Ask the living from any ghost town what happened to make it that way and they won’t say a word of it until the hour’s well into the night. They’ll speak to you nicely before then, ask you to get out in a real polite way and if that doesn’t work they’ll tell you to get out and never come back. Most times, that works. You have to remember–you’re the nosy one here, barging into people’s lives and disrupting them, asking them to remember things ten and twenty years past.
Some of them don’t bother, though. They’re a rare kind: probably old and tired enough to not give a shit of the consequences, social or otherwise, which works just as well for me as if it were any other person, as long as they remember everything right.
A lot of these folks are much more accurate if you tell them you care. You got to understand–a lot of weird things happen down by rural areas, where there’s enough people to notice but not enough to do something about them. We’re talking up and about the Bible Belt–if southern hospitality won’t get someone to open up about their grandson and a murder, nothing will.
They’ll tell you personal or creepy or just flat out weird things, but if you want to figure out the why of the how, you got to stick through it. I personally recommend a soda or something caffeinated right before, but everyone has their own cup of tea.
There was a thing or two that happened to draw my attention that month; a dead body down the road, a park on fire a few miles away. Those two things don’t seem like anything beyond a call to the police and grievances on their own. Gets weirder when I tell you about the face.
The way the body’s lip was contorted, blood still dribbling.
The animal skull in place of the head, like someone had tugged all the matter out and left nothing but skin stretched around it.
How the police could only begin to think it was a woman because of the nails.
The way the plastic equipment on the playground was burnt, melted, molten; and the trees left untouched.
An ID, tying the body to the town of the playground.
I’m not a policeman. I don’t get paid to care. I got curious, though. The company I work for gave me a leave for a day or two, on account of the unsettling thing I’d witnessed; I ducked away in time to not get interviewed and make the news with any vomit staining my shirt.
Then I took a week off. Drove home, stewed there a day or two, came back down again in a bus because touching my car reminded me of the awful way my car had lurched over an outstretched arm. Rented a hotel for the rest of the days, because when I’d gotten home, I’d googled the town, and before I had even been born, there’d been a day when the sinks barely turned.
It had been gasoline instead of water, fuel flowing through the pipes of everyone that believed in drinking water straight from the tap, and when half of them ended up in the hospital, most people had left. There was no visible reason for who had done it, let alone why. And for things the Internet can’t give you, you ask people.
Mr. Goldman, of the seasoned three-generations-settled type, finally gave me an outstretched hand on a Thursday night that went well into a Friday morning, and I took it. Asked him about the least traumatizing thing of all, to ease him into it.
“There’s no easing into this kind of thing, is there? But the fire, out of things that’ve happened this week,” he shook his head. “That poor girl. No one deserves a death like that. My goodness.
I’d rather someone set the whole town aflame than something like that happen.”
I agreed.
His trailer was set a good five or six miles from the site of the fire.
“To think about it, I’m not scared. That place–I mean, sure it’s upsetting. It’s concerning. For godsake, my kids, grandkids played there. I swung them on the swings. My son loved the slides. But it’s not enough, to make me move all the way on over to the ‘burbs.
I live in the city. I like living here, and man if anything’s gonna try to upset that, I’ve got a gun. More prepared for that sort of stuff now compared to. Well, earlier anyways.”
Did that have to do with the gasoline incident, I wondered.
“Couldn’t have my guard up for that. It landed me in the hospital for nearly a week, throwing up. I liked to stay active in my thirties. But no, that was one of the worse ones. There’s moments when, looking back, I think to myself, a good look-out here and there could’ve fixed it, probably. Made it better, at least.
We used to have a pet shelter here, lined up with all the other stores. My son had wanted a puppy, he’d spend all his time in there when he was in middle school, begging to look and keep one. One day, all of a sudden, place’s up and gone. Turns out the damn owner didn’t keep up to date with the vaccinations on some of those animals. Weeks before that, two of the kids in his school had got rabies. It popped up here or there the next month.
Horrifying to think about. I mean, when you have a pet, sometimes it bites you. Glad I never let him get one; he’s real careful about shots now.
That’s the mildest thing I can think of–five people went foaming at the mouth. Died, all because some schmuck wasn’t careful enough.”
Five people dead of that wouldn’t be as alarming in a big city, even now. But in a town being the size this one was, it was weird. People would think twice about having pets, and even when I’d come in decades later, there was no pet store as far as I’d managed to see.
“I’ll tell you, son, one of the kinds of people I hate most in this world are neglectful ones.”
I asked about the other kind, and his face clouded over. “Supersitious ones.”