Fact, fiction, of both ... you decide.

My Casper the Friendly Ghost Summer

By Jimmie von Tungeln

            What a summer. One hesitates to speak of it with any degree of levity whatsoever as it began with a family tragedy of deep proportions. A cousin, one of those people who traveled through life beloved by all who know him, a smiling sort who never raised a voice or started an argument, died in a freak automobile accident. He was hitchhiking from Pine Bluff, Arkansas to his home near Rison and caught a ride in a delivery truck, one those with open doors on either side. The truck veered of the pavement, hit a bridge embankment, and threw the lad into the air. He landed badly and died instantly. He was still in his teens, and his name was nearly the same as mine save for the middle names. Even they rhymed. 

            After the mourning, the funeral, the remembrances, and other traumas that death introduces into the mind and imagination of a 12-year old, the affair would have drifted into family folklore for me except for one fact, a fact that followed me like a lost puppy. Our names were so similar.

           Aside from that, I lived away from town and had little contact with those in the city during the summer. Our name was an odd one but well-known one around both city and countryside.

            Now I didn’t connect these facts when the brief account of the tragedy appeared in The Pine Bluff Commercial. A sense of it came to me a week later at my father’s grocery store south of city. It was before daylight and the whole family had turned out to accommodate the first truckload of cotton choppers for the summer. There was a thick fog that morning that wrapped the store in an eerie glow and gave it a gloomy aura as if it had been set down gently in place by the fairy people. At least that was what I was thinking as I returned from carrying out a load of trash.

Just as I reached the building, the truck pulled up. It was what we call in the south a “bob truck” that had been fitted with benches and a canvas top. It would scour the countryside of a morning and collect anyone wishing to chop cotton for a day and then deliver them home in the evening. It would stop at our store early so the hands could purchase something to eat for dinner (some of ya’ll call it lunch) and again on the way home so they could purchase something for supper that night and breakfast the next morning. It served those who led a hard life with few breaks.

But back to my story. It would happen that, as I reached the store, the first one to disembark from that vessel of despair was a man who lived a few miles down the road and was known locally as “Happy Bill.” He was considered “incompetent,” as my father would say but maintained a fair reputation as a cotton chopper and a better one as a picker. His name derived from his demeanor and, as far as I know, neither an evil nor covetous thought ever issued from his joyous soul. We rarely saw him other than during his brief work ventures. This morning he hopped from the truck with his customary good nature and stood peering through the fog looking for the front door of the store.

Instead, he saw me.

I won’t attempt to describe in full the events of the next few minutes. I will only mention that Bill sprang fully erect back into the truck without even bending his knees. He uttered a cry that I am quite sure had never been heard on his continent, followed by a stream of gibberish totally unintelligible to me but, apparently understood by his fellow travelers as eyes, white with fear, began to appear from within the truck’s enclosure. It took my father and the driver of the truck nearly 30 minutes to straighten out the misunderstanding, to the displeasure of several waiting cotton growers.

Happy Bill never came to our store again after that.

The second related experience occurred the next Saturday. I was enjoying the weekly matinee at the old Saenger Theater and had made my way to the concession stand. As I approached, I recognized a girl from school, paying the cashier for a box of popcorn and a soda. She was an extremely cute one, and I was arranging my best smile as a weapon of disarmament when she turned around and saw me. I saw her soft blue eyes, but what I heard was the sound of a cup of “Cocola” hitting the floor followed by the plop of the popcorn box. I looked and saw liquid spreading from the cup and popcorn kernels bouncing against my shoes. When I looked up, her blue eyes had turned a color more like that of a wet army blanket.

“You!” She said.

As a result of this mortifying experience, I finally understood the opportunities afforded by this confusion. In short, I began, and I am ashamed to admit this these many years thereafter, to have a little fun with it. I would purposefully sneak in behind classmates spied at baseball games or at parks, and be waiting plaintively until they turned. A little talcum powder was found to heighten the impact, as were a couple of smears of my sister’s eye-shadow.

I particularly enjoyed the time I caught, Benny “Belcher” Bohanon waiting outside the Boys Club early one foggy morning. I approached him from an alley and when he turned, I asked in a vapory voice, “Do you remember the time you greased my eyeglasses with your filthy fingers during math class?”

It went well until the day we had to register for school. I don’t remember whether I planned it that way or not, but Miss Womble was alone in the room studying a list as I walked up to place my name among those thirsting for another year of knowledge. Not wishing to afford a student the dignity of immediate attention, she continued for read for another full minute. Then she looked up.

The color drained from her face like gasoline falling from the bulb of one of those old overhead dispensers. I’ll swear the temperature in the room dropped a degree or two. She opened her mouth to speak, but her dentures failed to respond to the crisis and merely stayed in place, obviously not wishing to participate in this horror.

I gave her my most winsome smile.

“I thought you were …,” she said. “I thought you had been ….”  Finally, “I thought you were dead.”

I knew better, but something came over me—one of those wild, youthful impulses that tramples one’s better judgment like a raging bull on the streets of Pamplona. “I am, I said,” then I paused for effect. “I only came back to haunt you.”

Up until that point, it was my worst mistake of my life. After the parent calling, the threats, the exhortation, the promise of a front row seat in Hell, and the writing 100 times of “I will not dishonor the dead, I will respect my teachers, and I will not try to be cute,” I was exonerated. At least I graduated from my seat among the penitentiary-bound, to a more elevated one among those with simply no apparent redeeming qualities.

I feel quite sure the experience prevented me from ever going to medical school.

At any rate, I have assiduously attempted to honor the deceased to my utmost ability since that sad episode. I have also treated my teachers as gods and goddesses. Sad to say, thought, I do fall prey to trying to act cute from time to time.

Even at my age.

Boo!