Ghost Story

And for a moment he did not watch, but let his head roll back as she stooped, forcing him to lean sideways. His eyes drifted over the grotesque plastic animals behind the fence. Then he heard some fabric-cotton- moving over skin, and looked down. Her left arm was extended so that she was as far from him as she could get. The cheap pink dress was pulled up over her waist. She too was looking at the plastic animals. When the girl was finished, he took his eyes from her, knowing that she would glance at him. She stood up and waited for him to tell her what to do next. He pulled her back toward the car.

'What do you do for a living?' she asked.

He laughed out loud with surprise: this cocktail-party question! 'Nothing.'

'Where are we going? Are you taking me someplace?'

He opened the door and stood aside as she climbed back into the car. 'Someplace,' he said. 'Sure, I'm taking you someplace.' He got in beside her, and she moved across the seat to the door.

'Where?'

'We'll see when we get there.'

Again he drove all night, and again the girl slept most of the time, coming awake to stare out the windshield (she always slept sitting up, like a doll in her tennis shoes and pink dress) and to ask him odd questions. 'Are you a policeman?' she asked him once, and then after seeing an exit sign, 'What's Columbia?'

'It's a city.'

'Like New York?'

'Yes.'

'Like Clarksburg?'

He nodded.

'Are we always going to sleep in the car?'

'Not always.'

'Can I play the radio?'

He said yes, and she leaned forward and twisted the knob. The car was invaded by static, two or three voices speaking at the same time. She punched another button and the same crowded hiss erupted from the speaker. 'Twist the dial,' he said. Frowning, her face concentrated, she began slowly to turn the selector. In a moment she had locked onto a clear signal, Dolly Parton. 'I love this,' she told him.

So for hours they drove south through the songs and rhythms of country music, the stations weakening and changing, the disk jockeys swapping names and accents, the sponsors succeeding each other in a revolving list of insurance companies, toothpaste, soap, Dr Pepper and Pepsi-Cola, acne preparations, funeral parlors, petroleum jelly, bargain wristwatches, aluminum siding, dandruff shampoos: but the music remained the same, a vast and self-conscious story, a sort of seamless repetitious epic in which women married truckers and no-good gamblers but stood by them until they got a divorce and the men sat in bars plotting seductions and how to get back home, and they came together hot as two-dollar pistols and parted in disgust and worried about the babies. Sometimes the car wouldn't start, sometimes the TV was busted; sometimes the bars closed down and threw you out onto the street, your pockets turned inside out. There was nothing that was not banal, there was no phrase that was not a cliche, but the child sat there satisfied and passive, dozing off to Willie Nelson and waking up to Loretta Lynn, and the man just drove, distracted by this endless soap opera of America's bottom dogs.

Once he asked her, 'Have you ever heard of a man named Edward Wanderley?'

She did not reply but regarded him levelly.

'Have you?'

'Who's he?'

'He was my uncle,' he said, and the girl smiled at him.

'How about a man named Sears James?'

She shook her head, still smiling.

'A man named Ricky Hawthorne?'

Again she shook her head. There was no point in continuing. He did not know why he had bothered to ask in the first place. It was even possible that she had never heard those names. Of course she had never heard them.

Still in South Carolina, he thought that a highway patrolman was following him: the police car was twenty yards behind, keeping the same distance whatever the man did. He thought he could see the state cop speaking into his radio; immediately he cut his speed by five miles an hour and changed lanes, but the police car would not pass. He felt a deep trembling in his chest and abdomen: he visualized the police car gaining on him, turning on its siren, forcing him to the side of the road. Then the questions would begin. It was about six in the afternoon, and the freeway was crowded: he felt himself being drawn helplessly along with the traffic, at the mercy of whoever was in the police car-helpless, trapped. He had to think. He was simply being drawn on toward Charleston, pulled by the traffic through miles of flat scrubby country: suburbs were always visible in the distance, miserable collections of little houses with frame garages. He could not remember the number of the freeway he was on. In the rear-view mirror, behind the long row of cars, behind the police car, an old truck sent out a tall column of black smoke through a chimneylike pipe beside the engine. He feared the patrolman cruising up beside him and shouting: 'Get over!' And he could imagine the girl shouting, her high tinny voice shouting, 'He made me come with him, he ties me onto him when he sleeps!' The southern sun seemed to assault his face, to grind at his pores. The state patrolman swung out into the next lane and began to draw up toward him.

-Asshole, that's not your girl, who is that girl?

Then they would put him in a cell and begin to beat him, working on him methodically with nightsticks, turning his skin purple…

But none of that happened.

3

Shortly after eight o'clock he pulled over to the side of the road. It was a narrow country road, loose red dirt piled on the shoulders, as if it had been only recently dug out of the earth. He was no longer sure of what state he was in, South Carolina or Georgia: it was as though these states were fluid, as if they-and all the rest of them-could leak over into one another, pushing forward like the highways. It all looked wrong. He was in the wrong place: no one could live here, no one could think here, in this brutal landscape. Unfamiliar vines, green and ropelike, struggled up the low bank beside his car. The fuel gauge had been on E for the past half hour. All of it was wrong, all of it. He looked at the girl, this girl he had kidnapped. She was sleeping in that doll-like way, her back straight against the seat and her feet in the ripped sneakers dangling above the floor. She slept too much. Suppose she was sick; suppose she was dying.

She woke as he was watching her. 'I have to go to the bathroom again,' she said.

'Are you okay? You're not sick, are you?'

'I have to go to the bathroom.'

'Okay,' he grunted and moved to open his door.

'Let me go by myself. I won't run away. I won't do anything. I promise.'

He looked at her serious face, her black eyes set in olive skin.

'Where could I go, anyhow? I don't even know where I am.'

'I don't either.'

'So?'

It had to happen sometime: he couldn't hold on to her at every moment. 'You promise?' he asked, knowing the question was foolish.

She nodded. He said, 'All right.'

'And you promise you won't drive away?'

'Yes.'

She opened the door and left the car. It was all he could do not to watch her, but it was a test, not to watch her. A Test. He wished overwhelmingly that he had her hand trapped in his fist. She could be scrambling up the bank, running off, screaming… but no, she was not screaming. It often happened that the terrible things he