Poor ghost, p.1
Poor Ghost, page 1
PRAISE FOR
“From its riveting opening through the wonderfully imaginative unfolding of its narrative, Poor Ghost is a lively hopscotch of a novel, compelling, deep and powerful.”
—T.C. Boyle, author of Blue Skies
“As you read David Starkey’s Poor Ghost, you’ll be thinking deeply about how we got from Boston to QAnon, from Casey Kasem to Kyle Rittenhouse: what it all means to you, and what it says about us. But you won’t notice you’re thinking, because you’ll be laughing too hard as Stacey the retired librarian knocks out knife-wielding Álvaro de Campos with a jug of rosé to keep him from killing you in your own backyard while other Halloween-costumed fans of the aging rock band whose plane crashed there a while back livestream the fracas. By the time you realize how involved you are in the deepening mystery, it will be too late to get out.”
—H. L. Hix, author of Legible Heavens and The Death of H. L. Hix
“Poor Ghost opens with a bang and a fire that chars a shattered Cessna and a towering pine tree. It ends with another bang from an exploding brushfire that consumes a massive 70 acres … In between, this highly original novel—unlike any I’ve ever read—shifts among second-person revelations, text exchanges, rock magazine interviews, news articles, and government reports, exploring the ghosts of those departed and those about to be. There’s an invasion of groupies, lunatic murderers, a missing dog, and the mystery of what caused the plane crash. David Starkey makes it all meaningful, bringing the dead to life and offering rich, inventive entertainment.”
—Walter Cummins, author of Where We Live and Seeking Authenticity
“Poor Ghost is an examination of how we deal with loss and change and a tribute to the best band that never was, set in the confusing time of COVID lockdown. I appreciate David Starkey’s improvisations on rock history, but I am most touched by his portrayal of the slow dance of grief.”
—Glen Phillips, Singer/Songwriter (Toad the Wet Sprocket)
“Poor Ghost is straight-up beautiful. The daily chaos of the twenty-first century collides with the narrator’s dark and private emptiness, and somehow Starkey does all of this without a trace of irony or cynicism. I’ll say it again: beautiful. I bloody loved it.”
—Craig Clevenger, author of The Contortionist’s Handbook and Mother Howl
“What makes a band great? Dying in a fiery plane crash? Legions of fans who just won’t let them go? Poor Ghost is all this and more. [The book is] a story of deep human connections, of music and love and loss. From the first blast of power chords to its heart-wrenching finale, this is the great rock and roll novel you’ve been waiting for.”
—Glenn Dixon, author of Bootleg Stardust
ALSO BY DAVID STARKEY
POETRY
Cutting It Loose
What Just Happened: 210 Haiku Against the Trump Presidency
Dance, You Monster, to My Soft Song
Like a Soprano
Circus Maximus
It Must Be Like the World
A Few Things You Should Know About the Weasel
Starkey’s Book of States
Adventures of the Minor Poet
Ways of Being Dead
Open Mike Night at the Cabaret Voltaire
Koan Americana
TEXTBOOKS
Hello, Writer
Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief
Academic Writing Now: A Brief Guide for Busy Students
Creative Writing: An Introduction to Poetry and Fiction
Keywords in Creative Writing, with Wendy Bishop
Poetry Writing: Theme and Variations
ANTHOLOGIES (AS EDITOR)
Teaching Accelerated and Corequisite Composition
Living Blue in the Red States
In a Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare, with Paul Willis
Genre by Example: Writing What We Teach
In Praise of Pedagogy, with Wendy Bishop
Smokestacks and Skyscrapers, with Richard Guzman
Teaching Writing Creatively
KEYLIGHT BOOKS
AN IMPRINT OF TURNER PUBLISHING COMPANY
Nashville, Tennessee
www.turnerpublishing.com
Poor Ghost
Copyright © 2024 by David Starkey. All rights reserved.
This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover and book design by William Ruoto
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Starkey, David, 1962- author.
Title: Poor ghost : a novel / David Starkey.
Description: First. | Nashville, Tennessee : Turner Publishing Company, [2024]
Identifiers: LCCN 2022044623 (print) | LCCN 2022044624 (ebook) | ISBN 9781684429721 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781684429738 (paperback) | ISBN 9781684429745 (epub)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3569.T335815 P66 2024 (print) | LCC PS3569.T335815 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54--dc23/eng/20220928
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022044623
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022044624
Printed in the United States of America
For Sandy,
Always
1
When the plane crashes in your backyard, you are sitting in the living room, flipping through the cartoons in the latest New Yorker.
You live just a few miles from the Santa Barbara Airport, so it’s not unusual to hear low-flying planes. The sound of this one, though, is very different: much louder, and getting closer fast. You drop the magazine and hurry to the plate-glass window just as a small jet appears for a moment to your right, then the next moment is slicing into your pine tree, slamming into the earth, and bursting into flames. A huge plume of black smoke rises from the bottom of your backyard.
Strangely, the first thing that comes into your head is a lyric from an old Tom Petty song about an aeroplane falling on his block.
Then a shiver runs up your spine, and your hands begin shaking so hard that you have to clasp them together to still them.
Your daughter, Victoria, is visiting, and she begins screaming from the family room: “Jackson, oh my god, Jackson!”
For the first time ever, you are glad that Victoria is childless. Jackson is her dog.
“My God,” you whisper, and you and Victoria are running outside.
Your backyard is a trapezoid that’s narrower toward the house and wider—about forty yards wide—where the property ends. There’s a thin strip of lawn running along the house, then a row of juniper and rosemary bushes, then the yard dips on a deep slope for another fifty yards. Lemon trees grow by the fence line on either side, and, until moments ago, a fifty-foot-tall loblolly pine grew in the center of that patch of dirt and dry grass.
The pine is now splintered about five feet from the ground, with the upper branches smashed flat beneath the plane, which looks smaller than when it appeared in your window. It’s a passenger jet—or was.
The two of you make your way down the hillside into a swirl of black, acrid smoke. The jet looks as though some bad-tempered giant has torn a model airplane in half, and then torn it again for good measure.
The forward part of the fuselage has sheared off from the rest of the plane. The nose is partly buried in the loose earth near the lemon tree on the left-hand side of your yard. The right engine has detached from the rear of the plane and is leaning against the plane’s door, which hangs by one hinge. Both the engine and the cockpit are on fire.
The right wing has broken off and rests precariously on the remaining branches of the pine. Some of the branches have caught fire, though, thankfully, the tree was healthy—and the early autumn afternoon is calm. The fire hasn’t spread far.
The rear of the fuselage rests on the slope of the hill, near the other lemon tree, about ten feet from the front half. The left wing and engine are still attached. There’s smoke, but no fire.
The right stabilizer from the tail has come off and is farther down the hill. It has ripped through the wire fence that separates your yard from the Corellis’ orchard. Bent in half like a piece of aluminum foil, the stabilizer has cut into the trunk of an avocado tree.
What remains of the plane just about fills up your backyard.
For a moment, you and Victoria stand there in awe. It is silent, except for the flames feathering up from the front of the aircraft and crackling in the dry grass and pine duff and tree branches. It occurs to you that everyone on board must be dead.
The smoke from the right engine thickens. The air smells of burning rubber and what you assume must be spilled fuel.
You don’t see Jackson.
Then you hear a voice.
A man about your age, with a bloody face, his right arm dangling like a broken branch, is crawling out of the back half of the plane.
“My dog?” Victoria screams. “Have you seen my dog?”
He shakes his head and keeps crawling toward you.
“We’ll find Jackson, okay?” you tell her. “But right now people are hurt.”
You run over and help the man to his feet, then place an arm around his back and direct him slowly away from the crash.
The ground is pocked with gophe r mounds, and he trips as you move up the hill. “Ah, Jesus God!” he moans. “That hurts like fucking hell.”
“Sorry, sorry,” you say, “I’m just worried the plane might explode.” You look down at his blood-smeared face and realize that he looks vaguely familiar. “Is anyone else alive?” you ask.
He shrugs, or seems to. “I was asleep,” he murmurs. “When it happened.”
Your next-door neighbor, Barton, calls your name from his backyard, on the left, then awkwardly makes his way over the low fence between your properties. He stumbles down the hillside until he is beside you and the bloodied man, who has slumped to the ground. “Are you okay?” Barton asks. “Where does it hurt?”
“Are you a doctor?” the man rasps.
“A dentist,” Barton says.
“It hurts everywhere,” the man mutters, then his eyes roll back into his head and he is unconscious.
You take your phone out of your pocket and dial 911, cursing yourself under your breath. You should have done that right away.
You begin to tell the operator what is happening, but Victoria is screaming again. A man climbs from the front of the plane, his shirt on fire, his face burnt ashy black. He takes a few steps toward you, then falls to the dirt, motionless.
There’s a puff of smoke, and a tongue of flame shoots out of the right engine, which causes the wing suspended in the branches to flip and fall to the ground. What’s left of the pine tree begins to burn in earnest.
In the distance, you hear the wail of a siren, then another, and another.
“He needs help,” you say stupidly into your phone, looking at Barton and pointing to the man.
“The plane’s on fire,” Barton says.
“Well, Jesus, yes,” you say, frustrated and frightened and buzzing with a weird energy. You end the call and shove your phone in your pocket and gently lay the man you’ve been cradling on the ground.
As you edge toward the forward fuselage, intense heat sears your face and hands and arms. Then a soft breeze shifts the fire in the other direction, and you pull off your shirt, rush in, and do your best to smother the flames flickering up from the prone man’s clothing. Though his shirt is still smoking and his skin is hot to the touch, you grab him under his arms and pull him uphill, away from the fire.
He is unmoving, possibly dead, but you roll your shirt into something like a pillow and place it under his head. From the corner of your eye, you see Barton creeping in your direction as though the man is a monster who might suddenly spring up and grab him.
Barton reaches down and gingerly pushes a finger against the crispy flesh. He shakes his head, like someone in a movie or on a TV show, and you have a strange feeling that what is happening is something that might, indeed, be recreated by the entertainment industry.
The man’s face is unrecognizable, so you don’t know at the time that this is Stuart Fisher, the lead singer and main songwriter for the band Poor Ghost. If you’re honest, he looks like a charred piece of meat.
2
Your neighbor to the right, Jimson, is spraying water at the fire with his garden hose. To the left, Barton’s wife is doing the same thing. The hoses aren’t long enough, and neither is doing much good, but fortunately, because the air is mostly still and the avocado orchard running along the back of your properties is well-watered, the fire is limited to the pine tree and the dead grass stubble, and the plane.
But the fire in the forward half of the plane is too intense to approach now, and what you can see of the back half looks empty, though your view is partially obscured.
You don’t know what to do, though you somehow feel responsible. After all, it is your backyard.
The heat wavers, then becomes so fierce that Barton pulls the man who crawled from the back of the plane farther up the hill, while you do the same with the other man, who is surely dead. When you are far enough away from the flames and black smoke, you sit down again and stroke the man’s longish tangled and singed hair, whispering, “There, there, there.”
Across the canyon, people line the ridge. The late-afternoon sun flashes on what you take to be the lenses on the backs of their phones, as they send out a visual record of the disaster to their Instagram followers and Facebook friends.
In the street at the bottom of the canyon, it is the same.
Above the sound of the fire, burning with steady seriousness, you can hear the sirens getting louder and the intermittent squawking of crows.
And then, fifteen minutes after the crash at most, there are yellow-uniformed firemen swarming down the hill of your backyard. One of them carries a thick canvas hose over his shoulder, and the others hold it against their hips, as though it were a giant snake. A torrent of water douses the fire in the front of the plane, then drenches the crackling tree branches and the smoldering grass.
There is lots of steam—the brown-and-black smoke from the fires turns white. Then there’s the smell of wet ash, as four paramedics rush to the two men, pushing you and Barton out of the way.
More paramedics arrive, then sheriff’s deputies. Your backyard, which seemed eerily empty just minutes earlier, is now swarming with first responders, uniformed men and women who move through the world with the sort of unquestioning purpose you haven’t felt for a good long while.
3
When the fires are out, paramedics and deputies and firemen clamber into the two halves of the plane.
There is a kind of start-and-stop motion to it all. They move toward something or someone you can’t see. Then one of them freezes, and the others do too. A few moments later, the activity starts up again.
Barton has drifted toward you like a child on the first day of school sensing a possible friend, but the two of you seem to be suddenly invisible, so you sit there in the dry grass just below your juniper bushes and watch as the rescue workers bring up a body from the cockpit, and then another, and then one from the back of the plane.
It is mostly quiet near the wreck now—a susurrus of respectful whispering and one-word grunts.
Then you hear someone crying, and you look back up the hill. Above you is a line of neighbors from up and down the street who must have talked their way into your backyard. One of the neighbors, a woman in a pink dress, is holding your sobbing daughter.
You make your way up the wooden steps to the lawn and put your arms around Victoria.
“Oh, Daddy,” she says, and you wonder how many years it’s been since she called you anything but “Dad.”
A fireman taps you hard on the shoulder.
“Who are you?” he demands. His face is soot-stained, which makes his bright blue eyes all the more intense.
“I live here,” you cough—you must have inhaled more smoke than you realized.
“Is that right? Do you have some kind of identification?”
You dig your wallet from your back pocket and show him your driver’s license.
He gestures at Barton, who has appeared beside you: “Who’s he?”
“My neighbor.”
“Go home, neighbor,” the fireman says. “We’ve got it under control.”
“Part of that plane is in my backyard too,” Barton says, as if claiming his own importance in the scene.
The fireman glances toward Barton’s yard. “Not much,” he says. “This backyard here: this is the crash site.”
He is about to chastise Barton further—clearly the fireman doesn’t like him—but Victoria tugs at the fireman’s coat. “Have you seen my dog?”
“Your what? Was he in the plane?”
“No, but he was down here when the plane crashed.”
The fireman shakes his head. “If we see him, we’ll tell you.” Then he looks at you. “Did you see the crash?”
“Kind of. It happened really fast.”
“People are going to want to talk to you. The NTSB. The FAA. FBI. Get ready. You’re going to tell your story over and over and over again. Also,” he says, staring at your bare middle-aged chest and stomach, “you might want to put on a shirt.”
You wince. “I’ll do that,” you say, taking Victoria by the hand and walking toward the house. “Don’t worry,” you tell her, “we’ll find Jackson.” She shakes her head disconsolately, says nothing.
As you open the back door, you turn and notice that everyone with a phone—in other words, everyone—even a couple of sheriff’s deputies, is taking pictures of the two of you. You pull back your shoulders and try to pull in your stomach. This isn’t a picture you are going to be happy seeing flashed around the world.
