It's three in the morning and Samantha is driving down Highway 1 and her father's ghost is sitting beside her smoking an unfiltered Camel. Samantha's arms and legs are thrumming with energy because she's at the beginning of a manic episode. It's not fully there yet, but she thinks it won't be long before she sees it coming up fast in her rearview mirror. She's driving her Mustang Cobra and her father leans over and his face is still handsome beneath his supernatural glow. He raises one eyebrow. He smiles his big, shit-eating grin—a neon smile that's only for her.
"Stand on the gas pedal, girl. Give us some fun."
Samantha laughs, but her voice sounds strange to her, as if she's listening to a recording of her childhood voice. She floors the throttle and the speedometer swings up past 140 and the car batters its way through the air, all motor and roaring wind, but when Samantha looks back, her father isn't there. The sounds of the car fade away, like sounds in the movies sometimes fade, and Samantha hears the echo of her father's laughter. It's the way he laughed when she was a girl and she'd just done something brazen—tried to throw a pitch that made him stop crowding the plate or gone after his queen in chess. That head-shaking laughter of his that she'd do anything to hear again.
But her father is making himself scarce and so she slows the car down to ninety and it feels slow enough for her to get out and walk. On the seat beside her is a small stainless steel box. It's US Army issue and it has a milspec number and a black metal label that reads: Container, human remains, one each. Her father was lost, but now is found. He went MIA in Vietnam, but the Army finally dug up what was left of him and now Samantha is taking him for a ride in her fast car. She knows it's what he wants, because that's what he asked her to do.
* * *
Earlier that day, Samantha felt the energy building up beneath her like an enormous wave in one of those movies where the actors are forever shouting things like: "HOLD ON!" and "OH, SHIT!" She hadn't taken her lithium for three days. She took a hot shower, scrubbing her thin body, the body of a woman who didn't schedule her meals. She dried her closely cropped black hair and put on waterproof makeup because she had no idea where she would end up. She looked solemnly into the mirror and winked at the face that was shimmering just behind her own. She'd been flying straight-and-level for almost five years, taking her meds every day like a good girl, but now she needed to let the beast out of its cage. It was time for the upside of the bi-polar equation. She didn't think she could face what was coming next without a little help from her friend, Doctor U. B. Wild.
She'd done this before, and so she knew how to prepare herself. Before she started to get the giggles, she put on a plain, black dress and hiking boots and she hid her credit cards in places where she couldn't easily find them. She began to believe that anything was possible, and that maybe it wouldn't be so bad, this rough business that was waiting for her. The stuff of nightmares, really. She'd signed her name to the government forms, and soon she would meet a flag-draped coffin at the airport. The Army had sent photographs of what was left of her father: four scraps of bone, a rusted .45 pistol, and a scorched set of dog tags. She hoped the mania would help her through the next few days—that it would dull the sharp blade of reality, as it always had before.
She was dusting her apartment, trying to burn off energy, when the phone rang and a colonel with a deep voice told her that the aircraft was inbound. The man's voice was slightly proud, as if he were asking Samantha to come view a newborn child. Samantha felt the adrenaline rush that always came just before the euphoria.
"OK, then," she said. "Yes sir. I'll be the woman wearing black."
"We'll dispatch a car for you."
"No," Samantha said. She took the phone away from her ear and shook her head at it. "No offense colonel, but my daddy told me never to ride with strangers."
The man paused. Samantha put the phone back to her ear and thought she could hear the rustle of his frown. He cleared his throat and then he told her where the aircraft would unload its cargo and then Samantha was on the road in her Mustang Cobra. She knew she shouldn't be driving, but she needed to have at least that much control over things.
The Army flew the coffin from their Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii. Samantha's father was the only cargo. The Army knew it was him because they'd matched his DNA. They were 99.82% certain. A board of scientists reviewed the findings and the Pentagon brass agreed that all the corroborating evidence was in order. Samantha was instructed to sign a stack of photocopied forms that came by registered mail. She imagined an Army drill sergeant saying, "You're not fucking dead until I tell you you're fucking dead."
The aircraft landed like a fat, metallic goose at Moffett Field and then it taxied to the Cadillac hearse the Army had leased from a local funeral home. It was raining on the flightline and foggy and cold. Samantha carried an umbrella and she wanted to cry, but she couldn't. She also wanted to giggle but didn't. The pressure was enormous and she didn't believe it was her, standing here, doing this. For a second, she thought she saw her father standing beside her. He was sporting an electric-blue glow and wearing aviator sunglasses, Bermuda shorts, and a Grateful Dead T-shirt. He was standing at attention in his ridiculous getup and saluting his own coffin. But Samantha only saw him for a flash of time and she didn't believe what she saw and then he was gone.
The honor guard folded the flag and gave it to her. It was all wet and stiff and perfect. They loaded the casket into the hearse and Samantha got into her Mustang and the world was black and shiny and much too real. There was a police motorcycle escort and she pulled behind the hearse and turned on her headlights. She remembered reading somewhere that the headlight ritual was a modern rendition of pagans carrying burning torches to keep evil spirits at bay. And the motor cops used their sirens and it sounded like wailing but then the hearse did something that hearses don't normally do: It did a massive burnout on the slick tarmac, spinning its tires furiously and getting sideways. Samantha thought she heard her father laughing, and then he appeared on the seat beside her, clear as day.
"I always wanted to do that, girl. Seemed like a waste for that meat wagon to have all that beautiful horsepower and never use it. Hope you don't mind." He patted her knee and she felt the pressure and a hint of coldness from his hand. She shivered and her muscles tightened. Her father's voice didn't echo like supernatural voices created in Hollywood. It sounded as real as anything else—the wind, the sea, the beating of her heart. Samantha rubbed her eyes, shook her head, opened and closed her mouth, but her father was still there. She didn't believe he was real, but she didn't want him to disappear and so she remained silent.
"I know I don't have much credit with you, girl—but I'd like you to do something for me," he said. He took off his sunglasses and made them disappear and then appear again in his hand. "Take me to that little house we had down the coast. The last place we all lived together." And then he faded away.
The hearse stopped behind the big VA hospital in Palo Alto. Men in lab coats rolled the coffin through a set of automatic doors. A group of veterans were chain-smoking outside the hospital and they watched Samantha park the Mustang and walk through the creaking automatic doors and into the stale old building. She felt them staring at her ass, but when she turned, they made themselves extra-busy with their cigarettes. Her father's coffin was nowhere in sight. It was only a few seconds, but it seemed like hours before two men came to greet her.
The tall one wore a lab coat and he stepped in front of the short one and said her name, Samantha Edmonds, and it wasn't a question. He said that he was a doctor, but not a medical one. He was a forensic anthropologist and Samantha thought it was somehow appropriate that her father's remains were dug up and studied like the shards of an ancient culture. The man stretched out his hand, but his gray eyes were locked on Samantha's breasts and she still felt the vets outside watching her behind, and it was as if she were caught between two groups of hungry animals. But then the short man stepped forward and his eyes were full of apology, regret, kindness, dread. He was wearing neatly pressed Army greens with the insignia of a major. He kneaded his black beret in his pudgy hands and Samantha felt sorry for this short man who seemed so desperate to be somewhere else.
"I'm sorry for your loss, ma'am. He's in there," the man said, nodding toward a set of battered double doors. "Your father's in there."
Samantha's hands were tingling and she felt the wave rising within her and the sweet acceleration pushed her forward and it almost overpowered the grief. The sorrow was very strong, but it was also very old because she hadn't seen her father since she was ten. But every so often she thought she heard his voice. Sometimes after a manic jag, when she fell down into the deep pit of depression, she thought she could hear him telling her to stand up, get up, damn it—quit crying and climb back up to the world.
She followed the men into a white room with bright lights and there were rows of steel gurneys with dusty old wheels. The major opened the coffin. There was a box inside it and he opened that, too, and Samantha saw her father's bones arrayed like a child's unfinished Halloween project. She recognized a scrap of skull, the top of a femur, a spongy bit of vertebrae, maybe a clavicle. She remembered riding on her father's shoulders. She resisted an urge to hold the bones close and then she fought an urge to throw them against the wall. The manic episode was lifting her higher and higher and then she heard her father's voice again.
"Remember what I asked you," it said and she murmured, "Yes. O.K." but she was worried because she knew that people who hear voices shouldn't let the rest of the world in on their secret. She hoped she wasn't becoming completely psychotic, and then she felt him run his fingers through her hair.
"Daddy?" She stood on her tiptoes and peered down into the coffin. "Is it really you?" she said and she turned to the Army men but they only looked at their shoes. Samantha put on her poker face, the one she used when she was manic or high and didn't want anybody to know it. The voice said, "Pack me up and take me home, Tiger. Promise me." And then she believed it was her father, because he was the only person on earth who ever called her "Tiger."
The short major was saying that her father was entitled to a burial with full military honors: Purple Heart, an honor guard, a nice sendoff. But Samantha said, "Box him up—I'll take him." She was riding the wave. Rising straight up into the sky. She'd been holding it back for five years. She leaned over the coffin, no longer caring what the men thought. She whispered, "I'll take you home, Daddy. I promise."
* * *
Samantha is still driving ninety miles an hour on Highway 1 when her father reappears in the car. She looks at him and smiles and then she frowns.
"Sorry about all this spooky shit, girl," he says, "and about how things turned out. I wish I could do more for you."
The light in the car changes slightly and then Samantha sees her father very clearly. His neon glow is gone and he appears to be ordinary flesh and blood. Young and whole and smiling. Just the man she wanted to see all those years ago.
He pats her knee and says, "We'll get through this." He smiles and puts on some music, Carlos Santana's Supernatural, and they're grooving together, Samantha loving the way Carlos can make his guitar wail like a living thing, pain and pleasure all at once. She feels her father next to her and she isn't angry with him, as she'd thought she might be. They're as close as possible, considering they're on separate sides of the highest wall in the universe. Samantha remembers how things were when she was a girl, sees it all laid out before her like a feast, and the music pulls the old love and sorrow up to the surface of her. She's manic and her father is dead, but they're together again.
Before they arrive at their destination, Samantha stops at a 24-hour gas station and it's an island of light on the sandy plain. She gets out and the muscles of her thighs quiver with energy. She looks for a hint of sunrise on the horizon, but it's still too early. The air is warm and the trucks drone up and past and away. While she fills the tank, Samantha watches the back of her father's head through the rear window. The warm air and the impending-dawn sky and the lonely hiss and moan of the freeway remind her of another time.
She'd once traveled cross-country with her father. He'd taken emergency leave from the war and they weren't traveling for fun. She was a little girl and her mother had just died. Suicide or accident, nobody knew. Scotch and secanol, she later learned.
Samantha and her father didn't have much to say on the trip, but she was happy to be with him and he seemed happy to have her there. The funeral was on Martha's Vineyard because that's where her mother was from, and that's where the money to bury her came from.
Her father drove and smoked and he did the things that fathers are supposed to do—asking her if she needed to stop, buying her ice cream cones in the small prairie towns, promising her that everything would be fine, tucking her into beds at motels where the road sounds continued through the night and masked her crying.
They endured the funeral together, but then her father left again. She cried for days when he left her with her Aunt Millicent on Martha's Vineyard, but then one day the tears wouldn't come anymore. She had her first manic episodes that year, and the deep depression that followed, and it was like riding a demon-possessed roller coaster. She made three complete cycles before the doctors diagnosed it and prescribed lithium. She never told them about the sounds she heard: whispers from above, sighs rising to laughter, distant music, as if an invisible concert was being held in her honor. And she was just beginning to learn to live with the numbness caused by the drug, in a world without distinct lines, where colors faded together like the hazy sky over a lukewarm sea, when her father was reported missing in action.
She remembers exactly where she was when she heard it the news. Standing at the top of the staircase and listening to the polite, uniformed men, watching them sweating through their crew cuts. Seeing their tight way they held themselves. Hearing fragments of what they said. Missing. The word felt innocent to her. A product of bumbling hands, haste, a lack of concentration. Maybe if she thought about it hard enough, she could bring her father back by answering the question: Where did I see him last?
They arrive at their destination—an Army base near the sea that had been closed by an act of Congress. A rusted cyclone fence blocks the entrance and it has trash stuck in its wires, like food stuck in teeth. There's a guard shack just inside the fence, but its windows are dark and there aren't any vehicles or signs of life. Samantha looks at her father and he nods. She points the Mustang at the weakest-looking part of the fence. She floors the throttle and crashes through, and then she's driving on roads she remembers from her childhood days, and it's like falling into a dream. She feels her father beside her, the wave beneath. The adrenaline rush of excitement comes from nowhere and everywhere, and she wants the dream to last.
She drives to base housing with her father's box in her lap. The walls of the houses loom up in her car's headlights, their shadows turning and pointing away from her when she passes. She was a child there, and she knew the names of the families who lived in the neighborhoods. It was her entire world, once, but it seems smaller, now.
There are no young men and women to cut the grass and paint the buildings and trim the hedges. No white glove inspections. They used to "police the area," walking and stooping to pick up cigarette butts and tiny bits of trash, like roosters pecking for seeds. Everything was severe and well trimmed, as if nature itself was the enemy. The palm trees were pruned like the haircuts the men wore: "high and tight." The power lines were straighter. Cars were shinier and people said yes sir, even if it wasn't required, and the flags came down at the same time, on every flagpole on the base, as if people waited the entire day for just that one event. Taps. She used to imagine that everyone got into their beds and stretched out at attention, all at the same time, and then saluted and fell asleep to a secret cadence that ran deep inside them.
Samantha finds the house, and it's much uglier than she'd remembered—the two-box design of living quarters and garage, the fake stucco texture stained around the lower parts. Embarrassing, really, like seeing stains on a loved one's underwear.
But Samantha and her father sit together in the car and it seems to her that they'd just gone out for ice cream. Before her father went to war, they often stayed in the car after going out, as if they didn't want the good time to end. They sit until Samantha sees the dawn forming in her rearview mirror, and then they get out.
They laugh as they walk through the door—her small hand in his strong one. Inside, Samantha envisions the 70s décor: flowered curtains and shag carpeting and decoupage on the walls and funky candles and beads dividing the rooms.
"Looks like a Bangkok cathouse in here," her father says and then he smiles. Samantha thinks she can smell something cooking. Lamb maybe, and freshly baked bread. Her mother is humming to a Joni Mitchell song on the radio. It's the1970s all over again, a late summer day from long ago. She has sticky hands and ice cream breath and soon her mother will smile at her and tell her to wash for dinner.
She goes to wash her hands, but she's pulled back to reality in a sudden rush because there isn't a sink or toilet in the bathroom. It shocks her, but she's still riding the wave and she giggles and she turns and sees that her father is still there, standing in the hallway, watching her. The dawn is beginning to grow in the sky and she knows that he won't be there when it gets fully light.
Her father squeezes into the small bathroom, beside her. He presses something into her hand. The lithium. It's hers, dated just last week. Her father says, "Take it, girl—take your medicine for Daddy," and she shakes a pill into her hand and swallows it dry.
He holds out his hand and she takes it and they walk through the house that had been in Samantha's mind for so long. She'd never really thought much about the structure itself—built as temporary housing for WWII draftees. The thin walls, cheap plaster, squeaky floors. She sees the stroboscopic flashing of lives coming and going: generations of soldiers leaving to fight across the Pacific, their families left behind. Now it's as empty as her father's coffin in the base cemetery. The cupboards are empty. No dry goods or cans of soup. The refrigerator is gone and she looks at the place where it was and thinks it's strange that the wall behind the appliances had never been painted. That nobody had bothered to really finish the old house in all the years since it was built.
But Samantha and her father are walking together like they used to walk. Hand in hand. And Samantha leads him to the smaller bedroom. Her old room. She opens a trap door in the floor and takes him down into the crawlspace. She kneels with him in the place where she used to hide, where she used to dream. The dust is cool beneath her knees, and she remembers pale summer light streaming through mesh-covered openings. Her parents thumping across the floor above her. Her mother washing dishes, forever listening to Joni Mitchell on the radio. The twinkling sounds of silverware against stoneware plates, and then later, the sound their of voices coming down from the world above.
She kneels beneath the house where she learned how to tie her shoes, how to duck-and-cover, how to pray and really mean it. Her father puts his arms around her when she begins to dig the hole. His hands move to her shoulders and he squeezes them and then his fingers slip gently away. She smells cigarette smoke and feels a brush of whiskers against her cheek. Samantha's hands tremble as she pours her father into the hole, his brittle bones clinking together like poker chips.
She pushes a blanket of dust up over him and then she climbs upstairs and stretches out on the lighter part of the floor where her bed once stood. She's very tired and she closes her eyes. She waits for the sound of footsteps, the hushed warmth of clean blankets, strong hands tucking her in. She keeps her eyes closed and waits for the gentle pressure of her father's gaze. She doesn't hear him whisper "good-night," but she takes it on faith that he had.
Copyright © 2001 AZX LLC
