The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

HAUNTING ME SOFTLY by H. Andrew Lynch

I’m trotting, about midnight. My dad is with me and he’s only nine years old. He asks me, “Can we get some ice cream?” I tell him it’s too late and too cold. Lying casually, I add that if he comes back tomorrow, around noon, sure, we can get some ice cream.

Between dad’s napless head and a pair of rugged denim pants predating Sears’ Toughskins by three decades is naked torso. He’s wet from an arc of hydrant water he ran through earlier today, thirty-eight years ago. His smile is simple and predominantly toothless; it speaks of a snapshot in history when mamas were legend and the even summer heat of Georgia was welcome cover for the riots and fires in nearby Atlanta.

We come to an intersection. Dad looks both ways (gran’ma taught him well), and it’s almost cute. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice he’s licking his lips. He wants to find a Good Humor truck so badly I can smell his excitement in the cold. Doesn’t he know that it’s too damned late?

At this uneasy hour, Washington is darker than I’ve seen it since my runaway days. Tracts of streetlamps are out or on their way. Aspirant of New York streets, nearby manholes exhale steam. I feel a lot like the city. Too late for Good Humor.

When we reach the other side of the street, I glance to my left, down between a gray corridor of dark, warm homes. Someone shuffles drunkenly toward me—toward us. Me. Farther down, a cab streaks through a red light. When it’s gone, I hear a terrific screech, then nothing.

“What was that?” dad asks, awed by the echo. I ignore him because I don’t think he really expects an answer. Since he appeared earlier this afternoon, all he’s done is ask questions. I don’t like questions. I’ve answered too many of them. They remind me of the interrogations I weathered as a teenager. Unspoken questions, questions asked with a look and with the crisp snap of recycled paper as the world news buried my father’s face, but not his disgust.

We reach Parliament Circle. A trio of homeless polar bears argue at the stone chess stand that pokes out of the concrete. The fountain is dry, the statue, frostbitten and bleak. About seven benches around from the chess players, a punk rocker I’ve seen before is curled beneath other people’s trash. I hope she’s alive in the morning. If she is, I might bring her a blanket. For tomorrow night. “You know who that is standing up there at the center of the fountain?” I ask, unable to conceal boredom. Dad squints as if the statue were a solar eclipse. He shakes his head. “Benjamin Banaker,” I say, as if anyone cares. “He’s the idiot architect responsible for making Washington, DC, one of the easiest cities to get lost in. I think he went crazy over the cliché, ‘circles within circles.’ ”

“Benj’min Banaker, we heard about him. He’s black, ain’t he?”

“Does it matter?”

“Miss Green says it do.”

“Who’s Miss Green?”

“She’s the mu-lat-to lady who helps the principal at my school.”

“Oh,” I say. I look down at the back of my hand. In the cold, it’s pale blue, but in the summer, when I tan, I almost pass for a purebreed. Flexing my fingers, I wonder how a black bigot ended up marrying a white woman possessed of three times his moral fiber.

We sit at the edge of the fountain. Except for the arguing chess players, the circle is silent. A crisp breeze picks up the ends of my dark “white-man’s” hair and carries it from one shoulder to the other. I flick my head to correct the problem, then sniffle; I may be getting a cold. Dad’s restless, banging the heels of his too-short legs against the fountain’s cold barrier. The motion produces no noise, but it annoys me. When I was this Georgia boy’s age, dad told me I should never let the silly things other people do annoy me, that they’d try, and that I should be better than they because the Simpson men have always been proud and unbothered. I was in the fourth grade. A fat girl with a permanent pimple on the flap of her left nostril used to stare at me on the playground during recess and play with her budding nipples. I ran home after school and told my mother. She told dad. He told me not to worry about what the girl was doing. I remember wondering if he gave his girlfriend speeches like that.

“See this?” dad says. He points to a thin scar that runs from the crook of his arm to his wrist. Most kids are ashamed of deformities. They hide them, inspect them when no one is around. Dad is proud of the raised worm that wriggles when he forms a fist. “I was climbin’ over a fence and I fell down. My arm got caught on the metal and scraped me from here—all the way to here.” I hold very still and stare at the scar, which is a lie, I now see, a catalyst for tall tales. Dad told me he got the scar when he was stationed in Cairo. He told me he got it in a street fight. He said I should have seen the other guy.

Winter is starting to annoy me. I’m not usually bothered by extreme cold, but tonight it presses against my face and makes my beard brittle. If I brush my hand against the coarse hairs, they’ll break. I know it. Dad scoots a little closer. My body is a board; it won’t respond to the boy’s offer of affection. It can’t. We have no common frame of reference, no history of touching. We’ve played ball and endured each other’s seasons of antipathy. But we’ve never had room for loving words or loving deeds. Winter is starting to annoy me.

“Do you know where you are?” I ask. Dad looks up at me, says, “I’m here wichoo.” He doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know that, as a nine year old, he’s been dead for thirty-eight years. He doesn’t know his adult self is about ten miles away, dreaming in a bed I’ve never seen in a house I couldn’t find because I’ve never been there, and that the man dreams of a boy from Georgia who’s lost yet content here at my side. “Are we s’posed to be someplace else?” “Not really,” I say. “This is as good a place as any, I guess.” He’s not really listening. He jumps up on the fountain’s edge and runs around it until he’s at my other side. Then he plops down and rests his chin in his palms.

“I think we should get going,” I say. I reach out and take dad’s hand. He slides off the fountain and skips beside me. I look down at him because I feel his tenure coming to a close. I ask: “Anything else you want to do before you leave?” “I ain’t going anywhere,” he says, then looks straight ahead; he knows something is not right about his being here. His little mind can’t encompass the idea of the haunt. He belongs somewhere else. He belongs in a Georgia existing only in my father’s dream. The others, when they come to me older than the nine-year-old, are more dangerous. They skirt an understanding of what they are about, as they seep into my awareness and stay with me until I can’t stand them any longer. But like the others, dad won’t face his fleeting moment in the present, where he doesn’t belong.

Dad’s seen enough, I think, because he’s moved away from logical questions about getting ice cream, and now asks silly, disturbing things like: “Have you ever seen how bad a bunch of white boys are to a black lady?” As with the ice cream, I say no. I know he’ll persist. He’s a wandering Jew; he’ll press his point all the way to the root. “I’ve seen what they can do,” he presses. “It’s like in a National Geographic, when you see tigers walking in circles around a dead moose.”

“I’ve never seen a moose,” I say. I’m walking faster. His little hand is tight in mine, slippery, but that’s because my palms are slick. His chin dips a little; he’s disappointed in me. It’s typical of us to head each other off at the crossroads: me, peeling away on fumes of shame because I’m not the son he wanted; he, broaching embarrassing subjects and then withdrawing behind motor-powered windows, eternally cool, tinted glass.

Dad stops dead. He’s small, bony, but he’s an anchor. I’m holding his hand so tightly I stumble backward and almost fall on him. He yanks his hand free. His chin starts to quiver. With a breathy timbre, he says, “I don’t wanna be wichoo anymore. Where’s ma?”

He’s a little big man now. He’d like me to believe he can handle anything. I know better. Children are pretty good at absorbing trauma, but if there’s one thing that’ll break them down every time, it’s the notion, the oppression, of being lost. I’ve seen it before, like a hint of madness. Lost kids… unravel.

“Where’s ma?” He’s real tough. I could tell him his mother was raped and killed twenty years ago by a group of black teenagers. But I’m not like that. I want only for him to go away, leave me alone. I want to unravel this little boy, but only because I can’t touch the man.

“You’re lost,” I say.

I have no tears left for these personal exorcisms. I do them all the time. I learn what I can from the loved ones who haunt me, yet still live, then I let them go. Giving up ghosts, and all that.

Anger. “I can’t be lost—I know you.”

My chin dips a little; I’m disappointed. In me. “No, dad,” I whisper. “You don’t know me at all.” I can see the first thread in dad’s round face. His eyes are big, tearless like mine, but behind them there’s not much of anything. It’s an emptiness I know very well. The thread is smoke, empty in its own way. It rises from his face, curls around his ears, his throat. I turn away before my belly turns to steel and I really start to hurt.

Dad’s more difficult than some of the others: Mom at ages fourteen and twenty-five; little Joey, who used to take baths with me before we knew “pee-pees” were more than stubs of flesh to be fondled playfully; Father Maddox, a surprisingly free young rebel compared to the puritan who starred in my adolescent nightmares; and Paulette, who still calls me once in a while, although she doesn’t know I’ve met her in almost every stage of her life. And have hated her for it.

Dad’s at my heels. Although he’s dissolving, he tugs the back of my shirt. His voice is a beggar’s. “Don’t leave me. I—I don’t want ma. I want you, ’cause you’re the only one I know, ’cause I don’t got ’ny friends, just the white kids who walk by and say I should carry a candle at night or I might get stepped on. Nobody says hello.”

I’m not a cruel person, but I pull away from him. It’s not difficult to do so; he’s losing form. Only his bleating remains, powerful and girlish. The world is cold as I rush up the avenue, but it can’t freeze the nagging. He’ll hang on until there’s nothing left to voice. His puny cry will mature. In fifteen years, it will accuse and hone in on vulnerable patches of another small boy’s failures. For now, though, because there’s a living man he’s too intangible to replace, the boy from 1950 will die, again.

Not that that should bother me. Dad’s still a phone call away, dreaming in a bed I’ve never seen, next to a woman who’s not ray mother.

Haunting me.