Free Hemingway's Ghost by Layton Green Page A

air and waddled down Duval, huddled together like a giant white globular porkpie, each wondering if he would be the next found floating by the shore, throat slit and bloated.
    I watched and smiled.
    They cut over on Petronia and then walked down Whitehead until they could see the great house brooding in the darkness behind the brick wall. I could almost smell the jasmine drifting on the breeze. After the gaggle of Japanese tourists moved on, the Hemingways slipped into a thicket of palms and followed the wall to the rear of the property, where the wall was not as high and they could step onto a ladder set out by the caretaker.
    The caretaker, God bless him, was a very greedy man. Months ago Papa figured out they could pay him fifty dollars and he would let them climb onto the grounds at night and wallow in their secret intimacy with the Man.
    Because as different as the four of them were, the one thing they had in common, for different reasons, was their hero worship of Ernest Miller Hemingway.
    Bumby of course revered him as a writer, and as a fellow uneducated closet intellectual. Ernie was once a Golden Gloves champ and loved Hemingway because he was the ideal man’s man. Champ loved the outdoors and was an avid fisherman, and also had a passion for adventurous, muscular literature (he didn’t really get, nor did he care about, the Man’s subtlety and sensitivity). Papa loved him because he embodied the type of man who did whatever the fuck he wanted, all the time.
    They stood hidden in the jungle-like foliage on the other side of the wall, scrutinized by the small army of cats that patrolled the grounds, the mewling drowned by the battalion of crickets. To their right was the outline of the caretaker’s dilapidated house, a smudge of grey and brown in the darkness. The tourists took care not to walk too close to it. It looked abandoned, but the Hemingways knew otherwise.
    I
knew otherwise.
    Ernie whispered, “Is it clear?”
    “Clear of what?” Papa said. “That shit-for-brains doesn’t care what we do, and he’s been letting us in for months.”
    “There’s something about him gives me the willies, like when you tell him something and he looks at you for an extra second as if he didn’t hear you. I don’t want him looking over our shoulders.”
    “The light’s off. He’s asleep or strokin’ it.”
    Bumby ignored them both and stepped onto the garden pathway, feeling the familiar tingle that he was striding down the lawn with one of the wives on his arm, adoring worshippers at the gates, the next masterpiece in the works, the world his personal fiefdom. What Bumby wouldn’t admit even to himself was the repressed jealousy that every writer has of the great ones. Not of the writers who get rich; that’s a skin-deep kind of jealousy and easily shrugged off, the same kind of jealousy one has for a suitor who wins out because of money or family, rather than because he makes the girl weak in her knees.
    No, this jealousy festered in Bumby like an open sore, so painful it was murderous, because when it came to writing, the Man was truly great. So great that Bumby knew, deep down in his soul, that he himself had no business picking up a pen, and should stick to telling rich New Yorkers what vintage to drink with their ginger-braised lamb chops. Bumby had been writing for thirty-five of his fifty years, had never been published, and knew it was never going to change. Still, he loved writing, and loved the caché it gave him with the island’s burned-out waitresses who thought he was about to make it big.
    He heard the others creeping behind him, although they had never crept until recently. Not until they had gone down into the basement, talked to the Man through the Ouija Board, and discovered that his troubled mad spirit roamed these grounds.
    They shuffled down the outdoor stairs at the rear of the house, to the locked door at the bottom of the stairwell. Ernie bent over the simple lock and opened the door