Spirits

By Michael Jesse

Chapter 3

Jack had lost track of how many different places he and his mother had lived. He could picture six or seven -- most of them in those first few years after Grandma went into the home. For a while, it seemed that every Christmas was in a different place. For the first year they visited Grandma once a week, usually on Sundays, but soon she seemed unsure who they were and chatted with them nonchalantly, as she did with Bertie, about nonsensical things.

One day they visited and she had stopped talking, and never said a word again. She no longer paid any attention to Bertie, whose cage was moved out to the dining hall where other residents appreciated him. Eventually, she stopped noticing them at all and they stopped visiting. After that day, it was as if she was already dead, though her body kept functioning for a few more years.

As he drove along streets whose sidewalks he had walked so many times as a child, Jack caught glimpses of remembrance in a house here, a corner shop there. He found Rathmann Park with its circular man-made pond lined with red brick. When winter came, there was no official notice given when the ice was safe or not. People would just try it and adventurous children occasionally fell through. No one drowned because the water was less than four feet deep, but legend had it that some unnamed child of the past had died of pneumonia after walking home in wet clothing.

The unremembered addresses of his childhood were nearly all within walking distance of the little park, and he found most of them. At each site he remembered some little thing -- climbing out his bedroom window onto the slate shingles of the front porch roof to watch the Fourth of July fireworks or eating grapes under the arbor and spitting out the seeds.

On 3rd Street, he parked in front of the downtown branch of the Brayton Public Library. Architecturally it was half 19th Century Carnegie and half 1960s Modern -- the two styles not working well together. When he was about 11, his walk to school took him directly past it so he began spending his after school hours there. In the lobby were four red leather wingback chairs that were nearly always occupied, but he sat in one whenever he could. He could keep an eye out on the chairs from all three floors because an iron railing on each floor encircled the atrium looking down on the main floor. Browsing aimlessly down the aisles, he discovered an illustrated book of H.G. Wells science fiction stories and hurried down the stairs to claim one of the red leather chairs.

He liked science fiction stories and began writing his own little stories in the back of one of his school notebooks. He wrote one story about an astronaut who came home from his space mission and found that everyone on Earth had disappeared. In another story, a man could turn invisible and sneak into secret meetings of bad guys to discover their plans.

It was easy to find the little house on First Street that was their last home together -- the location of his mother’s death. The nondescript house was across the street from the side of St. Peter’s Catholic Church with its Spanish Mission style bell towers. When they first moved in, when Jack had just turned 13, they were jolted upright every hour by the clanging of the bells. Before long, though, their brains began to filter out the noise and they hardly noticed the bells at all.

Every summer, the church had a week-long festival in its parking lot with food vendors and carnival rides. Mickey, who had briefly appeared again after a year’s absence, walked around with his hands on his hips, elbows straight out and “accidentally” bumped into Catholic girls’ breasts -- for which he would politely apologize. Jack watched from a distance expecting Mickey to get slapped, but it never happened. Mickey was too smooth for that and usually managed to turn the encounter into a conversation. Despite his ragged clothes and unwashed hair, Mickey could charm nearly anyone -- except the nuns, who eventually spotted him and Johnny and threw them both out.

The house on First Street was on a corner of a small brick lane that went steeply downhill, so its backyard overlooked the side and backyard of the next house on that lane. That was the home of a white-haired old lady who swept her sidewalk and tended to her rose bushes. On Sunday mornings, a blue van with the words “Crossroads Pilgrim Holiness Church” parked in front of her house and a man in a white shirt and tie trotted up to her porch to escort her down her sidewalk. The van brought her back again shortly after noon, and sometimes a family emerged from the van with her and spent the afternoon at her house. The van returned after dinnertime and took everyone away again, returning at about 9 p.m. with only the old woman.

As a 13-year-old boy, Johnny had initially paid minimal attention to the comings and goings of his elderly neighbor, but the girls of the visiting family captured his attention. There were three girls, all of them older than him, plus a boy about his age. The mother had bright red hair and the father brown hair, and the four children had varying degrees of red-brown hair. The middle daughter, who he guessed was about 16, had the brightest red hair that shone in the sunlight and captivated him.

Each Sunday, he would start watching as noon approached. Most weeks, only the white-haired old lady emerge from the church van, but about once a month the family came out with her. It was summer and the children spent much of the time outside where Jack could watch them. He tested his reconnaissance options during the week so he would be prepared when the opportunity arrived again. He found he had some degree of view from the second-floor bathroom window, but the trees were mostly in the way. The back porch was too low because he could not quite see over the fence. He discovered that the best vantage point was up in the branches of the apple tree in the backyard, and he experimented with different perches before he found the best observation point.

The next time the family visited, while everyone was indoors presumably eating an after-church lunch, Johnny climbed the tree and waited. His patience was rewarded when the children came out in swimsuits to have a water balloon fight. The girls all wore one-piece suits that were not particularly revealing, but to Johnny seeing the bare arms and legs of the girls was electrifying -- particularly the middle girl. Her freckled skin was so white and her red hair so bright she seemed to glow in the sunshine. After a while the game was over and the girls disappeared inside the little house. Johnny climbed down out of the tree and went up to his room and closed the door.

Four Sundays later they appeared again, though this time the weather was cooler and there was no water fight. Instead, the children played badminton. The red-haired girl was still breathtakingly watchable in cutoff bluejean shorts and a tshirt. When the girls went inside, Johnny sighed and began climbing down the tree.

“Hi,” a voice said from below. It was the girls’ younger brother, about whom Johnny had almost forgotten.

“Um, hi,” he said in return, dropping to the ground in front of the boy. Johnny half-expected the boy to accuse him of spying on his sisters -- which would have been entirely accurate -- but he only said, “do you want to play?”

Jack was driving back to the Essex Club, but by a different route that took him past a familiar grocery store. The name had changed but it was the same grocery where he’d gone with his mother when they lived in the neighborhood. She got paid every two weeks and payday was like hitting the lottery. They would walk up the hill to the store as soon as she got home from work and fill their cart with anything and everything they wanted — frozen cream pies, cans of Spam, TV dinners, ice cream and candy. Johnny liked peanut butter cups and his mother preferred chocolate-covered cherries so they would buy one box of each. Nothing was out of bounds on payday.

Though Bessie Mayfair Goddard was a child of the Great Depression -- born two months before the 1929 stock market crash -- that experience had not turned her into a frugal penny-pincher. It never occurred to her to clip coupons or pay attention to what was on sale. She was just not good at planning ahead. At the First Street house, their refrigerator tended to build up ice inside the freezer. This was not a problem the week preceding payday, because nothing was left in the freezer but ice cube trays and perhaps a few sad homemade Kool-Aid popsicles. However, to make room for a new supply of frozen food on payday, they always had to use a hammer and screwdriver to chip out the excess ice. It would have made sense to perform this predictable task the evening before payday, but it never occurred to either of them to do so. It was always when they came home from the grocery store on payday evening that they remembered that this needed to be done, and so while the ice cream got soft on the kitchen counter, Johnny and his mother would take turns pounding away at the ice layers in the freezer, sending chips flying onto the linoleum to crunch under their feet as they giddily put away what seemed like an abundance of food.

Had she been practical enough to prepare the freezer the night before payday, Jack’s mother might also have been better at ensuring that the food she bought would actually last two weeks until the next payday. But that never happened either. They ate like royalty the first week and scraped by the second on Campbell’s soup and homemade biscuits. Breakfast and/or “dessert” consisted of a slice of toast sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar.

The grocery store was completely changed from Jack’s memory -- though the meat counter and bakery were still in the same locations. He gathered up some basics to get him through the next few days -- bread, lunchmeat, a frozen pizza, peanut butter, coffee, 7-Up, eggs and cheese. The store had a liquor aisle so he grabbed a cheap bottle of white wine and a pint of vodka. While waiting in the checkout lane he grabbed a TV Guide.

Back at his room in the Essex, Jack put away his groceries in his little kitchenette -- making himself a vodka tonic as he did so -- and heated up the oven for his pizza. He raised his glass at his reflection in the dark window that overlooked the pockmarked downtown. Taking the job had been a good move, and the mini-suite was the kind of home he imagined growing up. By the reckoning of his childhood, Jack was a success.

Jack began unpacking his computer and plugged his modem into the room’s phone line. He had to make an adjustment to the program so it would dial 9 before the number, but soon the modem was whining through the connection. He’d recently upgraded from a 1200 to a 2400-baud modem and the connection went through smoothly. When he was connected to the Internet, he navigated to his favorite discussion forum where MOLLY27 had been posting stories about her recent move into a communal house with several other women, most of them apparently lesbians. Logging in as reader JG07, Jack posted the question, "What's the latest with your new roommates?"

The pizza was done so Jack logged out and made himself another drink. He turned on the TV and flipped channels as he ate. Afterwards, he cleaned up his dishes and put everything away. He tended to be meticulous about such things anyway, but he knew that with such a small kitchen that habit would be almost essential. Refreshing his drink, he decided to try out the bed and brought his laptop over to it. The battery was not very reliable, so he arranged the cord so he could he could plug in. His glass was empty again.

Jack woke, and looked at the clock. It was 5:45 a.m. and he had to pee. On his bedside table was the remains of his last drink and he tossed it back -- hair of the dog. Ignoring a mild hangover headache -- he knew it would go away shortly -- he felt his way into the unfamiliar bathroom, the gray light of dawn providing some ambient light through the small window. Back in bed with a glass of water, Jack opened his laptop and logged in again. MOLLY27 had made a long post describing her flirtatious relationship with her new roommates.

Awake again at 7:15, Jack was fully past the hangover stage as he put on a pot of coffee and made himself presentable enough to take the elevator down to the lobby to buy a copy of the Sunday Morning Star, which was several inches thick and stuffed with advertising supplements. Back in his room, he made eggs-over-easy and toast and sat at the table reading the paper. Keeping an eye on the clock, he was showered and shaved by nine and getting dressed in a jacket and tie. He doubted he’d go through with it, probably not this week at least, but he wanted to be dressed appropriately for Sunday morning services at Crossroads Pilgrim Holiness Church.