Dead Men Scare Me Stupid (4 page)

Finally she had
had enough. She stormed out, throwing her engagement ring back at me and saying
she would never darken my door again. Hey, I thought, these ghosts are all
right. I’d been trying to get her to do that for a year. Not only that, but it
was a previous boyfriend who had bought that ring for her, not me. So I was up
one ring on the deal.

I decided right
then and there that I had been a fool to resist. A couple of ghosts were
probably just what I had needed all along.

“From now on,
we’re partners,” I said, shaking their clammy hands. “Welcome to the firm.”

They looked at me
with surprise, and, unless I imagined it, a little dismay.

I got on the
phone to order some little desks for them.

I don’t know how
I lived all those years without slaves. I honestly don’t. It’s a little thing,
but it makes all the difference if you want to live the good life.

From the moment I
got the Spirit World working for me, my life became a breeze. Anything I wanted
just floated into my hands. Things I didn’t want anymore were quickly taken
away. And if anything got in my path, it was violently hurled aside by an
unseen force.

“Scare that guy,”
I would say regally as I walked down Main Street with the fellas. “Bring me a
beer. Knock those children out of my way.” And all my wishes instantly came
true. It was wonderful. I was finally living the kind of life Frank Burly
deserved. Finally life was fair.

I had Ed and Fred
doing everything for me: doing all the legwork on my cases, making sure my clients
paid their bills on time, painting my house the “Color of the Week”, preparing
my meals and snacks, even bathing and dressing me and my clients. You name
something a slave can do for his beloved master and they were doing it for me.

“No,” I would say,
“I think the couch would look better over there. No, second thoughts, back
where it was is better. Tell you what, why don’t you keep moving it back and
forth like that. I like that. The constant movement appeals to my aesthetic
sense.”

And they had to do
it, because it was helping me, see? Of course, they did their share of griping.
All slaves do that, I’m told. But every time they complained, all I had to do
was remind them of why they were here.

“Hey, listen,
Burly…” Ed would begin, after I had told him to put in a new lawn, for example
– the one he had put in last week wasn’t new anymore. It had birds on it now -
but before he could get any farther I would stifle his complaints with a wave
of my hand.

“You want to help
me, don’t you?”

“Well, sure, but…”

“You want to do
your good deed.”

“Yeah.”

“You still like
my face as much as ever, don’t you?”

“I guess.”

“Well my face
needs a new lawn. So let’s get going. Chop chop.”

Life had become a
dream for me. Nothing was hard. Everything was easy. I didn’t even have to do
my own walking anymore. My legs were moved up and down for me, as I strolled
down the street, while I relaxed and ate grapes. I didn’t even have to buy the
grapes. They were stolen for me. Nothing I wanted in life was denied me. If I
coveted my neighbor’s ass, I got it.

Of course there’s
more to be gained from Heavenly Help than mere creature comforts. There’s money
to be made, too.

In one weekend at
a gambling casino, thanks to a little invisible help, I won $428. I probably
would have won more, but I only was betting one dollar chips. Better safe than
sorry, I always say. And I probably shouldn’t have changed some of my bets at
the last second when I got one of those sudden wild hunches of mine. Those
hunch bets all turned out to be losers. But it wasn’t the amount of money I had
won that mattered, it was the feeling that I hadn’t earned any of it. There’s
no better feeling than that.

The best part of
all this was that I knew it would never end. All good things must come to an
end for other people. For the suckers. But not for me. The rules didn’t apply
to me anymore. I was the King of the Spirit World. Make way for the King.

Then one evening
it all ended.

I had just had
one of the best days of my life. You know those kinds of days where everything
just goes right? Where everybody else’s tax refunds end up in your mailbox?
Where your business rivals spend the whole day stuck in elevators and all their
clients have to come to you? Where the horse you bet on is the only horse in
the race that doesn’t get spooked by something? Where the IRS man who’s coming
to talk to you about stolen tax refunds meets with, like, an accident? You know
days like that? Well it was one of those kinds of days for me.

I was sitting in
my easy chair, smoking a fine Cuban cigar that had been yanked out of Castro’s
mouth for me, while my little helpers, worn out from their day’s exertions on
my behalf, were tiredly soaking their feet in ghostly buckets of water.

“Whose idea was
it to be nice to him?” asked Fred.

“It was my idea,”
replied Ed, pouring more hot water into the bucket, “and it made sense in
theory. Piles of sense.”

“Well, look where
we are now. Look where your precious theories have gotten us. He’s got us
working our butts off here, and his life is better than it was, not worse.”

I had been
listening to this exchange. I tapped my foot. “Those clippings won’t paste
themselves into my scrapbook by themselves,” I said.

“Screw your
scrapbook,” said Fred.

I was stunned.
Nobody talks that way about my scrapbook. What had gotten into my slaves today?
Griping I could understand. I’ve been known to gripe myself from time to time,
when nothing else would work, but this bordered on insubordination. I rose up
to my full height, towering a full ¼ inch higher than before. My back really
hurts when I do that, but it’s worth it because I’m definitely taller.

“What’s that?” I
demanded.

They rose up to
their full heights and looked at me in a way that reminded me of how afraid of
ghosts I am. They had never looked at me like that before.

“Hey, what’s the
matter with you guys?” I asked, looking worriedly from one malevolent face to
the other, “Are you sick or something?”

“We’re sick all
right,” said Ed, grimly. “We’re sick of you.”

“Me? How could
you be sick of me? I’m your pal! Your buddy! Your hero! You came here all the
way from Heaven just to help me.”

“No we didn’t.”

“Huh?”

“What kind of
saps do you think we are?” asked Fred.

“Well…” I began.
Then I stopped. I wasn’t sure calling them any kind of saps would be a good
idea right now. So I didn’t say any more. I just waited for them to say
something.

That’s when they
told me the truth. They said they hadn’t come here to help me at all. Their
plan had been to pretend to be helping me, but in doing so to screw up my life
horribly. By now, they said, the cops should have arrested me on dozens of
charges, from intimidation to murder. My friends should have abandoned me for
acting so haunted all the time (I had fooled them there. I have no friends),
and my business should have folded for the same reason. They didn’t know what
had gone wrong. Maybe their plan had failed because it was too clever. (That’s
why my plans fail too!) Anyway, they were through being clever, they told me.
Their new plan was to just wreck my life as quickly as possible and get the
heck out of here.

I couldn’t fathom
any of this. It didn’t make sense to me.

“But why are you
doing this? What have I ever done to you?”

“Well, you killed
us,” said Fred.

“And I
apologized, didn’t I? And you said… well, I forget exactly what you said… but
I’m pretty sure you accepted my apology. Besides, you said you liked being
dead.”

“We don’t,” said
Fred. “It stinks.”

“But the ice
skating…”

“It stinks, I
tell you. Never mind about the ice skating. That’s not important.”

“Because of you, we’re
doomed to wander the Earth as ghosts for the next thirty years,” said Ed.

“I don’t
understand,” I said.

They made some
cheap cracks about me not understanding anything – the usual stuff. I get it
all the time. It doesn’t even bother me anymore – then they gave me a short
course in how the afterlife works.

They said that
ghosts are people who aren’t supposed to be dead yet. Their time isn’t up. So
there’s no place for them in the afterlife yet. Their clouds aren’t ready –
they have to be painted or fumigated or something. I wasn’t clear on that
point. Anyway they’re not ready. So people who die earlier than scheduled have
to hang around here and wait. Ed and Fred said they were going to be stuck here
until 2038, with nothing to do. That’s why they were so steamed at me.

I was stunned. I
didn’t know what to say. I handed them another scrapbook and told them to get
pasting. They refused. They said they weren’t my little helpers anymore. They
were my enemies now.

I tried to smooth
things over. I made a little speech. I said that whatever our differences had
been in the past, no matter who killed who, I was confident that… hey, where
did they go?

I looked out in
the corridor to see if maybe they were out there spit-shining my door, like I
had told them to do earlier that day. They weren’t. Then I checked the elevator
to see if maybe they were in there installing that shower I wanted. They
weren’t there either. I started to get the feeling that my little speech hadn’t
smoothed things over as well as I’d hoped.

It hadn’t.

From that moment
forward, Ed and Fred did everything they could to get me in as much trouble as
possible. Every time I walked past a policeman, for example, I would hear him
say: “Hey, who kicked me in the ass?” And then two voices, neither one of them
mine, would say: “I did it. Me. Frank Burly”. This always doubly pissed off the
cops. Not only was I not showing proper respect for a police officer, I wasn’t
even bothering to sync up my words with my mouth. There’s no law about that, of
course, but the police don’t like it.

And every time I
walked past a building it suddenly caught fire. When the fire department
arrived, my arms were always full of gas cans, political manifestos, and
suicide notes. And the only explanation I could think of to give them was a
weak laugh – a laugh that got weaker the longer they looked at me. Each of
these fires was deemed “suspicious”. And so was I.

Dead bodies began
appearing all around me: all over my property, in my bed, in my office, and
leaning up against the side of my house. I wasn’t sure whether Ed and Fred were
killing all of these people or just digging them up somewhere, but it didn’t
really matter, from my point of view. Either way, it made me look bad.

“What’s all this
then?” a policeman would say, gazing at all the corpses on my roof.

“This isn’t what
it looks like, officer,” I would say.

“It better not
be.”

“It’s just a
gag.”

“Gag, eh?”

“Yes.”

“It needs some
work.”

“I realize that
officer.”

“It’s not funny,
for one thing.”

“No, I suppose
not. And yet…”

“And it doesn’t
seem to be about anything.”

“It needs work
all right.”

“Got any more
gags like this?”

“Not at this
time, officer.”

“Good.”

I had a hard time
moving all the corpses off of my property, because most of the time I couldn’t
find my car. It was usually roaming around Central City by itself, with the
words “Frank Burly Special” painted on the side, causing wrecks, knocking over
pedestrians, and double parking in front of the police station and leaning on
its horn. It was racking up over 400 traffic violations a day for me. The cops
ran out of ticket books at one point. They had to order some more.

I probably should
have been arrested right away for all of these crimes I seemed to be
committing, but I wasn’t.

Fortunately for
me, our new police chief was a very methodical man. He was tired of losing
cases in court because a piece of evidence was thrown out for being bullshit.
He insisted that his men collect every possible shred of evidence before an
arrest was made. This backfired in my case, because I was giving the police
more evidence against me every day. Better evidence, too. No policeman in his
right mind would want to go to trial without all this great new evidence I was
giving him. So if I didn’t stop, or at least slow down, they’d never catch up.

They did ask me
to come downtown frequently to discuss all the crimes that were being committed
in Central City, and my possible starring role in them. In fact, I was at the
police station so often they gave me a reserved parking place next to the entrance.
It was a better spot than the chief had. But they weren’t ready to arrest me
yet. Just a little more evidence. They had to make sure. They knew if they blew
this one they would be laughed out of the law business.

Another reason
the police hadn’t arrested me yet was that they were being kept very busy
looking into all of the hallucinations that had been occurring around town;
landmarks would disappear and then reappear again, sometimes looking slightly
different; streets would suddenly be pointing in different directions and be
named for people no one had ever heard of, like “William Howard Taft”; statues
in city parks would suddenly be of different guys, or of the same guy riding a
different horse, or the same horse with an entirely different name; and nuclear
bomb clouds sprang up everywhere, then faded away, leaving no damage that
anyone could see.

Nobody seemed to
know what to make of all these hallucinations, but since they didn’t appear to
be dangerous, no one was too concerned. But the police had to investigate them
all, which left them with less time than they would have liked to investigate
what appeared to be the only really dangerous thing in Central City right then
- me.