Please Don't Go (9 page)

The walls looked as though they had not been painted in decades. He noticed thin fissures in the paint, creeping like tributaries through the room. He glanced down at the dark stained wooden floors. Pumpkin boards, by the look of them. Three summers previous, Zephyr had worked for a general contractor. One of their jobs had been to refinish a pumpkin board floor, and Rattup’s looked to be a near clone to that contract, but unkempt and dull. Zephyr looked to the ceiling next, and he realized that Rattup had finished speaking, and was now looking on him as he made his own careful observances. A smile crept across Rattup’s face, but this was undetectable to Zephyr since he was tediously studying the thick squared wooden rafters that criss-crossed the ceiling above him. The arch of the roof looked to be rounded, not pointed like most modern homes. The rafters had decorations propped on them as though they were museum shelves designed specifically for antiquities. They were wide enough to store a dead body, had Rattup a tall enough ladder and a killer instinct. The knick-knacks were random in every sense; a stuffed red fox, a leather football helmet propped up by wires, a wooden cuckoo clock, a piece of craggy driftwood that resembled Walter Matthau, a fake cactus with a painted clown face, a ceramic jug with the word “Molasses” written upon it, and several tin coffee cans, all of which looked to be antiques. Beside those was an aluminum sign for a brand of motor oil that Zephyr had never heard of,
Greased Zeus
.

“
You’re doing it right now, aren’t you?” queried the smiling Rattup.

“
What?” Zephyr responded with some unknowing ataxia to his delivery.

“
You’re writing. You’re
always
writing, aren’t you?” he asked the young man. Rattup could recognize, in Zephyr, his own actions from his earliest days of writing and fiddling with scenes, from before the time that his fiction and reality were married into one conjoined body of thought. It was all part of the logical progression, and it was quite apparent. “I knew that I recognized a kindred soul. You write so much upon the sticky graffiti-covered walls of your brain, each and every day. Always writing. Always developing.”

“
I guess I am.” He focused his gaze upon Rattup once again, who was nodding at him. “If you’re not always thinking it, then you get soft.”

Rattup nodded, cutting free a large piece of mushroom and stuffing into his mumbling mouth, “You’re already one or two steps ahead of me, from when I was your age. You’ve got the love for it, and I can see that. How much do you write? How often? Where? What’s your process?” The excitement in Rattup’s voice was easily undeniable.

He shook his head. “I don’t write very much. Once a month. A few pages here, a few pages there. Only when I’m really pushing myself or feeling creative. I get an idea, usually, and I start typing away on my laptop. And maybe a half hour later my interest wanes. I don’t stick with it like I should. My mom always said I’ve got no follow-through. Maybe she’s right.”

Nodding, Charles noted, “You talk yourself out of it. Convince yourself that the story is no good.”

“
Usually.” It dawned upon Zephyr that Rattup had been through the wringer of writing and was viewing him for his mistakes, and not his passion. Perhaps that was the kick in the ass he needed. “I don’t have a routine, though. I guess I dabble. But I still want to write.”

Rattup shook his head. “You must stop with the dabbling. Engorge yourself in stories, both from the reading and writing angles. Consume book after book in your reading, the fatter and long-winded the better. And write word after brilliant word thereafter. Study their style, and compare it with your own. Do not steal, but appreciate like fine wine, swish it about your swollen cheeks and let it become a part of you. Even if you’re just keeping a journal, write four to ten pages of material per day. Four, at a very minimum. Otherwise, you’ll never arrive. Arrival is not an overnight thing, like these Harry Potter types try to convince you. You’ll be rejected several thousand times before you get into that very comfy fold. Short stories. Novels. Non-fiction. Journals. Pasta recipes, even! Whatever outlet you choose, keep writing. Write until your hands are swollen and arthritic. Even if you want to write a film review for nobody in particular, and stick it beneath your bed in a shoebox. That counts. Work your words and show them your care. Just don’t be lazy about it.” He breathed heavily, out of breath at his rant on the craft of writing development. He no longer had the windy booming lungs that had aided him in his youth.

“
Okay,” Zephyr replied, feeling guilty about his slow-from-the-gate writing progress thus far. It was not a product of his lacking desire, but of his lacking time.
After college
, he always comforted himself.
After college, I’ll get serious about this writing thing.
It was never too late, of this he was sure Rattup would wholeheartedly agree. With that crushing admission to himself, it was almost time to change the subject. Zephyr asked, “Speaking of... are you writing anything new?”

Rattup threw his head back in laughter. He stood from his couch and walked to the fire. Pulling the poker free from its sheath at the fireside, he spoke softly, “I write every single day, young man. If I ever stopped, I think I may turn batty or perish. But I haven’t published a lick of anything in more than twenty-five years. With all this internet hoo-rah, I don’t even know where to go with it, but I can’t say I care all that much. I don’t even own a computer. Better off, I say. My day is over in that sense and I feel plenty satisfied. Now, I write for me, and only me. It’ll never see the light of day, but I can assure you that the Charles Rattup Fan Club isn’t losing any sleep over that prospect!” He poked at the fire, his eyes glassy as it flickered before him, the crackling split logs growing bright as they found new bastions of invisible oxygen. “I’ll write until the day I die. Nobody cares anymore, but I’m at peace with that fact. They never really knew who I was anyway, and one may say that they’re better for it. The day I was first published, even though it was nothing more than some stories, I was complacent with my position in the eternal history of the padded-elbow Literati, as long as somebody knew my name, even if it was a small handful of snobs trying to rake me down into the muck.”

“
What do you write?” Zephyr asked. “Fiction still?”

“
Oh, a little of this. A little of that. I write letters, mostly.”

“
To whom?” he asked of the elder writer, adding an offer, “Do you need me to drop any at the post office on my way back through town?”

Rattup giggled. “I don’t mail them, kid. I write them to my lover. I don’t really have a choice in the matter. But I enjoy writing them, all the same.”

“
Your lover? She’s still alive?” Zephyr asked, his face contorting in confusion as to why he had never taken her into his home. He soon felt guilt in his unintentional implication that Rattup was too old to have a living, breathing lover. He placed his lemonade on his lunch tray when he felt a cold gust of air enter the room, fearful that it would explode like on his previous visit. “Who is she?
Where
is she?” he asked, looking around the room in preparation of something he could not yet predict.

The temperature dropped exponentially.

“
She lives right here,” Rattup said, stepping back from the playful flames of his warm fireplace, throwing his hand about as if to say,
in this very house
. “She lives right here. She can’t even read though- quite illiterate, in fact. But she likes to see me write them to her, she coos and tremors in my ear when I do so. She stores most of them under our bed, in a little keepsake box. I guess one could say she’s nostalgic in some sick way.”

Zephyr could feel his jaw tightening. A door slammed on the opposite side of the house, out of their line of sight, but Zephyr believed it to be the one that led to the dusty old pantry. Following the door slam came a crashing sound, possibly the cans that were lined along the walls of the very same pantry in which he had aided Charles in refilling. Something was growing angry with their conversation, Zephyr quickly assumed, again fighting the urge to call Rattup out for perpetuating his craziness into the environment around him.

Ghosts were for suckers and crackpots. Conspiratorial.

Yet still, his stomach started to turn over in anxiety, terrified that he would engage in a repeat performance of his last visit, perhaps even doing physical harm to himself during a second incident. He stood from his chair, stepping away from the two glasses on the coffee table, waiting for them to send disintegrated shards of fury blasting in every direction. Rattup cast an eye at him that implied he would be better off sitting down for the moment, looking from Zephyr to the chair and back at Zephyr again.

She
.

Rattup had stated earlier that, “
She
’s okay with you.”

She
.

Again, he spoke of a
she
, whom he wrote love letters to, who apparently lived in the house with him. It was all utter madness, though the previous performance of some invisible hand in Rattup’s house tended to dissuade that snap judgment from its rightful perch. “Please, sit. We’ve discussed this already, her and I. She does not like to be spoken of directly; her ears burn when she is noted aloud, especially to strangers. It is as though speaking of her makes her feel alive again, and that is too heavy a burden for her shoulders. I think she prefers it this way.”

“
You’ve got to be kidding me,” Zephyr mumbled. A scratching sound came from the basement door in the hallway, a long chaotic gritty sound that reminded Zephyr of a child’s nails across a chalkboard. “Shit.” The sound ceased, but Zephyr’s imminent feeling of dread would not. He waited, on worn nerves, for the next outburst of their invisible hostess, whom he still refused belief in.

“
If we use our silent words, she’ll calm down. Please don’t go,” Charles asked of his young protege, his eyes shrink-wrapped in the beginnings of what would be beggar’s tears. There was little that could be done when an elderly man in the last laps of his life began to sob. Zephyr was not going to wait for that moment.

“
Silent words?” Zephyr replied, eying the front door. He could be in his car in less than thirty seconds. Home in less than ten minutes. In fact, Jackie would be pleased to see him earlier than she had expected. Perhaps she would even feel frisky enough to take her pleasure into the bedroom. Such warm thoughts, all beyond that big swinging door. A turn of a knob, and the end was in reach.

But Rattup was far too pathetic to abandon in his current state. He whispered his wishes to Zephyr, “I’ll get my little notepad. Like I said, she can’t read worth a damn. We’ll write. That’s what people like us do when confronted by terrible things. We write. Please. Please.
Please
, don’t go.”

9.

Rattup sat on his couch in an uncomfortable askew position, leaning his weight forward, an obvious discomfort in his aging kneecaps, holding his index finger to his lips in the universal sign of “don’t speak or mother will hear us”. He groaned and signaled for Zephyr to take a seat beside him on the couch, at a closer proximity than was comfortable for Zephyr’s skittish nerves. Charles then opened a wide yellow notebook that he had withdrawn from a drawer on the side of his wicker-topped coffee table. After fiddling through a series of pages that featured what appeared to be letters (the aforementioned love letters?), he came to a blank page and began scribbling in it with a furious fugue:
She can’t read this. Something about spirits, or at least this particular one. She can’t read AT ALL, if you can imagine that. They can put out fires, smash windows, or set the whole house on fire. But read? No, that is surprisingly above them! If we use this notebook, we’ll be safe from her wrath and we’ll be free of her outbursts. It’s when we speak of things aloud that she becomes triggered, or so that has been the way of things historically. Do you understand? Please tell me you understand this necessity.

Rattup dropped his pen to the surface of the notepad, pushing it on the coffee table towards Zephyr. He looked down at the old crazy’s note, reading it carefully, twice for good measure, looking up at Rattup in disbelief at the words upon the page. He wrote his response with a baffled air about him. It seemed unreasonable that he was forced to manually jot his response.

Zephyr:
This is nuts! We’re passing notes in class like a couple of teenagers? So we don’t piss off some ghost? What the hell is wrong with you? I can’t believe I’m ACTUALLY WRITING THIS.

Rattup:
She’s a crazy bitch, my boy. Stop thinking about it with so much logic, it doesn’t suit you. I had similar problems when this began more than thirty years ago. Just go along with me here. Please.

Zephyr:
I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it. And I refuse to believe it.

He looked up at Rattup with a face that reiterated this shaky disbelief. He raised his eyebrows and gave a nonplussed shrug of his shoulders. He was calling
bullshit
, as was done in his favorite card game. The old man had suckered him in with parlor tricks and Zephyr was only sticking around at this point to feed the dinosaur’s cracked ego, if for nothing more than a laugh when he got home and told Jackie about it all. She would find these new developments particularly ticklish. Kiddish, even. She would label Zephyr a fool, undoubtedly.