Are You Haunted (part two)

Are You Haunted

(part two)

He heard crickets, and the repeated call of a whippoorwill. And they would not have started up, he knew this much of nature, unless the storm were retreating.

He heard Rohdl. “You know nothing about me. For a very long time, I will stay.”

He smelled Lloyd Guy’s cigarette. The Big Chief was probably sitting in his Ford, pulled up just inside the needless gate. When he opened his door and hurled the butt over the wall (where it might land on one of us, Powell thought), Guy would sound the horn.

Powell lay wide awake…dead tired, the night had been so warm; hungrier than he let himself think about most days. He kept still, an arm shutting out the sun. Yesterday, Guy had bought him a sandwich, that was the trouble. But he might again today.

“Don’t bring your friends out here.”

Powell pushed up sitting. “I don’t have friends.”

“I said to her, I’m not havin a woman out here alone. Plain crazy.” Guy took off his straw fedora and waved it under his chin. “Then your lady friend told me her husband went off gettin water for the radiator. I told her, I seen your old man, but I never seen any car.”

He wasn’t getting the Big Chief’s point of view. “Why wouldn’t you believe her? You drove me out here yourself. You know I didn’t have anyone with me.”

“I know when people turn up don’t belong here. I got two of em right now. And you told me you wouldn’t do a job for me. You must not be hurtin for money. No, sir, I don’t think she’s married to you, and I don’t think you got a vehicle hid somewheres. But I’ll tell you what I do think. When I haul her up here and show her to you, I’m gonna be watchin your face, close.”

“Only the one house among all the others.” Rohdl’s voice came to them over the wall. “The windows black as I recall them, but not shuttered. And why did a vine grow there, to poison itself? Why was I told to go away?”

“See, now, that’un—” Guy cocked his head. “I’m not inclined to do anything about, cept run him off, if I find him up at the house again.”

This was a confidence, on the heels of a threat. The house factored into Powell’s scheme, and he needed Guy to trust him, maybe like him. Guy, who was not really a cop, but talked as though he had been.

“You can’t sleep in the city park, son. But no one’ll mind you, if you spend the night out here. They won’t, cause I patrol the Drybrook place, and this old mill. You see, Kenzie…” He had shaken cigarette ash on Powell’s trouser leg. “You gotta stay on my right side.”

And taking Powell for a war veteran down on his luck, Guy had talked about a lot he owned that needed cleaning up. Five bucks, for what he called a day’s labor. Five bucks if it ended up two or three days’ labor.

Powell was a veteran, and down on his luck if you looked at it that way.

But he didn’t do chores for handouts; you got handouts for nothing. People looked down on you, thought you should have more pride…

But you didn’t.

2

Haunted
Are You Haunted (part three)

(2019, Stephanie Foster)