Nostalgia for ghosts

But I did go back to school. Eventually I had to. My best friend there was a black boy named Barry Fox. He was the funniest, smartest kid I knew, a true comedian with timing well beyond his elementary years. He said things to kids like: "Your momma's so fat she leaves a ring around the pool." "Your momma's so fat she has to butter the bathtub to turn over." "Your momma's ass got its own zip code."

One Monday, early in the spring, Barry didn't come to school. He didn't come on Tuesday or Wednesday either. On Thursday he showed up again but didn't say anything. Finally, at lunch, he told me that his nineteen-year-old uncle, who lived with him and his mother and sisters in the Pine Chapel "projects," had been stabbed to death in a fight. I could tell he was about to cry.

Again, in an effort to console, I told the story about my power to see the dead when I was sick. I tried to reassure him by telling him about Christ's resurrection.

"What the hell you sayin'," he almost shouted. He was suddenly furious, telling me that I didn't know a thing about his uncle, or about Jesus, or about his family, or about black people, or about anything at all. He said that his dead-ass uncle wouldn't be let into my white-ass house anyway, dead or alive. He was right.

Then he told me he hated me. Then he did cry, right into his open hands.

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I needed a fever to prove to myself that this was real, that I could see what I thought, what I believed, I could see.

But it was spring, harder to get truly, deathly ill when the weather was beautiful and warm. And -- both blessing and curse, I thought -- I seemed to be getting heartier, healthier; I was getting bigger and stronger, even good at sports.

I did have some close calls with fevers that spring, though.

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I would often go over to the Drabbles' house. They were strict Southern Baptists. The father was a mechanic, as mean and quick to violence as any man I have ever been around; the mother stayed home with the nine children, ranging in age from four to eighteen. The children were not allowed to swim; the boys could not wear short sleeves or short pants; the girls wore floor-length handmade dresses and were not allowed to cut their hair, ever, their astounding manes cascading down below their waists. My family lived cramped in our small house with only four. They lived in a house considerably smaller than ours with eleven, which meant things tended to spill outside.

What spilled out of the house were the beatings. The father would take the boys out and beat them with his fists, rubbing their faces down into the dirt of the yard. The girls he would beat with a leather belt as he swung them around the yard by their hair or shirt or arm, each girl screaming at a slightly different pitch.

Usually, though, Mr. Drabble was not home weekdays.

I went to the Drabbles' because they were, due to the pressures of their strict upbringing, I imagine, the worst kids I'd ever known -- a whole new species of bad. The boys had pornographic magazines and shot BB guns at neighboring houses; they smoked cigarettes and drank stolen liquor in the woods. The oldest boy, who recently had a bullet shot into the door of his primer-colored El Camino "by a motherfucking spook," always had pot and an assortment of pills.

The other thing that spilled out of their existence into the yard, piling up in the backyard, was junk. A paradise of junk. Because the father was a mechanic, a poor mechanic, a do-it-yourselfer, a fixer-upper, he brought home old engines and minibikes and motorcycle parts and steering wheels and hood ornaments and tires and bent rims and smashed-in doors and washing machines and refrigerators and forklift parts.

Next page: Nothing, nothing; nothing. I feared I'd never see the ghosts again