GHOSTS CAN DANCE

THERE GOES KENNY'S EVERYTHING

     A sawed off pump gun.  Mannlicher.   Loaded, as always, safety off.  In the glow of the dash lights you could tell its shape under the raincoat between us.  It made me nervous but Vincent liked to have it handy.  There are crazies everywhere, you know.   And cops.  Especially cops. Those made me really nervous.  We'd just passed a speed trap at the foot of Suzanne's Hill.  Two cruisers.  I was wishing Vince would put his cannon in the trunk.  I told him.  He looked at me like I was asking him to church.  Said he wasn't speeding.

     Big city stress, Vince couldn't shake it.  Here we were, in the middle of a fifty-thousand-acre-patch of Great Eastern Company timber, and the man was acting like he was driving his cab through Roxbury with a pound of coke under the seat.  He had his eyes on the rear-view mirror, his chin up, nostrils flaring, listening for the faint whine of a faraway siren.  I was almost hoping for a crescendo squeal to pick up the beat of the piano-bar music on the CD player.  Now he was scanning the roadsides ahead.  Presumably for a bunch of crazies about to leap out of the spruce.  Jamaicans, guns blazing.  Or Conan-the-Barbarian.  You never know.  With all the looking everywhere but where we were going, I was surprised the numbskull hadn't put us in the ditch.  I wish he had, I might've survived the ride.

     Seven miles from home and three hundred more to go.  We were on the first track of a Barry Manilow CD.  Part of a box-set.  With all the speakers in the car I felt I was sitting in the orchestra pit at a Las Vegas all-star spectacular.  By the time we crossed the Mystic River Bridge they'd have the men in white put me away.  I had to lighten up the atmosphere.  Maybe Vincent would relax enough to poke fun at fair game.  Women. I would start with the topless one flexing muscle on the dash.  His new girlfriend, I guessed, I'd better be kind.  The red bars of the numbers on the digital clock were glowing through the snapshot, splitting her gold lame panties.

     "That's one rare babe," I said, "she's ON time!"

     I should've known he wouldn't get the joke.  Quiet for awhile, checking the mirror and the sides.  All was clear.  He came up with his choice of a good word for his love.

     "Built like a Mack truck, she's," he said.

     Vaguely conscious of wind noises and of the drumming of raindrops on metal I sat there, trying to think of something to keep the conversation going, come up with a line.  The fool had to dump it in my lap.

     "Her legs," he said, "too bad. They're a bit short."

     I couldn't help it, I had to say it.  "A Mack truck with a flat tire."

     He got it.  Next thing I was out of the car, walking home.  Grumbling something about seven-and-a-quarter miles in the rain.  Looking at the grass, a flattened can of Bud coming at me. Close.  Real close.  Trying to recall if I had stumbled.

     And there was this odd thing in beads and bell bottoms telling me to shut up 'cause hell would freeze over before I would need to walk again.

     "Just glide or ride, man", she said, "fly, slide like a bolide, never collide."

     A bo-what? Vince's imported weed wasn't so bad, I thought, but what was that at my feet, that crumpled puppet in my good L.L. Bean coat, that shape awash in sodden grass, dark muck spreading under it?

     The chick filled me in and I went ballistic.  Dead.  Sliding and gliding about the clearing.  A ghost.  Streaking across the road.  DEAD.  Howling to the clouds and raging at the wretched mess in the ditch.  Get up! GET UP!  Dead.  A ghost.

     "You going to calm down or what?" I went for her throat and sailed right through her.  I still shiver at the thought of it, the terrifying reality of it.  Two ghosts.  It wasn't love at first sight.