Rusty Greenfield of 568 Berry Grove Road by Chris Tarry

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Rusty felt old, like time had finally caught up to the sound of his own name. He’d made up his mind a long time ago about life, figured there wasn’t much exciting left to see in the world, that anything new was just oldness recycled. So when the ghost showed up, Rusty was surprised. He’d always considered himself a rather scientific man, not prone to believing in such things.

It was a Tuesday evening. Nothing special. Rusty lay in his faded recliner in the middle of his broken-down living room. He was asleep, his body sinking into the ruined fabric of the chair; incremental time-stamped steps marked the cloth like the rings of a tree. The television remote rested in his lap, news headlines streamed across the bottom of a dusty TV screen.

For Rusty, the first hint that someone else was with him came through the sound of crinkling plastic; the type of plastic placed on couches not meant for sitting. It was a noise he hadn’t heard in years—ever since Helen had insisted on wrapping the couch in the stuff—and it spoke to him from somewhere deep inside his sleep. He opened one eye, then, slowly, the other.

“I was wondering how long you was gonna make me sit here,” said the ghost, the preserved couch faintly visible through his form. He wore a bent and flimsy cowboy hat and dirty, tattered clothes, his presence blue and glowing.

“Excuse me?” said Rusty, his voice thick.

“You Rusty Greenfield, aint you?”

“I am.”

“Rusty Greenfield of 568, Berry Grove Road?” he asked again, cross-referencing the address with a piece of paper pulled from his ghostly pocket.

“Yes, that’s me.”

The ghost rose, his imprint still slightly visible in the plastic covering of the couch. “Can I get you anything from the kitchen, Rusty? I need a beer.”

“And you are…?”

“…He’d made up his mind a long time ago about life, figured there wasn’t much exciting left to see in the world, that anything new was just oldness recycled…”

________________

The ghost didn’t reply, just stepped across the living room without concern for the furniture that lay in his path. He traveled though the old coffee table, walked straight over the dusty, crooked floor lamp, and disappeared though the wall into the kitchen, the smell of horses clinging to him as he left. Rusty remained in his chair, considering his options.

“I brung you one anyhow,” said the ghost, rising from beneath the shag carpeting of the room. Sure enough, two Schlitz hung midair from wispy, glimmering hands, both cans already opened. “Know what I hate about Schlitz, Rusty?”

“The taste?”

The ghost laughed an airy laugh, releasing the faint smell of peppermint into the room. “Nah, the slogan.”

“When you’re out of Schlitz, you’re out of beer?” asked Rusty.

“Yeah, terrible aint it?”

“I guess. I never really thought about it.”

“It just don’t make no sense.” The ghost examined his beer, held up the can in an attempt to read the label. “Four percent, huh? Guess you get what you pay for.”

“This is kind of unusual,” said Rusty.

“Yeah, how you figure?”

“You. Here.”

“Well, where else you reckon I’d be?”

Rusty couldn’t really argue. Seeing as the ghost was here, where else could he really be? The science was sound, he figured.

“Is there anything you would like to watch?” asked Rusty.

“I sure do like that Wolf Blitzer feller, twenty-four hour stuff is my thing.”

“Just when you think you’ve seen it all,” said Rusty, referring to the ghost.

“Yup,” said the ghost, referring to the twenty-four hour news.

Rusty grabbed the remote from his lap and switched the channel to CNN.

“So, how long do I have?” asked Rusty.

“About three hours, give or take.”

“Will I be able to walk though walls, carry beer cans through floors? That sorta thing.”

“With practice.”

“Okay then,” said Rusty.

“Okay then,” said the ghost.

The room went quiet except for the television. The approach of evening began to gently paint the room in darkness. With Rusty content in his chair, and the ghost seated comfortably on the couch, the TV lit the space and neither spoke. Wolf Blitzer talked of a long-ago disaster in a new country filled with cowboys and Indians. The CNN graphics displayed buildings in grainy black and white photographs, the pictures weathered and bent at the corners.

“I’ll be damned, I think that was my house,” said the ghost, straightening up and pointing at the television.

“Looks like a real nice place,” said Rusty.

“It was. Something new to see every day around them parts.”

The ghost leaned back into the plastic-covered couch, sipped his beer and stretched his legs out on the coffee table, the spurs of his battered boots making a distinctive clink as he did so. The television blinked and flickered, throwing intermittent light into the dark corners of the room. Rusty’s eyelid’s began to dip.

The ghost gently willed the remote from Rusty’s lap to his, changed the channel, and then settled in for the night—waiting patiently for Rusty to fall into a deep and glorious sleep.

_______________________________________________________________________

Chris Tarry is a musician and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The G.W. Review, PANK, Cell Stories, Paradigm Journal, Opium Magazine, Northville Review, Drunken Boat, Defenestration, Metazen, and others. He makes his living playing bass in New York City, where he’s also hard at work on his first novel, The Wedding King of Vermont. He’s originally Canadian and has won a bunch of Juno Awards, which are like Grammy’s but pointier. You can find him at http://www.christarry.com

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