The Poor and the Haunted Read online

Before his mother could say no, Jimmy slipped through the darkened crack and back into the light of the world. Kelly still stood between the cars, eyes closed, hands on the headphones, mouthing the words to “Time after Time.”

  Jimmy could bring Kelly back to the house while he made the call. He could hold her hand as they walked inside. She could sit next to him, on a kitchen chair, while he told the dispatcher, “I think my father’s dead.”

  That wasn’t true though.

  He did not “think” his father was dead. He knew his father was dead. He had to say, “My father is dead.” The dispatcher would ask how he knew, and Jimmy would say, “Because he’s lying in our barn with a knife sticking out of his eye socket.”

  As her big brother, Jimmy could not let Kelly learn about Ronnie by eavesdropping on a conversation with a 911 dispatcher. He would have to tell her as they ran toward the house, and she might cry, and he would stop what he was doing to comfort her, and they would lose precious time. Losing time wasn’t about his father living or dying. Even if his father had a chance—which he did not—Ronnie Lansford’s life wasn’t the most pressing reason to get someone with authority out to the dairy. Someone who carried something stronger than knockoff Pine-Sol.

  Jimmy left Kelly where she was, listening to her favorite song. He would make the 911 call. All he needed to tell the dispatcher was his address, and his father had something big, sharp, and rusty sticking out of his eye.

  And to please come.

  Fast.

  Please.

  Please.

  Then, he would hang up the phone, run back outside, and tell his sister what happened. He would focus on Kelly and wait for the police to deal with his mother. Jimmy ran around the front side of the Firebird, heading toward the small dirt path splitting the tall, fire ant-infested weeds they called a yard. He ascended the short wooden staircase on their front porch and stopped for a moment. Before going inside, he turned away from their front door, his hand still on the rusty old doorknob, and looked back at his sister.

  It’s okay, Jimmy thought. It will be okay, it will be okay, it will be okay, it will be okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay—

  Diane screamed again.

  Jimmy stepped inside the house and headed to the kitchen, where the rotary phone hung from the wall. It was more accurate to call their kitchen a “phone room,” since their parents rarely cooked anything more than fried Spam and Cheez Whiz sandwiches.

  Jimmy picked up the phone and dialed, looking around the crumbling kitchen and rotting wallpaper. This home, Jimmy knew, had been coming apart long before he and Kelly arrived.

  “9-1-1,” the female voice answered. “What is your emergency?”

  “I think—I know my father’s dead.”

  “Repeat yourself, honey.”

  “My father is dead.”

  “How do you—”

  “He has a knife or something coming out of his eye a big knife it might be a piece of farm equipment I’m not sure please send someone now please send someone please please—”

  “Honey, how old are you?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Is your mother there?”

  Jimmy could hear the chaos surrounding the dispatcher.

  “She’s with my father.”

  “Is your mother alive? Is she okay?”

  “She has blood all over her she’s not okay but I don’t think she’s hurt—”

  “Honey, slow down. Can you confirm your address for me?”

  “71657 Torrance Road. We’re in the farmhouse at the dairy.”

  “The Torrance Dairy?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll send someone out. Please, don’t—”

  Jimmy saw his blood-soaked mother staggering toward the house, like a zombie from Night of the Living Dead. This wasn’t as alarming as what he couldn’t see: Kelly no longer stood between the Firebird and the truck. Jimmy dropped the phone, knowing whatever the dispatcher was going to tell him wasn’t half as important as finding his sister. He ran back out the front door, passing his mother on her way up the porch stairs. They exchanged no words, didn’t even bother with a meaningful glance.

  He ran toward the barn, going so fast he failed to hear the crunch beneath his feet as his dirty, cheap sneakers crushed the Walkman Kelly left on the ground.

  Once inside, what Jimmy saw was, in a way, even worse than what he saw the first time he entered the barn. His father was flat on his back, the gaze in his one intact eye directed straight toward the sunlight coming through the holes in the roof. The knife in his other eye socket remained.

  Kelly stood with her back to her brother, facing her father’s body. She squatted down and used her right hand to pick up a rock from the barn’s dirt floor. She stood up, cocked her right hand back, and threw the rock toward their father. Kelly was not a coordinated girl, but rage gave her an ease of movement she otherwise lacked. Jimmy saw it the time she bounded into his room and sank her teeth into their father’s neck.

  The rock connected, bouncing off the side of their father’s head with a thud. He didn’t move. Kelly might as well have thrown a rock at a package of ground beef. Stooping down again, Kelly grabbed another rock, spun, and threw it the opposite direction, toward the door his mother just exited. Jimmy ducked as the rock flew over his hunched body and hit the wall, kicking up dust and hay when it landed.

  Kelly stopped when she saw Jimmy. Her face collapsed, as though everything behind it disappeared: her rage, her spark, the fight Jimmy so loved.

  “Kelly I’m so sorry Kelly I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry,” he said as he took her in his arms.

  Jimmy stood there, holding his sister tight. He began to hear sirens in the distance. Kelly’s eyes were closed; her face pressed against Jimmy’s chest. Jimmy looked at his father’s body and wished harder than he ever wished for anything before. He didn’t wish for his father to stand up and shake it off. He didn’t want to see Ronnie stand, grab the handle, pull, and sneer from one healthy eye socket while saying, “Stop your fucking sniveling, ya pussies, or I’ll give you something to cry about.”

  He wished Kelly didn’t have to see what she was looking at. He wished he could shield his little sister from the hard realities of the world.

  It was too late, though.

  Jimmy held Kelly and opened his own eyes as wide as he could.

  He hoped if he took as much of this scene in as possible, perhaps God would allow Kelly to unsee the grotesque sight of their father. His family didn’t attend church, and Jimmy himself was ambivalent about religion, but he hoped God could find it in His heart to do him this one favor.

  This one solid, as boys his age said.

  The detective who entered the barn first, the detective who later gave Kelly and Jimmy the package of M&Ms in his car, noted in his report that upon walking into the barn he saw a male teenager, approximately fifteen or sixteen, holding a young female, approximately eleven or twelve. They were roughly twenty feet away from the body of a deceased adult male. Though he did not note it in his report, the detective noticed the way the young boy stared at his father’s body. He didn’t seem to blink as he fixed his eyes on the dead man in threadbare Rustlers.

  The detective also collected a bloody suicide note from the
young female and bagged it for evidence.

  Inside the house, investigators found several items of interest: discarded bags containing what the detective considered hell’s unmelted snowflakes, all sorts of pipes and smoking devices, and a loaded handgun, which was curious. A bullet is a far more efficient and less painful way to commit suicide than shoving a rusty piece of farm equipment into your eye. The police also noted the infestation of mice evident throughout the house. The detective made a mental note that the house was almost devoid of food and contained little evidence a family with two children occupied the residence, with the exception of a report card filled with A’s the detective found stuck to a fridge.

  The detective made special note of the report card.

  Upstairs, the detective found Jimmy and Kelly’s mother, still covered in their father’s blood, lighting up a pipe full of crystal. Unlike their father, their mother was still alive, although she was doing her best to change that. By the time the detective found her, she had smoked so much meth she might go into cardiac arrest soon, though the detective suspected she wouldn’t die. It wasn’t just her beauty that was resilient. She was a survivor.

  Like most people who knew Diane Lansford, he came to believe resiliency was one of her worst traits.

  Looking out at the two children huddled together in his cruiser, the young girl asleep with her head on her brother’s shoulder, detective Mike Carlisle knew these children were better off being raised by almost anyone else. And knowing the court system as he did, he knew despite the scene before him today—one parent dying a horrific death, the other parent being found with a pipe in her mouth right as her children were processing their father’s suicide—the courts wouldn’t remove these children from the care of their mother. In the eyes of the court, the addict never gets better by taking his or her children away.

  The judges said the health and welfare of the children were their first priority. But judges, Carlisle learned, were by and large lazy and full of shit. Family court judges knew the fastest way to get through their docket was to side with shitbag parents rather than consider the best interests of the children.

  On the way to the police station—after all the M&Ms were eaten—the Detective stopped at Derry’s, an ice cream place on the edge of town, near the Section 8 homes and apartments. Jimmy didn’t order anything. Kelly got a chocolate-dipped cone. Jimmy said nothing during the entire drive. He looked out the window, his arm around his sister.

  It appeared to the drive-thru staff at Derry’s that Detective Mike Carlisle arrested two children and then stopped on his way to jail to buy them ice cream.

  Carlisle looked out his window, the cruiser’s flashing lights illuminating the early evening as they drove down a darkened two-lane road toward the station. Earlier, another emergency vehicle raced down the same road, its lights and sirens disrupting the stillness of a quiet Saturday afternoon. The ambulance was headed for the hospital, carrying Jimmy and Kelly’s mother.

  On their way into town, Carlisle looked at the stoic young boy and chocolate-stained little girl occupying the same space in his cruiser usually reserved for methheads and thieves.

  Detective Mike Carlisle tried his best not to cry.

  Detective Mike Carlisle did not succeed.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  2019

  Jimmy stood in a storage unit not far from his home in North Phoenix and thought of the last month.

  He knew the handprint in Cedar Rapids hadn’t come from his own hand. Something had been in his hotel room. Though he couldn’t explain it, he didn’t doubt it for a second.

  That didn’t mean he was ready to share his experience with others. He tried with Bill at Jessica’s birthday party. Now, Bill likely thought he was a madman. He learned his lesson after that conversation. When Jill found him in the bathroom during Jessica’s birthday, facedown and snarling at a sink stinking of his own vomit, he explained himself with excuses he knew she didn’t buy.

  “It’s the heat,” he told Jill as she stood outside the bathroom door.

  “It’s a dry heat,” Jill said.

  “But it still gets to me,” he said, looking at the black suede swoosh on the side of his foot.

  His explanation may or may not have convinced Jill, but it didn’t convince himself. Something was in the bathroom with him. He saw the smudge just above the reflection of his own shoulder. He felt the cold shock when he touched the mirror. He sensed pressure on his back as he stared into his own eyeball. He could act like one of those tough guys in the haunting shows Jessica watched and find a thousand different ways to explain away what he experienced, but it wouldn’t work.

  Something had arrived, and if he wanted to learn more about who or what it was, the cardboard box full of tragedy in his storage unit was a good place to start.

  Not everything in the box was terrible. Inside were items that made him smile: The choker and butterfly clips Kelly wore when she was a teenager. A single, well-used pair of white Nike running shoes. A few cross-country medals and ribbons from high school. Jimmy could run a long, long way—and fast.

  Running was easy.

  He would pull the handle on the spotlight in his mind, the glowing beam illuminating a cow-shit-smelling patch of Oklahoma, a crumbling barn rising from scrubland like an unmarked blood-red pauper’s grave, and his legs became the wheels on Clyde Barrow’s 1934 Ford.

  For the most part, though, what was stored in the box was awful. The yellowed government-issued pages that documented and confirmed his father’s death. The knockoff Kmart Reeboks Ronnie Lansford wore the day he died. The nasty, incoherent letters his mother wrote to his father in the year or two after his death, letters Jimmy found and hid before Kelly could read them.

  All these horrors and more, including his father’s suicide note.

  The day of their father’s death, their mother handed Kelly the note in the driveway, kicking Kelly’s foot to get her attention away from the Walkman.

  “Here,” she said, placing Ronnie’s note in Kelly’s hand. She looked around at a house that belonged to someone else. She looked at a young girl she wished belonged to someone else. She looked at two fists full of her own chewed fingernails, her chemical hunger driving her to consume her own body after she ran out of Spam to chew on.

  “Motherfucker don’t want none of this,” Diane said before going inside the house and attempting to meth herself to death. Years later, Kelly repeated the phrase as a joke, and though they should have cried, they laughed. Poor kids do that: laugh when they should cry, and cry when they should laugh.

  At Arizona State, with access to the Internet, Jimmy relentlessly Googled suicide notes to see how his father’s letter stacked up against the last words of others who took their own lives.

  Google confirmed what Jimmy already knew: Like every syllable that ever tumbled from his rotted jaws, Ronnie Lansford’s last words didn’t amount to much.

  IM SORRY I CANT DO THIS ANYMORE THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG INSIDE OF ME I CAN FEEL IT ITS ALWAYS BEEN THERE IT WILL BE BETTER WHEN IM GONE - RONNIE

  One long sentence, unbroken by punctuation. When the police arrived, Detective Carlisle took the note from Kelly and bagged it for evidence. While suicide by impaling oneself through the eyeball is exceptionally rare, the police—though suspicious at first—concluded his father’s death was suicide and released all evidence back to Jimmy’s mother.

  The day Jimmy got the call to pick up his father’s belongings, their mother was gone. Not knowing what else to do, Mike Carlisle brought the sealed evidence bag over to the Lansford house and gave it to Jimmy.

  Disappearing was something Diane did often. One minute their mother was home, the next minute she would vanish for three days on a Taco Bell run. Th
ough Jimmy and Kelly knew she was nowhere near a Taco Bell, they were still disappointed when their mother returned with a pair of dilated pupils and zero Gorditas.

  Jimmy never returned his father’s belongings to his mother, choosing instead to hide the box on the top shelf of the closet he and Kelly shared. In the twenty-two years since his father killed himself, Jimmy focused on one line in his father’s note: I CANT DO THIS ANYMORE.

  Do what? Jimmy used to think. Hold down a job some of the time? Chug vodka? Fire up a glass pipe? Beat the shit out of Diane for not having the good sense to swallow the birth control pills that could have left him the plains-running stallion he imagined himself to be? What was so hard about Ronnie Lansford’s life that he just couldn’t go on? Nothing, as far as Jimmy knew. Now, though, Jimmy focused on another line:

  THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG INSIDE OF ME I CAN FEEL IT

  What did his father mean? Was it cancer? Was he using crystal and vodka to dull an actual physical pain? Or were the drinks and drugs Ronnie’s way of treating schizophrenia, or bi-polar disorder, or some other mental illness? Jimmy did not know. The only person who knew died when Jimmy was twenty-five. It wasn’t suicide, or murder, or an accidental overdose. Diane’s liver quit on her. What her clear complexion and naturally curvy body could survive eventually became too much for her internal organs.

  When he was twenty-five, he got the call from Mike Carlisle. Diane was found dead in her trailer. Like his father’s last words, Diane’s ashes were kept in the large cardboard box.

  He could ask his mother’s ashes what lurked inside his father, but there wouldn’t be much in the way of a worthwhile answer. The container of ashes was about as helpful as the woman was while still alive. She gave her perspective on his father’s death once, when she told Kelly “Motherfucker don’t want none of this.” In all her remaining years, it was the most insightful thing she ever said about the violent drifter she promised to love and honor until the day they died.

  It was up to Jimmy to find out what his father meant by “SOMETHING WRONG INSIDE OF ME.”