Before by Joseph Hurka Page B

with someone. Standing in a shadow at the back fence of the Topalka house, Ghost-Man had been unable to make out what the girl was saying, but she slammed the Ford’s door harder than she usually did and fairly rocketed backward out of the cement garage.
    Now he sees a glimmer of Susan Bristol’s bike, the rattling old Schwinn with its basket, and he moves to it and closes his eyes (there is not much to see in here, anyway, beyond the outlines of the school through a dusty glass window) and imagines that he can smell Susan Bristol’s chamomile shampoo, the nice bite of it; he runs his fingers over the handlebars of the bike and hears them slide there, dry, and feels the girl’s restlessness. His fingers go over the seat, sensing the split of woman. He smells mildew in this wooden, close darkness, and when he opens his eyes he is facing the door and the slight vertical line of light, and about eye level, working its way down the length of door, a large centipede is filing its legs steadily, the head occasionally stopping, probing, a hateful motion against the night. Ghost-Man is startled, then angry, to open his eyes upon this. He takes an old newspaper from the plastic recycling box, rolls it up, tips the door out, and brushes the large insect toward the outdoors, then replaces the newspaper quickly, just in case the centipede managed to somehow cling to the paper. He hates those fucking things.
    He steps quickly into the apartment—to civilization. There is still the smell of Tika LaFond in the air—of her coconut shampoo. Tika is the more attractive of the girls, but the brunette Susan often dries herself after she showers in the kitchen window, where she believes no one will see her; only the Topalka wall is there, the garden, the sunflowers, without a window. Susan’s breasts are naturally, beautifully large and tug with her drying. Ghost-Man once smiled, one summer evening, hearing Tika LaFond admonish her roommate for being naked before the glass. Susan had said, We live in the city. Creeps are every where. I’ll live the way I want to live. It’s the only time Ghost-Man has heard them fight, though when he sees sneakers that have been thrown against the wall in Susan Bristol’s room or a coat or hairbrush tossed in haste on Tika LaFond’s bed he can tell that the females have been quietly angry with each other. The hairbrush was on Tika LaFond’s bed this morning; her bed, too, was unmade, truly uncharacteristic of her.
    Susan Bristol is usually mixing the towel drying with eating something from the refrigerator, and now, stepping into the kitchen, Ghost-Man hears the refrigerator come on, as if on cue. He does not open it for fear of any sudden, unexplainable crack of light in this place, and that makes him think again of the centipede filing, filing downward, and he thinks if somehow he found a centipede on the refrigerator door it would be so maddening and frightening that he would have to leave quickly.
    But there is a homey smell to this place where the girls cook; one of them—he assumes it was Susan Bristol—has made spaghetti this night, and Ghost-Man smells thyme, basil, garlic. He takes the K-Bar knife from his packet (he has wiped it only in leaves), draws it from its sheath, and turns on the faucet. He washes the knife, letting the hot water run over the blade; the sink is dark, the water a black, refracted flow off the steel. It is dangerous to leave the water on for too long: He shuts off the faucet and swings the knife over the drain, air-drying it, then tugs his shirt out of his pants and dries the metal thoroughly, and returns the knife to its sheath, and the sheath back to the package. The package is tight now with the papers and the knife. He tucks in his dampened shirttail.
    Light stretches in from the windows facing the street; the floorboards have a creak to them, so Ghost-Man steps across them in a pattern that has proved quiet in the past,