precise, unequivocal answers. ‘I have lots of reasons, all complicated. I guess the main reason is simply to pay my respects. Another’s more practical. I’ve got this idea for a lead running around in my head. Something like: “On a snow-swirling night in early February, 1959, a small Beechcraft left the Mason City airport and shortly thereafter crashed in an Iowa cornfield. Along with the pilot, three young musicians were killed: the Big Bopper, Buddy Holly, and Ritchie Valens. As I stand here at the precise point of impact on a late October afternoon six years later, there is no visible evidence of the wreckage. For six springs this field has been plowed and sown; for six autumns the harvest reaped. The earth and the music heal quickly. The heart takes longer.”’ I paused for whatever effect a pause might have. ‘I know, it’s rough as hell, but you get the angle. I suppose the best way to put it is that I’m hoping to draw some inspiration from the place.’

‘I’ll draw you a map,’ Tommy said.

Music to my ears, the last piece clicking into place. I was starting to like the little dynamo. Maybe the reason Tommy throbbed with energy was that he didn’t waste any. I felt like grabbing a pair of jumper cables and hooking us up, brain to brain – boost some of his juice. The cold was draining mine through the corroded terminals. ‘I take it,’ I said, ‘you’ve been out to the crash site.’

‘Yup.’

‘Recently?’

‘Nope. Last time was early ’62, over three years ago.’

‘You see it after it happened?’

‘My old man’s a deputy sheriff. I heard the call come in on the box at home. I’d been there the night before, at the Surf Ballroom, where they played that night. That was over in Clear Lake. Almost every kid from around these parts was there; we don’t draw much top-line entertainment in these parts. It was a good show, but not great. They looked tired and beat.’ Course I was shit-faced on vodka. What we called a Cat Screwdriver – half a pint of Royal Gate, half a pint of Nehi orange soda. So when the call came in, even though I was hung over down to my ankles, I had to go out and see if it was true. Had no idea how true it was. Turned me inside out. Must’ve puked for an hour.’

My stomach churned in empathy. Breakfast wasn’t setting well. The bellyful of cold beer had congealed the bacon grease into a solid, sinking chunk; if it kept falling, it was sure to come back up. It’s hard to grit your teeth when they’re chattering, and it was my turn to ask why: ‘But you went back in ’62, right?’

Tommy’s sigh plumed in the air. ‘Yeah. Actually, I went out there a couple of times a month for a while. Don’t know why. Nothing to see but the corn growing. I had a chopped ’51 Ford coupe at the time, metal-flake green, dropped a T-Bird engine in it. All souped-up and nowhere to go. Or nowhere better. One thing, it was real peaceful just sitting there watching the breeze move the cornstalks. So, I’d tool out there fairly often – ain’t far, and there’s a long straight stretch where you can run flat out, coming and going. But after I blew the transmission, I went out less and less. Last time was February third, ’62. The anniversary. Don’t know why, though. Never thought about it. Just did.’

Before I could ask my next question, he turned and was moving back along the Caddy. By the time I caught up he was topping off the tank. ‘Don’t mean to pester a man on the job, but I wonder if you know who owns the land where the plane crashed? Figure I should get permission before I go trespassing around in somebody’s corn patch.’

‘Corn’s in,’ Tommy noted, withdrawing the nozzle and shutting down the pump.

‘That’s just less cover for my ass.’

Tommy smiled. ‘Bert Julhal used to own it, but I heard Gladys Nogardam bought it from him a couple of years ago. I’m not sure about that, wouldn’t bet on it anyway, but I’m pretty sure ol’ Gladys bought it. She must be a hundred years old now and people say she’s still sharp as a tack.’

‘What’s her story?’ Information is ammunition, and I had a bad feeling I’d best load up. A woman that old and still lucid would undoubtedly know her own mind, which would make changing it more difficult in case she didn’t dig my romantic gesture. I hadn’t been around a lot of old women lately, and the few I knew no longer seemed inclined to suffer what they found disagreeable.

Tommy was shaking his head. ‘Never met the woman myself, but I’ve heard a lot about her. She lived over in Clear Lake for about twenty years, married to Duster Nogardam. Duster was this big Swede dentist, but what he was famous for was skeet shooting. He was on the ’34 Olympic team, came in fifth or ninth or something like that. Anyway, sometime after that – don’t remember exactly – he went out pheasant hunting over on the Lindstrom place and just vanished. Car parked right beside the road. Never seen or heard from since. She finally inherited his estate. She got a little weird, I gather – wandered around at night, stuff like that. She bought the Julhal place because she said she was too old for city life and needed some fresh air. That’s what she told Lottie Williams, anyway. I heard it from my mom. You know how small towns are – live in each other’s pockets. Old lady Nogardam don’t work the place, of course. Leases it to the Potts brothers is what I heard.’

‘Wait a minute. Let’s take that back. Her husband just vanished? Poof? No trace?’ For some reason I wasn’t liking that at all.

I liked it three times less when Tommy said, ‘Same thing happened to her first two husbands, too. That’s the strange thing.’

‘Three husbands and they all disappeared?’

‘Yup.’

‘Who says? I mean, are we talking rumor, fact, or what?’

‘My old man’s a deputy, right? He read the police reports.’

‘How’d she explain it? They must’ve grilled the ever-loving shit out of her – three husbands vanishing is damn near impossible. Hell, two’s impossible.’

‘According to Dad, she said she couldn’t explain it. She said explaining it was their job.’

‘And they couldn’t, right?’

‘Like Dad said, “Coincidence isn’t evidence.”’

‘I assume her husbands all had hefty estates. Or some heavy insurance.’

‘Nope,’ Tommy shook his head, ‘that’s the kicker. Duster had a few bucks, and the second one – I think he had a ranch in Arizona – was barely making ends meet, but the first one was hocked to his armpits. He was a linoleum distributor in Chicago. They’d only been married a couple of years. She and Duster had been together for twenty or thereabouts; ten with the guy in Arizona, I think.’

‘And she had alibis and all that?’

‘Airtight, ironclad, not a crack. For all of them, not just Duster. Or that’s what my dad said.’

‘I don’t get it,’ I said, flapping my arms for warmth.

‘Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger.’

‘What do you think? She hire it out, they just get called to their Maker, take a walk, spaceships come down and spirit them away, what?’

‘Spaceships,’ Tommy said.

I couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not, and suddenly I didn’t care. I was freezing, and in a rotten mood to start with. Spaceships, sure – made as much fucking sense as anything. I reached for my wallet. ‘How much do I owe you?’

He glanced at the pump. ‘Six eighty-five ought to get it.’

‘You carry white gas?’

‘Gallon cans. Nothing in bulk.’

‘Gallon’s perfect. I’ve got a little single-burner Coleman in the trunk to brew up coffee – put a little antifreeze in my system.’

‘Might try a jacket along with it,’ Tommy observed.

‘No shit.’ I chuckled, handing him a twenty. ‘I gave mine to some poor bastard I picked up hitching last night. All he had on was an undershirt.’

‘You meet some nuts, all right,’ Tommy said as he took the bill. He headed for the office, calling over his shoulder, ‘I’ll bring you the map and the white gas with your change. Might be a few minutes with the map.’

‘Hey, no problem,’ I called after him. ‘And you keep the change. Good information’s more valuable than gas. And that map: I would really appreciate it if you make it as precise as possible … you know, “X marks the spot.”’

Tommy stopped to protest the tip but I waved him on. ‘The magazine pays for it. Legit expense. Hell, I’d give you a hundred if they’d hold still for it.’

I waited in the Caddy, letting it idle with the heater on full blast. I made a mental note to buy a heavy jacket before I left town, chastising myself for giving mine to Lewis Kerr when I remembered the foilwrapped cube of LSD that was still in the pocket. This added another dimension of possibilities to last night’s transactions. I hoped the acid somehow managed to get into his bloodstream – not that the world was ready for a hallucinating Lewis Kerr, though the notion pleased me immensely.

I wasn’t happy about Granny Nogardam and her missing husbands, so I gave this a few minutes of serious worry, cursing my luck. Why couldn’t it ever be simple? Why wasn’t the landowner some crop-failed farmer who’d be overjoyed to let me do any damn fool thing I wanted for twenty bucks and a six-pack, and throw in a ride back to town? But what the hell, maybe she would, too. No way to know till I asked. And I’d be doing that soon enough. I felt a tiny, voluptuous tremor of anticipation surge through me then, a little premonitory quiver of impending completion, and it thrilled me. I closed my eyes to savor the feeling and saw the Caddy parked in the middle of an ivory desolation, gleaming white-on-white. No sound. No movement. Then a flat, muffled WHUMP! as the white gas ignited and then a blinding roar as the gas tank exploded. Yes, yes, yes. Signed with love; sealed with a kiss. The gift delivered. I was dreaming on the verge of occurrence. I felt its inevitability in my bones. It was meant to happen. Had to be. No question.

When Tommy came hustling across the slab a few minutes later with the map and white gas, I was ready to make the last move, set the last piece in place. I was wasted but drawing strength from the promise of imminent release, about to lay that burden down.

The map, as I expected, was deft and precise. Tommy went over it with me quickly, and unnecessarily since the route was so simple – maybe ten miles of straight roads with only three turns to remember. In the field in back of the house marked NOGARDAM was a large X, carefully circled. I thanked Tommy for his help and insisted he keep the change, my sincerity not the least compromised by the fact I’d solicited his help under false pretenses.

Heading out of town, I remembered I should buy a warm jacket and generally get my shit together … have things organized in case Granny Nogardam proved intractable and I was forced to hit and run. I was all set to let it rip, but as Joshua and Double-Gone had cautioned me, that wasn’t sufficient justification for the wholesale violation of common sense.

As if in reward for my display of mature judgment, I immediately spotted a JC Penney’s and was about to hang a left when to my right I saw a hand-lettered sign propped against a sawhorse next to a Phillips station:

CAR WASH $1
BENEFIT METHODIST CHOIR 

I hung the right on impulse, figuring the least I could do was send the Caddy to its sacrifice clean.

The Methodist Choir Car Wash crew seemed to be composed entirely of ruddy-cheeked, blue-eyed, vestal eighteen-year-old girls, all of whom, unfortunately, were bundled against the cold. I wondered who sang bass. They were swabbing away on a ’63 Chrysler, with an old Jimmy pick-up next in line. They were singing ‘What a Fortress Is My Lord’ as they worked. The young lady who bounced over to greet me said it would be fifteen or twenty minutes if I didn’t mind waiting. I told her that would be fine as long as they’d keep an eye on the car and hold my place while I trotted across the road.

I was back in fifteen sporting a new red-and-green plaid wool jacket and carrying a bag with insulated longjohns and a pair of pink mohair earmuffs that almost matched my hat. The girls were still rinsing pig shit off the Jimmy, so I used the Phillips men’s room to slip into my long-johns. By the time I was properly dressed for the weather, the choir was ready to baptise the Caddy. Before I pulled it up I took my duffle bag from the trunk, using their witness to curb any temptation to hit the cooler for crank.

While they scrubbed off three thousand miles of road grime and sang ‘Rock of Ages,’ I sat in the Caddy getting my gear together and cleaning up beer cans and donut wrappers off the floor. I divided my possessions into three categories: immediate getaway essentials, basically the clothes on my back and the balance of my funds, which looked considerably depleted; the second category was walkaway, namely my duffle bag and everything I could fit into it; the third category was breezeaway, and included the first two plus everything else I felt like taking, notably Joshua’s sound system and the record collection. I figured the cooler was dispensable, but I’d take the speed. I deserved it.

I finished arranging my gear at about the same time that the Methodist Choir was wringing out their chamois. I powered down the window to pay and learned that the price included vacuuming the inside, and for another 50¢ they’d do the interior glass. Sounded like a deal to me, so I got out and wandered over to a phone booth while four of them, Windex squirting and vacuum humming, swarmed inside.

Just for fun I decided to give Scumball a jingle and tell him the deal was about to go down: time to relax. I dialed the last number he’d given me. On the third ring a recording informed me the number was no longer in service.

The girls were still working so, hoping to hear a friendly voice, I tried John Season’s number. Nobody home. I hoped he wasn’t out drinking, then recalled the remark about a physician first healing himself.

I thought about calling Gladys Nogardam, but decided against it. Let us both be surprised.

The Caddy looked so good I tipped the gospel ladies a five-spot, much to their wowed delight. They wanted to ask me about the car and California and the strange record player in the back seat, but I told them I was running late for a religious duty of my own and departed with a gallant tip of my hat.

Going slow and easy, I rolled out to the crossroads noted on Tommy’s map and took the left. Thinking it would be an appropriate touch, I put some music on the box, first the Bopper with ‘Chantilly Lace,’ then Ritchie Valens’s ‘Donna.’ I took a right on Elbert Road, and two miles later a left. Feeling serious, confident, ceremonially formal, I put on Buddy Holly’s ‘Not Fade Away,’ drumming my fingers on the steering wheel rim as I checked the mailboxes against the map: Altman, Potts, Peligro, and there it was – Nogardam.

A white farmhouse with dark green trim, freshly painted, it was set back from the road and fronted a large fenced field of corn stubble. Next to the house was a garage or some sort of storage building, but no car or other sign of occupancy. I turned down the gravelled drive just as Buddy belted out the last line, ‘Love that’s love not fade away.’ I clicked it off on the last note and shut down the Caddy. Wop: doo-wop: doo-wop-bop. On the beat, right on time; there, ready, and arrived. I took a deep breath and stepped out to ask Mrs Nogardam’s permission – not that I was going to need it, just that it would make things easier. As I walked toward the enclosed porch I found myself repeating her name to myself like a charm: Nogardam; No-gard-am; No-guard-em. I certainly hoped so.

She caught me badly off guard. The porch was damn near dark and I’d already given the heavy screendoor frame two strong, confident raps before I realized the front door was open behind the screen and she was already standing there. ‘Oh,’ I said in a burst of wit, ‘I didn’t see you.’

‘Obviously.’ Her voice was raspy but plenty forceful. In the interior shadows of the darkened house, further obscured by the screen, I could barely make her out. There was enough light to see she was hardly a withered crone – in fact, though indeed stooped with age, she was just a bit shorter than me, which must’ve put her over six feet in her prime. She was wearing a dark grey dress of some coarse material, her shoulders draped in a black shawl. Her hair, pulled severely back, was the silver color of leached ashes. Her face was deeply wrinkled, and the lines drew inward toward her eyes, eyes the color of dark beer held up to the light, a gold at once clear and obscure, eyes that were watching me unblinking, waiting.

‘Mrs Nogardam?’ I inquired tentatively, trying to recover my equilibrium.

‘Yes.’

I tipped my hat, hoping to make it look boyishly charming.

‘That’s a ridiculous hat,’ she declared, her voice like a file hitting a nail.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said benignly, buying time while frantically considering an angle of approach. That she wasn’t going to invite me in for a glass of warm milk and a plate of cookies was plain, nor would she likely yield to stuttering good intentions and scuff-toed boyish charm. Her unflinching gaze made up my mind. I touched my hat brim again, a gesture I hoped looked absently wounded, and said, ‘Sure it’s ridiculous, but that’s altogether appropriate to the rather strange journey that brings me to your door. I call it “strange,” but it has also become urgent and compelling, important enough that I would call it “essential,” at least to me, and a journey that’s impossible to complete without your kind permission, Mrs Nogardam.’

‘Whistles and flutes,’ she said.

‘No ma’am,’ I assured her, ‘even worse: I’m going to tell you the truth.’

That got her interest. She cocked her head slightly and folded her arms across her bosom. Encouraged by her attention, I laid it on her, the whole truth and nothing but, the condensed version, about ten minutes straight as she listened without comment, shift of weight, change of expression, or any indication of judgment. Told her how I came to have the car; quoted Harriet’s letter; explained Eddie, Kacy, Big Red, John, Scumball; the Big Bopper, Buddy Holly, and Ritchie Valens, and their music; mentioned Joshua, Double-Gone, Donna, and the rest. I told her as directly and forcefully as I could and, considering the duress of necessity, did an amazing job, damn near eloquent. I finished by telling her exactly what I wanted to do – to let it all roar upwards in an offering to the ghosts, the living spirits, the enduring possibilities of friendship, communion, and love. I concluded with a flourish: ‘It is all grandly romantic, yes; ridiculous, of course; surely melodramatic; indubitably flawed; rightfully suspect – but it is as real to me as hunger and thirst, as crucial as food and water. I’ve told you my truth, such as it is. I’ve done everything I have the wit and spirit to do. This is the end of my journey. Now it’s up to you, Mrs Nogardam. Please permit me to complete it.’

She uncrossed her arms. ‘You’re a fool,’ she said flatly.

‘Yes ma’am, I believe I’ve conceded that point.’

‘I’m ninety-seven years old.’

I didn’t see the relevance of that, but murmured politely, ‘People in town said you were over a hundred.’

‘People in town talk too much for people who have little to say. In that they’re like you, Mr Gastin.’

‘Be that as it may, Mrs Nogardam,’ I said, trying to keep a nasty edge from my tone, ‘what do you say?’

‘I already said it: you’re a fool. And one of the few blessings of my age is that I don’t have to suffer fools – either gladly or at all.’

I felt like tearing down the screendoor and strangling the old witch, but instead took a deep, shuddering lungful of air. ‘Then don’t. Just tell me yes or no.’

‘That’s why you’re a fool,’ she snapped. ‘You want to be told. You think you’ve earned the right simply because you have an idea that you’ve allowed to bloat into a need. Because you’re paralyzed with confusion. Because you’ve driven a few thousand miles on drugs and good intentions and a fool’s hope. Phooeey. Does believing you’re in love make you capable of love? Are you a priest simply because you’re willing to perform the sacrifice? What rights have you earned in these matters? Mr Gastin, there’s no permission I can give you; only folly I can prevent. If you want to make this grand offering of yours, this homage you’ve concocted as some secret proof of your worthiness, this testament to a faith you so obviously suspect, don’t saddle me with the responsibility of judgment. It isn’t a question of my yes or no.’

‘You mean it’s up to me?’ I didn’t follow at all. She was full of judgments, it seemed to me.

‘Of course it’s up to you, since you won’t accept anything other than certainty. Very well, then: if you can go out in that field and find exactly where that plane crashed, you’ll have earned the right to deliver your gift, as you call it; and you’ll not only have my permission to set it ablaze or any other fool thing you choose, but I’ll gladly come out and dance around the fire with you, and pay to have the remains hauled away. But if you can’t discover the precise point of impact, you must give me your word that you’ll go on your way without bothering me further.’

‘With due respect, Mrs Nogardam, I’ve come a long way, I’m very tired, and I’m not in the mood for proofs of my worthiness, or yours.’

‘Then leave.’

‘The fact that it’s your property by purchase doesn’t grant you the privileges of the heart. People own a lot of things that don’t belong to them.’

In the dim light I saw her bony fingers flutter at her throat. ‘Well, dear me. I must say, Mr Gastin, that that’s pretty high-falutin’ from someone whose property is literally theft, whose gift is stolen. But you are right, and I do agree. In fact, I have walked out in that field and felt exactly where those young men died. Felt it, do you understand? I am able or allowed to do so. And that, not ownership, is my claim to privilege. If you can do the same, you’ll have as much right in the matter as I do. But any shenanigans or tomfoolery, and I’ll stop you.’

‘You will?’ I wasn’t challenging her, merely curious about the means.

‘I’ll certainly try. And if I can’t, there’s neighbors or the sheriff.’

I softened my tone and played the ace she’d dealt me: ‘I told you the truth because I want to do this without deception on my part or objection on yours. I didn’t have to tell you the car was stolen; I could’ve said it was mine, or a friend’s, or thousands of other lies. But I want this to be right. That’s why it’s a point of honor with me to tell you I already know where the plane crashed.’ I took Tommy’s map from my jacket pocket and unfolded it, spreading it flat against the screen for her to look at. ‘There it is.’

Her attention locked on the map. After a minute of hard scrutiny, she stabbed with a crooked finger and asked, ‘Here? The X?’

‘Yes, ma’am. The man who drew that map for me saw the wreckage before it was cleared, and came back many times afterwards.’

‘The map’s wrong.’

I hadn’t even considered that possibility and was momentarily confounded. ‘Well, now,’ I began with feigned reluctance, ‘you say it’s wrong. He claims it’s right. He was here and you weren’t. You say you felt it. He saw it. It seems awfully relative to––’

‘If you want to discuss philosophy,’ she bluntly interrupted, ‘I suggest you try the university – they’ve made an institution out of mistaking the map for the journey.’

‘I’m not trying to be offensive, Mrs Nogardam. All I’m saying is you could be wrong. That’s all. That it is possible you’re mistaken.’

‘Then go look for yourself. You have till dark. No tricks.’ She shut the door.

The door was white, and shutting it had the bizarre effect of making the porch seem brighter. I stared at it, all at once pissed off, crushed, set to explode, dejected, gutted, wrecked, enraged, and lost. I headed back to the Caddy in a dazed stomp, mumbling aloud, ‘Why, why, why, why, why, why did it have to be some batshit old lady culled from the geriatric ward, some vestal guardian of corn stubble? Fuck her, goddamn it anyway … just get in the Caddy and crank it up till the head glows and turn it loose right through the motherfucking fence out into the field and grab your shit and touch it off and run like hell…’ mumble grumble till I was standing next to the Caddy. The air seemed to have thickened. I gazed out into the field toward the general area of the X on Tommy’s map. ‘“Go look for yourself.” What the holy shit does she think I’ve been doing?’ I opened the Caddy’s door, slid in, and slammed it behind me.

The sound of the slamming door carried across the harvested field. As if precipitated by the sonic disturbance, big fat flakes of snow began to fall. Just what I needed. Was it meant to cover the clues I was supposed to seek, or was it supposed to cloak my getaway? Or was it a shroud to conveniently cover that old witch’s body should I follow my deepest impulse and beat her to death with a ball peen hammer? Did it in fact signify anything other than what it was? Snow.

I was getting all wound up for another bout of metaphysical babble. The snow was swirling thick, silent, peaceful. I leaned forward, my chin resting on my hands on the wheel, and gradually relaxed as I watched snow swaddle the field; mound on the fenceposts; settle then melt on the Caddy’s hood, still warm from engine heat; stick to the windshield for a heartbeat, the intricate crystals dissolving into slow rivulets sliding down. Within fifteen minutes, about the time the snowflakes began sticking on the cooled windshield to obliterate my view, a weary calm came over me. I decided to try it her way first; maybe I’d learn something. I zipped my jacket all the way up and slapped on my new earmuffs.

I must’ve spent a couple of hours in that field searching for physical evidence that was perhaps being obliterated as I sought it, and for some sort of metaphysical evidence that I wasn’t sure I’d recognize even if I were capable of sensing it. Wild, dense, relentless, the snow fell, cutting visibility to the length of a stride. I tried to approach the task methodically, crossing back and forth between the east-west fences, trying to maintain roughly parallel lines, but when the tracks of your last pass are buried before you can start back, when you can’t see the fences till you twang into them, when you’re essentially following your frozen face, that method is doomed. I had no idea whether I was constructing a crisp, evenly proportioned grid or merely lurching back and forth in the same groove. But I did know that I was rapidly losing feeling in my extremities in absolute direct proportion to the feeling of immense futility swelling in my heart. By the time I floundered back to the Caddy I couldn’t even feel the cold anymore, just a powerful desire to lie down on the front seat and sleep. Maybe even die. It was all the same.

But first I had to get into the car, and to get the door open took a good jerk, and then another to free my bare hand from the frozen handle. It was almost as cold inside the Caddy as in that forsaken field. After considerable crude fumbling with the key, the Caddy turned over torpidly, then caught. I used my elbow to turn the heater up to cook and spread my hands in front of the vent.

My fingers resembled some mad confectioner’s display of blueberry popsicles. As they thawed toward tingling, I thought about energy and its wondrous, manifold, interpenetrating forms: thermal, kinetic, moral, hydraulic, metabolic, all of it. The energy required to warm you, maintain you, move you. Ergs – that basic grunt unit – in waves, calorie, current: x ergs required for each step on the journey, each turn of the wheels, each prayer uttered, answered, acted upon. The energy captured, transformed, released. The energy just to drive the welter of transactions. This was a melancholy contemplation, because while the world plainly vibrated with energy, personally I was just about out, the flesh sorely overdrawn and the soul about to be foreclosed. What remained to me as possible energy, the power I would need to act on the intractable Mrs Nogardam and answer her psychic pop quiz, was energy that I, with sad realism, understood was false: money, amphetamines, and madness. But I’d said I’d give it everything I had.

Once my fingers were again semifunctional, the tips alive with a burning ache, I dug out my bankroll and counted out $2000 in a hundred $20 bills. I folded and wadded them in my jacket pocket, flexed my fingers a few times, and headed back to Mrs Nogardam’s lair to talk business. I left the Caddy running in case the negotiations dragged on; I didn’t want to come home to a cold house. Besides, I had plenty of gas and nowhere left to go.

She’d seen me coming and had the door open, her gold eyes boring into me through the screen, only this time I saw her, too, and didn’t knock. Instead, the hand I raised contained $2000. Fanning the bills like a deck of cards, I pressed them against the screen for her authentication. ‘What you see, ma’am, is what you get. That’s two grand, a considerable dent in my cash assets – leaves me enough for a half-dozen grilled cheese sandwiches and a Greyhound ticket home. And it’s all yours, right now, if you let me honor the dead.’ I tapped the money lightly against the screen. ‘So what do you say we cut the horseshit here and both make ourselves happy?’

‘You can’t buy it,’ she said, her voice flat as Iowa. The door closed.

I kicked the aluminum-framed bottom of the screendoor, screaming in frustration, ‘Be reasonable, you old cunt!’

The door flew back open. ‘You mind your foul mouth, Mr Gastin, or your time will be up right now. Do you understand?’

The fire in her eyes had the paradoxical effect of forming ice in my scrotum. I flapped the money weakly, then tucked my hand into my jacket pocket as I nodded my meek understanding.

She continued, ‘I made the conditions clear. It is almost three o’clock. By five it’s dark.’

‘But ma’am,’ I pleaded, ‘it’s a snow storm out there.’

Her eyes didn’t leave me. ‘So it is.’ The door closed.

I trudged back to the Caddy through snow up to midcalf, though it seemed to have slackened a bit. Before getting back in my snow-bound landrocket I scraped the crust off the windshield with my coat sleeve. Softened by the heat from inside, it wiped right off.

I leaned back behind the wheel, a clear view through the windshield now, and watched the snow fall like cold confetti on my stalled parade. I felt utterly, dismally deflated. To try and buy it had been stupid. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on the options, but either my concentration was shot or there weren’t many options. I could leave, try to find Tommy, and bring him back with me, though he’d probably come on-shift at 6:00 and was gone for the day. Besides, I’d have to convince him to drive out and tangle assholes with Granny, and there was no guarantee the old hag would acknowledge Tommy’s memory of the crash. Nope, I decided, it was pretty much down to satisfying her or running her over, and I didn’t have the energy for either job.

Well, not on me. The trunk, however, wasn’t that far away. After all, it had taken me this far, and I sure didn’t seem to be getting anywhere without the help. I would take three – no more – to freshen up. I promised myself that if I took them, I’d try her way one more time before resorting to mine. I reached down and turned off the engine and was withdrawing the key when I noticed that in the course of my brief reverie it had stopped snowing. The sky was still leaden, but the scene to my eye was silent, pristine, clear. Looked like a sign.

When I opened the cooler in the trunk and seized the bottle of crank like an osprey nailing a fish, I perceived a small problem. Instead of a bottle of small, neatly cross-hatched white tablets, I had a bottle about a quarter full of a pale white liquid: I hadn’t screwed the lid down tight and water from the cooler had trickled in, dissolving the tablets into a thin slurry. Well, as long as only the form and not the substance had been altered, I’d merely have to make a careful guess at the proper dosage. Recalling from high-school chemistry that alcohol lowered the freezing point, I fished a six-pack out of the cooler while I was at it, and then closed the trunk.

I ended up having a wonderful wake in the front seat: three sips of speed, four beers, and a solid hour of Golden Oldies turned up so loud they blew the snow off the Caddy and loosened the siding on Granny Nogardam’s house. I listened to everything I had of the Bopper, Buddy, and Ritchie, hoping the sound of their music would stir their lingering spirits to help me.

A love for real not fade away!!!

‘Not!’ I screamed. ‘Not! Not!’ I hoped Granny was listening.

I stumbled from the Caddy and headed out to the field in the long-shadowed dusk. I hadn’t left myself much time. As I went over the fence I yelled, ‘Bopper, my man! Buddy Holly! Ritchie! Talk to me. Tell me where to deliver this load of a gift. Got love and prayers for you. Got ’em from Harriet. Got ’em from Donna, Ritchie – she’s sending her best. She’s sort of fucked-up in Arizona right now, but she’s trying, man. Everybody’s trying, you guys hear me? Double-Gone, Joshua, Kacy, John – they all send their love. The real kind that doesn’t fade away. So even if it doesn’t matter to you guys now, don’t mean shit to your gone spirits, it matters to me, to us. So talk to me. Guide me. Tell me where you want this monument to love and music burned, where you want the dark lit up.’

The snow started falling again, lightly, a few drifting flakes. No voices answered, inside or out, but I felt a faint tug of direction and began walking, starting around the fence-line and then spiraling inward, closing as the snow fell faster, thicker, until I could hardly see my own feet, till I felt like I was vanishing, and then my left foot came down on something solid. I knelt and searched with both hands in the snow until I touched it, slick and cold, and lifted it close to my face for a look. I bit back a scream when I realized it was a bone; then laughed with crazy relief when I recognized it as an antler, a deer’s shed horn, a thick main beam forked into two long tines, weathered a faint moss-green, nicked here and there with sharp, double-incised grooves where rodents had chewed it for minerals. I couldn’t stop laughing. ‘Great. Just what I needed. A fucking deer horn. Don’t you guys understand I already got enough pieces for the puzzle? Probably got more fucking pieces than there is puzzle. Come on, now: help me out, don’t mess me around.’ I brandished the horn to emphasize my point. It slipped out of my numb hand, burying itself base down in the snow, tines spread upright like the forks of a river joining to plunge straight down into the earth. And there it was, by sheer accident, right in front of my face: a divining rod, a witcher’s forked stick, a wand to dowse the spot where their ghosts broke free of their broken bodies. The key, or at least a tool to pick the lock.

With snow mounding on my flamingo hat, piling across the plaid shoulders of my jacket, my hands, feet, and face frozen beyond feeling, I worked the field with the bone wand held steadily poised in front of me, my whole being condensed to the receptive tip, waiting for its plunge. I spiraled slowly out from the center of the field, wired to the slightest stirring, faintest sense, a pulse, a trembling, anything. And I didn’t feel the slightest quiver of response – nothing; zilch; zero. It was solid dark when I gave up.

The porchlight was the only sign of life at the house. I expected her to be waiting behind the screen, but the door was closed. I knocked. Coming back defeated across the field, I’d tried to compose a new plea, but it no longer seemed to matter. When she opened the door I didn’t even look up.

‘Well?’ she demanded, friendly as ever.

I felt the tears coming and, afraid my voice would crack, shook my head without speaking.

‘You’d better go now,’ she said, and for the first time, I sensed a hint of sympathy in her voice.

Not much, but it encouraged me to give it a try. ‘I’d guess somewhere near the center of the field. It’s the only place I felt anything. I found a deer horn there, close to where the X is on the map. But you already said that was wrong.’

‘It is.’

‘You couldn’t be mistaken?’

‘It’s unlikely.’

‘Would you tell me where the spot is?’

‘No. You agreed to the conditions. You didn’t fulfill them. Now kindly leave.’

‘I want to come back tomorrow and try again.’

She didn’t answer or give any indication she’d heard.

I’d tried everything except begging, so I figured I’d give that a shot: ‘Please, Mrs Nogardam. Please?’

‘I told you no, Mr Gastin. Now I want you to leave.’

I slammed my fist against the screendoor frame, jolting it open for an instant before the spring whipped it shut again. ‘Damn your cold ass,’ I wept. ‘How can you possibly judge what I’m all about, what this means to me, how much …’ but I stopped because she hadn’t even flinched, not a blink, a start, a step back, nothing. Just watching me with those dark gold eyes.

I wiped at the tears with my sleeve, some clinging snow from my stingy-brim plopping to the porch floor. ‘Why can’t I make you see how much this matters? And not just to me, either. Donna, Joshua, Double-Gone, my friends in San Francisco – what do I tell them?’

‘Tell them you failed. Tell them pity is a polite form of loathing. Tell them I didn’t pity you.’

‘What fucking right––’ I started to rage but she suddenly lifted an arm and pointed past me into the darkness. I stopped cold.

‘Mr Gastin, if you want to work off your anger and confusion there’s a snow shovel leaning against the back of the porch. You’ll need it to clear a path to get out. Good night.’ She shut the door.

I picked up the shovel on my way back to the Eldorado. I started the car to let it warm up, took a little gulp of speed to lubricate my muscles, then started shoveling. There was about 200 feet of driveway out to the main road and I dug right in, not a thought in my raving mind except moving snow, and without thought there was no confusion, just the scrape of shovel against the gravel roadway, the grunt of breath as I lifted, pitched, and took another bite. In about twenty minutes I finished, walked back down the cleared drive, and replaced the shovel, figuring that I was, if nothing else, a success as a human snowplow.

Back across the drifted yard, I used my forearm to wipe snow from the corners of the windshield, then wiped the same forearm across my sweaty face. I was so warm, in fact, that when I slipped behind the wheel, I had to turn down the heater. I took another gritty swig of speed to replace lost fluids, turned on the wipers to clear the slush from the windshield, clicked the lights to highbeams, dropped it into reverse, and came off the clutch. The drive wheels spun for a second, then gripped. Aiming between the bullet taillights, staying light and steady on the gas, I backed out to the road.

When I felt the rear wheels on the pavement I stopped, slammed it into low, and screaming ‘Oh baaay-beeee, you know what I like!’ I stood on the gas. There was a shuddering second before the rubber fastened the power to the road and then I was smoking back down the driveway like a silver bullet, a dead bead on the fence, hoping I’d have enough speed to crash through into the field.

I never found out. Just as I nailed it into second and felt the Caddy leap forward in a spray of gravel and snow, a blast of flame exploded from near the porch and the Caddy’s right front end collapsed, the momentum snapping the rear end around so hard I felt it wanting to flip, but I squared it away as best I could and whipped around through a full 360°, showering snow. Then, I cut the lights and engine and bailed out, still uncertain what had happened.

Mrs Nogardam was standing in front of me in a white parka, hood drawn tight about her face, the shotgun in her hands pointed at my throat. ‘I asked you to leave,’ she said with a mean, even patience.

‘Ma’am, that’s what I was doing.’ I couldn’t keep the pounding of my heart out of my voice.

‘No, you were just being foolish.’

‘I stand corrected,’ I said, beginning to relax – she wasn’t going to shoot. ‘And it looks like I might be standing here corrected for a while longer, because I think you just shot my way out. Where were you aiming?’

‘Where I hit: the right-front tire.’ She lowered the gun slightly. ‘If you’ve got a spare, change it. If not, it looks like you’ll have to use some of that money on a tow truck.’

The possibility of that irony made me reckless.

‘Ma’am,’ I asked mildly, ‘is that by any chance a Remington twenty-gauge pump?’

‘It is.’

‘I had one just like it when I was a kid growing up in Florida. Used it on quail. You use yours on your husbands?’

Reckless, but it got to her: her eyes flashed and the gun barrel came back up to lock on my throat. Her voice was tight. ‘I find it difficult to believe you grew up, Mr Gastin. I find about as much evidence for your maturity as the police found for my involvement in my husbands’ disappearances. None. Because there was none.’

‘You realize, of course,’ I said softly, ‘you’ll have to kill me. I’m not giving up. This is something I have to do.’

‘No you don’t,’ she said. ‘But you probably will. That does not mean you’re going to do it here. I was calling the sheriff about the time you were putting the shovel back. I told him I thought there was a prowler. I doubt if he’ll hurry – I’m not popular with local law enforcement – but he should make it in twenty minutes or so, and then you can discuss rights and wrongs with him. Or you can hurry and change your tire. Or you can try to take this gun away. I won’t kill you – believe me or not, I’ve never killed anything in my life. But you might live the rest of yours without a knee, or the ability to reproduce.’

‘I was wrong,’ I told her. ‘You didn’t shoot your husbands – you froze ’em to death. Or froze ’em out so bad they were glad to vanish.’

Though she didn’t reply, her shoulders seemed to slump. I think I could’ve gotten to her in half an hour, but I didn’t have the time. If she was bluffing about the sheriff, she was bluffing with the best hand. ‘I have a spare in the trunk,’ I told her, hoping a new tire was all I’d need.

She held the shotgun on me as I fumbled the spare tire and tools from the trunk, and kept it on me till I was down on my belly digging out a place for the jack. While I can usually change a tire in five minutes on dry ground, I didn’t know how long it would take in the snow, so I ignored her to concentrate on my work. There was no reason to slow things down with more nasty exchanges. We were done talking. I’d be back. She had to sleep sometime.

I set the jack solid under the axle and then crawled out to spin off the lug nuts. I glanced in her direction to see how close I was covered, and for a strange, splintering instant I thought she’d disappeared. But she was there, all right, sitting cross-legged in the snow, gun cradled across her left arm, her head bowed against the snowfall – a few flakes blowing from the storm’s edge, a handful of stars glittering where the sky had cleared – and she looked for all the world like an old buffalo hunter hunkered down to wait out the weather.

I went back to work. The tire was shredded. There were pellet dents in the hubcap and a few concave dings in the fender, bare steel glinting through the chipped white paint and primer. I slipped the lug wrench over the first nut and twisted, leaning into it. The nut broke loose with a tiny shriek. I spun it off and dropped it clattering into the hubcap.

The sound had barely faded before she began to speak. I was stunned by the change in her voice, that hard edge turned to a delicate keening. ‘I loved them all, you know. Kenneth was the first. We were young, two years married. He had a lot of debts, a lot of doubts about himself, and we had some troubles – but when it was there for us, it was really there. I thought he’d just walked away from it. Snapped one moment and just kept going. Men can do that. I never tried to look for him. I was six months pregnant and somehow believed the baby would bring him back. The baby was stillborn. The minister and I were the only ones at the funeral, and the minister was there because he got paid. I used to visit the grave every day, hoping I’d find Kenneth waiting. I never did.

‘Joe, my second husband, disappeared out rounding up strays on the Arizona-Mexico border. The sheriff thought he might have been killed by drug smugglers. Stumbled on them by mistake and tried to stop them. Joe would have: he was big and rough, not a drop of sentiment in him, but he was so decent he was almost fragile. I knew he hadn’t just kept riding.

‘I remember pacing in the ranch house as it got later and later. Praying on the flagstone floor that he was all right. Beating on it with my fists.

‘I looked for Joe. Months after the posse had given up I was still out there every day. People said I was crazy, hysterical, a ghost-chaser. I looked in every baranca, arroyo, draw, and canyon, behind every tree and boulder for thirty miles. I never found a trace. But after a while out there alone in the mountains, looking so hard, so devoutly, I got so I could ride up a gully and feel the presence of death – tendrils, subtle odors, a particular stillness – and after three years of looking I could feel death where only a hair remained, or a fleck of dried blood, and soon I could feel it when there was nothing at all. You called me a hard woman; well, it’s a hard knowledge.’

‘Ma’am––’ I started to defend myself, but she sliced right through it, the old flint in her voice, ‘You listen while you change that tire. If you want to talk, talk to the sheriff.’

That shut me up. I spun off another lug nut as she continued. ‘I might still be riding that border if Duster hadn’t come along. His wife had died of cancer six months before and he was traveling around hunting and fishing, trying to let go. He stopped by the ranch house asking for permission to hunt doves down by the pond. We talked a bit, and the next day he came to hunt again and asked me out to dinner. I warned him about my husbands disappearing but he took it the same way he took my heart, with a kind of crazy, carefree seriousness. Duster was a rare man. He knew who he was, so he loved you for who you were, not something he wanted you to be.

‘Twenty-one years Duster and I were together, most of them around here. And one day he went out pheasant hunting over at the Lindstroms’ place and disappeared. I can’t tell you how hard that was. The police kept after me for months. I couldn’t blame them. But what could I tell them? I didn’t know what to tell myself. But I made up my mind I’d find Duster, and when the hullabaloo died down I started looking. I looked every night for seven years. Every single night.

‘You see, Mr Gastin, that’s how I learned to sense the dead, to feel the earth reveal the spirits it’s claimed, to sense the presence, read the signs. I learned it by looking for those dearly lost to me.’

I had the spare on the axle and was finishing the lug nuts. ‘Did you find him,’ I asked.

‘Mr Gastin, I’m sorry I have to be so stern with you. You are foolish, yet I admire your spunk.’

‘Then give me another chance at it when it’s not snowing. You had years of practice.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘not here.’

‘Then where?’ I asked, cinching down the last lug nut.

‘I don’t know. You can always try to get back to the beginning, but I’m sure you understand how difficult that is, and dangerous. Take it where you find it – that’s my advice.’

‘I’m not sure I understand,’ I told her politely, ‘but that’s hardly a new state of affairs.’ I worked the jack out and stood up. She stood up with me, the gun barrel pointed down at the snow, but she watched closely as I put the blasted tire and the tools back in the trunk, then back around and into the car. As I closed the door she stepped around to the driver’s side. When the gears meshed, as simple and smooth as that I understood what she was guarding in the field. I powered down the window. ‘Maybe I haven’t earned the right to deliver the gift,’ I said, ‘but I do think I’ve earned the right to ask you what you’re protecting here. I just can’t believe it’s the ghosts of three rock musicians.’

‘I’m protecting my ignorance,’ she said.

That wasn’t what I’d expected. ‘I thought ignorance was my affliction.’

‘You’re hardly alone.’

‘What is it you don’t understand?’

Her head turned slightly to gaze out across the field. ‘I told you I looked for the spot where Duster vanished, looked for seven years, and this is where I found him. I was sure of it. In the center, near where you found the antler. Of course, the antler wasn’t there then. This place is about nine miles from the Lindstroms’, in the opposite direction from where we lived at the time, but the feeling was powerful and clear. I thought maybe he’d been murdered and his body buried here.’ She closed her eyes, then immediately opened them. ‘The truth is, I hoped he’d been murdered … I wanted a reason, you see––’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘I thought it was your husband you were protecting. Now it makes sense.’

‘Don’t be so sure,’ she said sadly. ‘When I dug down that night, yes, there it was, a human skull. But it was the skull on an infant, Mr Gastin, a baby less than a year old, and it had been there long before my husband or your musicians died. There were no other bones. Just the skull. You could almost hold it in the palm of your hand. So you understand why I couldn’t let you drive this car out there and set it on fire? There are forces here beyond my understanding, so I had to insist that you prove yours.’

I felt my skull shining in the moonlight. I finally managed to say, ‘I’m not sure I wanted to know that.’

Mrs Nogardam leaned her hooded head to the open window and gave me a quick, dry smile. ‘Neither did I. It only added to the confusion. But if we don’t want to know, why do we seek?’ She smiled again, almost girlishly, then stepped back from the car, the shotgun swinging up level with the grille to remind me to act intelligently.

I backed out to the paved road, swung to the left, and got on it as fast as the snow allowed. For someone with nowhere to go I sure found myself in a hurry to get there, although on reflection there was a place I wanted with an overwhelming desire to reach, and that was far away from all the madness, the ghost salesman and ghost guardian and the moonlit skulls of children and a gift that didn’t seem to want delivery – but most of all I wanted away from my continual inability to make sense out of any of it, and my tumorous fear that there was no sense to make.

When I met a sheriff ’s car at the first crossroads – had she actually called, or was this a routine patrol? – I came very close to turning myself in. I stifled a powerful impulse to put a broadslide block on his cruiser and jump out jabbering, ‘Officer, this Caddy’s so hot the paint’s runny and that bottle of white stuff on the front seat is pure Hong Kong heroin I sell to schoolchildren and the papers in the glovebox still have wet ink and the baby’s corpse in the trunk is missing its head and my goodness is that an open container in my hand, you child-molesting Nazi cock-sucker. Oh, pretty please: lock me up! Yes! I need custody.’

But I didn’t. We eased past each other on the snow-slick road. I watched his taillights in the rearview mirror as they disappeared into where I’d been, the point from which I was unraveling. Where next, and why? Drive, I said to myself, for Christsake find out where you’re going. Yet even that pure injunction was stymied: because of the snow, the roads were so treacherous I had to doodle when I wanted to jam. I couldn’t even get it up past the posted till I hit 135, freshly plowed and sanded. I took it south, back toward Des Moines, mainly because there were more stars in that direction.

I don’t want to give the impression I was flying apart. In fact, I was fairly stable, paralyzed as I was by the triangulated suck of stark confusion, dread, and depression. It was just as Gladys Nogardam had so coldly put it: I’d failed. If I was smart, I told myself, I’d simply shoulder my duffle bag and walk away from the whole fucked-up mess. Quit while I was only behind. I’d entered that state of mind where flight is spurred by the vulnerable belief and poignant hope that what’s chasing you is worse than what’s waiting ahead. But if I wasn’t smart enough to cut my losses, at least I was bright enough to stop and catch my breath.

After knowing Joshua Springfield, how could I possibly have resisted the Raven’s Haven Motel on the north edge of Des Moines? The office reeked of the liver-and-onions frying in the manager’s adjacent apartment. On a small table opposite the business counter was a stuffed, ratty-feathered raven mounted on a jack-o-lantern. The manager kept eyeing me nervously as I signed in, then examined the registration card closely as I dug in my pocket for money.

‘Ah, under occupation here, Dr Gass … what sort of pharmaceutical testing do you do?’

‘Freelance,’ I explained. ‘But right now I’m working for the Feds. Some of them damn beatniks are putting ground-up marijuana in Saint Joseph’s Baby Aspirin. Found a batch up in Fargo this morning. Company says it was a split shipment, Fargo and Des Moines, so I’m down here to check it out. I’ll try to run it down in the morning. Haven’t slept in two days, that’s why I’d appreciate it if I wasn’t disturbed. I get disturbed easily. And whatever you do, don’t tell anybody – no need to start a panic. They might not even be on the shelves yet. But just between you and me, don’t give your kids Saint Joseph’s.’

‘I thought marijuana was green. That should make them easy to spot.’

‘It is green, pal, in its natural state – and I’m glad to see an alert citizen – but they’re bleaching it with mescaline tritripinate.’

‘Somebody ought to shoot the lousy bastards,’ he said with disgust.

‘Tell you what: we break the case, I’ll give you the names of the jerks as soon as I get them. Maybe try to work something out with the Feds to take their time, know what I mean? You can close the case before the shithooks even have a chance to call their fancy New York lawyers. You got a card with a number where I can reach you on short notice? You should be ready to move on it in a hurry.’

He gave me his card along with the room key, though he didn’t seem particularly eager to give me either.

‘Citizen involvement,’ I told him as I headed for the door, ‘that’s what separates the sheep from the goats.’ I turned around at the door. ‘Another thing: you on city water?’

‘Yes,’ he said uncertainly.

‘A word to the wise: get bottled. A retarded baboon could dump a vial of chemicals in the water supply any time he took the notion. Lysergic acid, hashish extract, opium crystals – a pound of any of that shit in the water supply could take out Des Moines for a week. You have a cup of coffee one morning and ten minutes later you’re up on the roof here trying to plug your dick into the neon sign. Don’t think I’m kidding.’

‘Bottled water,’ he repeated.

‘You got it. In this day and age, you can’t be too sure. Hard to be sure at all, in fact.’

I fetched my duffle, a six-pack, and the bottle of crank from the trunk and then started looking for #14. I wondered about my perverse delight in jacking around the Harveys and Bubbas and Walter Mittys of the world. To beat up on the defenseless didn’t show much character, nor much heart. No wonder I failed or fucked-up at every opportunity.

But the self-flagellation, meant to raise the welts of self-pity, stopped the moment I stepped into my room – not that it was breathtakingly spacious or tastefully appointed. Standard issue down to the smoke-yellowed floral wallpaper, a linty-green Sear’s close-out carpet, Magnavox fifteen-inch black-and-white TV bolted to the desk, and a lumpy double bed that had probably known more sexual joy and despair in a month than I had in twenty years – but # 14 offered the welcome sanctuary of transient neutrality, space without claims.

I locked and bolted the door, set my bag on the luggage rack, opened a beer, and moseyed into the bathroom hoping to find a spacious tub. The tub wasn’t luxurious, but it was adequate. I wiggled the bead-chained plug in tight and opened the hot water all the way. As the steam curled, I stripped off my grungy clothes and pawed through my duffle looking for something I hadn’t worn recently. Making a mental note to do laundry in the morning, I grinned at my display of confidence. But indeed, this was the trick – to carry on as if everything was normal. I needed rest, especially rest from thinking, but had to make some decisions about what to do now that I’d failed the delivery and lost my way.

In the time it took me to shut off the hot water, I decided I believed Gladys Nogardam or else was scared shitless of her, either of which was sufficient reason not to attempt a midnight run on the crash site, a notion I hadn’t realized I was still seriously considering. Nope, I was in over my head with Mrs Nogardam. But the point she’d made about returning to the beginning made more and more sense. In the spiritual inflation of enlarging the gesture – abetted by the baseless paranoia inspired by Double-Gone that Scumball’s goons might be awaiting me – I’d lost my original purpose and therefore my way, the simple, uncomplicated point of delivering it to the Bopper’s grave and then quietly slipping away.

According to the information I’d found at the Houston Public Library, the Bopper, as I’d assumed, was buried in Beaumont. The obvious move was to drive down and make delivery, and that’s what I decided I’d do after a good night’s sleep. While this amounted to a two thousand-mile detour, I could chalk it up as a learning experience. That was the ticket: get up early and back on track, rested, refreshed, and wiser. And no picking up any hitchhikers along the way or talking to anyone who might possibly deflect me from that simple task. I was too suggestible, too vulnerable to my own doubts. And another decision: if I didn’t pull it off this time, I’d just forget it and walk away. Abandon the journey as a fair try that failed, a victim of my own fuck-ups and fate. Sad, but no cause for shame.

I went in to check the bathwater and jerked my hand right back out – I wanted to soak myself, not cook lobsters. I was reaching for the cold water handle when it crossed my mind that I didn’t know which Beaumont cemetery had won the Bopper’s bones. It was about 8:00 and I was fairly sure Texas and Iowa were in the same time zone. With any luck the Beaumont Library was still open.

If the bathwater had been 20° cooler, I wouldn’t have phoned the library before it closed and my story might’ve ended up in a different place altogether. The temperature of water – such a simple thing. Everything intimately and ultimately involved, millions of convoluted contingencies, none of them meaningless, any one potentially critical, and potential itself subject to the infinite dimensional intersections of time, space, and luck. Obviously a mind is not enough.

I sat my bare ass down on the desk chair, put the beer within easy reach, then dialed information through the motel office. The number in Beaumont was busy, so I asked the operator to try Houston. The call went through smoothly, answered by a woman on the second ring: ‘Houston Public Library, may I help you?’

‘Could I have the Reference Desk, please?’

‘This is the Reference Desk.’

I put some honey in my tone. ‘Well now, ma’am. I have an unusual request, but so far in my research I’ve found that the world would get pig-ignorant mighty quick if it wasn’t for the patience and dedication of you librarians, so I’ll just blunder ahead here and trust you to sort it out. What I’m doing is some research on early rock-and-roll musicians and I’m having trouble with some background on a Beaumont musician known as the Big Bopper. That was his stage name; his given name was Richardson, J P, Jiles Perry. Now the thing––’

‘I bet y’all want to know where he’s buried.’

That snapped me to attention. ‘Now, how did you know that? You librarians telepathic?’

‘No sir, y’all just the third person today wanted to know where this Bopper’s buried, and a man in yesterday wanted the same information. That Bopper’s sure been popular around here the last few days.’

‘Myself, I’m doing an article for Life magazine. I don’t know if these other folks are reporters, scholars, or just interested citizens.’

‘I don’t know either. They didn’t say. But I can tell without going to the clippings that Mr Richardson died in a plane crash on February the third, 1959, up around Mason City – that’s in Iowa – and he’s buried over in Beaumont at Forest Lawn. Is that what y’all wanted?’

As I inched forward on the chair, my bare ass squeaked on the vinyl. I shared the sentiment. ‘The burial place, yes ma’am, that’s what I wanted. I’m not interested in the crash site. Is that what the other researchers are covering, the crash site?’

‘Truth be told,’ she lowered her voice confidentially, ‘the two men that were here today seemed more interested in the man that was in yesterday than they did in Mr Richardson. They didn’t come right out and say so, but I gather this other fellow, he’d taken some research notes from them? They asked Helen – she works the early shift – what he looked like, what sort of car he was driving, what he wanted, that sort of thing. They talked to Peebles, too – he’s the morning custodian.’

‘Sounds like the usual research rivalry to me. You wouldn’t believe how some of these scholars carry on.’

‘Lee – that’s the janitor, Leland Peebles – he didn’t think so.’

‘No?’

‘No sir. He said he talked to the young one with the crazy hat yesterday when he first came in – he was wearing this bright pink hat, but I didn’t see him. I don’t come on until noon. Anyway, Peebles said the young one was either crazy or on drugs, and he thinks the other two are after him for stealing their car or some money.’

‘I don’t see what that has to do with the Big Bopper.’

‘I don’t either, but it must have something to do with it – this Mr Richardson’s the one they all asked after.’

‘Well, I want to thank you for your help with this. It’s appreciated, believe me. And you sure got my curiosity going about those other three guys; hope we’re not all covering the same ground.’

‘Glad to help y’all.’ Night, now.’

No, I said to myself as I frantically redialed Houston Information for a number for Leland Peebles. Just help me. I’m the good guy.

Mr Peebles recognized my voice before I got seven words into my awkward ploy. ‘Mister, there’s no way I wanna be even re-mote-ly involved in this shit. None fo’ me, thanks jus the same. I don’t know you an’ I don’t know them, but I tell ya what I do know, and that’s that them men lookin’ fo’ you is exactly the sort you don’ want to be findin’. Big and nasty sort, you understand? I got my own burden of griefs, don’t need yours or theirs. Hullo an’ goodbye.’ He hung up.

‘Hold on!’ I shouted. When there was only that empty hum in response, I fell apart. Paranoia started playing my brain like a pinball machine, racking up seventeen free games by the time I got the phone back in the cradle. Lights and rollovers were flashing and popping, flares exploding in the darkness, livid yellows and lurid reds. I saw the two goons in the motel office, right that minute, showing my picture to our helpful manager. ‘Yeah, sure, the guy in fourteen, that’s him. The one works for the Feds.’ I saw myself tied to the chair I was sitting on, a guy about twice Bubba’s size gagging me with a ping-pong ball and a swatch of wide adhesive tape while the smaller one fished his tools from a black doctor’s satchel.

One shoe in my hand, an arm up a pantleg, I was scrambling around for clothes, knocking over the beer on the desk as I thrashed around on hands and knees groping for my other shoe as the cold beer dribbled off the edge of the desk onto the small of my back and down the crack of my ass, my brain screaming HEMORRHAGE! when a dry voice spoke to me with neither disgust nor loathing, just calm amusement. ‘George, not only is the mind not enough, it is evidently too much.’

And that voice snapped my panic, pulled the plug. It was me, of course, unless I’d locked someone in the room with me, but the voice seemed to come from outside that elusive entity I generally considered my self. I reached back and gingerly touched the wetness along my ass, then examined my fingers. Beer. I cringed with humiliation: I’d blown apart under pressure like a cheap transmission scattering down the stretch. I wondered abjectly what sort of quivering puddle of shit I’d turn into if Scumball’s specialists ever caught up.

I mustered a sort of fatal dignity and went into the bathroom, glad the mirror was so fogged with steam I couldn’t see my face. With a towel from the rack I sopped up the beer, then gathered the cleanest clothes I could find and laid them out neatly on the bed. So the bad guys were hot on my trail. Would Zorro fall apart? Shit no. Hopalong Cassidy? Are you kidding? Davy Crockett, John Dillinger, Zapata, Errol Flynn – would those guys be scrabbling around on a motel room floor too panicked by the mere idea of the crunch coming to pick up their fucking shoes? Surely you jest. I went back in the bathroom and wrung out the towel in the washbowl, then, facing myself, swabbed at the mirror. No dashing Zorro there, no cool-eyed Dillinger; neither swash nor buckle. Just crank-eyed, lip-quivering, day’s growth, sweat-gritty, wrinkle-dicked me. I walked over to the tub, lifted myself in, and sank.

I tried not to think, but it was like trying not to breathe. My first thought, oddly enough, was that I should call Gladys Nogardam and warn her she might expect some bad company. On second thought, I figured I should call the Houston Library and leave a warning for the goons, should they consider heading her way. That gave me heart. If a ninety-seven-year-old woman could stand her ground, then so could I. If Joshua Springfield could ride his Celestial Express into a sleeping town and challenge the prevailing dreamless version of reality and not even flinch when the shooting started, surely I could dream on. After all, Gladys admired my spunk, or so she said, and they’d shot at me as well as Joshua. And Donna trying to wash the stink of sour milk out of that sweltering trailer and feed the kids – if she could go on, what was stopping me? Besides fear, doubt, and no direction known.

What to do, where to go; the same old boring shit. Go to sleep. Go roaring back to Beaumont right into their teeth and touch it off on the Bopper’s grave. Or go to the phone, call a taxi for the airport, book a seat on the next flight to Mexico. Fuck the gift and fly away.

Thinking, thinking, stopping only long enough to add more hot water or crack another beer. By two in the morning I was out of beer, my face was raw from the steam, and my body was beginning to pucker and prune pretty seriously, so I stood up, dripping and shriveled, and watched the water spiral down the drain, a circle sucked through itself, disappearing to wherever it went – pipes, sewer, sewer pond, evaporating back to the air, falling again as rain for the roots – and remembered again Gladys Nogardam saying, ‘You can always try to get back to the beginning.’

I spent the next hour pacing the bedroom naked, trying to figure out some sort of beginning to return to, thinking I had to be desperately lost if I was trying to find a beginning just to begin again, assuming I was capable of distinguishing beginnings from endings, assuming they weren’t just illusions.

That’s how it was in room 14 of the Raven’s Haven Motel in Des Moines, Iowa, at 3:00 in the morning, full of failure, dread, doubt, beer, and speed. Pacing, pacing, pacing. I think it was the monotonous rhythm of walking rather than the monotony of thinking that conjured the echo of the beginning I sought. Big Red Loco taking the bandstand to play ‘Mercury Falling,’ shaping his breath into the silence we’d heard together as the stolen car flopped over the edge and fell, fell, fell, vanishing then bursting within the roar of waves breaking on the rocks. The same night the small Beechcraft fireballed into an Iowa cornfield. The first night I held Kacy naked in my arms. That was the beginning I wanted returned. Not to recapture the past but to open the present. Not a rebirth, you understand, but this birth. This life. My bewildered love, my fucked-up music, my shaky faith. But even so, it was a love with hope, a music I could still dance to, and a faith suddenly steadied by the feeling I’d finally got it right, that I knew where I was going: full circle, back to that turn-out above Jenner. A familiar plan to me, maybe even the original one, and it made me laugh. My laugh sounded a little unnerved, oddly wild.

I dressed, packed my gear, left $10 on the dresser for the phone calls that probably saved my ass, and went out and started the Caddy. While it patiently idled, gathering warmth against the predawn freeze, I stowed my duffle and celebrated the new beginning of the end with a sip of speed chased with beer, the first of the last six-pack left in the cooler. Either I’d been lost in concentration or he hadn’t yet appeared, but it wasn’t till I popped the emergency brake that I noticed my ghost. He was sitting on the passenger’s side of the front seat, watching. Our eyes met. ‘You’re crazy, you know,’ he said.

‘I know.’

‘Well, suit yourself.’

‘Leave me alone unless you’re going to help,’ I said, but he had already vanished.

I swung the white rocket around in the parking lot, eased out onto the empty street, and eight blocks later found the on-ramp I wanted. The freeway was a little slick, and snow from yesterday’s storm was plowed up along the shoulders. I took it easy, getting the feel of the road. When I hit the I-80 junction I stopped for gas. I sat staring at the dinosaur on the Sinclair logo while the yawning attendant topped off the tank. I took I-80 West, headed for the California coast. A big Kenworth rumbled past me as I pulled onto the freeway, and I honked and waved. He tooted back. The road was slushy in spots, but generally good. A green mileage sign read OMAHA 130. I put Bill Haley and the Comets on the box, ‘Rock Around the Clock,’ and then put some leather to the pedal, some sole on the go. If anybody was chasing me, they were going to be further behind. I was still eighteen hundred miles out, but I was closing fast.

I made Omaha before 6:00 Central, light just beginning to pale the sky. There was a strong cross-wind from the north, but the road was clear. It looked like straight sailing to the coast. I hoped to reach Jenner before the next dawn and figured that if I gained two hours in time changes and averaged around 80 mph, I could make a few stops and still have time on my side. Things were looking good.

A couple of things, however, were nagging at me. One was the gut-shot spare in the trunk. Or non-spare, since it was worthless. The rubber on the right-front was new, but I’ve never liked running without some extra on board; I can’t stand how dumb you feel when you have a flat. And although I have no statistical proof, personal experience has convinced me you’re fifty times more likely to have a flat when you don’t have a spare.

Then there was my ghost. Not that he’d returned to ride shotgun or anything alarming, but that he’d made an appearance in the first place. I figured he was a hallucination born of psychic distress and physical exhaustion, and I was certainly no stranger to hallucination. It seemed like only yesterday I’d been waltzing with a cactus under the melting desert stars, and it was yesterday that I’d seen Kacy in an Oklahoma waitress and got my gonads tenderized. I knew a hallucination when I saw one, and I’d driven truck long enough to know what tired, wired eyes could do with a heat mirage, tricks of light and shadow, semblances suggested by blurred or distant shapes, ghost-images dancing down the optic nerves when an oncoming driver neglected to dim his highbeams and left you half-blind and batting your eyes in his wake, all kinds of wild shit out there in the dark. But I’d never seen my ghost before.

Granted, there’s a first time for everything, but it nagged me, like I said, particularly since Lewis Kerr had only the night before supposedly returned my errant ghost. I didn’t want to consider the possibility it was my ghost, for as nearly as I understood it, ghosts were disembodied spirits of the dead, and I wasn’t dead, of that I was certain – although, like a clutch plate with an oil leak, that certainty was beginning to experience some slippage. If ghosts were spirits of the dead and I wasn’t dead, maybe it was a preview of coming attractions, a warning to watch myself. Or perhaps – and this struck me as so ludicrous I immediately accepted its possibility – I was being haunted by my own ghost.

It was mine. I was convinced of that, although recalling its visit I had to admit I hadn’t so much seen it as felt it, or maybe I’d seen it because I’d felt it so clearly. But ghost, hallucination, mirage, psycho-projection, whatever it was, it was of me.

And yet I wasn’t alarmed. For one thing, I didn’t think it was real, at least not real in the sense that little Eddie’s blood was real, or Red’s music, or Kacy’s coiled warmth. And real or not, my ghost hadn’t seemed threatening. If anything, it apparently wanted to help – it had pointed out I was crazy more as a reminder than a judgment or warning. Maybe I now was crazy enough to have split in two, which was all right with me; I could use a spare mind.

In Lincoln I stopped at another Sinclair station for a fill-up. I was beginning to think of that green dinosaur as a personal good luck charm. I wanted his pressed oils to power my run to the coast. I told the pump jockey to stock it to the top with gravity’s wine. When he looked baffled, I pointed to the dinosaur revolving above us atop the stanchion and explained, ‘Some of that prime, high-test dinosaur juice from the Mesozoic crush. Gas.’ He seemed glad to tear himself away from our conversation and get pumping. As I opened the trunk to get out the mangled tire, I cautioned myself that Lincoln, Nebraska, at 6:30 A.M. was not a good place to succumb to an attack of the mad jabbers.

The tire was the shredded mess I remembered, but the rim looked fine. I held it up for the attendant’s inspection: ‘You carry my size?’

‘Think so, mister,’ he said, staring at the blasted casing. ‘Jesus Christ, what did you do to it?’

‘Misjudged an old woman’s determination.’

He shook his head. ‘Boy, I guess so.’

Although he did have one in stock, he couldn’t – or didn’t want to – mount it until the number-two man came on at 8:00 to cover the pumps. He looked alarmed when I volunteered to mount it myself, or to watch the pumps while he did it, and mumbled something about insurance problems. Fuck him, I decided. The right-front looked plenty good to get me to Grand Island; in fact the rubber was good enough all the way around to get me to Alaska if I wanted to risk it.

Nebraska is a flat state – the roads so straight they have to put rumble-strips on them to keep you from going into highway trance – but it’s great terrain for making time, and I kept it up in the high 90’s as I blew down the pike. The traffic was light, and the hard cross-wind let up not far out of Lincoln.

It was beginning to look like a classic autumn day, crisp and full of color, when I hit Grand Island one hundred fifty miles and ninety minutes later. I’d barely entered the city limits when I saw a sign that read AL HAYLOCK’S TIRE N’ TUNE, and damned if the sign didn’t feature a picture of a rubber tree. Yes sir, that’s the kind of advertising to attract a man looking for the beginning, the raw material, the unrefined source. When the mechanic said he’d need about ten minutes to mount the tire, I told him to change the oil and filter while he was at it, and to give it a quick tune as well. I used his restroom to drain some beer, then went off in search of a donut to throw my growling stomach.

There was a greasy spoon two blocks west, the mechanic said, so I headed in that direction. A long stretch in the fresh morning sunlight felt good after sitting behind a wheel for hours. I was checking for traffic as I crossed a side street when my glance was seized by a huge chartreuse sign on the roof of a building about the size of a large cable car: ELMER’S HOUSE OF A THOUSAND LAUGHS. All the Os in the sign were tilted like heads thrown back in laughter, and in fact had faces painted on them, closed eyes and big open mouths out of which emerged, in pale flamingo script, assorted hee-haws, yuks, chortles, snorts, whoops, hyugha-hyughas, and other expressions of amusement and delight.

I was attracted by the oddity of the place, but admonished myself not to court distraction when things were clicking along just fine. Besides, the place looked closed. And just as I made up my mind, someone started waving a white flag in the store window as if signaling my attention or his surrender, or perhaps a meeting under the sign of safe conduct.

As I approached, I saw the waving flag was none of the above, but instead a floppy, butcher-paper sign a woman was taping inside a front window. HALLOWEEN SPECIAL, GET YOUR TRICKS HERE. Who could resist? Especially when I noticed that the woman behind the glass had the dourest face I’d ever seen. She looked like her breakfast had been a bowl of alum and a cup of humorless disgust.

On the door, in small, neat script, was another sign: ‘A practical joke is one that makes you laugh.’ Above it was one of those plastic squares with two clock faces commonly used to indicate store hours, but the hands had been removed. On one clock face the sun-leached letters read: ‘Time flies like an arrow.’ On the other: ‘Fruit flies like bananas.’

I was having serious second thoughts, but pushed the door open anyway, freezing immediately when I heard a hoarse male voice whisper urgently, ‘Edna, did you hear that? Oh Christ, I think it’s your husband.’

‘It’s just one of Elmer’s jokes,’ a weary female voice informed me. ‘A recording. Breaking the circuit in the door activates it. I tell Elmer it’s bad for business but he don’t listen to me.’ The speaker was the dour-faced woman I’d seen in the window. She didn’t look any happier in the dingy glow of the two forty-watts lighting the store. She was in her fifties, a few inches over five feet but showing all the signs of shrinking fast. She was dressed entirely in dull black except for a large, round pin on her bosom, a grinning, bright orange pumpkin with the legend KEEP FUN SAFE FOR KIDS. As I looked at her narrow, tight-lipped face, the legend seemed less a plea for the safety of innocence than a personal admission of its loss – her matte-brown eyes had given up on fun long ago.

‘No problem.’ I smiled to show her I could take a joke. My instinct was to cheer her up.

‘There’s not much stock left,’ she said, ‘but go ahead and look around. You need any help I’ll be behind the counter.’

It was a joke shop: joy buzzers, whoopee cushions that emitted long flatulent squeals when you sat on them, fountain pens designed to leak all over the unsuspecting user, plastic lapel flowers with hidden water-filled squeeze-bulbs to flush the sinuses of sniffers, kaleidoscopes that left the viewer with a black eye – that sort of thing, and more bare shelf than merchandise.

A section of plastics caught my eye. A pile of dogshit that looked so real you could smell it. Below that a display of severed extremities – fingertips to put in somebody’s beer, whole fingers to wedge in doors, the entire hand for under the pillow or the lip of the toilet bowl. Not to mention plastic snakes, spiders, bats, scorpions, flies, and hideously bloated sewer rats that I instantly envisioned floating belly-up in suburban swimming pools. Next to the animals were plastic puddles of vomit with realistic chunks of potatoes and half-digested meat. None of them made me laugh, but I’ll admit to a smile.

In the next aisle were books of matches that wouldn’t light, rolling papers saturated with invisible chemicals guaranteed to gag the smoker, exploding loads for cigarettes and cigars, and boxes of birthday candles that appeared normal but could not be blown out. The last struck me as cruel. If you couldn’t blow out your birthday candles, your wish wouldn’t come true; not that it did anyway, which was a different sort of cruelty. But if the candles couldn’t be blown out, was the birthday eternal, the wish kept alive without a future to grant it, deny it, betray it? The candles didn’t make me laugh, but since they provoked me with possibilities I decided to buy a box.

The next aisle was devoted to humor of a chemical nature. A handsomely packaged soap that promised to turn the user’s skin a gangrenous green a half hour after application. Something called Uro-Stim, invisible when dissolved in liquid and guaranteed to create in any drinker the frantic need to piss. I immediately thought of a couple of long-winded North Beach poets who could use a few hits in their pre-reading wine. There was also Rainbow P, a little packet of six colorless capsules that would turn your urine a choice of colors. I thought Uro-Stim and Rainbow P might make a devastating combination – send the victim hopping pigeon-toed and grimacing to the pisser only to deliver a stream of bright maroon urine … looking down, stunned, and thinking, It can’t be me! Jesus, who was I fucking last night? I started laughing, clearly getting in the mood.

I skipped a section of playing cards – some shaved or marked for tricks, others obviously for viewing (‘52 Different Beauties – No Pose the Same’) – and browsed a miscellaneous aisle of Chinese handcuffs, balloons called Lung Busters because you couldn’t blow them up with anything lighter than an air compressor, and a cheap-looking fry pan ostensibly coated with a revolutionary stick-proof compound, although the accompanying literature guaranteed this miracle coating would melt into industrial-strength epoxy within two minutes of heating, locking your eggs to the pan.

What sort of mind thinks of such things? I wondered as I shuffled on past the mustache wax that caramelized fifteen minutes after you put it on, a dusty box of Chocolate Creme Surprises (the surprise was either a licorice-tapioca filling or a hidden capsule of raw jalapeno extract), a display of rubber kitchen utensils, and, all alone at the end of a bare shelf, a big magenta tube with a screw top that looked like a tinker-toy package except for the gold lettering that identified it as ‘S.D. Rollo’s Divinity Confections, The Finest Sweets This Side of Heaven.’ No telling what those were. I unscrewed the lid to take a peek and great fucking Jesus! a giant spring-coiled snake shot halfway across the store, its flannel skin a blinding yellow with glaring polka-dots of baby blue and a flamingo pink only slightly more muted than my hat, its black button eyes glossy as sin and its tongue of red stiffened velvet ready to lie for pleasure. The shock of the vaulting snake made me drop the box of Uro-Stim, then step on it as I moved to retrieve the snake from over by the whoopee cushions. Blushing brighter than the serpent’s scarlet tongue and trying to babble an apology to the sour-puss clerk, who hadn’t even looked up from what she was doing, I was stumbling in total disarray when a familiar voice called, ‘Hey, George,’ and I wheeled around to see my ghost pointing to a stack of small white boxes. ‘Get me a couple of these, would you?’

‘What are they,’ I asked, but then he was gone.

‘I beg your pardon?’ called the woman behind the counter.

In my attempt to turn around, I tripped on the damn snake and fell against the shelf of whoopee cushions, instinctively grabbing one to break my fall. Which it did, to the long accompaniment of what we young boys in Jacksonville used to call a ‘tight-ass screamer,’ only this one ended more like a siren sinking in bubbling mud.

‘My goodness! Are you all right?’ She was peering down at me, sounding even wearier than before.

‘Fine, no problem,’ I mumbled, flailing my way up off the floor with the whoopee cushion under one arm and a hand around the snake’s throat.

‘I tell Elmer he should put a warning on that darn snake, but he thinks there’s already too many jokes that are explained. He thinks people can’t develop a sense of humor unless they experience the joke themselves. Here, let me help you get that snake back in the can.’

‘No, that’s okay; I got him.’ I was enjoying jamming him back in his container. ‘And don’t worry about that package I stepped on; I was going to buy it anyway.’ I screwed the lid down on S.D. Rollo’s Heavenly Confections with mad delight. ‘How much is this obnoxious snake anyway?’

‘Nineteen ninety-five,’ she said, sounding dismayed.

‘That’s a lot.’ I’d figured it’d be around two bucks.

‘The company that made it, Fallaho Novelties, went out of business a couple of years ago. They don’t make them with flannel bodies anymore – make them overseas cheaper with plastic now, but the plastic don’t hold up. Three or four leaps and the plastic cracks. And the spring’s some new alloy, not steel. Elmer wanted to keep it as a collector’s item, but he already had eight or nine of them so I insisted it go on the shelf. Elmer just marked the price way up there where he said somebody would have to be crazy to buy it.’

‘You and Elmer are partners in the store, is that it?’ Suddenly I was interested in old Elmer.

‘I’m his wife.’

‘Ma’am, if you tell me Elmer has cancer or has mysteriously disappeared, I’m going to jump through your front window and sprint for the Pacific Ocean.’

Her lips parted in surprise. ‘Why would you do that?’

‘Because I’m crazy enough to buy this damn snake,’ I said, smacking the can down on the counter, ‘plus the whoopee cushion here, and the Uro-Stim and some Rainbow P, and these birthday candles you can’t blow out, and a couple of boxes of that stuff over there, whatever it is – my ghost wants some. What is it anyway?’

‘Rabi-Tabs. They’re little tablets you put under your tongue that work up into a froth. Supposed to make you look like you’re foaming at the mouth. Like you have rabies.’

‘I’ll take two.’ I went over and plucked them off the shelf. ‘Anything else you want, Ghost?’ I said loudly. He didn’t reply. I picked up the squashed box of Uro-Stim on my way back to the counter.

‘Is that who you’re talking to? A ghost?’ Dismay and weariness joined forces in her voice.

‘Yup. I think so.’

‘Elmer’d like you.’

‘Ma’am,’ I asked gently, knowing better, ‘where is Elmer? What’s he up to?’

‘He’s in the hospital. In Omaha.’ She said it as if surprised I didn’t know.

I felt guilty for having forced the painful information. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. I hope it’s nothing serious.’

She looked up at me and said in a flat voice, ‘I thought everyone knew. It was ten months ago, last Christmas Eve. He went to midnight mass and slipped this new dental dye in the communion wine. Turned everybody’s teeth bright purple. People were furious. It was Christmas. They knew who did it, of course, and they turned on him. He went running from the church – laughing like crazy, they said – and his feet went out from under him on the icy steps and he cracked his head. He’s been in a coma ever since, in the VA down there. The doctors say they don’t know what’s keeping him alive.

‘I go over there every weekend. He doesn’t recognize me, though. He has this huge, happy smile on his face. It never changes, or not that any of us has ever seen. I tried once to pull the corners of his mouth down – so he’d look more dignified, you know? – but they went right back up. But he never opens his eyes, never looks at me, never says a word. I don’t know if he’s happy or paralyzed or near dead. I’m selling off all the stuff in the store. I guess I’m just waiting for him to die, and I don’t even know why I’m waiting for that.’

‘I think he’s happy,’ I said. ‘And I think this weekend he’s going to open his eyes and look in yours and say, “Honey, let’s run away to Brazil and start all over.” But if he doesn’t, if he dies, I hope you can find it within yourself to sit on his headstone and laugh, really laugh, from way down in your guts, for him and for you.’

‘It’s not funny,’ she said.

‘Some of it surely is. Why lose that, too?’

‘Because you just do,’ she said sourly, and started ringing up my purchases.

‘You should smother your husband,’ my ghost said, appearing briefly over her shoulder before he faded.

‘Did you hear that?’ I asked her, though she’d given no indication she had.

‘No,’ she glanced up, ‘what?’

‘My ghost said, “Mother him.”’

‘You’re just like Elmer. He loved Halloween.’

‘My ghost’s like Elmer. I’m really like you. Except I’m not waiting. You know why? Because time flies like an arrow.’

‘I know, I know,’ she waved a hand, ‘and fruit flies like rotten fruit.’ She handed me my bag of purchases. ‘You and your ghost have a nice Halloween.’ I wish she could’ve smiled when she said it.

I went straight back to the tire shop. The Caddy was ready and waiting, chrome flashing with sunlight. I put the bag of tricks on the passenger-side floor, except for the whoopee cushion, which I carefully placed on the passenger seat. If my ghost showed up again, still along for the ride, I wanted to find out if he’d set it off. This might well have been the first fart trap ever designed to detect the physical presence of a ghost. Never too crazy for empirical experiments in reality.

I paid for the tire and tune-up, then wheeled the car around the block a few times to make sure it was running tight. Couldn’t have been better. I headed back out for I-80, stopping along the way for dinosaur power at a Sinclair, and then at the Allied Superette for a couple of six-packs of Bud to restock the cooler. By the dash clock it was 9:20. I took a little sip from the crank mix to keep me on track, and a few minutes later I was ripping down the Interstate, California-bound.

Using my benny-quickened brain, I calculated that the Caddy would be introduced to the Pacific in about twenty hours, some twelve hundred minutes. I had roughly two hundred records in the back seat, two sides each, say three minutes a side, six per disc – well how about that? Talk about your celestial clickety-click, that was about twelve hundred minutes of music if I listened to it all, and that was exactly my intention. I could feel myself starting to hit the nerve snap-point of too much speed and not enough sleep, and music soothes the beast. I set aside everything by the Bopper, Buddy Holly, and Ritchie Valens; it seemed only fitting to save them for the last wild-heart run at the sea.

Between watching the road and shuffling records it took me about ten minutes to get set up. The spindle on Joshua’s turntable would take a stack of ten, which meant all I had to do was flip them every half-hour and change the stack on the hour. The first tune, Elvis’ ‘Now Or Never,’ sounded about right to me. I leaned back and cruised as I listened to him croon.

From Grand Island through North Platte and on to the state line, Nebraska – if you can believe it – gets flatter. You don’t really have to drive; just put it in boogie and hold it between the lines. It’s boring, and I suppose it was boredom that inspired the idea of sailing the records out the window once the whole stack had played. By the time this occurred to me I already had a stockpile of twenty records, so by restricting myself to one toss for every two cuts, I had some physical activity every six minutes. The interim was well occupied with drinking beer, listening to the music blast at cone-wrenching volume, choosing suitable targets, and, best of all, matching titles to their fates. For Brenda Lee’s ‘I’m Sorry,’ for instance, I just plopped into the slow lane to get run over. The Everly Brothers’ ‘Bird Dog’ I sailed out into a cornfield to hunt pheasants. ‘Teen Angel’ I saved till the highway cut in to parallel some railroad tracks, but I undershot it badly into a weedy ditch. Since I had some slack, I saved a few titles for more appropriate places – ‘Mr Custer’ definitely belonged to Wyoming, while the Drifters’ ‘Save the Last Dance for Me’ was obviously meant for a late-night fling.

Those whose titles didn’t suggest targets became general ammunition in my war on control, and were gleefully winged at billboards and road signs, and especially at speed limit signs. To sail a record out of a car moving 95 mph and hit anything except the ground is a real trick, and about 98 percent of the time I probably missed. But I tell you, it’s a magnificent feeling when you connect. Damn near blew my shoes off with joy when I sent ‘The Duke of Earl’ tearing through a Bank of America billboard. And as to the musical question ‘Who Put the Bomp in the Bomp-Da-Bomp?’ I’m not sure, but I know the record itself put one hell of a bomp on a 65 mph sign – folded the fucker almost in half, much to my delight. I celebrated this rare bull’s-eye with a toot on the horn and a solid squeeze of the whoopee cushion, happy as a seven-year-old with a slingshot in a glass factory. Shit, even the misses were fun – sailing gracefully out over the fields to drop like miniature spacecraft from Pluto.

I was having so much fun my ghost couldn’t resist. I’d just barely missed a Burger Hut billboard with ‘Theme from a Summer Place’ when he appeared in the passenger seat.

‘Ah ha!’ I pounced, ‘you’re not real: the whoopee cushion didn’t go off.’

He ignored me in his excitement. ‘Salvoes,’ he urged, ‘fusillades, machine guns, cluster bombs. Shotgun the fuckers! To hell with this johnny-one-note stuff.’ And he was gone.

I was reluctant but had a few spares, so I picked up five together, waited for a large green road sign announcing ‘CHEYENNE 37,’ came within a hundred yards and, allowing for some lead, snapped them backhanded out the passenger window. But something wasn’t right – the weight, the throw, the aerodynamics – because one nosed down and the other four fluttered and died way short of the target. I wrote it off as bad advice and told my ghost to forget it. I didn’t hear any argument.

If throwing music away like that seems sacrilegious … well, maybe it was. But I’d already decided to send the records and sound system down with the ship; they belonged with the Caddy as part of the gift, but rather than do it all at once I was delivering pieces along the way. The Bopper’s records, Buddy’s, Ritchie’s – I still intended to send them over the edge with the blazing Caddy, maybe even stacked on the spindle as a crowning touch. The rest I felt free to fling like seeds across the landscape, scatter like ashes. If they happened to collide with bill-boards, road signs, and other emblems of oppressive enterprise and gratuitous control, all the better – that seemed altogether congruent with the spirit of the music, doubly fitting considering it was also a lot of fun.

I gassed at a Sinclair station in Cheyenne, tipping my flamingo hat to the dinosaur, then hauled on for Laramie. I was starting up the east slope of the Rockies, where driving required a bit more attention, but there were still plenty of opportunities to cast the music far and wide.

‘What’s that, Mr Charles? “Hit the road, Jack”? No sweat.’ I reached out the window and fired it straight down; hard to miss when you’re right on top of it. No need to tell me not to come back no more, no more, no more, no more.

When Frankie Avalon asked the musical question ‘Why?’ I told him it was just to see how far he could sail into the sagebrush, that’s why. And I flung him out there as far as I could.

‘And Tom Dooley,’ I said aloud to myself and my ghost if he was listening, ‘sweet Jesus, man, you’ve been hanging your head since the Civil War, poor boy. Let me cut you some slack.’ And with a sharp backhanded toss I set him free.

Just out of Rawlins, about to crest the Continental Divide, I tired of the game and decided to use the thin air to go for distance – but was going so fast I couldn’t keep the longer shots in sight. When I hit the crest I pulled over, scooped up my pile of reserves and, after pissing beer into both watersheds, alternately sailed records east and west, watching them hang majestically and curve away, a few disappearing before I could see where they hit, and I’d bet some of them carried for miles.

I returned to the Caddy refreshed, though my break from rapid motion made me realize I was probably a bit overamped on speed; I made a mental note to lay off for a while or I’d be chewing on the steering wheel by midnight. Generally, however, I felt wonderful. I was on the Pacific side of the country, halfway to the edge with a downhill run, looking good and having fun.

It didn’t last long. ‘Hound Dog’ had just finished playing, and either the bennies had sped up my hearing or Elvis was singing slower – something was out of time. The next platter down was the Kingsmen’s ‘Louie, Louie.’ If you want to hear music for the end of the world try a 45 of ‘Louie, Louie’ played at 33 and progressively fading to about 13:

Looouuuuiiiieeeeee, Looouuuiiiieeeeeeeeeee,

Ooooooohhhhhhh yeeeaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Goooooooooooooootttttttaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Goooooooooooooooooooooo

Nnnnnnooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

The battery was dying in Joshua’s magic box. ‘Aaawwwwwwww fuuuuuuuccccccckkkkk,’ I said, trying to maintain my sense of humor as I reached back and snapped it off.

‘Music!’ my ghost demanded, suddenly beside me in the passenger’s seat. ‘Sounds! Give me the beat!’

‘If you don’t like it, leave,’ I told him, slowing to pull over.

He whined like a five-year-old. ‘But it’s boring without music.’ He disappeared.

‘Just take it easy.’ I wondered if he could still hear me. ‘Your man’s on the job.’

I stopped and got out. I could’ve switched batteries, but Joshua’s sounded so low I probably would’ve had to roll start the car, and I hate running on low power. To dig out Donna’s machine and plug it into the lighter socket seemed smarter; this would do till I got to Rock Springs, where I could buy new juice for Joshua’s system. In theory this sounded good, but when I lifted Donna’s record player from the trunk I noticed the tone arm was jammed down on the turntable, and the needle was broken. Somewhere along the line – probably in Gladys Nogardam’s driveway – the cooler must’ve slid into it. Or maybe I’d thrown the shot-up tire on it. Didn’t make any fucking difference how at that point – it was useless. I considered trying a needle swap but figured by the time I discovered they weren’t interchangeable I could be leaving Rock Springs with a new battery. Till then we’d just have to do without music.

Two silent minutes down the freeway, my ghost reappeared beside me, commenting in that nasal snottiness five-year-olds find so withering, ‘Well, my man; where’s the music?’

I ignored him. No reason to pamper hallucinations.

‘I need the beat!’ he demanded. ‘The sound of fucking music!’

‘I’ll sing for you,’ I offered sarcastically.

‘Why don’t you just turn on the radio there?’ He pointed. ‘They’re amazing inventions. Magic. You click on the switch and sometimes music jumps right out.’ He disappeared.

It was embarrassing. Like I said, I don’t normally have a radio in a working vehicle. Music is fine, but all the deejay chit-chat and commercials poison your attention. But the fact was I hadn’t even thought of the radio.

I was glad my ghost had, though. We picked up krom out of Boulder, almost solid music and a lot of it what I’d been listening to a couple months earlier holed up in my apartment trying to stay sane. After a steady diet of Donna’s collection, it was a nice leap forward to hear what was blooming from those roots. My ghost must’ve enjoyed it, too; not a peep out of him for fifty miles.

When he reappeared again it wasn’t to complain about the music, but to offer an observation. ‘Jeez, George, maybe I’m the paranoid one, but at the speed we’re traveling it seems hard to believe that black car behind us is catching up – well, not actually catching up, but sort of settled in, if you know what I mean.’

Two big mothers in an Olds 88. I use the mirrors on reflex and was sure I’d checked in the last half-minute, so unless I’d missed them or was slipping badly they hadn’t been there long. Considering their adverse impact on my pulse rate, I saw no reason for them to be there any longer than necessary. I was doing a smooth 90 at the time, coming off a long downhill stretch, and I had lots of pedal left. I was just stomping on it when I saw another car coming fast down the hill and, unless the dusk light was playing tricks, this one had a bubblegum machine bolted to its roof and generally conveyed the feeling of a state trooper. So rather than punch it, I let the accelerator spring push my foot back up to a more sensible 65 mph.

By coming off the gas suddenly like that, the Olds, if it wanted to stay on my tail, would’ve had to hit its brakes, thus making its intentions obvious, or at least provide some rational basis for the paranoia playing my heart like a kettle drum. If the Olds passed – the exact move I was hoping to force – I’d at least get a good look at them, and with any luck the trooper would nail their ass. I’d get two birds with one stone. Just call me Slick. Unfortunately the Olds must’ve spotted the trooper too, and didn’t gain an inch.

The Caddy, Olds, and trooper’s Dodge settled into a stately procession, an extremely nervous one from my vantage, marked by a great deal of wishing, hoping, and nonchalant concealment of visible felonies, and not untainted by a certain mean irony as Bob Dylan asked through the magic of KROM radio,

How does it feeeeelll

To be on your ooooownnn

‘Tell you the truth, Bob, not too fucking good right now, sort of caught between goons and the heat out here on the alkali Wyoming sage flats with a bad case of dread and my ghost hiding under the front seat, but I guess that’s what makes existence the wonderful adventure it is.’

We kept moving in strict formation, me in front, my worries right behind at hundred-yard intervals. Dylan finished his biting lament and the KROM deejay was announcing a license plate number for some promotional contest – if it was yours and you called within ten minutes you won two tickets to hear Moon Cap and the Car Thieves at the first annual KROM Goblin Rock-and-Roll Horror Romp at Vet’s Hall. I’d rather have been there than where I was and, worse yet, with a decision to make: should I take the upcoming Rock Springs turn-off or not? Not, I decided; I didn’t know the turf, a severe disadvantage if I had to run for it.

The black Olds, however, did take the exit, making me wonder for a minute whether they were simply a couple of big guys out for a drive. That left just me and the trooper, me wildly radiating innocence and the trooper, I hoped to Christ, receiving. Unfortunately, a discreet glance in the rearview revealed he actually seemed to be sending, since he was holding the radio mike to his mouth. Maybe a little spot-check on a five-niner Cadillac Eldorado, California license plate number B as in busted, O as in Oh-shit, and P as in prison, 3 as in the square root of nine, 3 as in trinity, 3 like the wise men. Such moments have led me to the firm conviction that driving our nation’s highways would be a hell of a lot more fun without license plates.

I held my speed at an even 65 for the next few minutes, then held my breath as I saw him coming up quickly behind. But he went on around, giving me a long look as he passed.

He saw a smile. Far better for a paranoid to have them in front instead of behind. Unless they’re playing games, as he apparently was, because in less than a mile he began to slow down. Now what? I silently shrieked, but ahhh, blink-blink, he was taking the Green River exit.

I continued driving as if he was right behind me, but after a few more miles and no sign of him, I romped on it. On the radio, the Rolling Stones were laying claim to their cloud, a position I shared, though by then it was dark enough that no clouds were visible.

No more than three minutes later, just as I made a mental note to gas at the next available station and pick up a battery, another trooper passed me in the eastbound lane, his brake lights casting an apocalyptic glow in my rearview mirror as he slowed to cross the divider strip. I momentarily lost sight of him as the road, approaching the Green River bridge, swung abruptly.

I snapped off my lights and started looking for somewhere else to go – there’s almost always a frontage road along rivers, and I hoped I could make one out in the fast-fading light. And there it was, just on the other side of the bridge; no need to signal or slow down much. Then I started looking for cover, a campground or spur road or anything. I came off the gas, though, going too fast to see, and to slow down seemed smarter than turning on the headlights. I finally spotted an abrupt right that dropped down to the floodplain; it looked like gravel trucks had used this through the summer. Banging bottom and rattling my teeth, I took it at full speed. I whipped the Caddy around so I was facing back up the road, backed in close to some willows, then shut the engine down and started gathering the beer cans and other incriminating evidence. I needed something to carry the empties so I dumped my joke house purchases on the front seat and used the bag. The first thing I heard when I opened the door was the river. It sounded green. I wondered if that was the reason for its name, but doubted anything so seductive. Probably it was named for the color of its water, though all I could make out in the heavy dusk was a broad shimmer of light.

I hid the beer cans and benzedrine behind a clump of willows, then strolled down to the river, keeping a sharp eye out for traffic on the road to my right. Far downstream I could see the headlights of cars crossing the I-80 bridge.

At the river’s edge, it was cold. As I stood there watching the light fade, three dark shapes winged over, one crying, ‘Argk! Argk! Argk!’

Ravens. ‘Argggk,’ I called back weakly, but they disappeared downstream.

My ghost appeared in front of me, standing on a rock about ten feet out in the river. ‘You’re crazy,’ he announced. ‘Barking at the sky.’

‘They were ravens.’ I defended myself. ‘Looking for the ark. Noah’s Ark, remember? All the animals two by two. You know, I’ve always wondered how it was that ravens were able to reproduce if Noah sent one off that never came back. That only left one, right? So how––’

‘Please.’ My ghost stopped me. ‘Let’s listen to the babble of running water; it’s so much more soothing than the ravings of your poor mind.’

‘Hey, you’re my ghost – you’ve got to be crazy, too.’

‘I don’t have to be anything,’ he said, vanishing.

I bent over and scooped up some water and splashed it over my face, trembling as it ran down my neck. It was cold. When I opened my eyes, blinking water from the lashes, I thought I saw a flicker of light upstream. I wiped my eyes and looked again. Still there. I couldn’t tell if the light itself was flickering or if something was crossing in front of it. I walked upstream till I could see more clearly. As nearly as I could tell, it was behind a screen of willows. A campfire, I decided. Maybe Smokey was having a wiener roast for his forest friends. I splashed another sobering shot of water on my face to sharpen my focus. Yup, I was sure I saw Bambi’s shadow, and then Thumper’s. But whose shadow was that, the tall naked woman unfurling her wings? I headed back to the car.

‘Where are you going now?’ my ghost demanded. I couldn’t see him but his voice was clear. ‘Don’t you think it might be wise to wait a few minutes before resuming this fool’s errand? I like it here by the river.’

‘I’m going swimming,’ I told him.

‘The river’s this way.’

‘I’m going to the car first. For a present.’

‘George,’ my ghost said with strained patience, ‘hasn’t it ever struck you that you’re one of those warriors who, every time he girds up his loins for another reckless leap into the unknown, gets his little pee-pee caught in the buckle?’

‘There’s always a first time,’ I said without breaking stride.

‘And a last,’ he reminded me.

On the way back from the car with the can of S.D. Rollo’s Divinity Confections in my hand, I cautioned myself over and over Don’t expect it to be Kacy; don’t even think of it. A far-fetched notion, I realized even at the time. I picked the slowest water I could find, a long bellying pool downstream from the flickering firelight. I caught a faint scent of wood-smoke.

I stripped to my shorts and, holding the Divinity Confections aloft, waded in to mid-thigh, then launched myself gently into the current. The water was so cold that all bodily sensations gasped to a numb stop, and if I hadn’t been so full of crank I doubt they’d ever have started again. After two stunned minutes of mechanical exertion I was across, crawling out on the opposite shore like some blue-fleshed proof of unnatural selection.

I flopped around on the sandy beach to reheat my body, then, still shivering badly, picked up the can of Divinity Confections and lurched upstream toward the fire. While the road-side of the river had a wide floodplain, the other side rose into steep, rockface bluffs with only a narrow, willow-choked flat between river and rock. I crashed my way through the willows, muttering and grunting to myself until I realized I probably sounded like a rabid bear. I felt the crosshairs centering on my heart. No need to frighten anybody into such unthinking defensive behavior as shooting me, so I stopped and hollered, ‘Hello there! Company coming with gifts and good cheer!’

‘Please, go away,’ a young woman’s voice answered close by, genuine appeal in her tone.

‘Nothing to fear,’ I called back, moving forward a few steps and stumbling into a small clearing. The fire was built against the base of the bluff, set back under a ledge that high water had cut through the centuries. The woman was standing in front of the fire shaking her head vehemently. She wasn’t tall, she didn’t have wings, and, of course, she wasn’t Kacy. She was a couple of inches over five feet, and what I’d taken for wings from across the river was a poncho made of an olive-drab Army blanket.

‘Please listen a minute before you send me away,’ I asked. ‘I’m probably stone crazy and a fool to boot, but my intentions are wholesome and altogether honorable. I was attracted by the light, and I just swam that icicle of a river because I wanted to bring you a present – whoever you are.’ I held up the can of Divinity Confections as if it were irrefutable truth.

‘That’s nice of you,’ she said evenly, lowering her head, ‘but I don’t want company. I’m not in the mood to entertain.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I assured her – as if there was assurance to be found in a wild-eyed, sand-blotched fool wearing nothing but his soaked jockey shorts and waving what looked like a large tinker-toy can. ‘I’ll entertain you. Please? I just want to talk to another human being.’

‘All right,’ she said reluctantly.

Her name was Mira Whitman, twenty years old, and she listened to my tale of low adventure and high stupidity as she sat on a log in front of the fire, her shoulders hunched and head down, staring at her fingers entwined on her lap. She had a small, squarish head, brown hair cut short, with a thin, sharp nose at odds with her broad cheekbones. Her face was deeply tanned.

When I finished my narration, bringing her right up to date on my mission and the imminent delivery at the continental edge, she said, still staring at her hands, ‘I guess you are kind of crazy. But, you know, at least it’s a real craziness; at least it has a point. And I hope you make it, if that’s what you want to do. Wreck that car, I mean.’

‘That’s what I want to do. But I didn’t tell you I’m starting to see my ghost lately. He just shows up. He looks just like me only he’s not flesh and blood. I talk to him. Do you think that’s cause for alarm, or does it matter?’

‘I have no idea. You’re talking to the wrong person. I mean, I don’t really even understand what you’ve been telling me. Don’t you see that? I have no understanding. It’s all I can do right now to wake up in the morning and see the river. Or a leaf. Or an ant.’

‘Why’s that,’ I asked gently, quickly adding, ‘But don’t tell me if it has anything to do with a man – one who loves you or doesn’t, beats you, adores you, who’s died or’s dying. I don’t want to know. Seems like every woman I’ve talked to in the last year has man troubles.’

She glanced at me, then looked down at her hands. ‘I thought you were doing it for love and music?’ But fortunately, before I had to defend the untenable, she went on, ‘But no, it’s not a man. That just hurts. Or infuriates. No, it’s me. Or not me.’ She bit her lip and glanced up again. ‘I got lost.’ This time she didn’t look back down. ‘Does that make any sense?’

I sighed. ‘Sounds painfully familiar.’

‘No.’ She was adamant. ‘With you it’s meaning. Making it mean something.’

‘And with you?’

She looked past me into the fire, then back to my face. ‘You’re nice, George. And I like what you’re trying to do. But it’s pointless for me to talk about it. For you the words help carry it, give you something to hold on to, but for me they tear it out of my hands, or turn it mushy.’ She started to add something, then changed her mind, her gaze moving back to the fire. ‘I’ve enjoyed talking to you, George, but the best thing you could do is leave.’

‘No,’ I told her, ‘I won’t.’ That surprised her. Me, too. ‘I want to know what happened and what you’re going to do about it, or what you’re trying to do. You sit here and tell me you’re lost and imply you have no sense of being real, and I see the real light from this real fire dancing in your real pretty brown eyes, and I know you’re wrong, me who doesn’t know very much at all. Maybe what you lost is a feeling, maybe a feeling I’ve lost, too; or that we’re both trying to create, or fake, or somehow just patch enough together to make it through another day.’

‘You’re so hungry,’ she said, looking straight at me.

I looked straight back. ‘Maybe you’re not hungry enough?’

‘I’m not like you,’ she pleaded, ‘can’t you see that? You with your lost lover and stolen car and wild adventures all over the country. For you – oh, Jesus, this doesn’t make any sense – for you it’s like you can’t blow up a balloon big enough to hold it all, can’t find a balloon large enough … and me, it’s like a little balloon I was blowing up every day, and every day the air leaked out until I was emptying faster than I could fill it. Ever since I was twelve, right around junior high, I’ve just dwindled. I’ll spare you adolescence in a small town in Colorado. I wasn’t pretty. I wasn’t popular. I wasn’t particularly smart. I didn’t have any friends that were the way I thought friends should be, men or women. But it was manageable. As soon as I graduated from high school I left and moved to Boulder. The Big City! I had a tiny apartment and I cleaned motel rooms in the morning and worked at Burger Hut in the evening. I liked being on my own, doing what I felt like when I didn’t have to work, but I was still shrinking. I could feel it every morning, like I was running away from myself over the hills. Then I got a break: this woman who came into Burger Hut all the time mentioned a job was opening at a radio station down the block, KROM, not as a deejay or anything, just a receptionist, record librarian, general assistant … and I got it. The pay was two dollars an hour, but I loved the job. The people were nutty and it was always chaos and it was fun being involved with the music. Music touches people, you know that, and I was part of it, and it had been a long time since I felt like a part of anything.

‘Then about three months ago they started this big bumper-sticker promotion. You know: you put a KROM bumper-sticker on your car, and if your license number’s announced and you call in, you win some kind of prize – albums, merchandise, tickets to a dance or concert or movie. The license plates are picked by what they called “The Mystery Spotter.” That was me, The Mystery Spotter. It sounds pretty important but all it meant was that when I was driving to work, or at lunch, or whatever, I’d pick four or five cars with KROM bumper-stickers and write down the license numbers and then turn them over to the manager. I was fair, too. I tried to be random, and it didn’t matter if it was a new car or old one or who was driving.

‘But what happened was none of the numbers I’d collected ever called in. The whole idea of the promotion is to make people listen to the station to hear their number called – plus the advertising from the bumper-stickers themselves. So after three days of no winners, nobody calling in, it got horribly embarrassing because it was like nobody was listening. The deejays started joking on the air that maybe The Mystery Spotter needed glasses. Then the station manager said, “Hey, bring in ten numbers; we’ll go till we get a winner.” And still nobody called. So the manager wanted twenty numbers. He told Evans, the night security guy, to bring in ten and me ten. None of my ten called. Eight of Evans’s did.

‘You understand what I’m getting at? It’s like I wasn’t connected. So I started cheating. I’d tell people I was The Mystery Spotter and that if they listened at eight o’clock or whenever, their number would be called and they’d win something. And they’d go, “Oh great! Hey, all right!” But they never called. And these were people who put those dumb stickers on their cars. It’s like I wasn’t real to them. Evans’s numbers? At least seventy percent of the time.

‘It seems dumb, but it really got to me. The Mystery Spotter who couldn’t spot anything. I could stand there telling someone I was the KROM Mystery Spotter and feel my voice go right through them without touching, and they’d smile back right through me, and I’d go back to my apartment and open the door and walk in and wonder who lived there. Go look in her closet and touch her clothes and my hand would pass through them like air.

‘You can’t live like that, without any substance. I had this dream where I cut my wrists. Took a razor blade and sliced in deep, waiting for the blood to spurt. But there was no blood. I cut deeper and deeper till my hand flopped back and I could look right down into my wrist and there was nothing there – no muscles, no arteries, no blood. I think I would’ve actually tried to kill myself if I wasn’t so terrified nobody was there to die.

‘The only thing I could think to do was to get away. I took my sleeping bag, some blankets, borrowed a fishing pole, stole a knife, and eventually ended up here. I like it, but it’s getting cold and I don’t think I’ll stay when the snows come. But maybe I’ll try. I’m doing better now, trying to make myself real again. At first I was like a little baby – not learning the names, that was just confusing – but touching the water, trying to feel the light on my skin, the texture and color of this stone, that stone, the leaves and the trees, with nothing in the way. Going back to nothing and starting over. And I’m doing all right. It’s slow. I’m not ready for people yet is all.’

‘Mira,’ I said, resisting the impulse to take her in my arms, ‘I want you to spot me.’

She tilted her head. ‘What?’

‘You’re a Mystery Spotter and I desperately need to be spotted. So please spot me. We need each other.’

She shook her head. ‘Maybe you’re too crazy.’

‘And you’re not? You’re crawling around touching things you’re afraid to name, licking rocks, going to extraordinary lengths to comprehend the most obvious things, and you call me nuts? Hey, the crazy have to help each other; nobody else knows how. My license number is BOP three-three-three. Call it in. I’ll be listening for it.’

She shrugged her shoulders under the poncho. ‘I can’t. There’s no phone. I don’t even work there anymore.’

‘You’re so literal, Mira; that’s part of your problem, I think. And maybe mine. Probably the opposite is true. But I don’t know.’ I picked up a small chunk of firewood and handed it to her. ‘Here’s a phone. Or use that rock over there. Use one of those hands you keep staring at – they’ll work. Or you can do it in your mind without props, even without words, certainly without reason.’

‘It’d just make it worse.’

There was an abject finality in her tone that freshened my determination, but I took a different tack. ‘Do you ever see ravens around here?’

‘Sure.’ She looked puzzled.

‘That guy I told you about that played the train recording? Joshua Springfield? Well, when Josh was a kid he heard a raven flying over calling “Ark, Ark” and he was sure it was the raven Noah’d sent out in the flood to look for land, the one that never came back, and Joshua figured it was still looking for the Ark. So you know what Joshua did? He went out in his backyard and built an ark so the raven would have a place to land. Joshua refused to leave his ark, to give up his vigil. Finally his parents had him committed. Does that make it worse?’

‘I’m not Joshua,’ she said, some fire in her voice.

‘No, you’re not Joshua. I’m not Joshua. Even Joshua knows he’s not Joshua. We’re ravens. That’s why we build arks.’

‘I guess I’m too dumb to understand. It’s just words to me, George.’

My ghost appeared beside her, looking down consolingly. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told her, ‘he doesn’t understand either.’

‘Did you hear that?’ I said sharply.

‘No.’ Mira was startled. ‘What?’

‘My ghost. He’s right beside you. He said I didn’t understand it either, so not to worry about it.’

‘George,’ my ghost said with irritated disgust, ‘leave this woman alone. She seems to know what her problem is, and what to do about it, which is more than can be said for you, and she undoubtedly has better things to do than listen to your bullshit. She wisely asked you to leave a couple of times already, so why don’t you lay off? If you need some miraculous conversion to bolster yourself, preach your madness at me.’

I repeated his speech verbatim, and Mira simply nodded – in terror or agreement, I wasn’t sure which. My ghost had disappeared, looking sorely annoyed, as I repeated his words. I waited a moment for Mira to comment. When she didn’t I went on. ‘There seems to be a general agreement that this fool should leave, so that’s what I’m going to do. I should get on with the night’s work anyway. I’ve enjoyed talking to you, Mira, and I’m inspired by your faith. Excuse my preaching when I should’ve been listening – it’s one of my larger faults. And please’ – I smiled warmly – ‘do accept this small gift I braved the river to bring you, a gift I hope will be the first of two I’ll deliver tonight.’ I picked up the Divinity Confections from where I’d set it down behind the rock and presented it to her with a small bow. ‘It’s candy, for a sweetheart.’

She smiled as she accepted it with both hands. ‘Thank you.’

Her smile almost made me cry. ‘You have a lovely smile, Mira. Under different circumstances it would be easy for me to hang around and fall in love.’ I pointed at the can. ‘I hope you like sweets. They make an excellent dessert for twig soup, tossed moss salad, and grubs in willow sauce.’

I was embarrassing her, and she looked at the can for something to do. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘this looks like one of those things you buy in joke shops, where something leaps out.’

‘A practical joke is one that makes you laugh,’ I quoted. ‘And no doubt there’s both sweetness and nutrition in humor, but it would be in the poorest of taste considering the situation, don’t you think?’

Before she could answer I took my leave, thanking her for her warm hospitality on a cold night.

‘Good luck, George,’ she said. ‘I mean it.’

‘Ah, you’re not real enough to mean it.’

She smiled again. ‘Maybe so, but you deserve the effort.’

‘Then put some effort into spotting me.’ I waved and walked into the dark thicket of willows. I loved her smile but wanted to hear her laugh.

I was about forty feet from her camp when I heard the springing whooosh of the snake uncoiling, and then her quick, piercing shriek. There was a faint, flat whump! followed instantly by a flare of light so intense I could make out veins in the willow leaves: the snake had evidently landed in the fire. As the burst of light faded, her laughter began – warm, full-throated, belly-rich laughter that rang against the stone bluffs and swelled down the river canyon.

I turned around and yelled through cupped hands: ‘That’s right, you idiot: laugh!’

‘You’re fucking hopeless, George,’ my ghost said at my shoulder.

‘Oh yeah? I feel like I’m brimming with hope.’ I stepped out of the willows at the river’s edge. ‘So you don’t think I’m one of the ravens, huh?’ There was no answer. Though it was to dark to tell for sure, I assumed he’d vanished. ‘Well, my ghost, just watch me – I’m going to fly across this river here and not wet a pinkie.’

I walked downstream till the bank widened. I concentrated fiercely, trying to let Mira’s laughter lighten my bones and feather my flesh, and then I ran for the river, flapping for lift, vaulting into the air. I flew seven or eight feet before I belly-flopped into the icy water. I’d flailed halfway across before I managed my first breath. The current was stronger than I remembered, but swimming was easier without the burden of a gift.

When I finally pulled myself up on the opposite shore, hunching out on all fours, panting and shivering like a sick dog, my ghost was waiting for me. ‘That was a spectacular flight,’ he said, ‘maybe a foot, fourteen inches.’

I trembled to my feet, jerkily stripped off my water-logged shorts, and swung them at his face. They passed right through it. Gasping, I said, ‘You haven’t seen anything. Foot’s a good start. Like seeing a leaf. Mira’s inspired me.’ I turned and flung my jockey shorts out in the river, then scrabbled around in the dark till I found my pile of clothes. I put them on gratefully, topping the outfit with my flamingo hat. I imagined it glowing like a beacon. The gods knew where to find me, if they were looking. As I walked back to the car I looked for a raven’s feather to stick in the band. I didn’t find any.

I started the Caddy and cranked up the heat, then gathered my bag from the trunk and five or six records that had already played. I stopped and retrieved the bottle of liquid benzedrine, reshouldered my duffle bag, and took it all down to the river.

I threw the records at the stars, missing by a couple jillion miles. I unzipped the duffle, took out my bankroll, added the two grand still wadded in my pocket, peeled off $500 for expenses, and hurled the rest toward the river. The unwieldy was fluttered apart into rectangular leaves, dropping silently on the water, whirling away. I stuffed several good-sized stones into the duffle bag and zipped it shut. I grabbed a strap, braced myself for an Olympian effort, spun once, twice, thrice, and cut loose. It hit halfway across in a tremendous splash, and sank. I unscrewed the cap on the bottle of crank and sidearmed it across the water like a skipping stone, lifted the bottle in a salute to the night sky, took a couple of farewell glugs, then whipped it out there as far as I could.

I trotted back up to the Eldorado’s heat, absently working my tongue around teeth and gums to cleanse the bitter chalk residue of the benzedrine. I smiled as I imagined some fisherman hooking into a trout full of speed, the pole nearly ripped from his hands, line smoking off the reel as he stumbled downstream howling to his buddy, ‘Holy fuck, Ted!’ just as the backing ran out on his reel and his $200 split-bamboo rod shattered in his hands. And Ted yelling back, ‘Hey, piss on the rod. I’ll buy you a new one. I’m wading in twenty-dollar bills here.’ Even if this wouldn’t happen, the possibility made me happy.

My ghost was sitting in the driver’s seat when I opened the Caddy’s door. ‘I better drive,’ he said.

‘Move your ass over.’

He glared at me; I glared back. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Why should I care if you continue to wildly overestimate your capabilities and underestimate mine. But if it’s going to be like that, let’s fucking do it. No little lost raven-poo going “ark, ark, ark.” Burn the goddamn Ark! Let’s have some spirit, George. Let’s scream through the night like eagles. Let’s do it right.’ And he was gone.

Fuck him and his eagles. I took it extra easy pulling up the embankment back onto the frontage road, not wanting to bottom out. I’d been abusing the Caddy lately, and it was built for cruising, not off-road racing. I approached I–80 with caution, then hung a right. No sign of official forces or black Oldsmobiles. We needed gas pronto, and a new battery for Joshua’s solid-drive master blaster. I snapped on the radio, but KROM was gone – must cut back their signal, I figured. Or maybe this was some topographical anomaly, because I couldn’t seem to find anything at all: just a blur of static from one end of the band to the other. Or perhaps a little electronic interference, I thought to myself, like radar. I went back through the dial and at 1400, crisp and clear, I heard a man talking to me:

‘Awwwriiiight, brothers and sisters! If you’re twisting one up, keep right on it; but if you’re twisting the dial, stop right there,’ cause you got KRZE, one billion megawatts of pure blow hammering your skull from our studio high atop the Wind River Range. Coming up in tonight’s lifetime we got you some tricks and treats, some goblin chuckles and that monster beat, plus tons more good stuff than you’ll be able to believe, so dig it like a grave while I whisper some sweet nothings in your ear. That’s right, relax. This is Captain Midnight at the controls, if there are any; I want you to enjoy your flight.

‘Now did I say treats? You might be worrying where you’re gonna find a bag big enough to bring back all your goodies tonight, one that’s big enough to truck the whole load home. No sweat,’ cause here’s Mr James Brown and I do believe he’s got a bag you can borrow, a brand new one at that.’

‘Hey ghost,’ I yelled as James Brown worked out, ‘how do you like this station?’ But ghost wasn’t talking.

To save on gas, and because I was still jittery about troopers, I kept it at an even 65. ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’ segued into Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett and the Crypt Kickers doing ‘Monster Mash,’ which in turn slid without pause into Frankie Laine’s ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky.’

Then back to Captain Midnight, who was hopping with excitement: ‘Did you dig that message? Cowboys you better change your ways or it looks like eternity for sure busting ass, chasing them fire-eyed longhorns through the clouds. Yiiiiiiippeeee-i-o, that’s hard. And you little cowgirls better be good, too, or they won’t let you ride horsies in Heaven, little britches, and you know that’s hell on a girl. Hey, but enough cheap Christian morality, right? Tonight belongs to the beasties and demons, vamping vampires and the living dead. Yes, it’s All Hallow’s Eve, and something darkly stalks the land and the furthermost recesses of the human brain, which has always loved recess. But something good stalks it, too, because our Mystery Spotter is out there spotting mysteries left and right, as well as a few well-chosen license plates, and maybe tonight’s the night your number comes up. That’s right, hot dog: you may already be a wiener. So stay tuned and you might pick up a couple of tickets to the dance. And while you’re waiting, we flat guarantee we’ll have a few other numbers that will both elucidate and amuse. How’s that grab your happy ass, fool? You got Captain Midnight in your ear, KRZE, where you find it is where it’s at, so high up we’re underground. Now catch a listen to this monstrosity.’

‘Purple People Eater’ came tooting on, but I’d just spotted a Sinclair station in some strange tourist trap called Miniature America and was already pulling into the pumps. The attendant, a sawed-off geezer in red, white, and blue overalls, was curious about the car and the big silver box in the back seat, not to mention the fried-eyed idiot in the pink hat. Too curious. He craned to watch me through the back window as he topped the tank and I hooked up the new battery. I don’t know if it was his oppressive attention, the raw Wyoming cold, or a case of speed-jangles, but my hands were shaking so bad I damn near couldn’t get the clamps cinched down.

The battery and gas came to $34. I gave the old geezer two twenties and told him to keep the change. He shook his head in disbelief, then grinned. ‘Mister, if I had your money I’d throw mine away.’

‘Throw it away anyway,’ I advised him. ‘It feels good.’

I rolled back onto I–80 and aimed at Salt Lake City, holding it at a solid 80. If I got stopped I could always argue I’d mistaken the highway number for the speed limit. I listened to the radio instead of records on Joshua’s revived system, just in case my license number was called. But first got an earful of Captain Midnight:

‘Now you might have thought your soul pilot, Captain Midnight here, was just flapping his lips when he said there was going to be some boss tricks and big treats on tonight’s special show. Maybe you’ve got us pegged as some no-class outfit jiving in the sagebrush, don’t know get-along-little-doggie from dactylic hexameter, so dumb we think Grape Nuts Flakes is a venereal disease. Well, how’s this for some air-you-fucking-dition: we got America’s main expert on poetry, history, and everything else to do us some short spots on the historical-emotional background of trick-or-treat. I mean this guy’s got fifteen – count ’em – Ph.Ds on his wall. We’re talking words like foremost and intellectual and anagogic insights into symbolic expressions of metaphorical parallels, and when you’re talking that sort of stuff, only one man rises with the cream: that’s the poet John Seasons. He works out of Baghdad-by-the-Bay, but his spirit abounds. Hey, when you want the tops you go to the top. So let me introduce John Seasons with Part One of a KRZE exclusive, “A Social Demonology of the Hollow Weenie.”’

There was a brief pause, then, no doubt about it, John’s voice, his fake professorial tone resonant with five scotches: ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Christopher Columbus and you’re a dead Indian.’

That was it.

Captain Midnight jumped back in: ‘Didn’t I tell you the man knows his shit? We’re gonna hear more from him, just hang on, but first a little paean to his name, and another man you might wisely have for company on this night of wandering zombies and rabid werewolves, ain’t that right, Jimmy Dean? Who’re we talking about? Who else but “Big Bad John.”’

I only half-listened to the song. The John I knew was neither big nor bad. Sharp tongued and a bit severe, like most poets, but sweet at heart. If he was self-destructive, it was only because he’d rather hurt himself than someone else. I was perplexed he hadn’t mentioned the KRZE gig to me; John’s only deep vanity was as an historian. He claimed to be a Metasexual Marxist, a school of historical scholarship where, according to John, one arrived at the dialectical truth by kissing tears from the eyes of victims. Maybe his KRZE series had come up after I left, or he’d neglected to tell me in the frenzy of my departure. But if all went right I’d probably see him in a day or so, and I could tell him he’d kept me company through a wild night. And maybe I could get a line on this weird radio station out of the Wind River Range.

‘And speaking of the man,’ Captain Midnight came in at the end of the song, ‘here he is with Part Two in our public service series, “A Social Demonology of the Ol’ Hollow Weenie.” This time we’re going to hear from a famous seventeenth-century religious leader, an old-fashioned, honest-to-God, down-home preacher man.’

John’s voice came on: ‘The Reverend Cotton Mather at your service. In 1691, one of the female members of my congregation at North Church came to me with the sad admission that she could not open her mouth to pray. I, of course, made every effort to help her. I tried physical manipulation, prayer, admonitions … all without success – though, in a noble effort to save her soul, I refused to admit failure. A few nights later I had a dream in which an angel appeared to me and urged me to kiss the unfortunate woman and thereby unlock her mouth to offer her prayers to God for the redemption of her soul. A less experienced theologian might have been fooled. In the past, you see, I had always been visited by angels in my study, not my sleeping quarters, and while awake, not in the vulnerable state of dreams. It was obviously a false visitation, the devil in the guise of an angel, and a devil plainly manifested through the woman who would not open her mouth to pray. I denounced her as a witch. Following a proper trial, she was burned at the stake, and so completely had Satan inhabited her that even under the scourge of fire she refused to open her mouth except to scream.’

‘My oh my,’ Captain Midnight cut back in, ‘Reverend Mather don’t seem too kindly disposed toward womenfolk. But don’t you get blue behind it, honey. You give the Captain here a jingle on this Satanic night – he’d like to bob for your apples, know what I mean? While I’m waiting for the switchboard to light up, let’s pin an ear to men of more modern understanding – Sam Cooke, say, with “Bring It on Home to Me” and Roy Orbison’s “O Pretty Woman.”’

It had been John Seasons for sure. The supercilious, righteous whine, the smug, zealous certainty of the conclusions – I’d heard his Mather imitation many nights in North Beach bars.

‘This John Seasons is a good buddy of mine, you know,’ I told my ghost. Evidently he wasn’t impressed.

I honked the horn for the hell of it and bored on deeper into the night. It was all in my imagination, of course, but I could clearly hear the Pacific Ocean breaking on the edge of the continent.

About fifteen minutes later, John came on again, manifesting one of those inexplicable congruencies we call coincidence. At the same instant I saw the highway sign for Fort Bridger, John’s voice began:

‘Jim Bridger’s the name. I trapped beaver in these mountains nigh onto a century ago. Traded the pelts for provisions and possibles, and pretty much went wherever my stick floated. Now what I wanna know, the thing that plagues on me, is what have you ignorant dung-heads done with the buffalo? I used to traipse this country all over and it weren’t nothing to eyeball thousands of them critters at the same time. Now I don’t see hide nor ha’r. You got ’em on reservations like the Injuns?’

All right, John! Maybe needed a little work on the mountain man accent, but it was nice to hear a whack for the natural world. Not that I remember John personally caring much for the wilds. I’d once tried to get him to go backpacking with me and Kacy, but he’d declined with the explanation that every time he saw a blade of grass he wanted to jump on the nearest cable car. His heart knew better, though.

I was just outside Evanston, moving right along, when his next lick hit: a lugubrious blackface, the parody of a parody: ‘Mah name’s John. John Henry. Ahm a steel-drivin’ man. Whup tha steel. Whup the steel on down, Lawd Lawd. An’ now them Southe’n Pacific muthafucks own half the Sierra Nevada.’

I couldn’t help myself. I had to stop in Evanston and call him, tell him how good it was to hear his voice, let him know there were listeners in the night. I figured the program was taped, so I called him at home from a Standard station. There was no answer but I let it ring; maybe he was in the basement printing.

About the fourteenth buzz someone answered, either out of breath or patience. ‘My God, all right, who is it?’

‘My name’s George Gastin,’ I said, thinking this was one of his boyfriends and maybe I’d interrupted something. ‘I’m calling John Seasons. We’re old friends.’

There was a breathy pause on the other end, then: ‘Well. I don’t like bearing bad news, but John’s in the hospital.’

I sagged. ‘Is he all right?’

‘They think so. All the tests are good. But for heavenssakes, he’s been unconscious for three days.’

‘What happened?’

‘It’s … unclear.’

‘Hey, pal – fuck that shit. I told you he was an old friend. I’ve taken him to the Emergency Room more times than I care to remember.’

‘Well don’t get mad at me about it! I don’t know you.’

‘Okay. You’re right. I’m sorry. But I don’t know you either, though you’re answering his phone.’

‘I’m Steven.’

Steven? Steven? I racked my brain. ‘You work at the Federal Building, right?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘I haven’t met you, Steven, but I know from John he holds you in high regard. You looking after his place? The manuscripts and presses?’

‘Yes. Larry asked if I would.’

‘I’m sure they’re in good hands. Now tell me what happened. He get those Percodans mixed up with some Scotch?’

‘Well, that’s what the doctors are saying. Or he got drunk and forgot how many pills he was taking.’

‘Did he try to kill himself, Steven?’ I made this as direct as I could.

‘No one really knows. Larry found him on the kitchen floor unconscious. It could’ve been a mistake.’

‘No note?’

‘No, nothing like that.’

‘And this was three days ago, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘And he’s in a coma?’

‘Yes. But as I said, all the signs are good. The brain waves are absolutely normal. The liver function isn’t great, but with the amount he drinks that’s to be expected. The doctors say it isn’t really a coma. I ask if he’s still in a coma and they say, “No, he just hasn’t regained consciousness yet.” Good Lord, you know how technical doctors are.’

‘What hospital is he in?’

‘General.’

‘Well, listen. I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’m on my way now, but I’m coming from Wyoming and there’s some business first.’

‘I go by the hospital every morning before work. If he’s awake I’ll tell him to expect you.’

‘Did you know he’s on the radio here tonight in Wyoming? A special series called “A Social Demonology of the Hollow Weenie.”’

‘Really? He never mentioned it to me, and we discuss his work all the time. I think he’s a fabulous writer, but you know he’s so hard on himself. It must be taped, of course, but I just can’t believe he wouldn’t have mentioned it. Are you sure it’s John? The title sounds … well, tacky.’

‘It’s his name, it sounds just like him, and he lives in San Francisco.’

‘How odd.’

‘Yeah,’ I agreed, ‘and getting odder all the time.’

‘That’s so true. You should see Haight Street these days.’

I wanted to avoid the sociological at all costs. ‘Steven, listen, my time’s up. Thanks, and sorry I jumped on you. I felt I had a right to know.’

‘I understand,’ Steven said. ‘I can appreciate your concern.’

When I pulled out of the gas station I was so preoccupied I didn’t realize for six blocks that I was heading downtown instead of out to I-80. I hung a U and had just straightened out the wheels when I saw three small skeletons dancing across the street about a block away, their bones shining with a pale green luminescence in the headlights. I wasn’t frightened by their appearance – they obviously were kids dressed up in five-and-dime Halloween costumes – but I was terrified by my desire to stomp on the gas and run them down.

I didn’t. I didn’t even come close, not really. I hit the brakes instead and immediately pulled over and turned off the car, jamming on the emergency brake as hard as I could. I sat there watching the three little skeletons continue their skipping dance across the pavement and then disappear down a cross street, happily unaware that a man with an impulse to murder them sat watching from a car parked down the block.

After Eddie, how could the impulse even have entered my mind? I felt my exhaustion collapsing on its empty center, my point and purpose caving in to an oblivion of regrets I could neither shape nor salvage, an oblivion I was clearly seeking with a twisted vengeance, trying to destroy what I couldn’t redeem, the gift I could neither deliver nor accept.

Yet it was also true that I hadn’t even come close; I’d smothered the desire the moment it seized me. But would I again? I raised my fists and hammered them down on the steering wheel, hoping the wheel would break or the bones in my hands shatter or both: any reason to get out of that sleek white Cadillac and walk away. But with each blow all I felt was the congealing certainty that the only choice left was forward and my only chance was fast. I understood too late that it was too late to stop. So, with the rush of freedom that is doom’s honey spilling in the heart, I got on it.

As I hit the on-ramp my ghost appeared, in the backseat this time, leaning forward to whisper, ‘George, oooh George, you almost did it back there. You better let me drive. You can’t trust yourself anymore.’

‘Why don’t you vanish for good,’ I said. ‘You’re no help.’

He laughed. ‘Okay, George. Sure thing. You bet.’ And he was gone, leaving an unnerving silence.

Five minutes and ten miles later, when I thought to turn the radio back on, Captain Midnight was doling out the encouragement: ‘Yup, the Captain’s back from that trip down the voodoo track, and hey!, ain’t we got fun? How are you doing on this night when the insane rip their chains from the walls and roam the night to play with the dead and plague the innocent? You still getting where you’re going? Keeping on keeping on? I hope so, friend, ’cause if life ain’t right with you, you better get right with life. Whatever that is on this ghoul-ridden night. You just tell ’em Captain Midnight, patron deejay of fool dreamers, prays nightly for your soul and twice on Halloween and Easter. Lapidem esse aquam fontis vivi. Obscurum per obscurius, ignotum per ignotius. Yes. And may the gods go with you, child.

‘And now, because KRZE is dedicated to giving you heart for the path, or some path for the heart, whatever it is you think you need, here’s John Seasons again with some more insightful demonology.’

‘My name’s Black Bart. A lot of people asked me why I only robbed Wells Fargo stages… if it was something personal against Mr Wells or Mr Fargo or both. Well, not really. I just sorta figured anybody with that much money should be robbed.’

‘OW!’ Captain Midnight shouted, ‘now there’s a jack-o-lantern with a fuse. But your Captain’s forced to concur that large piles of money are dangerous, so send me some if it’s piling up on you and save yourself the grief. While you’re getting it together, I got to attend to a couple of personal gigs. I could slap on a stack of platters and hope they didn’t stick, but since it’s Halloween I thought it might be a touch of class to leave you with some dead air. But to make it right by you, I’ll bring back goodies that’ll make you drool. Not just more boss sounds and John Seasons’s exclusive demonology, but things you can’t even imagine. But go ahead and wonder while yours truly visits the Lizard King and throws a few snowballs at the moon. Back in a flash, Jack – I’ll make it up to you, and that’s a promise.’

The air went dead. I would’ve turned it off and listened to Donna’s collection if it hadn’t been for John’s social commentaries. I didn’t want to miss one. They connected me to someone real, and I was convinced beyond reason that John would live so long as I kept listening. I thought of him drifting in his coma and wondered if, like Elmer, he had a smile on his face.

I slipped into something of a coma myself, my mind blurred as the night blurred with speed, shadows whipping around me like torn sails, waves breaking in my mind, a mind I’d maybe gone out of, long gone, blooey, nobody home on the range, but I was taking it on home anyway. I flew down the west slope of the Rockies into Salt Lake City before I knew I was there. The lights snapped me out of my trance. I started looking for my buddy, the green dinosaur, and, when I didn’t see him, felt like I’d lost a piece of magic. I settled for a Conoco next to an interchange. My bladder was a drop from bursting, but I stayed in the car with the windows up tight, cracking mine only a quick inch to tell the pump jockey to fill it with supreme. I was certain if I started talking the way I was thinking I’d be surrounded by squad cars faster than you could say, ‘Up against the wall, motherfucker.’ I didn’t want to fly apart when my only hope was to fly, to freeze my bead on the Pacific shore and stand on the juice. I gave the kid a twenty for the gas and told him he could keep the change whether he prayed for my doomed ass or not. I came off the on-ramp running.

When you have to piss so bad your tonsils are under water, it’s as hard to fly as it is to stand still, so at the beginning of the long desolate run across the saltflats between Salt Lake and Wendover, I cracked my momentum to pull over and piss, doing so with the profound appreciation that much of pleasure is mere relief. The night was so cold that my piss steamed as it soaked into the moonlit salt. There’s nothing like a good, basic piss to clear the mind, and by volume I should’ve become lucid; but perhaps I was just giddy, because I asked my ghost as if he were present, ‘Are saltflats the ghosts of old oceans? Feel like the seashore? Can we count it as the Pacific if we come up short?’

No ghost. No answers. But I could feel him then, feel him as he waited for his moment, waited with the massive patience of a boulder that knows it will someday be sand for the hourglass. That was his presence, but underneath I felt his essence, and his essence was wind. I stood there with my dick in my hand – suddenly alive in a memory when I was ten and a hurricane had hit out of nowhere and I’d watched, awed, as the wind ripped petals from the rose garden and flung them against the windows, pressing their colors against the quivering glass. The next morning, as he looked at his stripped and ravaged roses, was the only time I’d ever seen my father cry. The memory of it made me start crying, too. ‘Help me, ghost,’ I asked, not sure whether I was talking to my father’s or my own – both, I decided, since I needed all the help I could get. If ghosts help. No ghosts. No answers. I got back in the Cadillac and burned on down the line.

The best thing about saltflats is the flat: a straight, level shot to the horizon, the meeting of heaven and earth, the limit of sight. If you can go fast enough, you can see over the edge. The road was two-lane blacktop, and I opened it up all the way, straddling the white line unless the rare oncoming car sent me back to my lane.

The silence and distance were eating me up. I was just about to shut off Captain Midnight and spin a few records myself when there was an explosion of static on the radio and my Captain said, ‘Ah, back alive; proof against the demons so far, and so far, so good. “But who can tell on this witch’s flight/the true darkness from the dancing light?” Them fuckin’ demons are tricky. That’s why we asked troubadour John Seasons to offer us some insights into the dark. Oh John, way up there in your shaman trance, come in please.’

‘Good evening,’ John said mildly. ‘My name, if you don’t know it, is J.P. Morgan, and I’m here tonight to reveal the secret to success in American business. I think you’ll be surprised how simple it is. First, buy a steel mill. Secondly, buy workers. Buy them for as little as possible, but pay just enough to keep them going. Lastly, buy Congressmen, and pay them to enact tariff laws to keep out foreign steel. Politicians can be purchased cheaply, so buy in quantity. The goal, you see, is stability, and nothing destabilizes like competition. So remember: high prices, low wages, and a lock on the market. Because when you scrape off all the sentiment and rhetoric, spirit is for idiots and poetry for fools. Money is power. And, put bluntly, power rules.’

Captain Midnight was right behind him. ‘Right on, Brother John! Time to get real out there. Get your nose to the stone. Bear down and deliver. You’ve got to be at least as real as the demons, and that’s just to break even, Jack, hold your own ground. You got to get up over it or slide down under it or slip away in between. Think that over if you’ve got a mind, and in the meanwhile I’ll make more than good on my promise to make it right by you for that dead air. You think I’m jiving? Well, eat shit and crawl under a rock, because sitting right beside me live in the studio is that legendary street prophet and avatar of the damaged, the one and only Fourth Wiseman. You’ve probably heard the mantra he chants every day, all day, for your edification and maybe salvation: “The Fourth Wiseman delivered his gift and slipped away.” That one sentence, that single expression of holy being, is all his priestly vows allow him. But what you might not know is that he permits himself to answer one question every Halloween eve, and tonight it’s my privilege, and yours, to have him here in the studio with us, and I blush with the honor of having been chosen to ask him his question for the year. Welcome to KRZE, sir. He’s nodding his head and winging his yo-yo.’

‘Ask him what the gift was,’ I begged.

‘We understand, sir,’ Captain Midnight went on, ‘that you can only answer your one question and not engage in conversational pleasantries, so let me get right to it. Will you tell us, please, what was the Fourth Wiseman’s gift?’

I cheered.

‘No one knows,’ the Fourth Wiseman said, and hearing his voice I knew this was either the Fourth Wiseman or an exceptional mimic. ‘Scholars generally recognize three possibilities, for which the evidence is about equal. The three most supportable possibilities for the Fourth Wiseman’s gift are a song, a white rose, and a bow – the gesture of acknowledgment and respect, not the bough of a tree. But again, no one really knows.’

‘And which of the three do you favor,’ the Captain asked politely.

Silence. I heard my mother crying softly and my father, confused, saying, ‘Hey, it was a great dream: my brain turned into a white rose.’ I saw the rose petal kaleidoscope of colors smeared against the buckling glass as the wind milked their essence and infused the storm. I needed the names of the roses. I needed their protection.

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ Captain Midnight apologized. ‘I see the rules are strict – one question only. Thank you for being with us, you burned-out old speed freak, and please feel welcome to stay.’

The Fourth Wiseman said, ‘The Fourth Wiseman delivered his gift and slipped away.’

‘Well, slip away if you want, but you listeners out there rocketing through the dark better stay glued to the groove and be ready to move because here it is, a lucky license plate number picked by our own Mystery Spotter, plucked from the random churn of things like a speck of gold from the cosmic froth, and if it’s your number that’s up and you call and identify yourself within fifteen minutes, you’re gonna win two tickets to the dance. The dance, you dig what I’m saying?’

I looked down the road into my parents’ rose garden and tried to remember the names of all the roses while Captain Midnight paused for a thunderous drumroll before announcing, ‘Well, well, well, we got a California plate – just goes to show our Mystery Spotter is everywhere you are, and you never know when her wild eyes may fall on you. Could be never. Could be your next heartbeat. Could be, ooooh, couldie be. But tonight’s number could only be this one: BOP three-three-three. That’s B as in Boo, O as in Overboard; P as in Psalm; three as in treys; three as in blind mice; three as in tri – be it trilogy, trident, trial and error, trick, or just a little bit harder. So okay, BOP three-three-three, California dreamer, whoever you are out there raving in the dark, you got fifteen minutes to call me at Beechwood 4–5789. But hey, Captain Midnight’s gonna cut you some slack, Jack – I’m gonna give you twenty minutes to call in. Not only because I’m a righteous fool myself, but because the next side I’m gonna drop on you is so rare and so fine I don’t want it interrupted by some crass promotional gimmick. This side just happens to be twenty minutes long. It’s the only recording of this tune in existence, and the moment it’s over I’m gonna burn it. That’s right, you heard it straight: I’m laying on the flame the instant it’s finished. So listen well, because the next time you hear it you’ll be listening to your memory. And while the Captain isn’t one to pass judgment on the musical sensibilities of his listeners, if this don’t touch the living spirit in your poor, ragged heart, you best call a mortuary and make an appointment. I’ll tell you the name of the man who made this music when it’s done and burning.’

I didn’t have to wait long on the knowledge. The exhausted keening of the opening passage was already etched in my memory: Big Red playing my birthday song, ‘Mercury Falling.’

I felt like everything at once and nothing forever. I felt triumphant my license number had been called, joyous that I’d connected with Mira, who I was sure had spotted me. But I was crushed by the realization that there wasn’t a phone within a half-hour in any direction, and moved to tears by the first bars of Big Red’s sax calling to the ghosts across the water as we pushed the glossy Merc coupe over the cliffs and stood at the windswept edge waiting for it to hit. I was stunned, confused, possessed, lost, found, confirmed in my faith and strangely bereft. You can’t be moved in that many directions at once without tearing apart.

My ghost was there beside me on the front seat. ‘You worthless jerk-off, I want to dance. You think when he said the dance he meant some fucking sock-hop in a crepe-festooned gym smelling of fifty-thousand P. E. classes? No, you make sure we’re in the middle of absolutely nowhere, a thousand light-years from a phone, so we can’t win the tickets. Screw your dumb moral victories. I’m sick of being cooped up in your cloying romance. If we make it to the ocean, you’ll probably want to pave it so you don’t have to finish and admit your failure. You’ve gone crazy, George. That’s what I’m stuck to, a crazy fuck-up. But we’ll just see about that––’

‘Shut up!’ I bellowed. ‘I want to listen to the music.’

‘Well, I want to dance. You too proud to dance with your ghost? Afraid people will point and giggle? What do you think they’re doing now? Come on, George, if you’re not going to do anything with your body but abuse it, give it to me. I could use one. Just don’t include your mind in the deal, all right?’

‘Shut the fuck up!’ I screamed again, ‘this is my birthday song!’ I reached over and twisted the volume all the way up.

But you can’t drown out your ghost. He began singing, relentlessly off-key:

Happy birthday to you,

Happy birthday to you,

Happy birthday, mad George,

Happy birthday toooo youuuu…

Birthday Bow, I remembered. That was a name of one of the roses in the garden. My father was crying in the silence that Big Red had created. I could feel Kacy moving with me like a wave. A small blue rectangular miracle appeared before my eyes, a road sign:

EMERGENCY PHONE

1 MILE

I came off the gas and told my ghost, ‘Go get your dancing shoes, asshole.’ He laughed as he vanished.

The light above the phone box was broken so I used one of the birthday candles that couldn’t be blown out for light as I carefully dialed BE4–5789.

Be-beep; be-beep; be-beep; be-beep; be-beep. The sound like an auger up my spinal cord. Busy.

I hung up and tried again. Still busy. I figured I had a minute left. I called the operator, hoping she’d believe my claim of emergency and cut in. I couldn’t get the operator, not even a ring. Not even a hum. I tried BE4–5789 again and got nothing at all. The line was dead.

My ghost was standing beside me. ‘Irony eating you up is it, George? I’m afraid you’re gonna become mutilated, just like that old con salesman warned you about. But that’s your problem, buddy. Me, I’m going to dance.’

‘Be home early,’ I snarled at him as he disappeared.

Back in the Caddy and on the road, I caught the last notes of ‘Mercury Falling.’ ‘Burn it,’ I urged Captain Midnight, seeing the brilliant red petals in my mind. ‘Gypsy Fire,’ I remembered aloud. ‘Borderflame. My Valentine.’

Captain Midnight whispered, ‘Let’s let his ghost go now.’ I heard him strike a match. ‘Whooooosh!’ He laughed. ‘Memory.’

The room growing darker as the petals clotted against the window. The yellow and orange was Carnival Glass. ‘Carnival Glass,’ I said it aloud. The orange and pink was Puppy Love. ‘Puppy Love, Kacy, isn’t that a wonderful name for a rose?’

‘Ashes to ashes,’ Captain Midnight intoned, ‘dust to dust. Round and round the music goes, here in the majesty of bloom, gone in the voluptuous exhilarations of decay. Purchase for the roots, food for its green flesh, and where it stops nobody knows. But don’t you worry. The whole is perfect. It’s just never the same. For example, stick an ear on these new kids from England doing good-ol’-boy Buddy Holly’s tune from six years back – that’s right, brighten up for some truth, grab some stash and hang on to your ass, because you got the Rolling Stones and “Not Fade Away.”’

Tell me it still couldn’t come up roses. I joined in on the second chorus, singing it with rock-solid, gospel-light joy,

Love for real not fade away!

And my ghost, suddenly appearing sitting cross-legged on the hood, pressed his face against the windshield and roared,

Doo-wop; doo-wop; doo-wop-bop.

He smiled sweetly and then reached down and tore off the windshield wipers like a baby giant tearing the wings off a fly. I was so shocked it took me a second to realize I couldn’t see the road. He’d turned solid. My hands froze the wheel in position as I came down easy on the brakes, craning to see around him, my heart lurching against my ribs.

‘Better let me drive now, George,’ my ghost said. ‘You’re so fucked-up you can’t see through me.’

‘Nova Red!’ I yelled in his grinning face. ‘Warwhoop! Sun Maid! Candleflame! Trinket! Seabreeze!’ I was under 50 and still on the road. As I strained to see around him he moved with me, but I caught a glimpse off to the right of a low shoulder and open saltflats beyond, and that was all I needed. I cranked the wheel to the right, bottomed out in the drainage swale, then shot out clear and clean, mashing the gas.

My ghost was still hanging on, still sitting calmly and cross-legged on the hood, grinning madly as foam drooled from his mouth and flecked the windshield. I glanced at the floorboards. Both packages of Rabi-Tabs were gone. It no longer mattered what was possible.

My ghost lifted a hand to his foamy mouth, wiped off a viscous gob, smeared it across the windshield.

‘The Hokey-Pokey,’ I cried, ‘is raw orange with a yellow center. You put your whole self in and take your whole self out. The Bo Peep is light pink, white compared to my hat.’ I whipped off my stingy-brim and waved it in front of his foam-blurred face to blind him, then suddenly cranked the wheel hard-left and spun the Caddy through a full 360°, your classic brodie, and then I punched the gas and snapped one off to the right.

To see through the opaque Rabi-Tab film on the glass was difficult, but it looked like I’d thrown him off. My spirit broke with his first jarring stomp on the roof, dancing as he merrily sang:

The kids in Bristol are as sharp as a pistol

When they do the Bristol Stomp.

STOMP. STOMP. The headliner rippling as the roof buckled.

It’s really sumpin’ when the joint is jumping

When they do the Bristol Stomp.

STOMP. STOMP. Stomping on the roof.

My eardrums ached as I fishtailed to a stop, slammed it into reverse, punched it, and then did some stomping myself, down hard on the brakes. Nothing could budge him.

‘Who am I?’ he screamed. ‘Who am I?’ He started singing again, to the tune of ‘Popeye,’

I’m Ahab the Sailor Man – toot! toot!

I stay as obsessed as I can – toot! toot!

When weirdness starts swarming

It’s too late for warning

Because things have got way out of hand.

‘And you, George,’ he murmured, ‘you’re the innocent heart of the whale.’

The tip of a harpoon plunged through the roof, the barbed head burying itself in the seat about a half-inch from my head, so close it nicked the brim of my hat. A harpoon. How can you even think about something like that?

‘Let me drive,’ he demanded. ‘You’re wasted. It’s over.’

I drove. Rammed it in low, tached it up, popped the clutch. The nose of the Caddy lifted like it was some supercharged, nitro-snorting dragster getting off the mark. My ghost jumped back down on the hood and started tap dancing, stopping abruptly to say, ‘Let me drive. I know what you want; I know what you’re looking for.’ And tappidy-tappidy-dappity-tap he started dancing again, not even swaying as I hit second and wound it out.

Over the engine scream and my dancing ghost and the blood pounding in my skull, a voice spoke clearly from the radio, a voice I’d only heard once in my life, four words in mimicry of his mother: ‘Come on … we’re late.’ Eddie. I hit the brakes so hard I whacked my head on the steering wheel.

My ghost, unmoved on the hood, was lip-synching with great exaggeration as Eddie’s voice explained through the radio, ‘It was my favorite drawing. The horses are really deer who can pick up signals from ghosts with their horns like they were TV antennas or something. The big red flower can pick up signals from the sun and aim them at the deer. It’s just a big red flower, I don’t know what kind. The long green car is to go look for the flower and the deers. It needs big, tough wheels because it’s a long way and the flower is hidden and the deer can run like the wind. And the sun’s just there in the middle, you know, so you can see things. I didn’t want to lose it.’

I got the Caddy stopped, brought my knees out from under the wheel and up to my chest, and uncoiled a savage two-heeled kick at the radio. A woman screamed as the glass shattered. ‘It’s done, George,’ my ghost said softly, his voice coming through the radio. I kicked it again and again, and with every blow a woman screamed through the speaker and my ghost told me it was over, to let go. I was reaching for the battery out of Joshua’s music box to knock out the radio when I caught the glint off the gallon can of white gas on the backseat floor. In one motion I picked it up, swung it over the seat back, and bashed it against the radio. A woman screamed. I was swinging the can for another blow when I understood she was Kacy. I’d never heard her scream before, but I knew it was her. I dropped the can on the front seat. The blow had cracked a seam in the thin metal. The gas leaked in erratic dribbles, soaking into the seat. My sinuses burned from the fumes, tears spilling down my cheeks. I sagged back against the seat. My ghost grinned down triumphantly.

‘You drive,’ I said.

I swabbed my jacket sleeve across my face to wipe the tears, and when I blinked them open a moment later I was lying on the Caddy’s hood, my face pressed to the windshield, staring into the empty eyes of my ghost.

‘George,’ he said sweetly, ‘if you want to live you must throw yourself to death like a handful of pennies into a wishing well.’

He pivoted from the waist and reached over into the backseat. He was putting a record on the turntable. I knew he was going to mock me by playing ‘Chantilly Lace,’ so I was stunned by the sound of an approaching train, its distant wail slicing the dark. For a spinning instant I thought we were parked on railroad tracks and would have leaped if I hadn’t been hurled against the windshield as my ghost popped the clutch and smoked it through first into second as the train bore down and my brain bloomed with white roses. I shouted their names as he ripped it into high, wind tearing the petals away, flinging them to darkness and salt: ‘Cinderella! White King, White Madonna, White Feather, White Angel! Misty Dawn! Careless Moment!’

‘“Careless Moment?”’ My ghost roared with laughter. He thought it was so funny he turned off the headlights. I was going to die. Meal for the roses, meat for the dream. ‘It’s such a beautiful dream,’ my mother told me as the garden burned and the train screamed through my skull, obliterating every name I knew. I looked down at my body and only the skeleton remained. Then, taken by an undreamable serenity, I calmly stood up on the hood of the Caddy. I bowed to my ghost and then leapt lightly up on the roof. The wind sang through my bones. I could feel the exact pressure against every bone in my hands as I wrapped them around the jutting shaft of the harpoon and in one concerted movement snapped it off. I jumped back down on the hood, pivoting neatly as I swung the wooden shaft and smashed it through the windshield with all my might.

My ghost smiled up at me. ‘Took you long enough, George. I thought I was going to have to do it by myself.’

I dove through the smashed-out window and went for his throat.

My flesh and blood hands were locked on the wheel where his had been, 130 mph straight ahead into the salt-glittering dark. I could have gone on forever if the engine hadn’t blown.

The instant it blew I lost control. I tried to correct as it started sideways; a useless reflex. I was gone, and all I could do was hold on helpless and terrified as the Caddy slewed across the saltflats and finally went over, flipping three times bang-bang-bang, then skidding driver’s side down, my cheek pressed against the window, greenish sparks shooting past as if I was being hurled through the stars. Then, violently, the Caddy flipped again, end over end, twisting, then again on its side in a wild twirl, and as it was slowing I felt like I was inside the milk bottle we’d used in our first, nervous game of spin-the-bottle. My first spin stopped on Mary Ann Meyers. I felt her lips touch mine, the jelly-tremor roll through my loins. I felt Kacy’s arms slip around me naked in the sunlight. The whirling stopped. It was utterly still.

I took Harriet’s letter from the glovebox and kicked out the smashed door. As I slid through the twisted frame I instinctively reached up to protect my hat, deeply pleased to find it still in place.

The cold night air was luxurious. I breathed deeply and looked around me. Not a thing for as far as I could see, just the totaled Eldorado against the salt, gleaming white-on-white. I thought about what I wanted to say as I struck a match to the box of candles you can’t blow out, using their steady flame to ignite Harriet’s letter, which burned with the scent of Shalimar.

I had run out of grand statements. I kept it so simple I didn’t even say it aloud: To the Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly, and the possibilities of love and music. And to the Holy Spirit. I tossed Harriet’s letter through a shattered window. The spilled gas detonated, flames billowing through the twisted metal, white paint bubbling as it charred, then the gas tank blew and it all roared upward. I stood there and watched it burn.

I had no idea where the highway was, so I started walking with the wind. I hadn’t gone a mile when I saw a bloodstain spreading across the salt. Eddie’s mother appeared before me, pointing at the bloodstain, her voice trembling like her finger: ‘It’s just not right,’ she said. ‘It is not right.’

‘Yes it is,’ I told her. I kept walking.

The spreading bloodstain began to contract, rushing back to its center, spiraling downward into itself. As it vanished, a great whirlwind rose in its place. Blinded by flying salt, I knelt into a tight ball and covered my eyes. I awaited my judgment. But there were no words in the wind, no sound but it’s own wild howl, nothing but itself. Within minutes it died away.

I’d walked another mile before realizing my hat was gone. I hoped it had blown all the way to Houston and landed on Double-Gone’s head in a gospel stroke of glory.

In the distance I saw headlights on I-80 and took the shortest angle to the freeway. I was still a long ways out when I saw Kacy waiting in a cloud of light. I ran up, close enough to touch her, before I understood she was a ghost.

‘Oh, George,’ she said, her voice breaking, ‘we were on a dirt road in the mountains out of La Paz. It was pouring rain. A huge slide came down and swept the van away. I was in the back. I hardly had time to scream. Nobody knows, George. It happened in late September and nobody even knows we’re dead.’

‘Kacy,’ I cried, reaching for her. And I held her a moment real in my arms before she disappeared.