Frank

This story contains mentions of murder and suicide.

Two years ago, I took a road trip with a ghost named Frank. I found him already chopped up in my brand-new backyard, where he told me how his crazy ex-wife did it and left him there to rot. I told myself I was just stressed, and I told him that I’d never drive him all the way to California, but a haunted house is not nearly as cool as it sounds. Frank drove me fucking crazy. He smashed glasses, turned on lights when I was trying to sleep, turned off lights when I was going down stairs, broke my MP3 player, and moved shoes around so I’d trip if I wasn’t paying attention. I chipped a tooth falling over a pair of sneakers.

That was the final straw.

So, I shoved his corpse in a cooler, packed myself a bag, and we set off from my brand-new house in Vermont down to San Diego, California, because all he wanted to moan about was a change of scenery.

While we drove through New York, I tried to make more interesting conversation, but all he’d talk about was how sick he’d become of the pine trees. They didn’t smell like home anymore to him. He went on and on about how they made him sneeze and reminded him of his mother. For hours I tried to ask about her. He either didn’t hear me, or had started to ignore me, because unless I was talking about the trees, he wouldn’t say a word. I didn’t mind. Silence was nice, it gave me a chance to remind myself how fucked up that trip was.

He liked the motels we stayed in. His favorite was the Shade-Inn right on the Indiana state line. At that point, it was my favorite too, because it was the only motel we’d stopped at so far with a working shower. He didn’t care about that at all, I don’t blame him. He liked it because the woman behind the counter told him that he was ‘exceptionally tall for someone from Vermont’. I had no idea what she meant by it, but he took it as a compliment, and made sure to hover a few inches higher every time he saw her. I told him he could stay there instead of making me drive him all the way to California. He threatened to curse me, and we drove to Illinois the next day.

He liked my car. Whenever I played music or put the windshield wipers on, he’d go nuts. It rained in Missouri, that was probably the highlight of his trip, because I’d change the wiper speed like it was a game. He loved it! Every few hundred miles he’d ask to take a turn driving it, and I’d say no because his hands went right through the wheel, and I did still need the car to work. Mostly he just liked it because he’d figured out that he could press play and pause on my CD player. I had to stop for gas one day and he spent twenty minutes going from car to car, trying to press buttons and getting nowhere, until he came back to mine and told me he liked it best. To this day, I don’t really know how ‘Ghost Rules’ work, but he was exceptionally proud of this development, yet he refused to explain what made my car different.

It wasn’t until we got to Oklahoma that he seemed truly upset that he couldn’t fly to California. We were both extremely restless. I hadn’t slept more than three consecutive hours since we left Vermont because he insisted on ‘fulfilling his haunting duties’. He made me take a detour to the airport, and I did because I was so sick of his moaning about it, but he couldn’t get further than the security line. He tried to convince me to let him go through, but I would be the one that had to load the cooler carrying his mangled corpse onto the belt, and I really didn’t want to do that. There’s no explainable way to tell the agent that he’s my friend, we’re on a road trip, he’d rather take a plane. When we got back in the car, he didn’t talk to me for four hours.

We weren’t in Texas very long, yet that was the most stressful state we had crossed yet. To be fair, the cooler was not the foolproof containment system we both hoped it would be. His body started decaying faster and faster, plus his granddaughter filed a missing person report, and it didn’t take police very long to start looking for my car. So we made a plan: I would put the cooler in a discreet location, go tell the cops all about his ex-wife, then come back to get him before we went on to New Mexico. We had just picked a gas station on the map when, suddenly, there were sirens going off behind me. There was no way that he wouldn’t smell the cooler the second he got out of his car, and there was no way I wouldn’t get shot if I tried to get out of mine. I pulled over, panicking, hoping something would come together in the two seconds it took for the officer to open his door. I gripped the wheel until the rubber came off under my nails. I already knew I was going to jail, there was no hope for me, not even the ghost in the seat next to me could do anything but press play and pause on the CD player. Then, like some kind of miracle, lightning cracked from somewhere in the cloudless sky and hit the cop. I watched him crumple in the rearview mirror. For ten whole minutes I didn’t even turn the car back on. I just stared at the officer on the ground.

“He’s fine,” Frank said.

“Did you do that?” I suddenly felt a lot more uneasy about threatening to leave him in Indiana.

”I have a friend.”

He didn’t explain any more than that.

Once we got to the motel in New Mexico, I used a computer to google that officer. He’d been found alive, thank… whatever, I guess, whoever Frank’s friend may be. I looked up the statistics of surviving a lightning strike right after. As much as I wanted to know how Frank did that and what actually happens when you die, I just stared at him, lounging on the bed like nothing had happened, trying to press the buttons on the TV remote. I couldn’t tell if I was having fun anymore. The idea of a road trip with a ghost was fun at first, when he didn’t smell, and the police weren’t chasing me, and he was having fun, and I hadn’t just seen someone almost die right in front of me. I should have let him fly.

Arizona was just as terrifying. I’d stuffed my trunk full of air fresheners to help the terrible smell, but it just made everything smell like fresh roses and rot. I thought about what kind of movie this could be, not that I’d want to relive any part of that trip. I still wanted to go to the police and tell them I’d never met the guy they were looking for, but when I mentioned it again, Frank told me that he’d go in with me just to bring an officer to look in the cooler if I said anything before we got to California. I didn’t argue.

The Welcome To California sign brought me nothing but dread. It was officially the end of my life as I knew it. I’d go to the police with a bullshit explanation about why I’d taken a cross-country road trip with just one duffel bag and a car full of air freshener that still smelled like a rotting corpse. My sister would never forgive me, I’d never see my niece again, my parents wouldn’t invite me to Christmas, I wouldn’t even be able to go back to Vermont to enjoy the house I’d bought! I’d have a mugshot instead of a Christmas card and a jail cell instead of my newly redone master bedroom. I told all of this to Frank as we got closer and closer to San Diego. I tried to explain that his granddaughter would tell the cops I murdered him and stuck him in a cooler no matter what I tried to say and he wouldn’t be able to help because, legally, he was missing. Missing and dead, neither made him a good witness.

I was unloading the cooler behind a 7-11 when the police finally caught me. I just needed to change the ice, we hadn’t even reached the beach he wanted me to leave him. The frustrating part (aside from everything else that was going on) was that we were less than fifteen minutes away. Fifteen more minutes in my car and I’d have been done with the whole thing.

Instead, I was in handcuffs, sitting on the cooler, trying to explain Frank to the cop.

The officer had no words for what he was witnessing. I stumbled over my explanation about everything, telling as much of the truth as I thought he would believe. He leaned into his radio and called for another cop.

“Wait! I’m telling the truth, I swear-“

Suddenly, ‘This Love’ by Maroon 5 blasted from my car. I screamed so loud I thought my whole soul left my body. The cop jumped and put a hand on his taser. Frank had his head sticking through the roof of the car. He smiled, he was dancing to the music. I couldn’t tell if the cop could see Frank, who then ducked back into my car and hit pause, but I doubted it, because Frank was not pretty to look at, and the average person couldn’t stick their head through the roof of a car. It’s something the cop would have noticed.

“That’s him, the ghost is doing that, I swear!” I kicked the cooler over and the body tumbled out.

The officer’s eyes went as wide as my CDs, and Frank hit play again.

“He can control the radio!” I yelled.

“Quiet-“ the officer started moving slowly toward the car.

Frank paused it.

When the cop looked through the window, he could see the buttons to play and pause being pushed, just like if it were me pushing them. He looked right at Frank, I thought he could see him for a second, until he turned back to me and asked me what I’d taken.

“Nothing!” My voice cracked. “I swear, I swear!”

”Kid, you need to tell me-“

The song changed to ‘She Will Be Loved’. The cop jumped when it paused, and started again, then paused again, then played.

“It’s him!” I knew I was only looking crazier the more I flailed my arms around in the direction of my car, but I couldn’t help it!

The second cop car pulled up cautiously. Frank hit play and started dancing again.

”What the fuck is that?” the second cop launched out of his car.

So he could see Frank.

“It’s the ghost! He asked me to drive him down here, I didn’t do this to him, his ex-wife did! She’s back in Vermont, she cut him up, I just found him!”

The first cop looked like he still didn’t believe it, but the second had rushed over to Frank, gun drawn, just watching it dance.

“It was just a road trip,” I collapsed against the cooler.

“You seein’ this?” The second cop asked, but the first shook his head.

“Crazy morning, isn’t it?” Frank finally spoke.

Both cops went pale.

“Fuck you,” I said.

He paused the song. The second cop tried to poke him, but it just went right through. Frank actually tried to grab his gun and made a sour face when he couldn’t.

It was incredibly nice of him to get the cops attention like that. He’d given me no evidence that he ever cared about me, so trying to get the cops to believe my story surprised me. I said as much, and the first cop just shook his head in disbelief.

Frank smiled at me, “well you made a promise, and I’m not at the beach yet.”

”They’re gonna put me in a psych ward,” I groaned. “What the hell am I supposed to do?”

He shrugged, and told me to kill myself.