Listening for Ghosts by David Rabe

Author:David Rabe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Delphinium Books
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

I HAVE TO TELL YOU

one

Three pennies, two dimes, four nickels, and two quarters formed a nest of coins on the cutting board balanced on her lap. She had to strain against the fog deep inside her hand. It muffled her effort to work the penny across the faded brown surface, the poor old wood almost worn blank. But she concentrated and managed, the coin traveling like this little nomad, this little child, and she was helping it along, holding its hand. It was terrible the way it had all worked out. All of them dead. Even little Teddy. Dead in the desert. An old fat man. Not a dime to his name, nothing to leave behind, but the clothes on his back. Nothing to call his own but a six-pack of beer and half of it gone. Found by strangers in his little oneroom rented apartment, probably a shack. A bunch of rented furniture. The last letter he’d written to her had joked about the way he had to be on the lookout for rattlesnakes when he trekked through “this no man’s land,” as he called it, until he got to the road, where he could walk to the bar. Just like her penny, he walked for miles. It was three, if she remembered right—three miles to the bar/restaurant kind of hangout where he could play cards or bingo. She could get the letter out and reread to be sure, if she cared to. As if it mattered how far he walked to get to that joint way off in the desert, so far from home and family. All of ’em dead anyway. What was he even doing there? Arizona, for god’s sake. She’d stayed home, all her life, while the rest of them left and came back to visit and left and died. Just like him, walking that Arizona desert road. No car for him. Drunk behind the wheel, one too many times. Put him away in a California prison. She hadn’t really believed it was him, her baby brother, dead when they called. She’d wanted to go see the body. But how could she do that, going on eighty years old herself. It felt wrong, almost impossible to take on faith. Just a phone call like that. A stranger’s voice on the other end. It could have been anybody. It wasn’t, of course. And she knew that, too. Just wished she didn’t. He was nice enough, that stranger. A policeman trying to answer all her questions about the body, the way they found him, this corpse alone in his bed. Little Teddy. The baby of the family. Stinking of beer and worse, for sure. The TV on. Dead for days. So five years younger than her. She knew the tally, but wanted to work it out anyway, like it was something hard to be sure of. Little Teddy, born in December 1923, would have been seventy-two if he’d hung on one more month until December 11, 1995. But the poor kid didn’t make it.

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