Ghosting (21 page)

“Guess. Free associate. You all got family in Glasgow, right?”

Lyda’s head rears back with a dismissive snort. “Second cousins of mine, they’re in Fountain Run, Fleece don’t know them. They’re not worth knowing!”

“What could he do with all that pot in Glasgow?” asks Cole.

Greuel taps his bottle back and forth before him, sliding it an inch one way, an inch the other. His teeth work his lips as though to chew the meat off, and Noe bends to Greuel’s ear and whispers too quietly to be heard. Greuel’s face folds at the listening. Sweat bursts upon Cole’s neck once Arley Noe backs off, smiles. “What?” he asks.

“Blue Note thinks we could save time and flush out your brother if we got Mule and his toolbox in here, let him work on you some before mom. He’s concerned for our reputation, I think.”

“People start thinking they can get away with product without punishment, why, then what do we have?” muses Noe, rubbing the words thoughtfully as with his fingers. “You get one man asking why’s he need to pay today, maybe he’s short, needs credit. Next one hears that and now he wants to renegotiate terms. And on down the line and next thing you know, you can’t pay money to the people
you
owe. All a sudden you’re looking at the wrong end of a pistol held by some kid who seen too many movies.”

“I never could abide chaos,” Greuel says.

“Chaos is not conducive to business,” Arley agrees.

Their faces express disbelief at the prospect, heads shaking slow and side to side in rhyming tandem. There is not a sound in the house save the hiss of smoking wood punctuated by sharp gasps in the fire—both Cole and his mother start at the crash of one log crumbling as it rolls from the grate. No one else moves, and Cole can sense them beyond the table out of his sight forcing themselves still, like small creatures who by instinct swallow breath and freeze as they await a predatory beast to pass. Creed’s still leaning in the hallway with his beer; Spunk reclines on the sofa with a palm over each eye, big feet crossed at the ankles; Shady has drawn her knees to her chin and remains as far from Spunk as she can manage. It’s like a spell has been cast, leaving Cole as the single being capable of animation, agency, among the still-lifes around him.

He is alone here.

A peculiar image blooms within his mind, a vision from years ago of watching Fleece parse pills from sandwich bags into separate small teacups for their mother. He had been whistling a grim mournful tune—what was it? Cole had said, I don’t understand why you give her that, she’s fucked up and you’re helping her stay that way. Fleece had answered that she was so deeply fucked up she needed the pills as much as she needed to get straight. Supplying her was the only way he knew how to help.

“Mister Gruel,” he begins, breaking the spell, “I can prove we don’t know where my brother is or what he’s done.”

“That’s a tall order, boy. How do you propose to do that.”

“I’ll make it up for him.”

Cole!
—his name slips from Shady’s mouth like an expression of pain.

“You leave my mother alone. Let me take over for Fleece. You’re out a driver, right? I’ve even got contacts none of you sell to yet.”

“Hey he’ll surprise you, Papa,” Spunk breaks in. “I trust Cole with anything, I’ll speak for him.”

“Your word means squat, son. Breaks my heart but it’s true.” He glowers at his fat hands flat on the table. “This isn’t the unemployment office. I got my own problems.”

“Maybe I can help with them,” Cole says.

Greuel’s scowl simmers with impatience and yet also, Cole thinks he can see, legitimate consideration. He’s afraid to look at Arley Noe and try to guess what could be read there, and moreover he feels he must keep going: “You said yourself you want out. Let me get some deliveries in for you, set up some deals in the city. I can do this. I can make this happy.”

Greuel’s face has lost the scowl and now appears drawn by fatigue and exasperation. “Whole set-up is weirder than tits on a bishop,” he tells his fingernails. His eyes roll upward. “What you think, Arl, you’re the one has to deal with him.”

“I don’t care for the kid. But you know that.”

“I vouch for him,” Spunk bursts again, “Cole’s all right, Daddy, you know he is.”

Greuel pushes the water bottle around, droplets of condensation catching the headlight on one side, the firelight on the other. He grabs the bottle in his fist and brings the fingers to the left of his mouth and gulps deeply several times, chugging the water like a frat boy downing whisky on a dare, emptying the thing. Instead of setting the bottle down he hands it to Noe.

“This here’s no part-time job, kid. You don’t wing this. It becomes your life, you understand? It’s a long haul from this to that scuba school I hear you on about.”

“I understand what I’m doing,” Cole says, looking over his mother shut deep behind her own shut eyes. What do you see there, he wants to ask her again.

“This wouldn’t mean either that if I turn up Fleece he’s in the clear. This does not change my problem with your brother at all.”

Cole doesn’t answer him; he’s nodding, hardly hearing what Mister Greuel has to say anymore, he can feel the discussion subsiding to its end and he has them almost out of this house. He keeps nodding, even as Greuel shakes his head again side to side at the sight.

“Tits on a bishop,” he mutters. He pushes back from the table and eases himself onto his feet, grimacing with the effort. At close to full height he composes himself into the semblance of the man he used to be. The man just casts a field of unease around him—it’s his gift. Cole fights the urge to drop his gaze, to let it fall to the table, his mother, anywhere else.

And then Greuel nods. He nods—but it’s a nod of resignation, perhaps disappointment, even sadness. “Well, why the fuck not,” he says. “Why not.” He pats Arley Noe’s shoulder and nods again to everyone before turning down the hallway and the far stairway there that leads to the bedrooms upstairs. Creed quickly clears way for him. They all watch as the sick man shuffles to the steps, grasps the balustrade, and painfully begins the process of climbing one at a time.

Everyone watches him leave except for Arley Noe, who remains focused upon Cole. He looks as though he’s trying to startle his face into some particular expression and finds it refuses him, it won’t settle on only one.

“I never claim to know another man’s thinking,” Noe says in his dragging sandpaper voice. “I’m not as thoughtful as our Mister Greuel. But understand: I do not owe your family one thing.”

Spunk is on his feet shouting welcome. The outburst upsets Lyda’s daze, and her wide eyes startle about the room and the people in it as though she has awakened from a fine sleep into a place she does not recognize. Cole undergoes his buddy’s slaps and high-fives while he reassures his mother with his other hand clasped gently on her neck. Shady, though, has not moved or looked up from her hands clenched about her legs. He waits for her, silently urging her to see him even as Creed begins to usher them out—but she is stubborn in her refusal, keeping her eyes downcast while falling into step with Lyda. The door opens and February’s eager wind greets them with bitter cold.

Where the creek bends behind his mother’s house there lies a sinkhole pool, limited in its width but deep enough that the brothers never did locate its bottom. Not even in the times of hard drought when the creek shrank to a trickle—dried to flat warm limestone where brilliantly striped skinks of emerald and ruby flashed away at the boys’ approach—and left exposed a shallow cave secreted beneath the banks, a hovel of clay and slime that stank in the heat. No matter how dry the season this sinkhole remained brim-full with a slow surface whirl spinning dry leaves, bits of dead grass strewn by the mower, specks of dust, and the insects that lived and died there. Into the water the boys would discard any object they could do without and that fired their curiosity: a bird’s stale carcass, model airplanes, soda cans, several bonfires’ worth of oak and linden branches,—one time even Cole’s old tricycle, which he did not believe would fit and so Fleece had to prove him wrong, wrestling the bike down the pool’s gullet until it plunged the rest of the way on its own. The brothers would sit and watch the bird, the airplane, the stick turn slowly on the water until it sank from the surface and disappeared just as if sucked down an enormous drain. Then they would sprint over the knob to the lake and splash about in the shallows certain the object would reappear, for they sensed that somewhere the pool must follow an underground passage that opened into the floor of the lake—they didn’t know then that Holloway had been manmade. Nothing ever came back. Cole imagined
the whirlpool must sink straight to the deep heart of the earth, beyond the reach of any light, and he pictures those objects still descending there over the years, still spinning, silent in that dark, obscure quiet found only in deep water, all the abandoned toys and dead animals (thready skeletons now) circling low in that pool to nowhere. A mysterious place where time had not so much ended as come to a standstill. Sometimes they joked and wondered at what some explorer might make of them one distant future day when all of Lake Holloway was gone and the whirlpool had finally dried up and everything they had left there could be rediscovered. But in his secret self Cole believed the water would stay deep and dark forever, the detritus of empty summer days, these bits of their childhood selves, preserved yet hidden away for eternity.

It takes time to get used to what they have him doing; takes even longer to get used to how little there is, in reality, for him to do. Lots of down time in the mule business. Creed staked him for sales in town, first to CD Cooter, an employee of his uncle’s, then to Cooter’s friends. Dealing didn’t eat up the hours either. Over weeks Cole learns a new respect for dim Spunk Greuel because Spunk knows already how to do what Cole’s just beginning to learn. Car rentals—Cole had never rented a car or room before. Navigating Kentucky’s secondary and tertiary routes and figuring where these bypassed the interstates; identifying state patrols’ preferred speed traps and the location of their station outposts. He works sober yet drives as though stoned to the gills, the night late, a cop trailing close in the rearview: Cole pins his hands at ten and two on the steering wheel, speed pegged at five miles faster than the limit, eyes measuring the boundary lines.

Primarily he’s nothing more than a delivery boy. He rarely sees what he carries but is savvy enough to understand it’s not weed. The secondary routes drag out the drives. His first run had him coupled with Spunk in a VW Rabbit picked up from Rent-a-Wreck with a Bette Midler cassette stuck halfway in the stereo and magnetic tape spilling out its mouth. Every few miles Spunk said he was hungry and
they would pull over for a candy bar or chips. Twenty minutes later the two were pulling over again for sixty-ounce sodas; another half-hour and it was Spunk complaining he had to piss. “Why don’t you drive, then?” asked Cole. “You can pull over any time you want.”

Spunk cackled and bent to his straw to slurp among the ice left in his huge “souvenir cup.” He shook his head and looked out his window, formed a pistol out of his hand and fired at cows along the road. “It don’t work that way, see. I’m the face man. You, on the other hand, are the driver. You’re the muscle.”

Cole glanced over his mirrors, certain every car behind them had to be an unmarked state trooper. He was starting to think he should cut his hair and shave daily and work toward a generally more upright appearance that wouldn’t hint at his being a roadhound skeech.

“We’re fucked,” he murmured, wondering what sort of
muscle
they might meet at the other end of delivery. Suddenly Spunk’s enthusiasm for the martial arts began to seem less foolish.

The hatchback carried twelve sealed cardboard boxes that Grady Creed, gun tucked visibly at the front of his waistband, had instructed them
not to open
or else he would hear about it. The boxes were not labeled. All Cole knew was that they were to ask for a man named Cherokee when they got to where they were going, some place kept secret in Spunk’s head.

They headed south and Spunk turned him at 357, then 224, and Cole was lost among hills and cows until they hit a field topped by an aluminum hangar announcing
The World’s Biggest Open-Air Flea Market in the South
. The Rabbit ambled in gravel dust kicked up behind a pickup until Spunk motioned him toward a double-wide stall festooned with advertising insignia from the early century, Coca-Cola and Marlboro and German beers Cole had never heard of. Long tables sported bric-a-brac glasses and ceramics, iron skillets shining oiled; beneath the tables rows of cardboard boxes lay open. From the angle of the hill Cole could not see what was inside them.

Spunk, serious now, told him to get out but stay by the car. He tossed his soda cup to the floorboard and waved half-heartedly up the rise to a wiry rawboned man with long and sparse blond hair combed back and gleaming damp, a steel cane leaned against his knee. The
man looked like he could be related to Spunk, perhaps a vision of Spunk ten very hard years into his future, shirtless and pink-skinned save for the green eagle’s wings tattooed the width of his chest shoulder to shoulder.