“No, it isn’t!”
I nod yes.
The house and water tower have gone by and then a small drainage ditch appears and a crossroad leading off to the horizon. Yes — that’s right, I think. That’s exactly right.
“They’re way ahead of us!” Chris hollers. “Speed up!”
I turn my head from side to side.
“Why not?” he hollers.
“Not safe!”
“They’re gone!”
“They’ll wait.”
“Speed up!”
“No.” I shake my head. It’s just a feeling. On a cycle you trust them and we stay at fifty-five.
The first rain begins now but up ahead I see the lights of a town — I knew it would be there.
When we arrive John and Sylvia are there under the first tree by the road, waiting for us.
“What happened to you?”
“Slowed down.”
“Well, we know that. Something wrong?”
“No. Let’s get out of this rain.”
John says there is a motel at the other end of town, but I tell him there’s a better one if you turn right, at a row of cottonwoods a few blocks down.
We turn at the cottonwoods and travel a few blocks, and a small motel appears. Inside the office John looks around and says, “This is a good place. When were you here before?”
“I don’t remember”, I say.
“Then how did you know about this?”
“Intuition.”
He looks at Sylvia and shakes his head.
Sylvia has been watching me silently for some time. She notices my hands are unsteady as I sign in. “You look awfully pale”, she says. “Did that lightning shake you up?”
“No.”
“You look like you’d seen a ghost.”
John and Chris look at me and I turn away from them to the door. It is still raining hard, but we make a run for it to the rooms. The gear on the cycles is protected and we wait until the storm passes over before removing it.
After the rain stops, the sky lightens a little. But from the motel courtyard, I see past the cottonwoods that a second darkness, that of night, is about to come on. We walk into town, have supper, and by the time we get back, the fatigue of the day is really on me. We rest, almost motionless, in the metal armchairs of the motel courtyard, slowly working down a pint of whiskey that John brought with some mix from the motel cooler. It goes down slowly and agreeably. A cool night wind rattles the leaves of the cottonwoods along the road.
Chris wonders what we should do next. Nothing tires this kid. The newness and strangeness of the motel surroundings excite him and he wants us to sing songs as they did at camp.
“We’re not very good at songs”, John says.
“Let’s tell stories then”, Chris says. He thinks for a while. “Do you know any good ghost stories? All the kids in our cabin used to tell ghost stories at night.”
“You tell us some”, John says.
And he does. They are kind of fun to hear. Some of them I haven’t heard since I was his age. I tell him so, and Chris wants to hear some of mine, but I can’t remember any.
After a while he says, “Do you believe in ghosts?”
“No”, I say
“Why not?”
“Because they are un-sci-en-ti-fic.”
The way I say this makes John smile. “They contain no matter”, I continue, “and have no energy and therefore, according to the laws of science, do not exist except in people’s minds.”
The whiskey, the fatigue and the wind in the trees start mixing in my mind. “Of course”, I add, “the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people’s minds. It’s best to be completely scientific about the whole thing and refuse to believe in either ghosts or the laws of science. That way you’re safe. That doesn’t leave you very much to believe in, but that’s scientific too.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about”, Chris says.
“I’m being kind of facetious.”
Chris gets frustrated when I talk like this, but I don’t think it hurts him.
“One of the kids at YMCA camp says he believes in ghosts.”
“He was just spoofing you.”
“No, he wasn’t. He said that when people haven’t been buried right, their ghosts come back to haunt people. He really believes in that.”
“He was just spoofing you”, I repeat.
“What’s his name?” Sylvia says.
“Tom White Bear.”
John and I exchange looks, suddenly recognizing the same thing.
“Ohhh, Indian!” he says.
I laugh. “I guess I’m going to have to take that back a little”, I say. “I was thinking of European ghosts.”
“What’s the difference?”
John roars with laughter. “He’s got you”, he says.
I think a little and say, “Well, Indians sometimes have a different way of looking at things, which I’m not saying is completely wrong. Science isn’t part of the Indian tradition.”
“Tom White Bear said his mother and dad told him not to believe all that stuff. But he said his grandmother whispered it was true anyway, so he believes it.”
He looks at me pleadingly. He really does want to know things sometimes. Being facetious is not being a very good father. “Sure”, I say, reversing myself, “I believe in ghosts too.”
Now John and Sylvia look at me peculiarly. I see I’m not going to get out of this one easily and brace myself for a long explanation.
“It’s completely natural”, I say, “to think of Europeans who believed in ghosts or Indians who believed in ghosts as ignorant. The scientific point of view has wiped out every other view to a point where they all seem primitive, so that if a person today talks about ghosts or spirits he is considered ignorant or maybe nutty. It’s just all but completely impossible to imagine a world where ghosts can actually exist.”
John nods affirmatively and I continue.
“My own opinion is that the intellect of modern man isn’t that superior. IQs aren’t that much different. Those Indians and medieval men were just as intelligent as we are, but the context in which they thought was completely different. Within that context of thought, ghosts and spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons and quants are to a modern man. In that sense I believe in ghosts. Modern man has his ghosts and spirits too, you know.”
“What?”
“Oh, the laws of physics and of logic — the number system — the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real.”
“They seem real to me”, John says.
“I don’t get it”, says Chris.
So I go on. “For example, it seems completely natural to presume that gravitation and the law of gravitation existed before Isaac Newton. It would sound nutty to think that until the seventeenth century there was no gravity.”
