Soul Searchers

By Dan Baumgart

A stable home, a nice school, and a dream to make films with the ambition to match. That was Lars Pitkin's life until he met Joe Smith and Gary Young, two shiftless louts from the other side of the tracks who throw Lars's idyllic world into discomfort and disarray until it is discovered that Gary is a genuine clairvoyant who is being haunted by the ghost of a shamed teenage girl. With his dreams to produce artistic films on hold, Lars, with camcorder in hand, sets out to document his new friends' brush with the other side as an unexpectedly moving narrative unfolds in front of the camera and changes their lives forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dan Baumgart
• Release date: Mar 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311996152

Book preview

Soul Searchers

By Dan Baumgart and Joe Hudson

Cover design by Caligraphics

Copyright 2015 Dan Baumgart

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Contents

Start the Story

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

Sneak Peak

1

Stephanie turned the radio up to drown out the previous hour’s events, the yelling, the crying, the accusations turned confession. The radio produced, not the heavy percussion and electric guitar she would have liked at that moment but rather Tracy Chapman’s new single, Fast Car, in which the artist sings a tale of cyclic poverty and alcoholism, two things that Stephanie never had to experience. Stephanie was admittedly not into songs with much depth or meaning, mostly she liked Madonna, and though Fast Car was pretty straightforward, it had a message and told a story, not usually her first choice in lyrical content, but tonight it was perfect. She was hearing someone else’s problems instead of focusing on her own, which seemed small, embarrassingly so by comparison. Though it was a mere breakup, heart-wrenching and nauseating, it wasn’t the breakup itself that caused the worst of her current physical manifestations. Scott, whom Stephanie had been dating since they were freshmen, had been cheating on her with her best friend, Julie, for the past two months. It was the deceit, the humiliation, the pain brought on by that combination that was enraging Stephanie. She tried to focus on the song as tears rolled down her cheeks one after another. She wiped her eyes and took in a breath, stuttered air bursting through her exhalations. She was trembling from her fingertips to her shoulders, her chest was tense from a solid, rapid heartbeat, the torment unforgiving.

Now it was this sad song, which she thought would temporarily cease her own sadness but eventually compounded it. The woman singing, a child at the time of her experiences, had a bad relationship with her father but dropped out of school anyway to see to his needs when his alcoholism took its toll. Stephanie thought of her own father, a man who rarely drank or even swore, a man with whom she had a strong relationship. Now Stephane had to tell him that Scott, a young man who her father thought fondly of, was a cheating scumbag and that Julie, who had been a loyal friend and a regular fixture at their house for years, was the person Scott was cheating with.

Stephanie’s father would blame himself. That much she knew. She and Scott had had a few fights in the past, and her father would encourage them to make up because Scott was a good kid. He didn’t smoke or drink or take drugs. He was the captain of the basketball team, starting point guard and had scouts looking at him. Even if his basketball career didn’t elevate to NBA status, he was smart and would likely get a college scholarship. He was a real catch, as her father put it.

It was difficult not to be mad at her father, but Stephanie understood that he only knew the polite boy who opened the car door for his little girl, who brought flowers and wrote corny but heartfelt poems to his daughter. Why couldn’t he have seen Scott for what he was? Surely, there is an ulterior motive for guys who try so hard, and someone as intuitive as her father should definitely be able to see it.

Stephanie’s vision blurred again, and the thickening rain outside did not help. She could hardly see the road in front of her, not even well enough to pull off to the shoulder, so in a moment fueled by outrage and sadness, humiliation and shame, she stomped on the gas and screamed. Moments later, the tires responded with a scream of their own, and though she slammed on the brakes, realizing too late that her rash actions were met with speedy consequences, the car was already out of control. It struck a tree head on, and when her face smashed against the windshield, Gary woke up.

2

Gary Young was thirteen years old. He had just awakened from a nightmare so vivid and yet so alien that it couldn’t have been his own dream. Who was Scott? Who were Stephanie and Julie? Why did the names sound so familiar, like people he knew, even if he didn’t personally know a single human being by any of those names? The only certainty was that Stephanie was dead.

Gary looked to Joe, who was snoring on the floor next to the bed, which was only a mattress, no box spring or headboard.

Joe, wake up, he said, out of breath, terrified.

Joe only moaned. The sun was not up. Gary looked at the clock. It was just after midnight. Gary turned on his radio and fumbled with the knobs, looking for a station. As soon as he heard Fast Car by Tracy Chapman, he knew what had happened.

Turn that stupid shit off, Joe groaned.

Gary sat up, wide-eyed, staring at the wall. When the song ended, and the DJ came on the radio, Gary said, to no one in particular, Stephanie just died in a car accident.

That morning at school, there would be an announcement over the PA that Stephanie Longfellow, a senior at McKinley High, was killed in a one-car accident. Joe, fourteen years old at the time, would accost Gary in the hallway after his home economics class was dismissed and ask his best friend how in the hell he knew something that had happened while the two of them were fast asleep.

I was in her mind, Gary said. Right before she hit that tree.

The information regarding the tree would not be available until the accident was reported on the five o’clock news. Again, Joe, who never thought Gary to be very bright or creative enough to make something like that up, asked how he knew.

I told you already, Gary said. I was in her mind. I think I lived her last moments in my dream.

3

If I’d come to know Joe Smith and Gary Young at any other point in my life, I would dislike them. Actually, that’s untrue because my feelings for them currently skirt dislike. I would loathe their mere presence on this planet, the fact that they are allowed to breathe the same air that Albert Einstein and Gandhi once breathed. When I first met them, the only thing those two clowns did perfectly was waste oxygen. Oddly, they would become my best friends, even if I’ve still got my share of qualms with their behavior.

I do not dislike them because the squalor in which they live is unpleasant and causes me great discomfort. Plenty of things they have done in the time I’ve known them induces discomfort, downright anxiety at times. I do not dislike them because they lack education. I’ve known plenty of impressive autodidacts in my time, and though they are definitely not two of them, their lack of knowledge in many areas is not especially irritating to me either. What bothers me is their propensity for great ideas hindered by a near flawless lack of ambition. And they’re both drunks.

Joe’s and Gary’s alcoholism is not problematic to anyone but themselves, so I suppose it seems unfair to include that in my ongoing list of complaints against them. They do not drive around drunk because that would denote a car and a driver’s license with which to do so, and they do not alienate their loved ones with their drinking because neither of them has a loved one to alienate. Joe can hold his liquor as I imagine only a Viking on heavy doses of LSD could. One would scarcely know if he were sober, five beers deep, or had just finished a case to himself. Aside from the alcohol scent radiating from his sweat and breath, he seems to be the same person, drunk or sober.

Gary, on the other hand, is a stumbling example of why AA was invented. He slurs and he totters, he hiccups and cries. Once the buzz hits him, a mysterious look washes over him, an enigmatic glare that lets one know that he has transformed from a sloppy creature into a sloppier one, unpredictable and emotionally fragile, quick to snap and go on a howling, nonsensical rant of near indecipherable English, or he may laugh into his hands until he is sobbing.

Regardless of all that, they are an undeniably perfect duo. Joe is fat and unhealthy. Gary is rail thin and probably unhealthier. Though they are in their thirties at the time of this writing, Gary looks fifty due to his binge drinking, bad diet, and overall malnourishment. Because Joe is a year older, he fancies himself the smarter of the two, which is definitely true but not saying a whole hell of a lot. I will credit Joe for being an avid reader, but for everything he’s read by Dostoyevsky, he’s read three years of Hustler to get the bitter taste of existentialism out of his mind. For anything by Faulkner or Joyce or Cormac McCarthy, he’s read his weight ten times over in comic books and Star Trek paperbacks, so there is hope for his intelligence, though the wisdom and inspiration he’s gained from reading the greats or even the not-so-greats proves to be pushing nil when it comes to applying himself.

I have often heard the words trailer trash used to describe Joe and Gary. Gary once told me that the obnoxious, foul-mouthed girls from the trailer park were stuck up snobs, if that gives you any insight into how they live. Trailer trash would signify a trailer in which to dwell. Though they are not entirely homeless, Joe and Gary have not paid an iota of rent or property taxes. They currently live in a place which they have dubbed Warpwood Village. Their abode is a construction office, one of those near-gutted trailers that sits on construction sites, and it is nestled on fifteen acres of the shittiest land imaginable. Aside from the project’s humble beginnings, the property is utterly vacant.

The story goes that a wealthy land developer wanted to put a high-end subdivision on that plot of land. The majority of the trees were cleared and the blueprints were drawn up, but shortly after the road was paved and the first house was in the building stages, the land developer had a massive stroke that ate away at his project’s funding just as it did at his brain.

Due to its locale near trailer parks, liquor stores, and drug dens, no other developers wished to invest in the project. Even while it was under construction, junkies would often steal tools from the jobsite, and bums would harass the workers for spare change and niblets. It was a project destined to fail, and though the developer owned the property and someone still pays the property taxes, it just became an empty lot with one road and a cul-de-sac, the skeleton of a potentially nice house at one end and a lone construction office in the middle, which Joe and Gary have called home for the last three years.

You might be saying to yourself at this point, Lars, you seem like a pretty smart guy. How did you ever get mixed up with these two shiftless hobos? Perhaps you’re not, but I’ll tell you anyway. There’s a simple answer for that: public school. More specifically, the Integration Program. This will take me back many years, but it’s where we first met and how Soul Searchers came to be.

The Integration Program was popular in the 80s. An overpopulated, underperforming school in the inner city would shut down due to a lack of everything (except an underachieving student body), and the other, better schools in the surrounding areas were stuck taking in the riffraff. Like magnets, these morons were attracted to nice things in which