Ghosting (19 page)

“We got purified water in the fridge,” Greuel says as he places the deck at the table’s center.

“Brother Gil prefers his own brand,” Carolyn says. She reaches into a knit sack for another bottle of Kentucky Sweet Springs, a CWE sponsor. Ponder has invested church funds there and allows them to advertise in the greeting room, leave flyers in the seats.

“You should try a bottle,” he tells the room. “Purify it several times over. No hint of chlorine or fluoride, just good water a body needs.”

“You a salesman for a water company too?” Arley Noe’s lips hardly move.

Ponder broadcasts his best unchallenging laugh to the room. “Not at all! I’ll cheer on any deserving product. I’m a big believer in supporting local economies.”

Noe’s eyes narrow. “So are we, preacher, so are we.” His buddies chuckle into their cards. Greuel orders them to play the goddamn hand—and quickly apologizes to Carolyn for the language.

She has an appreciable way about her that inclines even hard men to politeness. On the drive over Carolyn had asked the point of meeting at Greuel’s home, and after hours. Wouldn’t a law office in the afternoon be more appropriate? She said she did not like nor did she trust these gentlemen, which Brother Gil knew already, because he knew Carolyn. Only her confidence in his vision could pull her from the three boys and the husband and her chicken tetrazzini and into the smoky night with a body-pierced tattooed reformed junkie thief to a den of malfeasant highbinders cradling cards beneath a heavy tobacco fog; only her faith in Ponder’s ability to steer their congregation could convince her to go against her sacrosanct beliefs in the core responsibilities of Wife
and Mother and follow him into that part of the night she mostly read about, cowered before, or watched on the TV with the repeating self-reprimand
Judge the sin, not the sinner
winding through her mind.

Sometimes you have to be willing to get dirty to do the Lord’s business. Ponder is perfectly willing to do whatever’s required to fulfill his vision of founding a new community thriving with nourished minds, righteous
doers
celebrating the marvelous gift of LIFE, practicing daily what God will call them to do for eternity after their allotted earthly spans. One day CWE Ministries will break from the conventional Sunday School sessions and after-worship brunches into its own suburban village—maybe even a legally incorporated city, an intentional community with deeds restricted to Christian-based practices, if he can figure language that won’t raise a church/state thing. They will transform the seminary grounds into a complex of basketball courts, movie theater, conference center, primary school, along with a chapel arena of proper size. Ponder foresees a flowering of God in the heart of wild Pirtle County.

Yet there are misgivings: he’s unclear on the logistics of a land trust, for one, and knows nothing of what Noe called an “Illinois-type,” or how this affects CWE’s ambitions. He would like to know. It is important to come away from this deal with the church untainted. Right now he would settle to just get things started.

“Friends, I am enjoying this game,” he begins, “and excuse me if this sounds rude, because I don’t mean it to. But at what point tonight do we start discussing that property?”

Over his cards, Arley tightens his mouth into a V—something of a wild boar to his face like that. “Yeah, when do we,” he murmurs more to himself than anyone else. There must be a customary rhythm to these negotiations Ponder is unaware of. He wonders if Noe realizes treatments exist for the problem in his blood that makes his skin blue like that.

Arley raises his free hand—a graceful object despite the blue pallor, narrow and elegant, a pianist’s hands, he would guess, except for the spectacular gold nugget and diamond horseshoe ring—and brushes through the haze with an air of trying to dispel more than smoke.

“Paper’s’re worked out. Even went the extra mile of notarizing.”

“I’m a notary public, Rev, bet you didn’t know
that
.”

“I didn’t, Lawrence. You surprise me every time we meet.”

“Ah,” Greuel says, “Ah well. I prefer Mister Greuel. The whole thing’s a peach of a deal: our group’s the trustee, you folks the beneficiary. It’s yours in some twenty years but we’re all aware I won’t be here to see that. So I congratulate you now—a lucky man leading a lucky church, I reckon.”

Ponder wants to tell him that God’s Will is not luck. Carolyn saves him by speaking up: “We thank you and yes, we are lucky—lucky to have the Lord on our side, wouldn’t you say?—but we do have questions.” She opens a notebook to a page marked by a magenta post-it strip, hesitates as she searches for the item she wants. Greuel stares after her with the same expression of slack-jawed surprise as if she had fallen through the ceiling.

“What she means is, we’ll have our own legal advisors look it over first, and then I have to run it by my board, et cetera et cetera before we sign and return. Obviously.”

“Certainly you do. A man wants to be sure he’s not getting blistered,” Arley says. “But understand, we want the deal committed legal on a fairly swift timeline.”

“I want this deal done before I croak!” announces Greuel.

“We understand,” Ponder says. He does feel a degree of compassion for the man so clearly suffering before him; feels equally the irrelevance his compassion probably means to him. “I’ll do my best to speed up the process. Owner financing has some of our members feeling . . .
reluctant,
let’s say. No one wants to be surprised by something like balloon payments down the line.”

“Gimme their names, they won’t give you any more trouble,” Greuel squawks. Ponder joins him in the laughter following and keeps it going longer than feels comfortable, his mouth molded into that false hilarity of a ventriloquist’s dummy. He is surprised by how self-conscious he feels here; perhaps he’s thrown by the queer glow of that bizarre headlight illuminating floor to ceiling behind Greuel.

“If your board feels they can muster bank financing,” Noe offers, “more power to them. We get paid that much faster. Our impression is the congregation isn’t so well-endowed as that.”

“You wouldn’t believe how many audits we undergo,” laments Carolyn.

Greuel nods into his cards, saying that it’s partial land trust, eleven acres bought outright where the values are only headed up. Noe levels his inexpressive and unnerving stare above the fan of his own cards at Ponder, whose eyes remain steady despite the flux he feels inside. Arley Noe’s grin, when it spreads enough to show his teeth, reminds him of a possum’s mouth. He has noticed this in previous meetings and wondered if his curiosity was too obvious—a curiosity confounded by his inability to decide if the smile is endearing in a homespun, salt-of-the-earth kind of way, or chilling to the spine. The other players fall into their own habits, lighting smokes as they frown over their hands, drinking liquor or else refilling glasses, gazing over at the TV basketball game simmering low.
No doubt they’ve got their work cut out for them now,
the announcer is saying.
The Cats dug themselves a deep hole in that first half.

Ponder clears his throat for the delicate question. “What did you decide as the percentage of your donation?”

The possum teeth disappear into a seriousness Ponder would have reserved for cursing the dead. The man waits an entire moment in silence, and then laughs in Ponder’s face. It’s not a particularly scabrous laugh, but the insult is there, the contempt. He lights a cigarette from the end of one Greuel has let burn to a coil. “You want to tell him?”

“You tell him. I feel awful. Where’s my dope?”

“Beside you, boss,” Grady Creed says from where he hovers outside the table. “Though it aint time yet, you got another hour.”

Greuel says he doesn’t give his balls what time it is, his legs throb and last time he pissed (pardoning himself to Carolyn again) he must have been passing sand for what it did to him. Noe shakes out three large white tablets and sets them on a paper napkin and tells Greuel he’ll get him water. “I’m coming back,” he adds, nodding to the others as he scrapes his cards into his palm.

“You leave those here you cheating fraud bastard,” Greuel wheezes—and throws up his hands in exasperation at his language before Carolyn and
the man of the cloth.
Ponder finds it difficult to
dislike him, though instinct points to a con here somewhere, one he believes in the old days he would have figured already, those skills for self-preservation having dulled over his recent years of plenty.

Arley’s flat eyes sweep the table and he orders everybody to turn in their cards, too. “Deal another hand when I get back.”

“Why don’t you get one of the boys to go?” from Greuel.

“I’m already up, my cards are in.”

“This is a twenty-dollar pot, for the love of your shameless whore mother.”

“Twenty dollars of mine in a few minutes,” Arley says. He backs toward the kitchen keen to show no credence given his companions, keeping eye until everyone tosses in their cards. Ponder cannot quite pinpoint exactly what it is about how odd the man moves; his steps look locked into slots on the floor, and there’s that weird, geometric precision to his gait, like there’s no give to his spine or shoulders. He’s never seen its like before.

Greuel broadcasts a harmless show of smile to Carolyn. “Bastard could buy this farm and your seminary in cash right now and he worries over twenty bucks.” He’s no longer apologizing for his language. At his wink to the preacher, Ponder sees his opening, yet he hardly has his mouth parted before Greuel speaks again: “All on the mantel, rev. Donation’s like a third of total. My tax genius says that’s the best we can do if I’m to leave my no-count boy a pot to piss in.” He seems to deflate to have the deal so easily summarized, as if its simplicity proved a great anticlimax to the evening.

“May I get it for you, Brother Gil?” Carolyn asks, standing, coat folded over arm.

“Creed there can get it for you, my ma’am,” says Greuel, shuffling the cards in tremulous hands.

But Creed is not paying attention to them. He is leaning both arms at either side of the double-window at the front of the room, peering through the thin muslin curtain. As Greuel repeats,
Creed there will be happy to get that for you,
Ponder starts at a woman’s angry voice raised and cursing, a sound that has everyone at the table turning toward the door. They hear a tumbling clatter, a grizzled cry—and then it’s the complaint of plank and joist beneath the vigor of spirited feet.

Creed’s a step from the door when it flies open and nearly slaps him in the face. Carolyn reels three steps back and falls with a song into Ponder’s lap, while Greuel stills his hands atop the deck of cards and stares frog-mouthed, greasy eyes wide. Claiming the room is a small, sturdy woman, her face caught in a wrestling between indignation and outright wrath, her head haloed by a wild bushel of hair writhed from the wind, from sleep, from sleeplessness—it looks like the wind itself made material and stuck upon her as a warning.

“Where is he?” she asks. “What have you done with my boy?”

“Lyda,” Greuel says, stretching out the name in a long slow song of three syllables,
la-EYE-dah,
“lovely Lyda Skaggs. Now here’s a woman what always did know how to make an entrance.”

She juts forward a delicate jaw. The muscles in her neck bulge and twist, wrenching furrows of shadow into her skin within the room’s queer light. “Lawrence Greuel do you mean to take my first-born from me too?”

Grady Creed shuts the door with care. She wheels at the sound. Only now does she seem to notice the others in the room, and with a self-consciousness sinking over her features, she circles slowly and takes in each face, some seven in all before Arley Noe returns from the kitchen. As she moves, her arms begin to wrap about her body, hands sliding up to clasp herself above the elbows, and her eyes dart from figure to face, landing briefly on Brother Gil—and then holding upon Carolyn with confused inquiry, as if she cannot make sense of the straight-world dress and careful makeup, the hair finely styled, the sensible shoes. In return Ponder can hardly make sense of her: she is like a figure returned from his own itinerant past. Or no, her face goes further back, to grandparents in youth staring fierce and unbowed from photographs commemorating one proud moment in their hills-and-holler lives of hardship. And yet the delicate jaw, a sensuousness about her eyes; she is hard but pretty.

Ponder lurches to his feet and helps Carolyn into her coat. He mentions only the lateness of the hour, aware that no one is paying him any mind.

“Well, there you go,” rasps Greuel. His eyes stray to Ponder for an instant. “She calls that boy her first-born only when she wants
something from me. I don’t know what you’re on about, Lyda, I should be asking for what your boy took that’s mine.”

The joker charm has faded, overtaken by the kind of gravity Ponder wished he could muster in himself. Greuel leans forward, intent on this woman wavering alone in the room’s center. His chest spills over the table edge, and his shirt shifts with his sagging flesh, yet he appears ready to launch from the wheelchair and overturn the table if need be. She shrinks visibly before the man’s gaze; Ponder can see it happening in stages. Her fingers hover over the cheap and inappropriately light jacket for such a cold night, and her eyes ferret from faces to floor without settling. Whatever thread of outrage that had brought her here is lost.

“I’ll just get those papers off the mantel there,” Carolyn says. “It was so nice to meet with you in your lovely home!” She crosses the rolled-wool rug and returns with the file tucked beneath one arm, ignoring the woman at each turn as she professes thanks on behalf of CWE Ministries to everyone for their time and how positive this was now that they finally got the chance to get familiarized with one another before the launch of this life-changing project. Already Greuel is inviting the now-irresolute woman to sit with him, to come, sit, and telling the card players to clear out. And Ponder is setting the name he heard into his mind: Skaggs, Lyda Skaggs.