Ghost Story

at Peter, clearly assuming that the old argument was still persuasive.

Peter felt himself sinking back into uncertainty and ambiguity-these arguments were persuasive. His father's worries were not his: and the issue had never been that he did not love his father, for he did, but merely whether he should always obey his father's infrequent orders-or as Jim put it, 'let him run your life.'

For had he, after all, done anything truly bad with Jim? Because of Jim's keys, they had not even broken into the church; then they had followed a woman. That was all. Freddy Robinson had died, and that was a shame even if they had not liked him, but nobody was saying that his death had not been natural; he'd had a heart attack, or had fallen down and hurt his head…

And there had been no little boy on top of the station.

And there had been no little boy sitting on the gravestone.

'I suppose I should be grateful your old man let you come out tonight.'

'No, it's not that bad. He just thinks we ought to spend less time together, not that we shouldn't spend any time at all together. I guess he doesn't like me sitting in places like this.'

'This? What's wrong with this?' Hardie gestured comically around at the seedy tavern. 'Hey, you- Sunshine!' Jim shouted. 'This is a hell of a great place, isn't it?' The bartender looked back over his shoulder and grimaced stupidly. 'Civilized as shit, Lady Jane. The Duke down there agrees with me. I know what your old man is afraid of. He doesn't want you to get in with the wrong crowd. Well, I am the wrong crowd, that's true. But if I am, then so are you. So the worst has already happened, and as long as you're here, you might as well relax and enjoy it.'

If you wrote down the things Hardie said and looked at them afterward, you'd find the errors, but just listening to him talk, you'd be convinced of anything.

'See, what the old boys all think is craziness is just another way of stayin' sane-you live in this town long enough you're in danger of woodworm in the headboard, and you have to keep reminding yourself that the whole world isn't just one big Milburn.' He looked over at Peter, sipped his beer and grinned, and Peter saw the fractured light in his eyes and knew, as he had all along, that underneath the 'stayin' sane' kind of craziness there was another, real craziness. 'Now admit it, Pete.' He said, 'Aren't there times when you'd like to see the whole damn town go up in flames? The whole thing knocked down and plowed over? It's a ghost town, man. The whole place is full of Rip Van Winkles, it's just one Rip Van Winkle after another, a bunch of weird Rip Van Winkles with vacuums for brains, with a knothead drunk for a sheriff and crummy bars for a social life-'

'What happened to Penny Draeger?' Peter interrupted. 'You haven't gone out with her for three weeks.'

Jim hunched over the bar and wrapped his hand around his beerglass. 'One. She heard I took that Mostyn dame out, so she got pissed off at me. Two. Her parents, old Rollie and Irmengard, heard that she went out a couple of times with the late F. Robinson. So they grounded her. She never told me about that, you know? Good thing she didn't. I would have grounded her, all right.'

'Do you think she went out with him because you took that woman to Humphrey's?'

'How the hell do I know why she does things, man? Do you see a sequence there, my boy?'

'Don't you?' It was sometimes safer to give Jim's questions back to him.

'Hell.' He bent all the way forward and lay his shaggy head on the wet wood of the bar. 'All these women are mysteries to me.' He was speaking softly, as if regretfully, but Peter saw his eyes gleaming between his lashes and knew it was an act. 'Yeah. Well you might have a point. There might be a sequence there after all, Clarabelle. There just might be. And if there is, then that Anna dame besides not giving me any herself after teasing me along, also screwed up the sex life I had. In fact, if you look at it that way, you could definitely say that she owes me a few.' He rolled his head a quarter turn up on the bar, and his eyes gleamed at Peter. 'Which had occurred to me, to tell you the truth.' He sat there, bent over, his head like a separate object on the bar, grinning maniacally up at Peter. 'Yes, it had, old pal.'

Peter swallowed.

Jim straightened up and knocked on the bar. 'Two more flagons here, Sunshine.'

'What do you want to do?' Peter asked, knowing that he would inevitably be carried along with it, and looked through the tavern's greasy windows at a pane of darkness flecked with white.

'Let's see. What do I want to do?' Jim mused, and Peter realized sickeningly that Jim had known all along what he wanted to do, and that inviting him out for a beer was only the first moment of the plan; he'd been steered into this conversation as surely as he'd been driven out into the country, and all of it, 'another way of stayin' sane' and the ghost town business, was enumerated on a list somewhere in Hardie's mind. 'What do I want to do?' He cocked his head. 'Even this palace gets a little boring after a flagon or six, so I guess going back to dear little Milburn would be pleasant. Yes, I think we'll definitely be going back to dear little Milburn.'

'Let's stay away from her,' Peter said.

Jim ignored this. 'You know, our dear lovely sexy friend moved out of the hotel two weeks ago. Oh, she is missed. She is missed, Pete. I miss seeing that great ass going up the stairs. I miss those eyes flashing in the corridors. I miss her empty suitcase. I miss her amazing body. And I'm sure you know where she went.'

'My father arranged the mortgage. His house.' Peter nodded more vigorously than he needed to, and realized he was getting drunk again.

'Your old man's a useful old gnome, isn't he?' Jim asked, smiling pleasantly. 'Innkeeper!' He banged on the bar. 'Give my friend and myself a couple of shots of your best bourbon.' The bartender resentfully poured out shots of the same brand that Jim had stolen. 'Now, back to the point. Our friend who is so sincerely missed moves out of our excellent hotel and into Robinson's house. Now isn't that a curious sort of coincidence? I suppose that you and I, Clarabelle, are the only two people in the world who know that it is a coincidence. Because we're the only people who knew she was out at the station when old Freddy passed.'

'His heart,' Peter muttered.

'Oh, she does get you in the heart. She gets you by the heart and the balls. But funny though, isn't it? Freddy falls down onto the tracks-did I say falls? No: floats. I saw it, remember. He floats down onto the tracks like he's made out of tissue paper. Then she gets all hot to own his house. Is that also one, old buddy? Do you see a sequence there too, Clarabelle?'

'No,' he whispered.

'Now, Pete, that's not how you got early admission to Cornhole U. Use those powerful brain cells, baby.' He put his hand on Peter's back and leaned toward him, breathing the clear odor of alcohol into Peter's face. 'Our sexy friend wants something in that house. Just think of her in there. Man, I'm curious, aren't you? That sexy lady moving around in Freddy's old house- what's she looking for? Money? Jewelry? Dope? Well, who knows? But she's looking for something. Moving that sexy frame of hers around those rooms, checking everything out… that'd be a sight to see, wouldn't it?'

'I can't,' Peter said. The bourbon moved in his guts like oil.

'I think,' said Jim, 'that we will begin to move toward our transportation.'

Peter found himself standing outside in the cold by Jim's car: he could not remember why he was alone. He stamped his feet, rotated his head on his shoulders; said, 'Hey, Jim.'

Hardie emerged a moment later, grinning like a shark. 'Sorry to keep you waiting. Just had to tell our friend in there how much I enjoyed his company. He didn't seem to believe me, so I had to repeat my message several times. He demonstrated what you could call a lack of interest. Fortunately, I managed also to take care of our liquid requirements for the remainder of this pleasant evening.' He partially unzipped his jacket and let the neck of a bottle protrude.

'You're a madman.'

'I'm crazy like a fox, you mean.' Jim opened the car and leaned across the seat to unlock Peter's door. 'Now to return to the subject of our previous discussion.'

'You really ought to go to college,' Peter said as

Jim started the car. 'With your talent for bull, you'd be Phi Beta Kappa.'

'Well, I used to think I'd be a pretty good lawyer,' Jim said surprisingly. 'Here, have a jolt.' He passed Peter the bottle. 'What's a good lawyer besides a superior bullshitter? Look at that old Sears James, man. If I ever saw a guy who looks like he could shit you from here to Key West…'

Peter remembered his last sight of Sears James, seated massively in a car, his face pale behind the bleary window. Then he remembered the face of the boy sitting on the headstone in front of St. Michael's. 'Let's stay away from that woman,' he said.