“Get out here, boy,” said Mama. She was holding the front door open with a drink in her hand, letting all the cool air out. “You’re about to meet your father.”
It was the end of August—two weeks before seventh grade—and my first major growth spurt had taken a toll on my old clothes. Holes in my shoes, pants I couldn’t button. Mama said she’d been waiting for cash from my father, but that struck me funny—she’d been waiting my whole life for the money to arrive, and it had never come.
She liked to kid, so at first I didn’t believe her.
But when I ducked under her arm and squinted into that harsh mid-summer light, idling on the curb sat a mud-splattered Ford F-250 with a chrome toolbox and one of those orange 76 balls on the antenna. The man in the driver’s window had a big messy beard with his gray hair pulled into a ponytail. He grinned when he saw me, a big snarling wolf grin, and that’s when I noticed the plastic tubing tucked under his nose.
“Go on, now,” said Mama, nudging me through the door. She gave the man in the truck a malevolent stare. “Your derelict father’s gonna take you to Mervyn’s.”
###
He said his name was Ghost, and he told me not to fuck with his oxygen tank. He’d propped the whole apparatus onto the bench seat with the center safety belt crisscrossed so it wouldn’t topple when he made the turns.
“You know who Jacob Marley is, boy?” he asked me.
“No sir, never met him.”
His slow wheeze sounded like our old Kenmore refrigerator.
“You wouldn’t have. He’s a character in a book. A ghost, like me. He had to carry these heavy chains wherever he went.” He’d missed the road to Mervyn’s and now we were headed the wrong direction, toward the ocean. “See, the chains are what you call a metaphor. They represent the moral burdens he carried in life. And now I’ve found myself in the same predicament as old Marley, only instead of chains, I have to drag this goddamn thing around.” He rapped his knuckle against the cold metal tank and it went tong tong like an underwater bell. “But I’m trying to make it right.”
At that age, I wasn’t ready to talk metaphorically.
“At least you have a nice truck,” I said.
“This ain’t my truck, son.”
“Whose is it?”
“Should be a registration slip in the glovebox. Let me know what it says.”
I thumbed the button, and the little door flopped open. Inside was a snubnose revolver, loose ammunition, and a disordered stack of papers. He didn’t look for my reaction, just pawed the wheel, easing through the intersection like a weary bus driver. He cracked open a beer one-handedly, took a noisy sip, and sucked at the foam caught in his beard.
“Well, what’s it say?”
I looked over the registration and read the first name I could find.
“Burt Sanderson.”
“Well there you go—it’s Burt fuckin’ Sanderson’s truck.”
The truck cab suddenly felt small, too small for my liking.
“When are we going to Mervyn’s?”
“Got to make a pit stop first,” he said, hoisting the beer. “This here’s my last brewski.”
###
He circled behind the liquor store on Portola Drive, just a block or two from the ocean. A pair of fishermen were crossing the parking lot with their waders on, six packs clawed in their hands, a sandy beach dog prancing behind them as they went. Ghost swore at the oxygen tank as he wrestled it out of the truck. On the dashboard lay a folded pair of sunglasses—he motioned for me to put them on.
“Sit tight and stay low,” he said. “I’m not as quick on my feet as I used to be. I practically ran this town before you were born—you could have called it Ghost City. But now—” He regarded himself with a cross of pity and disdain. “Now it’s for the younger studs. Maybe yours for the taking.”
He came around to the passenger door and opened it, and for a moment I thought he wanted me to go with him. Instead, he grabbed the revolver from the glovebox with his big hairy hand, squinted at the chambered rounds, and shut the door with a groan. I watched him lope toward the front of the store, dragging the tank with his left hand, pressing the gun to his leg with his right. When Mama talked about my father, she never used nice words, so I didn’t expect much—but this man looked like a lunatic, like he’d escaped a prison hospital in a shootout. I was angry that she’d made me go with him in the first place. I thought about slipping out and hoofing down the road, but I’d never been this far from home on foot before. He’d left the engine running with the radio on, Blue Öyster Cult singing about forty-thousand people dying everyday. The sunlight stung my arm through the window. I glanced at the thermometer on the dash—ninety-seven degrees. A seagull briefly touched down on the hood of the truck, shat, and launched away with a shriek. Another minute passed before Ghost reappeared, closing in on the truck, moving faster this time. I didn’t see the gun anymore. Instead, he clutched a brown paper sack to his stomach, the metal tank ringing as he dragged it along the asphalt.
He threw the paper bag onto the seat between us and adjusted his nasal cannula.
“Keep your head down, kiddo,” he said, the rear tires breaking loose. “And forget whatever nonsense your mama taught you. Sometimes you can solve your problems the easy way.”
“What problems?” I asked.
“The too broke for clothes kind.”
“You robbed that store, didn’t you?”
“Well,” he said, cutting onto the road. “I showed them my new Smith and Wesson and they were so impressed they showered me with money. That’s the way I’d put it.”
###
He told me to count the money in the bag, but not to touch the gun inside.
I folded my arms and watched the afternoon beach traffic as we sped by. I just wanted to go home, and I didn’t care about the money or the clothes. I pictured the police lining up to shoot the truck to pieces, lobbing smoke grenades like the cop shows Mama watched. The sunglasses mostly hid the tears, and I drew them tighter so he wouldn’t see me crying. But he knew all the same.
“Listen, kiddo. I’ll get you home soon. But we’ve got some catching up to do first.”
“I don’t want to catch up with you,” I said, with a hitch in my voice, and now he could tell I was really scared. “I want to go home.”
He didn’t respond, just gunned the F-250 down Portola Drive and hooked onto some unnamed side street, blasting through stop signs along the way. Soon, we were headed downtown. I recognized the car dealership where Mama traded in her old Dodge van for a smaller Toyota. There was the donut shop on the corner, and the old elementary school I attended before we moved to our midtown mobile home park. Ghost hummed along to the radio, throwing glances at me like a mischievous dog, like there wasn’t a bag of stolen liquor store money sitting between us.
“You know what I forgot?” he said. “The beer. It’s okay, there used to be another store up the way.”
“Just let me out,” I pleaded. “Give me a dollar and I’ll take the bus home.”
“Woah, buddy. We’re wanted men, now. You think the police will let you take the bus to midtown? That’s the first place they’ll look for you. You’ll hear the sirens soon, you’ll see.”
“I didn’t rob anybody. You did. And you’re gonna do it again.”
He looked offended—or at least he pretended to be.
“Listen, this air conditioning unit is shit, kid—I can feel my beard sweating. When I was a long-haul trucker, we’d have these glorious aftermarket A/C units that could make your nipples hard and your pecker shrivel up in a minute flat. But this—” he gestured vaguely at the console. “—this is bullshit. I tell you what—sit tight, listen to some tunes. I’m gonna get me an ice-cold twenty-ounce brewski, then I’ll buy you new clothes like I promised. Afterwards, we’ll go back to the Shady Oaks trailer park where your sweet mama will make you a grilled cheese sandwich and an Ovaltine.”
###
He came shambling through the double doors of Ralph’s Liquors like some deranged Santa Claus with a fresh paper sack balled in his fist. The liquor store owner followed close behind with an aluminum baseball bat. Maybe it was Ralph himself—a bald man with plaid trousers and a mustache like a long brown chevron. He swung at Ghost, but the old man fended off the blow. Ghost reared up and struck the bald man in the chin with the butt-end of the tank and sent him careening into the newspaper stands.
“We’re really in the soup now, buddy,” said Ghost, tossing the paper bag at me and dropping the truck into gear. “That bald-headed sonofabitch is mad as a hornet.”
The bald man regained his footing and managed to smash the front headlight to pieces before the F-250 churned a cloud of bright white smoke over the lot. We peeled out onto the main road and rocketed towards the redwoods, away from downtown.
“You told me you weren’t gonna do it again,” I said. I was done crying, and now I wanted to tell him how mad I was. “You tricked me, bastard.”
“You can’t call your own father a bastard. That’s a one-way ticket to hell.”
“Better than trapped in this truck with you.”
“This ain’t a kidnapping, son. If you want to go home without a new pair of shoes, I’ll take you. Why don’t you make yourself useful and count the damn money while we’re on our way. You know how to count, don’t you?”
“I know how to count, but I’m not gonna.”
“There’s a box of jujyfruits in the bag somewhere. Get yourself a handful and tell me how much we’re up to. If we’re over five hundred, I’ll let you keep some of it. Sound fair?”
We were a few miles outside of town when a bulldozer trundled onto the road ahead of us, red lights flashing. Ghost cursed and slowed the truck to a crawl as it made the turn. I figured it was a good opportunity to make a run for it, so I threw open the door, leaped to the road, and bolted the other direction. I didn’t know where I was, but it was a quiet neighborhood with tall redwoods and eucalyptus trees looming overhead, a dry creek winding alongside the road. Somewhere between the city and the mountains. I slipped through the bushes and down into the creekbed where I found a culvert just tall enough to hide in. Somewhere in the distance, I heard the howl of police sirens—a bunch of them droning at once.
I closed my eyes and counted to sixty, then back down to one.
On the third count to sixty, Ghost reappeared, squatting beside the culvert, watching me with a knowing smirk. I remember wondering how he’d found me so quickly, and how he’d managed to drag his tank and tubes into the creek bed without losing his footing. The way he sat wheezing under the redwoods, he looked like a frail old man whose time had come and gone.
“It’s cool down here, I’ll give you that,” he said.
“Why don’t you just go away?” I practically screamed it.
“I will, son. Sooner than you think.”
“Not soon enough.”
He nodded at this, chewed on it for a bit.
I couldn’t tell if the sirens were getting closer.
“Listen, kid. Your Mama didn’t call me because you needed clothes. She’s too proud for that. See, I’m the one who called her. I wanted to spend a little time with you before it’s too late. I’m done hauling this damn thing around. Marley can have his chains—I want to set mine down for good. So when this old tank runs dry, well, I don’t plan on getting a refill if you catch my drift. You understand what I’m getting at? In the end, there’s no refills.”
I pictured him lying in his coffin like my grandfather—the first corpse I’d ever seen—his gray hands knuckled over the breast of his burial suit. Somehow, a coffin seemed too simple for a man like Ghost—a man like him should be buried in the back of an F-250, or at sea in the hull of a pirate ship.
“You’re saying you’re about to die?”
“We all die soon enough. I’m just gonna push off sooner than the rest.” He tilted his head to the road, listening as a car passed. Maybe he could hear the sirens, too. “I know you’re mad at me. It wasn’t the best introduction, was it? I was telling you about moral burdens, well, leaving you and your mama high and dry while I did time down at Mule Creek is one of them. It’s no way to support a family, that’s for damn sure.”
“Mama told me you were in jail. She said you hurt somebody.”
“Mule Creek’s a prison, not a jail. I hope you never have to learn the difference. I’ve hurt people, sure. Nobody that didn’t deserve it. But that’s not what I was in for.”
“Then what was it?”
“Why don’t you come out of that culvert, and I’ll tell you about it.” He slapped his neck with the fat part of his palm. “It’s not much of a story, but I’m getting eaten alive down here. Then we’ll go straight to your mama’s house and give her all this money. Did you count it all before you bailed out?”
“There’s six hundred and twenty-seven dollars in the bag.”
“Well, shit. You’re a whiz with numbers after all.”
###
We found a green Ford Ranger parked on the street and Ghost got it started in under a minute. He said it was always a good idea to switch cars when you hear sirens howling all over town, and that once the police get an initial description, it’s all they look for. He said stealing cars was what got him sent to Mule Creek, and he told me how he’d gotten into a high-speed chase and a highway patrolman flipped his cruiser into a lake and drowned.
“When that happens, they throw the book at you,” he said.
“Did you escape prison?”
“No. But if you’re sick enough, they’ll let you out early. They give you restrictions to keep you in line, but it’s no different than before. See, that’s the thing about this country, son. Everyone likes to talk about freedom and opportunities, how you can work your way up any ladder—but that’s all horseshit. Corporations want to make you as small as possible so they can control you. They’ll pay you a rock-bottom wage, then take it all back in rent, food, and clothes. That’s what you call a vicious circle.”
“Mama works for a corporation.” I said it like a challenge, to let him know there might be good corporations, too. “Doesn’t make us small.”
“Yeah? Why do you have holes in your pants? Why are we robbing liquor stores for school clothes?”
“I’m not robbing anyone.”
“Keep telling yourself that. Where does she work?”
“Bank of America. She’s a teller.”
“The one on State Park Drive?”
“I think so.”
“Funny coincidence—that’s where I bank. My branch is one exit away. We’ll need to exchange all this cash for a cashier’s check so I can give it to your mama. You can’t just hand someone a paper bag full of money—it’s considered rude.”
He drifted off the freeway toward the bank, easing into the blue handicap zone in front. It took him longer to exit the truck, and he almost forgot to bring all the money with him. I wondered if his oxygen was getting low, and whether he’d die right there in the lobby before he could take me home. The beastliness I’d seen before had become something softer and tamer.
The air conditioning in the Ranger felt nice and chilly. This time the radio was tuned to a church station—some preacher talking about Jesus that and Jesus the other thing. I wondered how folks spent all day talking about Jesus. I could barely handle an hour on Sunday. I spun the little radio dial to the left and worked my way up. Talk radio, Spanish radio, more church radio. Around the mid-nineties, a rock station came on. I was about to turn it up when two loud pops went off in the bank. An old woman with big white curls came screaming out the front door, and another just behind her. I hadn’t seen anyone go in, but now the whole parking lot was filled with screaming white-haired women.
Then came Ghost, firing his gun into the air, a trash bag full of loose cash swinging in his other hand.
I sat frozen to the seat, watching him lumber toward the truck. He threw the door open and folded behind the wheel with the bag of cash spilling out over the cab and down into the floorboards. He tossed the revolver onto the dash, and I could see the two-inch barrel eking out a wisp of gunsmoke. The oxygen tank was gone, the plastic cannula dangling uselessly from his ear. A bloodstain grew in the belly of his shirt.
“Get down, kid,” he said, slamming the door. “We had ourselves a shootout.”
The Ranger broke loose and screeched through the parking lot as customers scattered, rushing down the boulevard with their hands cradling their heads. Another gunshot rang out somewhere through the tire smoke and the window behind my head turned white. As we blasted through a red light, a little white Honda sedan clipped the tail-end of the truck. Ghost cursed and righted the wheel and soon we were rocketing down the main road, running more lights, blowing through the intersections. I didn’t notice the tears streaming down my cheeks until I tasted salt.
But I knew the neighborhood—the coffee shop, the gas station where Mama filled up the Toyota before school. I knew the street names and storefronts. There was the neighborhood park where I had my eighth birthday party, where Mama had strung up banners and pinned colorful tablecloths to the picnic tables. I spotted the scrubby trail that led out the back and up to the mobile home park where I lived.
“There,” I said, grabbing at the wheel and pointing at the park. I could hear the terror in my own voice. “Stop there and let me go.”
He skidded into the lot and caught me by the wrist so I couldn’t jump out.
“Take the money,” he said, with sick and wet-looking eyes—dying eyes.
I shook my head.
“Take it,” he said again, but meaner this time. “Or I’ll drive to your mama’s trailer and give it to her directly. There’s enough here to buy clothes straight on through college. Shoes and pants and whatever else. Just take it.”
“I don’t want to.”
By now, it sounded like every cop in the county had flicked on their sirens, dogs howling in every yard.
“You want me dying on your front porch in front of the neighbors?”
“No. Let go of me.”
“The refills don’t last forever, kid. You hear me?” He hissed and touched his bloody-soaked shirt tenderly. “You remember that when they try to stuff you into a cubicle, or send you down a mine, or put you in the cab of an eighteen-wheeler like me. You remember when they try to make you small. Because when the tank runs dry, that’s all you got. Understand me? Now take it, dammit. Take it and tell Doreen to hide it where they won’t ever find it.”
My wrist ached under his manic grip.
“Okay.”
“Okay, what?”
“Okay, I’ll take the money.”
He let go of me.
I cinched the draw of the garbage bag and stepped into the hot afternoon. He watched me as I hurried across the park, toward the scrub trail. It felt like the whole world was watching, even though the park was empty. A fifty-dollar-bill fluttered into the dirt, and I knelt to pick it up. I saw Ghost take a big gulp of air, then another. I kept looking, wondering what he was going to do, knowing it would be the last glimpse of my father I ever had. He really did look like a ghost. Then he dropped the transmission into reverse and backed out of the park, spun the wheel, and disappeared into a cloud of road dust.
###
Mama kept the money.
The Sheriff’s Office visited twice that week, and both times she denied seeing him. I peeked at the detectives as they went around talking to neighbors, leaving their shiny business cards tucked into screen doors. The neighbors must have covered for us, because no one came around after their second visit—or maybe nobody saw him to begin with, the ghost that he was. And when a pair of hikers found my father’s body on some lonely redwood trail just a few miles up the highway, the snubnose Smith and Wesson at his feet, it seemed like it was the closure the deputies needed.
Every summer for the next five or six years, Mama and I would cross the Mexican border to shop at the tiendas down in Ensenada. She told me the money came with serial numbers, and it was best to avoid American stores. She was a bank teller after all, and she knew how to be careful. We’d get nice clothes down there for a good price. Brand name jeans and everything. We’d always stay a few extra nights at the beach hotels—nothing fancy, just somewhere we could eat and take a load off for a while. Mama would sit on the beach with a margarita and her Camel Lights and watch the sunsets while I ate nachos and ice cream at the hotel restaurant. The ice cream came with unlimited scoops, and sometimes I’d make myself sick. Mama would chide me for eating too much, but I told her that life didn’t always give refills, and sometimes you had to take what you could get.
“Don’t you dare start talking like you-know-who,” she warned, showing me the back of her hand.
“You think he was wrong about everything?”
“That ain’t the right question,” she said. Sometimes she got teary-eyed when she drank margaritas, and now she was turning her back to me, sniffling and wiping her eyes, watching the sunset fade over the cold edge of the Pacific. “Ask yourself if you want to wind up dead in a lonely old forest covered in bugs. Ask yourself what that would do to your mama—then work backwards from there.”
I didn’t want to end up like Ghost, that part was clear.
And I didn’t want to cause Mama any heartache.
But another part of me really liked the clothes.
“You hear what I’m telling you, boy?”
“Yes, Mama,” I said, smoothing the wrinkles out of my new shirt with the palm of my hand, admiring the mother of pearl buttons, the smell of fresh-cut fabric. I’d hidden a few pesos in the change pocket of my new jeans, and I slid them out and rubbed them together like a lucky talisman. “I promise.”
C.W. Blackwell is an American author from the Central Coast of California. He is a two-time Derringer Award winner and four-time nominee. C.W. is a member of International Thriller Writers and the Short Mystery Fiction Society. His debut short story collection, Whatever Kills the Pain, will appear in summer 2025 from Rock and Hard Place Press. Find him on Bluesky: @cwblackwell.bsky.social