The Crossroads

“Howdy, pardner! Mrs. J.”

Davy Wilcox stood, hands on his hips, at the far side of the crater.

“Hey,” Zack said.

“Hello, Davy,” Judy said. “Good to see you again.”

There was a noise behind Davy. A rustle of leaves. Three nuns stepped out from the shadows, their black habits fluttering in the breeze.

“You done good, Zack,” Davy said. “Ripped out every inch of that galdern tree.”

“Well, Judy helped.”

“Bless you both,” said Sister Elizabeth.

“Thanks, son,” said a handsome man in what looked like an air force uniform.

“Davy?” Zack asked. “Who are all these people?”

“Well, them there are some real swell nuns. And that feller in the snazzy uniform, that’s Bud. He’s the bus driver.”

“That’s the gentleman who helped me change my flat tire.” Judy waved at Bud. Bud snapped her back a salute.

“We’re behind schedule, folks,” Bud said. “Time to board up.”

Zack saw a pale blond girl dressed all in white.

“Davy?” Zack whispered. “That girl. She’s a ghost, right?”

“Yep, but don’t say nothin’. She don’t even know she’s dead—keeps trying to hitch a ride into town so she can go to a summer social!”

The crowd grew.

“I told ’em, Zack—said you were the man for the job!”

A locomotive beacon of light shone from the dead cornfield on the far side of the highway. Zack could see a silver Greyhound bus glowing from the inside out, as if it were a Japanese lantern and someone had jammed a five-hundred-billion-watt bulb inside it.

“Step lively, folks,” the bus driver said as he marched down the hill.

Several passengers followed him across the highway and into the cornfield. In the crossroads, beneath the blinking stoplight, Zack saw a motorcycle cop acting like a school crossing guard.

“Say, now, where’s the tree house?”

It was the aluminum-siding salesman.

“Move along, Mr. Billings,” Davy said. Billings tipped his fedora and headed down the hill.

“Move along, children. Two by two. Move along.”

Down in the road, Zack could see the scrawny preacher leading his Bible campers toward the light. Zack realized he had never seen any of the children smile before.

Now Zack saw six soldiers stumbling around in the cornfield. The Rowdy Army Men.

“Well, I reckon I best be going, too, pardner.”

“Wait!” said Zack. “This is too weird. I just saw the Rowdy Army Men and those Bible campers and—”

“They’re all the folks what died on account of that fool Eberhart in the flip-top Ford. But don’t you worry. Ol’ Clint is headin’ out of town, too.” He looked down into the pit. “Only I suspect he’s headin’ in the opposite direction.”

A bell pealed in the distance.

“Wait,” said Zack. “Where’s everybody going?”

“Where they shoulda gone fifty years back. But they was marooned down here on account of the memorial.”

“The tree? I don’t understand. Do you, Judy?”

“Maybe. Sort of.”

“Zack,” Davy said, “some folks will tell you that ghosts walk this earth on account of their unfinished business. But these folks? They were stuck here on account of someone else’s unfinished business.”

“Who?”

“Miss Gerda Spratling.”

“She, uh, left town, too,” Judy offered. “I think she and Mr. Eberhart have been…reunited.” She nodded toward the bottom of the pit. “Permanently.”

“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” said Davy. “She made the hour of his death so dadgum sacred, she made these other folks prisoners to it, too. Of course, me and my pops helped.”

“How?” asked Zack.

“Her tree was on our land and Pops saw no harm in letting her decorate it up if it helped her grieve. Me? I let her keep at it all them years. I didn’t know she was trapping souls with it until I checked in upstairs myself: Gerda Spratling couldn’t move on, so neither could they.”

Davy fixed his gaze on the intersection of Highway 31 and County Route 13.

“I figure when you come to a crossroads, you have a choice: right turn, left turn, straight ahead. Or you can just pull over to the side of the road and call it quits. But if you’ve got a good stretch of road up ahead and someone fun to travel it with, I say why stay stuck in a galdern ditch?”

“I knew you were a ghost!” Zack said. “Not at first, but I sort of figured it out.”

Davy looked down at his arms and curled his fingers. “Don’t feel like no ghost, though. Can you see through me?”

“Nope.”

“Dang. I always figured you could see through ’em, you know?”

“Yeah. Me too.”

“When I learned what was going on, I volunteered to come on back. Be a boy again. See what I could do to set things right.”

“Why’d you pick me to help you?”

“You were the only one brave enough. Adults? Most can’t even see ghosts and those that can just get scared.”

“It’s true,” Judy said. “We do.”

The distant bell tolled more deeply.

“Davy?”

“Yeah, pardner?”

“We were really friends, though, right? You weren’t just pretending to make me help you with the stump?”

“Zack, I’ll tell you true: You were the best buddy any feller could ever hope to have. Weren’t no pretending on my part about that. No, sir. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

Davy waved, turned, and walked down the hill to the highway. He wouldn’t be riding on the bus with the others because he had not been one of its original passengers.

Instead, he headed for the crossroads, where he disappeared into the darkness between strobes from the blinking stoplight overhead.

The bus vanished, too. The cornfield was dark and empty again.

It was really over.

Everybody had moved on.

“Wow,” said Zack. “How cool.” Then he turned to Judy and smiled. “Thanks, Mom. Thanks for everything!”

Judy smiled, too, even though she felt like crying: That was the first time Zack had ever called her Mom.

She sure hoped it wouldn’t be the last.