Reflections in Black

I am participating in the Writing Contest: Tell Your Ghost Story!

Based on a true story.

“I’m coming back to haunt people when I die,” Jim said with a grim chuckle.

Maintaining a speed twenty-five miles an hour over the limit, knuckles white on the wheel, his expression was hardened into something I couldn’t decipher. Jim ignored the swaying of his Datsun pickup that Sunday afternoon, April 26, 1987. Driving was the last thing on his mind.

A husky man with a round, youthful face, straight bright blond hair, Jim, at the age of 32, was routinely carded for alcohol. I didn’t see the humor in his statement knowing how his mischievous sense of humor could turn caustic when depressed. Like now.

He lived an active life, from football, to stock car racing, to serving in Viet Nam. Drafted into his first tour, he volunteered for his second.

Most of our adventures centered around the bar scene and although we avoided altercations with bouncers and customers, there were times we came close. Such as the night he pinched a waitress’ butt after several other women turned down his requests to dance.

“What’d you do that for?” I said.

“What was she going to do,” he said, “drop her tray of drinks and slap me?”

We managed to escape without paying our tab.

The cowboy bar we frequented was prone to fights and the moment one broke out, Jim retrieved the drinks from the combatants’ tables, saying, “They weren’t going to finish them.” He may have been able to drink from strangers’ glasses but I refused.

We didn’t frequent strip clubs but there was one memorable incident that ended with the stripper being fired, her boyfriend thrown out, and the bartender giving us a free pitcher of beer for our troubles.

Jim and I met a few years earlier at college and became best friends. Judy, his wife, had honey-blond, Shirley Temple curls and a beautiful Hungarian accent. I met her in the karate club as a sparring partner, and it was through me that they met. Married by a Justice of the Peace, I recall there being a question as to whether Jim’s divorce from his first wife had been finalized.

Ours was an odd threesome as I spent nearly as much time with Judy as with Jim. Judy and I maintained a tenuously platonic relationship with neither acting on the suggestive flirting or opportunistic situations, and he regarded our relationship without so much as a hint of jealousy even though he had been caught in a one-night stand himself.

By the time April 1987 rolled around, I was living in Utah, Jim employed as a math tutor and blackjack dealer in Nevada, and Judy working as a counselor in Idaho. Jim spent weekends in Idaho visiting her, and had called me the previous week with the grim news.

“Judy’s dead.”

“What?” I said stupidly, hoping it was another one of his prank calls.

“It happened Sunday night after I came back to Nevada. Judy told a friend she was committing suicide and then returned some books she had borrowed from a professor. The police had a watch out for her and even pulled her over, but she talked her way out of being taken in. They found her half-an-hour later parked on the side of the Interstate. Dead.”

“I had to see for myself,” he continued, “so I drove back and told them I needed to identify the body. They had done an autopsy and cut her open, and there was some blood on her cheek. I’m going back next weekend to pick up my stuff. Go with me?”

Of course, I agreed.

Oddly enough, I remember nothing of that weekend other than arriving at Judy’s apartment Saturday morning April 25, and our wild drive back to Utah Sunday afternoon April 26.

The first thing we noticed upon arriving at Judy’s apartment Saturday morning was that their bikes had been stolen, which put Jim in a foul mood. Bikes were forgotten the moment he stepped into her apartment. I pushed my way around him. It held the empty silence of death.

“Sonofabitch. See those chairs?” He said pointing at two rocking chairs setting side-by-side. The chair next to the window had a colorfully crocheted Afghan draped over the back, and I agreed to the obvious.

“That was her favorite chair. She always sat in it, reading, studying, or just listening to the record player and looking out the window. When I came back last week, I was pissed and kicked it across the room and busted one of the rockers. It should be lying over there next to the bookcase.”

“Maybe someone picked it up, like the landlord?”

“Seriously? And fixed it? And put it back where it belonged?”

He stared at the chair for long moments then said, “There’s a broken lantern behind the baker’s rack. Hopefully the oil didn’t soak into the carpet.”

Jim left to retrieve a garbage can and I reached behind the rack and retrieved the lantern, still full of oil and not so much as a hairline fracture.

“There’s nothing to clean up,” I said, handing it to him.

Jim cursed softly. With trembling hands, he took it from me and gently set it on the rack next to its mate.

“I bought Judy this set for Christmas. She always wanted hurricane lamps. I threw it against the wall and busted the chimney. Hell, there were pieces of glass all over the floor and the lamp was cracked.”

“Just like the chair,” I said quietly, inspecting the telltale gouge in the wall.

“Judy came back,” Jim said, more to himself than me.

I followed him into the kitchen where a three-LP boxed set of Handel’s Messiah lay on the counter next to a knife and dinner plate smeared with dried ketchup.

“She was listening to the Messiah when she did it,” he said in a wavering voice. “The record player was still running when I got here.”

Putting the plate and knife in the sink, he continued, “She used ketchup to help down the pills. Why the hell would she do something like this now? We were planning on moving to Las Vegas and starting a family for Chrissake! She was going to work in the hospital psych ward and I had an job offer for pit boss. She always wanted a house with a white picket fence.”

By August, Jim had replaced Judy not with a girlfriend, as Nicole considered herself, but a bed partner. Regardless, weekends were particularly difficult since those were the times he had spent with Judy. Seeking an outlet to his grief, Jim registered for Monday morning hang gliding lessons in Utah and weekends were now spent with me, hanging out and frequenting the bars.

“I saw Judy a couple of nights ago,” he said one Saturday afternoon. “She woke me up in the middle of the night and was standing at the foot of the bed. It wasn’t no damn dream either. I was just as awake as I am right now and she was as real as you are. We talked for a long time, about everything. She said it was so beautiful where she was that she wanted me to come with her.”

“You’ll get there soon enough and she’s not going anywhere. Don’t push it if you know what I mean.”

“You don’t know how goddamn hard this is! You have no idea!”

“You’re right, I don’t.”

That Monday morning was the last time I saw Jim. Per our routine, we bought coffee and donuts at a nearby convenience store, then I drove to work and he to hang glider lessons.

“I’m not coming next weekend,” Jim called to tell me several days later. “I crashed and bruised the shit out of myself. You should have seen everyone scattered like a bunch of goddamn cockroaches when my glider swung around and I came down at them. Hell, their eyes were bigger than mine.”

That was our last laugh together. The following week, Nicole phoned with news that Jim had committed suicide.

“The stupid son-of-a-bitch,” she said. “After he got off work last night, he gambled away every penny he had, then went home and put a gun to his head. And of course, it was me who found him. It was my daughter’s birthday and we were going to make her a cake, goddamn him!”

“Didn’t anyone hear it?”

“Nobody thought it was a gun shot. He had a .32 and a .38 and tried giving them to me a couple of times, but why would I want guns when I have two little kids? I think he was afraid and wanted to get rid of them.”

“I wish he would have said something to me. I’ll come down next weekend. He had some things of mine I’d like back.”

“You’re too late. Somebody notified his ex-wife and she showed up first thing this morning and cleaned out his apartment. It’s totally empty.”

Two weeks to the day of Jim’s suicide, he, or something, was waiting for me when I returned home from work. It was as though I had stepped through some invisible wall - the unsettling sense of being watched and the oppressiveness, like a sudden drop in air pressure.

I occupied the main upstairs apartment of a century-old mansion that had been converted into a five-Plex, owned by a personable slum lord. Mounting the steps two at a time, my first thought was that I’d find my yellow lab, Sabokka, injured or worse. Instead, he paced from one end of the living room to the other. Agitated, hackles forming a sharp ridge down his back, he regarded the living room couch with the same angst as the snakes we occasionally encountered while hiking.

The same couch that had served as Jim’s bed during his visits.

Sabokka returned to normal during our evening walk but once we started up the stairs, his hackles raised and his eyes locked on the landing above us. Had I somewhere else to stay, I would have done so without question, but there was no telling whether the presence would have followed or remained in the apartment waiting for my return. Having found me, it wasn’t something from which I could run or hide.

An uneasy evening followed, with Sabokka watched things that couldn’t be seen and listened to noises that couldn’t be heard. At times he startled as if being touched. As with his hackles, the hair prickled on the back of my neck and the constant feathery touch of a chill ran down my arms and back. Relieving it with a hot shower was out of the question.

As best I could tell from Sabokka’s actions, the presence remained in the living room when I finally went to bed. Moments after I turned off the lamp, Sabokka leapt to his feet and positioned himself between me and the open doorway, legs splayed defensively and his throat rumbling deep and loud. At the age of three, this was the first time I heard him growl.

I flicked the light back on expecting to some horror to filling the doorway but saw only the hallway wall, half-lit from the city lights shining through curtainless windows. A sharp creak of kitchen floorboards jolted me and Sabokka flinched.

I had had enough.

“You cannot stay here!” I demanded. “You have to move on. There is nothing for you here, do you understand? Your time here is over and you need to leave!”

Movement in the living room.

“If Judy came to you, then you need to go to her! Leave!”

I heard a heavy rustle. Sabokka did as well, and backed up a step.

“You are dead, do you understand? You need to leave!”

A tense standoff lasted for long moments and I could feel insistence in the outer rooms. Then it was gone.

Sabokka, trembling, cautiously inspected the doorway. Convinced all was well, he boldly patrolled the rest of the apartment while I remained in bed listening to the padding of his feet, ready to leap to his defense albeit unwillingly. Thankfully there was no need and he returned with his tail wagging in victory. Then curling up at the foot of the bed, he promptly fell asleep.

The presence had felt like Jim and I often wondered why he returned. And why he had left so willingly. Perhaps he came as warning, maybe a final goodbye, or, as he proclaimed months before, the joy of haunting. Regardless, the time may come when I learn the truth. Until then, the door I closed on my friends will remain shut.

And locked.