A sawed off pump gun.  Mannlicher.   Loaded, as always, safety off.  In the glow of the dash lights you could tell its shape under the raincoat between us.  It made me nervous but Vincent liked to have it handy.  There are crazies everywhere, you know.   And cops.  Especially cops. Those made me really nervous.  We'd just passed a speed trap at the foot of Suzanne's Hill.  Two cruisers.  I was wishing Vince would put his cannon in the trunk.  I told him.  He looked at me like I was asking him to church.  Said he wasn't speeding.

     Big city stress, Vince couldn't shake it.  Here we were, in the middle of a fifty-thousand-acre-patch of Great Eastern Company timber, and the man was acting like he was driving his cab through Roxbury with a pound of coke under the seat.  He had his eyes on the rear-view mirror, his chin up, nostrils flaring, listening for the faint whine of a faraway siren.  I was almost hoping for a crescendo squeal to pick up the beat of the piano-bar music on the CD player.  Now he was scanning the roadsides ahead.  Presumably for a bunch of crazies about to leap out of the spruce.  Jamaicans, guns blazing.  Or Conan-the-Barbarian.  You never know.  With all the looking everywhere but where we were going, I was surprised the numbskull hadn't put us in the ditch.  I wish he had, I might've survived the ride.

     Seven miles from home and three hundred more to go.  We were on the first track of a Barry Manilow CD.  Part of a box-set.  With all the speakers in the car I felt I was sitting in the orchestra pit at a Las Vegas all-star spectacular.  By the time we crossed the Mystic River Bridge they'd have the men in white put me away.  I had to lighten up the atmosphere.  Maybe Vincent would relax enough to poke fun at fair game.  Women. I would start with the topless one flexing muscle on the dash.  His new girlfriend, I guessed, I'd better be kind.  The red bars of the numbers on the digital clock were glowing through the snapshot, splitting her gold lame panties.

     "That's one rare babe," I said, "she's ON time!"

     I should've known he wouldn't get the joke.  Quiet for awhile, checking the mirror and the sides.  All was clear.  He came up with his choice of a good word for his love.

     "Built like a Mack truck, she's," he said.

     Vaguely conscious of wind noises and of the drumming of raindrops on metal I sat there, trying to think of something to keep the conversation going, come up with a line.  The fool had to dump it in my lap.

     "Her legs," he said, "too bad. They're a bit short."

     I couldn't help it, I had to say it.  "A Mack truck with a flat tire."

     He got it.  Next thing I was out of the car, walking home.  Grumbling something about seven-and-a-quarter miles in the rain.  Looking at the grass, a flattened can of Bud coming at me. Close.  Real close.  Trying to recall if I had stumbled.

     And there was this odd thing in beads and bell bottoms telling me to shut up 'cause hell would freeze over before I would need to walk again.

     "Just glide or ride, man", she said, "fly, slide like a bolide, never collide."

     A bo-what? Vince's imported weed wasn't so bad, I thought, but what was that at my feet, that crumpled puppet in my good L.L. Bean coat, that shape awash in sodden grass, dark muck spreading under it?

     The chick filled me in and I went ballistic.  Dead.  Sliding and gliding about the clearing.  A ghost.  Streaking across the road.  DEAD.  Howling to the clouds and raging at the wretched mess in the ditch.  Get up! GET UP!  Dead.  A ghost.

     "You going to calm down or what?" I went for her throat and sailed right through her.  I still shiver at the thought of it, the terrifying reality of it.  Two ghosts.  It wasn't love at first sight.

     Funny, but without Suzanne, I'd have never known I had been shot.  Like this guy I dragged over the gravel away from the smoking bits of an IED near Fallujah.  A goner, but he didn't know it, he hadn't felt a thing.  Just kept on telling of muzzle flashes that never happened and summing up the situation.  I fucked up, man.  What a nerd, I thought.  And now, here I was, Kenny the smart-ass survivor, laying in crabgrass.  Kenny's body that is, an apparent victim of a pump gun hit-and-run.  Kenny-the-ghost had it the worse with Suzanne.  A man just dead ought to get better treatment, say a look at a Saint Peter kind of guy, a friendly face with a patient ear for incoherent ramblings.  With a sad smile to brighten moments of terrible lucidity, eyes that would turn from a crying fit.  Ideally, a white-bearded Ronald Reagan.  Why not a Spike Lee look-alike in high-top sneakers.  Maybe an Oprah in page-boy haircut on a Welcome Wagon to the Thereafter, or a Jehovah Witness type in a midsize Ford.  Some sort of an angel, anything but Suzanne, the candid Queen of Sarcasm.  A family trait, she says.

     "Don't flatter yourself. The guy didn't shoot you because you are such a comedian."  She was adding insult to twelve-gauge injury.

     "There has to be more to it."  Like what, Suzanne?  What else but blind rage could possibly motivate Vincent to kill the Iraq buddy who spent half his summers swatting black flies in the pucker brush to keep him and his family in everyday ganja?

     "Let's find out," she said.

     And get even.   Another facet of what the Queen calls her inherited personae.  Gimme a break, she's such a snob, most times she sounds like she's on Public Radio.  I said I'd better things to do, like lay back with a joint rather than chase a paranoid psychopath to Boston.

     "Ghosts can't smoke dope, Kenny."  Why does she keep on reminding me?  Why rub salt on wounds that flies have already found?  That horrible mess I can still see.  Slime soaking poplin, raindrops spattering on the faint reflections of traveling headlights.  Why can't I escape?  Why can't I just pass away.  Away. AWAY.  Far from you, sick Queen.  Far from your peeping-tom sessions at the bedroom windows of fat country folks.  Far from your games of casual observations.  Your amazing revelations.  Your figuring of GENETICS.

"That's called Karma, Kenny".

YOUR HUMBLE NARRATOR

     Where did this one come from, you may ask.  Another ghost?  Nope.  Just a helpful hand, ahem, a helpful pen.  Please forgive this intrusion, but our heroes' interests are about to diverge from Emil's after an unexpected phone call and consideration of a geographical assumption that would prove most unhelpful to the ghosts ranks of the group.  When folks refer to a big city they use its name, they don't usually tag that moniker with qualifications like 'Greater' or 'area'. Vince, Kenny's murderous friend, lived in a crowded Boston neighborhood where eighteen-wheelers' drivers would venture only under conditions of extreme duress, if at all, and certainly not to discharge 80,000 pounds of potatoes.  That realization stunned Kenny, still grooving up there between the exhaust stacks, when he saw the truck slow to a crawl and enter a highway going West long before the city's towers rose above the suburban landscape.  As Emil skillfully backed the Rocket to its familiar bay at the truck terminal, a raging Suzanne tried to convince Kenny to take them to the city, but he had no clue about traveling to their destination, a favorite bar of Vince that ranked high in Suzanne's expectations.  Ah! A crowd, loud music, dancing hunks and babes, sweat and smoke, so many opportunities for languorous insertions between dancing couples, the works.  The trouble was in how to get there, it wasn't like they could hail a cab.  Anyway it was too early in the day, thought Kenny, and what if Emil left the terminal, how would they find him, how would they get home?  On and on.

     Before we proceed with the story your narrator must admit to an unforgivable sin.  Yes, I did it, I stole a setting (below) from another author.  It often occurs in the movies, where they call it an 'homage' to the work of, say a brilliant director.  It is less common in the book publishing business where the plagiarism epithet is thrown at the guilty with great heaps of scorn.  I hope

@MoodyMooseMouse

forgives me anyway.  The theft is minimal, the scene and setting in her book 'THISTLE WISH' stand miles above my work.  Let those who have read it drag me to the pyre –in effigy please.  To those who haven't read THISTLE WISH, I say 'you must.' It is the best I have read in a long time, heartbreaking and very funny, a story with a lot of soul.

My apologies for the interruption, back to trucking.

     By Department of Transportation rule, Emil had to take an 8-hour rest to be entered in his logbook.  Perhaps he would do that right where they were, hoped Suzanne, but that was before his phone chip-chipped away and Emil hollered at the terminal guys to hurry please, and they were good and they did, and the truck was already moving when they slammed the trailer's doors shut.  Emil was grinding his gears hard and high, heading to another stop for his return load and after that they were going North fast, damn the logbook.  Kenny returned to his post over the orange lights, quite relieved actually, and a bit puzzled by his easy-sweet thought of going home --though that was perhaps a result of witnessing Suzanne's annoyance.  She was cross at the thought of another day of watching tar between snowbanks and had gone below when Emil took another call.  Oooh!  That was the plan.

     In an hour they were in Dunham where the guards were quick to raise their assault rifles at the sight of an eighteen-wheeler roaring toward the prison gate, but the great hisses of the air brakes and the sight of Gail hopping and skipping with her little suitcase to the passenger side door was enough to calm everyone down.  Not quite a great escape, thought Suzanne, but surely a spectacular pickup for a ride home.

     Just out of town there was a sort of a mini-mall with enough parking to fit the Rocket along the snow banks at the back.  Long before the clicking of the shutdown diesel had began to space, the curtains had darkened the cab and the reunited lovers set out to update Emil's logbook.  Kenny moved to the trailer's roof to lay back and gaze at the clouds, Suzanne thought she would take a look around.  In a shop window a woman was hanging tricolor garlands above a large poster showing a man with a handlebar moustache waltzing a cute brunette at the terrace of a sidewalk café.  Fireworks framed a banner where cursive lettering spelled a message:  'Bastille Day in France this Summer!'

Mmmm... thought Suzanne, that's an idea!

No hurry, no harm done, the end.