MR. LARSON'S PIANO

FOURTEEN

It was just a few minutes after 1 a.m. and I had hardly taken my eyes off the piano. Being a night shift worker, my last night before I started my next four-day rotation I tried to stay up as long as possible so I could sleep the next day and get back on my work schedule.

I was sitting in my recliner and sipping a cup of strong, black coffee (the best way to drink it, in my opinion). I had a paperback novel sitting on the side table to my right, but I hadn't touched it. My eyes were set on the piano as if it might do a trick-jump up and start tap-dancing and singing with a black top hat on its head and a cane in its hand like some corny old vaudeville performer.

None of that happened, obviously.

And, in reality, nothing happened with the piano at all that night. There was no music, no slapping of the fallboard, no green slime oozing out from inside. It was being just a piano tonight-the way it should be. Just a big hulking instrument that never really inconveniences you unless you stub your toe on the side of it in the middle of the night, and that leaves you alone unless you decide to play it.

Of course, there might be good reason for that, if Sherry Wilson's good-luck charm she'd given us actually worked.

After she and Marcy spoke on the phone earlier that day, they met in the Burger King parking lot and Sherry gave her what might be considered by some as a kind of talisman. Marcy said Sherry had told her that as long as they kept this item on top of the piano, Mr. Larson seemed to back off a little.

I looked over to the left side of the piano, and on the flat wood shelf that comprised the piano's top, was an old picture of Harold and Emma Larson on their wedding day. Sherry hadn't said how she'd gotten ahold of the picture, and to be honest I really didn't give a shit. All I cared about was if this lucky rabbit's foot of a picture would truly work, or if everything Sherry had told Marcy about the picture was all in Ms. Sherry-Lynn's head.

The night wore on, silent as the night Christ was born. I was doing more than making sure the piano, or Mr. Larson, wasn't going to act up, I was trying to figure out what we could do to rid ourselves of both of these items-the instrument, and the ghost that came with it. Sure, we could do what the Wilsons had done and just pawn both of them off on someone else, make them someone else's problem like had been done to us, but I wasn't to that point just yet. I wasn't that desperate.

The time might come when I would be. I didn't expect the magic of the wedding picture would last forever, and I needed to have a game plan in place before that day came. And from what Sherry Wilson told us, it was impossible to destroy the piano, as if Harold Larson had it wrapped in some kind of supernatural armor that made it impervious to outside attacks.

The thought did cross my mind that maybe I should try it anyway- just beat the ever-living shit out of it with a sledgehammer, and if that didn't work, drag the damn thing down to the railroad tracks in the middle of the night and let that big yellow Union Pacific locomotive do its worst. Let Harold Larson haunt the train tracks at night like a real ghost story. But I put those thoughts out of my mind. It wasn't worth the risk. God knows we didn't need old Harry getting his panties into any more of a twist than they already were.

For now, we really had no other choice but to leave things as they were. And as long as Mr. Larson kept his distance and his peace, I'd be okay with having him as a somewhat unwelcome visitor in our home. As long as the talisman held up its end of the bargain and kept the boogeyman at bay, we could live with that.

And we did, for almost another full year.