Chris Green - Only the Good Die Young

“I don’t get it,” I said. “You don’t care about any of them?”

“Humans?” He seemed thoughtful. “Sure I care. I care that they keep my bars stocked. I care that they leave me alone and let me keep lookin’ for my gal’s letter.”

Damn. I’d expected for him to come out of this conversation appalled, not me.

“Hey, now,” he said, “you’re new. You’ll forget about most of it in time. You’ll find other ways of not bein’ bored.”

I faced front, wrapping my so-called arms around my bent legs. A salty breeze blew through me.

“Ya mad?” he asked.

“Not mad. Just… astounded.”

“’Cause I don’t sound… human?”

There it was again—the reminder that I was thinking too much like one of them, that I hadn’t even begun to let go.

Silence chomped the buzzing space between us.

But then I realized that this was dumb. I had a seasoned ghost by my side, and I wasn’t grilling him about so many things I needed to know. Besides, it wasn’t so much the fact that he’d said those things to me that hurt. It was the fact that, if Randy was any kind of example, one day I wouldn’t care much about anything going on around me, either.

Would that be the day I really became a ghost?

“You didn’t tell me about going into people’s heads while they were asleep,” I said, moving on to a new topic. But I still sort of sounded like a rag.

Randy perked up, not minding the bitchy part. “Have ya been practicing goin’ into humans?”

“Yeah. And I found out about dream-digging, no thanks to you.”

“Dream-diggin’.”

“That’s what I’m going to call it. Going into their dreams when they’re sleeping. You know?”

He frowned. “I coulda sworn I told ya all about that.”

“Nope.”

“Ah, well. A fella can’t get everything out durin’ a couple o’ drinks.” He lifted an eyebrow. “How’d it go?”

I shrugged. “Pretty well. It was trippy, seeing all the things in this human’s head.”

“You were scared as a sinner in a cyclone, huh?”

Before I could deny or confirm, he said, “First time I did it, I had no idea what was happenin’. I was tryin’ for a hallucinazion.”

There he went, mangling that last word again, just like the other night.

“What did you see in your human?” I asked.

“Giraffe ballerinas, mostly.”

“Really?” How would Amanda Lee interpret that?

But I wasn’t going to think about her.

“No lies,” Randy said, holding up his hands. “I was touchin’ a fella who worked at the zoo. Passed out clean on the sidewalk downtown. He’d been manhandlin’ his gal and—”

“You wanted to boo him. I know.”

I barely smiled at Randy as he returned the gesture, but much more effervescently.

“I jus’ hate when humans sleep,” he said. “No ghost likes to be ignored.”

“Is that why ghosts wake people up at night? So they can get a charge from their screams?”

“You’re catchin’ on, new ghost.”

When he got up to restart his search for the letter, I joined him. We were silent until he spoke again.

“Maybe you could use a little pickup. How about ya come with me today, and I’ll show ya what real ghosts do to stay active?”

I had so much on my plate, so many clues to hunt down, but I needed Randy. Needed way more advice, more interaction with my kind.

“Will we meet others like us?” I asked.

“Will we ever !”

With that lopsided grin, he conjured a travel tunnel. It burst into the air like an open mouth, and he waved me toward it.

After just a slight hesitation—still so much to do out here, so much to investigate—I nonetheless jumped in.

In for a penny…

… in for a pound of Boo World.

When Randy and I popped out of the tunnel in front of a two-story pine cabin house nestled into a flurry of oak trees in some bum-fuck part of nowhere, I thought he’d gotten his directions mixed up.

“Did you bring me to Grizzly Adams’s place or something?” I asked.

“Huh?” Randy scratched under his sailor cap as the travel tunnel folded up behind him.

I wondered if Randy and I should have a TV marathon someday. The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams had provided many nights of homey watching with my parents.

Randy started float-swaggering to the cabin before I could explain my love for the bear man.

“If you’re askin’ where we are,” he said, “we’re near Escondido.” Esh-con-di-do .

That was the town where I’d grown up. Holly Avenue. Hidden Valley Middle School. Orange Glen High School. We had to be on the outskirts, here in the boondocks, unless a bomb had dropped on Escondido and sent it back into the Grizzly Adams ages.

But I knew that wasn’t the case when I heard a series of rhythmic thuds coming out of the house.

Music. Disco?

Pale lights flashed in the downstairs windows as a different song played even louder over the first.

Buddy Holly rock ’n’ roll.

Randy was laughing as he moved forward, urging me to follow. “It’s war!”

“What?”

“Just come ’n’ see.”

We got to the daylight-dappled porch, where the front door was halfway open. So we threaded ourselves through the slim entrance and went to a large living room that had a circular black metal fireplace sunk into the middle of it, surrounded by shag-carpeted stairs.

Whatever had been making the lights flash on and off had stopped, but wisps of smoke were coming from the fireplace. I thought it was weird to have a fire going on a day that wasn’t so cold.

The blaring music switched from Buddy Holly to Mexican guitars as I took a good look at what was happening on those stairs.

Partying ghosts.

They were in old TV shades of black-and-white, just like me and Randy. Ghosts in long, Mexican fiesta dresses that looked like they belonged in Old Town as the women with braided hair swirled their skirts in time to the guitars. Ghosts who seemed to have arrived from Chinatown.

Nearest to us, there was a black man ghost dressed in a factory uniform; he raised his hands and seemed to wipe away the music that was playing and brought in a blare of ‘forties-sounding jazz. That encouraged an outraged hoot from a teenage ghost with greased hair, a plaid shirt over a tee, and jeans rolled up to his ankles. Near him were a housewife from the ’seventies, a guy wearing Old West garb, and even an old couple who balanced on top of a couch just off the edge of the fire pit, dancing cheek to cheek, no matter what music was on.

The housewife, with her dishwater blond ponytail, pale lipstick, paisley blouse, and flare-bottom polyester pants, wiped her hand through the air, bringing back the disco as the ’fifties teen booed.

Next to me, Randy struck a John Travolta pose, which he’d obviously learned from the housewife, who spotted him and waved frantically at him in greeting.

He went back to normal, shrugged like a dork, and yelled at me over the music, “So what do ya think?”

“I don’t know what to think!”

The ’fifties boy made a high whistling sound and the music stopped. That’s when I noticed that the room smelled like…

I do say, someone in here was smoking the ganja.

Everyone stared at me, smiling at the new girl. Even the old folks dancing on the couch paused to check me out.

“Hey, you all,” Randy said.

“Rand!” they all chorused.

Aw, they liked him.

Randy swept an arm out to me. “This here’s Jensen. Murdered by an ax in Elfin Forest.”

Several ghosts nodded in sympathy during this moment of etiquette, but the housewife spoke up in a chirpy voice.

“I know another ghost who died there. A hiker. You know him? Daniel Ashbury, longish hair, scruffy beard, looks like Jesus a little?”