Ghost Town (5 page)

"Owning land," Chief Leopard Frog once told me, "is like owning time. It is an exercise in folly."

The influence of the railroads waned with the construction of highways. Now the deciding factor became whether the highway would pass through your town. Again, the decision was left to politicians in a distant city. The people who lived in the town were at the mercy of other people who had no reason to show mercy. Your town was nothing more than a speck on a map. Specks don't matter much.

Money does.

After that, it was the factories. As one by one the farms failed, the factories took up the slack, providing jobs for the men and women who previously had worked the fields. Then the companies that owned the factories learned that they could make more money by moving their factories to other countries where people were even more desperate than the people in your town.

And so again, one by one, factories closed and the people in the town were left with nothing.

Many struggled to maintain their lives as they thought their lives were meant to be, farming, fixing broken farm machinery, and carving irregular-shaped bowls from walnut trees. But without steady economic nourishment, the towns eventually died and disappeared.

Those who could moved to bigger towns, or, if they had a large enough grubstake, to the cities.

Those who could not grew pumpkins and watched TV.

In the meantime, the buffalo had all been killed, the prairie grasses plowed under, the Indians displaced or, more often, exterminated by European diseases, and the early settlers had gone scrambling off to Colorado and California in search of gold.

It was into this environment that Paisley was born—and much later, myself—with nothing much going for it other than cheap land and high hopes.

The founder and first mayor of Paisley was a man named Daschell Potts.

Daschell Potts was a mysterious figure, having come out of nowhere and, later, having returned to the same place. But what he had going for him was a wardrobe of tailored white suits and crisp Panama hats. He wore a black string tie and fancied himself to be a Kentucky colonel, although he seemed more a caricature than the real thing.

He told people that he had once written a book, although Mrs. Franks, the former bookstore owner and a well-read woman in her own right, said she had never heard of him.

The selection of the name Paisley is worthy of mention. Apparently a group of city leaders met and during the discussion got into an argument about whether to name the town Red, Green, Blue, or Yellow, as each had a particular reason for favoring a certain color signifying something such as a wheat field, a sunrise, the big sky, or a verdant crop.

After several rounds of indecisive voting and more rounds of quality Kentucky bourbon supplied by the well-heeled Colonel Potts, they compromised on the name Paisley, representing a combination of colors, and that was that.

Now that I think about it, I guess I came within a hair's breadth of being born in a town called Plaid.

The plastic novelty factory was the engine that ran the town for many years. Not surprisingly, it was owned in part by Colonel Potts.

Colonel Potts was generous when it came to the support of the town. He built the elementary school, the middle school, the high school, the bandstand, and the ballpark.

Once each year he sponsored the Paisley Olympics, which consisted of sack races, three-legged races, diving contests at Paisley Lake, and a stock car race that took place on Highway LL, to the calculated innocence of state authorities. There was also the equivalent of a state fair for domesticated animals. Best cow, best sheep, best chicken, and best rabbit—all were eligible for cash prizes from the deep pockets of Colonel Potts.

Then the factory was sold to some bored foreign visitors and closed for good in Paisley, and the party was over.

Colonel Potts simply vanished.

The town soon followed.

ON A SECOND-FLOOR
windowsill of Mr. Heath's store I spied what appeared to be a hummingbird nest.

What a great opportunity for macro photos!
I thought.

Perhaps there would be eggs in the nest. Possibly even baby hummingbirds. Although it was late in the season for babies of any species, I figured it was worth a look. I had never seen a baby hummingbird, much less photographed one.

Luckily, the random hammering of the hotheaded Mr. Heath had created what amounted to a climbing wall. With my camera slung around my neck, I gripped one board with my hands while placing the toe of my tennis shoe on a board below. If I was careful, it would be an easy task.

Of course, what I hadn't given any thought to was the condition of Mr. Heath's handiwork. You know how people like to say "Time heals all things"? Well, those people are basically stupid. Because what happens is exactly the opposite:

Time rots all things.

The visible decay inside Mr. Heath's establishment should have warned me what to expect on the outside. Untreated pine lumber hastily affixed to a vertical surface has a useful life as brief as a monarch butterfly's.

When the board separated in my hands some fifteen feet above the ground, I fell backwards onto a tumbledown pile of concrete blocks, striking the back of my head and snapping my left clavicle—my collarbone—clean in two. Something was also wrong with my left leg.

If a boy falls in a ghost town when no one is around, does he make a sound?

Of all the dumb things that people say to one another, here, I think, is the dumbest. Following a catastrophe in which you have nearly been killed, the people who previously were walking around saying "Time heals all things" now are prone to say "Boy, were you lucky."

The doctor who treated me actually said this the following afternoon after I'd spent the night lying on the ground in excruciating pain, getting bitten by mosquitoes and crawled on by whatever sorts of bugs and slimy creatures perform their errands at night.

"It's a good thing you were wearing that orange cap, else your mother might never have found you," Dr. Appletree said. "It was like a bright signal by the side of the road."

First of all, my father's Columbus Catfish cap is peach, not orange. Second, there is nothing lucky about falling and breaking your bones. Third, I might add, and would have done so right then and there if Dr. Appletree had not been attempting to maneuver my severed collarbone into a position allowing it to be held in place with a sling, a profoundly painful experience, where is the luck in living in a ghost town where nobody even comes looking for you until nearly twenty-four hours after you've gone missing?

The only lucky part about the entire experience, so far as I was concerned, was that my camera survived the fall.

My collarbone would take weeks to heal. The back of my head had a goose egg literally as big as a goose egg, and my left leg was bruised and swollen as if it'd received a thousand bee stings.

It would not have surprised me if the goofball Dr. Appletree had said, "It's a lucky thing that you don't go to school, Spencer, because now you can't."

Luck.

Who are these people who try to make bad luck sound like it's good luck?

My guess is that they're some of the world's luckiest people.

That lucky Dr. Appletree's clinic was across the street from Wal-Mart. He had no competitors and could charge his patients as much money as he liked.

My world became as small as it had been at my birth, consisting of my bedroom and nothing more. I couldn't use crutches because my broken collarbone couldn't take the weight. I couldn't use my left arm because it was strapped into a sling. Everything I had taken for granted had been compromised. Turning the pages of a book. Taking pictures. Eating with a fork. Going to the bathroom. It was all an ordeal requiring planning and patience.

I took pills for the pain and slept a lot.

Once again, time had become distorted.

That first day home, when I woke up, it was dark, the television in the next room was silent, and Chief Leopard Frog was sitting quietly in the rocking chair opposite my bed.

"What are you staring at?" I asked, not bothering to disguise the hostility in my voice.

"Just watching over you," he replied.

"Ha!" I retorted. "That's a laugh! Where were you when I fell from the side of the store? Where were you when I lay dying in the weeds? Where were you when the insects decided that I was a sacred feast sent to them from the Bug God? And if I remember correctly, wasn't it you who suggested that I should give up my former idleness and begin to use my hands? Look where
that's
gotten me!"

"It's good to see that there's nothing wrong with your brain," Chief Leopard Frog responded. "Your expressions of anger are perfectly normal. Within a few weeks, except for an unfortunate lump, your collarbone will be, too."

"If you say so," I replied. "In the meantime, I have to hop on one leg to go pee and am confined to live in a world no bigger than a Christmas snow globe."

"And you're suggesting that's a bad thing?" Chief Leopard Frog asked. "Wait to find out. After all, what's the rush?"

"
THERE'S NOTHING TO DO
," I complained to Chief Leopard Frog. "I've passed the point of absolute boredom into the zone of terminal boredom."

"Good, good, all good," Chief Leopard Frog counseled. "Now we can work on patience."

Back in the days of the famous French Impressionists and Fauvists, those daring, bohemian painters in Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who shocked the world with their new, liberated view of color and shape and subject, it was not unusual to find entire paintings devoted to an artist's chair, or his bed, or his window, or his lunch, or his table.

Indeed, according to the Disney comic book
Uncle Scrooge on Art, Music, and Money,
today such images are highly prized and hang in the world's finest collections and museums. Some, such as a yellow chair by Van Gogh, or a red tablecloth by Matisse, are worth millions and millions of dollars.

Why such a fuss over such ordinary subjects?

I can tell you.

Those guys were stuck in their rooms.

What else was there to look at?

They had no money to go anywhere, and if they did manage to scrape up a few francs to go somewhere it was most likely downstairs to the café to meet girls, where their money was quickly gone.

Better to spend a few days painting a likeness of the chest of drawers, however wobbly and unlikely the end result.

For the first time in my life I understood these paintings, although, of course, being a native of Paisley, Kansas, I'd never actually seen them. But I'd seen reproductions in several of the better books deeded to me by Mrs. Franks.

Now I was also a room-bound artist.

My paintbrush was a somewhat antiquated thirty-five-millimeter camera. My world was a bedroom measuring approximately twelve by fourteen feet. I did have one advantage over those tortured Frenchmen. I had a macro lens. If it suited me, I could photograph my bedspread close enough to see the hand-woven fibers crisscrossing like the ties on tiny railroad tracks.

My first exposure under my new circumstances was a fly that had parked himself on the top of my bookcase. Instead of swatting him with my mother's
TV Guide,
which I probably should have done, thereby dealing with two nuisances at once, I took his picture as he scratched his hairy legs. Only the
click-thunk
of the shutter scared him off.

Country flies are bold creatures.

Whereas Van Gogh concentrated on the entire piece of rough-hewn furniture in his habitat, I focused on the knobs, the grain of the wood, the imperfections in the paint.

A loose screw in a hinge became a visual metaphor for all that was wrong with my life. A dripping faucet in the bathroom was an opportunity to express the relentless passing of time. Rust stains around the bathtub drain spoke to me of age and futility. A casually discarded T-shirt, lying like a carcass on the floor, stood for the meaninglessness of personal attachments, the fragility of human bonds.

I was an artist in a cage.

Of course, I had no visitors.

Other than Chief Leopard Frog, who came and went as the mood struck him, and the occasional prison-guard visit from my mother, delivering food, I was utterly, entirely alone.

It didn't take long for me to learn that two pain pills would help to pass the time better than one, and three could get me through an afternoon.

I began to complain of increasing pain simply to get more pills.

No one questioned my motives.

And why should they? They perceived their lives, though empty, to be very busy. They'd move from one interruption of their idle thoughts to the next. Who cares if there's a kid out in the country somewhere who's getting more medication than he needs?

Certainly not the overworked (and overpaid) Dr. Appletree.

Certainly not the ever-changing pharmacists at Wal-Mart.

That I spent my days in a drug-induced stupor is adequately demonstrated in the several out-of-focus pictures that came back to me in the mail a fortnight later.

But the interior of T. J. Heath's General Merchandise Emporium was a prizewinner, if I do say so myself. The story that it told in an instant was profound. Most of the others in the collection were throwaways. Blurry coat hangers holding nothing. Boring bedposts. A toilet at the moment of flush. My talisman sitting on a windowsill.

That sort of thing.

But as had become the custom, there was a ghost in the mix from Sparkle Snapshot. This time the ghost was Mr. Heath. He was out in his lumberyard, gathering pieces of pine boards that had fallen from his handmade storage rack. He had a pained expression on his face.

Just before I passed out from all those pills, an idea began to form in my foggy mind.

WHAT IF,
I wondered,
I used the ghost camera to photograph all the people of Paisley?

I mulled the idea over in my mind. This was not easy, since I had taken four pain pills at once and soon passed out again for hours.