Hometown Tourist

 

It always surprised people to find out that there even was an IT industry in West Virginia. Half of the state was still on AOL assuming they had Internet at all. Hospitals even the size of Meadowbrook was wired. There were no actual paper trails with medical records thanks to Bill Clinton and HIPPA. Some nurse left a senator’s STD screen in the break room one too many times.

The real issue here is that prior to 1998 Meadowbrook Hospital has no records.

Victor pulled his truck into the dirt lot in front of the New Haven Aslyum. Ramir whistled when he dropped out of the passenger side. Victor couldn’t blame him even at high noon it was creepy as hell. Even without the fog…might actually help the old folks in the New Haven Rest Home right across the hospital. Wouldn’t have to look at the thing.

“Shit!” Ramir spat. Victor looked behind him. Ramir was spread out on his stomach. His laptop case was just out of reach. “Tripped over something. A rock. Someone carved nineteen thirty-two on it.”

“That’s a grave, Ramir.” One they actually marked, anyway.

He jumped to his feet and snatched the case. “There are a thousand tortures I would rather endure than being here.”

Can’t blame him…I’d rather have Mary rip out my heart again. Their badges may have read Meadowbrook Memorial Information Services, but their paychecks read New Alliance Technology Solutions. A subsidiary of the New Alliance group recruited all across the state, but they didn’t have to look very hard to find Victor. He’d always been here. With one big exception.

NATS contracted full time to Meadowbrook and the mines. That fact always caught people by surprise. Victor guessed that when people pictured coal miners they still pictured blackened men with pickaxes attacking a seam of coal illuminated only by a tiny, dripping candle on the front of their hardhat.

They stood in the doorway. Or rather a hole in the wall. Could have just parked the truck in here. Victor clicked on his flashlight. No windows. The walls were stained gray. Any furniture or equipment had long been stolen or rusted away by now. The doors weren’t even left. The walls were dripping with graffiti. During the summer this place was quite a happening hangout for students of Goodwill High. His spotlight fell on red words Marcy Was Fucked Here an arrow lead down.

John Denver’s Country Roads rang off the stark walls.

He pulled his phone from the belt clip. It was illuminated by Mary’s photo. She wore an exasperated smile and black threads of hair hung over her face. This was the first photo he snapped on the phone. She had just woken up from a nap.

Victor sucked on his lower lip. His thumb hung over the big red Decline button. He walked over to the window behind his desk. The phone reported no bars and the call disconnected. He clipped the phone back to his belt and his hand went instinctively to the white band around his finger. He twisted the skin between his thumb and forefinger. His personal worry stone.

An e-mail dropped into Victor’s inbox from the higher ups the week before. New Alliance wanted a site survey of New Haven before starting renovations. They didn’t want to repeat the same mistakes – this time they wanted a paper trail that could outlast the town. They wanted to resurrect this building that started life as New Haven Industrial School for Colored Boys in 1906.

Victor crossed from the yellowed grass to the stone floor. The call disconnected. Ramir raised an eyebrow.

“No bars,” Victor said. He clipped his cell phone back to his belt. For a moment the screen illuminated Jenny Loves Mothman in blue.

“And they criticize arranged marriages,” Ramir said. “The key is we lead separate lives.” Ramir was the cliché Indian Admin and in Goodwill of all places. The only one Victor had ever met. “Well, we gave it our best. Let’s go for drinks.”

“Means nothing. I get one bar tops by my desk.” Victor unzipped his laptop case. He bit down on his flashlight and pulled a Dell notebook out. He retrieved a tiny Linksys box from a side compartment. LEDs sparkled like little, green stars. “Start from the basement. Work our way up.”

They turned into a stair well following the yellow spotlights. One eye following the light, the other on their instruments. MacGuyver in green. Seriously? Spelled it wrong to boot.

Victor’s stomach collapsed. He wanted to turn and run. Just to flee this building that blossomed after an awkward puberty into the New Haven Colored Sanitarium in 1927. Desegragated in ’58. Closed in ’79. They say the doctors lobotomized the lot of them for the hell of it and chucked their bodies out the back. Not all of them from the hospital days. Of course, they say that about any old asylum.

Except the New Alliance bulldozers unearthed the mass grave in 1995. Delayed the project for over a decade. The Sentinel reported that there were remains from fifty-seven bodies in all.

“No signal,” Ramir said.

“No surprise there.” Victor’s nostrils flared. His nose hairs now cinders.

“You smell that?” Ramir dashed the spotlight around the room. The black fell away from a table like a cloak dropping to the floor. It was burdened by an array of brown bottles ranging in all sizes. A blue, steel still towered over the bottles as the table’s centerpiece. Plastic tubes ran down from the still to the propane tank tucked under the table haphazard like an exposed circulatory system. “What is that?”

“We need to get out of here,” Victor said in a harsh whisper. “Right now.” They turned on their heels back towards the staircase. A grinning skull stood in their way.

“What are you doing in my house?” Except it came out “mah hawse.” His hand scratched over his stubbly face. In this light the man’s rotten teeth looked like they were filed to points. Please, please, please just be a trick of the light.

“We were just leaving,” Victor said. “Saw nothing.”

“What are you boys? Ghost hunters?” he said. “A little early for that, ain’tit?”

There was a soft click and the sun blossomed in the center of the universe. Ramir and Victor held up their hands like they could hold back the flood light if they just applied themselves.

“Got a fancy laptop,” another voice called.

“You..you can have it,” Ramir said. He placed the laptop on the ground and slid it towards the light. He had no idea if it got anywhere close.

“Looks like we’ve got ourselves a sand nigger.”

“Bet you don’t even have a green card!” the other vagrant said. The spotlight fell on Ramir’s face. “First Nine-Won-Won…”

“Look! My family is from India. I don’t have a green card because I was born in this country-” Ramir pleaded. He stood frozen like a deer in the headlights.

“Then my baby Mama lost her phone job!”

“And now we have a got damn A-rab president.” The meth skeleton shook his head. He made the motion of flicking a tear from his yellow eye. “Ain’t it just a fucking, crying shame? What has the world come to? Our boys go off to die, but we still got the enemy right here in Goodwill.”

“I suppose the retired Navy plates on my truck don’t mean a God damn thing to you?” Victor said.

The skeleton shrugged. “Stockholm? I’d a thought you’d known better, Beenadick.”

The vagrant set his floodlight on the ground. He swaggered towards Ramir the light flashed silver off his cleaver. Ramir’s lower lip trembled. “Should I cut his head off like they did to our boys? But on account of you’re a veteran…just castrate ‘em.”

Victor closed his eyes and shut off the flash light. His eyes popped back open – he could make the faint figure of the skeleton by the flood light. He threw his forearm over the skeleton’s neck and pulled the pen knife from his pocket.

The flash light clicked back on, and the skeleton clenched his eyes out of reflex. He felt a pressure against his eye lid and his eye push back into the socket. A tiny pearl of warmth was already forming against the lid.

“Move one more step!” Victor said. “And I put his eye out.”

The vagrant glanced back for a second and a silver crescent flared. Ramir gurgled and stumbled forward before collapsing outside the stream of light. The smell of iron and shit pierced Victor like a bullet. All of Victor’s air escaped his mouth and his muscles slacked. The vagrant buried his elbow into Victor’s gut. Victor thrust his knife, but missed the mark.

The knife skittered out of sight like a cockroach. The skeleton turned around glaring at him a yellow eye through a lanced eye lid. Victor brought the flashlight down in a fury of blows. The light extinguished and plastic shattered on the skeleton’s hands and forearms. His heel slipped on the blood blossoming from Ramir’s crumpled body. The skeleton tumbled into the vagrant.

Victor bolted for the stairs. The graffiti streamed past. He raced out of the Asylum and into the fog. He turned the corner around the asylum and charged further into the white void. Where is my truck? He could hear boots pounding against the soft earth. Black figures formed in front of him. Then the crooked forest of TNT sprung up around him. He curved his route. I can circle back around.

The footpads were closing in. He could hear the breath burning in their throats. Victor tumbled over a root. He ran his hands over a white dome. An igloo. One of the munitions bunkers left dotted all over Mason County during WWII. The door was unlocked. He pushed it open and propped it closed with his body. It was black and damp inside. He twisted his ring finger.

The stomping ceased. He braced himself and stopped breathing. It felt like hours passed before they moved on. He exhaled slowly and deliberately. His thoughts finally caught up with him slicing through the adrenaline buzz.

His chest heaved. What the hell are you doing? Pulling this kind of shit…it’s been a long time since Desert Storm. Who are you kidding? It’s been a long time since basic training. You were an engineer in Canada for fuck’s sake.

This is what crying would feel like.

There was shifting outside the door. The crunch of brown leaves under steel toes.

Your little stunt got Ramir turned into a Pez Dispenser. He actually had something to live for. Now all he has to look forward to is spending all eternity filled to the chin with shitty candies.

Then the stomping continued on until it was a faint whisper in the dark. Victor allowed himself to breath again. Why didn’t they look inside? Of course…He had to ram right into the igloo to even see it. He thought of checking his pulse. That’s what runners do, right? He jabbed his two fingers to his throat. Then chuckled and shook his head.

The door scrapped the ground and swung open once his body was lifted from it. He surged forward. Didn’t know how long he had before the meth necks circled back around. That little, haunting slice of Palin’s real America.

There was the rattle of chains. His right leg whipped from under him. Victor would later say that it all went black, but to be honest, it already was.

3

Victor saw himself riding a raft of logs drifting down the Ohio. Not so much Huckleberry Finn as lumberjack. The logs were flanked by grey boats from the Company. Goodwill was in the grips of its second boon. The timber payload was en route to the steel mills of Pittsburgh. Victor knew this in the same way we all know our dreams.

He lost his balance. Nothing-new there. The lumber vibrated from under him. His ears were ringing. The Ohio was violent today. He opened his eyes. A cloud of black soot billowed over him. The timber rattled apart and the ground fell out from under him.

He plunged into the black Ohio waters like forty-three more souls would in December, 1961. He broke the surface only once. He caught a glimpse of the ship. Orange light danced across its bow. The name New Alliance blazed in red paint stood out on the stern.

Then like those Christmas shoppers dumped from the Silver Bridge the cold seized him. His muscles were frozen. He descended into the black as smoothly as a knife through your only friend’s throat.

His legs dug into the bottom of the river. A blue light spread across the bottom. Something was moving. A school of fish? No, the Ohio was littered with corpses. They writhed and danced with the tide. He saw one blue face staring at him from the driver’s side of a sunken car.

Beside him Ramir stood. Victor spun his head in his friend’s direction. Ramir was bound in chains. He looked as if he died while trying to protect his privates. Maybe he was.

Then there was Mary.

Mary was the only vibrant and living creature on the bottom of the Ohio. She glided without effort through the icy waters towards him. Her skin was cast green in the light. Her tangle of hair darker than the water.

She pressed herself against him. Her naked body resurrected his dead muscles. Heat spread over his body. She pressed her lips against his and put breathe back in his lungs.

There it would stay trapped his lungs for all eternity. He knew this because it was a dream. Her hand pressed against his breast.

The pain roused him awake.

4

Moonlight crept through the door ajar. The Goodwill’s breath hung overhead. Victor pulled himself upright. His back drenched in stagnant water. His ankle throbbed. He unbound it from the chain that wrapped around it once, maybe twice. He propped himself against the wall. He limped out of the Igloo.

He staggered in the direction moss grew. He knew north would take him to Point Pleasant eventually. Might even lead him back into the Goodwill. God alone knew where he was. TNT – that could mean anywhere. Might as well just say Timbuktu.

His phone chirped. He unclipped it and found he still had no bars. It chirped again and the screen went black. He considered chucking it before clipping it back to his belt.

The sound of engines running pricked up Victor’s ears. He closed his eyes and listened. Trying to discern the direction of the road. Stumble out onto to route 79 waving like a madman. Hope to God no new Mothman stories sprouted as a result.

Then the low rumble was closing in on him. Victor half ran and half stumbled forward. Light flashed through the trees and Victor took a dive. He slid on his belly behind a lichen flicked stump.

Hunters. He was sure of that. Maybe they won’t be the same ones.

“We know you’re still out here, Beenadick!” cried a man mounted on an ATV.

“Your got damn Ching Chong truck never left,” the other hunter roared over his ATV’s engine. Victor pretended he was a Neanderthal trapped in ice. A static man trapped within the same silent second for all eternity. They would lose him again one inch at a time.

A techno beat of Hava Negila chirped from the pager at his hip. Even out here the Hospital could call him. Always at the wrong time!

The stump burst and thunder clapped through the trees. Victor hurled his pager. The meth necks threw their ATVs into reverse. Did they think I had a grenade? Victor made a run for it.

Thunder clapped again. Victor’s body crumbled. A black rose blossomed over his breast. He slid on his side through the muddy creek bed and fell face first into the water.

The meth necks pulled their ATVs up to the creek’s edge. Their rasping laughter hung over him when they cut the engines. Their flood lights danced over him.

Victor laughed and the men stopped. Because they didn’t get the joke. He hurt all over, he still laughed. “You missed!” Victor laughed and dabbed his fingers against his oozing wound.

Another slug tore through him. Victor slipped and landed on his ass. He laughed even more. Like many of the creeks running through the TNT this one was fed by the Ohio. The meth necks plunged up to the ankles in their filthy boots. They were in his domain.

A bubble surfaced and popped. Mary burst through dripping from head to toe. Her skin was gooseflesh. Her nipples were hard lentils. The hunters could only stare.

 

A correction. This was her domain, but unlike these men he was allowed here. They were little fish and they had no idea just how big the pond really was. The bigger fish always ate the little fish. It’s just the way of the world.