Hide and Seek

"Ben and Mary's ghosts."

"Could be."

"You sound like you've got more."

"I do. Did you know they were imbeciles?"

"You mean crazy?"

"No. Imbeciles. It's a pretty ugly story, actually. It seems that

when the bank called in that mortgage money they had a town meeting

about it. See, all Ben knew was farming, and he was pretty bad at

that. But there was no possibility of either of them doing anything

else for a living. So somebody came up with the bright idea of having

the town pay off the mortgage. It was only a little over a thousand.

And they figured it would cost them a whole lot more than that just in

bookkeeping and whatnot to keep them on the dole for thirty, maybe

forty, years than it would to pay off and let them keep the place.

"But the upshot was that somebody got cheap about it, I guess, so the

proposal was turned down. And it looked like Dead River was going into

the social welfare business for a while. Very exciting. But then, of

course, Ben and Mary disappeared and saved everybody the trouble."

"Imbeciles, huh?"

"Total morons. Ben couldn't read and couldn't write. He could handle

a plow and Mary could wring a chicken's neck and that was about the

whole of it. Now, where do you go if you're that stupid? That's the

next question. How do you manage disappearing?"

"You could die."

"That would be the easy way, yes."

"Or just wander off. A county or two down the line."

"Or you could do what my boss did and open a garage."

"You could do that."

He pushed the empty glass away from him and his smile was sly, a little

boozy. His hands waved apparitions in the space around us.

"Or maybe you just go back into the caves," he said. "And forget about

us entirely. Maybe you live off fish and weeds and spend your days

listening to the gulls and the wind off the sea, and you don't come

out, not ever."

"Jesus, Rafferty."