The Poor and the Haunted Read online

  “Please hurry,” she said. He caught the first forty percent of a sob before she hung up the phone. Jimmy imagined his little sister there, alone in the kitchen, as she placed the handset on the same rotary phone they had back on the farm into its cradle.

  He pressed the off button on the Lucidos’ cordless, and Julie immediately asked, “Is everything okay?”

  Jimmy’s best friend and his best friend’s mom both looked at him, their shared facial structure showing equal parts pity, compassion, and genuine concern.

  “I don’t know. I gotta go home. Kelly needs me.”

  “Do you need me to call the police?” Julie asked, knowing what the answer would be. They had different versions of this same conversation on multiple occasions.

  He knew he should call the police, knew he could even call Detective Carlisle directly and avoid the fiasco of their patchy front yard being illuminated by flashing reds and blues. While he could do that, he was pretty sure the person in the Firebird was his mother. She was probably banging away on the dash and the steering wheel, angry her car wouldn’t start. Again.

  “No, I think everything is okay. I just need to get home.”

  “I’ll start the car. Meet me outside, I’ll pack your stuff up and bring it to you tomorrow,” Julie said. The path from Brian’s middle-class street to Jimmy’s Section 8 home was long, winding, and marked with unnecessary obstacles. But if he ran, he could cut through yards, ignore stoplights, and do whatever it took to get to his sister as fast he could.

  “I’ll run.”

  Julie recoiled like Jimmy slapped her.

  “Jimmy Lansford, you will not.”

  She didn’t have to say Jimmy would run right through the worst part of town. Though Garrity was relatively small, the drug trade was run by men who maintained market share in neighborhoods like Jimmy’s by using extreme violence.

  “Ms. Lucido—”

  “Jimmy, you know you can call me Julie.”

  “Julie, I can get there faster by running.”

  “Jimmy—”

  Julie’s objections fell on deaf ears. Jimmy laced up the Nikes Carlisle bought him and was out Brian’s door before she could stop him. Within a few seconds he was running down the smooth concrete path splitting the Lucidos’ manicured lawn.

  Jimmy ran past the other upper-middle-class homes until they slowly became lower- middle-class, Toyotas and the occasional Lexus replaced by late-model Chevrolet Blazers. Decent homes then morphed into 24-hour gas stations and liquor stores and smoke shops, where customers didn’t even bother to open their car doors before twisting open one of the six Mickey’s malt liquor grenades they just purchased. He ran until the liquor stores and smoke shops faded into apartment buildings and trailer parks, dwellings that would one day be extracted from the ground like rotted teeth and blown all the way to Missouri by an Oklahoma tornado. The farther he ran, the less reliable lighting he had, and his silhouette passed in and out of the few remaining streetlights; one second Jimmy was in the spotlight, the next he was swallowed by the night.

  As he ran, Jimmy ignored late-night catcalls from drunks who had the good sense to have their Mickey’s already on hand. Men who peaked four years after they left their mother’s womb sat on their front porches mocking a boy who knew how and when to run.

  Jimmy reached their house and used the key to open the front door. He found Kelly, wide-eyed and sitting on their couch, a weight plate in her hands, just like Jimmy taught her. She wore one of his cross-country shirts and pajama pants, her brown hair up in a ponytail.

  Kelly had changed in the year since their father died. Regular brushes with terror made his sister look and sound more and more like a little girl. Jimmy hoped it was temporary. He needed her hard edges. He would always remember his father’s fist looming above his face, knuckles white, as Kelly leapt on Ronnie’s back and bit into the stinking stubble-flecked flesh of their father’s neck.

  Jimmy went in their kitchen and looked out the window. Kelly was right; there were people inside the Firebird. The car rocked from side to side, the rusty shocks emitting soft, squeaky moans.

  “Hand me that,” he said, pointing to the weight plate in Kelly’s hands.

  Kelly walked over and gave Jimmy the weight plate.

  “Same thing,” he said. “Don’t let anyone in unless it’s me. Not even mom.”

  “Kay,” she said.

  Jimmy opened their backdoor and stepped into a backyard choked with cigarette butts and empty brown bags stained dark with Tater tot grease. He accidently kicked a beer can. Milwaukee’s Best sloshed around the bottom. A little beer spilled on the front of his shoes. Of all his material possessions, his Nikes were most important to him. The first night he owned them he fell asleep with his face buried in a shoe, smelling first-hand footwear for the first time in his life.

  “Fuck,” he whispered, looking down at the beer stain on the toe of his Nike.

  The Firebird continued rocking. Jimmy kept the weight plate cocked above his head, ready to bring the iron down hard on anyone who might jump out and rush him.

  The only light in the backyard came from the weak glow of their kitchen window. The spot where the backyard faded into a dirt alley was almost pitch black. Whatever was happening in the Firebird was happening on the passenger side of the vehicle, the side obscured by the web of cracks in the glass. Jimmy moved slowly through the tall grass until he could see into the car.

  In the passenger seat sat a man with long salt-and-pepper hair and a short goatee, his tattooed arms bulging from his sleeveless shirt. A lit cigarette dangled from his mouth, the ash ready to fall at any moment. Facing the man, in his lap, was his mother. She didn’t have her shirt or pants on, and her eyes were closed. On the driver’s seat there were several crumpled bills, some fives and tens—but mostly ones—a can of Milwaukee’s Best, a cloudy pipe, and a bag of white rocks.

  Just like earlier in the night, Jimmy ran. Back through the backyard, up the stairs, onto the porch, and through the backdoor. Kelly was waiting on the couch for him holding another weight plate, ready to let her wrists do the work.

  “Come with me,” Jimmy said.

  “Who’s out there?” Kelly asked.

  “You’re going to help me. I need to practice. I need to run,” Jimmy said, leading Kelly back to their shared bedroom.

  “Right now?”

  “Yes, right now,” Jimmy said, looking back toward the kitchen. Outside, the Firebird still rocked, still moved side to side. Kelly grabbed her brother’s hand, their fingers locking together. They didn’t hold hands like lovers at a matinee. They white-knuckle gripped each other the way the condemned do when they are marched toward their end.

  “Jimmy, I don’t—”

  “Kelly, please. Please run with me.”

  Kelly stood on her tiptoes, peering back down the hallway.

  “Who was out there?”

  “Mom.”

  “Mom? What’s she doing? Why are we running from mom?”

  “Please, Kelly. We need to get out of here.”

  She sighed and looked at the door to their backyard.

  “Okay,” she said, “but mom borrowed my shoes.”

  Jimmy spit on his hands, rubbed them together, and used them to wipe the slight yellow of the beer from the toe of his right Nike.

  “You’ll wear these. It will be okay.”

  “Jimmy! I can’t wear your shoes. They’re huge on me.”

  Jimmy stood up and placed his hands on his sister’s shoulders.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “These shoes are magic. Carlisle knew that. That’s why he bought them.”


  Kelly squeezed his hand tighter and looked up at her brother “You don’t need magic shoes. You’re fast as shit, Jimmy. Everyone knows that.”

  “Exactly. But if you wear magic shoes, you’ll be fast as shit too.”

  Kelly didn’t believe in magic—she knew they couldn’t afford a hat, let alone a rabbit—but she believed in her brother. Fiercely.

  “Kay,” she said.

  Though Jimmy hadn’t laced Kelly up in years, that night he bent down and put his prized possessions on his sister’s feet. Once he finished with Kelly, Jimmy laced up his old sneakers, kept in a box under his bed just in case his mother pawned his Nikes.

  “Let’s go,” he said, grabbing Kelly’s hand.

  Once out the door Jimmy started running, moderating his pace so he didn’t get ahead of Kelly. His sister wasn’t a good runner to begin with, and the oversized shoes weren’t helping. The Nikes flopped on pitted sidewalks as they crossed streets named for presidents. Washington, Jefferson, and Monroe. Virginia’s finest, littered with empty Joe Camel soft packs and Schlitz Malt Liquor tallboys.

  “Jimmy, I can’t keep up,” Kelly said. The expression his sister made when she was trying not to cry was something Jimmy was familiar with. The site of her face as it crumpled and re-inflated and then crumpled again broke his heart. He would rather watch his mother eat a hundred pounds of crystal meth than see that look pass over his sister’s face.

  They stood under a broken streetlight. Unlike Brian’s well-lit neighborhood, when the sun went down in Jimmy’s part of town, darkness was all-consuming.

  “It’s okay, Kelly. We’ll just walk fast. It’s okay, Kelly. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

  “No, Jimmy. I can’t do it. Let’s go home,” she said, grabbing his hand and looking him in the eye. “It’s just mom.”

  Just mom? He thought. Like when he and Brian would hear footsteps upstairs, and Brian would see the panicked look in his best friend’s eyes and say, “Don’t worry, it’s just my mom doing laundry”—or like when he and Kelly would hear a terrible commotion in their kitchen, and Jimmy would check to see if everything was okay, only to find Diane in her godawful (and godawfully short) Van Halen shirt, hunting a chemically hallucinated rat with a plastic spork from KFC, and Jimmy would come back to their room and say, “Don’t worry, it’s just mom”?

  “Just mom”: in a normal house, two words so mundane and innocuous no one even noticed when they were said.

  “Kelly, mom—”

  “Jimmy, sometimes I sound like a little kid. I know that. But I’m not stupid. I know what she’s doing out there.”

  Jimmy pulled his sister close, his nostrils filling with the smell of her citrus shampoo. Dogs barked as the wind picked up, the litter lining Monroe Street becoming Dust Bowl tumbleweeds without bowls, or even dust.

  “Jimmy, it’s okay. It’s just mom. She won’t hurt us.”

  Mom has already hurt us, he wanted to say. Dad too. They fucked everything up before we even got here, and never bothered to fix it once we arrived. Our father put us in the newspaper way before my legs ever did, and our mother is a backyard whore. They hurt us, Kelly. And all they do is keep hurting us.

  Maybe Kelly held out hope that there might be something worthwhile inside of their mother. Despite their many, many flaws, Diane and Ronnie Lansford managed to raise two exceptional children. Perhaps that objective, indisputable fact was the source of Kelly’s faith in their mother. Or maybe she didn’t think that. Maybe Kelly knew who and what their mother was and just didn’t see the point in running through the darkness toward nothing.

  Their father was an only child, his parents having died while driving home drunk from a bar. Their mother’s family was no better off than they were and would not be thrilled about the idea of sharing their own TANF money and food stamps with a teenage niece and nephew. They had nowhere to go, so instead of running toward the unknown, Kelly decided to turn around and head back toward what she knew: their mother, and a house where plunging your nose into the dark recesses of a Goodwill couch constituted getting a breath of fresh air.

  Jimmy decided not to fight her. He couldn’t ask Brian’s family to take him and Kelly in, though he was sure Brian’s mom would have beds made and warm chocolate chip cookies ready and waiting, even at this hour. But while he could take his friend’s electronic hand-me-downs, he wouldn’t take his pity.

  The only other responsible person they really knew in town was Detective Carlisle, and Jimmy couldn’t ask him to take him and his sister in—plus, Jimmy assumed Carlisle’s involvement, no matter how well intentioned, always came with the inherent risk of his biggest fear: he and Kelly separated and in foster care.

  When it came to Carlisle, Jimmy’s assumption was incorrect. Even though he was far too young to be their father, if given half a chance Carlisle would become Jimmy and Kelly’s legal guardian in a heartbeat. The last thing he would do is involve the Department of Child Services, which was the same branch of government that thought Jimmy and Kelly were safe under the care of Diane Lansford.

  Rather than run toward Brian’s house or go to a payphone and dial Mike Carlisle’s number, Jimmy and Kelly turned around and walked home. In their backyard, a man with a sleeveless shirt and thick tattooed arms finished smoking out his mother before leaving the wadded-up money on the driver’s seat and walking toward the truck he parked in the alley.

  Alone and sweaty, the man’s semen running from her vagina onto the Firebird’s sun-cracked vinyl, Diane laid the passenger seat back. She gazed at a starless Oklahoma night through the Firebird’s T-tops.

  Though there was nothing to see, Diane heard the roar of an imaginary black helicopter settling just above her—the state coming to take her children away.

  Over her dead fucking body, she thought.

  Just try it.

  Her children were hers, and she would do with them what she pleased. As she looked through the Firebird’s roof, her lips slowly pulled back from her teeth. Her nose scrunched up, her hands curled into claws. She let out a cry that sounded to the neighborhood dogs like one of their own, and they barked back in response.

  Diane didn’t hear them. She dug her fingernails into her thighs, scratching and picking until they were raw and red. She felt the pressure of the whirring rotors in her mind as they beat down on the Firebird, pinning her against the seat.

  This black helicopter sent by that cop her kids were getting chummy with was not going to take Jimmy and Kelly.

  If Jimmy’s observer traveled back in time to this night in 1998 and stood in the spot where the backyard faded into the alley, it would see a naked woman, her eyes bottomless black pupils, her teeth bared as she screamed at a sky full of nothing.

  If it crawled into the dark and polluted corners of Diane’s mind and looked through the glass T-tops, it would see an obsidian helicopter just inches above the car’s roof. It would hear the apocalyptic THUMP-THUMP-THUMP of the world’s loudest rotors.

  The observer would feel the icy cold rush of crystal meth race through its body, its toes growing cold as its brain overheated.

  Despite the terror of the moment, it would want more.

  And more.

  And more.

  And more.

  It would fear the helicopter, yet as soon as the crystal ran its course, it would do anything—even sell its body—to see the helicopter again. This was one reason the observer would never visit this home, never travel back in time to 1998.

  Some things, the observer knew, were much scarier than faded handprints in an empty hotel room.

  Inside the house, Jimmy tucked Kelly in. He left his magic Nikes on her feet. After kissing her forehead, Jimmy reached beneath his b
ed, looking for the Walkman he purchased to replace the one destroyed at the farmhouse. Like the beginner’s weight set he bought, the Walkman justified dipping into the money he saved from his job at Derry’s. Though he splurged on the Walkman, he couldn’t justify a Discman, and the Lansford siblings still used tapes, rather than CDs.

  But at least they had music.

  Outside Jimmy heard his mother scream. He put the headphones over Kelly’s ears. He turned on Cyndi Lauper and lay in bed as his sister dozed off to her favorite song. Jimmy stayed awake, his eyes wide open, keeping watch over the person he loved most, waiting for another scream. Hours later, as he slept, Jimmy unconsciously bared his canines at the sound of Diane Lansford re-entering their home.

  CHAPTER NINE

  2019

  Jimmy’s home office was decorated with pictures of Jill, Jonathan, and Jessica, trophies and ribbons from his college cross-country days, and his framed MBA. No remnant of the boy Jimmy Lansford was or the family he came from—aside from the framed picture of Kelly on their kitchen counter—was allowed in his home. “Leave no trace of childhood Jimmy” was his rule, but it was a rule he was about to break.

  The week before, Jimmy Googled “Mike Carlisle Garrity Oklahoma” and learned his old friend became chief of Garrity’s police department in 2011. That didn’t surprise Jimmy. What did surprise him was that he actually copied and pasted Carlisle’s email address into his Gmail account. He didn’t think he would go through with it, until he hit Ctrl V on his keyboard.

  Carlisle responded almost instantly, emailing Jimmy back less than an hour later. Now Jimmy waited for the Skype connection to go through, his stomach roiled by nostalgia and nausea.

  “Oh my God,” Jimmy said.

  The face of a man who was once the closest thing Jimmy had to a father figure appeared onscreen. It had been eighteen years since they last saw each other.

  “My man,” Carlisle said. “Eighteen years.”

  “Eighteen years,” Jimmy said.

  The entire span of one complete childhood, Jimmy thought.