The Haunting of James Hastings (3 page)

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Authors: Christopher Ransom

Tags: #Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Suspense

BOOK: The Haunting of James Hastings
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I don’t wonder if it was more cowardice on my part - I know it was.
 
Stacey was cremated, her ashes sifted into her garden behind our home. I emailed a letter of resignation to Trigger, which he forwarded to Ghost’s business manager. It went unchallenged. I stopped dyeing my hair platinum blond and let it grow. I visited a dermatologist in Hollywood for two hours of laser tattoo removal three times a week until the most visible copies (on my arms, my neck, stomach) were reduced to raw pink baby flesh (yes, it is just like going to bed on fire). I grew a short beard and saw an optometrist who would prescribe a new pair of tortoise-shell frames to further disguise me as plain old me, and learned that I actually needed a prescription.
 
‘You have astigmatism of the left eye,’ the rotund, white-smocked man told me, patting my thigh with a small plastic paddle. I think his name was Robert Bryans, or Brian Roberts. One of those two first-name names. ‘It’s not serious, but you should wear glasses at night, especially when driving. You will also enjoy going to the movies a lot more now. The screen won’t look so out of focus.’
 
I didn’t respond. Her left eye was the one that had burst from her skull.
It’s okay, darlin’. I’m with you in spirit, or maybe you are with me. With any luck I will go blind in sympathy.
 
I boxed up my Vaporware threads and the pairs of signature Converse Ghost had given me for Christmas every year. I bought some regular clothes and soon looked like every other nobody on the street. I went to the liquor store and spent eight hundred dollars. I shed his gestures, the strut, pose, tics. I dropped his speech patterns and twangs, minimized the gangsta slang. I kicked the Ghost habit once and for all, put him in a box six feet under and pissed on his proverbial grave. I dropped out of his world, and this one.
 
Eleven and a half months passed before I saw her again.
 
2
 
The night death came back to West Adams I wasn’t spying, though it’s true that by then I had developed a habit of watching my neighbors. Sometimes with my naked eye, but more often through the 80mm Zhumell spotting scope I gave Stacey for her twenty-eighth birthday. She had been in a photography phase. I had hoped the Zhumell, which could be used as a telescope or digiscope attached to a camera, would encourage her to turn her gaze skyward when she inevitably tired of taking pictures. Upon presentation, she pretended to be thrilled with her gift. But after a few days of lugging her two Nikons, gear bag, the scope and its folding tripod around the backyard, trying to turn pigeons roosting under Whitey’s gables into urban art, she lost interest.
 
Playing the role of optimist, I moved the scope and tripod to the second-story balcony and spent fifty bucks on astronomy books. Over the next month, we shut off the TV and pretended the balcony - with its little arched roof, recessed decking and short spindled railing almost hidden in the house’s façade - was our private observatory. We shared bottles of Beaujolais and discussed the possibility of alien life forms. But eventually our lives turned busy, the weather cooled and the entire rig was abandoned.
 
Architecturally West Adams could be Anytown, USA, which is why so many scenes for movies and television shows are shot there. The banking- and commerce-heavy Koreatown lies north; South Central’s bludgeoned ghettos adjacent, you guessed it, south. The skyline of downtown Los Angeles lies east, the blur of afro-centric Crenshaw and industrial Culver City to the west.
 
Situated in the middle of them all and cut in half by the ten lanes of infinite traffic that ride the Santa Monica Freeway, West Adams is a roughly ten- by twelve-block enclave of historic homes that varies wildly, a little pocket of a neighborhood where nine-hundred-thousand dollar Victorians were steps away from run-down apartment buildings with diapers on the lawns. The same seventy-foot-tall skinny palm trees swayed in front of squalid one-bedroom crack houses and restored Queen Anne mansions owned by clothing label upstarts. A five-color painted lady might sell for seven hundred and fifty thousand despite her crumbling brick foundation; a plain six-bedroom bungalow two blocks south might be had for three-fifty due to its proximity to the church/liquor store/porn video/fried chicken shack/nail salon strip mall.
 
We were attracted to the neighborhood because it was on the way up, was being improved by the refinancing Hispanics and blacks who had never left, was being slowly gentrified by the young and upwardly mobile, those self-anointed artists and entrepreneurs like us, the ones who weren’t content with a condo or a ranch home in El Segundo; we wanted
character
and damn the risk, the gunshots, the gangs . . . those were just rumors.
 
After the accident, I retreated to the balcony out of respect for Stacey, who didn’t like it when I smoked in the house. The tripod seemed to be waiting for me, beckoning my sozzled eye. After four hours of stargazing, Stacey’s scope had become my scope, and I had my first night of real sleep in months.
 
I furnished my nest with a lawn chair, a small table for my ashtray and a green metal Coleman cooler my father handed down, to hold my beer. I kept a pair of flip-flops on deck, and mounted a hook under the eave to hold my black windbreaker and one of Stacey’s scarves (the thick purple one of cable-knit cotton), and thus my little self-pity station was complete.
 
When I wasn’t dreaming of launching rocket-propelled grenades at SUVs on Arlington, I saw remarkable, sometimes unexplainable things in the sky: flashes of green too slow to be comets, a jetliner whose red and green flashers blanked out under a cloudless sky, a red eyeball which seemed to vibrate looking back at me from light years away (more likely I was tanked and that one was just a stop light on Venice).
 
But like Stacey I soon lost interest in the stars. I learned to watch the people instead. Junkies staggering from fix to fix. Catholic schoolgirls walking home holding hands. Realtors hustling nervous newlyweds, like we had once been, into the latest remodel. Single mothers sorting credit card bills at dining-room tables. Upper-class fighting (silent candle-lit dinners which resembled aspirin commercials) and lower-class fucking (lights on, loud, dog-style). Up there on a balcony you see the life of your neighborhood, good and bad.
 
It was not a total escape.
 
Sometimes I stayed too late and drank too much, slewing dangerously close to the edge. It was a twenty-foot drop and our porch was surrounded by a concrete walk. Had I fallen, I probably would have spent the rest of my days drinking whiskey from a sippy cup. As dusk turned to true night (and my tipsy turned to true inebriation), often I would urinate off the side, into Stacey’s bougainvillea. Sometimes I would stand there naked and laughing and waving my arms, waiting for someone to call the police. They never did. Spend enough time twenty-five feet off the ground, you realize no one walking or driving by ever really looks up.
 
I can see now that I craved human company. I had spent so much time playing the role of Ghost, a larger than life character to whom people flocked, I didn’t know how to be James Hastings. I certainly did not know how to be a grieving husband. I would have liked a manual. Most of our real friends were still back in Tulsa. I didn’t know how to make new connections in cafés or bars. So it wasn’t long before I learned the optimal night, hour and angle to view each of my neighbors in their natural habitat, and my attentions were particular to three: the Gomez’s handsome bungalow to the west, into Mr Ennis’s stucco eyesore to the east and Officer Lucy Arnold’s brown Victorian across the street and three houses west.
 
Watching Euvaldo Gomez and his children, grandparents, cousins and their teenaged friends popping in and out was like watching a family sitcom with the sound off. There were patriarchal outbursts aimed at the calamitous dining-room table, and fits of playtime laughter on the living-room floor. Mrs Gomez was always cooking and serving food. The kids were always spilling fluorescent green or red punch. Euvaldo was an accountant with one of the firms downtown. At the end of each day, he would remove his jacket and collared shirt and tie, but not his pinstriped trousers or wingtips. He spent his evenings in his armchair while his children provoked him. I cast him as a Latino Archie Bunker, and learned to read his moods by the set of his eyebrows and the vigor with which he stabbed the remote control. They were a happy family - hardworking, celebratory, always in motion right up until bedtime, when the household would collapse into deserved peace.
 
With a swivel of the wrist, it was onto the next house.
 
Officer Lucy Arnold and I had history. She was a tall brunette, athletic with sinewy arms and almost imperceptible breasts, a bicycle fuzz prowling Venice Beach. Of all things for a cop to be, she was shy. She claimed to be the ugly duckling from high school, but she was all right. Proximity and professional courtesy opened the door for her, I welcomed her offer to help, and soon Officer Arnold became just Lucy. A casual friend and inside line to the department, my wallflower mole.
 
As the updates on Stacey’s case lost any new wrinkles, Lucy and I entered a routine of twice- or thrice-weekly happy hours which consisted of drinks on my porch, banter about her day and tender inquiries into my ‘process’. Now and then, when the Friday margaritas were blended a little too strong, Lucy would make some sort of flush-faced overture, usually a hug, or the wiping of a tear (hers) in amazement at my stoicism (numb drunkenness) in the face of such loss. We fumbled our way through a couple of her sports bras and somehow, as we crossed paths one afternoon in the kitchen - me emerging from the bathroom, she turning from the fridge with two cold beers - she wound up giving me a handy in front of the stove. But she wouldn’t let me reciprocate just then, perhaps sensing I had nothing to offer. The clumsy tangle of our increasingly sad happy hours became too much for me to endure. She understood. She would be there if I needed someone to talk to.
 
I didn’t believe she was being opportunistic, trying to land a vulnerable man now that his wife was out of the picture. She was just a nice woman with the misfortune to be on the receiving end of my mixed signals.
Help, thank you for dinner, now leave me alone.
We cooled off. Six months passed. Our exchanges on trash day or in the produce aisle at Ralph’s were still pleasant, but I seldom watched her any more.
 
By the time the incident with Mr Ennis happened, I had stopped thinking about Lucy Arnold altogether.
 
If the Gomezes were my sitcom, Mr Ennis was my still life. I never learned his real station in life, but my money was on lifelong bachelor or early widower, because I never saw anyone pay Mr Ennis a visit. No minivan arrived to spill grandkids onto his lawn, no old bag in her housedress ever vacuumed around his feet. He was like a grandpa silverback gorilla, the one you see at the zoo with half a dozen bananas lying around him because he no longer gives a shit and just wishes someone would shoot a dart into him. His living room was a diorama of mid-century couches, home-made lamps of cut-bottle glass, a vinyl ottoman and brandy snifter terrarium filled with peat moss and a tiny rubber turtle resting on a log. Sometimes Mr Ennis leaned over the terrarium and spoke to the turtle. I would have paid large sums to hear these conversations. I nicknamed the turtle Tiny Mr Ennis.
 
Mr Ennis lived a life of solitude and grunt sustenance, appearing magically in his chair around seven with a frozen chicken dinner still in the tin. He set these meals upon a folding TV tray and watched an hour and a half of local news, then
Wheel of Fortune
, the letter blocks shining bricks of white light across his chest and face and the oily sofa that propped him up like a short, meaty mannequin. After Vanna and Pat said goodnight, it was cop shows, heroic high drama until bedtime at ten sharp.
 
Initially there was something comforting in his isolation, a reminder that I was not necessarily the loneliest soul in our corner of the city. But toward the end I watched him with a gnawing hopelessness, too aware that if I continued on my present course his fate would soon be mine.
 
That evening, when the one-year anniversary of Stacey’s death was less than two weeks away, I checked in on all the usual suspects, but there was scant entertainment to be had. The air turned cool for March and I smelled rain.
 
I ducked back into the house and descended the stairs, on my way to retrieve another beer from the fridge. The wide landing was covered with a floral runner. Above the landing’s center, at eye level, was a porthole window that faced east. There wasn’t much to see out this window, except for the wild tangle of juniper bushes that threatened to overtake Mr Ennis’s shitbox abode and, I suspected, played hell with my allergies every summer.
 
As I passed the window, a pale face with a great yawning mouth swam over its surface. I startled and turned quickly, the way you do when someone on the street bumps shoulders with you. The face that confronted me was my own. Just a reflection created by the chandelier hanging in the foyer below me, and the outer darkness pressing itself against the house. I exhaled and rolled my shoulders before moving on.

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