Phantom Read online

  “But it ain’t,” Miguel said. “And your uncle knows what he’s talking about. So he must have meant the other way.”

  I sighed. I felt like yelling at him, but I had no good reason. Maybe I was just angry he made such a big deal about the Palabok Bandero, which, I admit, wasn’t half-bad. Maybe it was something else. I wasn’t hurting, but a tense itch permeated through my body, and it was signaling worse times ahead unless I took my medication. And maybe he was right. What the hell did I know?

  We kept driving. Arthur Street, turned right onto Hayes, but our directions said Arthur turned onto Garfield which turned onto Hayes. We kept driving in circles past low-slung houses looking small but expensive, twisting slow and wide streets with signs letting us know children were at play. A car passed us rarely, sometimes an SUV and sometimes an old pickup truck. One lawn was covered in toys and playpens, but I saw no children about, or even heard them. Some ‘For-Sale’ signs hung at odd angles, weeds growing up around them.

  I glanced up at the broad, blue sky. A solitary bird soared in spirals above.

  “Hank. Look at the trees,” Miguel said.

  “What?” I squinted around.

  “The lichen covers some of them. It’s weird.”

  “Yeah.” I’d registered it before, but didn’t put a lot of thought into it. I was looking around for people. Or something. “Look, that one over there doesn’t have any.”

  “It’s a cedar,” Miguel said. But he slowed down.

  “A what?” I asked.

  “A cedar. An evergreen. The lichen trees are all deciduous.”

  I frowned. I guessed he meant non-evergreen, like oaks or elms. Weren’t elms even really trees, just large bushes? I’d heard that somewhere. God damn, the itch bothered me. It wasn’t even really an itch, just a sense of feeling ill at ease with my own body. I didn’t want to get the meaning of deciduous from Miguel, it’d seem too . . . it’d make me feel stupid around him. But I could already feel his scorn, and it was starting to bother me.

  Fuck, I could just share some of the painkillers with him, and take some now to ease the discomfort, but then he might not be good enough to drive. Where the hell was Garfield? I wanted a lazy orange cat whose thoughts were easily dismissed. The street seemed to be in some arcane place maps failed to show, or didn’t want to. Damn California and its pre-fab towns. Damn sub-developments like this and everywhere, all the same, paper houses and paper lawns, all in some bland synchronicity. No matter what town it was, they all went to the same chain restaurants. Took glee in the new menu additions, took drinks from the same twenty-something disaffected bartenders. Went home and relentlessly rode nowhere in stationary bikes all bought at the same Wal-Mart, just in different places all over the country. There was nothing new about America but the climate.

  “This is starting to creep me out,” Miguel said. “And it’s getting dark. As your attorney, I advise you to get that hotel back the way we came and hole up for the night, with enough booze and drugs to forget about this little shithole.” He wasn’t my attorney. I forgot where he got the reference from, but he was awful fond of it. He smiled. “And I know you got drugs, Hank.”

  I made a bitter face. “The house is just around the way. Maybe you should double back. You keep driving too quickly. We must have missed a sign.”

  “I’m keeping the speed limit. Your uncle’s brother-in-law just lives in a shitty location, that’s all.” Miguel’s eyes widened. “What if we find them dead in the house? What if their hungry ghosts come looking for us? This fucking town creeps me out, man. Too many dead things. It’s haunted.”

  “I said it was . . . oh, never mind.” My shoulders slumped.

  “What if this town’s built over some Indian burial ground?” Miguel asked.

  I shook my head. “That ain’t happening.”

  “You don’t know that, man.”

  “I do, though.” I frowned. “If this town is built over an Indian burial ground, it’s only because the fucking country was. I read that millions of Indians died of smallpox before even the first real settlement in the US took off. Whole cultures wiped out in a generation. The ghosts were there, waiting, when the country got founded. They’ve always been with us, so why the hell would they care about one little town?”

  “Because, it’s, like, a mystic site or something.”

  “That’s just bullshit.” I could barely get the words out. I was tired as hell, and every street looked the same. Where was home, here? Had it ever existed? Had I imagined talking to my uncle? Had I made us drive all the way down to this God-forsaken suburban town because of some dream? I shifted and glanced at Miguel. He was fiddling with the radio, his mind already on some other tangent.

  We drove, turning left onto Pierce Street. Miguel fiddled with the radio and then turned it off. A great silence descended upon us, broken only by the wind outside and the apologetic cough from the engine of Miguel’s car.

  Miguel glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. “You got any of that prescription stuff? You brought it with you?”

  I made a face. I could feel myself stiffening. That little slimeball. Trying to guilt his way into stuff I need, stuff the doctor gave me. But I knew it was silly of me to feel that way. And he was my only ride back. “Yeah,” I croaked.

  Miguel grinned to himself and kept driving, humming some soft and cheerful tune.

  Miguel spat. “That ain’t a street! It’s like an alley at best!”

  “It’s a cul-de-sac,” I said, tonelessly. GARFIELD ST. was white letters on a thin line of green metal. The street had maybe four houses. I felt sad for the street somehow. Where could it have gone, where could it have meandered if it had only been given a chance? Instead it sat, hopeless and forgotten. My cousin-in-law was house #3. No car in the driveway. I scanned the others, saw an old Dodge in one drive, but otherwise empty.

  “Can’t tell if anyone’s in any of the other houses,” Miguel mumbled. “Maybe we should knock on doors.”

  “Let’s wait,” I said. “I’d feel weird having to explain myself.” And I wanted to not be in a car anymore. Not be around people if I could manage it. I wanted to be at peace.

  “Good idea,” Miguel said. He parked in the driveway and we got out. We ambled up to the front door. Mail was stuffed into the mail slot. Miguel eyed it and looked at me. I shrugged, and knocked on the door.

  No answer. I knocked again. Miguel tapped his foot, which somehow made me feel even more antsy. Everything about this town smelled bad. We really should’ve just left. But you haven’t been there. Once you drive far enough, all you want to do is get something out of the journey. It doesn’t feel fair.

  “More lichen on the trees,” Miguel mumbled.

  I knocked one last time, then fished through my pocket and got the keys my uncle gave me. With some fiddling, the door opened. I pulled the mail out and walked in.

  Inside looked like a wreck of a museum made for people to mock seventies living: shag carpets, modular couches, a sunken den-like living room with wood siding, glass sliding doors. Miguel tip-toed in deferentially. I slumped in and crashed on the couch.

  “I’m gonna look for bodies,” Miguel said.

  I nodded to him and glanced down at the mail. I picked through it and sniffed. Shouldn’t bodies stink up the place? I shook my head.

  The last piece of mail was dated ten days ago. It was from a bank. Some tiny bit of morality nagged just as I was about to open it, but I overcame that quick and ripped the envelope.

  The foreclosure statement seemed dry and bland. What a shame, something that could change your life would look so boring and lifeless. You wanted that kind of thing served by men who twirled mustaches and cackled dark and low. Men who wore effeminate capes, that sort of shit. Instead of vague, unappealing numbers, facts and figures and legal statements.

  There was lots of other private and confidential mail. I was guessing the unmarked ones were credit card statements. The massive majority were credit card offers. Shit that said
confidential so you’d open the letter and read about the incredibly low introductory rate, instead of just tossing it aside.

  “Nothing,” Miguel said, returning and slumping into the reclining chair, which looked a little like he was being consumed by pillows. “I think we’re free on the body department, but I didn’t spend too much time in the basement.”

  “This place has a basement?” I asked. “Shit, these houses usually don’t.”

  Miguel’s shrug was lazy and effortless. “What can I say?” He said. “They do shit old school down here in San Agosto.”

  There was a sudden noise. Miguel looked like he was about to jump out of his skin. We exchanged all sorts of vague looks at one another. I got up and we crept back to the kitchen.

  Through the glass sliding door, we saw a pack of dogs filing through the weed-strewn yard. Maybe five or six, of all kinds of breeds. They seemed bedraggled, skinny, their fur matted and nicked. All different varieties. A collie, a sad-looking golden retriever, you name it. One gazed on me, his eyes glittering doll-like. It seemed unnatural. Un-dog-like. I tapped on the glass and the rest looked up as one, ears swiveling forward. Then one bolted, and the rest followed. I realized I was holding my breath.

  Miguel said, “Whoa.”

  I opened the sliding door and stepped out into the yard. “All these weeds, feels like people have been gone longer than ten days, don’t you think?”

  Miguel said, without affect, “Dunno.”

  I glanced back. “You’re the expert on this stuff.” But he just shrugged.

  The yard was out of sorts. Someone had cut half the lawn and stopped, leaving the mower out there. A high fence blocked the view of the neighbors’ lawns, but I could see the hole the pack of animals had gone through. I squinted at the trees. “Whoa,” I said.

  “What?” Miguel’s voice sounded absent and a little nervous.

  “The trees, look.” I pointed. Dark reddish sap dripped from the trunks. “They’re bleeding.”

  “Sudden Oak Death,” Miguel said.

  “What?”

  “It’s a blight. Hit Northern California pretty bad. Not supposed to be this far south. Just kills off all the trees, acres at a time. They don’t have a cure. It just wipes them out.” His voice was sad and lost.

  “Even the cedars?” I asked, turning back to him, trying to grin.

  “No,” Miguel said. “No evergreens.” His look was sour. He wanted no joking. We went back inside.

  After that, we puttered around for a while and went to give Uncle a call, but neither one of us had coverage. I convinced Miguel to head back up the road, grab us some beer, call my uncle.

  Miguel squinted at me. “If I come back and find your desiccated corpse, or like, you ain’t here, I’m just gonna leave, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. It seemed fair.

  The moment he left, I dry-swallowed two pills and fumbled to the fridge to choke it down. Then I had another, just because I felt spooked. I sat in the middle of the couch staring at the blank TV, feeling miserable. The money hadn’t been worth it. I know my uncle just wanted to give me a bit of extra money but make me feel like I was working it off, but it still felt weird to me. Too easy, too much like a handout. I had nothing going on in my life. Girl had left six months ago. What was I doing now? I was adrift. I didn’t want it to be like this, but I couldn’t figure out any other way.

  This whole thing had gotten too complicated. Where was I now? What if Miguel never came back? I’d just be stuck here, in the middle of this weird suburban wasteland. I met my cousin-in-law once at one of my uncle’s things. He seemed nice. A balding guy, he kept his hair cut short against his skull. Wore an old tee shirt with some band’s name on the front. Khaki pants that fit, black shoes. My uncle and him talked about some fucking grill for the better part of an hour while I nursed a beer, my thoughts circling over and over again about some girl that wasn’t even at the party. His wife was some Chinese chick, older than him, snippy and almost unconsciously hostile to everyone else at the party, including me, but I didn’t care. When their eyes met, they both got this soft smile at each other.

  I think the last I heard she was pregnant or something, and then the accident happened and I kind of lost touch with what was going on with the family for a while.

  I knew the drug hitting me because my hand felt heavy, wonderfully heavy, and an immense calm fell over me like the nicest blanket in the world. My face and skin felt cold, but it was a good cold, a really happy cold. I was good in my skin, I didn’t care who knew it. I knew I was smiling. It felt a little silly to be smiling, but I was going to anyways.

  I laid back and stared at the ceiling for a while, then clicked on the TV and surfed through channel after channel of pleasant static. I kept thinking I saw figures there, moving like soldiers creeping up to the front in the middle of a blizzard, but I couldn’t make out anything but muffled noises under the huuuuush of the tv. The figures were going to go where they had to go, I just didn’t have the place to see them right. That was okay, I didn’t need to worry. And Miguel would be back with beer. I wondered who the figures in the static were. The head of one of them occasionally talked to me in some far-off voice. Some ghostly commentator? Maybe it was a sports program or some kind of reality show. All that time and effort, all those production values to talk to me and I couldn’t hear a damned thing they were saying. But then I heard something else.

  I turned the TV off. You hear something quick, you can’t remember what you hear because you weren’t paying attention—there’s just this sensation like you should have heard it, like it was somehow important.

  I felt every tiny piece of skin I had. I heard the slow movements of air in the house. I saw how still the air was. No sound.

  An age of indecision passed, and I got up. Prowled back to the kitchen. Checked the garage. Looked upstairs—an office, a master bedroom, a kid’s room but it had a sewing machine set up and the cradle piled with shirts and old magazines. Nothing. Was it a cat outside, maybe? Those dogs back again?

  I stood perfectly still on the upstairs landing and waited for the sound. Nothing.

  There. Maybe. Downstairs? I didn’t know. In a horror movie I would have been screaming at the television set to not go downstairs. Slasher movies were a game you knew people were going to lose. In a slasher movie you don’t investigate the darkened place—that’s where the bad people are. You waited for attractive people to make out, punishing the curious, living for shock, waited for the one conservative, virtuous, white-clad woman to step in and take the enemy down.

  In real life, you investigated the unknown, so you can fucking go to sleep at night. You think: no, that’s not an ogre in the darkness. That’s not some creepy thing my grandmother would hoarsely whisper at me. It’s just the fucking cat.

  Miguel had said he hadn’t spent much time in the basement. He’d pointed that out.

  I couldn’t believe it myself, but I crept down to the basement. Step by creaking step. It was tiny. More like a bomb shelter than anything else. Maybe that’s what it was made for. The light didn’t work. Figures. Miguel sure was taking his time getting back.

  My hands were slow and thick catching the light fixture up and down, fiddling with it. I took deep breaths because it felt so wonderful to take them. I still felt anxious, but the anxiety was softened by cotton balls and lemon-scented ready-wipes. I was impervious and clean. And the slasher wasn’t in the basement.

  They stored the stupidest shit down here. I wanted a kiddy-porn dungeon. Or a ghost. Fucking something, man.

  An hour. Maybe two. I wasn’t sure of the time. All of the clocks were blinking 12:00, but my phone had what I had to assume was the right time—only I never checked when Miguel left for beer in the first place. Maybe he got chicken and high-tailed it out. Who knows? It was getting late. He’d find me. I could crash out here.

  My face felt heavy and slow. Sleep wanted to be with me, love me, brush the hair from my eyes and whisper soothing things in my ear.
I thought I’d let it, but stumbled upstairs. They had a nice bed up there.

  I woke to another one of those sounds you don’t remember enough to know what the sound was. I was tangled in the bed. So soft and warm. Then I heard something again, a clump, maybe a voice. I couldn’t tell.

  Miguel? How long had I been out, anyways? Could I trust that was him?

  The room was agonizingly dark. If I remembered correctly, there was a broom out in the hallway to the stairs. I crept out of bed and headed out, picking up the stick. Heard muttering downstairs, but couldn’t make out the words. Something soft. Maybe the original family had returned. Or their ghosts, prowling downstairs listlessly and sad. I swallowed, and crept down the stairs. I hoped the staircase didn’t creak. It didn’t.

  I saw a shadow at the bottom of the stairs and thought, Ghost. Before I could run, I heard myself call out in a commanding voice, “Hey!”

  The shadow squeaked most unspectrally. “Who is it?”

  “What’re you doing here?”

  I heard another voice. “What the fuck is that?” it seemed to say, rushing in. “We’re not alone, I don’t think—oh my god! Someone else! I’m so sorry! We’ll get right out of here.”

  “No. Stop. What’s happening here?” I asked, holding the broom threateningly. I could see the shadows shifting. A girl and a guy, maybe. A guy and another guy who happened to have a higher-pitched voice. I didn’t know. I held the broom like a gun.

  “You don’t know?” the deeper voice asked.

  “I just got here,” I said.

  “You don’t live here?” the squeakier voice asked.

  “I got back from vacation. Look. What the fuck? Just tell me. What happened to all the people? Where did they all go?”

  “We don’t know, man. I come from the town down the road. Heard from a friend the other day. No one really knows. I don’t see anything on the news or nothing.”

  The softer voice said: “My cousin, he was in this bar, said a guy came in from up north. Heading to Mexico. Said he had a friend in the town next to him, just upped and vanished. His wife’s sister stopped answering her phone from her farm north of Ukiah. They just assumed the worst. Bank took the house back, anyways. They just said, ‘Fuck it,’ and left.”