I remain steadfast. To judge from the angle of my nana’s cigarette, she’s upbeat, happy even.
“That nasty place,” says Nana, and she makes a face. “Your papadaddy was headed out to collect you when he had himself the heart attack.”
I amuse myself by idly looking at my wristwatch. I pretend to warm my ghost hands over the sputtering, guttering campfire that consumes the mortal remains of Mr. Ketamine.
“Died right on my own front porch, I did,” says Papadaddy.
“Right on them steps,” adds Nana. “He grabbed his chest and keeled over.” She claps her hands together for emphasis. “He’d stopped breathing for twenty minutes before them paramedics showed up and revived him.”
Papadaddy shrugs. “What’s left to say? Not to brag, but I went straight to Heaven. I was dead.”
“You was not,” insists Nana Minnie.
Papadaddy counters, “I most certainly was.”
Undeterred, Nana says, “After they shocked Ben’s heart, the ambulance folks wanted to ride him to the hospital, but he didn’t want no part of going.”
Folding his arms, Papadaddy says, “She’s embroidering this next part. That’s not what went on.”
“I was there, you know,” says Nana.
“Well,” Papadaddy says, “I was there, too.”
“We’d been married for forty-four years,” says Minnie, “and he’d never before talked to me that way.” She says, “Maybe he was in pain, but that ain’t no excuse.”
“How could I talk?” says Ben. “I was dead.”
Nana Minnie continues, “No, he was bound and determined to go find you, pumpkinseed.”
Here, Gentle Tweeter, a theory is slowly coalescing in my supernaturalist’s thinking belly.
“After that,” Nana says, “he was like a different person.”
“I was like a dead person.”
Just to clarify, I ask, “You’re saying the rescue crew used a cardiac defibrillator on Papadaddy?”
Nana says, “He wanted to go find you at that terrible public toilet.” She says, “He was pale and limping. Them paramedics figured he’d die again at any minute.”
Papadaddy uses the tip of one index finger to draw a cross on his chest. “I swear,” he says. “I died in your nana’s arms on that porch.”
The paramedics, Nana explains, revived him and made him sign a medical release form. He waited for them to leave, but the moment they were gone he’d jumped into his pickup truck.
Nana leans close to me and confides in a stage whisper, “He called me the C-word!”
“We’ve been over and over this,” Papadaddy says, placating. “I did not.”
She coughs. “You called me the C-word, and then you went off to find Maddy at that nasty traffic island.”
My grandparents, they Ctrl+Atl+Bicker. They sulk. The patient, observant supernaturalist in me is sorely taxed. Finally, seeking some resolution, I ask, “Papadaddy? Listen. Did you, by any chance, go to the byway restroom and get your elderly wiener ripped off?”
He looks at me, aghast. “June Bug! How could you even ask me that?”
“Because it happened!” Minnie shouts. “Some monster ripped up your privates and you bled to death like a pig!”
“That didn’t happen.”
“I saw your dead body!” Nana says, “Don’t they watch the news in Heaven?” Her gnarled hands frame large, imaginary words in the air. “All the headlines blared: ‘Movie Star’s Pa Killed in Toilet Torture.’”
At this impasse in what is obviously a well-rehearsed stalemate, even as the continent of Madlantis founders in deep seas and flame-bedecked Boorites dash past us like human comets, I realize I’ve been mistaken. It’s obvious: Papadaddy Ben’s soul floated away, and another spirit took possession of his former body. Some ghost or demonic force used the shock of the paramedics’ paddles, like a juvenile delinquent hot-wiring a car and taking it for a joyride. Like I just now used Mr. Ketamine’s corpse. This strange wiener-wielding corpse rustler is who accosted me in the upstate toilet. Not my precious papadaddy.
Thinking fast, I cagily redirect my grandparents’ ire by asking, “Nana, do you know what I miss most about being alive?” Not waiting for an answer, I blurt out, “Your delicious peanut-butter cheesecake!” To my papadaddy, I say, “I’m sorry I wasn’t there to say good-bye when you died.” Pitching my words with an especially childlike sincerity, I say, “Thank you for teaching me how to build a birdhouse.”
I throw my chubby ghost arms around them in an awkward embrace as two red-tinted headlights approach. A strange automobile—spattered with blood, fringed with dripping strands of coagulated blood—cruises magically, silently up the steep side of the erupting mountain. At this most sweet moment of our reunion, a gleaming black Lincoln Town Car comes to a stop beside us.
Gentle Tweeter,
Nodding his head at the Lincoln Town Car, Mr. K’s ghost says, “This is my ride, right? I’m going to Heaven, like you promised, right?”
The driver’s door swings open, and a uniformed chauffeur steps out. First his polished, hooflike boots emerge, then his gloved hands, glistening and leathery, followed by the brimmed cap that must hide the two bony rinds that poke up through his not-combed hair. As he stands, he adjusts a pair of mirrored sunglasses that hide his eyes. He carries a sheaf of pages bound along one edge like a screenplay. This he lifts and begins to read from, aloud. “‘Madison felt faint with terror and confusion.’”
And I am, Gentle Tweeter, I do. I feel faint with terror.
“‘Her great, meaty knees wobbled, weak with horror,’” he reads, as if dictating my existence.
In fact, my knees are shaking.
The chauffeur reads, “‘Madison had served her maker well. She’d delivered billions of God’s children to the Devil’s clutches.’” He turns a page of his manuscript and continues. “‘Madison had betrayed even her own parents and condemned them to eternal damnation!’”
And, so it seems, I have.
Even Babette sidles up to savor my humiliation. To smirk at the sight of my defeat, asking, “How’s your psoriasis?”
“‘Little Madison,’” the chauffeur reads, “‘would soon render unto Satan every living soul whom the Almighty had labored to create. All that God loved, Madison had ensured that they would be given over for Lucifer to molest until the end of time….’”
The chauffeur pauses in his speechifying. He opens the rear door of the Town Car, and Mr. K readily climbs inside. The driver leaves the door open, and additional blue ghosts make a beeline for the car’s rear seat. The rapidly accruing spirits of Boorites burned to death, suffocated on toxic fumes, or drowned in the surrounding seas, these recently departed flock enter the door the driver holds ajar. They stuff themselves within. So many, so quickly that they blur, they pack themselves into this, this vehicle they think will ferry them to the heavenly hereafter.