No, this jealousy festered in Bumby like an open sore, so painful it was murderous, because when it came to writing, the Man was truly great. So great that Bumby knew, deep down in his soul, that he himself had no business picking up a pen, and should stick to telling rich New Yorkers what vintage to drink with their ginger-braised lamb chops. Bumby had been writing for thirty-five of his fifty years, had never been published, and knew it was never going to change. Still, he loved writing, and loved the caché it gave him with the island’s burned-out waitresses who thought he was about to make it big.
He heard the others creeping behind him, although they had never crept until recently. Not until they had gone down into the basement, talked to the Man through the Ouija Board, and discovered that his troubled mad spirit roamed these grounds.
They shuffled down the outdoor stairs at the rear of the house, to the locked door at the bottom of the stairwell. Ernie bent over the simple lock and opened the door with a credit card. They all cringed as it creaked open.
They did four different things: Ernie flicked the light and locked the door behind them, Champ took the Ouija Board out of a burlap sack and started arranging it on the brick floor, Papa lit a cigarette and pulled out his flask of whiskey that was engraved with a cheap likeness of the Man’s face, and Bumby went to read the love letter again.
“I told you not to touch that until we decide what to do about it,” Papa said, as Bumby pried loose a brick in the corner and pulled out an envelope whose seal had stood for decades until broken by the six of them last week. An envelope whose location had been revealed to them by the Man himself, speaking from the mysterious ether to which the Ouija Board granted access. They had left it there for the time being because they couldn’t agree on who should keep it. Their fear that someone else might steal it was eclipsed by their fear that one of them might sell the letter behind the others’ backs.
Papa said, “I’ve been making inquiries in Miami. We’ll have a buyer before long.”
“A buyer,” Bumby murmured to himself. He held the letter in his palms, cradling it as gently as possible, as he read words from the master that no living person outside of that room had ever seen.
“We’re not selling it yet,” Champ said, his reverence for the letter trumped by his yearning to buy a proper fishing boat. Champ and Ernie were day laborers for a construction company owned by a Mexican, which embarrassed Champ. Champ spent all his hard-earned money in the island’s dive bars, and he was also embarrassed that he couldn’t afford anything other than his twenty-year-old pontoon boat. If he ever hooked a marlin, he knew he would end up upside down on a rock in the Bermuda Triangle. “There’s got to be more,” he said, “and we’ll sell everything together.”
Papa blew smoke in Champ’s face. “I said I’m lining up a buyer, pisshead. It takes time. It’s not like selling a goddamned baseball card.”
Champ was Ernie’s best friend, and Ernie’s stomach clenched as the smoke swirled in Champ’s face. Ernie knew in theory he could take Papa in a fight, but Ernie was a physical coward outside of the boxing ring, where there were no rules or referees. “So who’s the buyer?”
“Don’t you worry about that. A contact from the joint is all you need to know.”
“Yeah, well, we’re doing the transaction together. All four of us.”
Papa showed his teeth and said nothing. Ernie hated him for it, but hated himself more. The truth was that the Man would have thought Ernie to be the lowest of men, the kind of man who ran from the battlefield.
Champ finished setting up the Ouija Board and they all gathered around it. It had belonged to Champ’s grandfather. The wooden board was splintering at the edges, the Gothic lettering fading. It had been Bumby’s idea, one night when they were all plastered at Sloppy’s: why not try and contact the Man to whom they spent their lives in dedication, and what better place to do it than at his former residence? They had nothing better to do, other than chase wrinkled whores down Duval.
None of them had actually expected anything to happen, none of them thought they would hear from a tortured revenant who claimed to be the ghost of the Man himself.
Bumby’s nervous eyes flitted over the small group, no doubt realizing that the last time they were here there had been six of them. Now Max and Scotty were lying on their dead broke backs in the Key West cemetery.
Champ placed the planchette in the center of the board, and they all hovered over it, each placing a fingertip on the plastic wedge. They moved the planchette around in circles to warm it up, then eased off the pressure, letting their fingertips rest lightly on the piece.
“Who’s first?” Champ whispered.
“Stop whispering,” Papa said. “There’s no one else here.”
“He’s here,” Ernie said. “He told us exactly who he was, including intimate details of his life.”
Papa gritted his teeth. “Maybe that’s because these boards respond to subconscious thought, and there were six Hemingway impersonators asking the questions. Maybe, just maybe, we wanted him to be here.”
“And the letter?” Bumby said.
Papa sneered. “You’re not as clever as you think you are, you know. There’s an easy answer for that, and it’s the same answer to the question of who killed poor Max and Scotty.”
“What’s that?” Champ said.
Papa grinned his words. “One of us knew about it.”
The rest of them grew still as they realized the thought did carry some weight, even though it wasn’t completely logical. For instance, if whoever hid the letter was killing off the rest of them, why reveal the hiding place? Besides, the one-page letter to a mistress, signed by the Man himself, was a thrilling find possibly worth a few grand on the black market, but hardly worth murder.
Idiots.
Bumby took a deep breath. “That’s ridiculous. The four of us were drinking the night Max was killed.”
“Yeah,” Papa said, “except you left early, and the rest of us closed it down.”
“I had to open the restaurant the next morning. I went straight to bed.”
“Bumby didn’t kill anyone,” Ernie said, although his voice didn’t drip with conviction. “Let’s do what we came to do and talk about this later. So who’s first?”
“Let’s start how we did the last time,” Champ said, then lowered his voice to a somber drone. “Is anyone there?”
They all stilled, making sure not to influence the planchette, then waited in uneasy silence until the planchette made a skittish progression to the word in capital letters in the top right corner. The hairs rose on the backs of their necks.
-YES-
Champ swallowed. “Who are you?”
-ME-
“Stupid,” Papa said to Champ, then, “Are you Churchill?”
-NO-
“Mother Teresa?”
-NO-
“John Updike?”
-NO-
“Ernest Miller Hemingway?”
-YES-
Papa hesitated, and the other three glanced nervously around the dusty room, as if waiting for someone to jump out of hiding.
But there was no one there.
Bumby said, “What year is this?”
-1961-
“The year he died,” Ernie murmured. “For sure it’s him again.”
“What’d you do last night?” Bumby said, and Champ looked at him sideways.
-GOT TIGHT ON ABSINTHE-
“Did he drink absinthe?” Champ whispered, as if spirits could only hear loud voices.
“Of course he did,” Papa said. “He drank everything.”
Bumby leaned forward while maintaining the lightest of pressure on the planchette. “Do you know who this is?”
-PAULINE-
“Do you know where you are?”
For the first time, the planchette failed to go to a letter or a word. Instead it moved in a slow, jerky circle, stopping and then starting on various letters, as if unsure of what to do.