by George Uriah
Everywhere he went in Nashville, Joe felt the presence of ghosts. He swore he could almost hear their voices, which sounded something like a whispered opera chorus, though something tragic or sinister, something in a minor key, like the devils of the underworld were coming to pull him down. At best, this chorus of ghosts whispered of opium dreams and tempted him to succumb to eternal slumber, though perhaps they were more malevolent. Come waste away with me, they pleaded. Walking the once familiar streets, he’d whip his head around, expecting to catch one in the act of following his footsteps. But the ghosts preferred to remain anonymous.
Joe returned to Nashville to break his fall, to nurse his wounds. Or maybe Nashville was the only place he had left to turn. He had lost everything in life but he could never lose Nashville, or so he thought. The truth was that there were many Nashvilles and he had lost his the moment he last left.
Nothing was the same after six years away. Mostly it was all the same, at least on the surface. Most of the same buildings were there, but they were somehow different. The bricks and mortar were the same at first glance, but time must have subtly shifted their molecular structure in a way only detectable by instruments more perceptive than all human senses except the sixth. Something was different on the elemental level.
Joe wondered if Nashville was a mistake even before he caught his first glimpse of the skyline with the allegedly iconic Batman building. Nashville had a few structures worth calling icons, Joe maintained, but this was not one. He had all his belongings in a pickup truck, a sad testament to his nearly spent twenties, steeped in rootless wanderings. He chuckled at the image of someone his age crawling into Nashville with everything they owned in a small pickup and nothing left to lose. Nashville probably saw a glut of similar arrivals but Joe was certain he was the only one not hell bent on making it in country music.
Joe pulled up to his mother’s house after more than thirty hours of driving. He had left Montana on the front edge of a February snowstorm. He didn’t fully outrun the storm until Kansas City, driving through the Northern Plains with visibility near nothing, his headlights shining on nothing but a swarm of snowflakes. More than thirty straight hours of white knuckle driving found him crossing from Kentucky into Tennessee, wondering if his homecoming was a mistake. Perhaps it was the latest of many mistakes. Joe had joined the Army to get away from his stalled life in Nashville. He had moved to Montana afterwards to get as far away as he could from the madness of the military. And he was running to Nashville because he had gone too far when he had run to Montana.
When he arrived in what qualified as his only hometown, Joe’s mother walked out of her gingerbread brick house to greet him. “You’re home,” she said, trying to fight back the tears and failing. “I ordered a pizza,” she managed to say.
“I could use something to drink,” Joe replied, knowing his mother likely only had boxed wine in the refrigerator. It would do.
Joe sat down to a meal of boxed wine and pizza. He chuckled, recalling many similar combinations of food and drink. When Joe had graduated from college and was home waiting for his entry into the Army, his grandmother lived in his mother’s upstairs rental apartment, the place where Joe would soon live. Many nights she was alone and Joe climbed up the stairs on the outside of the house to keep her company. It was always just the two of them and Joe’s rapidly fading grandmother would slip him a Jackson to go for takeout. She had ceased cooking for herself when she was caught pulling leaves off an outside shrub to make a poke salad that was nearly inedible and possibly poisonous. Joe would come back with a rotisserie chicken meal from a Caribbean place, usually having donated some of the side dishes to a Vietnam veteran asking for relief on the corner of the freeway entrance. Looking guiltily at the unkempt vet, Joe would toss back the bottle of Mad Dog he had bought with the change and needed to finish before arriving home. He was counting down the days until his military induction and he hoped he’d never be on the receiving end of a charity side item after being tossed aside by a country that often ignored its veterans unless convenient to political causes. And as he pulled into his street, he always tossed the bottle out the window so that his grandmother might never know his truths. No one could know his truths. Not even Joe knew them.
“So what’ll you do once you get settled in, son?” Joe’s mother asked, in no way implying a sense of urgency.
“I don’t know,” Joe shrugged as he finished the first of many glasses of wine. “Maybe I’ll go to Europe. Maybe I’ll apply to graduate school. I’ll probably get a job somewhere along the line. For now I’ll just catch up on some sleep.”
Joe unloaded his pickup truck early the next morning before the cold rain that was the leftovers of the Rocky Mountain storm caught up to him. The tarp he had used as cover had kept things mostly dry. He dragged his worldly possessions up the metal stairs on the side of his mother’s house that led to the apartment he’d call home for the foreseeable future. And then he went back to bed as if he hadn’t slept for years.
The next day, Joe went to Radnor Lake to walk around the manicured lakeside trail in the biting rain that was forecasted to last for several days. Having spent the past six years mostly in the Rocky Mountains, a large part of him wished the rain would be snow. He was the only one at the park, or so he assumed by the fact his truck was the only vehicle in the parking lot.
Joe chuckled when he saw they had started charging for parking. “That’s new,” he remarked aloud as if someone could hear him among the grayness. He didn’t bother to pay, correctly assuming no one would bother to check. By Southern standards, only lunatics braved rain that was a few degrees away from sleet. He would gladly be that lunatic today. Joe pulled over his thin poncho that would soon be soaked through. Then he started down the trail.
It was then he first started hearing the whispers of ghosts. He thought someone might be hiding in the brush, though the vegetation was now stripped to almost nothing by the season. But he was alone. He thought some thing might be hiding in the shadows, a deer perhaps. But he didn’t hear the rustling of leaves or branches. Only a mournful sound was audible, something like souls that had outlived even their memories.
Joe went to all the places he loved about Nashville and the ghosts followed him. He stood in line at the Pancake Pantry in the cold of a late winter morning, noticing the renovations that had happened since his college days a few blocks down 21st Avenue that seemed almost like a former life. He seemed to be the only one hearing voices. Everyone else held their conversations as if ghosts weren’t trying to interrupt their talking. He spent hours in the independent bookstore, now unfortunately in the mall, and in the last throes of its existence. He kept looking at the other side of the aisles to check if the voices he heard were from ghosts. They must have been but he never caught a flash of unexpected shadow. And no one else seemed to notice these whispered chants. Still, they followed him almost everywhere he went.
Joe suspected that his cat heard the whispers too. His mother had given him a kitten around the time he started high school. Gloria, the cat, stayed behind when Joe went to college and then the Army. Now that he was back, he reclaimed the pet that was supposed to be his. But all she did was sit in the front door of his apartment and look as if she would perish if forced to spend one more minute inside. So Joe gave Gloria back to his mother, conceding the fact that the cat had always loved her more anyway. But inwardly Joe convinced himself that Gloria only wanted out because of the ghosts.
Joe almost spoke to his mother about the ghosts. If anyone would believe him, it would be her. But he hesitated. She might think him crazy. She knew he had come home from Montana in part because his depression had nearly bested him. The howling winter winds and almost endless nights didn’t do him any favors either. Neither did the alcohol. He didn’t want to worry his mother regarding his mental state so he kept his silence. Joe could not find the words anyway. Human experience could not always be explained in terms of Newtonian science despite the natural urge to rationalize the inexpressible.
The voices followed him wherever he went, or so it seemed. Joe wondered if other people heard the same wails. Perhaps the sounds were so commonplace as never to be mentioned and he was the crazy one for just now hearing them.
Joe slowly eased into his new life. He found a part time job with a bank that would allow him ample time to study for the GRE and apply to graduate schools, as well as play video games games late into the night. His mother called one evening because she had woken up thinking someone had broken into his apartment. “No, I’m just playing video games,” Joe answered, not mentioning the bottle of rum he had finished.
A burglar would not be too far-fetched in the neighborhood, located on the wrong side of the Cumberland River. Occasionally helicopters flew overhead with searchlights aimed at finding fleeing criminals. At the gas station around the corner, two people were shot and killed in different incidents around the time Joe’s mother moved in. When Joe gave directions, he’d tell people to turn at the Murder Mart. “You know, the one that’s always on the news,” he’d explain.
Joe found a part time girlfriend down the street too, less than a mile between doors. He met Laura in the produce section of the nearby grocery store. She struck up a conversation when her young daughter kept smiling at Joe. Among other things, he mentioned that he had just gotten out of the Army. Laura had recently been set free by the Navy. She invited him over for dinner and told him her phone number.
When Joe showed up, she had chicken and dumplings simmering on the oven and a six pack of Miller High Life waiting for him. My type of girl, Joe thought to himself, even if the chicken was dry and the dumplings watery. He slept with her that night anyway.
Laura panicked when Joe got up to leave afterwards. He came up with a lame excuse and assured her he wasn’t playing a game. The truth was that Joe could not spend the night because his mother would know when he got home and worry about him until he did. Even if it was a separate residence, the proximity was too close. Soon after arriving in Nashville, he had spent the night at the apartment of some girl he had met who had recently moved from New Orleans. When Joe rolled in about seven in the morning, his mother stopped him as he walked up the stairs to the apartment, wondering where he had been. He assured her that he had merely had too much to drink and had slept on the woman’s couch along with her two cats. If his mother doubted his story, she never let on.
Laura turned out to be a part time girlfriend. Her cooking was lousy but the sex was better. So Joe kept coming back, although he suggested to Laura that she could save some time and money and stop by KFC or Sonic on the way home when he was coming over. Her daughter liked Sonic’s tater tots anyway. And Joe hated the idea of Laura spending unnecessary money on his borderline alcoholism so he suggested she just buy him 40 ounce beers. Schlitz would do.
Time after time, Joe broke up with Laura because he couldn’t trust her. She seemed to change her mind daily on what she wanted in life. But Joe wondered who was really searching for something unnamed. Either way the relationship was more off than on. But Laura kept begging him to come back and she always offered an unbeatable combination of dinner, beer, and sex. She knew Joe loved sports too and her cousin was a baseball groupie who had first row season tickets behind home plate for the local minor league team. So Joe put off a complete breakup until the fall. And then she came through with Titans tickets on the lower level for half the games. So he put off a complete breakup until the winter. And then she came through with Predators tickets. So he put off a complete breakup again. Besides, Laura knew where he lived and would drive by to see if he was home when she called and he did not answer.
“I know you’re there; don’t ignore me.” Laura would scream into the phone, as if she would stop and burst through his meager screen door that was all he bothered to close in the summer.
Joe cursed himself for dating someone so close to home, especially on the nights when he brought someone else back to his place and Laura would see her car, wondering who it was. She’d leave scores of texts and messages if he hadn’t remembered to turn off the phone. Laura interrupted his exploits so many times he began to think she might be someone meant to be, or at least someone he could not very well escape; he couldn’t tell the difference.
“We are meant to be,” Laura insisted, “Just like that rap song about meeting the girl down the block.”
“That song’s about infidelity,” Joe countered.
But Joe would always get lonely and hungry and come back to Laura for fried chicken, malt liquor, and sex. He would always fall asleep in her bed afterwards, but never for more than an hour or two. In the night so still except for the rustling of the oak outside her window, the one with the swing in which Joe pushed Laura’s daughter delightfully, the ghosts’ whispers woke him up. He would have set an alarm but it seemed superfluous. At that late hour, he would have tried to talk to the ghosts but he did not want to wake up Laura. So he rose on cue and slipped into his clothes as quietly as possible and stole out the door. Most nights Laura never stirred. She had prescriptions well beyond her tolerance, a more socially acceptable addiction than Joe’s malt liquor.
Lying in his own bed one night after a drunken half-mile drive from Laura’s, Joe thought he realized who the ghosts were. He only heard their voices in certain places and situations. He had been visiting all his favorite places but he was visiting them alone. These places had only been special to him because of the memories and the memories were only special because of the others that shared them. And now those others were gone.
Yet for every good memory, there was something in Nashville that caused him an eternal sense of sorrow. Joe had fled from these and he had fled from the other sorrowful memories he created in the places to which he ran. He wanted to bury the sorrow. Perhaps he had done so by running away. But he had buried much more than his sorrow. And now the past was dead. Joe had strangled it like barren land strangles seeds thrown upon it. Joe had destroyed everything he once was and all that he once knew. The wages of sin were death. But what were the wages of
death? Joe had a feeling he would soon find out. The ghosts would tell him.
But why should he hear ghosts in Laura’s bed? The previous incarnations of Nashville had not included her. But, Joe reasoned, there had been many other nights spent in another bed. He had tried to banish the memory of the woman who had once made Nashville feel like his home. He could hardly recall, but in moments of honesty he remembered the sense of sorrow he felt when he realized he could never be the man she needed. He told her he would join the Army and head out into the world to become that man. But the truth was that he was running from all he despised about himself. And he had gone about it in the wrong way. He had murdered everything he was, killing the body to destroy the cancer. And he had slaughtered the love they once shared. Now she was the ghost outside of Laura’s window. The pain he had caused was still in Nashville.
Since she had left his life, Joe had desperately tried to fill her void with woman after woman that never stood a chance of assuaging the sorrow. Thirty new women couldn’t replace the old one. But Joe kept adding more and more in hopes that the total would somehow equal that which he had lost. It never did. And Laura was just the latest attempt at conquering an unbeatable foe. She would have to go. He’d do it tomorrow, unless she had something good for dinner.
The next day was Sunday. Joe needed something hard to drink almost as soon as he opened his eyes. But the local liquor laws prohibited the sale of all alcohol except beer on the Lord’s Day. And in another apparent attempt to boost church attendance beer could not be purchased before noon, still an hour away. So he took his time rising from bed.
He shuffled down the stairs on the side of the house and peeked into the neighbor’s yard, adjusting his lucky Angels ball cap. They had a couple of Chihuahuas they mated for profit from time to time. Pancho, the male stud, usually yipped at him as he walked down the stairs. But Pancho was mounted on his mate and concentrating on the task at hand, strangely silent for once.
Joe pulled into the Murder Mart with still a few minutes left until beer sales commenced. He looked at the drunks leaning precariously along the walls of the gas station like the sagging pillars of Stonehenge. “My god, I’m becoming an 11:55 person,” Joe said aloud. He knew he had been drinking too much lately but did not like looking at the consequences. He reminded himself to stock up the next Saturday evening.
Joe picked up a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon tallboys and found himself third in line at noon. First in line was his mother’s old boyfriend, a songwriter named Timm who came to Nashville when he was Joe’s age and never realized his dream. Joe always chuckled when he thought that Timm had added the extra “m” to his nickname to stand out in an artsy crowd. It had not worked. Joe thought about ducking behind the cooler but Timm spied him first and asked how he was.
“Oh, you know,” Joe shrugged. “I see you’re still an 11:55 person.”
“Some things never change,” Timm rubbed his wolfman beard and shrugged. “Tell your mother I said hello.”
“Sure,” Joe said, now first in line and reaching for his driver’s license. “See you around.”
As he paid for his Pabst, Joe made a mental note to tell his mother he had run into Timm. In the end, his mother had left Timm because he had more in common with Joe than her. When Joe was home from college in the summers, he’d come home from work to find Timm sitting on the porch with a case of beer. The two would sit out until the late hours of the night, remembering to throw some meat on the grill around midnight.
As he walked out of the Murder Mart, Joe saw Timm about to pull away. He flagged him down.
“Let me ask you something,” Joe said, “Do you believe in ghosts?”
“Sure, man.” Timm answered with no hesitation, “They’re all over this town. Things that died with unfinished business. They’re just trying to set things right. One of these days I might be a ghost myself. Who knows, you might end up as one too.”
Joe drove back to his place and considered walking up the stairs to his apartment. He stopped halfway up and walked back down to stop and see his mother. Pancho was still mounted and happy. He knocked on his mother’s door and she opened it for him. Joe walked through with his brown bag of Pabst, one already finished.
“You look rough,” Joe said to his mother.
“I didn’t sleep well last night,” she replied, “Your cat kept me up last night. She wanted to cuddle.”
“That’s what cats do.”
“I’m not so sure how many more of these nights I can take,” Joe’s mother answered. She always cited scientific studies proving that people with pets get quantifiably less sleep than those without animals in the house. “I might have to put her down.”
“It’s a cat, not a choice.” Joe told his mother.
“I know,” she answered, “I just don’t know how much more I can take, she’s fifteen years old. Her health is failing.”
“Just let me know so I can say goodbye if you do.” In the end, Joe’s mother was so sad when Gloria’s health failed and she was put to sleep that she didn’t tell Joe for a month. But he had long since moved on from Nashville. Gloria was just one more thing missing from Nashville when he’d later come home for brief visits, always too short to saturate his senses in the city.
“You don’t look so good yourself.” Joe’s mother replied.
“I didn’t sleep so well either.” Joe thought about telling his mother about the ghosts but changed his mind. “I have a lot to decide lately.”
“About graduate school?”
“Yeah,” Joe shrugged. “I need to reply to my acceptance letters soon. I think I’ll pick one and say yes. I can’t live here in Nashville anymore. It’s like everyone speaks a secret language I once knew but forgot in the years since I left. Only bits and pieces of the vocabulary and grammar make sense anymore. As much as I love Nashville, it’s not my home anymore. Home is a time and not a place. And Nashville’s time has passed for me.”
“I think you should chase your dreams,” Joe’s mother conceded. “Even if it means leaving me and this town.”
Joe thought the smart thing to do would be to stop running from his past. But in the end, even if it meant leaving unfinished behind, he felt he should leave Nashville for good. “In the meantime, Europe’s calling.” Joe said. “Maybe I can find the missing part of my soul if I look hard enough.”
“It may be my fault,” Joe’s mother suggested. “I moved you around so much when you were growing up that I made you feel rootless, like there’s always somewhere else you should be. But you’ll always have me. You’ll always have this place to call home.”
Home is gone forever the moment you leave it, Joe wanted to answer. If you ever come back, everything’s changed and it’s not the place you remembered. You look for smiles and all you see are ghosts.
Joe eventually stumbled up the stairs to his apartment, glancing at the still pumping Pancho. He thought about watching some Sunday game by himself but thought another beer or two might be good. So he called Laura.
She said she’d stop by KFC if he wanted to come over. There was still some beer in the fridge. Joe considered the thought that he intended to break up with her for good that day. A part of him regretted not doing so. But chicken and beer sounded good. Besides, the ghosts still had not told him what they wanted to teach him.
A few hours later, as the Southern sun was dipping down to the horizon, Joe walked down the stairs to see Laura. Pancho was still mounted and happy and he marveled at the dog’s stamina. He’d give the ghosts the rest of the summer to speak and then he’d find a new town in which to create new ghosts once again. Maybe they’d tell him what the wages of death were. And in the meantime, he was hungry.
About the Author
George Uriah‘s short stories have been published or accepted for publication in 300 Days of Sun, Timber Creek Review, Thin Air Magazine, Line of Advance, and the Southeast Missouri State University Press. His education includes an undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt University and a Master’s from the University of Tennessee.