Ghost Tour (ch.6)

September 12, 1998

One thing Clinton had in spades were diners. The band had tried most of them and concluded that Terminal Diner was best, a conviction shared by many locals, but you could always get a table.

Liz was the kind of vegetarian who’d eat tuna salad. Reid went for it, ordered a cheeseburger deluxe. It was just the two of them. Once the waitress took their menus and delivered coffee, Liz got down to business.

“What’d you guys meet with Brandon about the other day?”

“Some digital pirating thing.”

He waved it away like secondhand smoke.

“You promised you’d keep me in the loop.”

“Jordan checked it out, it’s got twelve subscribers. Not a deal.”

Liz dumped fake creamer into her coffee, her spoon clinked the mug as she stirred it.

“I still want to be kept in the loop,” she said.

The exchange stopped there to avoid revisiting the same old underlying conflict, that Liz had been excluded from the recording contract.

There was a fiction that helped her save face, something about her having opted against it. It was true she’d expressed reservations when Jordan floated something about a six record deal, but that was the last she’d heard of it. Jordan went ahead and signed it without telling her, or Murphy for that matter.

Liz suspected Jordan would have left Reid out too, if it weren’t for the fact he wrote half the songs. At any rate, they’d cut her in on the advance without making her sign anything, so here she was. It wasn’t like anyone else was offering her money to play music at the moment.

“Anyway,” Reid said, stirring his own coffee, “what was up with your car?”

“Catalytic convertor. Four hundred bucks.”

“Ouch.”

“It’s still running. Could’ve been worse.”

The waitress brought their lunch. Reid gave Liz his coleslaw as usual, and both of them wound up taking away half their food in styrofoam containers.

#   #   #

Liz drove to the YWCA for one last self-defense class before the tour. The course was taught by a retired cop named Doug Ramirez. He stressed situational awareness and escape techniques, but also padded up for part of the class so he wouldn’t get neutered by a well-placed front kick.

Ramirez grabbed Liz’s wrist. When she tried to pull back unsuccessfully, he slipped behind easily and got her into a simulated chokehold.

“Relax, do like we practiced,” he said to Liz, going back to the beginning. “Where are your feet?”

When he grabbed her wrist again, this time she remembered to step to the outside, the rest flowed more easily from memory. She stepped in with a sharp elbow to the forearm, causing Ramirez to release his grip.

“Now what do you do?” Ramirez asked.

“Run like hell.”

“That a girl. Keep practicing with Helen.”

Paired up with another woman, they took turns being on the receiving end and repeated the sequence over-and-over. It always seemed to work.

#   #   #

Reid headed out 9W to the Video Shack with two videos neither he nor Kristina had remembered to return when they were past due last week. He held his breath.

“17.50,” the kid said.

“Christ, I could’ve bought them for that.”

“I feel your pain.”

Reid debated renting another. If he didn’t manage to return it before he left on tour, it would probably still be sitting on their TV when he got back. But Kristina had to work tonight, which meant he’d be sitting around alone tonight with nothing to do.

He’d never seen any Lila Parker films. It seemed likely he was about to meet her, so he rented Suddenly Motel. Light drama set in the Pacific Northwest, looked Sundancy. It had a few laurels on it.

Video in hand, he headed back to his car and consulted his to-do list. New socks from Penney’s. Disposable razors from CVS. Bank drive-thru. This was his last full day to himself, anything he didn’t get done wasn’t going to get done.

Lee’s Barbershop wasn’t always open this late in the afternoon, but the red, white and blue stripes on the pole out front were migrating upward, so Reid ducked in.

“Be right with you,” Lee said without taking his eyes off the gray head in the chair in front of him, then continued to talk baseball.

Reid took a seat, picked up a three-month-old Car and Driver. He half flipped through the pictures, half looked around the shop. There was an unused second chair from when times were busier and Lee had a hired man. Twenty-year-old magazine photos on the wall for men contemplating a style change.

Lee spun the chair so his current customer could inspect the back, a formality. When the old regular found his sea legs and wobbled to the register, Lee brushed and patted the chair so Reid could take his place.

The chair was still warm. Reid looked at the comb swimming in blue Barbicide, electric clippers dangling from a hook underneath. When he looked at himself in the mirror, it was like his own face as a boy was staring back at him.

Rock star, huh?

Privately, Reid estimated that he’d achieved maximum coolness at some point in the 1980s. If X-13 had tanked, he wasn’t sure where that would’ve left him.

Lee fastened a tight paper strip around Reid’s neck followed by a loose cape. He put his hands on Reid’s shoulders.

“So what are we doing today?” Lee asked, looking at him in the mirror.

“Just a trim,” Reid said.

“You got it.”

This was probably the fifth or sixth time Reid had sat in Lee’s chair. He was confident Lee knew what a trim meant, and that he wouldn’t be heading out on tour looking like a mental patient.

#   #   #

The DeWitt Taproom had exposed brick walls and other dog-whistle details. The owners were city people. Their imagined clientele had yet to arrive en masse, but other gritty-yet-authentic river cities had been discovered. Clinton seemed poised.

Kristina did not want to be at the restaurant tonight but, until her catering business took off, working part-time as a line cook at the DeWitt honed her skills and brought in extra money.

The chef was a Culinary grad named Yves. The fact that Kristina was self-taught and had her own business made him extra irritable.

“You sending this plate out like this?”

“Is the balsamic reduction too…enthusiastic?”

She mimicked with her hand the motion with which she’d drizzled vinegar over the braised lamb.

He took the oversized plate from her station and delivered it to the window himself.

“Order up!”

She pretty much liked everyone else in the kitchen. And Yves was unintentionally schooling her in how to disguise sarcasm respectfully enough you couldn’t be accused of insubordination.

It was slow tonight. Maybe they’d close early.

#   #   #

Reid sat alone on their 50s couch, eating cold, leftover fries, watching Suddenly Motel.

Would a hottie like Lila Parker ever really find herself in a one-horse town managing a roadside motel?

Once you got past that, it was amusing enough, somewhat episodic. Every passing stranger on their way to somewhere better staying just long enough to impart a little worldly wisdom, add some color.

Predictably, a hunky, sensitive type arrives. He has secrets, so does she. A late-night conversation on rusty lawn chairs. A lonely ding from the gas station across the road.

The next day he splits without saying goodbye. Lila’s character finds a suitcase left under the bed. She deliberates.

“Just open it,” Reid said aloud. Then the power went out in his house.

TV, lights, refrigerators, everything.

This wasn’t the first time. Being at the edge of town by the old cement plant, the old neighborhood seemed a forgotten corner of the power grid, the disruption of a single line would do it.

Rising from the couch, he was feeling his way toward the bedroom for the Maglite when, in the total absence of white noise, he heard something that made him freeze in place.

In the corner of the room, it sounded like someone was breathing.

In the thin crack of moonlight coming through parted curtains stood a shadowy human form, height of an adult male. The ratio of head to neck to shoulders was unmistakable. Reid’s eyes rescanned what must be an illusion, but the form persisted.

“Get the fuck out of here.”

Reid’s voice sounded stronger in his own ears than he felt at the moment. He felt around for any random object that could be swung.

The lights came back on. The form disappeared.

The refrigerators starting humming again. The TV went to static as the VHS player automatically ejected the video. If there was a breathing sound in the room, it too had disappeared.

Nonetheless, Reid turned on every light in the house, checked every closet and corner. His rationality said it had been his imagination, but the adrenaline still coursing through his body said something real had just happened.

He sat back down on the couch, rubbed his hands on his jeans to get them to feel unfrozen.

The front door opened, the familiar jingle of car keys came into the living room with Kristina.

“Why are all the lights on?”

“Power went out,” Reid said, which didn’t explain it, but somehow did.

“Didn’t go out at the restaurant…I brought you some polenta.”

She set a brown paper take-out container on the coffee table next to the white styrofoam one the cold fries had been in.

“Oh, I wanted to see this,” she said, noticing the box for Suddenly Motel.

She sat down on the couch next to him. The TV was still in static.

“You weren’t just in here a few minutes ago?” Reid asked.

“In where?”

Reid noticed she was scanning his eyes as if to doublecheck he wasn’t high on something and decided to let it drop.

“Never mind,” he said.

He pushed the video back in and hit rewind. He looked one last time to the corner of the room where the apparition had been, then settled back on the couch to eat the polenta and rewatch the first half of the movie with Kristina.

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