ME AND CHRISTOPHER, published in Personal Bests Journal 4, Summer 2002, 15-36.

Me and Christopher

‘So whaddaya wanna do today?’ my close friend Christopher asked, hands in pockets, shoulders slumped. We were in my back yard late on a Friday afternoon in early October, the school week over and done with.

‘Don’t slouch,’ I said. ‘I dunno. Nothin’ to do inside. The old man’s home from work.’

‘Well, let’s do somethin.’ I didn’t come all the way down here just to stand around and play with myself.’

I liked Christopher. He was so witty. I wished that I could be him. But I wasn’t, and so I tried to be like him. That’s why I didn’t like for him to slouch his shoulders, because I did, and I certainly didn’t want him to be like me.

We were at our wit’s end. Here we both were, 13-year-old boys—almost grown-ups, and with the same birthday at that—and we didn’t have a clue as to what we wanted to do. I still had forty-five minutes until supper time, and all I knew was that I didn’t want to go back into the house.

‘Hey!’ Christopher lit up, ‘how about let’s go to Callmeyer’s and get us an ice cream sandwich?’ Christopher never bought anything, so I knew what he meant.

‘Yeah, OK,’ I said, shoving my hands in my jeans pockets and slouching forward with him.

‘Don’t slouch,’ Christopher admonished. The point was well-taken.

We left by the gate to the alley and strolled together up the alley to the street at the end, trash talking each other along the way, saying ugly things about each other’s mothers.

At the street we crossed in the middle of the block, turned right and headed for Callmeyer’s corner store. In so doing we walked past the bar in the middle of the block at the alley, its door open, the odor of stale beer and the sounds of bottle clinks and blurred voices emanating from it. My old man always stopped off here on the way home from work for a quick one.

We arrived at the corner and went into Callmeyer’s store. His store, somewhat dark inside, was nevertheless a great place for a 13-year-old shoplifter to practice his skill. The chest freezer with all sorts of frozen goodies was just inside the large plate-glass window that faced the street, across from the checkout counter. The store was stocked with all sorts of groceries, medicines, and other items, including a meat counter at the back. Callmeyer’s wife worked here as well, and they lived above the store. His store was our neighborhood’s go-to place if you couldn’t go to a big grocery store. You could shoplift anything you wanted if you played it right, especially if you had a diversion to distract attention. Like a partner, like my other best friend Denny. Christopher and I had taken ice cream sandwiches and candy bars, and I had even stuffed a paperback novel down the front of my jeans once, zipping up my jacket to cover up the

protruding part. But the key was to buy something, something cheap, a legal purchase to fool Mr. or Mrs. Callmeyer, whoever was at the cash register. Besides, you wouldn’t dare just come in and seem to browse for a while if you were a teenager, and then leave. That was a dead giveaway that you were shoplifting.

I hated to steal from Mr. Callmeyer because he had a wicked sense of humor. Under glass on the counter and next to the cash register were little cards about the size of post cards, with funny sayings on them. My favorite was

 

ABCD puppies?

LMNO puppies!

OSAR puppies.

CMPN?

Once it was spoken, even a 13-year-old boy could understand it. I hated to steal from Mr. Callmeyer. But I couldn’t help it. It was a thrill. I was addicted.

On this day I reached into the chest freezer and stuffed an ice cream sandwich up the left sleeve of my jacket, then got another one to take to the counter. Pretty sneaky, I thought. I put a quarter and a nickel on the countertop. Mr. Callmeyer rang up the sale and took out the change from the till. As he put the change into my open right hand, he said in an even tone, ‘There you are. Now don’t take anything out of here that you didn’t pay for.’

Uh oh, was he on to me? I replied, ‘No sir, I won’t, sir,’ my voice beginning to crack. I put the change in my jeans pocket, keeping my left arm down at my side, below the countertop, where the ice cream sandwich was starting to soften inside the sleeve. Mr. Callmeyer looked at me askance as I walked to the door. Fortunately, a woman went up to the counter to pay for her items as I walked out of the store.

Christopher was waiting for me outside. ‘Hey, did you get anything?’ he asked.

‘Yeah. An ice cream sandwich, and I bought another one. So when did you leave? You weren’t there to help me in case he was suspicious. And he was!’

‘Sorry, man. I didn’t want anything this time.’

I wasn’t disappointed at all. I ate both of the ice cream sandwiches.

This wasn’t the first time that Christopher had abandoned me in a tight situation, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. We headed up the next two blocks to our junior high school to see if there was any action on the ball field or in the school yard, until it was time for me to go home for supper.

 

The next week I was shooting baskets at my elementary school playground. The backboard was attached to a chain link fence, and below it was a concrete wall about six feet high with a long row of connected benches right under the basket and extending all the way down the wall to the other end of the school yard, the benches just wide enough to sit on. You had to be careful doing layups or you would bang your knee on the bench back. Christopher was sitting on the bench off to the side, watching me shoot. I wasn’t very good and neither was he, but I was getting better each time I brought my basketball over here to shoot. I might have made three of every ten shots, and these were just from the free throw line.

Just then Gary Youngblood came walking alone down the sidewalk outside the school yard and saw me shooting. Oh shit, I thought, Gary was one of the neighborhood toughs, and borderline crazy. A loose cannon. I hoped he would pass on by.

No such luck. He came into the school yard. I hoped he was coming in just for a sip from the drinking fountain and then would pass on. He did get a drink, but then he ambled over to where I was shooting baskets. I had a bad feeling about this.

Gary was thin and wiry, about five feet seven, freckled of face with a head topped by wispy long blond hair that despite being gelled back into a pompadour still worked loose and floated in a breeze. He was sixteen years old and ran with the local teen hoods. If they had a slate of officers, he would be vice-president. Yes, there was one worse than he was.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘What’s up?’

‘Nothing much. Just shooting hoops.’

‘Lemme see the ball,’ he said. ‘I wanna take a few shots.’

‘OK,’ I said, and I passed him the ball, maybe a little too hard, because after he caught it he shot me a look that made my stomach flop.

‘Let’s play HORSE,’ he said, and he took his first shot, which bounced off the front edge of the rim.

I followed with a layup, being careful not to trip on the bench below. I made the shot. Gary didn’t. H for Gary. I then shot from an angle, banking it off the backboard. The ball went through. I said, ‘Gotta use the backboard.’

Gary made the shot from the same angle, all net without the backboard.

‘That wasn’t a bank shot,’ I said.

‘Shut up. I made the shot, didn’t I?’

I knew I had better not argue, so I said nothing. We continued the game, with me racking up HOR and Gary at HORS before the final shot. For my last shot I stood right under the basket, off to the right side, and banked the ball in. Gary stood in the same spot and shot off the backboard, but he did it too soft, and it hit the side of the rim at the backboard.

‘HORSE!’ I shouted. ‘I win!’

I guess I celebrated a little too enthusiastically, because Gary started after me, shouting ‘You son of a bitch!’ and other profanities. I backpedaled all the way across the yard, pleading with him to cool off. He backed me up to the railing around the long grate-covered window well below, which ran the entire length of the school building. I leaned away from him over the top railing, like a boxer on the ropes.

Gary feinted a slap to my face. I flinched and raised my left hand to ward off the blow, and he landed a blow to my mid-section. I doubled up, clutching my stomach, and he slapped me hard on my left cheek. I went down to the ground.

‘God, Gary,’ I whined.

‘Get up, you little fart! Think you’re better’n me, huh?’ He kicked at my side. ‘You cocksucker, you smartass bastard! You little chicken shit!’ punctuating each phrase with a sharp kick. Each kick sent waves of pain throughout my body, but I stayed down. Getting up or mouthing off back to him surely would have been a fatal mistake.

‘Goddamn sonofabitch!’ he finished. ‘You’ll know better next time, won’t you? Don’t give me that shit again. Maybe when you grow up you’ll back up what you say, you little baby.’ These last words he sneered, which made the hurt worse, but I still said nothing. He spit at me to punctuate his contempt. And off he walked, tugging up his collar and combing back his long, wispy, wild hair, which floated in the breeze as if under water as he strolled off cockily.

As I raised myself up, I noticed Christopher standing beside me. ‘Where the hell were you?’ I whined.

‘Off getting a drink of water. Why? What happened? Did I miss something?’ He had to have been teasing me.

‘I hate Gary Youngblood,’ I whimpered.

‘Yeah, he’s a creep.’

‘Worse than a creep. A jerk.’

‘A slimeball.’

‘A jackass.’

‘An asshole.’

‘Yeah.’ I was beginning to feel better already.

‘Some guys don’t deserve to live,’ Christopher added.

‘Gary doesn’t.’ I agreed.

‘He does nothing but cause trouble for everybody else.’

‘Yeah.’

‘The world would be better off without people like him,’ he intoned solemnly.

‘Sure,’ I agreed. ‘He should never have been born. Then the world would be a better place to live.’

‘When has he ever done anything good?’ Christopher asked.

‘Never!’ It was a revelation.

‘When will he ever do anything good?’ Christopher was beginning to sound like a Baptist preacher. He pounded his fist into his palm to emphasize his question.

‘Never!’ I responded.

‘Gary doesn’t deserve to live, the bastard.’

‘Right!’ Something welled up inside me.

‘Gary deserves to die, that’s what he deserves,’ he stated, much more solemnly now.

‘Yeah, right,’ I responded, tentatively. I was unsure of the direction in which the conversation was headed, but the road was attracting me nevertheless.

‘He should die. Then we’d all be better off.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Assassinate him. Somebody should. Then we’d all be better off. Too bad.’

Christopher looked at me, eyebrows arched. ‘Too bad what? Too bad nobody will kill him?’

‘Sure. I wouldn’t cry if he got killed. But who would do it, and how, and why?’

Christopher locked his eyes onto mine. ‘It could be done, and nobody’d have to find out.’

I considered this for a few seconds, its import working slowly on my consciousness, then on my conscience. My heart began to beat faster. ‘Christopher,’ I said, ‘do you know what you’re saying?’

‘Damn right I do! Guys like Gary don’t deserve to live! He’s always pushing, always shoving, always slapping little guys around, just to see them cry and bleed. The only thing that makes him smile is pain. We don’t need extra pain, do we? Don’t you have enough of it at home? Well, don’t you?’

I hesitated.

‘Don’t you?’

I sighed. ‘Yeah.’ It was painful just to admit it.

‘Well, who needs Gary Youngblood? The streets outside your house ain’t safe with him around. Who’s gonna miss him when he’s gone?’

‘Hell, we all will,’ I said. ‘We won’t have anybody to kick us around anymore.’ I laughed, which was a bad idea, as the pain in my ribs protested.

‘Well, then. All we have to do now is to figure out how to do it.’

‘Do what?’

‘You know what, dipshit. Kill him. You know, kill Gary Youngblood!’

His words thrilled me. I could feel myself carried away by them. We began to plot ways to kill him. I suggested we dig a hole in the school yard and poke sharpened sticks into it and cover it over. Then we would lure him across the yard, calling him names, vile names, and he would fall into the pit and impale himself. One of the stakes would gouge an eye, and another would pierce his nuts.

‘Naw,’ Christopher said, ‘too much could go wrong. When would you dig the hole, and how long would it take, and how could you keep it a secret until you were ready, and somebody else might fall in it first. Maybe you would fall in. Then what? You would gouge your eye and your nuts. Naw, that won’t work.’

‘OK, smart guy, try this….’ and so I went through a litany of other ways to kill Gary, all of which met with objections from Christopher. Not that they were any good; I borrowed them from Roadrunner cartoons, and they didn’t work in the cartoon universe either.

I suggested that we knife him in the back. But then, Christopher pointed out, I would have to be so close to him that if anything went wrong he could beat the shit out of me or wrest the knife from me and do me in. Finally, annoyed at my lack of creativity, Christopher suggested we shoot Gary. ‘That would be fast and good. All we would need is a gun. Is there a gun in your house? You could borrow it and put it back when you are through with it. Does your old man have one?’

‘Naw, I’ve never seen him with a gun. I’ve never seen a gun in the house, anywhere, upstairs or downstairs.’

‘Are you sure? Didn’t you tell me once that your Grandma has one in her closet?’

‘Oh yeah, I forgot. It’s a little pistol, maybe a .22 or something like that.’

‘Well, there you go. So we have a reason to kill Gary, we have a gun. Now all we need is an opportunity. A place and a time.’

‘So, do you know his routine? His habits? Times when he would be alone?’’

‘I don’t,’ Christopher said, ‘but you could find out. Aren’t you friends with his brother?’

I wondered why I hadn’t thought of that first; of course, I was friends with Denny, his younger brother. All I had to do was to find out what Gary did, especially at night, and especially late, late at night, when nobody would be around. I could find that out from Denny.

‘But wait a minute, Christopher.’ My eyebrows knit together and awakened to the enormity of what we were talking about. ‘Isn’t this just make believe? You’re not serious; we’re not serious about this? Are we?

His face mirrored mine, knit eyebrows and all. ‘Are you kidding me? Of course we’re serious. Hasn’t Gary bullied you enough? Hasn’t he bullied other kids enough? Of course we’re serious.’

And that was that. I had no counter argument. He was right. Somebody needed to do something about Gary Youngblood. And nobody else would, we were sure. But I wasn’t sure about my buddy Christopher and his murderous ideas. I wasn’t sure it had to be us.

 

Fast forward a few hours. It was 1:00 AM. Either that or 12:30, because the church bell solemnly rings just once on the half hour. Never mind, it was time to get up and get dressed. As I slipped out of bed, very quietly, I became conscious once again of the cacophony of night noises within the house. Not house noises but rather human noises, family noises. My room was the corner of an L formed by the other two bedrooms, the two entrances separated from my room only by folding accordion-like vinyl sliding doors. Even with the folding doors pulled to, the music of the night was still loud enough to create insomnia. In my mom and dad’s bedroom, just outside the door to the right, I heard my old man’s teeth grinding loudly, constantly, as if he were a seven-year-locust on a summer’s night. Next to him in bed, my mother laid down a rhythm section of unconscious moans and groans: ‘Ohhhh. Ohhhh. Moannnnnn.’ In the other bedroom off the other side of my room, my grandmother snored loudly, adding a bass line to the music coming from my folks’ bedroom. No wonder I had trouble sleeping at night.

Behind all of the human noises, I heard the faint, irregular nighttime house sounds, the sounds that seeded my imagination when I was a child. Now I understood them to be the sounds of a settling house, but just three or four years ago, they were the sounds of burglars, monsters, and ghosts. The only thing that was quiet was the street, just outside my window.

I quickly and quietly pulled on my pants and my socks and shoes, taking care not to sit on the bed once I got off it. The squeaking of the springs would be enough to awaken my grandmother, a light sleeper. I could not afford to wake her tonight.

After putting on my clothes and my jacket, I reached between the mattress and the box springs and felt for the cool, hard steel of the pistol. While my grandma was at work at the department store earlier this evening, I had sneaked into one of her closets and found the shoebox in which she kept her .22 pistol and box of bullets. It was a relic of her early years in Kentucky on the farm. Finding the pistol and the box of bullets under my mattress, my hand recoiled instinctively as I felt the adrenalin flow in my stomach. My heart began to thud in my chest, and I shuddered and took in a deep breath. I grabbed the pistol and shoved it into my right jacket pocket, the bullets in my left jacket pocket. I feared that if they were together in the same pocket, they might go off spontaneously.

Just then I heard a whisper outside my window. ‘Hey, you ready?’ It was Christopher, who had been waiting on the porch until he heard me stirring in my bedroom. Tiptoeing over to the windowsill, I whispered back, ‘Yeah, I’m ready.’ I kneeled and reached through for the spring-loaded catches on both sides that kept the screen locked in place. Slowly, very slowly, holding my breath, I slid the screen up until the catches passed the last slot. Locking them in place, I hunched over and slowly stepped through the window opening. Once on the other side, I reached back in and gently lowered the screen until the catches rested on the bottom slot. If they had gone all the way down, I would not be able to climb back in once my task was over. To insure that the screen would not somehow drop all the way down, I put a twig from the tree in the back yard between the bottom of the screen and the frame. That should do it, I thought.

Our house and yard were on a rise slightly higher than our neighbor’s next door to the north and was set back from the street by a small front yard. Our house had two sets of steep concrete steps—the ones that led from the sidewalk up to our yard, and the ones that led from the yard up to our concrete porch. From a perch up on the porch, you had a commanding view of the street below. The streetlamp across the street stood tall on its concrete pillar and shone a golden glare around it. The windows of the flats across the street stared blankly. Christopher and I slowly descended both sets of steps, hands in jacket pockets. I was startled when I first felt the pistol in my right pocket. I gripped its barrel, keeping my finger away from the trigger. Even though it wasn’t loaded yet, I didn’t want my finger to come anywhere near the trigger.

I listened for cars coming up or down the street. Thus far everything was going all right. No one was on the street and all the neighborhood dogs were silent.

We had to walk the street because if we had chosen to walk the alley behind my house, all the dogs in the neighborhood would have started to howl and bark. As it was, we were likely to arouse a dog or two before reaching the end of the block, but we had to chance it. We had to walk quickly and quietly before a car appeared out of the gloom up the street. At this time of night there was a good chance that a cop might be out on patrol, and I couldn’t risk being picked up with a .22 pistol in my jacket pocket.

Damn! The enormity of that last thought made my heart thump in my chest. Christopher noticed and asked me what was wrong. ‘What if I get caught even before I get to my spot? My god, how would I get out of that situation? How could I explain to a cop what I am doing out after midnight with a gun in my pocket?’ I would already be in trouble should someone at home wake up and find me missing, but what kind of trouble would I be in if a cop brought me to the front door at 1:00 AM, or worse yet, called the house and informed them that I was being held at the station for a curfew violation and weapons charge?

‘Ain’t gonna happen, Andy,’ Christopher said. ‘I’ve been out lots of times after midnight. There’s nothin’ to be scared of.’ He wasn’t exactly right, as he and I had once done this same thing after midnight and had actually walked at least a mile or two. When we walked through the park on our way back, still about a mile from home, I could swear that someone was trailing us, going from tree to tree about fifty yards behind us. When I had told Christopher this, we quickened our pace and wound up running out of the park onto the street, where it seemed safer. That was the first and only time that we walked out of the neighborhood after midnight.

‘Yeah?’ I asked dismissively. ‘Remember that night we went to the park?’ He didn’t reply. Gotcha!

As I looked back down the street, I saw headlights turn a corner two blocks away and come our way. We were in no man’s land. We were too far away to simply turn around and flee home but too far from the other side of the street at the end of the block. We figured that we could make it to the end of the block, though, better than we could make it back home, since the car was approaching my house from the south and we were half a block north of it. So we walked briskly, crossed the street at the north end of the block before the approaching car reached the intersection at the south end of the block. We ducked into the breezeway between the Church of God in Christ and the concrete retaining wall that was the northern boundary of Gary Youngblood’s house, itself sitting high up on a short hill overlooking the street. The leaves of a half-dozen autumns crunched under our feet as we crouched against the wall and waited for the car to pass by. I felt safe in the dark breezeway. We could hear the car approaching, slowing down, judging by the hissing of the wheels against the damp pavement.

Damn! It was a police car! But it didn’t stop. I could hear it speed up as it reached the end of the block, the north corner of the church building, and turned right. That was a close call.

As I crouched on my haunches against the wall, I pulled the pistol out of my jacket pocket and rolled the cylinder out. I loaded it with trembling fingers and snapped the cylinder shut. ‘Man,’ said Christopher, ‘you’re really gonna do it!’

‘What?’ I screeched, ‘you’re the one who made me do this!’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know. I was just admiring your courage. Good boy!’

‘Yeah.’ I shuddered.

I turned my attention back to the pistol. Soon Gary Youngblood would come sauntering down the street from one of his gang friends’ houses. Denny told me that he would when I asked about his routine some time ago. But I didn’t tell Denny what I was planning to do. Gary’s friends would probably have been out playing pool at the pool hall down on Broadway or drinking beer over at someone’s house or terrorizing people unlucky enough to have been out on the streets so late, or doing a host of other criminal things. He beat up even on his friends, he bullied his own brother, he had slapped and pushed me around, and he had even tried to kill all his family with a butcher knife once. Gary never did anything good.

Gary had to die.

We waited, shivering in the cool fall night air. As I crouched in the breezeway lost in my thoughts, I heard the far-off barking of dogs, mournful sounding at 1:00 AM. Every five minutes or so, a car rolled slowly by. And every five minutes or so I went to the edge of the church building and peered around the corner, looking both ways for signs of Gary Youngblood. Finally, after a long wait, just at the point that I had started to consider going back, I noticed up the street, in the next block, an approaching figure. As it moved into the domain of the next street light, I could see by its demeanor, by its lion’s mane of thin blonde hair, floating with each step, and I could hear by the clinking of the taps on the heels of his shoes, that it was Gary. His shape was getting larger now as he approached, strutting cockily, perhaps a little drunk, smoking a cigarette without a care in the world. The taps clinked louder now. He was wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket with studs on it reflecting the streetlight. He crossed the street and approached the church building. My heart pounded loudly in my chest as I moved toward the front of the church wall and raised the pistol to what I guessed was the height of Gary’s head. I slowly extended and straightened my arm. I could tell by the sound of the taps that he would soon break the plane of the breezeway. I took a deep breath.

There he was! I aimed. I heard a voice behind me yell ‘Do it! Do it!’ I pulled the trigger. The resulting CRACK! surprised me. It was hardly louder than a firecracker. Gary’s head lurched away and he let out a muffled cry. His knees buckled, and he stumbled and fell, holding the back of his head with his left hand. The neighborhood dogs replied to the pistol report. My whole body was on fire with energy and fear as I walked quickly over to Gary, writhing and moaning on the pavement. From behind, Christopher urged me on: ‘Pop him a couple more times!’

‘You goddamn son of a bitch. You deserve to die!’ I said through tears. I took a big breath, then let it out. His eyes locked on to mine as I put the gun close to his temple and pulled the trigger twice. CRACK! CRACK! The dogs renewed their barking. Soon the whole neighborhood would be awake.

I didn’t have time enough to admire my work. I had to get back home before anyone turned on their porch light and came out to see what had happened. Sweating, shaking from nervous energy, I took off down the block walking briskly but avoiding running, as the noise might cause more barking and maybe someone to come outside. When I got to the point across the street from my house, I crossed over and climbed the lower steps two at a time to the front yard, then caught my breath and let out a sigh. Christopher was right behind me. Then we carefully climbed the upper steps to the porch. As we got to the porch landing, the front door opened and my mother stepped out, bundled up in her pink housecoat. Uh-oh, I thought. Busted. I made sure that the .22 was deep in my right jacket pocket.

Speaking in a hushed voice, ‘Where have you been, young man?’ Mom asked, controlling her anger.

‘Me and Christopher have just been out walking around and talking. It was his idea,’ I said, gesturing behind me with my thumb over my shoulder.

‘You and who?’

‘Christopher. He’s right behind me.’

‘No one’s behind you.’

‘No, you’re wrong. He’s right h—’ I said, turning around to show her. She was right; no one else was here.

‘Right, no one else is here. And no one else but you is going to be grounded, either.’

I was confused about Christopher’s whereabouts. What a coward, beating a fast getaway! Continuing to speak in a hushed voice, I explained to Mom how I left out of my bedroom window, and promised that I would never do that again.

‘You can bet on that!’ she said in a hoarse whisper. ‘I am not going to tell your father about this, but if you ever do this again and I catch you, I will, and he will tan your hide but good! Now you go back into your room through that window. We’ll talk about this later.’

‘Yes ma’am,’ I said, as she went back in through the front door and closed it.

After passing through the window, I undressed and got into bed under the covers. I was shaking. When I thought that Mom was completely asleep, I rolled slowly out of bed and reached to where my clothes were. I took the pistol and box of bullets out of my jacket pockets and pushed them between the mattress and box springs. I made sure that I separated them out of the fear that somehow they would come together and fire off a shot.

Just then I heard far off a siren wailing, getting louder. Some vehicle stopped up the street and the siren stopped. I could see the blue and red lights reflecting on the walls of the brick flats across the street. I wondered if Christopher had made it back to his place all right.

Come to think of it, I didn’t know where he lived.

Once back in bed, I felt the adrenalin fade and then relaxed. Suddenly the enormity of what I had done came crashing in on my conscience. I had just killed a person! Did Gary deserve death? Christopher said he did. Christopher put me up to it. He didn’t do it; I did it. Why did I listen to him? What if we were seen? What if someone came to their front room window and looked outside to see us walking the street at 1 a.m.? What if someone across the street saw us climbing my steps? And what happened to Christopher? Did he just disappear? Mom said no one was with me on the steps.

I lay in my bed, reliving the events of the killing. I couldn’t sleep for the images in my brain. A short time later, after the church bell struck 2:00, I heard a rustling at my open window.  Christopher was crouching just outside the screen, staring at me. His face broke into a wicked smile. It frightened me. He smirked, then winked and was gone.

 

The next morning, Saturday morning, I got up late, around 8:15, dressed, and walked into the kitchen for breakfast. The old man had already gone down to the local bakery and brought back the weekend’s breakfast sweets, a peach cake and two gooey butter cakes, one plain and one with cherries on top. Yum, my favorites. He had already gone out to the back yard to work on putting up a concrete block border for a raised garden. Mom was in the kitchen, at the sink. When I came into the kitchen scratching my head and yawning, she said, ‘Somebody didn’t get a good night's sleep.’ I mumbled, ‘Yeah.’

Then she launched into telling me my punishment, which was to be grounded for two weeks, not to leave the yard except for school, and to do all the yard work during that time. ‘You’re lucky not to have it worse, young man,’ she said. ‘If this happens again, your father will decide your punishment, and you don’t want that!’

‘Yes’m,’ I uttered, and settled into my breakfast of a slice of peach cake, one of gooey butter cake, and a tall glass of milk. My grandmother had been up since 4:30 AM, as was her custom, and was in the front room knitting and watching morning television. After breakfast, I sighed heavily and went out back to offer to help my old man.

He told me to trim the shrubs. While I was trimming the shrubs, clipping the long whiplike branches that had served many times in my old man’s hands as punishment on my backside, Denny came down the alley to the fence and called me over. Speaking in a hushed voice he said, ‘Did you hear what happened to Gary?’ It surprised me that his voice was quivering and he seemed to be fighting back tears. He should have been pleased that Gary was dead.

‘No,’ I lied. ‘What happened?’

He explained being awakened by the sirens in front of his house sometime after 1:00 AM and by a knock on the front door. A police officer told him that a body was on the sidewalk in front of their house, and he asked him if he had heard anything. Denny was the first one down the steps to the sidewalk to see the grisly scene. He identified his brother Gary. He was followed by his father and mother, who screamed. (I don’t think I heard her scream.) ‘It was an assassination. Who would do such a thing?’ he asked with a trembling voice.

‘Gosh, that’s horrible, Denny,’ I said, as concerned as I could sound. ‘Maybe one of the hoods he hangs around with?’

‘I don’t know, maybe,’ he responded. ‘Did you hear anything last night, even though you live way down the block?’

‘I heard the sirens, but I didn’t know how far off they were.’

Denny knit his eyebrows and said, ‘You told me a few days ago that Gary beat you up. I hated to hear that. Have you heard if he did that to anyone else? Maybe someone like that did it.’

My stomach flopped. Denny was now linking Gary’s beating someone up with a revenge killing. That was coming too close to me.

‘It’s possible,’ I said. ‘But do you know how many kids he has beat up?’

‘The only one he told me about was you, because he knew we were friends. He rubbed it in to me.’

‘What an asshole,’ I said. ‘Sorry!’ I corrected myself. ‘Yeah, he beat me up, but I would never kill him for that. I couldn’t kill anyone. I don’t even have a gun.’

‘How did you know that he was shot to death?’ Denny asked. ‘I never told you that.’

I had made a major mistake. The next words were going to be important. ‘Well, I just remembered that a few minutes before I heard the sirens I heard some pops, like firecrackers, far off. I didn’t know what they were, but I guess they were gunshots?’ I hoped he would buy this explanation.

He did, though he thought for a second or two. ‘Yeah, they were. There was a lot of blood around Gary’s head. I don’t know if I can get that out of my mind. The police are starting an investigation. They are going to go door to door through the neighborhood, north and south of my house, and interview people. They already took statements from my family, and they will come back later early next week, when it’s daytime.’

This news concerned me. They had started with the Youngblood family, and they would ask all sorts of trick questions when they went door to door. They would come down the block to my house.

‘Man, I’m sure sorry about Gary,’ I said. ‘Hey, I’ve got to help my old man in the yard, so I’d better get back to it.’

‘OK,’ Denny said. ‘I’ll come by in the afternoon and we can go shoot baskets.’

‘I won’t be able to come. I’ve been grounded for two weeks. I can’t leave the yard except to go to school.’

‘Yeah, what’d you do?’ Denny asked. I had been grounded for six weeks not too many months ago for not going to the neighborhood show on a Friday night, instead roaming the streets with Denny. A friend of my Mom’s told her that she had seen me and another kid going in and out of stores that night, as we had been accustomed to doing for many weeks. That other kid was Denny. And then I couldn’t go to the show or anywhere for six weeks. If Mom had known that we were shoplifting, I probably wouldn’t have been allowed out until I was 21.

‘Something around the house,’ I lied. ‘Well, I gotta get back to helping the old man. I guess I’ll see you in two weeks.’

‘Bye,’ Denny said, and walked back up the alley. My old man didn’t know that I was grounded, so I had put on an act of offering to help him. I would rather have been anywhere else.

 

Later, our mutual task completed, the old man went back into the house to cool off and change clothes. He actually thanked me for helping, which was a first. Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all. Next thing I knew, Christopher was standing right behind me. ‘Hey, what’s up?’ he said.

‘Whoa, you scared me, man!’ I said, turning around to see him. He must have crept through the gate from the alley without making much of a sound.

‘Yeah, sorry about that,’ he said, ‘about as sorry as you were to Denny.’

‘How did you know about that?’

‘Oh, I heard some of your talk as I was coming down the alley.’

‘Well, if you really must know, I have been out here in the yard helping my old man because my Mom was waiting for me when I got back home last night. I’m grounded for two weeks. And where were you last night when I got home?’

‘I didn’t need to stick around to see you get caught by your Mom, so I skeedaddled.’

‘You came back an hour later, though.’

‘Yeah, I wanted to make sure you were all right, safe and sound in your bed.’

‘Thanks a lot for nothing. I guess you heard Denny tell me about Gary.’

‘I heard some of it. What did he think about it?’

‘He was actually upset. I thought he would have been glad that his evil older brother was dead and gone.’

‘Did he have any ideas about who would have done it?’

‘Nope, but he did make me nervous when he suggested that someone Gary beat up might have killed him.’

‘Why? Why were you nervous?’

‘Jerkoff! Because he beat me up! That worried me.’

‘Hmm, that is something to be nervous about. What else?’

So I relayed the rest of what Denny told me, about the police making house to house calls to interview people and find witnesses. ‘He said they started with his family and would come back to finish their interview next week.’

‘Hmm, I wonder what his family told them. I wonder what Denny told them. I wonder if Denny heard the shots.’

‘Speaking of which, dipshit, why did you run off when I … when I shot Gary?’

‘I was waiting in the dark to help you in case you missed.’

‘Yeah, right. Well, I’m starting to really worry about this. I think the cops are pretty thorough investigating, especially murders. Somehow they are going to find out who did it.’

‘They would have to get ideas from witnesses first. Who knows what Denny knows? I bet he didn’t tell you everything, and I bet he’s going to start thinking about a revenge killing. And guess who would be a prime suspect for a revenge murder?’

‘Who? Not me. I told Denny I could never kill anyone. Now I wish I hadn’t done it.’

‘Too late for that. When he starts to put two and two together, it will add up to you, Andy. We shouldn’t let that happen.’

‘If it’s going to happen, it will happen, and then I’ll deal with it. He should know that I couldn’t do it.’

‘How do you know that? Don’t you think you should make sure that doesn’t happen?’

‘Yeah, right. How?’

‘Wellllll….’ He said, with a twinkle in his eye.

‘What are you getting at?’ I was afraid of where he was going with that.

‘We can figure out a way to keep him from concluding it was you and squealing to the cops.’

‘Yeah, how? Kidnap him?’

‘No, something more permanent….’

‘What are you suggesting, Christopher?’

‘Stop him from talking. Do him in, of course.’

‘What the hell? No way! No way, man, no way!’

‘OK, then let him figure it out and squeal to the cops. Then it’s off to the big house for you, and you know what’ll happen there.’

‘I don’t care! I can’t do that! Denny’s my friend, my best friend!’

‘And what am I, chopped liver? I thought I was your best friend.’

‘You both are my best friends. But I can’t do that to him.’

‘OK, then it’s bye-bye time, old buddy. See you around. I’m not coming to visit you in the Big House.’ And he turned to walk away.

‘Wait a minute, Christopher, don’t walk away. I’m just confused. Help me!’

‘You’ve refused my advice. I don’t have any other advice. You have to whack him. Period.’

I was worn down by the argument. I was so afraid of the future, so afraid of the knock on the door. So afraid to be fingered for doing the right thing for making life better for everyone in the neighborhood. Christopher had a good idea then, but I didn’t like this one. But was there anything else to be done to keep me out of jail? ‘OK, then,’ I said, ‘how do we do it?’

Christopher laid it all out. Me and Denny were going to go out after midnight and go to the park, just to show my Mom that she couldn’t keep me in. I protested at first, because I had been caught by Mom last night, and I shouldn’t do it again so soon. But Christopher reminded me that the cops were going to start going through the neighborhood on Monday, and they would take Denny’s statement and trick him into revealing his suspicions. ‘They’ll do it, and when they ask him who might have a reason for offing his brother he’ll tell about Gary beating you up. Then they will be at your door!’

‘OK, OK, I get it. But how can we set it up?’

Christopher then revealed the foolproof plan. It just might work, I thought.

 

On Sunday after we got home from church, I called Denny and asked him to come down to the fence in my backyard, as I had a great idea. ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘I’ll tell you when you get here,’ I answered.

Around 1:00 Denny arrived at the fence. ‘So what’s your big idea?’ he asked.

‘OK, you know I’m grounded for two weeks. I can’t stand having to stay in for two solid weeks and not get to do stuff, especially do stuff with you. I want to get out, and when my folks don’t know it. Why don’t you come by after midnight tonight and let’s go out for a long walk, just to show my folks they can’t keep me in. Let’s go to the park. I’ve never seen the bear pit on the other side of the park anyway, and I wanna see it.’

Of course Denny liked this idea: he was all for thumbing his nose at authority. He would help me thumb my nose at my parents. ‘It’s a deal!’ he said, and we shook hands on it. He would be at my bedroom window just after midnight. Then he left, walking up the alley whistling.

We would take the same route that I did with Christopher months ago, walking to the nearby park, the third largest in the city, where somewhere in the middle of the park, away from all the houses, in the middle of the night, we would do Denny in and hide his body under a shelter.

I couldn’t believe that I was all in for this. Whatever Christopher said, I would do. He was smarter than I was. Was it wrong to do what we had planned? Sure. But the reward was the thrill if I could get away with it. And doing it would protect me from the cops. Denny would be silenced. I had to do it.

 

So it was arranged: Sunday night—actually Monday morning—at around midnight Denny would drop by my window, and I would get up and leave through the window, making sure to hide the pistol, which I would have already loaded with bullets. I would have to be extra careful this time, making sure not to wake anybody as I left. I went to bed at 10:30, after the news was over and Mom & Dad went to bed. The old man had slept in his easy chair the last two hours, all throughout the news as well. Monday would be another day of work at the brewery, and he would be up at 5:30 for his cigarette and cup of coffee. He told us that he had donuts and coffee at work for his breakfast. Nothing at home. So the day would start with a cloud of cigarette smoke in the kitchen, to which my mother would add her own cloud of smoke later. She would be up at 6:30 to make my breakfast before sending me off to school. My grandmother would be up no later than 4:30, sitting in her own bedroom until the kitchen cleared out and she could get ready for work at the large department store. My adventure had to be over no later than 2:30 or 3:00 at the latest.

Shortly after midnight I heard a noise outside my bedroom window. Expecting Denny, I was shocked that it was Christopher instead. In a low whisper I said, ‘What the hell are you doing here? Denny will be here any minute!’

‘Just wanted to make sure you’re still going to go through with it, little buddy.’ (I hated that expression, as I wasn’t ‘little’ and we were exactly the same age, to the day.)

Annoyed, I whispered a little too loudly, ‘Yes, of course, you little prick!’

‘Ha! Who’s got a little prick? Ain’t me! Denny is on his way, so make sure you do it. Don’t chicken out. Bye now!’

As soon as Christopher was gone, I heard Denny’s footfall on the steps. He was quiet as a cat, but I still knew it was him. He came up to the window. ‘You ready?’

‘Yeah, I’m ready.’ As before, I raised the screen very slowly until it locked in the notches on both sides. Then I carefully bent down and stepped out onto the porch. As I did, the pistol caused my left jacket pocket to brush against the aluminum frame and make a sound. I hoped that Denny didn’t notice. As well as the rest of the people in the house.

Once I was out and had lowered the screen, putting a popsicle stick between the bottom of the screen and the frame to keep it from lowering and clicking, we were on our way down the steps and walking quickly up the street on our long trek to the park.

I was growing increasingly nervous as we walked. Was I going to kill my best friend tonight? Wasn’t one murder enough? Denny noticed. ‘What’s up with you?’ he said. ‘We’re going to be fine. We’ll show your old man and old lady they can’t keep you in!’

If he only knew, I thought.

After twenty minutes of walking and talking, we entered the park. The bear pit was located near the opposite end of the park, so we had to walk another ten minutes to get there. I put my hands in my jacket pockets because it was chilly. Doing so, I felt the pistol in the left pocket, and my hand recoiled as if it had been bitten by a snake. ‘Are you all right?’ Denny asked.

‘It’s just chills. It’s kind of cold outside,’ I said. I angled us toward the center of the park, and we soon approached a large bandstand. I heard a voice behind me say, ‘This is the place. This’ll do.’ It was Christopher’s voice. I didn’t know that he had been following us.

‘Let’s go up the steps and dance and sing as loud as we can!’ I said.

‘Great idea, Andy! Let’s do it.’

We climbed the steps and walked to the center of the bandstand and started singing “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight” as loud and silly as we could, jumping around like monkeys. I felt free, free of parents, free of restraints, free of worry. ‘Do it now!’ whispered Christopher, standing on the steps. ‘Now! Now!’ Denny continued to sing and dance as I pulled the pistol from my left jacket pocket and put it into my right hand. I cocked the hammer. The click and roll of the barrel caught Denny’s attention. He stopped his dancing and singing, turned around, and looked at me. He was staring down the barrel of a .22 pistol, which I was holding in a two-hand grip. We were about six feet apart. ‘Wha-, wha-, what’s up, Andy?’ he said. ‘Why are you pointing that gun at me? Is this a joke, or what?’ he pleaded.

‘It’s what, Denny, it’s what,’ I said.

Suddenly Denny figured it out. ‘So it was you! You killed Gary, didn’t you? And now you’re going to—what? Kill me too?’

‘Now! Now!’ Christopher said behind me. ‘I’m sorry, Denny, I’m sorry,’ I said, tears clouding my eyes. Denny ducked and lunged at me as I pulled the trigger. I fired twice. Denny fell into me, and we both went to the floor of the bandstand. He moaned and couldn’t grip my legs. He was hurt, maybe badly. I got to my feet and backed away from him, Christopher yelling, ‘Finish him! Finish him!’ I backed away too far and fell down the steps to the ground below. Getting up I shouted, ‘I’m sorry, Denny! I’m sorry! I’m sorry, Christopher, I’m sorry!’ And I ran off, leaving Denny on the floor of the bandstand.

‘Get back there and finish him off!’ Christopher shouted from behind.

‘No! He’s probably going to die anyway!’ I cried, and continued to run as fast as I could. I had to get away from there. I had to get home and back to bed.

‘You dipshit, you’re going to regret this!’ he yelled.

Yes, I had failed. I knew I was going to regret this for sure.

 

Epilogue

‘And so you were arrested the next day?’ Dr. Parker said.

‘No, I was arrested not long after I made it back home and back to bed, without getting caught by my parents, by the way. Denny made it back home, too. I don’t know how he did, bleeding and all, but he did. I never saw him again after that night. They called the cops and an ambulance. I heard the sirens later. They knocked on our door about 2:00 AM. Hoo boy, was it a surprise to my mom and dad! Their golden boy son arrested for murder!’

‘What about Christopher? What happened to him?’

‘What happened to him? He was arrested, too, of course. In fact, he’s been sitting here with us in this office all this time. He’s right over there,’ I said, gesturing to the corner off to my left.

‘Of course,’ said Dr. Parker, jotting down something on his notepad.

‘I told you so,’ Christopher said from the corner. ‘Now we’re both locked up in a loony bin thanks to you, you chicken shit.’

INVASION OF THE SKY DANCERS, a Novella

Invasion of the Sky Dancers

[A Short Novel Looking for a Publisher]

MY SPIRITED MOTHER, published in Exemplary Short Stories, by Silent Spark Press, 2022

My Spirited Mother

Sitting in Mom’s room in St. Anthony’s Memory Care nursing home watching her chest slowly rising and falling as she floundered in a coma, I leaned back and scanned her side of the room. This was a double-occupancy room, but the other side was currently unoccupied. Everyone in this ward had dementia or Alzheimer’s, and Mom was one of those with Alzheimer’s. She didn’t have long to live, according to the nurse who spoke with me earlier. “It’s probably hours and not days,” she said. As I sat there and looked around the room, my gaze landed on the tall, wide wardrobe just beyond the foot of her twin bed. I had of course seen it before, but not really seen it and understood its significance. Here in the wardrobe were all that remained of a life spanning over 91 years. Just a house robe, pajamas, house slippers, some handkerchiefs, and several boxes of Depends. All other of her possessions—the furniture, the television, the knickknacks on the walls of the rooms in her house, and everything else, including the house itself and her car—had been sold to help fund the $7500 a month it cost to care for her in this sad place, full of people who were now just shells of themselves, devoid of energy, joy, and memory. Especially memory. Although Mom remembered my face, I doubted that she remembered my name these past few months.

Seeing that there was nothing else for me to do but sit and hold her gnarled hand, watching her slow breathing, I decided to leave and go home. It was nearly midnight anyway, and I was getting sleepy. What had kept me from falling asleep in that chair were what I thought were involuntary smiles on her face. I guessed that her facial muscles were preparing for the end, after which they would tug and freeze the corners of her mouth. But what did I know? I wasn’t a doctor.

I rose from the bedside chair and leaned over to her ear and whispered, “I’m going now, Mom. I’ll be back tomorrow to check on you if you’re still with us. But if you don’t feel like hanging on any longer, you can let go. I’ll understand.” I sat there a few more seconds, holding her hand, then leaned forward and kissed her on her forehead, passing my other hand through the riot of her gray hair, all flat on the back of her head from lying on the pillow but splayed out elsewhere. Right down here to the end she had a full head of hair, unlike my Dad, who was nearly bald when he died. I had thanked Mom many a time for my full head of hair here in my late 60’s.

I got up and left.

Forty-five minutes later, after I had arrived home and had just settled down to bed, the phone rang. Who would be calling me at almost 1:00 in the morning? I thought. However, I knew even as I picked up the phone. It was the overnight nurse at the nursing home, who told me that my mother had passed away not long after I had left. “They often do that,” she said, “wanting to spare their loved ones from watching them die. She probably knew you were leaving and just let go. It was a peaceful passing. I found her while doing my rounds.”

I drove back to the nursing home to spend a few minutes with her before the ambulance arrived to take her away. The nurse told me that usually one resident a week dies there, but the staff never really gets used to it.

Several days later the visitation and funeral took place. We followed the hearse in the limo to the cemetery, where we bid goodbye to her as her casket was lowered into the plot next to my father, my sister, and my grandmother. I was now the last survivor of our nuclear family, and as a result a deep sense of loneliness descended upon me.

After we arrived home from the funeral, of course all the extended family gathered there. We had plenty of food to share because the church ladies had taken care of us. While we were eating, the family members all told stories about Mom and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa, until around 9:00 everyone began to leave. It’s interesting how quickly people leave after the first ones announce they’re going. By 9:15 all the cousins and friends had hugged us and left, and it was just my wife and me, plus Lydia, the daughter who lived out of town, who would stay overnight and leave the next day. We chatted for a while, then my wife Marie and Lydia said they were “pooped”—a nod to Mom, who had always used that word when she was tired. I bid them goodnight.

“Aren’t you coming to bed now? You’ve had a long day,” Marie said.

“Yeah, it’s been a long day, but I can’t sleep just yet. I’m too wound up. I’ll come to bed later.”

“Well, all right, but don’t be too long,” she said, then gave me a kiss and a hug before leaving for bed.

“I won’t,” I said, then sat down in Dad’s old recliner and recalled the events of the past week: Mom’s death, the grueling session with the funeral director, the arrival of out-of-town family, the gatherings, the meals, the conversations—especially the questions I couldn’t answer. Just recalling these events was mentally tiring.

Then I started reflecting over the past five years, the progress of the stealthy disease, Mom’s growing forgetfulness and confusion, the change in her personality, her anger at me for being a deadbeat son (I wasn’t, but that didn’t matter), then after the full flowering of Alzheimer’s her gentle spirit and acceptance of me, even as she forgot everything about me but my face. I forced myself to stop these maudlin thoughts, reminding myself that this chapter of life was finished. After a period of mourning I would have to move on.

As I pondered these thoughts with my eyes closed, suddenly I heard from across the room, “Did I tell you that I met the most wonderful boy last week?” This question snapped me out of my reverie, and I opened my eyes to see a young woman sitting on the sofa. She was wearing a white blouse with shoulder pads and a pink pleated skirt that just reached her knees. She leaned back on the couch and grabbed her knees with both arms, looking dreamily at the ceiling. Her dark brown hair fell to her shoulders, topped by a pink tam jauntily tipped to the side. Her red lips were full, slightly parted by an overbite. She looked familiar to me, and I was so enamored of the sight of her that it never crossed my mind that for one thing she shouldn’t be here in my living room and for another she didn’t look like a solid person, since I could almost see through her.

I was shocked at first. “Who are you? And how did you get in here?”

She looked at me; she seemed to look through me as well. Then she said, “Me? I’m Helen. So glad to meet you!”

As I studied her features, a memory of earlier photographs came to mind. “Are you my mother? You can’t be. We just buried you earlier today. And you didn’t look like this.”

“Your mother?” she said, “maybe, maybe.” Her dreamy look returned, and she looked once again at the ceiling. “Did I tell you I just met the most wonderful boy last week?” Her face widened into a large beautiful smile as she recalled the memory of her meeting with this wonderful boy. “I just have to tell someone. Can I tell you about him?”

What was going on here? “But Mom—if you are my mother—this is crazy. You’re dead. You shouldn’t be here. Why is this happening? Are you a ghost come to haunt me for treating you bad, or something?”

“Never mind that,” she answered. “Let me tell you about the most wonderful young man that I just met. His name is James, and he’s tall, thin, and handsome, and he has this cute dimple in his chin.” She lowered her legs and looked straight at me. “I was out with a group of friends from work for dinner, and a couple of young men joined us. We sat at tables pushed together down at the soda fountain on Broadway. I was struck by this young man, so as we chose our seats, I patted the chair next to mine and said to him, ‘You can sit next to me,’ and winked. He did, and you know what? He pushed his hip right next to mine and smiled at me. I could have melted! I put my hand under the table to scratch my thigh as we all chattered like birds about nonsense, and he reached under the table and grabbed my hand on the sly, not even looking at me. My heart just flipped!”

I couldn’t help but be captivated by her tale, but I had no idea how this applied to me, why I was hearing this in the first place. “Wait a minute!” I said, “Why are you telling me this? Why are you here?”

Just then Marie came shuffling down the hallway into the living room, yawning. “Are you talking to yourself again, dear?” she said, rubbing her eyes. The woman on the couch went silent, apparently out of common courtesy. She sat primly, hands folded in her lap, and waited.

Marie looked only at me. She couldn’t see the woman on the couch. “Now this is weird,” I said.

“What?” Marie replied. “What’s weird?”

“You should tell her,” Helen said.

“I don’t think so,” I said to Helen.

“You don’t think so? Don’t think what?” Marie asked, confused.

“I’m sorry,” I responded, “I guess I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“Then come to bed. It’s been a long day, and a long week. You should rest up on your Family Leave time.”

I had to agree with her. “All right,” I said, getting up out of the chair and taking Marie’s hand.

“But I never finished my story!” protested Helen, the woman on the couch, as we walked down the hall to the bedroom. I was glad to be rescued from this strange visitation. I hoped that was the end of it.

. . . . . . .

The next day our daughter Lydia left to go back home to Chicago. I drove her to the airport early that morning. “I hope you’re going to be OK, Dad,” she soothed. “I miss Grandma, and I know you do, too.”

“Yeah, thanks,” I said. “I’ll be fine. She lived a long life and got to see her grandchildren. And you’ve always been special to her.”

“Yeah,” she said, as I pulled in to the Departures lane. We got out of the car and said goodbye with a hug. “I love you,” she said, teary-eyed.

“I love you too,” I replied. And then I watched her drag her wheeled carry-on through the entry and disappear among the throng inside.

I drove back home during the end of the morning rush hour. When I arrived home, I saw that Marie had already left for work. I dropped my keys on the counter, poured the last of the coffee into a mug, and went into the living room to sit and ponder the events of the previous few days. I was lost in thought when I heard a voice in the room. “So, as I was saying….”

Startled out of my reverie, I looked in the direction of the voice, and there she was, on the couch again, the young woman who had appeared last night. “What!?” I croaked.

“As I was saying,” she said, with a sly smile, “he held my hand and stroked it for a while, still looking ahead and speaking to Ben across the table: Ben, my partner at the box factory, you know, but he was not my boyfriend. He was just a friend, that’s all. If he only knew what James’ hand was doing under the table—”

“Wait a minute! Slow down! What are you doing here again?”

“Doing here?” she replied. “I don’t rightly know, but here I am. Maybe something will come to me later. Anyway, as I was saying—”

“Stop! Stop! This is just too weird! Are you going to morph into some kind of demon and tear me to pieces?” I must admit that I had watched too many horror movies in my life.

Perturbed, she said, “Of course not! I’ve just come to tell you about the most wonderful young man. Now, where was I? Oh yes. He was stroking my hand, but then his hand left mine and began to inch up my thigh, like a curious spider. He looked askance at me and winked, then looked forward, pretending to listen and respond to the chatter going on. I could see then that he had a dimple in the cheek that was facing me, so I thought he must have one on the other cheek. And his burning blue eyes! My, what a handsome man! He was getting fresh. I gently pushed his hand back down my thigh, but then it began to creep up again. I let it go further before pushing it back down, but it began to inch back up again until I gently slapped it when it was getting up a little too high. ‘Shame on you, boy!’ I whispered in his ear, but my heart was fluttering. He laughed, and I laughed in response. I added, ‘Naughty, naughty boy!’ and he said, ‘Yes I am!’ and winked again.”

I lost all interest in shutting her down, as if I could anyway; I was more interested in finding out more about this forward guy. So I asked, “Who was this handsome, fresh boy?”

She didn’t hesitate to answer. “Why, he was James Simmons, the cutest young man in all of the South Side!” She got that dreamy look in her eyes again.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “James Simmons is the name of my father, and Helen Simmons is my mother’s name. Or was….”

“If you say so,” Helen replied. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

Just then the telephone rang. I got up out of the chair and went to the kitchen to answer the phone. It was Marie. “Hi dear,” she said, “just calling to see how you’re doing.”

I looked back toward the living room. The couch was empty. “I’m doing fine, sweetheart. Just fine. Thanks for asking.” I didn’t feel like telling her I was seeing hallucinations.

“Well, you just relax and chill out the rest of the day. You deserve a rest after all you’ve been through.”

“OK, I will,” I said, then thanked her again and hung up. When I went back to the living room, the couch was still empty. My spectral guest was gone, hopefully for the last time.

. . . . . . .

Intrigued by this woman’s story and her appearance, I thought that she might be my mother after all, but my mother from another era in her life. What she was wearing looked from another era, too. I remembered the old photo albums she had given to me just two years before when she was still somewhat in possession of her faculties and was getting rid of a lot of her possessions. Two of those albums seemed to be from about the 1920s to the 1940s, plus later albums with color pictures taken after my sister and I came along and grew up. I was interested in those old albums. They were stored in a closet in the basement. I went downstairs and opened the closet door. After moving several storage bins, I found the boxes with the old photo albums in them. The stiff cardboard front and back cover of one of them were hanging on by a thin leaf of ripped cover paper. I opened it to see old photos taken of my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother, and all of their friends. I was intent on finding pictures of my mom, and when I did, I was astounded to see confirmation that the woman who sat on my couch was indeed the woman in these pictures. I turned past the pages of grade school graduation pictures and turned to a page of pictures of Dad and Mom at about the age of 19 or 20. All smiles both of them, arms around each other’s waists, happy and obviously in love.

A voice behind me said, “Yes, those pictures!” I turned around and nearly screamed, when I saw the spectral woman, now dressed in a short-sleeved knee-length blue dress, cinched at the waist by a blue belt. Just like the woman in the black and white picture on the page. I wondered where she had gone to change clothes. “Yes, yes, that’s the day my James and I went to the show! We saw The Philadelphia Story, I think. I think because we spent most of the time necking in the balcony. What a hot time! I could have melted when he slipped his hand up—”

“Stop!” I screamed. “I don’t want to hear any more!”

“Why not?” she said. “It was such a glorious time. I whispered in his ear, ‘You naughty boy!’” But then he grabbed my—”

“That’s enough! No more, please!” I covered my ears, shocked at the words coming out of her mouth. “You’re my mother! I don’t want to hear about what you and Dad did in the balcony, or at any other time!”

“Dear boy,” she said, “you are such a prude. I bet you did the same when you were young.”

“If I did I would never tell you! And you shouldn’t be telling me this.”

. . . . . . .

You might ask, did I tell Marie about these visitations? Well, no, I didn’t. How do you explain to someone that you’ve  been visited by a ghost? By the ghost of your mother? A mother with a potty-mouth? My mother was never like that in life. I never saw my mom and dad even hug. I never saw them interact much while growing up. Could they have behaved like this when they were young? It sure sounded to me like Dad was the aggressor, but she certainly seemed to surrender with glee to his advances. So no, I didn’t tell my wife. Besides, she would probably say that I was projecting my own sex obsession onto my parents while grieving. Nope, she wouldn’t believe me.

I didn’t return to the photo album for two days, fearful that as soon as I picked it up Mom would revisit me. She never showed at all during that time, actually. So I thought that I had seen the last of her. I thought that she went back to wherever she came from.

I had another think coming.

After two days, I was curious and once again picked up the photo album when I was alone at home. I opened to the pages of several photos taken on a trip with some of their friends. It had to have been on a summer’s day because the three young women in the pictures were wearing blouses tucked into high-waisted, thigh-length loose shorts. Surprisingly, the three men weren’t wearing shorts. They had on pleated trousers with cuffs and long-sleeved white shirts, but their sleeves were rolled up to their elbows.

“Oh, I remember that day…and that night!” There she was again, looking over my shoulder. I nearly jumped out of my seat.

“Stop showing up like that!” I complained. Then I noticed that she was wearing the same outfit as in the picture.

“Settle down, boy,” she soothed. “Sorry about spooking you.”

Spooking you: did she know she made a funny?

She said, “I’ll try to be better. But I’ve got to tell you about that day….” Before I knew it she was off to the races again, and I knew where the race was going even before it got there.

“There were three couples, Bill and Sue Ann, Wally and Trixie, and us. James had a car, so we all piled in and went down to the river and walked around for a while. Just holding hands with James thrilled me! Then we went down to the soda shop on Broadway again and had sundaes (which she pronounced sun-duhs) and malts. I split a big chocolate malt with James. It had two straws, and every once in a while our foreheads would meet as we leaned in to suck on our straws. Oh what a thrill it was just to touch any part of James’ body, even a hard forehead!”

I wanted to head her off before she got to where I feared she was going, but she wasn’t having any of it. She went on. “After that we drove to the park, where we all walked around the lake, then subtly broke off into pairs. James found a shady spot under a tall elm tree, then sat down and patted the ground next to him. I sat down, and immediately he put his arm around me and drew me in for a kiss. It was a nice, long kiss, accompanied by his other hand slipping under my loose shorts. Oh my, when he reached my—”

“No!” I shouted. (I was glad no one else was home.) “No more! That’s enough of this, this nasty talk!” I was thoroughly shocked and embarrassed. My parents didn’t do things like this! “You know you’re embarrassing me, don’t you, Mom? This is shocking. I never saw anything like that out of you two when I was growing up.”

“Now, honey, that’s before you came along, if you say you’re my son…our son. I don’t know who you are and why I am here, but maybe in time I will. You have to know that we had urges then, strong urges that were hard to stop. Surely you’ve had them too. Haven’t you?”

When did my mother ever talk like this when I was growing up? I knew nothing of their dating life, certainly not the sexy side of it. I kind of wished now that she had talked like this back in the day. However, the focus wasn’t on me now. I said, “Let’s not talk about me for the time being.” Something she said begged a question. “One thing bothers me, Mom. How come you don’t know me, who I am? I know you.”

I could see through the wavy iridescence that she was puzzled by my question. “I don’t rightly know. You look familiar to me, or you look like you will be familiar, maybe some time. Right now you are just a man who lives in this house that I appear in, I don’t know why. Except that you have my photo albums.”

Hmm, I wondered. Maybe she doesn’t know me because at this point in her spirit life she hasn’t given birth to me. Considering that she had my sister six years before she had me, I feared that she intended to describe the events of the nights on which we both were conceived. I closed the photo album, which whumped shut, and at the same time she disappeared.

Three days later I returned to work. I was glad to get back into the routine. I would go to the office two days a week and communicate via Skype with my team members the other three days: I was fortunate to have a job that allowed and even encouraged working from home. I had avoided the photo album on the first day of working from home, but like a drug the urge to open the photo album returned and grew over the passing two days until I realized it was an addiction. I actually missed those visits from my mother’s spirit, and I realized that the photo album was the key that unlocked the door through which she came from wherever she was when not here. So on the Wednesday night of my first week back at work from Family Leave, I bid Marie good night, saying I wasn’t sleepy yet.

“Well all right,” she said, “but maybe you should take a melatonin now so you’ll be sleepy soon.”

“OK,” I replied. “That makes sense.” I went to the bathroom and took the pill, bid her good night with a hug and a kiss, then went into the living room. I reached for the photo album, which was lying on the book shelf, then settled in to browse through it. I opened it and turned the pages until I settled on Mom and Dad’s wedding picture. I knew what would happen next.

And it did.

From behind me I heard that familiar voice. “Oh, our wedding picture! What a lovely day that was!”

I turned around to see my mother wearing the same dress as in the photo. It wasn’t a white wedding dress; it was a simply stated pink dress, the hem at her knees, with a buttoned-up white collar. Her shoulders were augmented by shoulder pads, as in the picture. In the picture Dad was in a suit and tie. Both of them smiled big at the camera, which enshrined this moment of bliss forever. Seeing it brought tears to my eyes. I asked her about the events of that day.

“Never mind the day,” she said. “We were both nervous to be on display during the ceremony and after. We couldn’t wait for it to end. James took me back to his room at the rooming house, where we couldn’t wait to throw off our clothes and….”

This time I let her tell the story of their first night, at least the first part of it. I was shocked that it wasn’t the first time that they lay naked together, but it was the first time that they had sex. It was such a sweet story of intimacy that I couldn’t stop her until she started to tell me what she did to and for Dad. “OK, that’s enough,” I said. “I get the picture!” I closed the photo album, she disappeared, and I took my excitement to bed and Marie.

. . . . . . .

The next day I worked from home via Skype on my laptop. And that was all right, since after Marie left at quarter past eight I planned to open the photo album. With a lingering kiss and hug—left over from the night before—I bid Marie goodbye. Then I went into the living room and pulled the photo album off the shelf and began to browse from where I had left off. After turning a few pages, I found a sweet studio picture of baby me in my mother’s arms. Surely this would bring her back.

And it did. I heard that voice from behind me say, “Oh, what a sweet, sweet picture! That’s my son Billy. And I recognize you now. You are my son Billy! You were so cute then.” I turned around to see that she was wearing the same dress as in the photograph. “But you know what I remember even better? The night you were conceived! We had been married seven years by then, and we had explored every inch of our bodies. We were pros! I knew what excited him the most, and he knew what excited me most. When he kissed and nibbled down my stomach until he arrived at my—”

“Whoa, Mom, you don’t need to go any further! I know where you’re going with this. Please spare me the details.”

She gave me a quizzical look, a deep stare, as if looking through me just like I literally looked through her.

“Yes, my dear, my dear Billy. It’s really you, all grown up. Now I know why I came here. It was to see you again, to tell you that your Dad and I had a vibrant and vigorous love life, which you knew nothing about. That’s an unwritten chapter in your own life. Your Dad and I fell out of love a couple of years after you were born, and we didn’t get it back until after he retired and you were long gone, married yourself. I hope your love life was as alive as ours was from the very start back in those days.” She paused. “Yes, I needed to tell you about our romantic joy before I passed on for good. I see that now.”

Those words touched me. My eyes began to tear up. “I’m so glad you came back, Mom. Thanks for telling me your love story, and even though I cut you off several times, I knew what you were about to say. I will never forget these visits, and I will never forget you.”

A sad look spread across her face. “Billy, I feel a pull now to leave. I don’t rightly remember where I was before, but I know I’m going back. Goodbye, my dear, dear son, and may you and Marie love each other as much as your Dad and I loved each other.”

I thought I saw a sparkle in her ghostly eyes that looked like spirit tears, and then my mother slowly faded until she was gone, for good.

I never saw my spirit mother again. But I looked with renewed eyes at Marie and our relationship. She never saw my mother, but she reaped the benefits of her visits.