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Chapter Five

Two Shots, And A Twist

Allen could barely see Cindy. The contours of her body were fuzzy, as if he couldn't quite pick up her signal. Cindy was Allen's girlfriend before he had died. They were supposed to have had brunch that very day. Having been beaten to death with a tire iron had not made Allen very optimistic about being able to reschedule. Cindy was now inside the art gallery crying on the shoulder of a slender young man named Pietro, whose real name was Peter. Peter / Pietro always wore black and had a mysterious growth of hair under his lower lip. His gallery show, called "New World Roadkill," consisted of black and white video images of animals squashed on the pavement. Pietro was a conceptual artist, and he had always had the hots for Cindy. The way he comforted the young blonde woman would have irked Allen even if he had still been alive.

Pietro cooed into Cindy's ear, "expel it. Grieve. Grieve. You have to cleanse yourself to visualize the future."

"Get your hands off my girl," Allen said aloud, though no one seemed to hear.

"I feel so responsible," Cindy sobbed. "I was waiting to tell him about us. I was going to do it today at brunch. But he's dead." Her nose was running and Pietro leaned away so she wouldn't get any snot on the front of his turtleneck. "Even if he was a dweeb, he doesn't deserve to be dead," she wailed.

Allen slumped against one of the TV monitors. Pietro looked up and almost toppled Cindy. The image of the monitor blurred. Pietro dissolving, evanescent dream of flattened yellow cat. Pietro couldn't take his eyes off himself. Allen leaned away from the TV and the image became clear instantly.

"Huh!' Allen thought. "Just the opposite of real life. Touching the antenna used to make the TV clear." Once Pietro's image cleared up, he turned back to Cindy. "We mustn't be sentimental, cher. I don't mean to be callous but a dweeb when he dies is only... well, frankly, only a dead dweeb. We can't ennoble him... for slipping and falling in his tub."

Cindy looked sharply at Pietro. "You can't know he slipped and fell. The police didn't tell me that." Cindy's voice was hushed and she looked furtively around the gallery.

Pietro ignored her and walked to the wall and straightened the monitor showing a squashed raccoon. "Huh? Oh, I just heard about it." He winked at her and it gave Allen the creeps.

Willa walked into the gallery. She was more vivid than any of the other humans. Willa and Allen worked at the Forest Service together. They had been buddies, eating lunch together and sharing ideas for low cal desserts. Allen had never felt romantic about Willa and was afraid to think that she may have been as lonely as he was. He never thought of her as beautiful but now he could see her more clearly than anyone else. Her dark eyes sparkled like wet ebony.

"I know you two killed him," she said in a flat voice. "I just don't know how."

"Have a cup of coffee, dear." Cindy sniffed, and lifted the revolver from her lap, the hole in the end of the barrel as black as a shark's eye.

Chapter Six

Thick As Mud

Allen rushed toward Cindy but he was still dead, so he passed right through her body as if he were nothing to her in death, much like he had been in life. Passing into Cindy felt cloying and painful like putting aftershave on cuts all over his body.

Willa stepped forward and calmly took the revolver out of Cindy's trembling hands. "Did you use this on Allen?" Willa asked coolly.

"I didn't touch him." Cindy began to sob. Pietro moved closer to her in the red leatherette booth.

Allen was disgusted. Cindy had meant to dump him and probably would have if he hadn't been murdered in his apartment. Yet, strangely, this didn't concern him as much as his discovery that as a dead person he could interfere with TV signals and too that he was apparently in love with Willa. He watched her as she put the evil-looking revolver into her leather fanny pack.

Allen looked out the window. His heart was sore with the feeling he had for Willa. They had been pals. He trusted her, but he had pursued the glamorous Cindy.

Now he knew Willa had loved him, had been his friend, and it had been foolish for him to fall for Cindy. Out above Ketchikan, millions of salmon swam above the river, thick and intertwined like mylar banners in a mild, mild wind. Allen saw a great prehistoric moose ambling on the ridge line and a Stellar's sea cow drifting unteathered like a fleshy weather balloon above the trees.

"Relationships" are really weird," he said to himself. Pietro lurched out of the booth he was sitting in. He was agitated and his slender hands flitted around his head like caged songbirds.

"I'm stressing. I'm stressing here. I can't deal with personal confrontation. I've got to focus on the reading tonight." And Pietro walked toward the rear of the gallery, Allen followed him. Willa stood in front of Cindy and stared. Cindy traced some unknown letters with her index fingers.

Of course Pietro could not see Allen, but the artist turned, nervously watching over his shoulder as he walked down the narrow and dimly lit hall. Pietro went to a storage room and locked the door. Allen passed through the door. Pietro dug into a can wedged into the corner and took out a plastic bag. Allen sat back on a bale of rags and didn't say a thing as Pietro undid the bag and dumped bloody clothes into a metal trash barrel. There was a white shirt spattered brownish red and stiff as an old meat wrapper. When Pietro squirted lighter fluid on the cotton pants, black stains bled scarlet and dripped into the bottom of the barrel. Smoke rose black and greasy and there was something startlingly familiar about it. Allen recognized the smell slowly, as if it were a memory from childhood.

"This is my blood," Allen said to himself, watching Pietro's flame-lit face as he stirred the burning clothes in the barrel. Pietro looked up and his bloodshot eyes met Allen's from across whatever boundary separated the living from the dead. Pietro's eyes flashed with recognition as he took one step toward Allen, raising the burning clothes in front of him.

Chapter Seven

Fresh Ground

Allen ran from the room where Pietro was burning the bloody clothes. Allen was certain now he had been murdered, and he knew that some humans left on earth were more substantial than others. Willa was vivid and clear as she stood next to the table confronting Cindy, who appeared to be a ghost image on a cheap TV.

"Why did this have to happen to me?" Cindy moaned. "To you!" Willa snorted.

A stocky fisherman wearing dark glasses walked into the gallery. He looked at the images of dead animals and wrinkled his nose as if testing sour milk. "I'm off the Ginny C. I was looking for that weird T-shirt place, you know. My crew wants some of those fish things," he mumbled almost apologetically.

Even though Cindy was crying, she motioned with her knotted tissue. "The other end of the street," she replied. Willa turned on her heels. "This isn't about you. It's about murder. It's about Allen and his family. I'm going there now." Willa turned and walked out into the street where a gentle rain squall was blowing through. "I'll see you in jail," she called out over her shoulder as she put her hood up. Allen followed her to the home of his parents.

Later he wished he hadn't. All the grieving people were vivid. More clear than any of the other living ghost people he could see now that he was dead. His mother's eyes were rimmed in red and she was wearing her housecoat in the middle of the day, lying on the couch with her eyes open. His father was wearing his work clothes with his logging boots unlaced. He sat back in his lounge chair staring up at the ceiling. The weather channel was on TV and as Allen walked past the set, the reception blurred. His sister stood up and fiddled with the antenna. Allen laced his fingers through hers and thought he detected her smile.

"He's here," Allen's sister whispered.

Willa stood next to her and put her arms around the girl's shoulder. When Allen touched them both, they stiffened. Willa shuddered.

"I think you're right" was all Willa could say.

In the corner of the room the old Indian man with the black-footed ferret around his neck was sitting in the straight back chair next to the sideboard. The old man was still wearing the "No Irony" button. He had a cup of coffee in his left hand and a bowl of dip on his lap. He smiled at Allen and gaily waved a carrot stick.

"It's clam dip," the old man said. "I brought it with me. Grief makes you hungry. Did you ever notice that?"

Allen nodded absently.

"Let's get out of here then," the old ghost said, "before I eat myself to death."

As they stepped off the porch onto the street, Allen looked to his left and saw the dark form of a brown bear running hard towards them. The bear's teeth sparked; its hot breath pumped into the cold night air. Allen closed his eyes and listened to the charging footfall of claws scraping the sidewalk.

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