“What’s the matter, you blow a fuse?”
He motioned for silence, his finger to his lips.
“Can you feel him?” He whispered as he ushered us into the great entrance hall of the mansion.
Our footsteps echoed through the empty house as Chris led us past the dark dining room towards the kitchen. The cats yowled and hissed unseen from the corners and under the chairs, moving like shadows in the candlelight. It must be my outfit.
In the kitchen Chris had arranged thirteen candles in a circle on the kitchen table. In the center of the circle was a large manila envelope with the words Common Poets written on it with black magic marker— my book.
We sat down at the table. I felt a chill as I picked up the envelope and opened it. Rabbit’s picture was on top of the stack of photos and poems. I looked at Chris across the table; he seemed to shiver. Steaks leaned over and looked at the picture.
“That’s him isn’t it? That’s the ghost.”
“Yeah, that’s the ghost.”
I handed Steaks the picture of Jimmy. Chris just kept staring at me. I shook my head and shifted through the stack of photos and poems, words and images I thought I would never see again. Steaks held the picture against her breast and closed her eyes.
“I’m gonna’ see if I can feel his presence. You guys be quiet.”
I stuffed the pictures and pages back into the envelope and lay it solemnly back in the center of the circle. Chris shoved the envelope back towards me.
“Take it, it’s yours.”
“What’s the angle?”
“Sssssh! I’m getting a vibration.”
I looked at Steaks; she was trembling.
“He’s here, in this room.”
Chris paled and turned his head from side to side, cautiously inspecting the room. I don’t know, maybe it was the booze or my book suddenly appearing, wrapped in the bloody hands of a dead friend, but the whole scene Chris Boone and the wolfman sitting around a circle of candles waiting for Betty Boop to trance channel the Rabbit—it was starting to piss me off.
“Is this what you wanted to do, give me my book back? Is that it?”
Steaks eyes popped open.
“I can’t do this if you guys don’t shut up!”
Chris slumped back in his chair, frazzled, nervous.
“Yeah, that’s it. Take it and go.”
I grabbed the envelope and stood up. Steaks looked at Chris then back at me.
“Well, you ruined it. I was just starting to pick up on him.”
“Yeah, what’d you pick up?”
“Rage.”
CHAPTER SIX
COMMON POETS REVISITED
IT WAS DAWN when Steaks and I pulled into the small gravel parking lot behind our storefront loft. Her chic date from the party was sitting on the trunk of his red B.M.W. convertible with a cheap bouquet of flowers in his hand. She back gate, which was the entrance to our lofts. He groveled a bit and offered her breakfast at her favorite little sidewalk café in Beverly Hills. She asked me to join them. Although the thought of wolfman scarffing up Eggs Bennie on Rodeo drive was très amusant, I turned them down. Her date gave me a discrete “I owe you one” look and they disappeared in a cloud of dust. I unlocked the gate, walked down the back steps, past Steaks’ cactus garden and into my empty room. Halloween, at last, was over.
I stretched out on the couch and opened the envelope. I felt old as I turned the pages and looked at the photos. Texas came running back to me, hot and full of pain. I felt the burns from the sparks of the welding torch and the loneliness born of sorrow, for welding was a solitary task. Once the hood swung down over your face it was just you and the darkness staring through that small window of black glass at a ball of light twenty thousand times brighter than the sun. Sometimes it would get unbearable for Jimmy. He said all that high voltage electricity made his brain run faster and faster; things he’d done, things he’d said, fights with his wife, all spun and blurred together in the darkness under the hood until he felt his soul burning and melting like the metal at the tip of his welding rod. He’d stand up shaking, lift his hood and stare at nothing, his face dripping wet and black from the greasy smoke, then he’d sit his hood down and walk slowly to the shop office to ask the foreman to let him do something else for a while. After the summer he stopped welding all together.
We had worked together that summer welding huge sections of steel pipe big enough for a man to stand up inside. We stood up inside those pipes and welded. In July. In Texas. All day. It wasn’t so much the hundred and thirty degree heat or the thick smoke from the burning steel, but the sparks had no place else to go but through your clothes and into your skin and all you could do was cuss and bear it—you didn’t come out until you’d finished your seam. It was a government job, air vents for a copper mine, and welders could have all the overtime they wanted. Jimmy and his wife had just had a baby; he needed money to get out of debt. I had promised my girl a trip to Mexico. Two good reasons for two good Texans to stay in that living hell three good hours after closing time. We got to know each other during those long nights. I heard about Nam; he heard about college. I learned how to spit tobacco; he learned to split fractions. God, that was a long time ago.
I sat there for a moment, lost in time, then slowly it came to me Chris Boone had something to do with Rabbit’s death. Trouble had been brewing between Rabbit and his wife for a long time but it didn’t get violent until Chris became involved in the book I was writing. What power did this man have? How long had he been practicing the dark arts? Hypocrisy was the mainstay of evil, this I had learned from my research. Satan appears as an angel of light, the Bible says. All the pieces were there but how did they fit together? Why, after all this time, did he decide to return my book to me? I searched through the papers for the last chapter, the one about Jimmy’s death. If Jimmy’s ghost was haunting him maybe there was a clue in the last chapter that would tell me how Chris was accountable for Jimmy’s death. Something I had written down, without knowing, all those years ago could be the key I was looking for. I found the chapter and began to read.
CHAPTER 31
ASKING FOR IT
THE PLANT WAS HOT that July morning, and it stayed hot all day. Late in the afternoon a flatcar loaded with stacks of sheet metal pulled into the East Bay of the plant. The car creaked down the ancient railroad tracks that ran the length of the plant. Rabs loved the railroad, and every time a car like this came into the plant he’d tag it with his old hobo handle, Pecos Star.
“That way my buddies still think I’m riding the rails.”
“Ever think about going back on the bum?”
“Goaty, every night when I hear the train pass down in the bottoms, son. I slept better on the rails then I ever slept in my life; them old cars just rock you to sleep.”
Goat