The Midnight Country

Chapter 14

May became June, which became July, which became August, and I didn’t see Ghost ... although I left him something every day, something which was always gone when I returned, at least at first. By September, however, he’d stopped taking what I left him completely—nor would he appear when called—and I began to worry. That would have been about the time I started getting serious with Jenny—holding hands at the indoor skating rink, kissing for the first time in the balcony at The Muppet Movie—as well as my first growth spurt, all in the legs, which made me feel gangly and insecure but also made me taller than Jen, which I liked, and which she liked, too.

It was also around the time the murders started happening, and what become known as the Comet’s Tail Mangler—at first just in the local paper but soon the national ones as well and finally the NBC Nightly News—started making waves across the country. Nor was that the only national news story to touch me; for my parents’ missing flight was back in the spotlight also—primarily because the business tycoon who had resumed the search (after the Coast Guard and Federal Aviation Administration abandoned it) had now given up, too.

For Shad and my grandma, it was case closed—again. For me, it was the beginning of a season of denial that would last clear through September and into the school year; a season in which I became more convinced than ever that my parents were still alive. “Denial can be a powerful thing,” my mother had once said (I believe it was in the context of someone’s rumored drug and/or alcohol addiction), but for me, in that fear-addled fall of 1979, it became something more; something akin to an obsession or even a psychosis; something which rendered me deaf, dumb, and blind—to the reports of wreckage having been spotted by a private flight out of Honolulu in the wee hours of Christmas morning; to the reports of the victims of the Mangler having been mauled as if by an animal— mauled, and partially eaten. Indeed, I had even begun looking forward to introducing them to Jenny (when they were finally picked up from Gilligan’s Island, which is how I imaged their circumstances), had even selected a date: New Years, 1980—the day the call would come. The day the news would be announced that survivors had been found and that they were in good health; the day we would drive to the airport in Grandma’s black GTO and watch my parents descend the steps like soldiers returning from Vietnam, their faces tanned from the South Pacific, their necks adorned with leis.

In the end, however, the New Year brought news of a different sort—though news that struck home regardless—for the latest victim of the Mangler turned out to be Stuart Dalton himself: decorated veteran, local hero (for his service in Vietnam), and a close, personal friend of our parents—so close that we were invited to his funeral; where I ended up in line behind his widow for the viewing of the casket, a casket which had been draped with a veil to prevent scrutiny of the body.

Even now, some forty years later, it would be difficult to describe what I felt that day, as Song Li offered her final words and her husband lay hidden beneath the gauze and the reality of what had occurred—what had been occurring, ever since the death of the convict—came crashing down; as Song said goodbye to her “darling Stuart” and I said hello to reality (for the first time in months, possibly even since my parents had disappeared), and knew, though the thought of it tore me down the middle, what had to be done. If, that was, I could even find the portal.

If, that was ... I could find my friend.

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