Ghost Town (7 page)

I did the math.

When Paisley folded its tent, so to speak, there had been three hundred and fifteen full-time residents, not counting the parttime migrants who worked at the plant to help get ready for the Christmas season, or the proven idiots (methamphetamine manufacturers) who could hardly be designated as human.

There are twenty-four exposures on a roll of film. Let's say that with my amateur skill and general guesswork about ghost pictures I could get eight former Paisleyans per roll, if I was lucky. That's three shots each, so I would need to buy forty rolls of film.

Wal-Mart sells thirty-five-millimeter film for less than two dollars a roll, so that would mean around eighty dollars for film and another, say, twenty for batteries, and then there would be the processing charges at Sparkle Snapshot, which had been running nearly five dollars a roll, so that's another two hundred bucks, easy.

Whew!
I thought.
No wonder so many artists apply for government grants.

Where would I get the money?

MONEY
! It's the grease for everything from art to business to space exploration.

The only thing of value I owned was my father's camera.

Disconsolate and discouraged, I set the lens for macro and aimlessly aimed my camera at my bare toe, the little one on the left foot, the one that curves to fit neatly into the row with the others, the one with only a tiny sliver of a toenail, the baby piggy that cried, "Wee, wee, wee," all the way home.

Or possibly it was "Oui, oui, oui."

One never knows the origins of those odd old stories.

Sighing, I examined the image before me with little interest and snapped the shutter.

Instantly, my toe disappeared.

Holy smokes!
I thought, recalling the Haitian witch doctor's widow's warning: "Never use it to take a picture of yourself."

That lady wasn't kidding!

My financial dilemma remained unresolved for days. I continued to study the catalogs.

Who knew there were so many different kinds of stemware, vacuum cleaners, toilet seats, rubber bands, and chickens? You name it and there's somebody out there somewhere who's put together a catalog with a hundred variations on it.

One day, I was delighted to receive the latest edition of
Uncle Milton's Thousand Things You Thought You'd Never Find.
On page two it carried a two-line message inside a thick-bordered black box that read, "In Memoriam. Felix D. Katz, M.D."

Hmm,
I thought.
Could Dr. Katz have been the one who got my lucky talisman?

On page three was featured the Paisley-made joke-telling fish key chain that I'd gotten so long ago at Wal-Mart (for the price of a roll of film, I now realized!).

Uncle Milton's price was nine ninety-five.

That's a lot of money for a key chain,
I thought.

That was when it dawned on me that Uncle Milton Swartzman must have a lot of money!

From there, the next thought was easy:
Write to Uncle Milton and ask him to underwrite my art project.

Dear Mr. Swartzman,
I wrote.

I'm so sorry to learn about your friend. Was it sudden? I hope he didn't suffer. Was it the lucky talisman?

The purpose of my letter is this: I am embarking on a major artistic undertaking involving the use of my own (presumed) ghost camera. I have calculated my expenses at three hundred dollars. Where I come from, that's a lot of money. I was wondering if you'd be willing to assist me. You are the only rich person I know. Otherwise, I wouldn't bother you. Actually, you are one of the few people I know, period, but that's another story.

Thanks for considering my request.

Sincerely,

Spencer Adams Honesty

PS. Where are the Cayman Islands?

PIPS. I enclose three poems written by my Indian friend. It wasn't my idea. He insisted.

Instead of having to wait a fortnight, I received Uncle Milton's reply at the end of the week, delivered right to my front door by FedEx. This in itself made for considerable excitement. Strangers rarely came to Paisley.

"I would have been here yesterday," the driver explained, "but I had trouble finding your town. Then, when finally I did find it, I took a look around and said, 'Criminy, what's the rush?'"

"Would you care to stay for dinner?" my mother asked. "It's fried chicken."

"I'd love to, ma'am," he said, "but I've got to get back to Kansas City to reload."

"I understand," my mother replied, disappointed.

Dear Kid,
Milton Swartzman wrote:

I don't hand out money to anybody. It goes against all my principles, which are principally about my money. I will make you a deal, however. I will pay you five bucks apiece for as many of those bad luck amulets as you can talk your Indian pal into carving. They ll be a great addition to my catalog. That doctor had just stepped outside the hospital when a grand piano fell on him from five stories up. Splat! Just like that. Unfortunately, with my bad leg I was unable to recover the talisman. So you guys get busy and get me some more. You know, in a funny way, it's lucky you live in such a hard luck place. You could make some real dough.

Very truly yours,

Milton Swartzman

President and Publisher,
Uncle Milton's Thousand Things You Thought You'd Never Find

P.S. The Cayman Islands are located in the Caribbean Sea between Cuba and Honduras.

P.P.S. Your friend carves knickknacks a lot better than he writes poetry.

P.PP.S. The nurse came into my room to tell me about the doctor's accident and said, "In a way, he was very lucky."

"How's that?" I asked.

"Well," she replied, "it was a Steinway. That's the best there is."

I folded the letter carefully and slipped it back into the colorful FedEx cardboard envelope.

So here was the deal: By exporting Paisley's bad luck to the Cayman Islands one notched bee burl at a time, I could soon have the three hundred dollars I needed for my ambitious Paisley memorial photo-art project.

The big question now was how to convince Chief Leopard Frog to carve sixty more talismans. That's a pretty big order for an otherwise idle whittler.

I FOUND CHIEF LEOPARD FROG
on the porch swing, feeding Cheetos to a squirrel.

"You're making his face orange," I observed.

"War paint," Chief Leopard Frog replied. "A great tradition."

"Okee-dokee," I said. "But it seems to me that it's not that much different from stirring up bees."

"It's completely different," Chief Leopard Frog replied.

Hmmm,
I thought.
He seems to be somewhat miffed with me. Have I been neglecting him lately?

Even when dealing with imaginary friends, it's important to be sensitive to their idiosyncrasies. So I started over, this time using a different approach, one based on the principles of salesmanship—flattery and lying—that, unknowingly, I'd begun to pick up from my contact with Milton Swartzman.

"Hey, guess what?" I said. "That publisher loved your poems."

"Really?" Chief Leopard Frog replied. His voice, his posture, and his demeanor suddenly brightened. "Which one did he like best?"

"He liked them all equally well," I fibbed. "He said there was no way to choose a favorite. He wants to see more."

"No kidding," Chief Leopard Frog said. "This is wonderful news."

"I hope you don't mind," I added, digging the hole deeper, "but I also let him see the talisman you made for me. He said you are truly a gifted artist capable of profound expression in many media."

"Wow," Chief Leopard Frog responded. "He said that?"

"Mmm-hmm," I replied.

"So what happens next?" Chief Leopard Frog inquired earnestly, dumping the entire bag of Cheetos at the feet of the squirrel, which was now covered in salty, cheese-flavored, iridescent orange dust.

Timing is everything. In photography. In fishing. In manipulating imaginary friends. You have to know when to set the hook.

"What do you mean, 'next'?" I asked disingenuously.

Chief Leopard Frog was always one for tradition. He spoke of tradition as if something that had happened in the past was more important—even sacred—just because it happened a long time ago. So I was simply following Chief Leopard Frog's ideas about tradition when I proceeded to deceive him for my own personal gain.

White men have been deceiving Native Americans for personal gain since the first greedy European set foot on this vast continent. The practice continues to this very day, as seen with all the gambling casinos in such unlikely places as Oklahoma and South Dakota. To my convenient way of thinking, there is no more long-standing tradition in the relationship between Indians and whites than relentless mutual exploitation.

Thus, my conscience shuddered only slightly when I said, "He wants to publish a book of your poems in conjunction with an exhibit of your art. He needs about sixty talismans and an equal number of poems. Can you do it?"

"It may take a while," Chief Leopard Frog replied. "But yes, of course I can."

"Way to go," I said encouragingly. "Let's get started right away, shall we?"

"I'll need some fresh notebooks," he said.

"Why don't we do the talismans first," I suggested. "We can always do a rush job later on the poems. How hard is it to write a poem?"

"Then I'll have to find another bee tree," Chief Leopard Frog explained. "That last one is about petered out."

"I'll help you," I replied. "Just follow the bees, right?"

One Sunday morning, back when there had been a First United Methodist Church of Paisley, the Reverend Dr. F. Foster Frost preached these words:

"Someday," he declared to his tiny congregation, a well-intentioned group that included my mother and myself, "God will demand that you pay for your sins."

In my experience, Dr. Frost was dead wrong. There's no "someday" about it. It's more like "within forty-five minutes. If you're really lucky, half a day."

Three hours after Chief Leopard Frog and I struck out in search of a new bee tree, I lay swollen and writhing in pain in my nest of quilts.

"Didn't I tell you that you're allergic to bee stings?" my mother shouted. "I'm beginning to wonder if you
can
be homeschooled. You're such a slow leaner."

"Ohhhh," I replied.

God's punishment is swift.

Meanwhile, however, Chief Leopard Frog sat outside on the front porch, whistling a happy tune as he whittled away like a happy-go-lucky dwarf in a Disney cartoon.

NO SOONER WERE WE ALL AFLUTTER
, what with poems and talismans, than Paisley, Kansas, was deflated like a hot-air balloon shot in its side by a vintage two-barrel shotgun.

Ka-ploop!

Things slowed down after that, and in Paisley, let me tell you, that's pretty doggone slow. Any slower and it would have been on a par with glacier formation or amber solidification.

I recovered from bee stings and broken bones and a bonked head while Chief Leopard Frog whittled and wrote poetry and whittled some more and my mother watched
Oprah
on TV and nobody but nobody came down our road, not even the FedEx man, who I had been certain would be back for my mother's fried chicken.

Pumpkins grew. Spiders crawled. My toe, the one I'd accidentally photographed into the fourth dimension, remained missing.

During this interlude I paused to reflect on the outrageous lie I had told my best friend. I was in a situation of my own making in which I could not defend my actions. That I was encouraged to do so by others, namely Milton Swartzman, only made it worse, because it proved me to be a moral weakling.

And yet I needed the money.

Isn't that what bank robbers say?

I was no better than a bank robber.

If it were not for the warning from the witch doctor's widow, I would have taken my own macro portrait.

That's how small I felt.

Like a bug.

Somehow, I was going to have to tell Chief Leopard Frog the truth.

Ohhhh,
I thought to myself.
I'd rather be stung by bees!

"How's it coming?" I asked him, taking a seat beside him on the porch.

"Many talismans. Many poems. Many more to do," he replied.

"I wish I could help, but I simply don't have your talent," I said.

"All art comes from the same source," Chief Leopard Frog observed.

"I reckon," I replied. "But I couldn't write a poem if my future depended on it."

"You photograph poems," Chief Leopard Frog said. "Very fine, very beautiful, revealing a magic world."

"Why, thank you, Chief. That's kind of you to say," I answered, sincerely flattered. "I'd like to be able to do more, but it's expensive."

"All art is costly to the artist," he replied. "Consider poetry. Each word must be torn from the heart. Very expensive. Very painful."

"Hmm," I said. "I hadn't thought of it like that."

I put a roll of film in my camera to photograph Chief Leopard Frog's work in progress. I figured that if nothing else, Milton Swartzman could use a snapshot for his catalog. Also, I wanted to record Chief Leopard Frog's art before it was dispersed throughout an unwary world. The detail in his carving, as always, was astonishing.

By the time the film came back from Sparkle Snapshot in St. Louis, Chief Leopard Frog had completed forty individual pieces and an equal number of new poems, each poem associated in some way with one of the carvings.

My feelings of guilt rose steadily, like the
DRINK COCA-COLA IN BOTTLES
thermometer outside Mel's (closed forever) Bait Shop on a summer day in Paisley, Kansas. Not just for hoodwinking Chief Leopard Frog, but also for unleashing Paisley's bad luck on an unprepared planet.

The talisman pictures turned out nicely. I also appreciated the bonus shot of Maureen Balderson in the bathtub. By now I'd come to expect such things, but this one was especially interesting. I'd forgotten what a nice smile she had.