From behind the polished mahogany bar, I watched the front door open and caught a glimpse of the darkening sky. A blast of street steam cut through the air conditioning.
“Head’s up, Jennie, spooks,” whispered Reggie, my manager, as the clairvoyant with the big hair and thick black cat-eye makeup led another group of tourists into the tavern. Sweat clung to their faces as they lined up for the bathroom, still clutching the multi-colored crystals on little silk ropes and copper dowsing rods that moved only with help from a ghost. A group of men who looked like they were from the Philippines or Indonesia ordered seven IPAs. I held a plastic cup against the tap and watched the light golden liquid form a small layer of foam.
The ghost tours came in every night, usually around the same time. Sometimes, while standing outside on a break, I would catch a little of it. Cat Eyes the clairvoyant would tell a story of a woman whose husband threw her from an upstairs window after he caught her having an affair.
I would watch as Cat Eyes coached her charges on how to talk to ghosts. “Is your name Addy? Cross her rods if your name is Addy,” she’d say, while a tank-top-wearing tourist nervously gripped a copper rod in each hand. People seemed to play along, and they didn’t take it too seriously. Some of them just looked embarrassed, and I didn’t blame them. Walking around with their arms clamped to their sides, bent at 90-degree angles with metal rods jutting out from their clenched fists -- they looked like something out of a low-budget fifties sci-fi movie. You can’t walk around like that and not feel like a little bit of an asshole.
“I don’t want to take this ghost into the bathroom with me,” muttered a woman clutching copper rods. Her cheeks were red like she’d been out on Tybee Island and forgotten to put on sunscreen.
“You can leave them on the bar,” I said. She nodded gratefully and dropped the rods on the bar with a clank. After she disappeared down the narrow hallway to the bathroom, I glanced around to see if Cat Eyes was watching. Her back was turned, so I picked up the rods and whispered, “Hey, ghost. Is this pseudo-scientific bullshit?”
I gave the handles a gentle squeeze and the wiry rod-ends crossed. Reggie grinned and nudged me with his elbow. I set the rods back on the bar just as Cat Eyes turned around. From the smile on her face, I could tell she hadn’t heard me. She winked one of her black-rimmed eyes, and I suddenly felt a shiver.
The woman with the sunburn came back to the bathroom and picked up the dowsing rods. She released a sigh.
“Come on, ghost,” she said. When I caught her eye, she laughed. I could tell she just wanted to go back to her hotel and put on TBS.
Cat Eyes herded her group back out onto the sultry street. The bar was suddenly quiet again, with just a few people dotting the square edges of the bar. An old country song came on the jukebox. It was a rags-to-riches tale about a prostitute who got rich enough to buy a mansion in Georgia and a townhouse in New York.
“You know her, don’t you?” I asked Reggie.
“Who?” he asked. He dropped a stick of olives into a martini glass and passed it to a customer.
“Cat Eyes.”
Reggie shrugged. “She comes in here all the time, but I don’t, like, know her, know her. Why?”
“I was just wondering if she really believes in all that stuff. Like, does she really think ghosts are controlling those rods? Does she think the same people talk to her every night? If you were a ghost stuck in the same building for 200 years, would you really talk to random people?”
“It’s an act,” said the white-haired man drinking the martini that Reggie had just poured.
Reggie shook his head. “I don’t think it is.”
A young couple came in and took a seat at the bar, eyes glassy from whatever cocktails they’d just been drinking someplace else. I knew their order before they opened their mouths: Whiteclaw hard seltzer for her, Corona with lime for him.
Half an hour later, the bar was empty except for two customers, so Reggie cut me. I walked slowly toward the bus stop, minding the damp, mossy cobblestones. I’d been in Savannah for 12 weeks and I could finally walk over the uneven bricks without constantly tripping. But everything that had enchanted me when I first came here -- the gas lamps flickering on every porch, the searing pink azaleas, the secretive antebellum shutters and the hanging gardens of Spanish moss -- had all flattened into everyday scenery.
Post hedonic adaptation, or whatever it was called, my life didn’t seem so different from when I was back home in La Crosse. I still tended bar, only now I served fried green tomatoes instead of cheese curds, and catered to ghost hunters instead of hockey fans. I still lived in an apartment in which a narrow strip of linoleum with a fridge on it counted as a kitchen. I still had no boyfriend and was getting nowhere with my songwriting.
As I rounded a corner near a house with black shutters, I heard a strange, pulsing static that sounded like a badly tuned radio. A group of people was clustered around the wrought-iron fence. I recognized her pile of hair silhouetted against the lamplight: Cat Eyes. Her tour was nearing its end. The static was coming from a small device in her hand. Every few seconds, it caught half a word or two beats of a pop song.
Wouldn’t it be funny, I thought, if it gave a full traffic report or the score to the Braves game? That would be spooky.
A voice broke through with one syllable -- “Ma” -- before dissolving back into static. A young girl in shorts slapped a mosquito on her calf.
“Is your name Mary?” Cat Eyes asked. The tour group stared up at the house, waiting for a curtain to rustle in the dark. During the day, the house was a museum. The walls were orange but looked red in the dark. On all but one of the windows, the black shutters were closed tight while a palm tree stood guard. I’d heard that the museum people hated ghost hunters like Cat Eyes, and that was why she only brought people by here at night after they’d all gone home.
“Mary Stanley, is that you?” Cat Eyes pointed to a window on the upper floor. “Mary Stanley was the daughter of a wealthy Irish merchant. She jumped from that very window when the man she was supposed to marry was arrested and hung.”
“Hanged,” I corrected. All the eyes in the group turned toward me. Cat Eyes was still clutching the noise box in her hand. Her eyebrows met in the center of her face.
“What?” she asked.
“Hanged. When you’re talking about execution, the past tense of ‘hang’ is ‘hanged.’ ‘Hung’ is for a totally different kind of ghost.”
One of the Indonesian or Filipino guys, for whom I’d poured the seven beers earlier, burst out laughing. The man next to him said something in a language I couldn’t decipher, and when the first man replied, they all laughed. He must have translated my joke; I wondered how you would say ‘ghost with a big dick’ in Tagalog or Malay.
Cat Eyes turned around and went on with the story of Mary Stanley. She told the group that on one tour, while standing in front of this same house, a voice broke through the din and said, “Go now.” Things like that always seemed to happen on other tours.
A bus ride later, I was back at my apartment. I noticed the orange glow of a cigarette in the shadows of the upstairs porch.
“Evening, Jennie,” said my upstairs neighbor, Kelvin. I wondered why he insisted on sitting in the dark like that. He sat up there all day, braiding palm fronds into rosettes which his daughter sold in her souvenir shop down by the river. I told him about my encounter with Cat Eyes, thinking he’d laugh at my ‘hung’ joke. Instead, he took a long pull on his cigarette and crushed it out on the floorboards.
“You got to be careful,” Kelvin warned me. “When you stir up haints, they have a way of following you.”
I crossed my arms. My bra was swampy and I needed a shower. “I didn’t stir up anything,” I said.
I heard the crackle of cellophane as Kelvin opened a fresh pack. I could just see him on the news someday, celebrating his hundred-and-tenth birthday, telling the world that the secret to a long life was two packs a day.
“You oughta say a prayer for protection,” he said.
“Kelvin, the only thing that goes bump in the night around here is you.”
His laugh crumbled into a cough and I said goodnight.
I tossed my purse into a corner, next to my Hofner acoustic which I hadn’t touched in weeks. There was a faint smell of mold coming from the carpet that seemed to be worse than it had been the day before. I’d already called the landlord twice. It was just like in La Crosse when I slipped on the ice because the caretaker never got around to shoveling the snow.
After my shower, I flopped on the bed. The springs groaned under my weight. I could hear Kelvin upstairs, tracing square patterns on the floor. Why did he always have to practice his waltzes at night?
I drifted in and out of sleep, waking in time to see the hours click by on my bedside clock. I dreamt I was in a painting; the artist had laid down a thick stripe of dirty white that met an equally thick stripe of gray. Over that, he painted a small house with icicles dragging down the eaves. The door opened, and I found myself inside. My father was sitting in his recliner, clutching a can of Stroh’s. When he got up, he revealed the split in the leather where bits of foam poked through.
“Jennie,” he said, “you can’t run from who you are.”
I opened my eyes. It was just after three. I turned over and stared at the little green light on my air conditioner. I squeezed my eyes shut again.
A wet wind from a far-away hurricane lashed the wrought iron gates of the cemetery. Cat Eyes was there. Her noise box was on the ground in front of her, pushing out garbled nothing. She wore a neon pink dress and a necklace made of amethysts that covered her entire clavicle. I wanted to tell her it was gaudy -- like a pair of Barbie roller skates -- but I couldn’t unlock my jaw. She thrust a pair of rods into my hand. The handles felt icy and I feared my skin would stick to them.
“Cross Jennie’s rods if you think she’s a good soul,” she commanded a nameless spirit. The rods did not move. I squeezed the handles, but they remained motionless. On the other side of the cemetery gate, a bat fluttered from tree to tree, disappearing into the curtain of moss that hung from a live oak.
“Cross her rods if you think she should leave.”
The copper rods inched closer and closer until the two ends made an X. Cat Eyes grinned, her amber irises suddenly glowing. The flame from a gaslamp danced across her chest full of amethysts.
“The spirits want you to leave.” She snatched up her noise box and pivoted on her toes like a ballerina, her pink satin transforming into flowing black lace as she floated away.
“Leave where?” I asked as she vanished into the soft fog that rose up from the cobblestones. “Leave the cemetery? Leave Savannah? Leave the planet? Specificity would be helpful.”
Through the fog, I watched her silhouette slowly dissolve. With the rods still in my hands, I turned my back on the cemetery gate and ran toward River Street. I slipped on a set of steep, slate stairs, but sprung to my feet, unhurt, when I reached the bottom. I could hear the sound of the river rushing toward the ocean. The Georgia Queen dozed peacefully where she was docked, the moonlight shining on her paddlewheel.
I whipped the copper rods as hard as I could into the water. They barely made a splash as the current swept them out to sea.
In the morning, I could feel the dark circles around my eyes, as if they had been sucked back into my skull. I found my guitar on the floor next to my bed. Two of the strings were broken and the headstock was chipped. I cradled its varnished wooden body against my chest and ran my fingers over the chip. How on Earth did this happen?
After I got dressed and locked the apartment door, I saw Kelvin sitting on the upstairs porch, smoking his first cigarette of the day.
“That was some song you played last night,” he said.
In spite of the heat, I suddenly wanted a cardigan. “Song? What song?”
Kelvin laughed. Smoke flowed through his nostrils and the spaces between his teeth. “It wasn’t any song I’d heard before. I couldn’t make out the words. You were picking the hell out of that guitar, though.”
I wrapped my arms around my chest. My toes curled against the soles of my sandals. “Sorry about that,” I muttered.
All morning, I meandered around the Victorian porches of Starland, trying to remember picking up my guitar during the night, but all I could think of was my dream of Cat Eyes and the graveyard.
When I arrived at work, Reggie told me I looked like hell and poured me a shot of bourbon before my shift started. A few hours later, when the ghost tour came through, I noticed a man wearing a Brewers jersey.
“You from Wisconsin?” I asked him. He came and sat on a barstool across from me.
“Madison,” he said. I poured him a tap beer. The pearlescent foam sloshed over the side. I told him about my dream about being back in La Crosse, about the gray-and-white winter landscape. I expected him to say something like, “I’d love to live down here -- I’d never have to shovel snow again!”
He set his beer down and said, “I love winter. I played hockey all the way through school, even college. I coach my son’s team now.”
He picked up the magenta-and-violet crystal that dangled from a white string. It began to spin in a circle. “The ghost told me that she’s a teenage girl who died from yellow fever,” he said.
“You believe in that stuff?” I asked.
He winked.
Cat Eyes came over to the bar. I half expected her to grill me and demand to know what I was still doing in town. But she just smiled and put her hand on the man’s shoulder. I poured the rest of his beer into a plastic cup so he could take it with him and watched him follow Cat Eyes out into the humid twilight.