Ghosting (20 page)

Cole sweeps the Audi in close beside his pickup and parks. An accident on 53 between a minivan and a tractor put them a good forty minutes behind his mother and now he’s frantic, mistyping the gate code twice before he gets it right. He tells Shady to go on home, knowing she will refuse, knowing they’ll argue as he tries to assert his rightness in the matter, and knowing he will lose yet more time and the argument anyway. He asks her to stay in the car at least. She won’t listen. “I’m in this too,” she insists; but how could she be? How is that even possible?

He finds his mother at the table in the front room, folded forward in her chair as if in recovery from a blow to the stomach, slim-shouldered
in worn denim with the old cable-knit sweater loose over her hips, her back to him. Arley Noe and Mister Greuel sit within arm’s length of her on opposite sides, completing two points of a triangle over the round tabletop. Cole had expected for find her calmed by now—Lyda’s rages pass like summer thunderstorms, all flash and volume that leaves behind a refreshed and peaceable kingdom—but from here she looks near collapse. She turns, her distressingly slender arm bared as she reaches to him, the tender skin inside her wrist slightly blue in Greuel’s headlight. “Son, come here,” she murmurs, “you sit with me.” At his hesitation, her fingers begin to draw in rhythmic waves, the gentle motion of stroking the throat of something small and vulnerable. “Come on, I need you,” she says. Shady nudges him from behind. He turns a chair backward against the table edge and sits.

“Need anything?” from Noe.

He shakes his head. On the table before Lyda is a collapsed shaving kit, its black leather dulled with age yet brilliantly veined. Sidewise he tries to study her; she is cast in a numb slump and her eyelids appear to be losing resistance beneath a great weight. The hand that invited him holds above the table, palm now turned down and fingers stretched stiffly as to gauge their steadiness. Her fingers twitch with tiny quakes, and now it’s her son reaching to her, clasping, covering her hand with his own.

“We have a problem needs resolving,” Arley Noe says. “Now. Tonight.”

“Let me handle this, blue boy.” Greuel’s hand slices the air with unlikely speed. His words come forth blurred around the edges but clear enough to understand, and his sacklike face quickly fills the compass of Cole’s sight, his voice a blunt grinding stone. “You have a beef with me motherfucker now’s the time to lay it down.”

Cole’s palms turn moist. “You’ve always been right by me, Mister Greuel.” He doesn’t know what else to say. He never does, not when it matters. The old man glares, mouth stuck in a wretched twist. Cole knows more is expected out of him. “I’ve known you all my life. You, Spunk. Miss Clara. I don’t remember anything before I remember her being in my life, you know?”

“Only reason we are talking. Why you are
here
and we are
talking
. Anybody else—” his hand rises again, slices the air again, a slower chop this time.

“What do you want from us?”

“Your mother—she’s got these ideas. Spend time alone like her and thoughts get into your head, you don’t know where they come from. I know because hell, I never leave this house. Lyda here, I don’t like her ideas. I don’t like what they hint at, and sure as fuckin’ Christ don’t like the idea of her mouthing off with these ideas somewhere else. I doubt you’re too enthusiastic about this, either. Young buck like you doesn’t need this shit, your head should be on what that doctor’s daughter got in her jeans, not with this here, am I right? It’s awkward.”

At
awkward
Greuel’s throat seizes. His entire torso bolts forward, chest thumping the table as a coughing fit crackles behind his clenched fist. His eyes distend, redden, they glisten more with each successive spasm as his other hand seeks the bottle of water nearby. Despite the fit his eyes never leave Cole’s face. His head rears back and he nearly swallows the bottle plunged deep into his mouth and the water pools and overruns his lips. Arley Noe starts to rise but Greuel grabs his wrist, sits him down again.

“I don’t look well and I don’t sound well but I assure you I am perfectly fine.”

“Sure you are. I’m glad you are.”

“Don’t give me that. Nobody’s glad I’m alive, including me.” He belches into the back of his hand, checks to see if anything had come up. “I’ve spent the last sixteen months readying things for after I’m gone and your brother’s been a big part of that, Lyda has it all wrong. I find any hand in this room touched Fleece Skaggs then that is one hand I will see nailed to a post in my front yard for all the world to consider. That boy was like a son”—here he glances at Spunk and Cole follows; Shady is pressed as far against the end of the couch as she can go while Spunk plays, grinning, whispering into her ear—“the kind of son I deserved.”

He gathers himself, chews his lips and stares deeply at Cole, waiting as though a moment is needed to allow such pronouncements
their intended gravity. In turn Cole watches the tics in the wild ham-gravy eyebrows, the capillary webs spidering the dark oysters below Greuel’s eyes.

“I am only going to ask you once. Do
you
know where your brother’s at?”

His mother touches his arm, and then withdraws. Behind him he hears the smack of a hand and Shady’s intense whisper—
Quit it, Spunk!
—against Spunk’s chortles of amusement, but nobody pays this any attention. The entire room feels intent upon him. But he has no answer, he has no answer to any worthwhile question he has ever thought, and he fights the urge to either stand and shout as much or else crumple into a ball beneath the table. Why would Greuel ask him like this? Doesn’t he have the answers already? His eyes seek the older man’s, briefly, before sliding into focus on his shiny, unshaven chin.

“No, Mister Greuel. I sure don’t and I wish I did.”

Greuel slaps the table again and rolls back. He turns to Noe, whose own eyes narrow at Cole as if having trouble deciding which part of him to eat first. “I told you,” Greuel says. “Can you admit I told you that much?”

“I hear him saying it. That don’t mean nothing.”

Greuel launches at Cole again. “Fact: your brother stole from me. He stole from me so it
hurt
. Go down to my stables, you see any horses there? No, it’s a five-star hotel where critters keep their paws warm all winter. I sold every one of them, even Clara’s Sadie Dame. This pains me in ways you will never understand. I have been denied. I want what’s mine.”

“The horses?”

It’s a frog-steady stare he drops on Cole now. He stabs the water bottle at his mouth again but gulps mostly air, the plastic breathing with each seething slug. Without word Arley Noe rises and heads down the hallway in his smooth and strange gait, as if he itemizes every step, counting down from a finite inventory. With the break Cole checks out Shady, who has subdued Spunk’s obnoxious tendencies, leaving him grinning meanly, his head and hips miming a strange dance in repose, like a party raves in his head and he wants to milk every last second of it.

When Noe returns with more water Greuel chugs it greedily, two fingers pressed against the left side of his face. Bell’s Palsy is a recent affliction. Still the water trickles out, following the curve of his rusty first chin. He clears his throat again with an awful scrape.

“So tell me what you do know.”

Grady Creed leans a shoulder against the hallway corner, green beer bottle in hand, and taps sturdy fingernails against the glass, a small hammer chiming a bell.

“What did you give her?” asks Cole, indicating his mother.

Lyda’s smile shifts between melancholy and contentment. Her eyes study the rims of her lower lids (
What is it you see?
he wants to ask), her shoulders curved even more deeply inward. She whispers apologies—Cole can’t tell if the words are directed at him or simply said aloud: she is sorry, she says, sorely sorry. In the next instant her eyes look weepy, but no tears fall.

“The lady was agitated when she got here. I give her something to ease the upset,” Arley says. He regards Lyda with the dispassion of a researcher evaluating blind-tested volunteers. “I don’t know. Maybe it was too much juice, you can’t always tell what somebody’ll take and she’s a dry reed, that one.”

“She doesn’t spike,” Cole says.

“I’m fine, motherfucker,” slurs Lyda. The words come out as
muller . . . flokker
. Creed and Greuel laugh, and even Arley Noe is stirred enough to crease the lean flesh of his cheeks.

Now a tear blossoms to full flower. The blurred mascara and bunched lashes present her eyes as dark bursts of mourning. “Don’t you all laugh at me,” she says. “I know this feeling don’t last forever.”

“Your mama’s fine. If we wanted anything done it would be done to her by now,” Greuel says.

Creed shifts his weight and draws heavily from his bottle, the beer sloshing audibly; despite willing against the urge Cole’s gaze darts to him and discovers Creed returning a stare with intense, careful eyes.

“I don’t know anything you guys don’t, is my guess.”

“Try me.”

Cole tells about the burned-out car.
We know that,
Greuel says, palm patting the table. Cole tells of the empty rooms at the top of the
seminary.
This is not news,
says Greuel, voice rising and palm smacking the tabletop harder than before.

“Yeah, but the thing is the dogs, the dogs are still there.”

Greuel stares, implacable, the toad on its lily.

“You say he’s a son to you, then you know he wouldn’t leave those dogs behind to starve, I don’t care if he planned to rob you of everything you got.”

“Dogs’ll find a way,” says Noe. “What they got them snoopers for.”

“What’s a few dead dogs against the rest of your life on vacation?” asks Greuel.

“It would be a lot, to him. He wouldn’t do it. He’s wild but Fleece isn’t cruel.”

“News to me,” Greuel intones, extracting a snicker from Creed. “So what am I to divine from this bit of information? Your brother takes my run, he’s hiding in Pirtle County to keep them dogs fed?”

“Maybe he arranged something with that caretaker,” offers Shady from across the room.

“The caretaker,” Greuel repeats as though to note the detail. “We talk to him yet? What’s he say?”

“You don’t have to worry about him,” answers Creed.

“I decide what I worry about. What about you, Cole—you ever meet this caretaker?”

“Sure. Fleece knew him. Knows him.”

“He get you high?”

“Fleece?”

“Come ON!”

Cole pictures the trash bag pulled from the closet, big Hardesty hoisting it aloft, resin shining on the dark green plastic like a cola spill, light-green dust settling in the late sunlight. He shrugs, nods. Arley asks him if it was any good.

“Not as good as yours. He said he got his from a cousin up near Cincinnati.”

It’s his first bald lie. Speaking it he feels a tremor in his belly, the suspicion of a first step toward failure. Can these men see him? Can they tell from here he has to make it up as he goes? From the lie he offers the last bit of truth available to him.

“His mags?”

“The what?”

“His rims. He had those expensive mag wheels. They’re not there, I looked.”

“The boy remembered his rims.” Arley Noe’s bottom lip peels below yellowed teeth in amusement, the lips twisting his mouth into a kind of sickle, “I’ll be damned to say it Greuel but isn’t that Fleece Skaggs?—skedaddles with a whole season run but you can’t leave behind mag rims you paid good money for.”

“First I heard of it,” mutters Greuel. He turns to Grady Creed, smacking his knuckles against one another. “You care to explain how a car perv like you missed this little detail?”

“Dang, boss, I didn’t take a comb to the thing. Anybody could see it was his car and all burned up. Didn’t think there was anything else to know.”

Greuel returns to the matter at hand. A new sheen shimmers on his cheeks, sick-yellow and agleam. “What else?”

“He went off for you. Next thing I know, nobody’s heard from him, there’s his car.” Beside him Lyda nods twice in measured motion, nodding in agreement or in the effort to raise her head he cannot tell. The movement requires a great deal of her concentration, endeavor, and time. She sniffs a heavy amount of mucus and swallows. “We got our questions too, you know. What’ve you scoundrels done to my boy?”

“Oh enough, Lyda. Sing a new song.”

“How’m I to know you didn’t do nothing to him?” Her voice has grown thick; it descends to a whisper at the end.

“Because I don’t have my reefer! Where the hell is my reefer I want to know! I got no money and no reefer. Do you have any idea what kind of sore corner this dumps me in?”

“Whole situation’s a damn mess,” Arley agrees.

“Where you think your brother would get to?”

“Fleece? Hell Mister Greuel, I wouldn’t know, honest to God.” It comforts him a moment to speak the truth even though it’s a truth he finds no comfort in.