The Ghost in the Tavern by Mark Jacobs

I saw him again yesterday morning. The ghost in the tavern, that is. I knew he was not really a ghost; he was a man like other men. Nevertheless, he made me think of a spirit, lingering for a reason or a purpose I would never know. There was a large rectangular window in the tavern. It faced the street. Mornings, waiting for the work van, I was often aware of him, stationed to one side of that window. He stared out, presumably at me. The angle at which he chose to stand prevented him from being seen.

Because I could not see his face, I could hazard no guess as to his attitude toward me. In the course of my journey to America, I learned to expect the worst from people. I might well represent to him all the newcomers to his city whose arrival he resented. It is a fact that our physical appearance counts against us with many Americans.

Father Hate, I have learned, sires unruly children. I came face-to-face with some of them on my journey. The most unfortunate of those encounters took place in the Darién Gap. If I’m honest, I must also admit coming into contact with some of them back home as well. Here, in this small Ohio city, I shall doubtless meet more.

The ghost—it pleased me to call him that—was of medium height with the prominent belly that so many Americans seem to have. I could not begin to guess his age. Nor did I have any idea what he was doing at the tavern so early, when the establishment was not open for business. Perhaps he was a cleaner, perhaps he was insomniac, or an early riser, I just didn’t know. My lack of familiarity with the customs of this country limited my frame of reference.

The sign out front said Pinetop Tavern. My English is weak, although I am confident it will improve and seek every opportunity to learn. There must be significance to the word ‘Pinetop,’ possibly great significance, but it eludes me. Tavern, of course, is a common word, at least around here.

I generally get to the pick-up location early. Promptness, you see, is in my nature. The company sends out vans to collect its workers. None of us owns a car, or a small truck, though God willing, that will come, it will come. Our hope is as great as our capacity to endure. Sometimes I wait alone, other times we make up a small crowd, enough to fill the van ourselves. Yesterday morning, I was unaccompanied, so the ghost at the tavern window was looking at me, if he was looking at anybody.

I intend to keep this job. That does not mean I like it. Back home, we have slaughterhouses, but they are trivial affairs compared to this grand monster of an operation designed to efficiently pluck, cut up, and package a quantity of chickens numbering in the millions. Some days the work horrifies me, other days it sucks the life out of me, and I return to my uncle’s house, where I have my own room, exhausted. Back home, we used to consider eating a chicken quite a treat. We saved them for celebrations. I remember the zest with which my mother wrung the neck of her birds, her lovely face reddening with pleasure. Now, since being employed at the processing plant, I have stopped eating chicken and doubt I will begin again.

I prefer not to say the name of my home country, or to enumerate the specific problems there that lead people to seek a life elsewhere. Discretion is called for. I do not wish to be identified.

As the van pulled up, I noticed movement at the tavern window. The ghost was tired of looking at me, I supposed, or he had something to do. I rode to work with a tingling feeling, in the company of mostly quiet people gearing up to get through their day. Was I being singled out? To what end? At the plant, standing in line to punch my timecard in the machine, I continued to have a strange feeling throughout my body, the kind of feeling a person who has garnered the attention of a spirit is likely to have.

Everyone at the plant has his or her own way of surviving. Mine is by thinking about the past as though it were a story. Naturally, I have little control over which parts of the story rise into my conscious mind as I go about my duties. They come as they will.

I work in the room where the chicken carcasses are taken for the next stage of processing immediately after the plucking machines are done with them. People say there is something in the feathers that is bad for the lungs. I have no idea whether that is true. People talk about a tickling in their throats, and yes, I have experienced it.

Yesterday, as often happens, my mind went back to my journey to this country. It began in a certain amount of hope when the aunts and uncles on my mother’s side of the family pooled their scarce resources, providing me with enough money to make the trip. They were generous, you will say, and they were. Their liberality is undeniable, given how little they have and will always have. I cherish the memory of their sacrifice and the love that enabled that sacrifice. But the situation was complicated. My mother found herself obliged to beg from her sisters and brothers because she was afraid my father was going to kill me.

That sounds harsh. It sounds dramatic. Is my father one of Father Hate’s many children? Possibly, possibly. He loses his temper. When he loses his temper, his hands become weapons. With increasing frequency, I became the target against which those weapons were employed. Once, I fell on my back and knocked my head against a rock – the edge was sharp – and lost consciousness. My mother raced to protect me, and I believe it was the sound of her terrified keening that brought me out of the dangerous sleep into which the fall dropped me. I woke to blood streaming down my face, but at least I woke.

Still, even after that incident, I was reluctant to leave home. Probably, I would not have decided, finally, to undertake the trip if my father had expressed remorse for having knocked me down and out. I was not passing a moral judgment on the man; I was estimating my chances of long-term survival.

Think about such things with sufficient intensity, and time passes as in a dream. The best story, of course, is one in which you yourself figure prominently.

When the lunch hour arrived, I sat with some people I know at the table where we normally gather. I ate beans. We have a way of preparing beans that can make my mouth water simply by contemplating a plateful. Along with the beans, I ate two apples. I am fond of apples, which back home only the wealthy can consume because they must be imported. The novelty of their crisp, sweet taste has not yet worn off. I have tried many varieties and like best the Honeycrisp apple, which is not always available at the supermarket where we shop; I don’t know why.

People at the lunch table talked with great urgency. They often do. It is as though they have saved up all the things, important and trivial, funny and sad, that occur to them in the course of the morning and now must unburden themselves in the scant thirty minutes we are allotted to eat. Don’t get the idea that I am a recluse. Far from it. Most days, I participate in the conversation with gusto. But yesterday I felt uneasy. I did not much like the thought of being singled out by the ghost in the tavern. It created a feeling of vulnerability. After my trip to America, I’d had enough of that feeling.

Yesterday afternoon passed in a blur of remembering, just as the morning did. The Darién Gap kept coming back to me. You probably know that it is mostly in Panamá and that it connects the South American continent with the North American continent. Among people who travel as I did from a troubled home country to the United States of America, the Darién Gap has acquired a reputation as the final hell you must cross, and you cross it without being assured of your salvation on the far side. It’s not so much a leap of faith as a stumble.

There is jungle in the Gap, hot and slickly wet and filled with dangerous creatures, including insects that sting and suck your blood and deposit the invisible eggs of disease in your body. Traveling through, I noticed something sinister about the light in that jungle. It made me feel as though I were seeing everything—trees and vines and small capering monkeys, birds of brilliant color, spiders and ticks and scorpions—through the eye of a serpent. The serpent that took over my vision was a fer-de-lance, one of the deadly species, or so I was told by another man who underwent the same odd experience.

There are mountains in the Gap, too. They are forbidding and lack the slightest hint of charity. Ascend these heights of ours if you dare; we will do nothing to make the climb easy on you. That is the attitude they project. Once, a man behind me on the steep, slick, narrow path up lost his footing and fell. Sadly, he was carrying his daughter, a beautiful child with thin legs. I remember her red dress. There was embroidery on the front of it. Back home, I believe she wore it only on special occasions. I did not know the language of the man who fell but had been entertained, listening to him encourage the girl to keep going. He was doing what a father ought to do, fulfilling his duty right up until the moment they fell. The shriek, you will say. Yes. The man’s shriek as he fell to his death. I could be remembering wrong, but I do not recall the girl making any sound at all.

There are rivers in the Gap. If the mountains are indifferent to your human welfare, if they take no notice of your ambitions and dreams, the rivers are more actively vicious. They would dearly love to kill you. They have rapids and undercurrents and deceptively inviting eddies designed strictly for that purpose. Well, and do not discount the American crocodile. Its leather smile still occasionally appears in my dreams, causing me to wake in alarm.

You do not set foot lightly in a place like the Darién Gap. It is a test of your will and your strength, and quite a few do not pass it. This is through no fault of their own. They are small – we are all small – and the Gap is big. The bones of those who fail to make the crossing bleach slowly, slowly. I make an effort to remember them in prayer. I do not always succeed.

Crossing the Gap is also a test of your luck.

Mine was not good. I survived the ordeal, you will point out. How bad could my luck have been, after all?

Bad, I tell you.

From the spot where the van drops me after work, I walk twenty minutes to get to my uncle’s house in a neighborhood of roomy old houses, some of which have been chopped up into apartments. My uncle and his wife live on the ground floor of one of those. Upstairs is a family of equal size from the capital city of another country whose name I will not mention.

You might find this strange, but the uncle who shelters me is my father’s brother. He is younger by three years than my father and knows all that need be known about his older brother’s angry outbursts. We choose not to talk about him, although my uncle and his wife and I derive deep satisfaction from sharing stories of home, especially how home used to be before so many of Hate’s unruly children appeared on the streets.

My uncle and his wife have four splendid children, all of school age. Already they speak wonderful English without, I am told, a hint of an accent. The eldest, a girl, has promised to help me improve mine. She is a teenager and lives a busy, exciting life with many friends and many things to do with them, but I believe she will carry through.

Normally, I spend my evenings with the family. We watch television. The children play video games and complete their homework assignments, which are not terribly onerous as far as I am able to tell. My uncle presides over this family gathering as a satisfied chieftain might, his contentment the equal of his wife’s. She is a talkative woman with much to say, aided by a certain sly humor. I like best her laugh.

Last night, however, I went to my room after the evening meal and stayed there, door closed. The ghost in the tavern was with me, in a manner of speaking. I could not shake the uneasy feeling that knowing he was secretly staring at me created in me.

There is a rocking chair in my room. It has a straight back, and I find it comfortable. The rocking action is pleasant, not to say delightful. 

Once again, the Darién Gap came to my mind as I rocked away my anxiety. The group with whom I was traveling—we were twenty or so people from various countries—had covered what we were told was two-thirds of the ground that had to be covered when we were joined by four men who spoke Spanish. They appeared suddenly from a side trail in the jungle, stepping out in front of our party with large smiles. Their clothes were as muddy as ours. Their straw hats were crushed. They had the look of refugees from war.

They asked to join us, explaining that they had the same destination in their sights that we did. One of them boasted three gold teeth and a black pistol in his belt. He promised to shoot game as we went along and share the meat. He was a Central American, I don’t mind saying that much.

There were Spanish speakers among us. One way or another, the new men’s proposal was translated into languages that all of us understood or partly understood. I should say that there was a certain camaraderie among us. Mostly, we were too tired to feel it, let alone express it, but it was there, the way the weather is there even when you are not thinking about it. We had this in common: none of us trusted our guide. What kind of person makes his living taking helpless foreigners through a dangerous wilderness? His long, stringy mustache was a clue; he was not dependable. There was also his habit of constantly scratching the backs of his hands. This man claimed to have safely delivered hundreds of people across the southern border of several American states.

As for the camaraderie, on a couple of occasions, I fantasized about meeting up with some of my traveling companions on the other side of the border, once we were safe and established in America. You don’t have to point out how silly that was.

We were exhausted from our ordeal, which felt like it was going on forever, and the idea of fresh meat sounded good to some of us, myself included. We talked it over at length. At any rate, it was convenient to have an excuse to take a break. The guide stepped aside and let us come to our own decision. After a lively debate, we invited the new men to go with us as we tackled the final third of the journey.

A mistake. In our vulnerability, how could we have avoided making it?

That night, I was lying on the ground wrapped in my blanket when the man with the pistol pointed it at my head. His breath was the breath of a rat in a sewer. He made me understand that he wanted everything I had. Without hesitation, I gave it to him. I became aware that, around me in the camp, his partners were systematically robbing the rest of our group. They had knives rather than pistols and surely knew how to use them. Some of the women had already begun to moan, and one man from a Middle Eastern country was sobbing in a way that was unsettlingly like a song.

The thought has occurred to me, with some frequency, that our guide was in on the robbery, that he led us the way he did in order to allow the new men to cross paths with us. Perhaps he took his cut of the money that my aunts and uncles pooled for my benefit. I would like to know the truth, but certainly never will.

Up until that moment, I was among the more well-prepared people in our group, thanks to the generosity of my mother’s siblings. Afterward, I was destitute. We were all destitute.

And yet, you will say, here I am in a small city in Ohio, a place where taverns abound, and people drive gleaming automobiles, and late at night the traffic signals go through their colors as if reassuring the sleeping residents that order exists, and when they wake, the world around them will be largely unchanged from when they lay down to sleep.

You’re right, of course. I do not dispute it. Here I am, and these are good things; they are worthy features of this American life.

I slept poorly. It would be interesting to ask everybody who was in our band of beleaguered travelers, or at any rate those of us who made it, how they sleep now. Impossible, of course. Upon crossing the border, they scattered like grains of sand in a high wind. This country is vast.

I woke before the alarm I’d set on my phone. I am usually the first in the house to get out of bed. The ten or fifteen minutes I have in the kitchen are all I have to myself in the course of an average day, and I treasure them.

I left the house earlier, even, than I normally do. It’s the middle of October now and already quite chilly. The weather in this part of Ohio—may I say our part of Ohio?—can be wintry even in autumn. Sometimes it snows. It was cold enough this morning that I could see my breath as I hiked.

No one was at the pick-up spot when I arrived. I deliberately refused to look across the street at the Pinetop Tavern, but I couldn’t keep up my resistance for more than a minute or two. Sure enough, there stood the ghost at the window, at an angle making it difficult to see more than his bulky outline.

I froze. What did he want from me? It was possible, it was more than possible, that he intended to report me to the police or to the immigration authorities. I did not and do not have any paperwork authorizing me to be in Ohio.

I turned away. I would have run off, but if I missed the van, I had no other means of transportation to the chicken plant. The foreman to whom I report for duty has no patience with excuses. If you want the job, show up. If you don’t show up, you lose your place.

This was my dilemma.

I dithered. When I looked back across the street, I was shocked. A man—no longer a ghost—was standing in the doorway of the tavern. He was an individual of average height and appearance, perhaps in his fifties. He wore tan work pants and a sweatshirt with the logo of one of the American football teams. His gray hair was tousled. The laces in his brown boots were not tied. He looked as though he had just crawled out of bed, and made me think of a bear; now that I was certain he was no spirit, he was a man of flesh and blood.

He gestured at me, indicating I should cross the street. Again, I thought of running. But if I ran, he would presume that I did not belong in this country; his country. It’s not true that only the guilty run, but it’s what people believe. So I crossed the street, a bit too slowly, trying to keep my breathing under control. Fat chance. My heart thumped like a rabbit’s foot.

I stopped on the sidewalk, far enough from the man that I could evade him if he moved to grab me and detain me until the police showed up. Had he already called them? I said Hello in English. I said, Good morning. It seemed important to put on a brave front. Offering the man an ingratiating smile felt like the act of a coward. I smiled.

In my mind, I was already deported.

The man shook his head. He looked angry. He looked perplexed. He began speaking. I am not an idiot. I pay attention to all the English that swirls around me in Ohio. But in that moment of panic, I could not catch a single word of the torrent gushing in my direction.

In the endless flow of words, there must have been a command to follow him indoors. When I didn’t, he took me by the arm and dragged me inside. I went reluctantly. I was scared, sure, but more than that I was worried I would miss my ride to work.

The tavern had a homey look and a homey feel. The walls were paneled with wood; the wood had knots and attractive imperfections throughout. It was not a large place. You would know everyone who came in, you would raise your glass and say Nice to see you again, brother or sister. The air smelled of beer and of something else with which I was not familiar. There was a bar with stools lined up in a neat row. There were tables and chairs arranged around the room. The man pointed me to a table. I sat.

All that terrible way from home to here, the falling death of the man and his red-dress daughter, the robbery at gunpoint by a man with gold teeth and rat’s breath, the fear and the discomfort and the fatigue that went on as though they would never cease: it counted for nothing.

Under such dreadful pressure, a new thought came to me. Perhaps if I had stayed at home, I would have killed my father instead of his killing me. Perhaps that crime was, after all, what my mother sought to forestall by sending me away.

Still talking, as though to himself, the man disappeared through a swinging door into another room, which was disturbingly dark. Now was my chance to escape, but I didn’t take it. My legs, my arms, my whole body felt heavy, felt clumsy. I could hardly move. I was afraid that if I stood up, I would fall over on the tavern floor. Pride kept me in my chair, and the fear of looking foolish.

The man was back. He was carrying a plate. He put it down in front of me. This time when he spoke, I was able to make out the words.

Breakfast burrito.

I ate it. It was my first. I enjoyed it. The taste was slightly spicy, but not unpleasantly so. I would have enjoyed it more had I been able to converse with the man, who was evidently compelled to talk, even to a person who could not understand him.

I ate quickly. When I finished, I stood. The man shook his head. He scowled. It dawned on me that his gestures had a different significance for him than they did for me. I have not been in this country long enough to read people the way one learns to read those around him, growing up at home.

I said Thank you, in English.

He waved a hand in irritation. I moved toward the door. I could not afford to miss the van. A good friend of my uncle’s got me the job at the processing plant. Both men would be furious if I threw away the opportunity, and I would not blame them.

I thanked the man a second time. He disappeared again. I was already out the door by the time he caught up with me. He thrust a bag into my hand.

Here was the van. It was white, it was cozy, driven by an immigrant from one of the Caribbean countries who had a license. Two men and a woman were boarding. The woman was one of our group, who sit together at lunch. I took my place behind them. Not until I took my seat did I open the bag and look inside. It contained three breakfast burritos. They were wrapped individually in aluminum foil. They were still warm.