And his whole body just… went up. Like a magician’s smoke effect. The trumpet jerked in my hands and the brass valves started jumpin’ on their own. Smiles saluted us with Freddie Hubbard all the way out of Memphis that day. He really was pretty fantastic, a shame we couldn’t have jammed in life. But soon as the train slowed again, we plugged the horn and mouthpiece with newspaper, sponges doused in glue. Hollis dug a shallow grave in the weeds near the tracks and I placed the trumpet inside and swept dirt over top.
For a while we could still hear that horn going, through the balled-up paper, earth, and all. I hope he’s still there, sleepin’ the Big Sleep in a vessel that meant the world to him. But Heaven help the patience of anyone who digs him up.
Clay waited for more, but Boyle’s monologue had run its course.
“So you want me to use Farewell Ghost to lay Deidre to rest?”
The longer she stays in the house, the more she suffers. And the more you suffer.
Clay sighed through his teeth. Sweat leaked down both armpits at the very idea. “What would I put her in?”
Boyle paced to the loose plank that had concealed the guitar a few nights before and it lifted on its own. Take a look. A better one than you did last time.
The shirt still pressed to his head, Clay hunkered down on all fours and crawled over to stare into the cobwebbed crawl space. In the dim, invading light, he could just make out something else in residence. A brown leather sleeve. Clay recognized the jacket from photos snapped late in Boyle’s life.
Inside the pocket.
Even before he could pull the jacket through the narrow gap, Clay felt the hard glass pressing through the leather. He reached into the interior pocket and his injured fingers touched the neck of a long bottle. It was old, the glass opaque and smooth, the mouth stopped with a cork.
Deidre and I found that on the beach in Cabo. A message in a bottle spit from the sea. Except there was no message inside. We brought it home andI used to leave poems and quotes for her in there. I was afraid Dave’s wife would chuck it with the rest of my shit, so I worked on my ghostly ability to hold a nail, then a hammer, and so on, till I had skill enough to hide my stuff under the floor and nail it down.
“And I should do what? Leave the bottle on my nightstand and hope she crawls in?”
Wherever you put it, Deidre is bound to notice. The real trick will be to cork it the second she’s inside. Let her fall into a deep slumber. Let her pain be over.
“And if she escapes before I seal it and launches me out a window?”
I’m rootin’ for that not to happen.
“You’re not as good a comedian as a guitar player.”
If things go south, just get out like you did today. We’ll think of something else.
Clay lifted the bottle so he could stare down its neck. His phone binged, his ride to the ER here. “I’ve got to go.”
He bit his tongue a moment before asking the question, the one really playing on his mind: “What happened that night, Rocco? Why are you and Deidre still here?”
But, in fact, Boyle wasn’t there. A moment prior, Clay had felt him like a physical presence, a mass of energy filling the space immediately to his right, and now that feeling dissipated faster than water down a drain. Boyle had departed before he’d heard. Or he’d dodged the question entirely.
8
QUEEN BITCH
Clay’s snore caught in his throat and his eyes snapped open to find the bottle six inches from his nose, unmolested on the nightstand. Despite his agitated nerves, shivering like summer birds on a winter wire, despite overdosing on Mocha Frappuccinos, Clay had fallen asleep on his nocturnal vigil. Doesn’t look like I missed much.
Except something was happening now. Something had awoken him—
Footsteps. Moving swiftly down the hall toward his bedroom. Angry footsteps.
His door banged as the visitor met the lock—which he’d engaged, uncertain if it would stop Deidre or not—and Clay gasped audibly.
Peter spoke up: “Open. Right now.” And the edge in his voice had Clay casting off pillows (his would-be shield against objects thrown at his head) and jumping out of bed. His father’s eyes were waiting on the far side of the door. “Is there an issue you’d like to discuss?”
“What time is it, Dad?”
“What the hell is the matter with you?”
“Is it as early as it feels?”
“You couldn’t have called me up and cursed at me like an adult?”
“What are you talking about?”
At such a profession of innocence, his father bore his crowned teeth. “Are we five years old again? Writing on the goddamn walls?”
Clay only stared back.
“You don’t remember breaking that either?” Peter nodded at the spiderwebbed fractures across Clay’s window. “And Christ, how’d you get the caterpillar over your eye?”
As if to remind himself, Clay touched the stitches on his forehead. That was another question he couldn’t quite answer. I spent four hours at Providence St. Joseph because a ghost slammed a door on my face?
His father took the silence as incrimination. He studied the room like a prison guard, taking in the discarded piles of clothing, the Rickenbacker on its stand, sniffing at the musky tang of deodorant and old pizza. Finally, Peter’s gaze fell on the empty bottle, and in that moment his face betrayed something else. Not outrage at all, Clay realized, but something deeper, and harder to disregard. Concern.
An empty liquor bottle. A head wound. Destructive tendencies. Peter was honestly concerned for a son he didn’t know or understand. Because Peter Harper loved his son. And maybe now he was a little afraid for him too.
Clay’s stomach filled with
