American Ghost (12 page)

She turned over and went back to sleep but was awakened sometime
after by a hammering on her window, and a hoarse voice, calling through the glass, “Jolie! Wake up!
Jol!
”

At first, she thought it was a dream, a mental replay of the morning, of Carl and his fake redneck roust. She sat up, blinking, and realized it wasn't a dream. She was lying on her bed in a dark bedroom, dressed and rumpled from a day's cooking, and a pale face at the window hissed, “Jolie! Come round and open the
damn
door!”

It was Carl, standing on the propane tank, calling her from her bed to unlock the front door, as he had done many a time before. She was stupid with sleep and rolled out with a curse and made her way through the dark house, annoyed and resigned, thrown back in time to their early teenage years, when Carl's life was full of small emergencies that had to be shielded from their father's eyes. He was waiting at the door, as usual, impatient and mumbling, yanking at the door before she had it unchained.

“Hold on,” she fussed, fumbling with the chain, then stepping back sharply as Carl burst in, bringing a blast of freezing night air, Lena sagging at his side.

“Git her,” he snapped.

Jolie jumped to catch Lena before she fell. They managed to steady her between them, a light enough weight, though hardly on her feet. “Will you
ever
grow up?” Jolie whispered to Carl as she helped him half drag, half carry Lena to her bedroom, Jolie's voice low, so as not to wake their father.

Carl didn't deign to answer. He got Lena as far as the bed, then disappeared back down the hallway, leaving Jolie to kneel in front of her and pat her cold cheek. “Lena? Are you okay? Have you been drinking? Your hands are like
ice.
” Carl returned with an armful of towels that Jolie snatched from his hands. “If she's drunk, Daddy's gonna
have
your
hide.
You are
messed
up in the
head—
you know that?”

“She ain't drunk,” Carl whispered as he stripped her wet sweater over her head. “She's wet as a salamander and freezing to damn death. God, it's turned cold; turned on a dime,” he muttered, yanking the covers to
Lena's neck, then starting for the door. “Meet me at the truck, and git yer coat. It's cold as hell; bridge is iced.” He was halfway through the doorway when he realized Jolie hadn't moved. He came back far enough to snap, “It's your
boyfriend,
okay? He's in town—come on.” Then Carl was gone, his footsteps padding down the hallway to the living room, then out the door.

Jolie was too paralyzed to follow. She just knelt there, Lena's wet sweater in hand, till she heard the crack of the screen door. She came to her feet in a scramble and stumbled barefoot through the dark house to the shock of the cold porch. Carl was parked across the street at the church, intentionally trying for dimness, only his brake lights lit, his face hard in the green glow of the dash. Jolie raced across the cold asphalt and yanked open the door, shaking so hard she could barely get it shut.

“Where?” she chattered.

“In the ER, in Cleary,” Carl answered as he wheeled around to the highway. “Shot in the back. Damn near dead.”

He struck off the words with such stone-faced composure that Jolie didn't believe him. She sat there, staring, then burst out in unrestrained fury, “Will you
quit
with these
dumb
-ass jokes,
Carl
? He didn't go
hunting
! They didn't take
guns
!”

“It's no damn
joke,
” he snapped, his eyes locked on the thin line of highway that he sailed along at ninety. “We found him by the dock—barely got him to town—Jesus, he was bleeding,” he murmured, so blunt and merciless that Jolie realized he was by God telling the truth; it wasn't a joke.

She asked for no more details, could stand no more details, her nails biting into her hands as they flew down the dark highway, tears running down her face unheeded, till they jerked to a halt in the bright tinsel light of the Cleary ER. She was half out the door before Carl stopped her, gripping her arm and telling her across the seat in a low, quick voice, “If anybody asks, it was a stray shot, Jol. A poacher or a drunk—you hear me?”

She nodded numbly, then scrambled out in her jeans and bare feet,
across the cold, snagged concrete to the fluorescent glory of the sliding doors. The merciless light showed Carl to be wildly disheveled, covered head to hands in a film of gray river muck that stiffened his hair and gave his eyes a wild, minstrel whiteness. The receptionist stopped him at the counter, but Jolie would not be slowed, ignoring her to pass through the sliding doors to the inner sanctum of the hospital, as quiet and pale as a ghost. She passed row after row of examining rooms, white and stark and empty, till she came upon a gurney in a back hallway, momentarily abandoned by the nurses, the patient swathed to the neck in white blankets, and hooked to dangling transfusion and antibiotic bags.

It was Sam, obviously in the middle of transport—to surgery or another floor, or maybe the morgue. It was hard to tell which, he was so pale, so utterly bleached, his chest motionless beneath the covers, only the monitor humming with a faint, reassuring beat. She approached him slowly, halting at the edge of the bed and gripping the cold metal rails with tight, white knuckles, wondering what madness had possessed her to keep him in Hendrix so long, to open its mysteries and expose him to such risk?

Was it love or loneliness or sheer desperation that had stopped her from pulling him aside that very first night at the café and giving him the same heartfelt advice that she'd given Lena the night before: to get out while he could.

To run for his life.
Run for his life.

S
am Lense knew nothing of the guns or shots or the hysteria that had taken hold of his friends that night in Hendrix. His most lasting memory of the evening was the ferociousness of the swollen river, which bore little resemblance to the broad, placid friend he had been camping beside for the past three months. This was another river altogether, black and impenetrable, the current racing by as fast as a Formula One racer when they finally made it to the galvanized-tin roofs that marked the Hoyt fish camp.

As the junior member of the crew, he was the lucky bastard who got to jump out of the boat and secure them to a makeshift floating dock in a primeval wilderness so thick you couldn't see your hands in front of you. He knew that one wrong step and he'd fall headlong into the running current, would be fifty feet downstream before he could so much as lift his face and gurgle for help. On Ott's shouted advice, he tied one end of a rope to the post, then wound the other end tight around his hand for balance. With one foot on the shifting dock, one on the boat, he helped the old men onto the dock, one at a time, for which they thanked him, politely and sincerely, then quickly disappeared up the bank on a squelching mud path and left the unloading to the youngster (which was the very reason they went to the trouble every year of charming one into tagging along, to take care of such nasty chores).

As Sam wrestled with the ropes and the slippery boards and the razor cut of the freezing wind, he cursed himself for getting caught up in this macho bullshit, for being too proud to borrow a coat for a trip to the river on the coldest night of the year. Finally, after a good half hour of weaving and ducking, and several stumbles that almost landed him in the water, he got the last box unloaded and started for the camp with the fitful beam of a small AA flashlight. He could barely make out the dull metal sheen of the roof of the main cabin in the clearing ahead, the path so slick and wet and laced with cypress roots that he had to keep his face down, to keep from stumbling. He'd finally made it to the high end of the path, at the clearing that marked the actual Hoyt camp—then, with no interval, no pause at all, he was lying flat on his back in a cold, white room that somehow seemed an extension of the woods. It was as cold, maybe even colder.

Whenever he floated into consciousness, he kept wishing he'd listened to Jolie and stayed home. He berated himself for disagreeing with her, was tormented by strange, vivid dreams of the river, where he'd be huddled in the low-riding boat, whipped and tormented by the icy wind. He could see Jolie up ahead, sometimes sitting on the prow of the boat, but usually standing at the edge of the woods, her face sad and set, disappointed in him. He sometimes tried to call out, to tell her she was right, that he shouldn't have come out on the river in nothing but a sweatshirt on such a night. But in the strange and immutable laws of his dreamworld, he couldn't. She was always ahead of him somewhere, close and present, but voiceless.

He could never lay hands on her, even in his dreams.

When he finally came to himself, he was in a different room on another floor, this one warmer and darker, much better. He didn't dream here as much, but slept real sleep and woke up with a small amount of strength, enough to ask, what had happened to him? Where
was
he?

For he'd forgotten the woods by then, and the high river and his footing in the slippery mud; had forgotten about Jolie and the grimed, weed-choked cemeteries of Spanish West Florida. He was in suburban
Miami and everything around him smelled and sounded like the city: the Cuban nurse who changed his IV, the Dominican lab tech who came and took his blood, his large and extended family, who watched him with anxious eyes, told him he'd had an accident. An awful accident.

“Did I wreck a car?” he remembered asking his aunt, who gripped his hand and smiled a brittle smile.

“Save your strength, Sammy. You're fine. You're strong. You'll be home soon.”

That was the tone of the conversation, saying everything and saying nothing. His father, Leonard Lense, was a hovering, grim presence, devoted to Sam's comfort, but obviously a man with a grievance, who was charming to the nurses, but otherwise incommunicado. He was formidable by nature—bald and bullet-headed and never the kind of person who suffered fools gladly, even if they were his sons.

He wouldn't speak of the Mysterious Accident at all, and Sam's usually straight-shooting brothers followed suit, filling their visits with a lightweight chitchat that was bizarre and disorienting. They offered no explanation for his excruciating chest, or the grid of stitches that itched like a son of a bitch, till one of his nephews slipped up and told him that he'd been in a hunting accident; that he had been shot.

“A
hunting
accident? When did I go
hunting
?” he muttered, unable to imagine how he, Samuel Bernard Lense, had taken up hunting in Coral Gables without even realizing it.

Only when he was moved to a regular floor at Baptist Hospital and the opiates were curtailed did he begin piecing together memories of his last days in Hendrix, of Thanksgiving at the Hoyts', of going to the river—not to hunt, but to fish. Jolie hadn't wanted him to go.

“You'll freeze your ass off,” she had warned, and so he had.

When his father dropped by that night, Sam was happy to report that he hadn't been in a hunting accident because he had never gone
hunting,
though his father seemed resistant to the logic of the argument and nodded casually, and tried to change the subject. But Sam was strong enough to have begun putting pieces of the puzzle together and insisted
on talking about his concern not for his own mangled chest, but Jolie: Where was she? Was she
mad
at him? Because he kinda remembered her being mad.

He asked everyone who walked in the door—nurses, dietitians, and especially his family, who seemed not the least bit troubled about the girl. There seemed to be an understanding among them that Sam was weak and not himself, and not responsible for his pleas and threats and raging insistence that,
no,
she wasn't some casual girlfriend! They were in love! They were engaged! He'd spoken to her father! He had called them from a pay phone at the campground! Didn't any of you lying, dumb-ass idiots remember
anything
?

He was so weak that for the first time in his life he was prone to tears of frustration when his family mildly shook their heads, arguing in the most reasonable fashion if he was sure he had been that serious with a young girl he hardly knew? Who never called or came to see him? Sam had no answer, but lay back, rubbed his chest, and tried to call information. But he found that his wallet and his checkbook had fallen into the same black hole as the rest of the year, with no explanations from his family, only forced smiles and sidestepped questions.

He accepted then that he was a prisoner in his own home and quit begging for information, quit appearing to think of Jolie at all. He ate whatever was set before him and steadily gained strength. He talked to his father about taking a new direction in life, thought about getting out of anthropology and maybe applying for law school. It was nonsense, of course, but enough of a red herring that his family began to believe he was moving on, showing a little common sense at last. He worked hard to keep it that way, called admissions at FAU and UM to ask about schedules and requirements, fees and financial aid. He brought up UF, as if in afterthought, said he needed to talk to Professor Keyes, see what credit he could salvage.

“At least then I won't have wasted a whole year,” he told them.

His father offered to drive him to Gainesville, though Sam waved him aside, said he'd driven there plenty of times, he knew the way. He
asked to borrow his father's car and his credit card bright and early one Monday morning, assured him that he'd pay him back—and once he got on the road, he stayed on I-95 all the way to Jacksonville. He turned west then on I-10 for the long trek to Hendrix, desperate to see Jolie and find out what the hell happened that night in the woods. One minute he'd been trying to find a footing on a slippery path; next minute, boom, his life was gone.