Ghost Story

goddamned killer who drinks beer and eats hamburgers and takes his kid out for a drive on Sundays, then I'm gonna call you up and laugh in your faces. And I'll see that people around here never stop laughing when they hear your names. You understand me?'

'Don't shout at us, Walt,' Sears said. 'I'm sure we all understand what you said. And we understand one thing more.'

'Just what the hell is that?'

'That you're frightened, Sheriff. But you have a lot of company.'

Conversation with G

7

'Are you really a sailor, G?'

'Um.'

'Did you go lots of places?'

'Yes.'

'How come you can hang around Milburn so long? Don't you have a ship to get back to?'

'Shore leave.'

'Why don't you ever want to do anything but go to the movies?'

'No reason.'

'Well, I just like being with you.'

'Um.'

'But why don't you ever take off your shades?'

'No reason.'

'Someday I'll take them off.'

'Later.'

'Promise?'

'Promise.'

Conversation with Stella

8

'Ricky, what's happening to us? What's happening to Milburn?'

'A terrible thing. I don't want to tell you now. There'll be time when it's all over.'

'You're frightening me.'

'I'm frightened too.'

'Well, I'm frightened because you're frightened.' For a time, the Hawthornes simply held each other.

'You know what killed Lewis, don't you?'

'I think so.'

'Well, I discovered an astonishing thing about myself. I can be a coward. So please don't tell me. I know I asked, but don't. I just want to know it'll end.'

'Sears and I will make it end. With young Wanderley's help.'

'He can help you?'

'He can. He has already.'

'If only this terrible snow would stop.'

'Yes. But it won't.'

'Ricky, have I given you an awful time?' Stella propped herself up on an elbow to look into his eyes.

'A worse time than most women would,' he said. 'But I rarely wanted any other women.'

'I am sorry that I ever had to cause you pain. Ricky, I've never cared for any man as much as I have cared for you. Despite my adventures. You know that's all over, don't you?'

'I guessed.'

'He was an appalling man. He was in my car, and I just overwhelmingly realized how much better than he you were. So I made him get out.' Stella smiled. 'He shouted at me. It seems I am a bitch.'

'At times you certainly are.'

'At times. You know, he must have found Lewis's body right after that.'

'Ah. I wondered what he was doing up there.'

Silence: Ricky held his wife's shoulder, aware of her timeless profile beside him. If she had not looked like that could he have endured it so long? Yet if she had not looked like that, she would not have been Stella- it was an impossible speculation.

'Tell me something, baby,' she breathed. 'Who was this other woman you used to want?'

Ricky laughed; then both of them, at least for a time, were laughing.

9

Motionless days: Milburn lay frozen under the accumulating snow. Garage owners took their telephones off their hooks, knowing they already had too much snowplow business with their regular customers; Omar Norris carried a bottle in each of his coat's deep pockets, and rammed the city's plow into twice his usual quota of parked cars-he was on triple time, often plowing the same streets two or three times a day, and sometimes when he got back to the municipal garage, Omar was so drunk that he simply rolled onto a cot in the foreman's office instead of going home. Copies of The Urbanite stood in wrapped bundles at the back of the print room-the newsboys couldn't get to their collection points. Finally Ned Rowles shut the paper down for a week and sent everybody home with a Christmas bonus. 'In this weather,' he told his staff, 'nothing's going to happen except more of this weather. Have yourselves a merry little Christmas.'

But even in an immobilized town, things happen. Dozens of cars went off the roads and stayed nose down for days, buried under fresh drifts. Walter Barnes sat in his television room nursing a succession of drinks and watched an endless round of giveaway shows with the sound turned off. Peter cooked their meals. 'I could understand a lot of things,' Barnes told his son, 'but I sure as hell can't understand that.' And went back to his quiet, nonstop drinking. One Friday night, Clark Mulligan put the first reel of Night of the Living Dead back in the projector for the Saturday-noon showing, turned off all the lights, flipped the broken lock on the fire door and decided once again not to bother with it and went back out into the blizzard to find Penny Draeger's body lying half-covered with snow beside an abandoned car. He slapped her face and rubbed her wrists, but nothing he could do would put breath back in her throat or change the expression on her face-G had finally allowed her to take off his dark glasses.

And Elmer Scales finally met the man from Mars.

10

It happened on the day before Christmas. The date meant nothing to Elmer. For weeks he had done his chores in a blind rage of impatience, cuffing his children if they came too close and leaving the Christmas arrangements to his wife-she had bought the presents and put up the tree, having given up on Elmer until he realized that what he was waiting up for every night didn't exist and never would wait around to get shot. On Christmas Eve Mrs. Scales and the children went to bed early, leaving Elmer sitting with the shotgun across his lap and his paper and pencil on the table to his right.

Elmer's chair faced his picture window, and with the lights off, he could see about as far as the barn- a big shape in the darkness. Except for where he had shoveled, the snow was waist-high: enough to slow down any sort of creature who was after more of his animals. Elmer did not need light to scribble down the random lines he thought of: by now he did not even have to look at the paper. He could write while staring out the window.

summers them old trees was high enough to glide from

and

Lord Lord farmings a ballbreaking business

and

somethings not a squirrel scratching under the eaves-

lines he knew would come to nothing, were not poetry, were nonsense, but which he had to write down anyhow because they came into his mind. At times they were joined by other lines, part of a conversation someone