MY FATHER’S GHOST by Jim Marino
My father’s ghost came to dinner about twice a week. It was unpredictable. Sometimes he’d be sitting at the kitchen table four or five nights in a row. Other times, as in life, he’d fail to appear for an entire month without anyone acknowledging that failure. But most weeks we’d find him in the kitchen two nights or three, leaning his elbows on the formica or tilting back his chair on its rubber feet.
He didn’t eat much. Mostly he smoked, stale wisps of cigarette curling around our heads, and talked angrily about the neighbors or the news. He’d push the food on his plate with a backhanded fork, breaking up his fish sticks and scrambling the pieces, reducing one half of his chicken patty to shreds and leaving the other untouched. Our mother appeared neither to see him nor the plate she had set before him. She gave his remarks, his insults, no response. He commented on the food, and we couldn’t argue. Our kitchen’s fluorescent light shone balefully on the nights he came to dinner, making plain the dried sweat on our boiled hot dogs, the chemical jaundice of our mac and cheese, the flecks of congealing fat on our turkey loaf. Our father’s ghost never helped our appetites. We kept our heads down and did our best.
He spoke in exacting detail about the increasing shabbiness of our house, the miserable condition of our roof, and the rotting porch stairs. He complained about the many things that the school district did not bother teaching us and about how poor our grades contrived to be even so. His greatest genius lay in picking subjects about which we could not speak. Why hadn’t I mentioned my last report card? Why didn’t I ever bring up any girlfriends? What was the real story about those basketball tryouts? When we could not answer he would chuckle, a dry rustle all too clearly meant for himself, pull deep on his Camel and begin, in his hoarse, leisurely voice, to elucidate our difficulties. Some nights my little sister would begin crying and not be able to stop. Eventually my mother would walk out of the room. He never gave us permission to leave the table.
He came to our Little League games. Sometimes he was simply there, standing among the other parents. Other days he would turn up halfway through an inning, driving the Dodge he’d been killed in. Its front end was jagged and wrenched out of shape like a jawful of shattered teeth, its windshield a starry web of interlocking fracture. The other parents stood stone-faced as if our father were invisible, inaudible, while he berated the umpires and opposing players. But once or twice each season another adult would have enough. An umpire would grow sick of his crowing abuse and run our father off the field, or someone else’s father would start cursing him. Our father swaggered away backward, facing his accusers and redoubling their curses.
We took silent note of it. This was one of the infrequent ways that adults, who never confessed anything about our father but that he was dead, implicitly acknowledged he was there. Years later I’d lose my part-time convenience-store job because my father’s ghost lurked in the parking lot, harassing customers and audibly pissing on the dumpster. The manager muttered about “bringing the wrong crowd” and “watching who you associate with,” unable to meet my eye. When I pressed him, he grew stern and said that my check would come in the mail and I should never come back. But now and then the adults could not keep up the whole of the pretense. We knew that at least sometimes they saw him.
One day in Little League I was at bat with two outs. I wanted to get on base. There was a runner on second and a better hitter, because all hitters were better, behind me. My coach was shouting to take my time and just get on base. I knew what he meant and wanted to please him. I wanted to watch the next at‑bat from first, wanted the next batter to win the game and wanted to pretend that I had somehow helped him do it, to hold up my hand for a high-five at a moment when he would have to seem pleased. I did not want to swing the bat, which had so often led to failure. But I’d discovered that I could slither to first by standing with the bat on my shoulder and posing as a more discerning batter waiting for my pitch. The other kids could not reliably hit the strike zone, so that if I did not swing I could almost always have first base. My coach would say good eye as I trotted purposefully down the line, as if he or I believed that I would have swung at another pitch, at any pitch, as if either of us believed that I had gained what I had gained by the use of any skill.
My father wandered between my team’s bench and the third base line, always in the corner of my eye. “Why don’t you swing the fucking bat?” he demanded. The umpire had called the first pitch a ball, but I knew he might have done otherwise, and my father made that knowledge public. Then a strike. “And that SHOULD be strike two.” The other team still chattered and jeered, but my teammates and coaches sounded quieter. There was a ball, a strike. “If you’re afraid to play the game, quit!” my father shouted. “Don’t stand there like a chickenshit.” The weight of my batting helmet strained my neck. Another pitch, called a ball. The ghost croaked with laughter. “You playing baseball, or are you dressed for Halloween?” The benches had fallen silent, and the field. The only sounds were my father’s voice and the ball slapping leather. “No. Fucking. Guts.” The baseball fluttered weakly, just above the bottom of the strike zone or just below, the third strike. I looked at my shoes with stinging eyes. No one spoke as I found my way back to the bench, but my father followed, ranting in disgusted fury. He was behind me for the rest of the game and as I walked home alone. I listened to his every belittling noise. It took years before I understood he’d enjoyed it.
Over time, he found my failures on the baseball field less compelling than my younger brother’s success. Nothing drew my father’s scorn better than something one of us was good at. For my brother, it was sports. He’d be on second after a double, with our father’s ghost hectoring: Too close to the bag! Too far off the bag! Can’t you take a lead, dumbass? My brother’s victories drove my father to fury, his flustered errors to dark satisfaction. I don’t know where the danger lay for my sister. Friends, I think, and dates, although dates were bad for all of us. I think my sister was popular. She was the kind who is. But I’ve seen her returning from parties in tears, unwilling to speak, seen her silently hugging herself after boys dropped her off. She was the best at having a world outside our house, so it was outside the house that my father attacked, in front of those she most badly wanted to like her.
For me, it was writing. If I labored hard over a school paper, my father’s ghost would jeer at midnight across the kitchen table. “Just what do you think you’re doing?” he’d ask. “Writing history? He’s had hair on his balls for five minutes and he wants to tell people about history.” You needed to act as if you had not heard, to do everything you would have done if he hadn’t said anything. We got better at it as we got older. Pretending he was not there was how we grew up.
“You’re busting your ass over this stupid piece of homework that you could just get off goddamn Wikipedia. Everyone else is going to spend ten minutes getting it off the internet where it is anyway and get the exact same grade as you. That fatass friend of yours? Got it off the internet, like you should have.” I went back a page to correct a small error of detail. “Now your fat friend is smoking a bong and watching TV. And that pimple-faced slut who’s always giving you boners is over there with him. What do you think he’s doing? Talking to her about Doctor fucking Who?” He laughed his corrupt inhaling wheeze of a laugh. “While you’re jerking off about the Missouri goddamn Compromise, your best buddy is compromising that girl.”
I would stay up writing until two or three, and as the hour got later he grew more relentless, until nothing kept me working but my hate for him. Sometimes I pretended to quit, leaving my work sprawled across the table and stumbling to bed, knowing how failure and surrender mollified the ghost. But I crept downstairs before dawn and finished my work while he snored on the living-room rug. I knew he would not wake until after I’d gone. My papers, in their apparent disarray, were always left so that I could see immediately where I had broken off and which task I was on the way to completing. So I trained into myself, like a laboratory’s dog, the unbreakable habit of early-morning writing, and other habits I took longer to understand.
My father’s ghost grew progressively angrier when I applied to college, and at last turbulently enraged. My brother and sister had to share the brunt. He’d be at dinner every night without a break for weeks. He turned up at baseball practice and dance rehearsal. Some mornings his car was idling in the school parking lot, a thing we’d never seen before and therefore ominous. At first I didn’t understand what had stirred him up, and then I acted as if I did not. The day I got my first acceptance he didn’t even pretend to eat dinner. He harangued us about my selfishness for three hours, pacing the kitchen: how I was running out on my brother and sister the first chance I got. How I would bankrupt the family, the devouring maw of my tuition leaving nothing behind for my siblings, not college or even new clothes. How I was abandoning my mother. I kept my eyes on my plate. One by one, my family left me alone with my father’s rage and fear.
Then it seemed to stop. He didn’t come around when the second acceptance arrived, or the third, didn’t show his face for two weeks. When he reappeared nothing was said about college. I thought I’d gotten past it.
On prom night his crooked car idled in front of our house, behind the Pontiac my mother’s then-boyfriend had insisted I borrow. My father beeped as I came down the steps fussing with my cummerbund. Nobody looked his way. Or everybody tried not to. I shook then-boyfriend’s hand, kissed Mom’s cheek, and gave my best excited smile as I climbed into the borrowed car. I wished it did not smell like then-boyfriend’s aftershave. I wished the car were not a stick. My father’s ghost pulled out behind me, following so close I could not see the hollow, blind sockets where his headlights had been. I heard his Dodge, the wet repeated cough and pitiless locust whine of its ruined engine, and saw my father grin behind his aviator sunglasses, white teeth flashing in his ragged sandy beard. He lifted his beer can, a long forty-ounce, in toast or salute. We slowly navigated the leafy residential streets, and he followed without gaining or losing an inch.
She was waiting on the front step: my sweet friend, in makeup that did not suit her, her naturally shining hair bound in some dreary artifice. Her muted pimples glowed beneath layers of powder. I saw she’d covered over everything I loved in her anxiety to please me, and my heart turned like a diving plane. I wanted nothing more or less than to convince her not to worry, to murmur reassurance and hold her head against my chest. But my father was only steps behind.
We went through the old dumb show of pinning the corsage and posing for cameras. Her beaming parents betrayed no sign they noticed my shuffling, belching father on their lawn. I think they knew. They were remarkably polite. They seemed not to mind their daughter leaving with a haunted boy. I walked my friend to my borrowed car, opened her door, and stepped to the driver’s side. I got behind the wheel and was no longer in my mother’s boyfriend’s Pontiac. I was in my father’s Dodge.
My date sat, still and nervous and pretty, hands folded politely on her lap. She gave no hint she was sitting in a totaled car. I shifted into first and lunged into the street, tilting my head to see the road through the shattered windshield. Her parents waved from their steps. The car smelled of smoke and spilled gasoline, and its front alignment had bent in the crash so it took constant struggle not to veer into the oncoming lane. My date smiled expectantly. I thought I heard my father move and mutter in the back seat, but dared not look away from the narrow sliver of visible road. I turned on the radio to cover his noises, but then my father’s voice was on the radio, low and vulgar and steady. The ghost’s voice rasped and taunted, describing my date’s tits, her ass, her hairy little quim, and the increasingly obscene and repetitive things he maintained I wanted to do to them. I couldn’t tell if she heard.
I parked the destroyed car at the outmost edge of the parking lot, lurched toward the dance hall, and was steadied by the damp, nervous grip of my friend’s hand. She squeezed, just half a second, and I felt my weight recenter. I turned my face to hers and arranged it into a smile. I followed her inside, sat with her, danced. There was a polite and wary space between us, even when dancing. I did not know what to do. I didn’t know what she’d heard and what she hadn’t, what she discounted or forgave, what she hoped. I didn’t know how to speak of it. That space grew as the night did. What would she think if I touched her, with my father’s coarse prophecies in her ears? What would it mean to touch her knowing she’d heard? She tilted her face up to mine, questioning, but I no longer knew what was being asked. We danced, orbiting at an increasingly hopeless distance. Her eyes were expectant, and puzzled, and at last, on her doorstep, hurt. I could not explain. I could only see I was hurting her and be convinced that my touch would be more hurtful still. Then she was wholly out of reach, and I drove home, carefully, by myself. My father did not keep me company.
I left for college without knowing if my father’s ghost would follow. My mother could not come, even to drop me off, nor leave soon enough to make the welcome ceremonies. She’d planned to drive me, to take the three of us on a last family road trip, and spoke sentimentally of that plan all through June and July. But then, as so often, her shift at one job changed, and she had a problem with the boss at the other. She could no longer get the time off, no longer quite had the money. The Pontiac-owning boyfriend departed with ill feelings. Our family had come to expect these things, the endless unexpected expected bad luck that cut off whatever we hoped for, and most surely whatever we were reckless enough to want openly. We wondered if our father’s ghost made these things happen, had somehow cursed us, or if his ghost afflicted us as part of a larger curse. We knew our mother could not manage the trip, and saw the knowledge in her face even as she spoke grimly about finding a way. I worried as the day neared, because there had never been any plan except one that would not happen.
It was two days’ drive, and the decision, just after the eleventh hour, was that I’d take the old station wagon with my brother, and he would drive the car home. Mom counted the gas money into my hand. “Don’t spend it too fast,” she said. “Your brother has to get home.” I clenched the ragged bills tight, seeing my brother gasless on a roadside two hundred miles away. My mother gave me a loaf of banana bread she’d baked to endear me to my roommates and a farewell hug. As I backed out the car I saw the crumpled Dodge in my rearview, suddenly lurching into the drive. I hit the brakes too hard, and the wrecked Dodge pulled back. My father’s ghost sat behind the wheel drinking beer from a can. He grinned and waved. I backed up. He pulled into the driveway. He pulled out again. After the fourth time he let us into the street. I put the car in drive and started forward.
For years we’d wondered, without asking, what would happen if we moved away. If we no longer slept under his roof, if we left this town even death could not rid of him, would we escape, or find him waiting? Neither my brother nor I spoke when we crossed the town and then the state line, looking forward at sunshine over the trees. He was with us along the highways the next day and night and day. Sometimes he tailgated, riding our bumper and threatening to pass on the right. Sometimes he hung back, barely in view, slipping between lanes. Once I saw his burning car miles ahead, the foundation of a smoky pillar on the median green. My brother pretended not to notice, and so did I, but we’d long since learned each other’s pretenses. “Don’t look at him,” my brother said at a gas station, as our father leered with his open head wound. “It makes it worse.”
The station wagon swilled gasoline faster than I expected, and highway prices ate through gas money like fire in dry grass. I ordered carefully at a truck stop Burger King, decided we should save the money earmarked for a motel. “Come on,” my brother said. “I’ve got this. Don’t make me sleep in a parking lot.”
Our father did not come inside our motel room, but rumbled all night through the halls, filling ice buckets and shouting lyrics of drunken songs. We lay silent and watched the ceiling. My brother had been right. It was safer not sleeping in the car.
We reached my college after dark on a long late-summer day. It was past dinner time, and my roommates were off at something the schedule called a “mixer.” I parked in front of the dorm and shouldered my duffel bag. My father was not inside. No one seemed to be inside. There was only the flickery yellow glower of overhead lights, the whitish tile of the floor, the dark-stained banister of the main stair. We climbed three flights without speaking. I followed the numbers to my door and turned the key in the lock of a dark room. I switched on the light, a sluggish fluorescent illumination, dropped my bag, and set my mother’s baked gift on a desk. There was a long, simple note from my roommates, explaining that they were not there. My brother and I sat drinking beer from cans, not willing to end the conversation or the journey, or else not ready to leave me in a silent dorm with darkness outside. We talked an hour and more. My brother would have to drive through the night, and we knew it. No one returned, no footsteps rang on the stairs. We were the only souls under that roof.
“Okay,” my brother said. “This is it.” I stood reluctantly, gave him a last hug, and handed over the keys. He went on his travels, and I remained on mine, and we watched to see which the ghost would follow.
Jim Marino’s stories have appeared in Apex Magazine, Literal Latté, CRANK!, Strange Plasma, and The Greensboro Review.