The Invisibles

Ghost Stories

172 ghost stories— As the story went, the Dravinski family lived on a federally owned wildlife preserve south of the city.The man of the house, a naturalist , had gone to high school with Erik’s father, the sort of friend who never dropped in without a buddy. On the day this Dravinski telephoned, Erik saw his father happier than he had seen him since July ended and the ubiquitous reefs of dead, decaying mayflies joined the unremarkable past.There had been no great loss to speak of, but it had been one of those quiet periods during which the house felt unmistakably sad to Erik, when he and his parents all seemed separated by an insurmountable gulf. Now, squinting in shady amusement, his father hollered into the telephone, howled laughter, and spoke in clipped sentences. He called up a litany of strange last names—Kovacs, Horvath, Materni, Farkas—happily remembering the humiliations of high school. He faced into a corner , as if his wife and son couldn’t possibly fathom his giddiness. They would get their chance. The Dravinskis were throwing a party that weekend. His father couldn’t understand why his wife shrugged and retreated to the living room, where she could read a mystery in peace, or why Erik sighed in defeat and slunk out into the yard, dreading the introduction to still more people who were probably cooler than he. “You don’t live in a wildlife preserve,” Erik said to himself, going out to the vegetable garden, jar in hand, to hunt moles. His mother liked to kill them, so he relocated them to the field. “You dwell in a wildlife preserve.” It was a long drive down the road that passed the point where the Maumee River widened to rapids. It was a Saturday in late ghost stories — 173 September, an evening the color of honey, mosquitoes cruising. Inside, the car smelled of vinyl cleaner and his mother’s perfume, last of all the wind.They drove past corn fields and a graveyard on a high hill, as well as several barns converted to cider stores with gaudy, hand-painted signs and displays of tomatoes and blackberries set out front. This world of frank beauty was near Toledo, but you’d have never guessed it, and if its residents wanted to keep it a secret to preserve it, Erik sympathized. He was thirteen years old, short and soft-bellied, humiliated in all ways by the absence of puberty signs, except for his voice, which had always been deep. Though they lived in the suburbs, he went to a Catholic school on the east side with boys whose parents worked in factories and restaurants . At recess in the school parking lot, they liked to wait for him to approach them, accuse him in loud voices of releasing an egregious fart, then flee across the blacktop. School days were long and tedious and scarred with his humiliations, but the solitude of the weekends was harder on him. As they traveled along, he tried to care about the local lore his father remembered. A man who drove a DeLorean lived in these hills. He zipped down the highway on Sunday afternoons, while the sheriffs ate biscuits and gravy in Grand Rapids. Erik thought cars were boring and dirty, and he was a little afraid of men who were enthusiastic about them.They drove past a seasonal carnival, its red and orange lights dull, its small Ferris wheel and roller coaster buried in a patch of woods. His father claimed to have taken him there before he was old enough to walk. What a waste that seemed, but his parents smiled at the memory. They passed a former boys’ reformatory, Catholic, like so many of the region’s institutions from the early part of the century. A tall, brick, vaguely military edifice on a hill near the river. His father said it was haunted by the ghosts of abused boys, all of them around Erik’s age. 174 — ghost stories “Peter, let’s not go into the Twilight Zone,” said Erik’s mother. She had her window down, and her wispy hair, dyed red, flickered over the headrest of the ultramarine seat. “I’m just trying to cultivate a healthy fear of boarded-up buildings in the child,” said Erik’s father. He was a famous joker. His wife and son knew better.“Who knows what...