Tucker’s Story

Light flashed across the windshield as Jon Peterson pulled his silver BMW sedan slantwise into an open parking space. He turned off the engine and checked his watch. Six minutes to three. Climbing stiffly out of the car, he turned to take in the town he had driven two days to reach.

Back in Philadelphia, the glass and stone towers of downtown office buildings were still in the grip of winter, the streets edged with dirty gray rags of snow stained with car exhaust under the heavy iron sky. But here, a few miles north of the Louisiana border, an unmistakable spring softness hung in the air. The rows of crepe myrtles lining the grounds of the Union County Courthouse had already burst into color, and the hedges of bridal wreath spirea opened their cool white arms to the fresh sunlight. Across the street, a red neon Pegasus, its forelegs lifted, rose into flight from the roof of an empty café.

Jon turned to face the bar on the corner. Gilt letters arranged in an arch across the plate glass window spelled out Mansfield’s. At 41, Jon Peterson was already a full partner in his law firm, and he’d learned the value of time. Precisely at three, he crossed the sidewalk, pushed open the front door, and walked in.

Four dimly glowing chandeliers disclosed a line of dark wooden booths along the left perimeter of the room, red velvet wallpaper, and, to the right, a long walnut bar with a gleaming brass foot rail. A single figure hunched on a stool at the bar, a glass of beer in front of him. Jon observed the man as he walked toward him: khaki pants, his steel-toed work boots scuffed and muddy, a Navy windbreaker, white hair spilling from under a battered blue baseball cap.

The man turned at Jon’s approach.

“Are you Mister Tucker?” Jon asked.

“Yeah, I’m Zachery Tucker.” The eyes flicked down and up again, taking Jon in. “And you must be Jon Peterson.”

The men shook hands. A bartender appeared suddenly behind the bar, seeming to form out of the dusky interior of the lounge. His white shirt glowed in the unnatural twilight, a black bow tie, red vest.

“Have a drink, Jon Peterson.” Tucker smiled. “I think you’re going to need one.”

The drive had been exhausting, the last stretch of it on winding two-lane highways through tracts of shadowy pines that seemed to go on and on. Jon ordered a martini, dry, two olives, and the bartender withdrew to mix his cocktail. An awkward silence ensued, both men staring straight ahead, not speaking, each uncertain how to begin. When Jon’s drink arrived, he took a sip of the icy gin and broke the silence.

“I’ve come a long way to hear what you have to say about my uncle’s death, Mister Tucker. So why don’t you tell me what you know?”

The old man turned on his stool to face him, a hand on one knee. His gaze, direct and assessing, caught Jon off guard, unsettled him for a moment. The quick, dark eyes belied the sense of age conveyed by his lined and weather-beaten face.

“Do you have an open mind, Jon?” Tucker watched closely for his response.

“I listen,” Jon said, taking back his equilibrium, “and I observe. I make up my own mind about things.”

“Good. Are you a religious man?”

“Not particularly.”

Tucker paused. He glanced at Jon from the corners of his eyes.

What was the old man’s game? Jon reminded himself that this was the South, and he hoped he hadn’t fallen in with some lay preacher.

“What do you do for a living?”

Jon told him.

The old man laughed quietly to himself.

“Well, that explains it,” he said. Tucker sat up and squared his shoulders. “Okay counsellor, I’ll make my case. I’ll tell you the story. Taylor Peterson was my friend, and I owe him that much. And you can make of it any damn thing you like.”

Jon formed the sudden impression that the man had been sitting there for the last hour, debating whether to speak. But why was he so defensive? After all, he was the one who had contacted Jon to offer whatever information he possessed.

“Your uncle and I used to meet here every day for an hour or so after work to knock back a few beers. Everything I’m about to tell you he told me, piece by piece, right here where you and I are sitting. Everything but the final scene,” he added, “and I think I can fill that in for myself.” He looked at Jon directly for a moment. “I don’t know how well you knew your uncle, but he was a serious, thoughtful man. That makes it hard to dismiss what he said. He wasn’t a fool, and he sure as hell wasn’t a liar. It started one night with an incident he couldn’t explain. Seems that years ago he had adopted a stray cat.”

“Sam,” Jon interrupted.

“What?”

“The cat’s name was Sam.”

Jon remembered the animal from his boyhood, from a time when his Uncle Taylor was still a part of his life. Sam was a big orange tom with green eyes. The cat would follow Taylor Peterson from room to room as he read or wrote or sat on his back porch sipping coffee and thinking, watching the light go down. The animal would station itself somewhere nearby and watch him silently with those green eyes, blinking.

“Your uncle’s rooms face the square,” Tucker continued. “If you go out the door of the bar and look up to the right, you’ll see four windows on the third floor overlooking the side of the courthouse. That was his place. He purchased those rooms from the city: old hardwood floors, leaded windows, brick walls. He loved it. Said it was like living in a museum. Anyway, he was lying in bed one night, half asleep, and a door blew open behind him. He could hear the doorknob hitting the brick wall.” The old man shook his head. “The only thing is, counsellor, there’s no door in that wall, just a window that’s sealed shut. And then, before he had a chance to react, he felt a cat land on the bed. He could feel the weight of it, the four paws light but unmistakable, and then he sees the cat run across the foot of the bed, jump down, and disappear through the open bedroom door.”

Tucker paused to sip his beer, and Jon waited impatiently for him to continue.

“Well,” Tucker said, “Taylor got up and searched the place, the parlor and adjoining kitchen, the office with its rows of bookcases, the big desk and chair. There was no way the cat could’ve gotten in, and once in, no way he could’ve gotten out. But the rooms were empty. What’s more, your uncle insisted that it was the same damn cat.”

“You mean Sam?”

“Right. The cat who’d trailed him from room to room. The one who’d been dead for 30 years. Now what do you make of that?”

He could see from Tucker’s face, the eyes fixed and earnest beneath the brim of his ball cap, that he was serious. But he reminded himself that just because the man across from him was convinced didn’t mean that he wasn’t mistaken, or worse.

Jon shrugged. “He must’ve been asleep when he saw the cat.”

Tucker smiled and nodded.

“Yeah, your uncle suggested as much himself. But then he backed away from that.” Tucker tapped the bar with one finger for emphasis as he spoke. “He insisted that he was awake, wide awake, from the time that doorknob hit the wall.”

Right, Jon thought. The doorknob that wasn’t there.

“We talked it over for a few days,” Tucker said, “but we couldn’t figure it out. Your uncle started talking about Einstein, dimensions overlapping, one reality slipping momentarily into another. Taylor always needed to get to the bottom of things, you know, to understand.”

That, at least, was true. His uncle’s unswerving intellectual curiosity and pursuit of the truth, his insistence on the importance of that, no matter the subject or consequences, was one of the reasons that Jon had decided to become a lawyer. His own father — distant, strict, and forbidding — had never had much of an effect on Jon’s life. It was his Uncle Taylor who had shown him, by example, how he wanted to live, what kind of man he wanted to be. Perhaps that was why he’d come so far so readily after so many years to listen to this stranger’s story.

Tucker said, “We were prepared to write it off as an anomaly. A glitch, as your uncle put it. A slip in the gears of the universe. But then something happened that took the situation — or whatever the hell you want to call it — to the next level.”

 

For several moments, the two men sat together in silence, each immersed in his own thoughts. Jon heard the door open and turned to see a shaft of daylight cast across the floor, and a couple entered the bar. At first, he resented the intrusion. His skepticism aside, the old man’s story intrigued him. He was anxious to see where it would take them, and he didn’t want to be interrupted. He soon realized, however, that the newcomers were content to sit in a corner booth, absorbed in their own drama, talking quietly and keeping to themselves.

“I know everything about this town,” Tucker said suddenly, apropos of nothing. “I’m the town’s memory. Tuckers have been here since the beginning. You know about the Parnell-Tucker feud?”

Jon shook his head.

“My great-grandfather was the town marshal. October 9, 1902.” He pointed toward the door. “He killed two men in a shootout right outside on the square in front of the courthouse. Their relatives caught up with him a year or so later and shot him. He lost an arm and had to hide out in Little Rock. That’s the sort of story your uncle loved about this place. He kept quoting some writer — I forget who — saying that the past is not really past, that you could see signs of it everywhere you looked. Taylor was a smart man. He understood that about this town.”

“Faulkner,” Jon said.

“What?”

“The writer was William Faulkner.”

“That’s right.” Tucker smiled. “Faulkner. You must be a pretty smart guy, too.”

Jon was uncertain whether he was being mocked or complimented, but he decided he didn’t care either way.

“We were doing fairly well here for a while. Sullivan Oil invested in the town. The craftsman bungalows and the Queen Anne houses with their turrets and wraparound porches were restored and opened as cafés or bed-and-breakfast hotels. They even restored the old opera house and started bringing in plays and live music.”

Jon remembered the relative desolation of the square.

“What happened?”

Tucker stared straight ahead, as if he was reading the labels on the rows of bottles displayed behind the bar: Cutty Sark, J&B, Old Grandad.

“COVID came to town,” he said, “and a lot of places had to close. You couldn’t put a crowd in the opera house for a show. People were afraid, and they started staying away. Then Sullivan Oil closed their offices here and moved to Houston. Most of the money and opportunity left town with them. If you drive down West Avenue now or take a spin around the courthouse square, every third or fourth business you see is boarded up, the space for lease. That old bookstore on the square claims to be in operation, but they’re never open. The only places still doing business are the bars and liquor stores.”

Whiskey, Jon thought. The medicine against despair.

“Sounds like the town is dying.”

“It’s beginning to look that way,” Tucker admitted. “And you know, once a place reaches a certain stage of decline, it’s damn near impossible to bring it back. Your uncle had a theory about that. He said that when people start to pack up and leave a town, the dead begin to filter back in. There’s more of them here now than there are of us.”

Jon glanced uneasily over his shoulder at the pale couple in the corner booth, their heads together, not speaking. For a moment, he thought he could make out a red gash at the young man’s temple.

Turning back to Tucker, he said, “If you believe that, what are you still doing here? Why don’t you leave?”

“I’ve lived here all my life. This is my home. Where the hell else would I go?”

Jon studied his companion’s features, the profile etched against the half-light: the angular nose, high sharp cheekbones, the face, somehow, like granite. Perhaps this was what it meant to grow old, to spend more time in the company of the dead than the living.

Jon asked, “What was it that happened next?”

He thought at first that Tucker hadn’t heard him, but then the old man drained his beer, caught the bartender’s eye, pointed to his glass, and began.

“About three weeks before your uncle’s death, he was lying in bed, his back to the wall. Again he heard a door fly open, the doorknob striking brick. A rectangle of light fell across him — the shape of a doorway — and there was a shadow in that light, a woman. He heard three steps come into the room. They had a distinctive click to them, he said, like boudoir slippers with heels. But when he swung around, no one was there.”

Tucker’s beer arrived, and he contemplated it in silence, seeming to observe minutely as the foam slid down the long, cold surface of the glass.

“He turned on some lights and checked the place, as he had with the cat, but his rooms were empty. From that moment on, though, he never felt as if he was alone there. He said he was being watched.”

Despite himself, Jon asked, “Who was she?”

“No one Taylor knew, I’m pretty sure of that. When oil was discovered a stone’s throw north of town in 1921, this place became a boomtown overnight. People came from all over — Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi — to stake claims here and try to strike it rich. These old brick buildings on the square and for a block or two in every direction were all originally cotton warehouses. But when the oil started flowing, they were converted to bars and restaurants, and the upper stories, more often than not, became cathouses. The town was wide open.”

A pause ensued, and the old man shook his head and laughed. “You know,” he said, “every Sunday morning before dawn, the cops pulled a wagon through these streets, picking up the bodies so the respectable people could go to church. The ones that were dead drunk they took to the city jail. The ones that were dead they dropped into the river below the hill. A few days later, they’d surface somewhere downstream in Louisiana.”

Jon fixed the man with a steady glare. Is this what he’d driven all this way to hear?

“Are you trying to tell me that my uncle had the spirit of a dead prostitute in his rooms? Do you really expect me to believe that?”

“That is what I’m telling you,” Tucker replied, apparently unruffled. “Whether or not you choose to believe it is your own damn business. Your uncle believed it, though, especially after he brought in Miss Maude.”

“Who the hell is Miss Maude?”

“Maude Talley. She’s a medium, a damn good one, too. Her family has lived in this town almost as long as mine. You want to meet her?”

Jon shook his head. He didn’t see any point in meeting the town witch. Looking around restlessly, he noticed that the couple in the corner booth had vanished. He hadn’t seen them leave, but they were gone. He and Tucker were alone again, except for the bartender lurking unobtrusively in the shadows at the far end of the bar, wiping glasses. Jon wondered if he should get up and leave, too. He’d had just about enough of this.

He turned to find Tucker watching him.

“You know,” Tucker said, “that’s the problem with stories like mine. No one believes them until he has his own experience, and then he doesn’t say anything because he doesn’t want people to think he’s crazy. It’s like some secret that everyone knows but no one will talk about. Let me tell you something, though. Things like what happened to your uncle have been part of human experience from the beginning. As far as I’m concerned, I’m too old to give a damn if people think I’m crazy, and frankly, that includes you, counsellor. I just want to know as much of the truth as I can before I die.”

Beneath his annoyance, Jon felt a grudging admiration for the old man. After all, he was his Uncle Taylor’s confidante. That had to mean something.

“Okay,” Jon said, decided. “Fair enough. Finish your story. I’m listening.”

Tucker drank deeply and picked up the thread. “Maude told your uncle that the girl was killed in those rooms. The girl told her this as soon as she walked in. According to Maude, the dead are all around us, talking, trying to tell their stories, but most of us can’t hear them. Maude hears them, though. She explained to me once that it was like a radio playing constantly that you can’t turn off. Anyway, the girl was freelancing, trying to stay out of the establishments where you had to split your take with the house. Someone got wind of this, and they killed her.” Tucker shook his head. “I guess things like that happen whenever gold or silver or oil is discovered in some place and there’s a lot of ready money to be made. People get hurt. Maude advised Taylor to get out of those rooms, that there was bad energy there from what had happened, and now that the girl had come through, it was bound to get worse. He wouldn’t listen, though.”

“What do you mean come through?”

“She came through the door in the wall.”

This time Jon couldn’t help himself. “You mean the door that wasn’t there.”

Tucker smiled. “Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there, counsellor. Besides, like I’ve already told you, your uncle heard it open, at least twice. And he heard other things, too.”

This proposition, in the gloom of the empty bar with the spring twilight forming at the curtained window, took on an immediate reality in Jon’s mind. He imagined the dead stepping through the walls of the bar, plumbers and oil field workers, to arrive in this place at the violet hour as they had when they were alive.

“One night he was working at the desk in his study. He heard this rustling, sweeping sound, very faint, repeated over and over. It sounded familiar, but he couldn’t place what it was. He stopped working to listen, and then, with a shock of recognition, he knew. A woman was brushing her hair. On an impulse, he switched off the lamp on his desk, and he could see the small crackle of electricity in the darkness as she dragged the brush over and over through her long hair. But there was no one visible in the room.”

Jon could hear the brush’s faint sweep in his uncle’s dark study, followed by a heavy, suggestive silence.

Tucker said, “After that, she started moving closer.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your uncle started waking up in the middle of the night certain that someone was lying next to him in bed. He’d reach over, but there was no one there. Sometimes there was an indentation where someone had been lying, but when he laid a hand on the sheets, they were cold. Still, he knew he wasn’t alone.”

The bartender arrived and wordlessly, with a single raised eyebrow, enquired if he wanted another drink. Jon shook his head, and the man slid silently away. When he was out of earshot, Tucker spoke again.

“Then one night, he saw her. He woke from a sound sleep, not gradually or peacefully, but opened his eyes at once and was instantly alert. He said it was like the feeling you get sometimes deep in the woods: suddenly the birds stop, it goes silent, the hair stands up on the back of your neck and skull, even the air seems to go still, and you know something is watching you. Your uncle turned toward the brick wall behind him, and the shock, he said, made his heart race so quickly, so suddenly, that he thought his chest would explode.”

Jon directed a sidelong glance at Tucker. The coroner’s report had listed the cause of Taylor Peterson’s death as heart attack.

“The woman kneeled at the side of the bed, staring at him, just her head and shoulders visible above the mattress. The room was pitch black, but he could see her perfectly, as if she was somehow illuminated in the dark. Long hair, pale brown, her face a ghastly, bloodless white, her green eyes fixed on him. You could see at once that she was dead.”

The image filled Jon with dread.

“What did he do?”

“He was terrified that she would climb up on the bed and come toward him with those dead eyes. But then, suddenly, as if someone had switched off a light, she was gone.”

Again there was a pause before the old man spoke.

“This encounter couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds, but it left your uncle considerably shaken, and he wasn’t the kind of man to scare easily. I told him what Maude had told him: get the hell out of there. But he wouldn’t listen. He felt as if the woman wanted something from him, and he need to know what it was.”

“Did he ever find out?”

“He never got the chance to tell me,” Tucker said. “But I think he did.”

The bar was silent, empty. Outside, a single car in need of a muffler drove past on the square, the engine throbbing.

“What do you think she wanted?”

“Company,” Tucker said. “In my opinion, she wanted company. Another customer.”

Company, Jon’s mind repeated. Another customer. He clutched the bar and closed his eyes to steady himself.

“The next day, he didn’t show up for our meeting, and when he didn’t show up the day after that, and no one had seen him, I went over to his place to check on him. I knew where he’d stashed his spare key, so when no one answered my knock, I went in. Everything was in order: the dishes washed and drying in the rack, a single wine glass on his desk, some dark sediment drying in the bottom. But I knew right away that something was wrong. When I called out, all I heard in the rooms was the echo of my own voice. I walked into the bedroom and found him dead in his bed, face up, his eyes open as if he was staring at something he didn’t want to see. I was the one who called the police.”

Jon Peterson had come a long way to hear this story. Now that he had, he wanted more than anything to get out of that close, dark bar, out into the open air. He reached for his wallet and placed a 50-dollar bill on the bar, and when the wraith-like bartender appeared out of the dim light to claim it, he told him, “Keep the change.”

The two men walked out of the bar together. Once outside, Jon paused, facing the square in the twilight, and breathed in the keen spring evening. The air, vaguely scented with pine, was as cool and sharp and cutting as the gin he’d consumed. The white blossoms of the spirea hedges glowed in the blue dusk. Beside him, Zachery Tucker fished a pack of Marlboros out of his windbreaker. For his part, Jon had already made up his mind to ignore the old man’s story. His uncle died of a heart attack. Unfortunate, but it happened all the time.

His eye rose to the third-floor windows of the old brick warehouse to his right, his uncle’s rooms. Why had Taylor Peterson chosen this place, this Southern town falling slowly into ruin, so far from his own roots, his family? Jon guessed he would never know. As he wondered, looking on, one window brightened suddenly with lamplight, and a woman moved across the space of the glass. She only appeared for an instant, just long enough for Jon to see her clearly. She wore some kind of black lace gown and stepped slowly and deliberately into and out of view, drawing a pearl-handled brush through her pale brown hair.

Jon swung around to face Tucker. He pointed to the window with one outstretched arm.

“There’s a woman up there,” he said. “There’s a woman in those rooms!”

Tucker snapped his lighter shut, exhaled, and squinted at Jon impatiently through a blue cloud of smoke.

“Of course there is,” he said. “What the hell do you think I’ve been trying to tell you?”