Haunted

  The jar sitting on the counter between them, Claire looked up from watching it and said, “How much?”

  The old man looked at his wristwatch. He said he'd never sell it except he's getting old. He'd like to retire and not sit here all day getting robbed blind.

  “How much?” Claire said, her purse on the counter, open, and her gloved hands digging out her wallet.

  And the man said, “Twenty thousand dollars . . .”

  It's five-thirty, and the store closes at six.

  “Chloral hydrate,” the old man told her. Knockout drops, is how the guy killed her. That August night he found her half asleep on pills, he just tipped a bottle down her throat. Of course, a Mickey Finn shows up in the liver during autopsy, but everybody said she'd got the stuff in Mexico. Even her doctor who'd wrote the script for her pills, he said Mexico. Even he said suicide.

  Twenty thousand dollars.

  And Claire said, “Let me think.” Still watching the white murk inside the jar, she pushed back from the counter, saying, “I need to . . .”

  The old man snapped his fingers for her purse and coat and umbrella. If she was going to wander the store, he'd hang on to them.

  Without even taking the playing cards, Claire handed her things over the counter.

  Claire Upton, she could look at a polished trophy and see a young man still reflected there, smiling and beaded with sweat, holding a tennis racquet or a golf club. She can watch him getting fat, married, with kids. After that, the trophy shows nothing but the inside of a brown cardboard box. Then the trophy comes out, held by another young man. This one, the son of the first.

  But that jar, it felt like a bomb waiting to go off. A murder weapon trying to confess. Just putting your finger on it, you'd feel a jolt. An electric shock. Some kind of warning.

  While she wandered through the shop, he was watching her in the video monitors.

  In the dark lenses of old sunglasses for sale, she watches a man wrestle a woman to the ground and kick her feet apart.

  In the gold-tone tube of an old lipstick, she can see a face crushed inside a nylon stocking, two hands around the neck of someone in bed, then the same hands scooping the spare change, the wallet, and keys off the dresser beside the lipstick. The witness.

  Claire Upton and the old-man cashier, they're alone in the shadowy store with pillows of yellowed lace. Needlepoint dishtowels. Counted cross-stitch pot holders. Silver-plate brush sets tarnished dark brown. Mounted deer heads holding wide racks of antlers.

  In the steel blade of a straight razor, the handle, chromium, scrolled and heavy—reflected there, Claire can see her future.

  There, among the shaving mugs and horsehair brushes. Tall stained-glass church windows. Beaded evening bags.

  Alone in the shop with Marilyn Monroe's lost child. Alone in this museum of things that no one wanted. Everything dirty with the reflection of something terrible.

  Telling the story now, locked in the bathroom stall, Claire says how she picked up the razor and kept walking, down every aisle, always peeking at the blade to see if it showed her the same scene.

  Telling her story now, sitting in the bathroom at the back of the antique store, Claire says it's not easy, being a gifted psychic.

  The truth is, Claire's not easy to be married to. Over dinner at a restaurant, she may be listening, then her entire body will shudder. One hand will fly to cover her eyes, and her head will rear back and twist away from you. Still shaking, she'll peek out at you from between her fingers. A beat later, she'll sigh and put one hand against her mouth in a fist, biting the knuckle but looking at you without a word.

  When you ask her what's wrong . . .

  Claire will say, “You don't want to know. It's too awful.”

  But when you press her to tell . . .

  Claire will say, “Just promise me. Promise you'll stay away from all cars for the next three years . . .”

  The truth is, even Claire knows she can be wrong. To test herself, she picks up a polished silver cigarette-case. And reflected there is her future: her holding the straight razor.

  When it's closing time, she walks to the front of the shop, just in time to watch the old man turn the sign from “Open” to “Closed.” He was pulling down the shade that covered the window in the front door. The shop display window was cluttered with egg cups. Chenille bathrobes and bedspreads. Perfume bottles shaped like Southern belles wearing hoop skirts. Dead butterflies framed behind glass. Rusted birdcages. Railroad lanterns with shades of red or green glass. Folding silk fans. No one on the street could see inside.

  The old-man cashier says, “Made up your mind?” The jar is back, locked in the glass cabinet next to his register. In the white murk, only a dark eye and the shell of a tiny ear show through.

  Reflected in the jar's curved side, distorted there, while the old man had told the story of Monroe's murder, Claire had seen something else: A man tipping a small bottle between two lips. A face rolling back and forth against a pillow. The man wiping the lips with his shirtsleeve. His eyes settling on the bedside table. The phone and lamp and the jar.

  In Claire's vision, the man's face comes closer. His two hands reach out, huge, until they wrap the jar in darkness.

  That reflected face, it's the old-man cashier, without his wrinkles. With lots of brown hair.

  Behind the counter, the jar just sits there, throbbing with energy. Glowing with power. A sacred relic trying to tell her something important. A time capsule of stories and events wasted here, locked in a glass case. More compelling than the best television series. More honest than the longest documentary. A primary history source. A real player. The child sits there, waiting for Claire to rescue it. To listen.

  Wanting justice. Revenge.

  Still watched by the security cameras, Claire holds up the straight razor. She says, “I want to buy this, but I don't see a price on it . . .”

  And the old man leans over the counter for a closer look.

  Outside the shopwindows, the street is empty. The security video monitors show the store, every aisle and corner, empty.

  In the monitor, the old man falls backward, smashing the glass curio cabinet behind him, then sliding to the floor in a mess of broken glass and blood. The jar tipping, then falling, then broken.

  Calling now, from a bathroom stall, Claire Upton tells her husband, “It was a doll. A plastic baby doll.”

  Her purse and coat and umbrella spattered with sticky red.

  On the phone, she says, “Do you know what this means?”

  And again, she asks how best to destroy a video camera.

  20

  The Baroness Frostbite leans closer, a steaming bowl of something liquid cupped in her hand, and she says, “No carrots. No potatoes. Now, drink it.”

  And, curled on her bed, in the camera spotlight, Miss America says, “No.” She looks at the rest of us crowded outside the doorway, Director Denial included, then Miss America turns away to face the concrete wall, saying, “I know what that is . . .”

  The Baroness Frostbite says, “You're still bleeding.”

  Leaning into the room, Director Denial says, “You need to eat something soon or you'll die.”

  “Then let me die,” Miss America says, her face muffled in the pillow.

  All of us in the hallway, listening. Recording. Witnesses.

  The camera behind the camera behind the camera.

  The Baroness Frostbite leans closer with the soup. In the rising steam of it, her mutilated lips reflected in the shimmering hot grease that floats on top, the Baroness says, “But we don't want you to die.”

  Still facing the wall, Miss America says, “Since when? The rest of you, you'll only have to split the story one less way.”

  “We don't want you to die,” the Reverend Godless says, from the doorway, “because we don't have a freezer.”

  Miss America turns to look at the bowl of hot soup. She stares at our faces, leaned halfway into her dressing room. The teeth inside our mouths
, waiting. Our tongues, swimming in drool.

  Miss America says, “Freezer?”

  And the Reverend Godless makes a fist and knocks on his forehead, the way you'd knock on a door, saying, “Hello?” He says, “We need you to stay alive until the rest of us are hungry again.”

  Her baby was the first course. Miss America will be the main course. Dessert is anybody's guess.

  The tape recorder in the Earl of Slander's hand, it's ready to tape over her last scream with her next. Agent Tattletale's camera is focused to videotape over everything so far, in order to catch our next big plot point.

  Instead, Miss America asks, Is this how it will go? Her voice shrill and shaky, a bird's song. Will this be just one horrible event after another after another after another—until we're all dead?

  “No,” Director Denial says. Brushing cat hair off her sleeve, she says, “Just some of us.”

  And Miss America says she doesn't mean just here, in the Museum of Us. She means life. Is the whole world just people eating up other people? People attacking and destroying each other?

  And Director Denial says, “I know what you meant.”

  The Earl of Slander writes that down in his notepad. The rest of us, nodding.

  The Mythology of Us.

  Still holding the soup, looking at her own reflection in the grease on top, the Baroness Frostbite says, “I used to work in a restaurant, in the mountains.” She dips a spoon into the bowl and brings it steaming toward Miss America's face.

  “Eat,” the Baroness says. “And I'll tell you how I lost my lips . . .”

  Absolution

  A Poem About the Baroness Frostbite

  “Even if God won't forgive us,” says the Baroness Frostbite, “we can still forgive Him.”

  We should show ourselves to be bigger than God.

  The Baroness onstage, she tells most people, “Gum disease,”

  when they look too long at what's left

  of her face.

  Her lips are only the ragged edge of her skin,

  greased red with lipstick.

  Her teeth, inside:

  the yellow ghost of every cup of coffee,

  and every cigarette in her middle-aged life.

  Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment:

  The shifting, falling color of snow flurries.

  No two of the tiny blue shadows the same shape or size.

  The rest of her is goosedowned, quilted and insulated,

  her hair tucked under a knitted hat,

  but never again

  warm enough.

  Standing center stage, the Baroness Frostbite says, “We should forgive God . . .”

  For making us too short. Fat. Poor.

  We should forgive God our baldness.

  Our cystic fibrosis. Our juvenile leukemia.

  We should forgive God's indifference, His leaving us behind:

  Us, God's forgotten Science Fair project, left to grow mold.

  God's goldfish, ignored until we're forced to eat our own shit off the bottom.

  Her hands inside mittens, the Baroness points to her face, saying, “People . . .”

  They assume she was once gorgeously beautiful.

  Because now she looks so—bad.

  People, they need some sense of justice. A balancing act.

  They assume cancer, her own fault, something she deserved.

  A disaster she made happen herself.

  So she tells them, “Floss. For God's sake, floss before bed every night.”

  And every night the Baroness, she forgives other people.

  She forgives herself.

  And she forgives God for those disasters that just seem to

  happen.

  Hot Potting

  A Story by the Baroness Frostbite

  “Come February nights,” Miss Leroy used to say, “and every drunk driver was a blessing.”

  Every couple looking for a second honeymoon to patch up their marriage. People falling asleep at the steering wheel. Anybody who pulled off the highway for a drink, they were somebody Miss Leroy could maybe talk into renting a room. It was half her business, talking. To keep people buying another next drink, and another, until they had to stay.

  Sometimes, sure, you're trapped. Other times, Miss Leroy would say, you just sit down for what turns out to be the rest of your life.

  Rooms there at the Lodge, most people, they expect better. The iron bed frames teeter, the rails and footboards worn where they notch together. The nuts and bolts, loose. Upstairs, every mattress is lumpy as foothills, and the pillows are flat. The sheets are clean, but the well water up here, it's hard. You wash anything in this water, and the fabric feels sandpaper-rough with minerals and smells of sulfur.

  The final insult is, you have to share a bathroom down the hall. Most folks don't travel with a bathrobe, and this means getting dressed just to take a leak. In the morning, you wake up to a stinking sulfur bath in a white-cold cast-iron claw-foot tub.

  It's a pleasure for her to herd these February strangers toward the cliff. First, she shuts off the music. A full hour before she even starts talking, she turns down the volume, a notch every ten minutes, until Glen Campbell is gone. After traffic turns to nothing going by on the road outside, she turns down the heat. One by one, she pulls the string that snaps off each neon beer sign in the window. If there's been a fire in the fireplace, Miss Leroy will let it burn out.

  All this time, she's herding, asking what plans these people have. February on the White River, there's less than nothing to do. Snowshoe, maybe. Cross-country ski, if you bring your own. Miss Leroy lets some guest bring up the idea. Everybody gets around to this same suggestion.

  And if they don't, then she brings up the notion of hot potting.

  Her stations of the cross. She walks her audience through the road map of her story. First she shows herself, how she looked most of her life ago, twenty years old and out of college for the summer, car camping up the White River, begging for a summer job, what back then was the dream job: tending bar here at the Lodge.

  It's hard to imagine Miss Leroy skinny. Her skinny with white teeth, before her gums started to pull back. Before the way they look now, the brown root of each tooth exposed, the way carrots will crowd each other out of the ground if you plant the seed too close together. It's hard to imagine her voting Democrat. Even liking other people. Miss Leroy without the dark shadow of hair across her top lip. It's hard to imagine college boys waiting an hour in line to fuck her.

  It makes her seem honest, saying something funny and sad like that, about herself.

  It makes people listen.

  If you hugged her now, Miss Leroy says, all you'd feel is the pointy wire of her bra.

  Hot potting, she says, is, you get a gang of kids together and hike up the fault side of the White River. You pack in your own beer and whiskey and find a hot-springs pool. Most pools stand between 150 and 200 degrees, year-round. Up at this elevation, water boils at 198 degrees Fahrenheit. Even in winter, at the bottom of a deep icy pit, the side of snowdrifts sloping into them, these pools are hot enough to boil you alive.

  No, the danger wasn't bears, not here. You wouldn't see wolves or coyote or bobcat. Downriver, yes, just one click away on your odometer, just one radio song down the highway, the motels had to chain their garbage cans shut. Down there, the snow was busy with paw prints. The night was noisy with packs howling at the moon. But here, the snow was smooth. Even the full moon was quiet.

  Upriver from the Lodge, all you had to worry about was being scalded to death. City kids, dropped out of college, some stay around a couple years. Some way, they pass down the okay about which pools are safe and where to find them. Where not to walk, there's only a thin crust of calcium or limestone sinter that looks like bedrock but will drop you through to deep-fry in a hidden thermal vent.

  The scare stories, they pass along also. A hundred years back, a Mrs. Lester Bannock, here visiting from Crystal Falls, Pennsylvania, she
stopped to wipe the steam from her smoked glasses. The breeze shifted, blowing hot steam in her eyes. One wrong step, and she was off the path. Another wrong step, and she lost her balance, landing backward, sitting in water scalding hot. Trying to stand, she pitched forward, landing facedown in the water. Screaming, she was hauled out by strangers.

  The sheriff who raced her into town, he requisitioned every drop of olive oil from the kitchen at the Lodge. Coated in oil and wrapped in clean sheets, she died in a hospital, still screaming, three days later.

  Recent as three summers ago, a kid from Pinson City, Wyoming, he parked his pickup truck and out jumped his German shepherd. The dog splashed dead center, jumping into a pool, and yelped itself to death mid–dog paddle. The tourists chewing their knuckles, they told the kid, don't, but he dove in.

  He surfaced just once, his eyes boiled white and staring. Rolling around blind. No one could touch him long enough to grab hold, and then he was gone.

  The rest of that year, they dipped him out with nets, the way you'd clean leaves and dead bugs out of a swimming pool. The way you'd skim the fat off a pot of stew.

  At the Lodge bar, Miss Leroy would pause to let people see this a moment in their heads. The bits of him left all summer skittering around in the hot water, a batch of fritters spitting to a light brown.

  Miss Leroy would smoke her cigarette.

  Then, like this is something she's just remembered, she'd say, “Olson Read.” And she'd laugh. Like this is something she doesn't think about part of every minute, every hour she's awake, Miss Leroy will say, “You should've met Olson Read.”

  Big, fat, virtuous, sin-free Olson Read.

  Olson was a cook at the Lodge, fat and pale white, his lips too big, blown up with blood and squirming red as sushi against the sticky-rice-white skin of his face. He watched those hot pools. The way he'd kneel beside them all day, watching it, the bubbling brown froth, hot as acid.

  One wrong step. One quick slide down the wrong side of a snowdrift, and just hot water would do to you what Olson did to food.

  Poached salmon. Stewed chicken and dumplings. Hard-boiled eggs.