He’s saying, “Do you remember which door it is, Scott?”
I see him standing there and his flowers are blowing over in the wind.
So I added Bill’s name to the list of people I have ever loved. I wanted to write down these names so that I can remember them one day when everyone else has forgotten. I wanted to write a list of all the people I had ever known and keep them in my heart. I wanted to have a list of them even though I couldn’t see their faces.
THIS LIST BEGINS…
Gary McClanahan, Audrey Karen McClanahan, Audrey Karen’s story of her family, Nell Jones, Samantha the dog, Nanook the dog, Midget the dog, Razy the cat, Buddy the dog, Iggy the cat, Stanley, Stirley, Leslie McClanahan, Aunt Bernice, Aunt Mary, Monte and Lisa, Uncle Larry, Aunt Mary Ellen—the most beautiful woman I knew, her children, Mary the cleaning lady, Lil Bill, Big Bill, Elgie McClanahan, Russell Wilson, Mickey Hawkins, Mike Chapman, Wayne Tiller, Brent Sanford, Jason Taylor, Jay Lilly, Ricky Duggan, Nicole Owens, Ammie Costa, Reinaldo Lopez, Keith Cordial, Jenna D, Chastity Burns, Tracy and the Fury’s, Keith and Eric Fogus, Carl Taylor, Robbie Bragg, Ulysses Phipps, Chad Tabor, and church: Joyce Hanshew, Melvin Hanshew, Ada and Harold Sifers, Ruby Hanshew, Harold Hanshew, George and Lena Deitz, Blaine and Aline Cook, Blaine Duncan, the Gwinns, Gary Redden, Charlie and Janette Redden, Viven and Ruth Bragg, the football team: Joey Fitzwater, Bill Bob, the baseball team: Boozy, Aaron Brown, Ryan Crookshanks, Kim Maguire, Mandi Demoss, the people at law school I secretly hated, Charlie and Dan, Ja Ja, Tom Maguire, Arlene Maguire, Chris Oxley, Lisa Griffin, Tim Keenan, Colin Worthington, Tammie Toler, Karen Angle, Jo Price, Sherry Koon, Mrs. Walker, Kenny Walker, Charlene Green, J.C. Dunbar, Patti Milam, Coach G., Casey Whitlow, Dr. David Bard, Dr. Baker, Dr. William Ofsa, Rosalie Peck, John Turner, Aunt Lynn, Mark, Marz Attar, Tom Attar, Carrie Sanders Turner Ricks Attar Sanders, Wood and A, Tia and Fay, Sue Sanders, Sarah Turner, Sarah McClanahan, Iris Grace McClanahan, Samuel Ray McClanahan.
These are the names that are written inside my heart, but my heart will die one day. So I want these names to stay inside this book forever, but if this book is needed for fire, then set this book on fire. Then these names will live inside the other names, inside the invisible ashes. There is enough fire burning inside my secret heart to keep them warm for a long time.
If you recognize any of these names from this book, please write to me, or better yet. Come quick. Tell me they have returned. Tell me they are alive and living well.
And I will tell you something else.
I will tell you that you have been visited by ghosts.
I know there will be other love names to add to these present names. The lovely Eleanor Gould.
They are out there. I am wanting to find them.
I am searching for you.
THE BREAK IN
So Bill did something stupid. A few nights later he was so pissed off he broke into the school. He took a sledgehammer and busted through the walls. He busted a hole in the wall of the cafeteria and stole a whole box full of salt and vinegar potato chip bags. He emptied chalk dust in the hallway and pissed in the chalk dust. The school was wrecked.
The principal went into her office and sighed because she thought her office was left untouched. None of her papers were messed with and none of her filing cabinets were turned over. This was different from the other rooms. She even asked the secretary, “Why would he trash the rest of the school and leave my office alone?” The secretary just shook her head because she didn’t know either. The principal sat down at her desk to call the police and the superintendent’s office. She opened her desk drawer. She reached in for the phone book. And then she screamed. She screamed because she saw a big turd sitting perfectly in the middle of her desk drawer. Someone had crapped it there.
“Damn, that’s cold to shit in somebody’s desk drawer,” Lee said.
I told him this was different though. This was not your ordinary robber. This was a robber who actually took the time to shut the drawer afterward. Most people would have left the drawer open and took off, but this guy was different. This guy was something of an artist.
We found out that Bill had been arrested that afternoon. The police asked me if Bill had been home last night. I told them I didn’t know. The police went through the numbers of absent students for the day and when they went by Bill’s mom’s apartment they found him asleep on the couch with five or six empty salt and vinegar potato chip bags sitting on the floor.
There was only one thing to learn from this.
The world was a weird world.
The world was a joke.
Oh well.
I WENT BACK
So I tried not to think about Bill over the next couple of weeks. I went to school and I studied. They sent Bill away to juvie because he wasn’t an adult. I came home to Bill’s mom’s apartment in the evenings and I studied. I thought about Nathan and I thought about Ruby and I thought about long ago. I thought about long ago so much that I wondered if they were really dead.
But she was dead. I knew she was dead when they all showed up at Ruby’s house over the next couple of months and started gathering up all the stuff they wanted. There was somebody who wanted the pictures (half of them were gone already). There was somebody who wanted the dolls. There was somebody who snuck out the back door with four garbage bags full of stuff. There was my cousin who bought the bed off my uncle and paid for it a couple months later—COD. We watched the rest of them go inside and gather up all the things they wanted in garbage bags. We watched people pull pickup trucks to the front door and fill them full.
Stanley just sat and watched them all and said, “It’s like a bunch of damn vultures. It’s like a bunch of damn vultures licking a bone clean.”
Of course, we got something too, but we didn’t call ourselves vultures. A couple of days earlier, I told my uncle that all I wanted was Nathan’s checkerboard. And so the day after the funeral, my uncle came home holding the checkerboard and said, “Here.”
It was my Uncle Nathan’s checkerboard, all beat up and taped together in the middle. I sat and ran my fingers over the checkerboard and I thought about ghosts.
After it was all done, I saw them again. One night I dreamed we were all back at Grandma Ruby’s and we were all sitting around the table in a big circle. Grandma was in her recliner in the kitchen, talking and ordering people around just like always. Then the rest of the family sat around in a circle, except there wasn’t any table now. Then all of the sudden this man walked in. It was Nathan. At least it looked like Nathan. He was taller and he had a beard. And it was like he had never even suffered from cerebral palsy.
Everybody was like, “You’re walking. You’re walking.”
He walked around the circle, and he shook our hands. He shook my Uncle Terry’s hand. And then he shook my Uncle Stanley’s hand. And then he shook my hand. And that was the thing about it. He wasn’t like I remembered him at all. He was all different now.
He was fucking angry.
I found a video my Uncle Terry made of my Grandma Ruby’s last days. I’d been watching it for weeks now. On the side of it he wrote Ruby Irene Goddard 1917-1997. And so I pushed play and watched the video of my Grandma Ruby in her deathbed, all broken-looking and little. And my Uncle Terry was sitting beside her bed and she was dying.
I started hanging out with this girl Charity. She was over at Bill’s mom’s apartment one night and I asked her if she wanted to watch this video.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Oh it’s this video of my grandma dying.”
She shook her head. “Fuck no. That’s weird.” Then she asked me if this was my idea of being romantic.
So I went back. I took Bill’s car and I took Charity and I drove down to the old house. As I drove up the road I swore I was going to see the house again just like I always saw it. I swore I was going to see the house from far away with its lights on, glowing golden in the night. I swore I was going to see blankets covering the trees and leading up to the door. I wondered if it was going to be like this—if I was going to see the front door open and the screen door closed like in the summertime, and I wondered if I was going to be able to see everything inside the house—Nathan sitting at the head of the table and Ruby hobbling around on her old cane. I wondered if I would see myself from years earlier walking around as well. And that’s what I expected driving by Grandma Ruby’s house in Danese.
But as I drove closer to the house, I realized there wasn’t anything like that anymore.
THERE WEREN’T ANY BLANKETS.
There was just the house and it was all locked up and alone. And it was all boarded up too and there weren’t any lights on anymore. And so I looked to see Nathan sitting at the table but he wasn’t there. And then I looked to see Ruby hobbling around and cooking chicken and gravy on the stove, but she wasn’t there anymore either. I stopped imagining it all because Ruby was in the ground now.
I walked with Charity around the house and found an unlocked door, which I opened and went inside. I felt like a burglar. And it was strange.
It was so empty inside. It looked so empty and broken down. There was the smell of musty carpet in the air and grooves in the floor from where the furniture sat for years. I walked with Charity into where Nathan always leaned against the footrest when he watched
Walker, Texas Ranger
. And then I walked her back into what they called Terry’s room. I saw that the ceiling was falling and water stains were running down the walls and so I said that it was just an old thrown-together place that didn’t even have a foundation really. Now it was falling down. It wouldn’t take long before it would all be gone.
I went into the kitchen and there was an old box of tapes on the floor. It was full of Nathan’s old VHS tapes I used to always watch. There were Gaither Gospel tapes, a couple of workout tapes Nathan bought because there were women wearing bikinis on the cover, and there was an old Johnny Cash tape I always watched on Sundays after dinner. Then we walked through the house to the back. The roof was caving in near the bathroom. There was a hole in the floor in the back porch. We walked out into the backyard where the Johnny house was. I showed her the field where all of the children used to work. Then we heard this squealing.
“What the fuck is that,” Charity said and grabbed my arm. Then she pointed to this possum struggling to walk towards us. It struggled to walk by the tree, but then it fell over, and then it tried to get up again. It looked bloody and there was a sore or a hole in its side where it looked like it had been shot.
“Is it hurt? What’s wrong with it?” Charity asked.
I walked closer to it and looked at it. It wasn’t playing possum.
“Be careful, Scott,” Charity whined.
“It’s rabid,” I said. I circled around and it stared up at me with its tiny, little eyes. I told her it was the strangest thing, but they always come around people when they got to this point. I told her it probably smelled us out here and came running.
“Why would it do that? Why would they want to come around people?”
It flipped and flopped on the ground and tried to walk. There were blood streaks running through its white hair. Then it tried to walk through a hole in a rusty chain-linked fence and got caught. The jagged fence cut and sliced at its skin. It still tried to pull free, but the fence had it now. It was caught in the fence and it was dying.
Then I heard my Uncle Nathan giggling like a demon from somewhere in the dark.
SO I WENT AWAY
I went away from this place and I lived somewhere else. Years passed. When I came back, it was all the same. It had been years, but the place was the same. I started teaching at the school I went to as a boy. It was a substitute gig. The original teacher needed surgery and she would be out for three weeks. There was a little girl there in the 5th grade class and she was so shy she could barely speak. The other 5th grade teacher told me that the little girl’s mother was on drugs. She told me not to get close to the kids like that because they never made it through the school year. They always ended up moving or just disappearing. She told me that she had been to a funeral just a few weeks earlier for a student’s mother who had overdosed.
I discovered a few days into teaching that the little girl couldn’t read. I stayed after school and tried to teach her. I told myself I was helping her, but who knows. Then I went home in the evenings and waited for the next day to come.
I tried looking for Bill, but I couldn’t find him. I asked around but nobody seemed to know. I drove by Ruby’s a time or two, but the house was falling in now and it usually just made me sad.
Then one morning I opened up the local paper and read about a robbery and a murder in the Rupert area of an old woman and her husband. There were two pictures of the suspects they had recently arrested. They were kids I knew from long ago. One was Naked Joe who I last saw a year after high school sitting on top of the monkey bars and shooting a pellet gun at some little kids playing nearby. And then there was this other guy who looked different. He had long red hair over his shoulders and a tattoo on his neck. His hair was long and flowing like a lion’s mane almost. It was so long and curling and flowing you could barely see his face behind the thick red beard. The beard covered his entire face. He looked like somebody from another world. At first I didn’t recognize him but then I saw the name beneath the photo. It was Bill. “Holy shit,” I said looking at his long long hair.