Tonight Jack would talk to the ghost. He took to the street. The warm wind is blowing on his face. Splash—pound—Nikes scrape the edge of a curb. Whoa that was close. He lets his mind wander down into his feet. His mind is splash-pound.
Running at night made him feel like a character in a black and white movie. Especially, when the headlights lit him up. Like he was on the silver screen. A swift street pounding shadow—getting farther from home. Red then green shiny streets reflecting in the stoplight, then the night pauses on yellow. Steam coming up from the sewer grates. A hungry rat comes up for air.
Jack thinks, better hurry the rain’s coming again, then—so what if it does… His course takes him toward the warehouses and factories. A deeper thickening of pollution—in a way it’s comforting.
The blue bus light winks on a faulty circuit on Edsall Avenue, across from a defunct arcade. A gigantic purple and green centipede sign smiles and slithers across the roof with a splintered hole—maybe from a shotgun.
Would Jack see the ghost? Like he has been seeing him for the last five nights. Jack thinks about probabilities and “A Coin Flip” study goes through his mind. Will it be heads again for an even six nights straight? Jack works in statistics. He is an insurance actuary just like his deceased father was before him.
His chest tightens. The blue flickering light is approaching. A mammoth is coming. Air rushing into the brake cylinders—Tsss…Red lights flash and a door clanks open. The city bus stays and seems to take a deep breath. Tsss…It trundles away like a sad giant, toiling endlessly, thanklessly. Jack smells diesel fumes and sees stark white faces lit up—going to some drudgery or leaving one.
A familiar figure with rounded shoulders is sitting alone under the flashing blue light. The color fades. Rain drops like black ink hit the halo of a streetlight. The idea of a black and white movie comes again, so in this winding-down time, impossibilities and probabilities merge casting shadows over reality.
Jack’s dead father is sitting there. Jack feels a sharp pain in his upper back. He thinks he might suffer a heart attack. Jack, the insurance actuary, quickly calculates the odds of dying: 41, male, running in the urban darkness, low traffic, high crime, light supper, slip and fall rain, one daily bowel movement (Metamucil), blood pressure (elevated, Zestril), family health—fair—all this going through his head faster than an IBM.
Sitting in the hard flickering light on a bench, Jack’s dead father waits to catch the Night Owl bus like he always had, escaping his insurance actuary tables and spreadsheets. He is still a workaholic, even in death.
Jack’s plan of speaking to the ghost was harder than he thought, as he slowed up, more breathless from apprehension than running, fear crept into him like an ice sickle dripping down his neck, maybe that was the rain. The menacing urban silence is broken by a distant screaming siren—that’s better. It’s comforting, like the pollution. Some violence is taking place or a car accident. Jack calculates the odds of death by murder. A US Census table of city demographics flashes through his mind. A dog is barking and more join in like they too, are hearing death.
The apparition wore the same clothes they buried him in. A black suit, somewhat undertaker creepy once it was on him and a little baggy. His sandy hair incorrectly parted on the left side. A little too much white base on his cheeks, making his lips look too red and lively like a hood in a “Great Gatsby” gin joint. Then the color bleeds out of the lips and they are white. The rain stops and the night goes back on pause.
Jack looks down at the neon green swoops of his Nikes. He straightens his yellow Adidas shorts, and fluorescent green T-shirt with the silhouette of a runner. His reflective wristbands are dripping sweat and raindrops. He steps forward within his father’s graveyard shadow.
All the color bleeds out of Jack’s bright clothes that are picked to keep him from becoming roadkill—even his tan is gone. Jack studies the black hairs on his white arm seeing a dark vein standing out running under his wrist band. The damp shirt and his sweat catches an icy breeze. As if the open bus stop shelter of glass and steel is air-conditioned. Goosebumps rise on his arms. If he had hackles, they would be standing. Jack steps into the bus shelter.
People at bus stops don’t always want conversation, especially at night, and from lunatics with wild supernatural ideas. All they want is a safe bus ride home in their lumbering giant to whatever or whomever waited for them. A slab of cold pizza and a slice of TV. Jack thought, why am I getting twisted? He is a ghost.
“Hello,” Jack studies the man. Maybe he wasn’t his father?
“Hello,” The man has a pleasant look on his face, and Jack realizes the stranger looks younger than his deceased father—younger than Jack is now. How could Jack think this man was his father?
A clunky musician’s case sat by the man’s feet. He looks at Jack and his eyes are his father’s. They are deep sad wells of a dawning failure, and the circles are just starting. “Are you going to Kalamazoo?” He smiles the same crooked smile as his father’s. Showing the familiar slight gap in his teeth.
“What?” Jack’s chest gets tight again. How many times had his father said that when Jack was a kid on his bike or skateboard? He swallows hard, and automatically says, “Nah, I’m takin’ the number seven to Cleveland.” Jack almost adds, Dad.
The man smiles. This is the correct response to an inside joke and he whistles a sad tune. Jack heard it before, hard to place, something to do with summers long ago. It might be, “Danny Boy,” Jack hums along. “The pipes the pipes are calling…” A sadness overtakes him and loosens some inner wall, and suddenly he thinks he might cry.
The man crosses his legs, feels in his coat pocket, and Jack knew a stick of Wrigley’s spearmint gum would be presented. “Like a stick of gum?”
“No, thanks.” Jack says wiping at his eyes like it was the rain. He would have taken it, but gum from a ghost in funeral clothes didn’t appeal. Then he thought, no this is ridiculous. He is just some lonely guy commuting home after another long day of drudgery in the cubicle, figuring out insurance actuary tables.
Jack realizes he has named his father’s past profession. A spooky, cold job that his father delighted in doing, Saying odd things at the dinner table, about being a .03 chance one of them would choke to death on chicken, but a .05 chance on steak. Jack has followed in his father’s footsteps. Working at the insurance company in a long line of desks, much like a famous picture of the writer Franz Kafka, except Jack has a bright computer screen. After tonight Jack will start calculating the odds of people returning from the grave.
Jack saw a Sears price tag dangling from his father’s left cuff. Fright cuts through Jack in a bright stomach dropping realization. Jack bought that suit. His mother pulled it off the rack arguing with Jack about the color, six months ago. Jack wanted a blue suit. Even though the light is poor and flickering Jack notices, the man isn’t wearing the silver wedding band. Jack could see it was not there when he offered the gum. Did the undertaker steal it? That damn ghoul.
“What kind of instrument do you play?” Even though Jack knew because his father always played a trumpet out in the garage. Where Jack’s mother exiled him, and then yelled in her best nagging voice, Come on Johnny it’s late… The neighbors are gonna call the cops, again!
“Trumpet.” says Jack’s father, the ghost. Jack examines the case. It’s shiny. The one in the garage was beat up with scarred stickers slapped on to it from places like Wabash, Lansing, Bloomington, and, of course, Kalamazoo. He hopes his mother hasn’t dumped it at Goodwill. “Ahem,” he clears his throat. “Would you like to hear me play?” A ghastly white tongue wets his lips.
This reminds Jack of having morning coffee with his wife, writing his little stories, as she Face-booked. The same eagerness in his voice, “Ahem,” clearing his throat, “Would you like to hear a quick story? It’s just a thousand words.” She declined most of the time, saying she couldn’t focus on a story, too early, or not enough coffee or… etc. When she did. Jack used different voices to make his convoluted tales sound better. Like lowering his voice for the corrupt copper mine official, raising it for the glad-handing Girl Scout…
The ghost (if he was a ghost) opens the case. The trumpet catches the streetlight in a magical golden glint… then the color drifts away like smoke, and it is dull and dented, almost bone white. Something to wake the dead for revelry. “I’m going to play some Chet Baker in E-flat.”
His father, in his funeral suit from Sears, at the bus stop raises the trumpet. Something biblical in the motion like a priest and a ritual. All the eagerness in his eyes, white stiff lips press the trumpet’s mouthpiece. Funeral rouge cheeks expands. Jack hopes the music from the other side will be blissful—smooth—like Miles Davis or Charley “Bird” Parker. The heroes of the blues and jazz, his father chased his entire uneventful life.
The horn-blower plows through the notes, honking his way up the scale, screeching and squelching off key and so unearthly loud that Jack starts back peddling, and runs from the terrible racket. His Nike’s slapping the wet pavement! The chaotic-cacophony, now mixed with all the neighborhood dogs howling. Then it stops. A voice calls, “Slow down Jack! You have a .069 chance of dying of a heart attack at age 41, when running at 13 miles per hour. Watch out for the airplane!”
Jack hears funeral taps, and he looks back and sees something black rising from the bus stop’s blue oasis of light, like haunted, angry failure.
The next night the stars are shining and swirling in the pollution like Van Gogh’s Starry Night… Jack’s feet are not pounding the gutters. They are resting on his La-Z-Boy chair’s footboard with the colored afghan on his legs like an old man, writing the story of his father. The Ghost. “Ahem… Judy.”
Judy gives him a wary look. “What?”
“Would you like to hear a story about my father?”
She refuses to look him in the eye, shifting in her matching green La-Z-Boy, looking back at her phone. A kangaroo is bouncing and boxing at a barking dog. “Nah.”
Jack is disappointed and slams his laptop shut. He thinks of the last words the ghost spoke to him. Watch out for the airplane! He stares at Judy who is smiling, then she chuckles at the kangaroo and dog fighting. Jack frowns. “You know just sitting there… You have a .0086 chance of a 747 crashing and blowing you to hell.”
She looks up from her phone. Judy is very hurt, she yells, “So do you!”
Jack’s on the wet street. His Nike’s are splash-pound, splash-pound, splash-pound. He’s taking an early morning business flight to Detroit. There is a .0066 chance… He squashes the thought with a sprinting burst and strides past the empty bus stop on Edsall Street.
The sun is shining gloriously at Midway Airport in Chicago. Once they are in the air, the sky goes from light blue to dark blue, then black. The cabin lights turn on like it’s nighttime. A storm blows down off of Lake Michigan. The old timers would call it a “Heller.” Twenty-foot waves are tossing ships like toys. The plane rumbles under his seat, sheet metal is straining in the walls, heads of hair shake in a sort of blurry unison. They are rushing higher and higher like they are riding a roller coaster that is climbing and climbing almost straight up, for a vertical plunge.
A woman sitting next to Jack smiles and says, “Ooh, golly.” She genuflects with red fingernails and grips the armrest. “I’m Ann.” She has a Wisconsin accent and laughs, “I’m from Oshkosh, B’gosh.”
Everything smooths out, and there is a loud cheer! The black sky is tinted with an ominous yellow like it has contracted malaria. Then another wicked bout of shaking wind-shearing turbulence—they’re not out of it yet. A loud bone jarring bang hits somewhere near the tail-end. Jack looks out the window and sees a white triangle flashing through the black sky. He can even make out AIRBUS-AIRBUS-AIRBUS… The jet lurches down filling up space with its tonnage. Then straight down. His stomach is in his throat and never leaves it.
His father is sitting beside him. He is the screaming face of Ann, “Are you going to Kalamazoo?”
“Nah, I’m takin’ the No. 7 to Cleveland.”
Image: Bus stop at night in the mist on a lonely road by Vlad Aivazovsky from Pixabay
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