Ghosting (31 page)

But she doesn’t. She’s too worn to make that small gesture. She thought to do it, and that’s enough. He leans over to kiss her but she’s already out. He says he’ll call her later; she tells him to do what he wants. She does not look back as she hurries to the house, even though she can hear the truck’s coughing idle linger in the drive, waiting expectantly for her to turn and wave goodbye. But Shady’s gone already. She doesn’t feel like she should have to say so.

Lyda’s wagon is in the driveway when he returns home. The man she slept with must have been something special for her to stay the night—usually she gave some stranger run of the house for a weekend or two, until the inevitable blew up and she kicked him out. Whatever. All Cole wants is a long, scalding shower, and to shove the night he just lived through into some hidden and forgotten cranny in his mind. He wants the water hotter than he can stand it, so hot the ceiling’s loose plaster shines with steam and the walls run amber from his mother’s nicotine. The mirror so clouded he won’t have to look at himself.

She’s not in the kitchen and he doesn’t call out. He tosses his mud-caked boots to the corner on the pile of accumulated diving gear and does not think over how long it has been since he used it. In the bathroom he flips on the shower to get the hot water going. The spray is freezing when he tests it and he pulls back to wait, takes off his sweatshirt (noting then the sticky grime on his hands) and rests his backside against the sink, the mirror out of his line of sight. He studies the mold settled in the corners of the shower stand, it looks like discarded coffee grinds, most likely something off of him—pill-head swinger ride or not, Lyda is a woman who likes her bathroom clean.

No steam yet. Sometimes it takes a while. He switches off the cold water entirely, leaves on only the hot.

He can’t blame Shady; he shouldn’t have sent her to Sheldon, and she shouldn’t have seen Grady Creed smack him like a disobedient
child while Cole sat there and took it. Everything is beginning to feel like a test he’s unprepared for and fails at with each new, unforeseen level. He is learning about Fleece in ways he would prefer not to have learned; unsettling things that, however vaguely, make him feel somewhat better about himself—at some fundamental level he has a conscience. He’s unsure his brother does, or did. But he knows Fleece never involved Shady in the work.

He tests the water again and the cold shocks his hand. He switches the water off and stares at the handle for a time as though he can will it to find heat. Then, opening the bathroom door, he meets his mother nearly chest to chest.

“Pilot’s out,” she says, already holding up a flashlight. “Do your mom a favor?”

As he reaches for the flashlight she steps back, taking him in. “Whoa, baby, let me get a look at you. What did you get into last night, weren’t you with Shady? Where’d you all hide the body?”

It’s like a crucial piece of rigging behind his face snaps from the strain of keeping it in place. He can’t find his voice for a moment, though his mouth hangs open large enough to pop a golf ball into it.

His mother titters, pats his cheek several times. “Did you two at least put a blanket down? Don’t you have a place to go?”

“I should be asking you, ma. What brings you home after morning sunlight?” It’s a phrase she used to say with feigned admonishment to Fleece when he was barely a teenager, rampant on the terra with a will of his own Lyda never tried to rein in.

“Honey it is a wicked world out there and I don’t have to tell you.” She hands him the flashlight with a slurry smile, swaying; she leans back into the hallway wall, and by the flush in her cheeks and the rime rimming her eyes he can tell pharmaceuticals are filling her with love. “But sometimes you can almost think, maybe it’s not so wicked in spots. You wouldn’t believe what I’ve been up to. And you wouldn’t approve.”

“Try me,” Cole says, but her eyes close and her head glides in off-measure from side to side, her coy smile making her a young girl keeping a secret she will wait to tell.

“It’s a new day. Spring is here and can’t you just feel it? I hardly slept. Everything might be all right after all.”

“What everything? Fleece?”

She shrugs as though suddenly sleepy. A great yawn reddens her face and she doesn’t cover her mouth until the yawn is finished. Her hand dismisses him from there. “You get the heat going. I’m thinking a cup of tea, myself.”

Her purse sits open on the kitchen table; among the sundries he spots the black film case where she keeps pills on the go. Within the assortment of sizes, shapes, and colors, he recognizes a few oxy-eighties and swallows two with water so cold it hurts his teeth. His body feels tender from what he put it through last night, and the little sleep he caught on the concrete out front only settled the soreness deeper into his bones. He left his sweatshirt in the bathroom and he’s too lazy to go for his boots. Outside he quick-steps across the wet grass in loose socks and under the thin T-shirt his skin tightens with the rude cold of the March morning.

Beneath the house the air is dank and chilly as an icebox. Cole hasn’t felt properly warm since he and Shady were at it on Spunk’s couch. He rubs his hands over bare arms. Here it’s the same smell as by the river last night: moist, mineral, silty. A shiver runs through him. He dismisses images from his mind as they come.

He never knew Hardesty. The man had been more of a dark specter over his childhood rather than an actual person, a bogeyman he should feel relieved to have lifted from his spirit.

The pilot lighter rests on the brick ledge that gives to the crawl space accessing the pipes. Cole kills the gas and waits for the air to clear. He squats with the small of his back against the brick, then sits to ease the pressure on his frail knee, and stares into the dark. The chill against his back starts an ache in his lungs and he coughs into the damp.

The body had been heavier than he would have imagined. Hardesty was a big man, well over six feet tall and thick across the shoulders and torso, a body of hefty muscle gone slack, age-fatted into simple bulk. His head was large and wide-boned as the rest of him, great in diameter and with teeth that looked chiseled from some dense material found in deep woodside, stone or clay or live oak hewn by rough tools. It was difficult to carry him. Creed had left the task to Cole and Spunk, leading them into a field of tall saw-grasses, a spade
slung over his shoulder as casual as a kid with a baseball bat. He moved in lumbering spurts, preoccupied, as though trying to divine a specific location from hints on the wind.

“Could’ve pulled us up closer,” Spunk complained. “What four-wheel-drive’s for, I thought.” Silently Cole agreed; his knee burned like a tight ball of fire, and with each step Hardesty’s bare heels, sticking out of the rolled tarp, thumped against his neck like clubs. “It’s all grass, you could make this ground easy.”

“Yeah—we could cut a nice new trail for anyone to explore, right on,” Creed answered, searching. “They should put you in charge. I always slept real sound in jail.”

Their shoes sank in a loamy gumbo that sucked harder at their soles the closer they got to the river; Cole smelled the Ohio before he could hear it. By the time the grass cleared around an oxbow of stagnant black water, so still its surface perfectly mirrored the bone-bright gash of moon, they were all high-stepping against the pull of the mud. Twice they dropped the body, Hardesty and the tarp taking on water and weight each time. Cole’s back was shrieking.

“Smells like a sewer out here,” Spunk said. “We going to sink him in the river?”

The Ohio appeared as an expanse of pure black stretching endlessly before them, and they set the body on the rocky outcropping—gently, as if now they were afraid of hurting him. Above, the naked branches of white sycamores and other trees Cole couldn’t identify rose and dipped in the wind, like giant fingers conjuring spells, or curses, he couldn’t guess which. The wind itself moved like a bodied presence through the grasses and it was much colder here. His sweaty skin crawled where his clothing stuck to him. Hardesty’s great teeth gleamed in the moonlight beneath the cavity where his nose should have been; a sight that made him queasy each time he ventured a look at it. Yet he couldn’t stop stealing glimpses of it.

Grady Creed stood on a berm with fists at his waist, facing the river as though in survey of a great victory that had occurred there, the spade angled from his hip sharp-edged and silhouetted like a dangerous tail. He set one foot on the bleached trunk of an elm weather-stripped of bark and gleaming like prehistoric bone. Cole and Spunk
both clutched their thighs in each hand, bent and gasping. Creed sniggered.

“Sink him in the river? Boys,” he said cheerfully, hoisting the spade, “this county sits on limestone bedrock. Now you’ll find limestone bedrock is a great natural accomplice to criminal mischief. Tonight you learn the proper method of body disposal in a river environment.”

He told them to pay attention because this would be quick. Sinkholes provide readymade graves, he explained, with half the work done already. “But what makes a sinkhole—either of you know?” Neither of them did. “Water erosion. Sinkholes let rainwater find its way underground. For us that means once the body’s out of sight you got to worry it might still move around down there, end up on a fishhook or in some noodler’s hands. We don’t want to encourage this thing to float. Why’s a body float?”

“Gas,” Cole said.

Creed nodded as he set a foot near Hardesty’s hip. “Basically we’re whisky stills full of fermenting juice. I’ve seen it, blows you up like fuckdoll. You want to allow a place for the gas to get out, like this.” He plunged the spade into Hardesty’s belly. Then he widened the cut by shunting the blade back and forth, an earthy squish and suck sound that Cole knew instantly was in his head now and forever. “But shit still moves down there, we get floods and all, right? You got to make sure that if anybody ever finds this they still can’t figure out who it was. How you think we do that?”

“Fingerprints?” from Spunk.

“Good. We take the fingers. And?”

He turned his attention to Cole, enjoying his personification of the attentive professor in the field, but Cole was hardly there anymore. He was hardly anywhere, he felt as empty and purposeful as anything else around them that wasn’t speaking: the wind, the grass, the moving river. A rain owl hooted its strange and unique call.

“
Teeth,
good. You don’t have to take everything, just mess it up enough so nobody can match this mouth with a record somewheres. Though I doubt our caretaker spent a lot of time at the dentist. Still.”

He handed Spunk the spade and told him to gather the fingers, a
job Spunk applied himself to with merry diligence.
Sick!
he exclaimed at the feel of the first thumb falling away. Quickly he finished one hand, and then inspected the small pile gathered beside his boot. “You know what, these would make a real fancy and powerful necklace,” he said. “I should make me a necklace and hang it over my bedroom door, keep away the evil spirits.”

“No, you’re not. You’ll give them to me, you demented fuck,” Creed said, shaking out a plastic bag. “Cole, you get the teeth.”

Cole snapped to at the sound of his name. “I don’t think so, man.”

“Sure you are. You’re going to do his teeth or I send you in there after him.” Creed stepped up to Cole’s face, his forehead closing in near enough to press against his own. He smelled tobacco and ale over the river stench.

“C’mon, Cole,” Spunk said. “Come on, man, he’s dead already.”

Cole remained bent at the waist with his hands clutching his knees, breathing deeply through his mouth. Breathing had become difficult for him, a deep wheeze had begun to web in the back of his lungs. He didn’t move.

“See, now’s when it’s good to have some Little Kings in the belly,” said Creed. When he spoke again, after a pause, his voice had lost its mocking tone, turning almost brotherly, almost gentle and commiserating. “First time’s always a bitch. But you got to do it, every man does his share. Arley told me to make sure you do something. Specific instructions.”

“Carrying the body aint enough?”

In his home Hardesty had remained with his head thrown back, lips smacking at something tasteless, his throat working noisily. He blinked at the ceiling, and Cole had watched as the blinking slowed. Nobody spoke for some time. As if for no reason save to break the silence, Hardesty murmured, “My nose.”

Mule was cleaning the saw with a paper towel; he had begun to wipe down each of his tools with some kind of bleach solution that sharpened the air, returning each piece to its respective pocket. Arley Noe hovered nearby, out of Mule’s way.

“Goddamn you, Arley Noe.” Hardesty’s voice sounded strange, flatter than before. “My very own nose.”

“You don’t need it no more,” Arley said. He sniffed the air above the man, who continued to face the ceiling as though lost of the energy to raise his head. “Smells bad in here anyway, you’re not missing a thing.”

“God damn you. Arley. Just—God damn you.”

His head jerked up as he coughed out a clump of what looked like blackberry compote. The jelly caught and hung pendulous from the whorls of beard even as his head fell back again. The substance rolled over itself slow and hypnotic, shifting shape as it wormed from whisker to whisker, the lamp light shifting over the surface as it wandered, wavered, until its own weight pulled it onto the floor with a dull splat. Noe patted him on the shoulder, several times, finally leaving his hand there, squeezing the shoulder in gentle rhythm, in some lost gesture of consolation.

“Don’t you worry about me and God, caretaker,” he said. “We damned one another a long time ago.”

Beside the sinkhole Creed handed Cole the spade. He hardly felt the tool in his hands; his hands were only tangentially his anymore, as if the cold had taken all feeling from them. Creed nudged him forward and Cole obeyed. He felt for the body through the extension of the steel tool, straddled it, and located the dull and hefty teeth within the open mouth. With the spade’s edge he pushed back Hardesty’s hoary upper lip and settled it on his gums. He braced one foot on the back of the blade.