Government Cheese
by Corey Mertes
Some years ago I was renting a house with a woman a good decade or so older than me—a cougar, I guess you would call her. She had a 17-year-old son who lived with his father out in the country. For reasons to be explained, I will refer to her simply as M.
The house we rented was haunted. It still is, as far as I know. This was common knowledge in that part of town. As a result, the rent was cheap, which is why we chose it. We ignored the rumors about ghosts because neither of us believed in that nonsense.
Before long, circumstances forced us to reconsider those beliefs. A Google fiber guy refused to enter the extra bedroom, the reason being that “something just isn’t right in there.” M claimed she once felt the temperature drop by 40 degrees in that room in ten minutes. We brought in a paranormal specialist who confirmed the presence of spirits. He identified where the portal is in the yard where they come and go and there appeared to be three of them: two men and a little girl. I personally heard the girl say “I pooped my pants.” She said it in a frightened way, as though she knew she were going to be punished.
I didn’t mind it so much but M wanted to leave once the phantoms started manifesting themselves more often. For the most part they left us alone so where’s the harm, was my argument. We fought about it. Twice I took a bat to our beat-up couch. In time she came to see it my way—like I said, the rent was cheap. I was working temp jobs back then with a vague notion of starting my own car detailing business. M served drinks at one of the downtown hotels, I never remember which. She frequently talked about going back into stripping.
*
But this is not a haunted house story. One evening I was driving home at rush hour from the last day on a two-week job moving boxes around an Amazon fulfillment center when I pulled into a left turning lane near the Heart of America Bridge. After missing the light, I banged on my wheel and cussed at the slow clown in front of me, a moment later recalling that M had asked me to pick up ramen noodles on the way home, which would have required me to go straight instead. Even worse, an old homeless woman was stationed along the median and there was no avoiding her glare.
This woman must have been close to 70 with hair like a bedridden Einstein. The careless drape of her clothes gave the impression of a weeping willow. I was angry, as I am at all of those people, for making me feel guilty when they could be staying cool in a library or a shelter someplace out of our range of vision. The humidity was enough to sap a teenage gymnast let alone a bag lady with memories of the Kennedy assassination. I forced a smile that I immediately regretted because it encouraged her to hold up the cardboard sign leaning next to her, much larger than your typical roadside entreaty. But instead of a plea it contained a story—hers, as it turned out—in a script that diminished in size as it stacked toward the bottom, as though she’d realized mid-writing that she would run out of room. It began:
TODAY is the 2nd anniversary of the death of the man who guided me . . . and turned me to GOD.
My head snapped forward. The woman must have recognized my discomfort, but rather than direct her sign at the drivers lining up behind me, she stepped closer and pressed it just inches from my window. Every driver’s nightmare, a pushy homeless person while you’re stuck in traffic. I tried to delay by rifling through the ones in my wallet pretending it contained something bigger, but I could sense her shaking her head disapprovingly, as I imagine the jury will do when I stand for the Last Judgement. She knocked on my window and pointed at the next line of her narrative.
But this is not a religious tale.
Thank God, I could hear myself thinking. I peeked up at the light. Only now did the cars to both sides begin to cross. I had no choice but to read on. She had composed brief statements about her childhood, about her siblings and school, about the tall neighbor boy she had a crush on. Then, abruptly, in small print near the bottom, her shit got real.
My mother killed herself when I was twelve. Carbon monoxide. I found her body in the GARAGE.
My mind sought meaning in the woman’s random reliance on capitalization. Finally the cars in my lane were allowed to move. Behind me a miserable woman leaned hard on her horn. I accelerated through the intersection while in the mirror the old wretch, wearing a wry grin, rotated in sync with my turn. As I sped out of view, she raised her sign and flipped it over, revealing what looked to be a continuation of her chronicle.
I couldn’t help myself. Fuck the groceries and the traffic, I had to know what happened when this pitiful old woman, as a once-innocent tween, came upon her mother’s dead body. I circled around and got back in line. This time she was seated on her crate. When she saw me she didn’t pause, she picked up her sign and rushed over, holding up the side of it I had yet to read.
My father was a marine. He named all three of our dogs after firearms. COLT MAGNUM BROWNING. When mother died he remarried. I wore a blue dress and carried the ring on a velvet pillow. Later he also COMMITTED SUICIDE. ALSO in the garage only with a shotgun. This time my stepmother found the body.
When the light turned green, she revealed a second sign behind the first, and I was hooked. To her obvious satisfaction, I circled around two more times to finish her tragic story.
Quite a mess! She had to hire those cleaners who specialize in gruesome crime scenes. Six thousand dollars. I guess that cleaned her out HA HA. Turns out dad was broke. Our hearse driver cut off a woman on the way to the cemetery. Who FLIPS OFF a funeral procession? The stepmother raised me alone after that. We had to go on GOVERNMENT CHEESE. She must be dead by now, the bitch. I haven’t heard from her in 47 years.
This all really happened I swear.
Wanda Wisatella. Still around.
I never give to people on the side of the road except food maybe if there happen to be morsels left in the wrapper on the seat by my side. Yet I felt mysteriously moved by this woman’s plight. Rather than accept the few dollars I held out, she cocked her head and smiled—the same condescending grin she’d offered up earlier suggesting that I, and not she, was the one with a lifetime of distress. Behind me a rhapsody of car horns compelled me to move on. She said something as I rolled toward the intersection, either “I just want to be heard” or “They’re giving you the bird.”
On the next block an otherworldly sensation came over me similar to when the spirits in that house reappeared. But this woman was no ghost. I circled around one last time with the intention of opening up my whole sorry wallet to her.
When I returned to the spot, however, she had gone. The crate was still there, and under it the two cardboard signs comprising her testimony. I wanted to get out and salvage them, an impulse that vanished when the light changed before I could make up my mind. She might come back and be devastated by their removal, I reasoned while merging into traffic—not left toward home or straight in the direction of the market, but right, onto the northbound bridge. I followed that freeway for many miles—hundreds of miles, by the end of it—without any plan whatsoever. And I never looked back.
*
That was in Kansas City ten years ago. In the weeks that followed I often felt bad about leaving M without a call or a text, and later about blocking her number. Presumably, she got stuck with eight months’ rent on a house she was afraid to sleep in.
By the way, here is why I refer to her only by her initial. She suffered from severe anxiety related to an unfortunate coincidence beyond her control. She has an identical name to a woman who, in a crime that made national headlines, had murdered her four children. This happened in California just after we’d started dating. When I say identical, I mean everything: first, middle and last names, all the same spelling. The odds of that must be astronomical. After the killings, M began receiving spine-chilling messages on her phone and on social media. We’re talking death threats containing the most grisly details directed at her, me, her family, her son. It was a whole thing. The police report we filed went nowhere. Ultimately, she had to cancel her accounts and change her number, and for a while that seemed to work. But then the bullying started up again about a month before we moved into that house. Moving didn’t stop the harassment.
So yes, I felt guilty leaving under those circumstances. But I got over it. That’s how it works, you wrestle with the Beast and get over things . . . or something like that. Look, don’t turn to me for answers, I am not perfect. Did I say I was proud?
Corey Mertes received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago and an MFA in Film and Television Production from the University of Southern California. His short stories have appeared in many journals and have been shortlisted for the American Fiction Short Story Award, the Tartts Fiction Award and the Hudson Prize. His debut story collection, Self-Defense, was published in February 2023 by Cornerstone Press.