Ghost got out of the car. His pale eyes turned skyward and lit upon strands of telephone wires trailing away over the rises and misty falls of the road. He stood swaying gently for a moment, his hands trembling at his sides, his mind travelling the wires. Then he shook himself, turned in a circle, and said, “See that church over there? There’s a path back behind it and we go through the cemetery and the woods, and there’s a big house up on a rise.”
They trailed through the cemetery, casting long shadows over the softly rotting gray stones and the bright patches of grass and earth and sunlight, still sipping from cans that dripped foam and amber sparkles caught by the sun. Steve wiped his hands on a red bandanna. Ghost, still humming his song, caught the tops of the tall weeds between his fingers and let them slip away again. Burrs clung to the cuffs of Steve’s jeans and Ghost’s gray wash pants, and Steve began to whistle.
The twins sat on the front lawn in the cool mud of their wishing well, tracking the travellers’ progress for ten minutes before the swish of leaf-laden branches and the crunch of pine needles could be heard from the overgrown path in the woods. When the travellers’ shadows wavered around the bend in the instant before they would come into view of the lawn, the twins each pulled up a handful of grass and tiny blue starflowers, flung them into the wishing well, and darted under the front porch. Two pairs of yellowy-green eyes peered out; two heads leaned together, whispering about the cracked leather of Steve’s cowboy boots and the purple Magic Marker drawings on Ghost’s white sneakers.
Ghost stopped to look at a muddy spot on the lawn, a shallow hole carefully outlined by rocks. Rough gray stones bordered the red clay gash in the scrubby grass; lines of smaller white pebbles radiated out, half-embedded like teeth in the patchy lawn, a sunburst in stone. Gently, Ghost traced a line of pebbles with the toe of his sneaker. “What’s that?” asked Steve.
“Little hole in the ground. There’s flowers in here, Steve. And pennies.”
“Trash heap, maybe. Listen, we ought to get rid of these brews before we knock on their door.”
They set the beer cans down in the shade of the porch steps. Out of the corner of his eye, Ghost saw two small, stick-thin, spidery hands creep out from under the porch and snatch them. He got down on his hands and knees and tried to peer between the boards. Rotten leaves, patches of sun and shadow... a small hand, scuttling out of sight.
A kid answered Steve’s knock and looked up at him through a curtain of auburn hair as brilliant as a robin’s breast. The kid was in his late teens, perhaps, only a couple of years younger than Steve, but smaller and shyer; he said nothing but “H’lo” and stepped back to let Steve in. Steve glanced back at Ghost on his knees, his eye to a chink in the porch, his hand searching in his pocket. Ghost pulled out a shiny dime and dropped it through the chink.
“Saw the twins, prob’ly,” said the kid. Steve shrugged and stepped into the foyer.
Ghost had been right; the house was big. It was also damp, and dim, and full of the presence of Jesus. His picture hung huge in the front hallway, eyes as sad and wise as a basset hound’s, hands outspread in benediction. When Steve looked at it from a different angle, the palms oozed blood. The wallpaper was velveteen-flocked maroon blotched with water stains. The ceiling hung heavy with plaster fruit, ivy leaves, dull-eyed cupids.
When Steve explained about the T-bird, the kid brightened. “I might be able to fix it. I can, sometimes.” “She’s a perverse old whore,” Steve warned him. “She’d as soon pop her radiator cap in your face as look at you. Maybe we better just call the junkyard.”
Ghost, letting himself into the foyer, heard this. “Steve, you won’t let that old car go until the back end falls off. Let’s go back and get our stuff, at least. If we’re going to be here long, I want to practice the guitar.” Steve groaned. They stepped back out onto the porch, and Ghost caught his breath. “Look. They came out.” The twins were crouched next to the wishing well, their heads bent over the muddy hole. Their shadows spilled across the grass, black and twisted. When they turned, Steve, who was a year older than Ghost and sometimes protective, couldn’t help grabbing his friend’s wrist and pulling him back.
The two small figures on the lawn had gleaming eyes shadowed by bone and pallor. Their faces were ferally delicate. Their bare chests were bony little hollows covered with white skin, and the shoulders they pressed together were raw, pink, puckered... and somehow so misshapen, so wrong, that Steve could not at once grasp the nature of their deformity.
The twins stared for a moment, still hunched over their wishing well. Then they darted and were gone—
whether into the woods, around the house, or back under the porch, Steve wasn’t sure. He glanced nervously behind him and said, “What...”
“It happened right after they were born,” the kid told him. “They came out of Mama’s belly grown together. Nearly ripped her open. She had to have thirty stitches. The twins were born with one arm each, Michael’s on the right and Samuel’s on the left, and the doctor cut them apart at the shoulder.”
Steve stared at the spot where the twins had been, seeing again the twisted little shapes, their way of leaning on each other, shoulder to truncated shoulder. He tried to think of something to say, and could only come up with “Sorry.”
Ghost closed his eyes and followed Steve and the kid through the woods, letting his feet find their own way along the path, seeing by the ragged light that filtered through his eyelids. He imagined himself tender, tiny, naked, barely formed, protected only by the being whose bone and blood and soul were fused with his. He felt the cold pain of the knife, the hot, slicing agony of the cutting apart. A whimper escaped him, a tiny sound of aloneness.
“Huh?” said Steve, turning.
Ghost opened his eyes. “Nothing.”
When they reached the T-bird, Ghost got Steve’s guitar out again. Steve and the kid stuck their heads under the hood and began speaking with enthusiasm about the perversity of cars. Ghost listened to them for a few minutes, half-smiling at the inanity of car talk. Then he walked back through the woods to the house and sat on the porch steps and played all the songs he knew. He sang them loudly and joyously, making up what words he couldn’t remember, and he was moaning an accompaniment to a strange wordless song that had suddenly possessed his fingers when the twins tumbled around the corner of the house, mops of dark hair wet and tousled, bodies dripping, faces streaked with water or tears. The scars on their shoulders stood out vivid and angry against their paleness.
The twins were naked, and Ghost realized they were older than he’d thought: their crotches were dusted with soft dark velvet, though there, as elsewhere, they were underdeveloped and small. When they saw Ghost they fell to the ground, huddling, trying to shield each other with their single arms.
Ghost reached for them, wanting to gather them to him, give them something to cling to. When he saw the terror in their faces he stopped, forced himself to put his hands back on the guitar. “What happened to you all?” he asked.
“She gave us a bath,” one of the twins said finally, spitting the words out, staring at the guitar.
“Who, your mother? Why doesn’t she let you lick yourselves clean? That’s what my grandmother used to do—or let me take mud baths.”
Smiles wavered and died on the twins’ lips. Ghost watched them gravely for a moment, then began to play the strange song again, plucking the notes from the strings, letting them fall and shatter like drops of colored water, throwing his head back and wailing sounds that were nearly words. When one of the twins reached up to touch the silver inlays on the guitar, Ghost didn’t stop playing. The song grew wilder and stranger, pulling Ghost’s fingers across the strings. It separated into long ribbons of sound and merged again into washes that encircled the twins, drew them closer, pulled them to their feet still leaning against each other.
They placed their hands together, the lines and hills of their palms interlocking like a puzzle of flesh. They bowed their heads until their f
oreheads were touching and then they swayed apart and began to dance, circling, pressing flat together along the length of their little bodies as if they would merge once more, clutching at each other with childish lust and desperation, spinning away and pulling each other back, skinny poetry, music of flesh and bone. The music rose and spiralled.
All at once they were upon Ghost, their faces sticky against his, their hands finding his heartbeat. Ghost managed to shove the guitar aside before they pushed him back onto the steps, his lips sticky with their bitter tears and sour-sweet spit. For a moment he hid behind the darkness of his eyelids and let it happen: the warmth of their soft peachflesh, the tangy soapy smell of their bodies, their music-driven passion.
But resentment and terror of outsiders stiffened their hands, made their fingers hard and sharp. Teeth found the hollow of Ghost’s throat and a bright, wet pain bloomed there.
Then their weight was gone from him and he was alone on the steps, only the neck of the guitar in his hands, only its cold smooth body pressed against his. A faint keening came from under the porch.
“Mister?” said a small worried voice. “The twins didn’t hurt you, did they? They wouldn’t hurt anybody, not on purpose.” Ghost looked up. The twins’ older brother had returned. Behind him stood Steve, oil-smudged and besweatted, his long muscles tensed, ready to kill anything that had assaulted Ghost.
“I’m not hurt,” Ghost told them, watching their faces.
“Your neck, Ghost,” said Steve quietly, “there in the V.” Ghost put his hand to his collarbone and drew it away sticky, violet with his blood.
II. BROTHER
The twins were almost fifteen when the angel came and took them away.
No one else in the family ever really loved the twins.
And the twins didn’t love any of us either. Maybe that’s why they were so angry at having been cut apart.
The twins’ names were Michael and Samuel, good names, an archangel and a prophet. But nobody ever called them by those names, and if anybody did, the twins never answered. To us they were just the twins, more than one person, not quite two, separated at the shoulder the day after they were born and nearly bled to death. God’s will be done.
The day they came home from the hospital, Mama hung a picture of Jesus in their room and put them to sleep in their two little cribs. They yelled all day and all night and all of the next day. Mama thought Jesus’s eyes that glowed in the dark were scaring the twins, so she took the picture down, but the twins kept yelling until she put them in a crib together.
After that they had to sleep in the same bed all night, every night, forever—else they would scream just like they had as newborns. Mama took in the town’s mending and dressmaking, and the twins slept in her sewing room among heaps of fabric and crackling tissue patterns, their dreams zigzagged by the whine of the electric sewing machine.
The twins learned to crawl one-armed, a fast scuttle down the hall, over the cabbage rose rug that skinned their knees in the living room. They learned how to pull themselves up, hanging onto each other. If they leaned on each other, they could take a few steps. They wouldn’t come to Mama when she held out her arms, or to Daddy or me either. They hung onto each other and toddled in circles, holding each other up, pulling each other down when they fell.
The twins ate our food and slept in the bed we gave them and let us keep them clean, but we existed only in a tiny corner of their world, a corner reserved for such things as clothes and dinner and the hated baths. When I got old enough to discover the gift God had given me for fixing car engines, they would sometimes come out to the shed and watch me work on some neighbor’s junker. Mostly they ran free in the woods and lived under the porch, playing the games they made up inside their heads. They loved to dance in ritualistic patterns, stepping and bobbing and circling. At the end they would clutch each other tight as ticks, howling if anybody tried to pull them apart.
The twins wouldn’t talk until the summer they were five and I was eight. We prayed for them every Sunday in church. Mama even sent away for some holy oil. It came in little plastic packets like ketchup in a restaurant, and Mama rubbed the twins’ throats with it whenever she caught them sitting still, but they didn’t talk until they were good and ready.
The picture of that summer kitchen, ninety degrees by the Silks Motor Oil thermometer in the window, stays in my head as bright-colored and underwater still and clear as the 3-D scenes in the special Bible Mama got from TV. The twins were sitting at the kitchen table eating peanut butter out of the jar. The peanut butter was soft and caramel-runny around the edges of the jar, and the twins’ faces were smeared with warm tan goo. Mama was getting a can of potted ham out of the cabinet to make me a sandwich.
A fly crawled in through the hole at the bottom of the screen door, made electric loops around the kitchen, and landed on the rim of the peanut butter jar. The twins watched the fly for a second, until it got stuck in the melting peanut butter and began to struggle. Then one twin—Michael—turned around in his chair, looked right at Mama, and said, “What made you think we wanted to be cut apart, anyway?”
Mama’s fingers had just closed around the can of ham. Her hand jerked. I watched the can tumble down and thump from the countertop to the floor. It bounced once and rolled to rest against the side of the plastic trash can. Michael pulled the fly out of the peanut butter, wiped it in a smear of wings and legs and brown stickiness on the edge of the table, and picked up his spoon again.
“I don’t want them around me,” Mama said flatly, later, and the twins were moved out of Mama’s sewing room and into an upstairs guest room which they said was too cold and haunted, and finally into my room. They said they would not sing at night if I would take down the Bible pictures Mama had given me, and we lived in peace.
They were five then.
They were thirteen when Daddy found them in a puddle of blood on the floor of the garage shed. They had a package of razor blades and were huddled near the back wall, behind Daddy’s truck, their gashed shoulders pressed together, bleeding into each other. Between them they had to have thirty stitches. I pulled the blanket over my head that night and listened to them whispering in the next bed.
“I thought we’d grow back together,” said Michael. “I wasn’t going to tell them that.”
“Now it hurts,” mumbled Samuel, close to sleep.
“It always hurt,” said Michael. “That place where they cut us apart.”
III. GHOST
Ghost dreamed this lifetime, asleep next to Steve in the cold upstairs guest room—a room which was haunted, Ghost knew, but only by the sad thin shade of a cat that had starved to death there fifty years ago, shut in and forgotten by a vacationing family.
The kid knew how to fix Steve’s T-bird, but could not do the work until sundown because it was a Sunday. By that time it was too late to hit the road, so the family allowed Steve and Ghost to stay for ten dollars in the upstairs guest room. Ghost lay awake late fingering the small clean bite mark on his throat and feeling the shade of the cat still roaming and listening to Steve’s even breathing, the breathing of a man at peace with himself and at truce with the world.
Then Ghost was asleep too. He found himself weaving through the milky thick clouds that often swathed him from the waist down in his dreams. In dreams he seldom saw his feet, though he felt that he was barefoot.
He was crossing the front lawn of the house. He passed the muddy hole in the ground, the hole the twins filled with coins and flowers and called a wishing well, and wondered what they wished for there. He skirted the edge of the woods and covered the thirty feet to the shed behind the house with the instantaneous effortlessness of dreams. He was in the garage. The walls bristled with tools. There was a red pickup truck, the old-fashioned kind whose shape always reminded Ghost of a loaf of bread, and a battered warhorse of a Chevrolet that the twins’ brother must work on during the aimless, melting days between the Sundays.
A thin river of blood trickled fr
om between the rear wheels of the truck, cutting a path through the oil and grit on the floor, staining the concrete. The windows of the garage were opaque with moonlight. The windshields, the metal of the tools, glowed faintly blue. The moonlight turned the blood black.
Ghost saw the twins then, jammed together in the corner behind the pickup, naked, their feral faces and narrow chests and broomstick legs slicked with blue-white light, spattered with wet black blood. The raw weals of their shoulders, their scarred flat shoulders, were pressed together, their blood flowing into the gashes they had inflicted upon each other. Their faces were smooth and innocent and utterly blissful.
The slice of the razor. The black blood. The bliss.
“I know what they wish for!" Ghost screamed, waking himself up. Beside him Steve stirred and muttered and pulled all the blankets away, but did not wake. The scream had been only in Ghost’s mind, a dream-scream.
“I know what they wish for,” he whispered, and stared into the darkness for a long time before sitting up.
IV. BROTHER
The other one was just a kid like me, a little older, a little smarter. But the one called Ghost was an angel. I knew it by the wing of hair that fell like flax over his eyes, and by his skin that light shone through, and by the way his hands shaped the air. And I knew it by what I guess you’d call his aura.
Mrs. Carstairs in our church reads them; she can tell a lot about a person by the color of his aura. The twins, she says, share an aura. It is the purple-black of a bruise, and it surrounds them both, connecting them, no matter how far apart they are. I’ve never seen the twins’ aura, nor any other. But anybody could see the golden light surrounding this Ghost, as translucent and yet as heartbreakingly bright as sunlight sifting through pure dawn clouds on Easter morning.