The ghost of Pop sits shaking his head and watching Gail Anne scrub blood from the pink living room carpet, and after ten minutes of this silent rebuke she tells him he’d better keep his opinions to himself or else shove off. Pop does the thing with his bottom lip where he sucks it up into his mouth and appears to chew it like Copenhagen—Pop in his ethereal form can hover, glare, menace, brood, stare accusingly or even point and indict but praise the good Lord he cannot talk—and Gail Anne enjoys this victory, though it is small and soft like an old grape. The blood stain is the exact shape of the state of Ohio and Gail Anne wonders amid everything else what on earth is the point of that.
“What on earth is the point of that?” she asks Pop, who only glances at the stain and shrugs. “I need baking soda,” she says, and struggles to get to her feet, crawling on all fours until she can push herself up against the sofa. She labors into her slippers. In the dim lamplight her feet appear swollen and ink-stained, forty years as an emergency room nurse mapped across her skin in flooded capillaries and twin bunions that make right angles of her big toes.
Once in the pantry, however, she reaches for the chocolate-covered pretzels instead of the Arm & Hammer and stands eating in the cool dark. She sees Pop drift past and almost offers him a pretzel before she remembers herself. Did Pop eat chocolate-covered pretzels? It is hard to remember the contents of one’s pantry thirty-four years in the past. Jerky yes. Deer jerky a definite yes, if not culled from his own hunts then gifted by a colleague. But she cannot recall Pop having a sweet tooth. If she had to divide the family by their preferred flavor profiles it would be Pop: salty; Gail Anne: sweet; Mickey: sour.
Pop is waiting at the pantry door, obviously impatient for her to finish the job in the living room.
“What difference does it make to you anyhow? You old badger.” Gail Anne feels foolish for name calling, and anyhow she’s now far older than Pop was. Is? Would have been? She doesn’t understand the grammar of haunting husbands. Pop circles the stain like a wad of flushed paper, folds his arms, pulls his legs up under him and holds that pose until Gail Anne shuffles back into the living room with the baking soda and a pitcher of cold water and another handful of clean rags.
“Do you mind?” Gail Anne waits for her dead husband to float aside before she’ll lower herself back down to the floor, not willing to pass through or under him or have any contact whatsoever with whatever visible matter has now assembled itself in the shape of Pop. He’s only been in the house a week, and Gail Anne is still queasy at the thought of touching him or having him somehow float inside her, such a violation seeming un-Christian and unpleasant like full-body pins and needles. Pop’s only been back since Mickey went to smoke dope in the garage and saw a curious sliver of orange beach towel poking out from behind a rafter. Gail Anne had wrapped Pop’s Weatherby Mark V in paper, wrapped it again in a beach towel, and shoved it far out of reach into the garage ceiling. Mickey pulling the rifle down somehow summoned the old (young?) man’s ghost, and that night when Gail Anne lay down to bed, she found her dead husband perched on the dresser like a vulture. She ran screaming into Mickey’s empty room, Mickey already at work pouring blue fizzy cocktails for middle-aged school secretaries at the karaoke bar, and tripped over the gun left lying on the floor. She hadn’t seen it in over three decades but she knew its evil silhouette, could see the moonlight reflected on its gleaming wood stock. Pop hung over the rifle going side to side with his head down and reminded Gail Anne so much of a repentant child that her horror melted into a queasy acceptance, something about the return of the gun and Pop seeming inevitable, maybe even right.
She watched the next morning as Mickey sat on the couch eating his Frosted Flakes while Pop swam lonely circles around the ceiling fan. Mickey had only been four when his father died, but she thought even if he didn’t recognize the ghost as Pop, perhaps he might be startled at the appearance of any ghost at all. But Mickey never said anything and, as Gail Anne had been deciding not to tell Mickey things for thirty-eight years, concealing the reappearance of his dead father was no kind of departure for her.
Cleaning blood from a carpet is no novice’s game. As with any stain, blotting and lifting are key, but blood has a particular composition, a viscosity or tackiness, unlike pet urine or diet soda. It has a way of bonding to the nylon fibers, a real ‘til-death-do-us-part sort of permanent fuse so that, even once the stain is no longer visible, the ghost of the stain remains, an oiliness that only the carpet owner can see, so that their eyes will forever trace the edges of the stain like a lost continent just submerged beneath the waves.
The smell of the blood gets up into Gail Anne’s nose and she’s going to be sick. She’s not in any condition to run to the toilet so she just twists her body away from the smell and tries to push the vomit down, the ferric blood and the sweet chocolate pretzels now mingling in her nose and the back of her throat. After a minute her stomach settles and she returns to the blood stain and Pop is now lying on the floor with his head propped up in his hands, an expectant look on his long cowboy face.
“I wish you’d tell me how long you were planning to stay,” Gail Anne says, no longer bothering to carefully blot. She grunts and gives hard, vigorous strokes over the pink fibers.
Pop cocks his head and squints one eye.
“If you’re tied to the house then I’ll move. I don’t know how I feel about selling a haunted house but I expect you’d do the right thing and maybe only haunt the garage or hide up in the attic or something. If you’re tied to the rifle then that’s fine, too. I’ll drop it down to the bottom of Corpus Christi Bay. I’m only telling you this so you know my perspective. And so you can decide what you’re going to do. I’ve made all my choices and they’re mine to live with and I’m fine with that. You hear me? Do your ears work? If you’re here to rattle your chains and make me repent on something I did, you can go back to wherever you’ve been.” She was sweating now from the scrubbing and she wanted a Coke. But from the floor with her sore knees and swollen ankles the kitchen was so far.
There was no specific, utterable reason why Gail Anne had kept the gun, but more like a series of impressions that would descend veil-like over her eyes on occasion—peekaboo!—and then whip away too fast for her to gather them and see what they looked like. Best she could interpret, from what little her conscious mind would allow her to see, was that getting rid of the gun would be tantamount to admitting that Pop had done them grievous and willful wrong, instead of the far more convenient truth that he had bravely, if vainly, tried to save his family from financial ruin. She’d hidden the gun in the garage and crowded the space underneath with cardboard boxes of Pop’s mother’s silverware, sewing patterns from back when Gail Anne had a waist she wished to show off, plastic Easter eggs and glass Christmas ornaments and warped Tupperware lids, and the fourteen bankers boxes State Farm Insurance disgorged one Tuesday onto her front lawn, containing ten years-worth of investigation to come to the conclusion that Gail Anne had known the minute she opened the front door on Mother’s Day in 1986 and found her husband’s tattered ear on the indoor welcome mat, that Sherman “Pop” Hazlitt had taken such a hit from his savings and loan dalliances that he put the barrel of a Weatherby Mark V in his mouth and blew out the back of his head with such violence across the pink carpet and stucco walls that the popcorn ceiling cratered above the china hutch and Gail Anne was still finding pinprick specks of blood on the varnished oak furniture into the 1990s. When the life insurance money was held up pending investigation and later denied, they lost the boat (What did she care?), they lost the townhouse in Houston (Just an investment property), they lost their stake in the 100-unit tract in Laredo (Probably a scam anyway), as well as all their savings, cushion, wiggle, and breath. The only thing they didn’t lose was the house in Corpus because Pop had inherited it free and clear from his grandfather and because she’d dressed four-year-old Mickey in his Sunday suit and trotted him before the sleepy judge and begged him not to toss a Baptist widow and her child on the street. To her surprise the financial debts accrued in tandem with the emotional ones, and Gail Anne began living inside bad metaphors: the burden of debt, a mountain of debt, a hole out of which she could not dig. And Gail Anne—a nurse for Lord’s sake—should have seen Pop sinking, should have been ready with a lifeboat. The gun is her reminder of this and every should, a balance she acquired the minute she unlocked the front door and saw the ear and pushed Mickey back from the scene so hard he fell backwards onto the concrete and smacked his head.
“Skunk!” she cried, as she picked him up crying and rocked him back and forth. “A skunk got in and sprayed all over and we can’t go in until it’s all cleaned up, okay?” After three nights at her sister’s, Mickey refused to go to sleep without a kiss from his father, and Gail Anne took his fragile hand and looked into his coffee eyes and told him his father had had a heart attack and joined the angels. When the coffin was lowering into the ground Gail Anne saw Mickey and herself reflected in its glossy surface as though their ghost selves were going down there with Pop, and for a long time after she caught herself wondering if that wasn’t exactly how it was, that a death could come so quick and awful that it pulled everything in after it like a black hole.
In a year Mickey had forgotten the color of Pop’s hair, in five he no longer remembered his mother pushing him down and him hitting his head, and in ten he’d lost the skunk story altogether. “My dad had a heart attack when I was four,” she’d heard him tell visiting friends. And content and uncurious, Mickey left it at that.
Gail Anne looks at Pop looking at the chair where he’d last sat and she feels again that he might not be real, that he might be a manifestation of guilt or anger or fear come to haunt her for lying all these years to her only child and denying him the opportunity to know the horror of his own past. And then she comes again to the conclusion she’s been reaching all week which is, So what then?
A young visiting preacher came to the church once, back when Gail Anne’s faith in abstractions like charity and community had been shaky but extant, and gave the righteous assembled a condescending lecture on the importance of not telling lies. “A lie is like squeezing all the toothpaste out of a tube,” he said, emptying an entire Colgate into a dish to make his point. “Once it’s out,” he said, proffering the bowl for their spiritual benefit, “it ain’t never going back in.” Gail Anne remembers this now and thinks that, for a preacher, the man knew shockingly little about lying. A lie is an open door. You walk through it and it closes behind you and just like that you’ve split from the path, never to return, charting an alternate timeline you both control and are controlled by, the lie defining the parameters of this new world. The lie is the toothpaste, fine, but it’s also the bowl, the hand that squeezed it, and the thirty people fanning themselves in church pews who watched it all empty out.
“I wish you could go get me a Coke,” Gail Anne says and Pop looks genuinely sorry he can’t. He points to the carpet, to Gail Anne’s puckering hands, and makes his face even more contrite. Something Gail Anne did not know until it was time for her to know: the friends and family of someone who shoots himself inside his own home have to either clean the mess themselves or, if they have the money, pay someone else to do it. Gail Anne nods, for she’s always known that Pop has been sorry for everything that happened after he left, wherever he’s been. Pop steps forward with his arms out like he wants a hug, but Gail Anne puts up her hand. What on earth would be the point of that?
Pop points back at the stain. Gail Anne’s still got to vacuum up the baking soda, and then probably go at it again in the morning. It’s late, time for Mickey to come back from the bar. She wonders if she shouldn’t just sit on the floor until her son comes home so he can help her get to her feet. Pop is circling the stain again, frowning, and Gail Anne can see he’s got more on his mind or conscience or wherever ghosts hold their grievances.
“You think I spoiled him, is that it?” she asks. Pop stops circling and looks at her and taps his head twice like, You think, dummy? Gail Anne waves this away. This is exactly why she started the vegetable garden, to get outside, to avoid slamming her ankles against all the shoulds and shouldn’ts inside the house. Too many debts in there. She understands what to do in the vegetable garden. The instructions are clear in the world of plants in a way they are not back in the house. Pull the weeds, plant the seeds, water the soil, eat the rewards. It reminds her of being back in the emergency room. Caring for the dying is not a complicated business. Stop the bleeding, suture the wound, set the bone, pump the stomach. When a man’s been shot it is obvious what he needs to get well. Caring for the living, however—
She has zucchini, carrots, onions, squash, and bell peppers. She plans to add avocado, pecans, Mandarin oranges. This summer she has two rows of English peas, twenty plants in all. Mickey’s favorite food as a boy was frozen peas. It turned her stomach a little the way his hands always carried their sweet and slightly feculent smell. But the rabbits have made a buffet of her vegetable bed. It was hard enough to coax the sun-baked South Texas soil, so used to growing thorny mesquites and prickly pears, and pointy-tipped Mexican fans and spiney aloe vera, into a cradle soft enough to nurture species from more forgiving climates. After defeating soil and sun and drought and seeing those green, green shoots rise toward heaven it seemed unforgivable to allow the plants to succumb now to the general Darwinism of Texas. She tried mesh but the rabbits burrowed under it. She tried coyote urine but that only brought wasps. She even hung mirrors around the garden hoping the rabbits would be fool enough to see themselves and startle and flee, but these rabbits would not be deterred. They came to her garden as though it contained the last food on earth, and Gail Anne felt that this was some cruelty inherent to the state, that the only things that could survive had to be mean, that nature this far south rewarded the sharp and the bitter.
She ordered the traps on the computer and baited them with the fattest, ruddiest carrots she could find. Days and days she waited. The ants enjoyed the carrots heartily, but the rabbits wholly ignored them. Then finally this afternoon, as she sipped instant coffee and watched Pop count cars passing the house on the country road, she heard the metallic clank that signaled her victory.
It was a good sized cottontail with a strange tuft of white fur between its ears like an angel had pressed one lambent finger there. It shrieked and jumped and kicked the sides of the cage with its back feet, and as Gail Anne brought it triumphantly out of the garden she realized she hadn’t thought through what she should do next. She didn’t want to kill it, but she didn’t know where to take it either. There were fallow cotton fields on all sides of the house and nothing beyond that but suburbs and highways. For Lord’s sake, of course the rabbits were coming to her garden—it was the only food for miles. She put the cage in the shade and brought it some water and some lettuce and tried to think what to do.
After dinner she’d fallen asleep in front of the television and didn’t hear Mickey bring the cage into the house. She didn’t hear him feeding the rabbit Cheerios or taking pictures of it with his phone. She didn’t wake up until he’d brought the gun out of his bedroom and was noisily loading a cartridge into it.
“You damned fool!” she shrieked. “You’ll blow that rabbit in a thousand pieces!”
“You said it was eating up all the vegetables. You said you wanted to get rid of it.”
“Quit waving that gun around before you hurt yourself. If I’d wanted to kill the damned thing I would have done it already. Jesus, you scare me sometimes. Use your head.”
Mickey had folded his arms across his meaty chest. He already had his work shirt on, a garish Hawaiian print of umbrella drinks and red parrots, and the shiny gun looked like a prop, like something he would pose with at a party. Pop stood behind him and glared at Gail Anne and she wished she could scream at Pop to go disappear into the ceiling. “I’m not stupid,” Mickey said. “I wasn’t going to shoot it in the house. I was gonna take it out back and do it clean and easy. Put it out of its misery. You think it’s happy in that trap? And plus—how come you never told me you had a bitching gun up in the garage all this time? I’m gonna set up a target range in the backyard soon as I get a day off work.”
“Gimme that gun. You’re not shooting that damned rabbit.”
“Well then I’m gonna let it go. You can’t keep a rabbit in a trap. That thing’s barely bigger than a shoe box.”
“Give me the gun, Mickey.”
“What’s it gonna be? I shoot it or I let it go.”
Pop was swirling, rocketing around the room. Gail Anne hadn’t known that flying was an action that could be done angrily but Pop was like a depleting balloon, round and round, high and low. Gail Anne was so angry at the pair of them, men and guns and grown men who needed still to be taught what it was to be grown, to grow, to tend the sick and clean the stains and tell the lies and follow the path. She wondered for a second, a thought like a bullet that traveled through her head and out again, if they were ever deserving of her infinite forgiveness, if she had planted love where nothing would grow, if something down in the dirt was spoiled and rotten and wouldn’t let anything up that wasn’t twisted and bent and ugly. But forgiveness is a payment of debt, she told herself. The debt is paid to him.
She grabbed for the gun and Mickey held it out of reach—he’d inherited Pop’s long arms and torso—and she reached for it again, only her foot faltered and she could only swat it. She screamed as her foot rolled onto its side and onto her bunion with a pain that made her see white stars and taste metal. She dropped onto the couch and picked up her foot and it wasn’t until she saw Pop’s accusing look and Mickey shaking his head at a new crater and a new red stain spread up the stucco wall and under the rabbit cage that she realized he’d done it. Or they’d done it. Or God. The air conditioner kicked on and powdered drywall and small tufts of white fur drifted through the room like ash. No one said anything. Even Pop took off his hat and knelt down before the little brown body.
Mickey had apologized seven or eight times before Gail Anne realized he was speaking. “…a big bachelorette party,” he said. “Can’t be late. JJ’s gonna shit.”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” Mickey said. He propped the gun against the wall and kissed Gail Anne on the forehead before grabbing his cigarettes and his keys and his phone to leave for the karaoke bar.
“Mickey,” she said when his hand was on the door handle. “I love you.” Pop was standing just behind his son so that the two men looked like paper cutouts, the past and the future, the present dissolving somewhere in between. “I love you.” She said it to both of them. Mickey gave her a half wave and went to work.
Gail Anne looks at the stain now and it no longer looks like Ohio. It looks like a heart. Pop is curled across the mantle like a cat and his eyes are closed like he’s sleeping. Gail Anne looks at her watch and Mickey should have been home an hour ago and she guesses he’s out with his friends and that’s fine, she thinks. That’s where he should be. She puts her hands on the pink carpet and pushes herself onto her knees and tries to gather the strength to stand.
