Ghosting (28 page)

“It’s got something to do with how we start out in the womb. Did you know a man can produce milk, get breast cancer, all that?”

“Mule. A man don’t need his nipples. You understand what I’m saying?”

“I know the freaking routine, Arley.”

Gently, Mule spreads Hardesty’s thick chest hair away to expose a surprisingly small and pink aureole. He presses the open edge of the hawks-bill against the man’s breast, steadying it in place despite the rapid heaving of Hardesty’s rib cage.

“Hold on, boyo,” Mule says. “This’ll hurt.”

“Wait, what’re you asking me, you’re
supposed to ask something before you hurt me,
man, what do you want to hear?” Hardesty speaks quickly, then groans deep as the snips bear down, his entire body tensing up, the chair jumping on the floor.

Where his nipple had been a small mouth snarls stark white. Creed nudges Cole and tells him, quietly, to check it out, give the body time, and even as he tells him this the white mouth quickens with pink; the blood beads up in tiny dots that gradually pool together, then starts to run freely into the hair over his belly. The nipple sits on Hardesty’s thigh. His head angles in contemplation of it, his face seemingly baffled by the ease at which a piece of his body has changed location, moved from where it had existed for years without notice to there, above his knee.

Arley bends back in close to him. “There’s not much from you I want to hear, honestly. I think I got the how figured out. Not so sure about the why. You steal from me, you steal from Greuel; steal from all of us in this room, in fact. Why? Try again.”

Hardesty does try, as far as Cole can tell. None of what he says can satisfy Arley Noe. It almost seems as though words are not even what the blue man wants to hear, and it feels like they are there a long time, asking. Cole cannot figure exactly what Noe expects to learn from the man—everything Hardesty says appears to arise from some deep-seated honesty and the utmost desire to be released from this chair and this room, yet with each answer he loses another piece of his flesh. First Noe asks a question, and then Mule comes down with a snip from the hawks-bill, regardless of the response. As though the whole scene is a show; a kind of play-acting.

But for whose benefit would that be? Whose?

Certainly not Dwayne Hardesty. The man’s chest and belly has begun to thicken with an extra skin of his own blood, like the scum that gathers on the surface of boiled milk; his ears disassemble into pieces lost from a jigsaw puzzle. Soon the white of his skull gleams from what used to be his left eyebrow. At each cut, Professor Mule places the piece of the man’s flesh onto his thighs for Hardesty to view.

Helluva way to make fighting weight, Creed says to general silence.

Through it all Noe never raises his voice, never loses patience. His stare, Cole thinks, is as flat as an owl’s. He sticks to a line of questioning about a man named Crutchfield—was Crutchfield in on this, too? Did Hardesty ever talk to Crutchfield? Did Fleece ever talk about Crutchfield? With the repetition of the name Cole feels an acceleration, the room spins from the house and the ground and whirls into some other dimension, a place of deeds that would fill a heart with shame if they were to occur in real life. The name
Crutchfield
rings no bells. Hardesty claims he’s never heard of him, either—this even after Creed uses the brad driver to pop a bolt into the tendon below his kneecap. Cole believes him and wants to say so. Yet he shudders when Hardesty calls him out.

“Cole Skaggs,” Hardesty says, “the little brother, you tell them what I told you”—the caretaker dips forward and a long strand of varied color splashes on the floor between his legs, Cole uncertain of its source—“what I tell you? I ever say anything about the Crutch?”

“You talked to this guy?” asks Spunk.

“He didn’t mention anybody to me. He said Fleece gave him a few books in a trash bag. For letting him live up there.”

Arley Noe casts his strange smile, a smile from stillness, as though the man had adapted human expressions while unable to understand the motives behind them. “I
know
where
my
weed’s at. I don’t understand why it got to be there is all.” To the man on whom his gaze has not left he continues: “You say you don’t know anything. How you come to calling this man ‘the Crutch’?”

A roaring groan erupts then, and Hardesty’s head falls back. He spits and starts again. “Motherfucker I’m from Burnside. I shipped home in seventy-three with a morphine habit and nine hundred and fifteen dollars I could spend in a week. Anybody in Pulaski County like that’s going to learn him Nate Crutchfield if that’s who you’re asking about.”

Noe straightens again, hands in his pockets; he works his thin lips silently. Mule eyeballs the caretaker as though chewing over the best way to remove a stubborn stump from his yard.

“It’s James Cole,” Hardesty wheezes at his thighs. “And not all Skaggs. James Cole.”

Cole looks at him. He wishes Hardesty would stop bringing him into it. He wishes he could tell the man he’s here because he has no say and he has no conception of what to do with himself or with the caretaker and—his head runs empty of thought, fills with a signal close to a dial tone.

“James Cole, get them off me. Get me out of here. Do I look like I need to be here?”

“I talked to Crutch,” Arley continues in his quiet drone of a voice. “He described a man—well, way he described him made me think of you, caretaker. He said you drove Fleece down yourself. Some tale about Fleece with a broken hand, cast and all.”

“Bone,” Hardesty calls out.

“Lying to spite the nose on his face,” Noe says.

“Arley I don’t know how much longer we got him, he’s going to black or bleed out soon, one or the other.”

“Lies to spite the nose on his face. Mule. You understand what I’m saying?”

He holds out the dovetail saw.

Lawrence Greuel reclines beneath a mound of woolen blankets and one quilt of sentimental value, the real thing, passed down from the nineteenth century by his grandma. Its ratty resilience impresses him, squares of cloth thinner than paper save for the few patches he had sewn in himself over the years. He fingers the yellowed batting inside a small tear as he squints at the late-night news glowing between his fat feet, two bloated blobs exposed to the air, propped on his sofa’s armrest. Those talking heads have nothing to tell that Greuel needs knowing.

He used to be the man who made things happen. Now his feet look like something inflated by a clown for the amusement of children. He hates the sight of them, but they burn radiantly even as the rest of him freezes, so he can’t hide the feet beneath his blankets. The right one lacks its little toe, the left has only the first two, both feet white as fish bellies save for the puffy purple amputation scars. He doesn’t even think of them any longer as parts of him: never as
my feet,
simply
the feet
. They feel encased, without pores. When he complained of the discomfort, his private nurse—a meaty thumb of Thai attitude that Greuel likes and abhors in equal measure—told him,
reassured
him, seemed like, that she could do nothing about hot feet.
That mean you been bad man, Hell get ready for you,
she said. Then she burst with a display of unforeseen hilarity and shook his big toe. “The look on you
face, ha! The look on you face, ha ha ha!” until he, too, laughed, struck by this tiny woman so worked up over what she said.

He never could get the names of these nurses right despite the many times they’ve slowly sounded out the stacks of consonants and vowels that make up who they are—a name with six or seven syllables, his head can’t hold it, hardly anyone understands what he says these days anyway. This morning he called on Gwen and she answered,
Pakpao! you call me Pakpao!
in a merry shout. Another nurse tried to coach him on
Dhipyamongko
but Greuel gave up on that one, settled for
nurse.
Was she the one to tell him that it was hell licking at his feet?

Always did have a thing for Asian babes. Blue Note had told him this was due to his never having been over there, surrounded by chest-high people everywhere you turn. He claimed he got enough of that cut in the service. But Noe—if Greuel didn’t know the son of a bitch so well he might guess a guy that strange was into boys or cows or whatever, maybe not even anything living. In the end (as in all things with Noe) it came down to clarity, to clean lines. Noe likes him some whores. Back when they owned majority interest in that strip club in Lexington—in seventy-two?—his partner confided that he found “use of a woman satisfying but they’s no-count otherwise.” Greuel had laughed and he had understood. Pay a girl outright and you owe nothing after, don’t have to care what she thinks of you or wants from you or (the real kicker) what she
hopes
for you. Things get rough, Greuel had decided long ago, once a woman decides on a man’s potential.

Pay-to-play worked for a creepy crow like Arley but would never work for him. Greuel likes women. He likes the clack of their heels on his hardwood floors, their easy enthusiasms, their laughter—the real thing, not a put-on laugh but the kind that froths up when they can’t help it and aren’t concerned with how they sound. Because of this liking Greuel has dealt with more grief and headache and expense, he readily admits, than Arley Noe has ever had to suffer.

Does it bother him that he has to pay to be looked after now? Absolutely not. He never had met another Clara.

And still Noe got into some mess himself when he ran a few escort girls, on paper it looked good but Greuel knew going in he didn’t want to muddy his hands with that shit. He still had Clara then to answer
to anyway, he’d had to keep even the dance club secret from her (the name of the place escapes him now,
Saddlebreds
or something)—not because she would’ve been against the investment morally or ethically but because she would’ve ended up as friendly counsel and advisor to the dancers, and Greuel didn’t need the aggravation.

What does Noe do with his money? Greuel hasn’t a clue even though he has looked into it, secretly, and more than once. He knows a lot went to lawyers, because Noe’s loyal escort girls turned to easy talkers when they realized the talking might help them out of a jam. The eighties hadn’t been friendly to Arley Noe, he had been forced into eggshell-walking for a few years there.

That’s why Greuel stuck to the reefer, the pills, more crank since the kids seem to be into it. Everybody an independent contractor who don’t know more than what they have their hands in directly save for him. Save for him and Arley. It’s all old Blue Note’s concern now.

He looks over his burning feet again. Flexes his aching legs. The backed-up feeling from the phlebitis makes him picture clots colluding in his veins. One shakes loose and that’s all she wrote, like having a bullet in you already just waiting for its moment to hit where it matters. Not the most fitting end after the life he’s led, fact it’s a damn shame. But isn’t it always? He had watched outraged at the injustice his Clara had suffered, thirty-six and her body winding down, first the stiffness and odd aches and then after the diagnosis her determined attitude, then the demoralizing fatigue and outright pain, then the catheters and bed pans and Greuel bedside in the hospital watching her blood pressure and oxygen percentages ticking down. She was out of it by then, didn’t even know he was there.

For him it’s not so much a winding down as the goddamn wheels flying off. He plans to complain and curse every downward sign whether anyone listens or not.

His feet teem in a high sizzle. He cannot sleep and he’s alone. Where the hell is everybody? Past twelve midnight at night and the phone hasn’t rung and where is snakebrain Noe and where the hell is
anybody?

He wills the phone on the low table beside him to ring. He’ll stare it down until it does, he’s got more heart still than any dumb insentient object. He stares at it, glaring. Then he bores with the standoff. He picks up his address book and thumbs the wrinkled and food-stained pages, careful with the ones torn loose of the binder rings. He’s had this book some forty years now. He marvels at the number of entries crossed out and updated with moves or blacked out as they died. Pages and pages of associates . . . friends are those gone,
because
they are gone, cold bones in the ground or else ashes, invisible molecules floating, maybe, in the very air about his room . . . the thought of which leads him to suck several deep huffs from the oxygen mask.

These days his friends are doctors and their script pads and these Asian nurses with impossible names. In his book he does not see one name to call, one name that could expect his voice past midnight for anything other than mean business.

There’s that pastor’s mobile phone number. A pastor with a mobile phone—so incongruous to Greuel’s sense of things that he chuckles, decides right then maybe it’s best he kicks soon, this world no longer fits him. Noe’s going to make a squealing pig out of that pastor and his church, stroke of genius, who’s going to bust a church? and Ponder in too deep a money bind to say a word about it. He flips past the business card to the end of the book.