Ghost Tour...The Valley of Ashes

“It’s not much of a Ghost Tour,” I said. “We haven’t really been able to track down many murders in the Station.” 

About fourteen, jeans that ended at mid-calf, plain denim shirt worn down to a faded blue where it traced her shoulder blades. Tennis shoes, one of the strings broken and retied. Tight auburn curls pulled back with a rubber band. Shoulders squared up.

“I’m sure there must be something,’ she said.

I could get away trashing the Union Station Ghost Tour…I was the operator.

The Station back then was a colossal wreck; take your ordinary cemetery mausoleum and blow it up a thousand fold and there you have it. Cavernous, shadowed...an artist would squeeze dry his tubes of black. Flocks of bats in the stone rafters and standing water in the lower decks.

I’d point my flashlight into the corners and asked if anyone in the tour sensed the presence of the dead. 

We needed another guide. This girl– or her father – had seen the ad. Him? Black jeans, white t-shirt, black shoes, shock of black hair. Irish, and not the wistful Irish, but Black Irish, sullen and ready for damage. An Ozark drawl.

Neither of them was for me, definitely not the girl. Becky? Yes, Becky. I needed looks and chatter, she was all grave questioning and doomy black eyes. I scraped back -- metal chair on cement floor-- and was about to say so, but right then the father pushed away from his slouch…as though to come towards me.

I’d at least better go through the motions.

I reached for the script I kept in a worn plastic sleeve, but it was nowhere.

“Look,” as the thought occurred to me, “I want to see you in action, I really do, but I can’t find the script, you feel like just winging it?”

“Winging it?”

“Just pretend, make something up, pretend you’re leading people around.”

Maybe desperation put her over the edge. She looked over, her father paused, looked from below dark brows,  then nodded. 

“Mister, I will give you a real good Ghost Tour.’ A pause. “Do you just want the killings? Or everything?”

“Let me have it all.”

We went out into the Great Hall, vast, empty. She stood solemnly, then went to different imaginary spots on the floor.

“At the time, there’s a wall here, and a mirror. Tony Durby is looking into the mirror, adjusting his red tie, when he sees Kip James rushing towards him with gun drawn; before he can turn around the bullet’s gone through his head. The mirror cracks in all directions, like crystal veins. ”

Now at the ancient ticket cages.

“And here, Tom Jacobs pulls out a knife -- he never carried one before that day -- and stabs the man he thinks is stealing his wife, but it’s the wrong man, he’s been wrong about that from the beginning.”

As she went from spot to spot, she looked back at me over her shoulder directly at me, a look that was…what? Sad?  Grieving? Another girl could have done some damage with that backward glance.

“Danny Crutchfield, life always did run thin in him, it evaporates once and for all right here.  Angela Miller, ‘Coffee’ to her friends for her cream in coffee complexion, kills her uncle’s wife over a disputed will. Anthony Romesko, he tumbles over the broken balcony railing. The four ladies traveling together from Chicago, three of them are dead the next morning…some new disease. Troy and Jenny Bradshaw, a slow motion death that one, he denies her nothing...except honest love, it's her cousin he loves, and her life runs out like sand–no, like ashes”...and then I couldn’t take anymore.

“Enough.”And all that was vicious in me made me say, “The ad said graceful and vivacious, didn’t it? Didn’t it? What don’t you get about that?”

The father heading towards me then, head down, shoulders up, big arms flexed and rising… but he drew up short as the lone security guard edged into view.

“Come, lass, there's nothing we’d ever need from this...” He may have lacked the finer skills, but he surely had mastered the art of the curled lip; that was a world-class sneer he gave me.

She gave me one last mournful look, backwards-looking as ever, then they were out of that colossal ruin.

Good riddance.

It doesn’t seem possible, but that summer turned out to be the last when I could call myself a man in good standing, not very firmly in that category even then, never remotely in that category after.  

I noticed that while I might not be destructive per se, there surely were a lot of bombed out buildings and burning cars in each place I had just been. I left wrecks behind where people and businesses and loves had once stood like I was being paid for it. ‘Leveled’ might be the word.

I had entered the Valley of Ashes, every time I touched something I brought my fingers back gray with it. I won’t tell you all that I did – I’ll never do that – but some of them might even have earned an honorary mention at the tail end of Becky’s Ghost Tour.

Yes, the Ghost Tour, now these thirteen years past. I had forgotten about it entirely till I read in the paper last week of the murder of Susan Harper by Angela ‘Coffee” Miller, over the matter of a disputed will. As it happens, right there in Union Station, renewed and restored now to its shiny best. Thriving in fact…but there have been some violent incidents. Tony Durby and the veins of the cracked mirror? Mirrors all over the place down there now, but from what I saw on TV last night they’ll be replacing one of them. It’s ruined.  The others she named?

I’m rather afraid they haven’t happened. Not just yet.

For, like usual, it’s myself I’m worried about.

It wasn’t a backwards-looking glance at all, was it, Becky? It was all forward. You were the best Ghost Tour guide of all time, you were seeing the ghosts that we were all going to become. 

So Becky, Rebecca, sweet girl…where are you? Where in this big world? Why did you look at me so sadly with your backwards glance? What did you see? Can you tell me, lass, what’s to become of me? What’s to become of my ruined life, my one and only ruined life? – lsm