The Poor and the Haunted Read online

  Jimmy looked back up, toward his mother, and saw her legs were at an unnatural angle.

  That’s when he realized the legs weren’t his mother’s. Diane Lansford was holding a body, her own legs tucked beneath her, arms wrapped around the shoulders of whoever she mourned. Jimmy moved toward his mother. She did not appear to notice. She just rocked back and forth, her knees bouncing off the barn’s dirt floor.

  Jimmy saw who his mother held in her arms.

  His father’s feet were clad in a pair of Kmart sneakers. His legs were wrapped in Rustler jeans. He was wearing a t-shirt, though what the t-shirt had on it was a mystery. There was too much blood to tell. Jutting from his right eye was a long, rusty piece of metal. Like his wife’s, Ronnie Lanford’s face was a solid red mess.

  His father died when the blade penetrated his orbital socket. Jimmy later learned the tool entered hard and fast enough to travel through a significant portion of his father’s brain and fracture the side of his skull.

  His father was balding. Or had been balding. Ronnie Lansford as a carbon-based being with a scalp and follicles was now past tense. The only remainder was his legacy. That part of Ronnie was all arsenic, and always would be. Moving her face across the bare portions of his skull, his mother let out a one-word cry, “WHY?!”

  Why?

  Jimmy spent the remainder of his youth asking himself that question.

  Why?

  Why couldn’t his parents ever get their shit together? Why couldn’t his father keep a job? Why couldn’t they live in a normal house, in a normal neighborhood? Why did he need his little sister to defend him? Why was his father lying in his mother’s arms with a piece of farm equipment buried in his eye socket? Why, if God had a plan, was this part of the plan?

  His mother asked again.

  “WHY?! JIMMY WHY DID THIS HAPPEN?”

  Jimmy looked up. He watched a jet pass briefly over a jagged hole in the broken wood roof. The day was clear, though he wished it weren’t. It was reasonable to expect death and blood in between thunderstorms on a dark day. It was terrifying to know nightmares didn’t wait for the sun to fade—or for sleep to come. He looked away from the light, the airplane, and back toward his bloody heritage.

  “I don’t know, Mom.”

  It was all he could think to say, because it was the truth. He did not know why his family was dealt a bad hand. Worse, for the life of him, he could not understand why they kept coming back to the same dealer and the same table, over and over.

  He wished again for his mother’s scream. Just once more. He wished for something scary enough to make him run for the door, grab his sister, get in the Firebird, and take off. He needed another scream to confirm what he already knew: though just one parent died, he and Kelly were worse than alone.

  They still had Diane.

  Instead, she didn’t scream, and he didn’t leave. The three of them stuck together—for a while, at least. They left the farm and found a HUD-subsidized place back in town, where they tried to be a family. They didn’t put a lot of effort into this new family (and, other than Jimmy and Kelly, no one put a lot of effort into the old family), but they tried to stay together.

  And they were all worse off for it.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  2019

  Standing in his backyard, Jimmy remembered Jessica’s first birthday party.

  Back then he was still in business school. Jonathan was a toddler, and they lived in a drywall box small enough to make learning to love a close family a requirement. In those days, no one pooped alone, and though awkward at first, a pooping pal grows on you—or at least it did in the Lansford sequel, which, based on the first scene alone, was obviously a much better story than the original.

  Jessica loved balloons—her first word was “BA-woon”—so Jill went overboard on the balloons. This was the daughter they always wanted, and their last first birthday party until they became grandparents.

  Jill asked Jimmy to pick up the balloons from a Party City a couple of miles away from their apartment. When Jimmy arrived in the used Toyota Camry they owned back then, the clerk laughed and said, “Really?”

  “Yes, really,” Jimmy said.

  Jill bought far too many balloons to fit in the Camry. Jimmy drove home with his arm outside the window, holding the balloons as they floated above the car. Several times during the drive back to their apartment he thought he would lose his arm, the balloons, or both.

  The pain in his arm and the laughter from the neighbors were worth it. Jessica spent the entire party with her head bent back, looking toward the ceiling and saying “BA-WOON!” Balloons filled their apartment for weeks. The four of them spontaneously broke into random games of catch and balloon volleyball, Jessica crawling and mauling pink helium bubbles while Jonathan laughed until he peed. A house full of people he loved, balloons, and constant laughter—Jimmy cried once or twice then too, but those tears differed from the tears he cried now.

  Once Jimmy graduated with his MBA and earned a good salary (and then a better salary), every birthday became a bigger production, with a different theme.

  A Backyardigans pool party.

  A Hannah Montana Hollywood movie theatre party.

  A murder mystery party, complete with costumes.

  This year, for Jessica’s twelfth birthday, Jill talked him into hiring a band from Jonathan’s high school, which managed to send a backyard full of twelve-year-old girls into hysterics. Jimmy stood near the sliding glass door sipping a Coke and thinking about how different this party was from anything he experienced as a child.

  He and Kelly never got real birthday parties. They were lucky if either one of their parents remembered their birthdays at all.

  Once, when he was six, Jimmy was invited to a friend’s party at the local McDonald’s. When everyone else was on the playground, including adults, he put his fingers in the birthday cake. It wasn’t enough to ruin the afternoon, but it was enough for Jimmy to leave his mark on the party.

  Later he felt ashamed and told his father. He wanted to be punished for what he did. He wanted to be told he let everyone down.

  Instead, his father laughed and said, “Fuck ’em. Fuck ’em. That’ll teach ’em.” At six, Jimmy wasn’t sure what ruining the birthday cake would teach his friend, other than to never invite Jimmy Lansford to a party again.

  His childhood memories were interrupted by his neighbor, Bill, who sidled up without Jimmy even noticing. Bill was one of the few neighbors Jimmy regularly spoke with.

  “Goes by fast, doesn’t it?” Bill asked.

  “It does, it does go by fast. A lot faster than we think.”

  “Yep,” Bill said. “Hot outside, isn’t it?”

  It is Phoenix, Jimmy thought. Commenting on the heat was like looking at a tomato and saying, “Sure is red, isn’t it?”

  “Yep,” Jimmy said. “But you know what they say. It’s a dry heat.”

  “Dry heat! Ha! Yeah. So is an oven.”

  “Yep. Ovens are hot,” Jimmy said.

  Jimmy preferred small talk to deep conversations. He couldn’t do it today, though. He couldn’t pretend the most important thing on his mind was the heat or the Diamondbacks pitching staff.

  “Can I tell you something, Bill?” Jimmy asked. He ran his hand through the sweaty remains of his hair.

  “Sure thing, buddy,” Bill said.

  Jimmy looked at the collection of strangers in his backyard. Superficially, they were human Old Navy: visually inoffensive, totally unmemorable, straight off the rack. Superficially, he was no different. But deep down, he knew there was more to his neighbors than they presented at a suburban birthday p
arty. What he was looking at was just a collection of storefronts.

  Even Old Navy has skeletons in its closet.

  Or ghosts.

  “I…I think I saw a ghost. In an airport Marriot. On a trip to Cedar Rapids.”

  Jimmy had lived next to Bill for years, and he knew there were a limited number of subjects Bill found worthy of conversation. Ghosts were not on the list of preapproved topics.

  Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was his daughter turning twelve. It’s always difficult to see your kids leave childhood behind, but this birthday was uniquely difficult, and his ability to maintain a conversation about the heat he and Bill shared a hundred times before was gone.

  Bill stared at him, soda halfway to his lips, until he said, “I…really? Mary watches ghost shows all the time. I…guess I don’t believe in that stuff.”

  “I was in the hot tub, in the hotel courtyard, when I saw someone staring back at me from my room. I got the security guard to take a look, and he didn’t see anything. But I did. I saw it.”

  Bill looked panicked. That the conversation deviated at all from their normal list of topics was bad enough, but ghosts?

  “Cedar Rapids,” Bill said. “Huh. I don’t know about ghosts, but I think the city has a minor league team. They’re an affiliate of the Cards, right? No, the Twins? No, the Cubs. No, no. It’s the Twins. No, I think it’s the Reds.”

  This listing of baseball teams would have gone on for quite a while had Jimmy not grabbed the soda from Bill’s hand, raised it to his own lips, and finished it.

  “Like I said, the security guard checked the room and found nothing—no one. Not a thing. We watched the security camera footage, and you couldn’t see anything on that either,” Jimmy said. “So, I went back to the room. There was a handprint on the window. I left…I…I went to Kmart.”

  There was a long moment of silence before Bill said, “Kmart? I didn’t know they still had those. Remember when you were a kid, and your mom took you to get some toys when there was…what did they call that? The red something sale?”

  “The Blue Light Special,” Jimmy said.

  Jimmy never shopped for toys under the blue light. Instead, he remembered Diane buying Spam, Cheese Whiz, and generic white bread. A complete meal, illuminated by one half of a knockoff police siren.

  Jimmy, Bill, and the collection of storefronts gathered in the Lansford backyard understood suburbs are a tradeoff of safety for conformity, variety for comfort. That afternoon Jimmy lost his ability to conform, and Bill lost his sense of comfort.

  “Have a good day, Jimmy,” Bill said. “And tell Jessica I said happy birthday.”

  “Bye, Bill.”

  “And tell her I said not to grow up. It goes by too fast.”

  Bill walked away, looking for his wife. Looking for an excuse to leave the party.

  Jimmy already regretted making Bill feel uncomfortable. Being kind was something he prioritized. Kindness was not a character trait valued by Jimmy’s parents, and he defined himself and his version of the Lansfords in response to his family of origin.

  He went through the sliding glass door and made his way to the half bathroom on the first floor, needing to relieve himself of a bladder full of Coca-Cola.

  After he did his business, he stopped to look in the mirror. He stared at his own reflection. He was starting to lose his hair, the lines across his forehead deepening every year. Every month, lately.

  He was still a good-looking man, but he was no longer a young-looking man.

  For most of his life he could ignore it, but at the early onset of middle age, it was unavoidable: He looked more and more like Ronnie Lansford every day, but when Ronnie died, his face was weathered by rage and Marlboro Reds—not the smile lines that aged Jimmy’s face. But the hair, the nose, the cheekbones, the chin, the coloring, the ear size—all the fleshy ghost of Ronnie Lansford.

  And the eyes.

  Jimmy, without question, owned his father’s eyes.

  The same heavy lids.

  The same blue.

  Jimmy stepped closer toward the mirror. Suddenly he wanted to dart left, just to see if the man in the mirror did the same. For some reason, he doubted it. Instead, he pulled back the lids of his right eye with two fingers.

  The man in the mirror pulled back his lids, too.

  Suddenly he felt pressure across the entire backside of his body. He stood there with his right eye still pulled open.

  He felt light wind, neither hot nor cold, on his neck. The light bulbs in the fixture above the sink glowed steadily brighter, until one burned out. The mirror was dirty, smudged just above his shoulder. He reached toward the mirror and touched the smudge. His entire arm went cold. The backyard BBQ he consumed traveled up his throat, out his mouth, and into the sink. He removed his hand from the mirror and felt whatever it was leave the room.

  The pressure on the backside of his body was gone.

  Jimmy washed his face and rinsed his mouth out before turning the faucet off. He stayed there, stooped over. He ran his tongue along his teeth, the canines sharp and bone-white. Jimmy placed his tongue between his teeth and bit down, bright red staining a mouth full of Blue Cross/Blue Shield-covered alabaster.

  If Jimmy recapped the day as honestly as he could (though he would not do that, not even to Jill), he would say he was talking with his neighbor, perhaps even joking, when he realized he needed to go inside because of the heat. There he vomited in the sink.

  If Jimmy’s observer recapped the events of the day, here’s what it would tell you:

  In the suburbs of Phoenix, a man stands in his backyard drinking a Coke. His neighbor, someone the man knows relatively well, stands by him attempting small talk. The man skips the small talk and tells a strange story about a ghost he thought he saw in Cedar Rapids.

  The man turns away from his neighbor to enter his home, where he makes his way to the restroom. He stares at himself in the mirror for several minutes. The man’s hair is a sweaty mess, pasted to his forehead by the perspiration that comes even during a dry heat.

  Once near the mirror—so close his nose almost touches the glass—the man pulls his right eyelids apart, stretching them as far they will go. The man observes his own eye, staring straight ahead, before touching the mirror. While looking at whatever he sees over his shoulder, the man spontaneously vomits, and then bites his own tongue until drops of blood splatter the spotless sink. After vomiting, the man removes his hand from the mirror and begins scrubbing his face and rinsing his mouth out.

  Most troublingly, the man remains bent over for quite some time, his teeth bared at the sink, even as everyone gathers to sing Happy Birthday.

  CHAPTER SIX

  1997

  Who made sure Kelly got dressed and ready for school when she was too little to do it herself? Jimmy. If he didn’t do it, no one else would. Who put a blanket over his mother or father when one or both passed out on the front porch, too wasted to make it to their bed?

  Jimmy.

  In the Lansford home, normal was not an option, and Jimmy faced two choices: Let life eat him and Kelly alive, or shoulder more of the burden than any child should. If he saw something needing cleaning, which in their house was everything—drunks and drug addicts make lousy housekeepers—Jimmy cleaned it.

  But store-brand Pine-Sol could only mask so much, and lemon-fresh rot was still rot.

  Standing there in the interior shadows of a ruined barn as his mother clutched his father’s bloody body, Jimmy knew generic Pine-Sol—even mixed with a little bleach—could not clean this mess up.

  “Mom,” he said.

  “Ronnie! Oh, Ronnie. RONNIE!” h
is mother cried.

  Like Jimmy, Ronnie Lansford did not have a proper name. Ronnie was not short for Ronald. Jimmy was not short for James. Even if Jimmy never went to a good college, never bought a nice house and a new car, and never married a pretty wife, he swore if he ever had a son, he would give him a proper name.

  And he would never, ever shorten his son’s name.

  “Ronnie! RONNIE! FUCK YOU! Ronnie!” his mother screamed, still rubbing her face on his father’s bloody scalp.

  “Mom?”

  Nothing.

  The barn was still, and when his mother wasn’t wailing, quiet enough he could hear mice running back and forth in the hayloft. These mice were likely cousins of the sons of bitches who stole Jimmy’s Oreos. He had a vision of walking toward his father’s body, yanking the blade from his eye socket, and climbing the stairs to the hayloft before going full Lizzie Borden on every mouse he saw.

  Mouse parts flew through his imagination, going so high white underbellies and pink tails shot through plane engines, raining blood on the Lansford’s borrowed patch of Oklahoma cow pasture. The sky would darken, and Jimmy would be the one to darken it.

  “MOM! LISTEN TO ME!”

  His mother looked toward him. She was still—despite all the fried county commodity food, crystal meth, and hard liquor she consumed; despite the occasional beating she endured at the hands of Ronnie Lansford—a beautiful woman. Diane’s Farrah Fawcett face could not be beaten, smoked, snorted, injected, or drunk away. Other than money, his mother’s looks were the biggest reason for his parents’ constant battles.

  “Mom, I’m going—I’m going to call the cops.”