Damn near every place is haunted, whether ghosts are real or not. Live in a place long enough and you get to know a few.
There’s not much of a shoulder on this highway. Just before this bridge, I usually see Larry on his bicycle. He was thrown out of the casino one night and got hit by a truck on his way home.
A kind, eccentric old man, Larry lived in the trailer behind us when we were in town. He rode that bike everywhere. I met him one day when he was looking for his cat.
Well, sort of his cat. One of the many strays in a town too small for animal control, she had taken up with him. He left food for her and they spent time together when she cared to. I thought I had seen her outside our kitchen door, meowing for the breakfast bacon, though it may have been someone else.
On the day I met Larry, the cat had waited for him like usual outside the Casey’s on the main drag. When he came out she was nowhere to be seen and Larry was distraught, worrying someone had scooped her up and taken her home, which I doubted but hoped was true. We searched but she never did come back.
I once worked in a kitchen in an old creole cottage in New Orleans, overrun with the ghosts of cats. There were holes in the walls, and in monsoon season the roof leaked so bad it would drip on the chef as she stood at the window, calling tickets.
Restaurants in the Quarter are hopelessly plagued by rats, hugging the Mississippi as they are, so they always kept a cat on the payroll to banish the vermin from the dining room and the creepy pantry, a narrow closet in which I scaled a rickety, sliding library ladder to retrieve big jars of tomatoes and cans of olive oil.
The rats were a lost cause. I recall chopping vegetables by the window while a particularly robust rodent romanced his lady in the courtyard, putting the diners off their pricey lunch.
I never knew what happened to those cats, but they didn’t last long. Their replacements would simply materialize one day. I half believed they came in on the produce truck, packed in boxes with peas and potatoes.
Just South of here, a man unknown to me jumped into the river, to save a little boy unknown to him. This man had gifted to his new homeland an unknowable quantity of courage and compassion, but he had not brought with him the ability to swim. I believe the little boy survived.
My heart breaks a little for that man each time I cross this bridge, just after I say hello to Larry. Or just before, when heading West.
There is a bridge I regularly cross where a man I didn't know, in a state of drunken misery, drove over the edge and wasn't found below for several days. I don't know how this was managed. There is a memorial there too. I feel it is haunted.
There are little memorials for the road killed like that up and down the country road I drive every day between home and town. And that says nothing for all the other non-human relatives who perish between those ditches. Meanwhile everything just gets bigger and faster and more distracted. What a world.