Read The Haunting of James Hastings Online
Authors: Christopher Ransom
Tags: #Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Suspense
The Haunting of James Hastings (6 page)
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I pressed the TALK button again. There was no dial tone. I pressed it twice, waited and tried the line again. It was flat, dead. I was frightened, and then angry as well as frightened. Angry for being such a coward. Ghost wouldn’t stand here like a little bitch. Ghost would march up there with a butcher knife and shred anyone who dared to trespass in his castle.
I went to the kitchen and yanked open the utensil drawer. I found a long meat fork with a thick black handle. I shoved the phone into my back pocket and walked to the stairs. I went up at a steady pace, determined not to slow down or panic. I made it to the landing and flipped on the hall light. I listened for any movement and heard nothing. I squeezed the meat fork handle and began my circuit of the halls, which formed a rectangle around the ballroom - a space smaller than it sounds and might once have been a library or large study of some sort, but which Stacey had decided would become the ballroom - at the house’s center.
The first longer leg of this rectangle, immediately off the stairs, was flanked by a linen closet, then the main bathroom, followed by another closet and finally the master bedroom at the end. I checked the bathroom and the closets, opening and closing the doors with delicate precision. None contained a person. I continued to the master bedroom and found the door closed. Had I left it open or closed? I could not remember, and it didn’t matter much because Olivia, the woman who cleaned the house every two weeks, might have shut it after her dusting or whatever she did in there nowadays. She could have left it open, too, and the fact was I had no way of knowing. The master bedroom was maybe halfway across the house from the living room. It might have been the bedroom phone that had been dropped, but the noise I heard had sounded closer than that, toward the center of the house.
I decided to check the other rooms first and finish my inspection in the master. I walked around the ballroom’s doors, into the second long hallway. I checked the three smaller bedrooms, the second half-bathroom and the wider closet where we stored the Christmas tree decorations and other boxed junk we rarely used.
All of the rooms were empty. I backtracked, passing the ballroom’s double doors again, and suddenly wanted to be in the master bedroom and done with this distraction. I twisted the knob and barged in, the meat fork at my side. I flipped the light on.
The bed was made. Everything was neat, ordered, just as I had left it. Olivia had kept it clean, ready for my return. It was like a hotel room, the sheets folded back, the pillows plumped. The walk-in closet harbored no trespasser.
On the nightstand was a square lamp with a clear glass base, the clock radio and the telephone. The handset was standing appropriately erect on the cradle. No one was here. No one had used the phone. No one was in the house. The
thunk
sound was just one of those random old house sounds.
thunk
sound was just one of those random old house sounds.
Unless the thing that made the random old house sound is in the ballroom. Go on, you big pussy.
No, I wasn’t going in there tonight. There wasn’t a phone in the ballroom, and this inspection was about the phone, the caller. Nothing more.
So, who had called me? And how did they manage to replay my voice? My voice, repeating things I said months ago, back when I spent a good portion of the evenings drunk and bawling and talking to myself so that I didn’t have to listen to her voice in my head - or worse, the vacuum of silence when she refused to talk to me? Had I used the phone then? Had I called someone in my misery? Could they have recorded me and played it back to taunt me? Who would do such a thing?
No one called me these days, except for Lucy. Everyone else had stopped calling months ago, when they realized I wasn’t going to leave Los Angeles until I was good and ready.
It’s better to leave him alone
, they said, though they couldn’t understand how I could stay in
that house
.
It’s better to leave him alone
, they said, though they couldn’t understand how I could stay in
that house
.
This house. This bedroom, our bedroom, the room I could no longer sleep in. I went to the dresser and opened a drawer. Stacey’s socks. Little balls of pink and yellow and white. And then her ‘winter’ socks, the plain athletic socks that used to bunch up in piles at her ankles as she padded around the house when January subjected us to fifty degree mornings. I closed the drawer. The next was packed tightly with what I had come to think of as house shirts, old t-shirts that began their life as mine, were adopted by Stacey, and eventually belonged to both of us. The kind of shirts you put on to paint a chair on the patio. I unrolled a black one featuring a cheesy airbrush-type painting of a nude woman standing on a tree limb in a mystical forest, her back to me as the full moon swelled yellow in a faery sky. Wolfmother, it said. One of Stacey’s favorite bands. I pressed it to my face and inhaled. It smelled like dust.
I dropped it and closed the drawer, opening another to the top right. Here was a collection of my underwear. I stared at them, trying to make sense of the order, the neat way they had been folded and stacked. Did a certain portion of women in the world fold boxers in thirds, sides in, and then in half, top to bottom, until they were a perfect square? I always thought Stacey wasted her time folding my underwear this way.
‘Just wad them into a ball and shove them into my dresser,’ I had told her on at least a dozen occasions. ‘I don’t care how they look, save yourself the trouble.’
And she would always frown at me as she continued folding, her movements growing more graceful and yet somehow robotic as if she were defying me by playing the role of laundry geisha. ‘It’s nicer this way, James,’ she would say.
That was another of her Stacey-isms I had forgotten about.
It’s nicer this way
.
.
Stace, why do you always put the same Otis Redding CD on when we have company over for dinner?
It’s nicer this way.
I would catch her using her special bottle of lemon polish on the wooden coffee table-trunk despite the fact that Olivia had sponge-cleaned it earlier that day. Why don’t you just tell Olivia to do that next time? And Stacey, my wife, my little imperfect, white-haired wife would double-wrap the cloth around her middle and pointer fingers and massage the oil into the dark knots and, almost beneath her breath, say, ‘It’s nicer this way.’ I made fun of her for the way she misted the bedspread with her pouch of jasmine water right before we crawled in to have the sex (that one was a James-ism, ‘the sex’), treating our ordinary, Crate & Barrel bedroom like some boudoir, and she would lift her chin and look away from me and say, ‘It’s nicer this way.’
It’s nicer this way.
I would catch her using her special bottle of lemon polish on the wooden coffee table-trunk despite the fact that Olivia had sponge-cleaned it earlier that day. Why don’t you just tell Olivia to do that next time? And Stacey, my wife, my little imperfect, white-haired wife would double-wrap the cloth around her middle and pointer fingers and massage the oil into the dark knots and, almost beneath her breath, say, ‘It’s nicer this way.’ I made fun of her for the way she misted the bedspread with her pouch of jasmine water right before we crawled in to have the sex (that one was a James-ism, ‘the sex’), treating our ordinary, Crate & Barrel bedroom like some boudoir, and she would lift her chin and look away from me and say, ‘It’s nicer this way.’
I realized that I was holding a pair of my boxer shorts, the orange paisley one that only days ago I had worn and left in the plastic basket that served as my downstairs hamper, and I realized that I was crying again. Somehow, in the past three days, they had made the trek from the laundry room to this dresser, where they were folded into thirds, then in half, a perfect square. That was some kind of magic, a trick that broke my heart even as I began to shake with fear.
She had been right. Always.
It was nicer this way.
5
Saturday I bought a gun.
Actually, I didn’t buy it. My neighbor, Hermes, gave it to me. He worked out of his Navigator at the end of the block, on the corner in front of his green shingle. The house was in his mother’s name, but it belonged to Hermes. A man named Jaysun kept an office with a view out the third-story turret, where he could spot po-po coming from six blocks in any direction. The rest of the crew usually clustered in a circle, dealing, texting, chilling, waiting for the action, soaking up the heat and arguing about sports.
Before our driveway was repaved and the garage rebuilt, Stacey and I had to park on the street. This meant that when we came home from late dinners or clubs, back when we still went out on Sunset and pretended we were somebody, we often had to park two or three blocks from our front door. We had noticed Hermes and his crew, and the cars that slowed, the handshakes through the window before they sped off.
‘Do you think they’re dealing?’ Stacey had asked.
‘They’re not waiting for the school bell to ring,’ I answered.
We were two frightened white kids from Tulsa, progressive but still essentially Middle American. But the idea of crossing the street, in our own neighborhood, to avoid threading our way through a pack of six black men blocking the sidewalk, seemed wrong. The first time we met them, it was after midnight and the block was dead silent. Dew on the lawns, a gritty mist in the air. When we were ten feet away, I cleared my throat.
‘Hey, guys, how’s the night?’
‘What up, dawg,’ one of them said very slowly, exhaling a raft of blunt smoke over our heads.
‘Late dinner, drinks,’ I said as we stopped and joined them. ‘We’re in the white house up on the left. Just moved in a few months ago.’
‘I’m Stacey, this is my husband James,’ Stacey cut in. ‘You guys should come by some time for a cocktail tour. We’re still remodeling but you’re welcome anytime.’
I tried to mask my alarm at my wife’s invitation.
‘Right on,’ the tallest one said, his eyes going up and down Stacey’s one-piece Adidas dress. He was built like an NFL linebacker and handsome enough to make a black dress shirt and track pants look formal. He had long dreads and his eyes were the color of a dragon’s. ‘Hermes,’ he said, offering me the other blunt making the rounds.
‘I’m good,’ I said. ‘But thank you.’
Stacey stepped up, hit it and quit it. Hermes grinned in approval, first at her, then at me. That was my girl. Neither of us liked to smoke pot. We were bar kids, kept to the sauce. Later Stacey discovered pills, for different reasons. But leave it to my wife to go the extra mile in order to bond with our neighbors. To her, this small act was no different from the yellow chocolate cake she had baked and delivered to the Gomez’s two weeks earlier. It was the right thing to do.
‘Yo, Herm,’ a man leaning against the Navi said. ‘Dis nigga look like Ghost.’
‘I get that a lot,’ I said. I did not feel like explaining my job just then, though that would prove useful later. The black community respected Ghost, and some of that respect naturally spilled over to me, even after they learned I was his
fugazi
.
fugazi
.
‘You the ones with that howlin’ diggy?’ one of the others said. He was short and his Lakers jersey fell to his knees.
‘That’s Jaysun,’ Hermes said
‘Henry is Stacey’s beagle,’ I said.
‘Rawr-ooo rawr-ooo!’ Jaysun said, and we all laughed.
Hermes and Jaysun came by a few weeks later and had a beer on our porch, filling us in on some of the local flavor. I confessed my role as Ghost’s untalented twin and hooked them up with some tenth-row tickets to a show at the Hollywood Bowl. It was all good. No one - from within our sketchy neighborhood or trolling from another part of the city - ever fucked with our house or the car. This was something, considering I had just bought Stacey a loaded S5, the down payment for which came from that skit Ghost and I did on MTV. The one where it appeared as though Ghost was performing an autopsy on himself, before returning from Heaven with a machete to carve up those who dared to try and take his place. The skit was later licensed by one of the ‘edgy’ soda companies, became a hit in Japan. Hastings gets a bonus.
So when I decided I needed a gun - just for some added security - there was no question of who I would turn to. I just took a short walk down to the corner and waited by the hydrant, chinning in his direction. Hermes’s driver, a grinning man who weighed at least three hundred pounds and went by Salaucey or just Sal, leaned out the window and waved me forward.
I stepped up to the window. We made small talk for a minute. Then they recognized the look on my face.
Leaning across the Navi’s console, Hermes said, ‘Whatcha need, G?’
I made my request. Hermes didn’t ask why and refused to accept my four hundred dollars.
‘You take good care of this block, Hastings. Shit, my house gone up sixty K, all the home improvement you done.’
‘You been looking at real estate comps?’ I said. ‘You can’t move out on me, Herm. Not now.’
‘Nah, man. I ain’t goin’ nowhere. This here my home. But I talk to the brokers same as everybody else. I know what I’m holdin’.’
‘So, what do I do now?’
‘Now you go home and chill. Give it an hour, then check your recycle bin. Come see me you run into any pro’lems.’
‘My recycling bin?’
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