There was a man
who lived down the block from me when I was a kid. He might have been thirty
or he might have been ninety--in childhood, anyone over ten seems ancient
to you--but he stooped, he dressed in black, he sighed whenever I saw him.
At night, in
summer when I slept with my windows open, I could hear him weeping loudly
and bitterly, and in the daytime he would sit on his front porch, staring
blankly at the emptiness of our dull residential street. When he sobbed
at night he sounded like wolves and like water draining from a bathtub;
as he sat on his porch in the daytime he looked like a ghost. Actually--since
Mom was during this time reading Victorian ghost stories to me--he looked
"spectral." He looked like a spectre from Dickens.
Occasionally,
I would speak to him as I passed by on my bike. "Good morning, Mr. Mirton!"
I chimed often. "How are you?" I would do a lazy loop in front of his house,
waiting for a reply. He never gave me a reply. Just an unfocused stare.
If I were in
an obstinate mood I sometimes continued looping lazily around and around
in order to carry on a one-sided conversation. "Nice day, isn't it, Mr.
Mirton! Wow, look at that sky!... Days like these make you want to kick
back with a beer and just sit by a pool!... You like beer?... pools...?"
And so on, a perfect imitation of my father when he was trying to get someone
new to like him.
Jay Allison,
one of the few boys anywhere near my age living on the same street, developed
a more subtle tactic for getting Mr. Mirton's attention. Jay threw things
at him. On an evening in July, while the sun lingered for hours on the
brink of death, Jay and I stood at the curb of Mr. Mirton's yard and tossed--first
softly and then firmly and then desperately--an assortment of items we
had gathered for the purpose. Appendages of slaughtered action figures,
Jay's sister's dolls and tea set, buttons, pins, pens, notebooks, ice cubes,
stones, bits of wood, a package of frozen peas, and old game cartridges.
We struck Mr. Mirton more than once and made a hell of a racket but nothing
moved him. He remained inert, distant, detached, dead. Mr. Mirton got a
black eye from an ice cube and a bloody nose from the frozen peas but he
did not even wince.
That night,
however, as I lay in bed listening to the sobs like wolves and draining
water, I noticed a new sound. Usually there were the crickets chirping,
and our dog barking, and the odd car or truck engine, and the voices of
teenagers walking from house to house in addition to the cries. Not much
else. Some variation but always identifiable sounds. On the night after
Jay Allison and I attacked him, though, mixed in with the sobbing I detected
a more menacing sound I could not name. Unsteady creakings, metal against
metal, the sounds of a bronze world being split by an earthquake. The sobs
began, as they usually did, around ten or eleven, and, as always, lasted
until daybreak, but the new sounds started an hour later and lasted until
just after midnight.
It scared me.
I thought of the stories Mother read to me in the day time--about spectres
seeking revenge, mostly, and a terrible possibility crossed my mind: Mr.
Mirton looked like a ghost because he was a ghost, and now Jay and I had
wounded him. What if he would now seek his revenge, and what if the terrible
new sound had something to do with his vengeance? To my mind, seeking revenge
was the only purpose of being a ghost. Quite possibly, Mr. Mirton had spent
years sitting on his front porch waiting for someone to do something to
him o he might have cause to get back at them. He wept all night because
he had not exacted a wrathful vengeance on anyone, Until now, he had not
found anyone to revenge himself upon.
I did not sleep
that night. As soon as my parents began getting dressed for work, I went
downstairs to eat a bowl of cereal, then stepped outside to feed my dog,
Bosch. Though still summer, the morning was cool, with a heavy dew on the
ground. The grass stuck to my bare feet as I crossed the backyard toward
the fat oak tree where we kept the dog chained. Bosch, a collie, began
leaping and dancing as soon as he saw me bearing his breakfast in a metal
dish.
Because of my
lack of sleep, my mind was not as alert as it needed to be. I placed the
food in front of Bosch, who took no interest in it. He was not happy, it
turned out, because of his breakfast but because I had come to see him
so early in the day. I kneeled down to pet him, the dewy grass soaking
my thin pajamas at the knees and Bosch's we tongue soaking my face. As
he nuzzled into me, I giggled and pushed him back.
It was then
that I noticed the blood. His mouth was a crimson red, his paws stained
even darker with blood and mud. My own hands, from where I had touched
him, were smeared a deep maroon. At first I thought he had managed to coax
a cat too close to him, or perhaps a squirrel. Then I saw, in the entrance
to his doghouse beside the tree, the blank and detached stare of Jay Allison's
head, lopsided, resting on one cheek.