Haunted

A short story, originally published in the literary journal MonkeyBicycle. And some explanation about why it was submitted with Submittable.  Read the transcript of this recording here:  https://saroff.com/haunted.html 

Visit MontanaVoice.com for more information and to listen to additional episodes. 

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Hello, welcome back to Montana Voice. This is your host, Steve Saroff.

Several months ago, when I was feeling washed over by accumulated loss, I submitted five short stories to literary magazines. Several dear friends had died, and I was trying to shake off some of the regret that comes when thinking about everything we forgot to do together. Writing is a good way to shake things off.

One of those friends was Michael A. Fitzgerald, a novelist, who also started the software company Submittable. I met Fitz 16 years ago when he came to me with his idea for Submittable, which, as an investor and mentor, I helped him launch. He and I became close friends, and emailed, texted, or talked almost daily. So when he died, I kept talking to his memory, imagining what he might have said back to me. Not ghosts nor weirdness, just missing someone.

And thus, thinking of what I could do to have something new to say to Fitz’s memory, I searched for good literary places that are now using his software, Submittable. Deciding what were “good” by reading the stories on the places I found. And then I sent my stories to those places.

I write the same way now as when I was 20, and because the world has changed a lot, I did not think any of the places would accept any of my words. But I wanted to tell Michael’s memory this: “Hey, it is so freekin’ cool that thousands of places are now using your software, and I just used your software to submit my writing.”

If Fitz were still around, I would be going over to his house today and bang on his door and say, “Hey, check this out.” And then show him my story in the current issue of Monkeybicycle, which is one of the cool and competitive lit journals that is using Submittable. And then we would probably have launched into a rambling talk about the state of fiction and how it can be a tonic during these crazy times.

And of the five stories that I sent using Fitz’s software? Against all the impossible odds, four have now been accepted, so more of my words will be out in the world soon, reaching for memories through the Aether.

And this is the story that is in Monkeybicyle. The story is kind of a weird one, but I hope you like it.

Haunted  by Steve Saroff

Daniel has callused hands, sun-faded laborers’ clothes, and a face that is not handsome. Daniel is a quiet drunk. He shows up each day after work for the Happy Hour at the Top Hat, looking harmless. But he burns places down. He pours gasoline through broken windows of places where she danced. 

Four years earlier, near his thirtieth birthday—a springtime in Montana when the river’s ice jams had let loose with their floods—he was not a drunk and not dangerous. Fifteen years since any kind of permanence, Montana was just a place he was working at while on his way through things. The West, he had discovered, left him alone. Whether oil fields, ranches, or highway work, there were always places to stay for a month or a season where the rents were cheap and the rooms quiet. The fringes of boom towns were the best. Empty oil barrels and scrap lumber in fields next to the weekly rent motels and employers who paid with cash. This still goes on. All of this is very real. This story. These people. This sort of painful haunting.

She was a dancer from the Boston Ballet. Twenty-five years old, unmarked skin, a bachelor’s degree in literature, and a family with money. One morning that spring, she missed the chartered flight taking the ballet to Seattle and ended up on a flight that went through Salt Lake City and Missoula instead. During the flight, she got drunk again. She had been drinking heavily for a few days, and in Missoula, believing the plane had landed in Seattle, she got off. When she discovered her mistake, she caught a ride to town, got a hotel room, and called the dance director. He fired her, and she decided to stay where she was until her money ran out.

The next night, she walked into the Top Hat. It was a Friday, and the place was crowded. Daniel was sitting at the bar, facing away from the band, drinking a beer, and she pushed next to him to order. After she got her drink, she leaned backward against the bar and watched the people dancing in front of the band. She arched her back and shook her head. Long, blonde hair brushed against Daniel’s face and poured over his arms. He watched her in the bar’s mirror. There was nothing he was going to say or do, but when she put down her empty glass, she saw him looking at her in the mirror. She met his stare in reflection, and she smiled. “Dance?” she asked, still looking only at his reflection. “Sure,” he answered.

Smokey and dim, the band was loud and fast. He kept up with her, and she liked that. She also liked how he did not try to talk to her between songs, and she liked how his breathing was calm and even. They danced all night. Other men watched her, the men who were in the crowd near the end of the bar, well-groomed men with smooth faces and quick eyes. She saw them watching her. Their shirts and the way they stood reminded her of what the dance director looked like. The dance director and all the others she had let touch her — all the men with their plans and schemes: sailboats on the Boston Harbor, write-ups in magazines, inheritance, and well-planned control. She stomped and spun wildly, nearly fell, threw her arms around Daniel’s neck, kissed him suddenly, and, before he could respond, whispered in his ear, “Take me out of this place. Take me anywhere.”

His room was in the Montaine Apartments, and she was standing now, looking out the window over the river. The ice floes in the river crushed against each other as they moved, making a low, grinding noise. The ice in her glass of scotch made gentler sounds. The only light came from the window. She was naked and silhouetted, with her hair down to her waist. Daniel was naked, too, lying on his back. Nothing had ever felt so good for him. Now, he watched her and listened to the sounds of the slow and the fast ice.

“I like this,” she said, “I like this place. I like the view.” Then she put her drink down and lay next to Daniel.

In the morning, he woke before her. He took the covers off her and looked at her in the light. There was not a flaw or a scar, and her legs were too exciting for him to look at without touching. She woke up then and laughed. “Your hands are rough,” she said. Then she kissed him and wrapped herself around him, and Daniel did not try to understand why.

Sailboats in the harbor against a backdrop of crystal towers. One, two, three, four… nine boats. The water ferry slicing past every half hour, and the seagulls skimming the wakes. She was telling him about Boston, pointing and counting what she was remembering. A week had gone by. Daniel had stopped going to his job. He spent all his time with her. He cooked her breakfasts, eggs and sausage and coffee, using the hot plate in his room. He would wake her and get her to eat a bit. Always hung over, she would want a drink, too, and he would pour scotch into the coffee. He liked it too, the not caring because he had everything possible, he had more than what he had dreamed possible. And being drunk with her was something better than his dreams. She would rub his shoulders, touch his arms, and move her hands along his face. “You’ve been through a lot,” she told him, “Your hands and your face. Tell me stories, please, tell me anything.” And he did. Stories about old cars and stories about highways. Thunderheads over the prairie at night and driving towards the flashing lightning. Stories about oil rigs in winter and how the ice had to be melted with steam from metal hoses. Stories about watching fights between men who would not hold back. And stories about being alone and waiting for something to change.

“Tell me about when you were a kid,” she said.

But he shrugged and said, “There is nothing there to talk about.”

She hugged him then and said, “It’s OK. Forget it. Forget it.”

Dancing, dancing. Each night, they went to where there was music. Luke’s, the Turf, the Top Hat — all Missoula bars that had bands then. She loved the crush of sound in those places, and she liked the way Daniel never told her to stop. Each night, after the bars closed, they would stumble back to his room and, no matter how drunk, have sex like they were still dancing, crushed and sweaty and desperate and perfect.

Then his money was gone, and hers ran out, too. He sold his car to pay rent, and when that money was spent, he got a job. 

“Don’t leave me alone,” she said. It was no longer spring. The river was low and muddy. The rented room was hot and small.

“I have no choice,” he said.

Now, each night, he was tired and wanted to sleep, but she still needed to dance. “In a few weeks, I will quit,” he told her. But now his hands were starting to bother her. 

“Your rough hands,” she yelled, “Put your rough hands someplace else.”

And then she was gone. No explanation. No letter. Just him returning to his nearly empty room one evening and her things all missing. The earrings by the sink, the clothes in the closet. Gone.

That night, he found her in the Turf. She was dancing with another man, someone dressed in clean clothes. Daniel waited until the song was over and went up to her. When he told her he wanted to talk, she smiled at him. “Sorry,” she said, “There is nothing to discuss.”

Daniel put his hand on her face and tried to talk, but the man she was dancing with knocked Daniel’s arm away and shouted, “She told you to leave her alone.”

“This is not a Western,” Daniel said to the man. “Stay out of this. This is between me and her.” 

Then the band started to play again, and it was too loud to hear anything. She grabbed the man, and they spun and moved into the densest part of the crowd. Daniel watched them for a while and then walked out of the bar, not knowing what to do, not knowing where to go, but knowing something was terribly wrong.

For a while, he saw her in the bars, saw her dancing, but he did not try to talk to her again. He did not try to do anything, but he wanted her back. Every night, after work, he would go from place to place until he found where she would be dancing, and he would sit at that bar and drink and watch her until she saw him. Then she would leave, followed by whomever she had been dancing with, which on most nights would be someone new, someone he had never noticed before.

For a few weeks, he thought that she would come back to him. He felt and knew that some night soon, there would be a knock on his door, and it would be her. He kept an unopened bottle on his dresser. He kept two clean cups ready. 

And then she was gone from the bars, and Daniel did not know where she was. He did not know if she had left town or not. It was winter then, and Missoula’s air was thick and dirty. The sun was a gray, dull ball low in the sky, and the river was frozen and silent. 

And Daniel left. He went on the road, hitchhiking south, to be in places where he knew that she could not be: desert towns so stark that he knew not to expect her. Places she could never chance through. Places where he would not be hoping for an unexpected touch, an unexpected dream.

Now, these years later, Daniel is sitting in the Top Hat on a Wednesday evening. He has come back to be in the places where they were together, and none of it makes sense. A month ago, he burnt down Luke’s on a Monday morning, before dawn, and was in bed sleeping, calmly sleeping, when the fire hoses were spraying the embers. A month before, he had done it to the Turf.

Tonight, in the Top Hat, he is staring at the dance floor. It is early, and the place is almost empty. Daniel is crying but so softly that no one notices. He is imagining and sees her. She is spinning and smiling, her hair tangling in his arms and hands. He sees her holding him as the song ends. He feels her pushing her face into his chest. He hears her breathing deeply and he sees her reaching up with her whole body to kiss him. 

But then, the song is over, and he is just a drifter who has lost his chance and is alone. And he sees himself as suddenly old, sitting at a bar and watching her memory dancing without him. Worse, he sees her dancing with another while other men wait in line for their turn. Daniel sees all this, and he stops crying, and he wants to burn the place down.

Daniel turns away from the empty dance floor, wipes his eyes, and asks for another drink. The bartender serves him and says, “Bad news about the Luke’s, huh? Who do you think is burning the bars?”

Daniel shrugs. He does not care, and he is not worried and does not feel guilty. All he is thinking is how long it will be before this place, this last haunt, is also too much for him to stand.
  - steve saroff