Samantha Hunt - Mr. Splitfoot

“What did Father Arthur want?”

“Some loose ends from the hospital.”

Nat nods. Mr. Bell parks.

Some of the houses have books. Some have TVs that cover entire walls. One has a room given over to a collection of dull-looking rocks. One has no furniture in it at all. “My uncle’s condo,” Mr. Bell explains.

Nat and Ruth dress in clothes provided by Mr. Bell. He tells them that their clothes, the stuff from the Father, scare people. “ Children of the Corn, ” he says.

“What’s that? Like we’re farmers?”

“No. Sociopaths.” He gives her a wink.

Nat and Ruth wait in the bedroom until he comes to fetch them. She sits in a windowsill. “You know I’m making my bit up?” she tells Nat.

“I’m fine with that.”

“But you’re really talking to dead people, right?”

“How many times are you going to ask me that?”

“Can you just tell me the truth?”

“I talk to dead people. Yes, yes, yes, I do.” To the tune of “Skip to My Lou.”

“Good because otherwise it would be stealing. I don’t want to steal from people who are already so sad.”

When Nat and Ruth are led into the living room, the guests are sitting cross-legged on the floor as if telling ghost stories around a campfire. Ruth and Nat join them there.

“But they’re children.” One man wrenches his spine to complain to Mr. Bell.

“Precisely.” Mr. Bell pats the man’s shoulder, a familiar gesture. The man smiles as if the teacher just praised his correct answer. “Children have not yet hardened the divide between life and realms of the undead. In India”—Mr. Bell lifts a curled finger to his temple—“the most attuned mediums are always children. India,” he repeats, “and Brazil. And”—feeling inspired—“Morocco, of course.”

“Brrrriiinnnng!” Nat’s off. He twists his hands, tuning in. “I’m speaking with a man named Lester. Yes. Anyone have a Lester? Sorry Leroy. No Leonard.”

“Yes!”

“Brrrinnnggg! Yes, sorry. Leonard. Now Leonard was your—”

“Grandfather.”

“I was about to say that. Brrrrriiiinng! Served in World War II, yes?”

“How did you know?”

“He told me.” Nat had practiced too.

“Grandpa.”

“You’re a hick, and nobody ever helped a hick but a hick himself!”

“Pardon?” the man asks.

“I’m standin’ here on my hind legs. Even a dog can do that. Are you standin’ on your hind legs?”

The man looks around himself. He remains sitting.

Nat foams, spits, rails, swinging his arms. “Here it is, ya hicks! Nail up anybody who stands in your way! Give me the hammer and I’ll do it myself!”

Mr. Bell rubs his hands together. He’s really not that much older than Ruth, but he works it with confidence, with his suit, and people believe it.

“Grandpa Leo?”

Later Ruth hits on a vein. “I see a toddler in a costume,” she whispers in her trance. “Dressed as a lion.” She pauses. “No, it’s a bear. A dog.”

One of the mothers explodes, grief on the walls of this foreclosed home. “That was her second Halloween. She was a poodle.”

“Yes,” Ruth says. “I see jack-o’-lanterns. Candy corn.”

The mother rolls with sorrow, as if there is a button inside her Ruth can just keep pushing, flooding fresh tears from a never-empty well. At least the mother will sleep tonight.

Afterward, over chicken with cashew nuts, they count the money. Ruth gets quiet. “Sweetheart, sweetheart.” Mr. Bell touches her hand. “It’s not as if you’re pretending the dead are alive. People want to be told what they already know — the dead were once here and they loved us. You should be happy to tell people that.”

Ruth nods.

“Why do we split it three ways?” Nat wants to know.

Mr. Bell pushes his Adam’s apple left then right in a samba beat. “Because there’s no end to my generosity.” He exhales with an open mouth, blowing breath and insult Nat’s way. Mr. Bell looks to Ruth again. “Buck up, little flower.”

She and Nat keep their money stuffed up the hollow leg of their metal bed frame. Eventually the bed can hold no more. Nat slices open the lining of his winter coat and fills it, like a transfusion refluffing the flat garment with cash. It’s so much money, Nat doesn’t bring up the three-way split ever again.

Word spreads. People line up to talk to the dead. Parents who have lost their children. Children who’ve lost their parents. A young woman who survived, in utero, the car crash that killed her mother sits beside the father of a boy who’d mixed a potion of Drano and grapefruit juice for his girlfriend and himself. The town alderman misses his mother. A high school history teacher whose nephew was caught in an undertow. Mr. Bell collects them. It’s not hard. Dead people are everywhere.

Sometimes the same people return, though Ruth, in the spirit of egalitarianism, has each new person receive word from their dead before issuing repeat performances.

Mr. Bell counsels a skeptic in the hallway. “Sometimes it’s two or three generations removed. You might not recognize a great-great-aunt. Don’t worry. She knows you.” He squeezes the man’s arm. “Please leave your coats in here,” Mr. Bell requests. “We’ve found it best to be unencumbered by material possessions when spirit is present.”

And Ruth is quite like a spirit. “Mary?” her voice crackles, the warm static of an old radio. “Is someone here looking for Mary?” Silence. “I’m sorry. The name is Larry. Larry?”

And a woman whose cardigan is pulled tight as a tourniquet round her middle sucks in her breath. “Harry is my husband. Harry.” Her cheeks spot with blood.

“Of course. Harry.” Ruth walks like a ballet dancer on her toes. She touches the living, placing hands on their shoulders to calm them. Ruth laughs. “Harry just made a joke. He was quite funny, wasn’t he?”

Afterward, over souvlaki this time, Mr. Bell asks, “What have you two been learning in school?”

“We don’t go to regular school. The Father instructs us.”

“What’s he teaching you?”

“Sine. Cosine. Jesus,” Ruth says.

Mr. Bell mulls it over. “Can’t say I remember that.” He looks above their heads. “How about Sherman’s charge on Atlanta? Did you cover that yet?”

“We’re still working on Herod’s expansion of the Second Temple.”

The storage center’s sign is big as a billboard. OUTER SPACE. The plastic veneer paneling of the trailer is made to resemble wood. A sign is taped to the wall. RENT DOON FIRST OF MONTH. Someone had crossed out the misspelling. Zeke’s alone in the office, smiling like there’s no one he’d rather see.

There are a number of file cabinets, a gun locker, a plastic lunch box, and, behind the desk, a poster of the solar system with all the planets, including Pluto.

Zeke wears a country-western shirt with pointed pockets unsnapped to his sternum. He looks different today, sweatier, skinnier, more scruff on his chin. His eyes are red.

I can get divorced in ten months, Ruth thinks.

“You need some storage?” Zeke teases her, friendly as a man with something to sell.

She should’ve worn her new jeans. She feels like a child in her old dress and apron. “What kind of stuff do you store here?”

He leans into her. “All manner of celestial wonders.”

“Pardon?”

He huffs his shoulders in a fake chuckle. “Just getting started so at the moment I’m primarily storing space.”

There’s a newspaper on his desk, today’s paper. Upside down Ruth makes out a story about bodies in the Middle East and another piece speculating which movie will earn the biggest box office receipts this weekend. She’s been to a movie theater twice in her life. “Father Arthur told me you talked with him,” she says.