I asked once what scared you, and you told me you were afraid of absolutely everything. I said you walked through the world anyway, with your chin up, so that made you the bravest person I knew.
So—Dear Ghost: here’s a Letter, and a story.
When I was seven or eight, I met a kid. I don’t know what dark business brought me into his orbit, but I see country road and a dirt parking lot, light poles with bugs flying through every halo. I hear a chorus of frogs singing loud in the night. I don’t know why my parents pushed me in his direction and left for an hour. The circumstances don’t matter, but the frogs do, because this is a story about frogs.
“You boys are the same age,” my mom said when she introduced us, like it was some kind of happy miracle and she could never have imagined such a thing. “You’ll have fun.”
We were both white boys and the same age, so instant friendship got assumed. That’s the source of most things wrong with the world, ghost—the insistence on seeing ourselves in the mirror of someone else. In my experience, tribes composed of like people are nothing but pure evil.
Left to our own devices, we both knew immediately we were nothing alike. He was one of those tanned, confident lords of the playground; tall for his age, blond hair worn a little long, madras shirt and boat shoes. Small for my age, I wore black Keds with one broken lace and a crewcut. I loved Little League and wanted most of all, desperately, to be good at baseball, but I went to the batter’s box a guaranteed strikeout. I always had buttons missing from my shirt, and could never explain to my mom where they went.
I was scared of everything, too. Like you.
A lot of no-such-things followed me around in those days, and I imagine far to the west you were seeing them, too. I wish we wore Batman telephones on our wrists, when I was eight and you were seven. As soon as mine flashed and beeped, I’d hold it to my ear and you’d be on the other end. We’d agree that of course there are “such-things”, and that would be that. We’d decide whether we needed to do anything about them, or just keep walking scared with our chins up. We wouldn’t have been alone.
I must have played with the kid more than once, even if I only remember the frog, because I knew a lot about him.
His parents were very young.
The father was a budding movie star who had gone to California to work on a film. He left behind a Corvette Stingray convertible, carelessly stored with one soft tire and the top down. I had never touched a Corvette before, and to this day the recollection feels holy. The car was a Hot Wheels come to life. Orange from a distance, up close the color changed. The metal-flake paint moved like water—flecks of gold and silver and copper mixed into hard candy.
The kid told me that his dad bought the car brand new and had it repainted metal-flake before he would even drive it, like that explained everything. Maybe it did—buying something that ordinary people dreamed of owning, but it wasn’t good enough to drive off the showroom floor.
His mother was loud and pretty. She was trying to be in films too, and she filled the spaces around her with inappropriate laughter, beautiful hair, white teeth, and the perfume-stink of her fear. She moved around distracted, and every time her glance lit on her son, she shooed him with her fingers and told him to go play.
My parents whispered to each other, quiet so I wouldn’t hear, that the movie star was never coming back. He had sent divorce papers from the west coast. I guess even beautiful hair and the Corvette couldn’t keep him. A boy obviously hadn’t made a difference. The starlet didn’t know what was going to happen to her.
My dad said, quiet so she couldn’t hear, that she never mentioned her son and some people had no business having a kid.
The boy got five dollars a week to spend, and more if he asked. Nobody kept track. His mom got a man-friend to drive him to any store he wanted. He bought new toys just to break them. It made a kind of fabulous, careless wealth that remains beyond my imagination, even today. Twenty-five cents in my pocket made a windfall that needed careful consideration before spending on a baseball or a balsa wood airplane. A dollar was too much to spend, and owning one meant I had to walk to the bank with my little passbook to add it to the six bucks or so I had saved for college.
(I didn’t know what college actually was. As things happened, I never found out. Maybe I have six bucks in a small-town bank, still collecting interest.)
I remember night-time, and the frogs singing. The kid had something to show me. It wasn’t a Corvette, and it wasn’t a toy. Around the back of something, a place grownups couldn’t see from a window or the parking lot, stood a wall. It had been spattered with gore. I didn’t understand what I was looking at until the kid told me it was dead frogs. I hadn’t known blood turned black. He liked to throw them against the wall as hard as he could and watch them explode. He broke them, like he broke his toys.
From the darkness around us, the frogs sang.
I loved them. In those days, you could always catch a frog if you looked. My mom said never inside the house, and one hour was the maximum keeping-time. They had to be returned to someplace cool where they could see water if they wanted to. Sometimes, finding the right place and putting them back made the best part of the adventure.
Horror actually crawls. I can feel it still, fingers moving on my chest and neck, when I remember seeing that he held a frog. It was a big one, eyes shining from beneath his fingers. He told me to watch the wall, not the throw, or I would miss the moment.
I set my feet and told him to let the frog go.
“Make me,” he said. “Maybe I’ll kill you, instead.”
It was clear the idea interested him, and I have no doubt he put it away for later.
“Make me,” he said, again.
So, I did. I was small for my age and I couldn’t hit a baseball out of the infield, but I had a big litter of brothers and sisters. We fought every day, sometimes for fun, and sometimes not—and we wore our bruises and missing clumps of hair with pride and never tattled. I knew fists and was practically a Kung-fu fighter, and this kid got everything he wanted and never had to fight anyone.
I slugged him, and he dropped the frog.
It was over pretty fast. I’d like to remember that I rode in on my skinny horse and rusty armor and beat the living hell out of him, but I think the truth has fewer colored flags. I imagine after I tossed a couple of wild punches, he lost interest. If he had to pay for something, he didn’t want it.
The frog hadn’t moved from where he dropped it. I was crying while I found a cool place like my mom always said to. The frogs around me sang and sang, so there must have been water nearby.
The world changed that night, or maybe I did. I think the line between my sunlit childhood and the Askew dissolved—or maybe I just stopped believing there was a line. I know what evil is. If he’s alive today, I have no doubt the kid has stayed busy all these years, breaking toys and frogs and people.
I wish I could tell you, ghost, that I saved all the frogs that have hopped into my path since. The truth is, I let most of them take their own chances. The world has its ways, and we’re still afraid of it, you and I.
We walk though anyway, and the frogs still sing. I’m not scared when you’re close by. I have a flashlight after all, and you have crumbs.
Bob Bickford
When I was little the library was my favorite place.I was born in Lone Pine, California. My parents liked to move and so did I, for a while. I have roots throughout the United States, but I was mostly raised in Toronto, Canada.
My father was a psychiatric social worker who grew up in the slums of Boston. He was a tough guy who got an education on the GI bill and pulled himself out of his birthright. He married twice, the first time to a woman who left him a widower. Alone with a toddler, I suppose he was determined that it wouldn’t happen to him again, because the second time he married a woman much younger than he was.
She was the product of a Southern family; royalty that included the same Duke family that bought a university and named it after itself. Wilful and rebellious, she scorned Southern convention, rejected the closeted skeletons and wide streak of alcoholism that hid behind decorated formality. She disowned her family, converted to Catholicism, marched for civil rights, and married the older man from a poverty-stricken background. I am the oldest of the seven children she bore, one after the next.
We were brought up in curious contrasts. There were the economies that so many mouths to feed on a middle class income made necessary; (hand-me-down clothes, Tang and powdered milk, peanut butter for ten thousand consecutive school lunches), but my mother’s background dictated private schools, music and dance and art lessons.
I attended St. Michael’s Choir School and studied piano and organ at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. I hated studying anything at all; my mother was determined that I should be a doctor and despaired over my future. I only wanted to read fiction, and did so endlessly. The library was my favorite, enchanted place (it still is). I didn’t realize I was in fact studying for what I wanted to do most.
My father’s plan to not be widowed again fell through, and my mother was suddenly gone when I was 16. He had been ill equipped to raise one child the first time, and now there were eight of them; the youngest only three years old. In some sense we lost him, too.
Life changed, just like that. My behavior guaranteed me a quick expulsion from my exclusive school. I did manage a high school diploma (by the skin of my teeth) but I was mostly happy to leave school for good. I lost an early love, and wandered to Los Angeles. I learned about the streets, and about living in the places that cause most people to lock their car doors when they drive through. I was blessed with the same genes that took my father through life in the mean part of Boston, and survived.
Eventually, I grew up and moved again, first to Atlanta and then back to Canada. I made a living in the ‘fixing cars’ arena. I live in a very old house on a wooded lot that is infested by dogs and turtles and parrots, and perhaps the ghost of a young girl. My teen-aged son is a light in my life who wants to be an author and a professional football player. I never tell him that both are nearly impossible, because they aren’t.
The library has continued to haunt me. When age said the possibility of a university degree was long past, I decided to try my hand at a novel anyway. Somehow I finished it, and have produced one a year since. I’m working on my tenth.
You can visit Bob’s Blog HERE.
You can buy Bob’s many books HERE.
The humans put the money in the money basket -- so that all contributors may become plump with their labour.