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his emphysema became too much to deal with.
    â€œWeird,” Cliff said, lifting the binoculars to his eyes. “But what makes you think he’s a ghost and not just some loon?”
    â€œI don’t know. Lots of things, I guess.” In reality, it was one thing: Anna. The visit from Anna had seemed connected somehow, had made my thoughts turn to the supernatural. And then there was Dad shooting at what had to be the same visitor I had seen the night before. Dad was a crack shot and he rarely missed. Yet I’d seen the light from the man’s cigarette from my upstairs window after the gunfire.
    â€œAnyway,” Cliff said. “What did he want?”
    â€œHe just stood there. Like he wanted to knock on the door but couldn’t decide if he should or not. The wind was blowing and it was raining and his hair kept flying everywhere. He was smoking too. Switching out hits from the oxygen with drags on his cigarette. He just stood there. It seriously creeped me out.”
    â€œSo you think this guy is a ghost?”
    â€œI didn’t say that. It’s just weird. It’s all too weird, like something out of a movie.”
    â€œDid this apparition have a scar on his right cheek?”
    â€œI couldn’t tell. Why?”
    â€œLong white hair, right? Messy. Greasy. Scruffy beard?”
    â€œYeah.” I looked down and saw Cliff looking through the binoculars.
    â€œI think I see your ghost,” Cliff said.
    â€”
    I zoomed the binoculars in on the man’s face. If anything, he looked more frightening by daylight than he had a few nights ago. His scar was long; it ran from his right eye down his cheek until it disappeared beneath his shirt collar. He muttered to himself as he paced around outside the cabin.
    â€œWhat’s he doing?” Cliff said.
    â€œLooks like he’s moving in.” I panned out and saw that he was indeed moving in. He was carrying a large framed painting into the cabin. His pickup was filled with boxes and furniture.
    â€œYou’ve got to be pretty hard up to move into that place.” Cliff whistled. “No running water, lights. Jeez. I hope he brought plenty of books.”
    I panned back to the truck. “I see a bed frame, so yeah, it looks like he’s taking up residence.”
    â€œWhy do you think he came to your house the other night?”
    I shook my head and lowered the binoculars. “I don’t know.” What I didn’t say was that I felt damned determined to find out.

Chapter Four
    WALTER
    I remember fourteen. Best and worst year of my life. Best because I learned how to be a man. Worst because I forgot how to be a boy.
    The year was 1960. The year I met Seth Sykes.
    Before Seth, I had friends, but they were the roughneck kind, the type of boys more interested in knocking out windows and kicking around seventh graders than doing anything worthwhile. I knew right away that Seth was different.
    We liked to hang out at the pond. Me, Jake Rogan, and Ronnie Watts. The summer before, we’d built a little hut out of two-by-fours hauled over from Ronnie’s place. We kept a good supply of cigarettes, moonshine, and one
Playboy
. May 1959. Had a sketch of three bathing beauties on the front. That magazine might have been the most looked-at periodical in the history of the world. I still compare every woman I see to the women in those pages. I suspect that’s a sad thing in the end, but it’s true, so there’s no use in hiding it.
    You might say it was sort of like our hangout, a place where we felt like men. It never occurred to us then that we didn’t have the first clue about what it took to be real men. Ronnie, he had a saying he liked to always recite when he was sitting in the little fort, a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of Eugene Porter’s moonshine in the other. “A man in his castle is a beautiful thing. All I need is some cootch and I’d have the world by its