Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Graduate Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2009 Ghost Brian Phillip Whalen Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, and the Rhetoric and Composition Commons Recommended Citation Whalen, Brian Phillip, "Ghost" (2009). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 10617. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd/10617 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Ghost by Brian Phillip Whalen A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS Major: Creative Writing and Environment Program of Study Committee: David Zimmerman, Major Professor Steve Pett Marwan Ghandour Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2009 Copyright © Brian Phillip Whalen, 2009. All rights reserved. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS PART ONE 1 Ghost in the Valley 2 Bridge 17 Trick 25 Sheriff 34 Playhouse 46 Secrets 58 Chateau 66 Contracts 75 Escape 86 PART TWO 95 Ghost 96 Kayla 102 Knead 103 PART THREE 130 Susan 135 Gone 148 Alone 159 Dogs 170 Imbroglio 181 Panic 190 Ghost in the Water 196 Burn 208 1 PART ONE 2 Ghost in the Valley “Tell it again, Wardell." Kayla stood beside Wardell, watching him wave his flashlight in and out of drawers, over and around the tops and sides of furniture in the otherwise pitch black room. Cobwebs clung to every object, every surface covered in dust. Even though they found those pills, Kayla was bored. This was the third house they'd looted tonight, and she'd already found the one thing of value in the place. A silver ring she slipped on her finger without Wardell noticing. The house was cold. No electricity, no lights and no heat. She didn't care to rob the place. She wasn't after the loot, like with the other places. All she wanted was to hear about the ghost. “Come on, Wardell. Quit fussing and tell me how it happened.” The pills they took still tasted funky on her tongue. They didn't have water to wash them down with. She ran her tongue against her teeth and watched Wardell kept moving his flashlights over objects like a spotlight. “You’ve heard it before,” he said. "Why you need to hear it again?" "Because you only ever tell me parts. Never the whole thing. You get going, then you flip channels when the shit gets good." "Quiet down." "When you tell me." "Enough," Wardell said, brushing her hand off his shoulder. Kayla hung back while Wardell dug through the desk drawers. He found a little box filled with worn and faded Buffalo nickels. He pocketed the coins, then opened and closed the rest of the drawers. He thumbed through some jewelry in an old wooden box on top, but Kayla'd already nabbed the ring. Wardell pocketed an expensive-looking pen from the desktop. He dropped the 3 jewelry box into the bag he carried, where he'd already stuffed a few choice albums, a small table- lamp, and a handful of glass figurines. “Start with the part about the girl,” Kayla said. “How she fell in love, but her parents took her away. Then the accident. And the man who disappeared." Kayla pushed in close beside Wardell, invading his space like she knew he hated. Her head barely reached his armpit. Wardell brushed her off with a sharp elbow. “You know the story by heart." “I don’t know all of it," Kayla said, steadying herself. "Nothing but the gist." “You know enough.” "Not about the ghost." Wardell shone his flashlight around the room, hunting for something he might have overlooked. Something worth more than a couple dollars at the pawn shop. Kayla, ignoring the dull sensation where he'd struck her in the chest, poked Wardell in the back. She wormed her fingers up and down his ribcage. “Come on, old man,” she said. "Can't you stop thinking about money long enough to please your whore?" Wardell knocked her away, harder this time, turning his back as he walked around the desk. Kayla fell against the desktop, smiling despite the pain. She knew she was testing his limits. Wardell liked to shut up and focus on something simple when he was jonesing. Kayla liked to talk. But Kayla, more than anything, hated being kept in the dark. “It ain’t fair to keep things from me, Wardell. I don’t keep nothing from you.” Kayla moved the tip of her flashlight across Wardell’s back, spelling out her name between his broad shoulders. He walked to the far wall and started browsing the bookshelves there, beginning with the Z’s and working his way backward. She followed him, first with her flashlight, then with her 4 body. She slid beneath one of his arms, noisily fingering the books Wardell decided to leave on the shelf. The books he chose landed on the desk with a thump. “You gonna read all those, Wardell?” “Gonna sell em,” he said. Kayla stopped touching all the books he didn't take, and picked up a book he'd chosen. She flipped through it quick, scanning her flashlight across its many pages, then set it back on the desk. She glanced over the covers of the other books, all brown and black with no pictures. “How you know which are worth something?” “By the way they look,” Wardell said. They didn't look like much to her. She hopped around to the other side of Wardell and started looking at the books ahead of him. She pulled one at random from the shelf and shone her flashlight on the cover. It was brown and smooth, except for a central image engraved in the faded cloth. She couldn’t make out the design, but she felt against her fingertips several raised lines woven around each other to form some sort of spiral. She held the book up for Wardell to see. “How about this one?” she asked. Wardell took the book from her. He shone his flashlight on the spine, then flipped to the title page. He shrugged, then handed the book back to her. “Put it on the desk,” he said. Kayla started flipping through the book instead. She sat on the edge of the desk, brushing aside the other volumes. A few fell on the floor, and with each thud Wardell shook his head. Kayla sat with her legs spread apart, her bare knees poking out from beneath her skirt like two ends of a pair of tongs. She put her nose to the spine and inhaled. "It smells funny." 5 Wardell didn't pay attention. So she leaned back and stretched a leg in front of her, slid a foot up the back of Wardell's calf. He tried to ignore her, but his knee buckled slightly when she rubbed her foot behind it. “Can you tell about a book the way you can tell about a whore?” she asked him. He ignored her, even with her foot rising higher up his leg. "Tell me about the ghost, Wardell. I mean it." Wardell was running out of patience. She could see it in the way his shoulders tensed. He reached behind and smacked her foot away. “Damn, K!" he said. "Can’t you see I’m concentrating?” Then he smacked his hip. The sound of the buffalo nickels that jingled in his pocket reminded her of the snap of a dog’s leash. Kayla watched his fingers twitch. “When you first saw me,” she continued, sliding her foot back between his thighs, “Did you say, now there’s a book worth reading? Did you want to thumb through me, stick your nose inside?” Wardell set the flashlight on a shelf and clenched one hand into a fist. The muscles in his forearms quivered, but after a few seconds he stretched his fingers out, long and smooth, and slid them in his pocket. She heard him playing with the coins. "I wish we had more dope," Kayla said. Wardell threw a few more dusty hardcovers onto the desk beside her, then grabbed the flashlight and continued to judge the titles of the books. Kayla moved her foot this way and that between his thighs. She opened and closed to different sections of Walden . Every page was dense with words. Big words, too. Words she recognized but couldn't tell the meaning of. She flipped to the title page. “Walden; or, Life in the Woods ,” she said. “Ha! Walden. That's almost like Wardell!" With one shoe wedged between his thighs, Kayla kicked her other toe against Wardell's bottom. His once round and muscular buttocks were flat and weak, like two half gallons of milk. 6 She'd once seen him squat and toss a 150 pound dog over the fence like it were nothing more than a rolled up sleeping back. He still had strength left, but it was dwindling. "What do you say, Wardell? Wanna move in here with me, have our own little life in the woods? Cut down trees and hunt bears and shit? Let me read this book to you, maybe it'll tell us how." She noticed next to the title page a blank page where someone had written a list of names, each in different colored ink.