Ghosting (14 page)

This is how she thinks, seeing the present situation and its ramifications and the motivations of herself and the people who have molded her into the person she is, all at once, even as she acts. The whole routine is exhausting.

“We come bearing gifts,” she announces, mentally thanking her father and apologizing to him for being so irresponsible with his money as she pulls the two quarter-bags from her purse.

“Shady,” says Cole.

“You can’t pay me cash but you can get me weed? How thoughtful.”

“That’s not mine to give, Sheldon.”

“It’s okay,” Shady says, and thinks:
It is
. Doing this pleases her. “How much does he owe? I’ll bet you clear near three hundred selling this stuff. It’s fantastic. And I speak from experience.”

Sheldon holds up a bag and shakes it, examining the contents with the air of a jeweler evaluating a precious but unpolished stone. “The key here is can I sell this off before I smoke it all myself,” he says.

“You’ll have to be disciplined, Shel,” from Tina.

Cole retreats to the desk chair by the bed. His reaction to her sudden offer is not quite what she would have expected—although he doesn’t surprise her, either. It’s like he chose one of the ways this could go and he chose wrong (to her mind). He sits with his forehead in his hand, turning away from where Sheldon begins to pack a clay pipe, saying he’ll try it first before he agrees to this arrangement—and that he’s not saying these two bags are enough to erase Cole’s debt—but his cousin does not appear to be listening. Cole is staring at a ceramic plate on which two white pills sit by a small pile of powder and a metal spoon. He draws his finger through the powder absently, touches the
finger to his tongue. And as his cousin lights up and the girls begin to talk, Shady believes she can hear what he’s thinking, and she wants to send him a message to break up those dark thoughts—you owe me nothing for this, it’s perfectly okay, this hasn’t cost me a thing—even as she wonders where the impulse to have made the offer at all comes from. More importantly she feels the strong desire to let Cole know she believes in her heart everything
is
okay, Fleece is out there somewhere and he’s okay, and Cole does not have to worry: the way the world works in the end is with everything coming out all right when you believe you can make it so.

Later she tries to reiterate this line of reasoning as they sit in Cole’s truck in a park halfway between Montreux and home. It’s a remote place at night, abandoned on the bank of the Ohio River, several acres of rutted athletic fields with a single gravel road and lot by the shoreline, separated from a cement plant by swaybacked junk trees lassoed in thick vines. Before them, at the river’s edge, humps of alluvial deadwood shiver with garbage, remnants of recent flooding. A coal barge pushes upstream, unseen but somehow felt, or heard, sifting long roods of water to collapse on the muddy bank, whispering what sounds to her as
please . . . please . . . please.
She’s not certain why they’ve stopped.

“You should drop the med school idea and go in for business, maybe. You’re half in business already,” Cole says. His wrists are crossed over the steering wheel, two fingers extended onto the edge of the dash; his fingernails scrape softly at the gray plastic there, a sound like the small waves against the graveled bank.

“I’m trying to help you get what you want. You know how to go about these things, I know you do. But maybe you need a little push.”

“I get plenty of pushing.”

“Sheldon, guys like him, they just want some fun. You can make tuition off that and the people you know. Get to that Jersey diving school you talk about.”

“Actually Louisiana’s probably better. They got oil rigs right
there in the Gulf, so.” He runs a finger over the dust gathered on the ledge before the gauges. “Listen, I appreciate what you’re doing, don’t get me wrong. What you did.”

“It’s what friends do for one another.”

“I’m going to pay you back,” he says, repeating it over her as she tells him he doesn’t have to. After the pause, she changes the subject.

“How long will it take to come up with the money for a diving school?”

Cole shrugs with a distinct indifference she has learned to identify as a defensive pose, his way of indicating what he doesn’t want to think about.

“There’s the issue of them saying they won’t sell to me anymore.”

“The quarry isn’t the only place to make a buy. The guy even said it wasn’t Mister Greuel who told him to tell you. What about Spunk?”

Cole guffaws, snorts it back. “I’m not so desperate to put myself in the position of imminent arrest, now.”

Shady’s hands move to the drawstrings of her sweatpants. She extends the strings to full length, untying the bow and letting them fall again. She starts a burl knot into the end of one and speaks to it: “You’re the careful type. You’ll do just fine. You don’t want to live on the lake forever, do you?”

She peers out at the dark water, at a white form lifting near the bank. At first she doesn’t know what to make of it, thinking the white came from the top furl of a wave, but it’s too high to be of the river. A bird of some kind, then; a blanket. Then she realizes it’s only a plastic bag caught in the branches of a fallen tree. The dull ordinariness of that—garbage on the riverbank, as common as bird shit on a car—returns her eyes to her lap. She wishes something extraordinary would happen to her, if only she could decide on what kind of extraordinary it should be.

“Fleece got off the lake,” Cole says.

“Do you think Greuel would do something to him?”

“Fleece bolted and they’re pissed. That’s why they won’t sell to me at the quarry. One more thing my brother has left me to sort out. Kind of puts a damper on your plans for financing my education.”

“That’s not what your mama thinks.”

“Lyda doesn’t think so much as free-associate, know what I mean? If she had her way I’d have already been over at Greuel’s with a shotgun and a noose.”

“You wouldn’t do that.”

“A laker would.”

Lakers
. Lake Holloway isn’t three miles from Laurel Estates where she grew up. She thinks it strange to have grown up in the county, a place to her so wide open and peaceful with its farms and traffic slowed by tractors, the Episcopal church she grew up in and the youth group activities in which she took part; sleepovers and riding lessons and athletic camps every summer—that was Pirtle County to her, that is her home, it’s where she comes from. She used to bristle any time she heard her mother and friends gossiping over the latest newsworthy arrest, always some laker running riot where he wasn’t supposed to be, and her mother might say the place should be burned so that it could start over, or else bought out and its inhabitants evicted to somewhere else.... Shady would tell her mother,
You don’t get to choose where you’re born, just because you live on the lake doesn’t mean you’re a bad person,
and her mother would smile with her masterful condescension and tell her daughter of course she might be right, you can believe anything if you want to hard enough.

“What are you thinking?” she asks.

His response is not quite laughter, but more a flurry of rapid exhalations through his nostrils. He tilts his head toward the riverbank, says, “Speaking honest, right now I’m just wondering where the plastic sheet on that tree there came from.”

Her eyes follow his to the white sheet, or bag (she’s unsure), modulating its shape on the river breeze. She twines a drawstring tight over her finger as she laughs: “Boy, you are high.”

“I’m not so bad, not after Tina’s Ritalin.
You’re
high.”

Her laughter comes harder now, full from her belly. “I am high, so. What time is it? Why did you bring me down here, anyway?”

Cole studies his hands on the steering wheel; she detects tremors in his fingers. As though he realized her noticing, he moves his hands and clutches the steering wheel as if they’re driving 100 miles an hour over gully roads.

“I guess I was kind of thinking we might make out or something.”

“‘Or something?’ That old cement factory got you feeling all romantic?”

“Well now, there’s the river. . . .”

Her laughter is loud and she knows this isn’t the best response but she’s feeling good, she’s comfortable around Cole, he understands how awkward the moment is and so she just lets go, has her laugh. Still she’s aware he’s waiting until the fit subsides, and he isn’t joining in; he is staring through the windshield at the river again. Suddenly she touches his arm.

“Oh honey, I’m sorry. You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Would it be so fucking bad? Why are you hanging around me so much if you’re not interested?”

“Well.”

“Well what?”

“Well you have to admit the whole idea is kind of weird.”

And it is,
it is weird
. She gave her virginity to his brother. She won’t deny she likes Cole, though she’s still uncertain how close she wants to be with him. Why can’t she come out and say this as clearly as she feels it?

The bag or sheet or whatever it is out there starts to flutter and quake, shuddering on spasms of wind. It folds over the branches of the dead tree as though presenting a neat bow, a diver moving into pike position, and its underside catches the air and the entire sheet lifts with a loud complaint. Sailing above the water it turns silent and rises, flexing and expanding, and then stills like a kite capable of choosing its direction, until another gust whips the thing from sight. Cole starts the truck and throws it into reverse.

“Hey,” Shady says, softly.

“I should get you home before it gets too weird in here. Fleece probably wouldn’t approve anyway, would he.”

“Hey, that’s not fair, that’s not what I meant at all.”

“What is it then? You think
I’m
weird? Is it my eyes? My knee?”

She shakes her head no, ignoring the fields they pass on the way out, tending to the neat bow she ties with the strings of her sweatpants, and recalling that her choice of underwear tonight is comfortable but
not flattering. “I like you, Cole,” she says, and means it—she does like him, she feels drawn to the boy, and speaking so only makes it the more evident to her. Yet she doesn’t feel like doing anything with him. Not yet; not here.

They’re out of the park and Cole pops the clutch shifting gears, and the engine dies in the middle of the road. They coast as he tries to restart with the clutch in neutral, headlights dimming as the engine sputters; the steering wheel locks and they are headed slow toward the low side of the road. Shady says his name again, softly at first, then with more urgency and volume as the truck reaches the shoulder and the wheels on her side dip into the roadside ditch. But by then Cole has the truck started and they’re on their way, the unlit passage covered by trees at either side. She thinks to speak but holds her tongue, preferring this uncomfortable silence to speaking and opening doors to emotions she doesn’t feel up to dealing with tonight.

When he leaves her at her family’s gate she pats his thigh and kisses him quickly on the cheek and says not a word. She forces herself to walk up the drive as without a care in the world, and feels Cole in his truck lingering, watching after her as she steps into the dark toward home, and bed, and she’s grateful for the courtesy of that, for his concern for her safety even though nobody is going to be out here waiting in the great yard before the house. And I’m looking out for you too, Cole Prather, she thinks. He needs looking out for far more than she does.

Mister Greuel informs Arley Noe he wants to walk. Noe has brought him reams of documents to study and sign, to get his son to sign since he’s moving everything into Spunk’s name (William Estes Greuel), real estate info, deed history and title, insurance demands, enough small print to make the eyes of any healthy man cross and glaze, and healthy Greuel is not. The house canters with noise—he hates being alone but there’s a cost to that, a flipside to when he might want peace and quiet to get work done. His son’s on the Sega with a couple of rowdy cronies trying to annihilate one another, one of whom strikes Greuel true as an eye-catching minx (he’s old enough to look at any woman younger than twenty-five, with any reasonable figure, as such), and a couple of his runners aren’t even running, they’re playing at cards with their radio blasting classic rock, and the phone keeps ringing for his punk son on top of it all.

Over the time it has taken his various ailments and illnesses to set up permanent residence in his body, the dining room table has substituted for his office, and it has become the center of a lazy and loud chaos. A walk would be good.

Before, he would retreat upstairs for privacy. Or down to the basement where the humid air stayed cool among the wood panels and carpeted floor and fluorescent light. Nowadays he does not like to mount or descend stairs unless he knows he won’t have to traverse them again until the next day. His swollen legs and puffy feet ache.
Pain stabs where the doctors removed two toes—to prevent infection, they said, showing him how the toes were dead already (his body, dying in pieces). You need to walk more, they said, get the circulation going.