Kill Whitey

His body—what was left of it—was never found, despite State Police divers and repeatedly dragging the bottom of the lake. They found a seven-foot long catfish, a stolen car, and another corpse—that of a teenage girl who’d been missing for three months, abducted and killed after her car broke down at a lonely exit ramp along Interstate Eighty-Three—but there was no sign of Whitey. No bones. Not even his clothing or jewelry. He’d vanished. The authorities had other cases to solve, and this one had wrapped itself up pretty neatly, so they didn’t go searching for explanations. The theory was that the storm had increased the lake’s currents, and that Whitey’s remains were sucked down into one of the sinkholes and deposited in the network of caverns beneath the surface. Either that or the catfish ate him. The cops seemed pretty satisfied with that explanation. I was supposed to accept it, too.

But I didn’t. Not at all.

A little more than a year later, I was up late one night. I’ve suffered insomnia since it all happened. My new apartment was quiet. I sat on the couch, drinking beer and petting Webster. Bored, I flipped through the channels, looking for something to watch. The first Friday the 13th movie was on, and I settled for that. It wasn’t until near the end of the film that I remembered the conversation I’d had with Yul and Sondra when we were hiding in the abandoned warehouse. Before I could change the channel, Jason lunged out of the lake and attacked a woman in a boat. They’d thought he was dead, but all that time he’d been down there waiting.

When he jumped out of the water, I screamed. My beer spilled all over the carpet and my pizza fell onto the couch. The sudden reaction startled Webster, and he ran away hissing. My neighbor pounded on the wall, telling me to quiet down. I put my hands over my mouth and screamed again.

Webster stayed hidden for hours. Maybe it brought back bad memories for him, too.

I didn’t sleep the rest of that night.

I don’t sleep much at all anymore.

Eventually, my hair grew back. It doesn’t get very long, and there are places where it’s still thin, and my scalp shows through, so I wear a ball cap most of the time. My body healed, for the most part. A little stiffness sometimes in my back and neck. I suffered some permanent hearing loss—not enough to make me deaf but enough to qualify for disability. So I’ve got that going for me. I don’t have to work. Now I sit around all day, bored. At night, I do the same thing.

Once I got it back from the authorities, I traded in the Jeep and bought a blue Chevy Nova instead. Found it at the junkyard for cheap and restored it myself. New paint job and tires, rebuilt engine, chrome rims, custom upholstery. I had to get rid of the Cherokee. I didn’t have a choice. Every time I drove it, I’d think of my friends. Once, while listening to God Forbid on the way to the grocery store, I swore that I smelled Darryl’s cigarette smoke. Not a ghost. A phantom memory, of course, but a painful one. I still don’t believe in God or demons or spirits. Whitey was almost certainly supernatural, but that doesn’t prove there’s an afterlife. It just proves he had some fucked up genetics. Spirits don’t exist.

The only kind of ghosts we see are the ones we carry with us.

Mine are with me all the time. I can’t get rid of them. I’ve tried. I drink and find things to occupy my time—try to lose myself in sports and sitcoms and whatever else is on TV. Turn my music up and try to drown out the world and the voices in my head. But no matter what I do, I can’t lose my ghosts. They haunt me like those abandoned industrial parks haunt this state.

I drive out to the lake sometimes, on days like today when the weather is bad and the park is deserted. I don’t bring an umbrella. I let the rain fall where it may. I walk out onto the pier and throw stones, skipping them across the surface while the storm rages. I think about my friends and of Sondra, and especially Whitey.

They never found his body, but I don’t believe he got sucked into a sinkhole. If he had, then why wouldn’t the same thing have happened with that missing girl’s body? Her corpse was discovered.

Whitey’s is still missing.

Fish have stem cells. So do frogs, and everything else that lives in the lake. I wasn’t sure at first, so I looked it up on the internet. I found out that scientists use fish stem cells for all kinds of research. What if Whitey can use them too? What if Sondra was wrong? Sure, maybe he would have preferred the stem cells from his own offspring. Perhaps they were more powerful or gave him faster results. But what if he had no choice? What if he had to rely on the stem cells of other living creatures—like fish? There are plenty of fish at the bottom of the lake. Rasputin drowned beneath a frozen sheet of ice. Maybe there weren’t any fish around when he went. But it was summer when Whitey and I faced off on this shoreline.

What if Whitey isn’t dead?