The ghost was crying. It was the 8-track’s fault.
See, Patrick was driving to Sheila O’Connor’s Halloween party–which was going to rock–so he put on some Kiss to get himself in the spirit. You know, tonight was it: he was finally going to tell Sheila how he felt. Sheila, who had been his best friend since the first grade, who had beaten up Samantha Cummins in the sixth grade when she had made fun of his mom for walking funny, when really she had MS and Sheila was the only one who knew. Sheila, who he pretended to be high with freshman year of high school–in truth, he didn’t know how to inhale and was too embarrassed to admit that fact, so he just blew out that heavy, stinking smoke as slow as possible and laughed at everything, even when Sheila started talking about how her dad might have been better off if he would have just died in Vietnam. Tonight, man, tonight was the night. He was going to tell her everything. He’d made a list and kept it in his head and it went something like: Sheila, you make me feel lightheaded. Your hair is tops, the way it’s so long. And even though you’re kind of fat and even though you laughed that time you saw my dong at Reggie’s pool party last year, I think you’re wicked. I think you’re so incredibly wicked.
But as Patrick’s Camaro weaved slowly through the half-lit streets of Downer’s Grove, Paul Stanley’s voice began to unwind in high-pitched trills. “King of the Nighttime World” was ruined by the shit eight-track player that stuck out almost an entire inch from the console, the one his older brother helped him install and swore without making eye contact that the thing wasn’t stolen. It wouldn’t stand. He dug for the flathead screwdriver he kept in the glovebox and jammed it into the tape deck, working it around in broken circles until the tape popped out and landed on the floorboard. When he reached down for it, the Camaro jumped like he’d hit something and Patrick slammed on the brakes, skidding to a stop beneath a flickering streetlight.
He killed the ignition but left the lights on, the bells from the cab sailing on the air like rattling chains. This October was cold. A breeze slithered into the sleeves of his spandex and gave him the chills. He was dressed as Ace Frehley, the Spaceman. His mom had done the makeup. His dad had started drinking at the kitchen table.
Walking toward the front of the car, he prepared himself to see a raccoon or a mailbox snapped from a stake, a bunch of mail scattered beneath the undercarriage. But when he knelt down to find out, all he saw was this dented pumpkin-pail, candies spilled out all over the asphalt. He shot up and ran to the back of the Camaro, thinking mostly: Fuck-dicks, I’ve killed a kid, fuck-shit. When he got there, he saw a little ghost lying in the street behind the car, its sheet all red in the glow of brake lights.
So he got down next to it, actually laid down in the road with it, this ghost. He started rubbing its head, checking its breathing by pressing his cheek against the ghost’s scratchy bedsheet, feeling it blow up and down, saying little things like it’s going to be all right, ghost. It’s going to be all right. Of all the things he could have thought as he reached down to lift the sheet off this ghost, like prisons and what his thin, do-nothing mustache might mean inside one of them, he thought about some of the stories Sheila’s dad had told about the war. He always ended them with the phrase hell-on-earth. And Patrick would sit there and listen, bearing the stories of napalm and bayonets and friends choking on their own blood, not telling him he felt squeamish at the sight of blood, had refused to dissect a sheep’s heart in biology class Sophomore year, because, well, he knew Sheila was at the top of the O’Connor’s staircase doing something to her hair, and in any second she’d be in his car and they’d drive to the North High parking lot and complain in the dark about how much they hate it here.
The ghost coughed and Patrick, feeling scared and stupid, scooped it up and carried it to the passenger seat. He laid him down and buckled him in and then started searching the ground for all the ghost’s candy. Bottle Caps, Razzles, Tootsie Rolls and Bazooka gum. It must have taken him like ten minutes to get it all in the pail. He got back in the car and sped out of the neighborhood, wondering what he could possibly do next.
Halfway to Sheila’s house, the ghost sat up and looked out the window. It watched a group of trick-or-treaters shuffle from house to house. A kid in a blue polo shirt wore a rubber Chewbacca mask. His pal C-3PO tried his best to walk like a robot.
At Sheila’s there was a huddle of monsters all laughing and smoking in the porch light. Patrick told the ghost to wait in the car. Inside, the house was a wreck. There were guys dressed as Leatherface and Lord Summerisle, cackling disco queens and Frankensteins. Wally LaComb was there, dressed as Jesus. He had a tiny wooden cross taped to his back and Kool Aid blood beneath some taped up sticks he had wrapped around his head. He tried to hand Patrick a joint.
“Come on man,” he said. “The power of Christ compels you.”
Patrick shook his head and made his way through the den, heavy with weed, and out to the backyard. Sheila, done up as Carrie, stood by the pool in her older sister’s prom dress. The thing was ruined with blood. She had a cigarette and a can of Old Style in the same hand. Patrick felt weak. The pool was lit up red and steamed in the cold.
Patrick ran up to her, sweating and nervous.
“I’ve got something to show you,” he said. “It is of serious importance.”
“Are you drunk?” Sheila asked.
He grabbed her arm. Looking at his eyes, she knew something was up.
Sheila turned to Cassandra and Sara, who’d been standing next her shivering, trying their best to look like the foxiest dead Downer’s Grove North High cheerleaders to have ever existed. “Make sure these douche bags don’t burn the house down,” she said, pointing to Wally and his fellowship of Christ, passing around the joint like sacrament in the O’Connor’s formal living room.
They tumbled across the front lawn toward Patrick’s Camaro.
“You’re acting really weird.”
Just look, he seemed to say, extending his arm to the passenger seat of the Camaro.
Sheila shook her head and asked, What? with her eyes.
“I hit a ghost,” Patrick said, out of breath. “With my car.”
But the Camaro was empty. There was no sheet, no candy, no fog on the window. Just a lonely 8-track of Destroyer lying on the floorboard, a peeling sticker of the hottest band in the world locking arms and dancing.
“A ghost. Right.” Sheila rolled her eyes. “Very funny.”
“But–” Patrick had nothing.
“Come inside, man,” Sheila said, her face glowing, even under all the dried blood. “Cassandra totally wants your jock. She showed me this poem she wrote–”
“Sheila.” Patrick felt sick. His stomach was trying to bottleneck up his throat. The ghost, he thought. I hit the ghost.
“She loves you, dude,” she said. “She wants it. Bad.” Sheila exhaled a whirl of smoke as she said Bad, and Patrick thought it had looked like something that would have been epic at the beginning of a music video, the way her soft lips pursed to make the B sound and how you could just barely see her tongue flatten against her teeth. When she did shit like this he could feel it in the pads of his feet, like he was about to fall off a roof, like he’d found something super important. But this wasn’t a music video. It was just some party in a nowhere town where the girl he loved just couldn’t see it.
He looked back to the Camaro.
“Really, man. You’re freaking me out.” She hunched her shoulders and did this little bounce thing. “Come inside.”
So Patrick went into the party and drank beside the pool. People complimented his Ace Frehley costume, said he’d done The Spaceman proud. When “Shock Me” came on over the radio, he stood on the diving board and air-guitared Ace’s solo, and Sheila laughed and looked at him like something might happen. But by the end of the night he was too drunk for Cassandra or Sheila.
He woke up the next morning in the backseat of his Camaro, the windshield studded with rain. His makeup was all over his hands and seat in blue and silver clumps. The hangover veins on his temples were in full effect. He was the biggest loser he knew and he said this out loud to himself as he climbed over to the driver’s seat. “Sweet Pain” at a low volume seemed the perfect soundtrack for the drive home. As Patrick reached down to the floorboards for the 8-track, his fingers edged against something else: an unopened box of child-size Bottle Caps, the cartoon cap leering up at him, judging him.
Ryan Mattern holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from California State University, San Bernardino and M.A. in English from the University of California, Davis. He is the recipient of the Felix Valdez Award for Short Fiction. His work has been published in Ghost Town, THE2NDHAND, Poetry Quarterly, and The Red Wheelbarrow, among others. He currently serves in the United States Army.
