Ghost
Steve won't let me sleep in the back seat anymore. Once I heard him think "if we have a wreck and I die, he'll go with me" and then it was as if his mind filled with blood. He turns the radio up loud to keep me awake too. It doesn't bother me. I see things at night when I haven't slept, especially way out here in the desert where the huge curving rocks seem to dance.

At some point you have to start letting people save their own lives. But not Steve, not yet. Not since Ann died. He would just drive off a bridge or something. Even as I think that I see the car tumbling end over end toward water. More water than any we have passed in days, some Southern river with rapids, sharp slick rocks thrusting up to meet us.

But that is the one thing he will not do, not as long as I'm alive. And that's why I always have to be with him and I always have to stay awake.

At last we have driven too far with no sign of a town or a truck plaza or at least a gas station with a coffee machine, and we have to pull over -- rather, we start running off the road and there is nothing to stop us but sand. I see a scorpion made of moonlight disappear beneath the T-bird's right front wheel. We pull far off the highway and stop in the shadow of a butte. Steve stretches and yawns hugely, then leans across me and grabs the pipe out of the glove compartment. "Shit, I'm too tired to drive, too keyed up to sleep."

"Want me to drive awhile?"
"Nope."

We pass the pipe in silence, Steve's face sharply lit by the flare of the lighter and the glow of the bowl, and the car fills with the pale lavender smoke of the sticky pot some fans gave us at the show in Dallas. It is almost white, with tiny filaments rowing all over it like cobwebs. When it burns it smells a little like skunk and a little like wormwood, but it has the candy taste of hash.

"Mmm..." Steve leans his head against the back of the seat and closes his eyes. "That's better."

"Don't fall asleep behind the wheel."
"The car's stopped, Ghost."
"Well, don't anyway. It's bad luck."

He shakes his head but is too tired to argue, and crawls into the back seat. After a minute I crawl back there too. We shove Steve's guitar case into the front and try to get comfortable.

Of course, I'm not supposed to be writing about this. But Steve would never read my notebook. He would and did read Ann's diary with SECRET written in big black letters on the cover and a ribbon knotted around it, but he wouldn't crack the covers of my dogeared old lyric book/journal without asking.

I catch myself humming, then singing under my breath. "I've been through the desert on a horse with no name --"

"You're singing that fuckin' song again!"

"Sorry," I say. It's been running through my head for days. I don't know if it's a good song or if I just think it's good because I heard it a lot when I was a kid. The desert landscape outside the T-bird's windows is just like the song made me picture it, except in real life there are no cow skulls lying around. I like the song and I think Steve did too but I have ruined it for him.

We both need a shower real bad. My hair is past my shoulders and feels as straggly as dry weeds on the back of my neck. But Steve buries his face in it as if it were clean. I feel my eyes squeeze shut. He has to get his night terrors out of the way while he is still awake or they will plague his dreams. He saves it up all day and at night he hugs me so tight sometimes I think my bones will crack.

I always heard it got cold in the desert at night and it is true. The windows are white with steam. But inside the car we are warm and the smell of our bodies is almost sweet. We eat and drink the same things and breathe the same air and our chemistries must be thoroughly mingled by now.

Steve's lips move against my hair. "You -- feel good. I like sleeping with you when it's cold out."

This makes me homesick. The back seat is still soaked, literally, with memories of him and Ann. I wish we were in my room lying under my pile of blankets, looking up at my ceiling of stars. I feel the desert around us, vast and indifferent. Our ridiculous boat of a car suddenly seems very small.
I guess Steve picks up the feeling because he pulls me closer and rubs my back under my shirt. His fingers move in small firm circles up my spine. I look up at him and then we are kissing, and it still feels so strange to kiss him and also like the most natural thing in the world. There is no taste I know like the inside of his mouth and yet I can imagine no taste more exotic. His face is rough with days of not shaving and his hair smells of wind and road dirt and gasoline.

"It's so obvious," he said to me once before we left Missing Mile. "But most of the time I'm still too stupid to see it. Hit me over the head once in a while, will you?"

That was after we were already sleeping in my bed every night, waking up together every morning. And he still has a hard time understanding that that's usually enough for me, that anything beyond that is just gravy.

Steve sleeps leaning back against a pillow folded between the seat and the door. It's the only way he can stretch his legs out. So I lie on the edge of the seat with my head by his chest and go to sleep listening to his heartbeat. Sometime later I slide to the floor, but don't wake up until I hear the tapping on the window.

Ann

My awareness feels like the beginning of a nuclear meltdown, the event that happens at the core of the reactor before everything is poisoned and burned. I don't want to be aware. I don't want to keep experiencing that last moment of pain and rage forever, but it seems as if I will.

Steve let me die, possibly even killed me. We made a mistake, he tells me in his prayers. But you would have died anyway, the kind of pregnancy you had, it would have killed you. We tried to help and we fucked up and I miss you like hell and I'm sorry.

You poisoned me, I say, but Steve is never able to hear me. Only Ghost can hear me, and see me too. He was my best friend in the world, my ally, the only person who understood Steve better than I did. He was my protector. And he let me die too.

Fuck you, I say. Fuck, you, fuck you, fuck you both. But it never helps; they only fuck each other, and the comfort it gives them sears what's left of my heart.

Ghost

It's Ann, of course, as it always is. It's Ann outside the car in the desert, Ann at my bedroom window most every night last winter, Ann drifting through the trees behind our house, casting no shadow and never once touching the ground. She's like an old hand-tinted photograph, her red hair faded, her eyes and skin almost transparent.

You killed me, she says for the millionth time, you and him, you poisoned me.

Go home.

Fuck you, she says as always, that place is not my home. I'll never go there.

I've seen plenty of earthbound spirits, but never one that I felt wanted to hurt me just because I was alive and it wasn't. Ann can't hurt anybody, but she would if she could. She is so angry. I remember her lying on that bed in New Orleans, that bed whose sheets and pillows were wringing wet with her blood, because we had poisoned her to try and get the baby out. Either way she would have died, but it is horrible to know that I held that death in my hand. And I see her so that Steve won't have to.

Her lips are still moving, but slowly she disappears into the steam on the window, and I turn my head back toward Steve. He's still asleep. He always stays asleep when she comes. I do everything I can to make sure of that. If he were to see her, he might just drive off that bridge even knowing what he knows.

I press my face into Steve's chest and can't help staining his T-shirt with a few tears before I sleep.



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