Ghost Critter

I was never fast enough to find out what it was in that secret place we used to sneak off to. Late spring. All during summer. Whenever it wasn’t snowing. What kind of critter was it? Must have been a frog or a turtle. But to this day, it bothers me that I was never fast enough to get a glimpse of it.

Northeastern Indiana wasn’t just full of frogs and turtles, it had a lot of railroad tracks, too. All through its podunk-tiny towns. I was ten. When you walked a couple blocks down the street and stood on the railroad tracks and looked straight down them, the tracks looked like noodley-warped licorice strings, but parallel to each other, just going all over the place together. How the heck could a train ever go on THAT? Fortunately, trains only went by maybe once or twice a year, and super slow even then. We lived in a stagnant backwater of the state. Podunk and stagnant.

But if you followed those screwy tracks way down to the weird side of town where most of the really hardcore hillbilly kids lived—the kids that would all sit in the back of the schoolbus and say “mother-effer” every other word in their sentence—then down there like a mile or so there was this tiny abandoned building about the size of two 1970s telephone booths. The windows were out and the door was gone. I don’t know what this little building was, something to do with the train tracks maybe like a century ago. The floor was missing, and there was a little pond there. A puddle. Like all bodies of water in Indiana, if it ain’t frozen, it’s wet. Never dries out.

Our friend Skeeter showed us this place. He said there was a ghost critter in here, and he wasn’t lying. Even he doesn’t know what it is. The thing is TOO FAST. Every time you poke your head in the little shack, the thing is ALREADY GONE. All you see is the splash in the puddle. What the hell was it?

And I wonder why I didn’t try harder. Because these days, I’m thinking now it’s going to haunt me till my dying day. What the hell was that? What the hell was wrong with me for not getting a NET and going right on straight down there? Even if I’m right and it was just a turtle or a frog—frog, probably—still, it bugs me bad now that I never got to see WHAT KIND. What kind of spots did it have, if it even had any? How exactly big was it? Was it green or brown, or greenish-brown or brownish-green? How big was its mouth? What did its eyes look like? How pointy was the mouth, or was it more round?

I didn’t appreciate Indiana. I had a psychotic mother bad-mouthing it all the time in the background. So there was that. And then we moved away. And I never got to see what kind of critter that was. And I was never diligent enough to bring a net with with me and dredge that sucker out. So uncharacteristic of me. Was I already gone by then?

Thanks, Mom.

That might be in my Top 10 All-Time Things That I Would Do if I Had a Time Machine: Go back there with a fishing net—even a tea strainer!—and find that little guy.