Ghosting (32 page)

“Go on, Cole, we’re watching,” Spunk said.

In the quiet of their waiting, the single rain owl called out:
who spooks you, who spooks you-all?

He pressed down with all his weight. The bones gave so easily that he fell forward past the body, Creed catching him with a hoot and then passing him on with a hearty smack on the back. Cole continued forward and did not turn around; he made the edge of the water and stood in the gaps between the rocks, inhaling deeply sludgy river fumes. The cold river began to seep into his boots, paining the bones in his feet. He wrapped his arms about his head like a kerchief, chinned his chest. The rain owl called again.

It used to feel so damn
good
to breathe, Lawrence Greuel thinking how nostalgic a man can get for all the little things he took for granted once they’re gone forever. Now he’s no longer sure he feels gratitude to even
be
breathing. He exhales a chorus of high pitches, a swarm of distant seagulls range throughout his lungs, his chest sounds as if he’s got the friggin’ Gulf of Mexico trapped in there—inhale, and it’s juddering waves against the shore; exhale, and the seabirds take flight, raging riot, their beaks gnashing at one another’s wings. Yet he feels no pain. There is a not-unpleasant numbness, a disassociation; he’s surprised, when he moves, to see his limbs respond. Like the entirety of
Lawrence Greuel
has retreated into this soft blur within his head, and only in his head does he perceive sensation: a firm and disagreeable pinch pressing his skull cap. Like it’s been forced into a hat too small. That, and the constant watering of his eyes—particularly the left, which stings to boot. Who knew the eyes could be so prodigious, so productive.

He blinks, and a puddle expands against the bridge of his nose. A tissue comes into view and sops it gently; he pinches the eye shut and the tissue drags over the skin and lashes with evident care. A woman’s touch.

“Was I asleep?” Honestly unsure, and the fact frightens him. Gray light fills the thin curtains over the window where he could swear it had been dark a moment before, the Tiffany lamp casting a rose blush
against the beige linen there. Now it’s gray light luminous behind the curtain and no lamp at all.

“Only about a day,” Lyda says. She lifts his arm as though to take his pulse, but she’s only turning his wrist to check his watch. “Near a day and a half, truth be.”

She crosses the room to toss the tissue into the trashcan by the bureau near the window. She wears cutoffs and sandal-toed heels, a woman who always shied from sensible shoes when she bothered to wear them at all. Between her knees he sees the trashcan overfilled with tissues and Lyda bends from the waist to pull out the bag, giving Greuel a cheesecake shot of her legs and fine calves, the form-fitting shorts outlining her vulva swollen as a primate’s; he’d heard tales of Lyda’s fat pussy and the sight of it outlined there fills him with unfettered gratitude. How could a pill junkie still look that good, and at her age? Goddamn if God was indiscriminate in wasting great genes on useless people.

The tears stream freely past his cheek and into his ear. “I remember when you ran around without enough clothes on to wad a shotgun.”

“Ha,” she says, caught midstride.

“Don’t look like you’ve found much more to wear since then.”

“I wore this in high school. Any lady my age would be proud to show that off.” She spins on the floor with the garbage bag held out, a swaying silent bell, then tugs at the cuffs of her shorts. “These jeans were my daddy’s. He used to call me Little Old Nasty Thing.”

“Clara was like that. Not nasty—we buried her in a dress she said was her favorite from high school.”

“Clara wasn’t forty years old, that’s nothing to brag on. Maybe not nasty but she was no Virgin Mary either. And I don’t care to hear about her even if I’m standing in her house.”

“
My
house,” Greuel coughs, and the coughs rake him over for a full minute. His body shudders and quakes and unfortunately feels all his own again. “Everything from the gate out front to the river is mine, heaven high and hell deep.” He settles back, sucks for breath, listens to the seagulls deep inside. Lyda’s heels clack down the hallway. “That was near twenty years ago, you still hold that against her?”

“You don’t?”

He must have passed out again. He didn’t hear her leave or return but there Lyda is, standing empty-handed and smelling of cigarettes, a silhouette haloed entirely by outside light.

“I don’t like talking about your wife. I know it worked out best for me in the end, but still. You talk like she was some kind of saint and she sure was not that.”

“Don’t I know it!” He coughs again, once, and hesitates with his fist before his mouth, expectant—but his lungs settle. “Can’t tell you how much I wished you’d wanted to balance the cheat. But nah, you were too crafty for that, you saw your way out. One wicked crafty lady.”

“Don’t blame me for what you wanted to do.”

He looks at his watch but cannot read the face of it, his vision too blurry even if he shuts the running eye. He looks down the blanket that covers him, molded to his naked body in relief. He is very thin. His bare feet on the armrest display purple sores he hasn’t seen before. He wiggles the remaining toes, sees them move, amazed he controls them somehow still.

Lyda bends again, this time shaking a smoke out of her pack by the window. “It’s not the doing that bothered me. It was the acting like he wasn’t, like it wasn’t none of my business.”

“Dumbest thing Bethel Skaggs ever did, out of a lifetime of dumb things, was take out an insurance policy.”

“You silly man, you think he ever thought of insurance? Any wife knows how to sign her husband’s name.”

He admires this, her worldliness as matter-of-fact as weather. But talk of the past tires him—it’s all over and will never change. He wonders how many days, hours, are still allotted him. Time feels like a bank account with dwindling funds and no further deposits.

“Why don’t you sidle over here and drop your daddy’s britches, let me get a good sniff of something other than all this medicine?”

She doesn’t even turn, searching for her lighter. “Old man, you are in no shape to be thinking on snatch.” She gives her hips a little one-two shake and winks at him as she heads for the door, and secretly he’s relieved by her refusal, resigned to empty bravado.

“Got nothing else worth thinking about.” Greuel shifts his eyes back to his covers and the tears, emotionless, emptied of any signifier save biological process, run onto his cheeks. “All my life I resented not being a thinner handsome man and now look at me, bet I could fit in one leg of my trousers and but all I can do is piss honey.”

“I believe it do smell like it,” Lyda laughs. She holds up her cigarette, says she’s going outside.

The sulfur of a lit match fills his nostrils. Pakpao is speaking quick in that half-talk, half-song speech of hers. That she’s here means dialysis and he’s glad for it, he feels better for hours after, almost normal, like normal and just getting over the flu. It’s the best he can hope for, it’s what passes for normal now. He says as much to Arley Noe, though he can’t locate him exactly. He recognizes the dark tobacco.

“Look at this mess,” his hands waving over his body.

“I will not deny,” Noe says. Greuel sniffs him out against the doorframe, spectral and dissolute, hands plunged in pockets and the hand-rolled smoke dangling from his mouth, disheveled in his shapeless suit and trilby. Looks no different from the day he sauntered into Greuel’s Danville pawn shop circa 1960, dropping pilfered candlesticks, wedding china, and a TT-30 semi-automatic pistol he claimed to have brought back from Korea as he teased out the morphine habit into its eighth year. As Pakpao continues her chatter-song at him—
outside with you cigarettes, outside!
—his face and eyes feature a fantastic, bored melancholy.

“How long till you’re clear?”

“You’ll come back?”

The eyes shifting from Pakpao’s mouth to the floor being the most he could expect. “Give me a couple of hours.”

“You go outside, you going to kill your friend,” says Pakpao.

Noe smiles around the cigarette and does not answer. “Nah, I don’t do him no more favors.”

Greuel had figured Arley would be first to go. He had looked forward to discovering what-all the older man had kept hidden during
his lifetime—to discovering how many different ways his friend and partner had screwed him over. That’s only one more mystery he’ll never know the solution to now, just as he’ll never understand why did Clara stray, or what made Fleece Skaggs, the son he should have had, steal so much as to nearly break him. Shouldn’t a dying man receive some enlightenment at the end? Justice comes maybe in the next life, here all we get are guesses and the Law, Greuel’s father had told him. He’d spent his life rendering his own justice to prove the old man wrong. If not justice, at least judgment. But no answers to the questions that matter to him.

He wakes again to raised voices outside the house. It’s night, the curtains hang flat and colorless with it. Pakpao’s gone, the portable dialysis machine nestles in its corner draped in opaque plastic. He hears Mule’s foggy drawl out there, and a cawing laugh that could be either his son’s or Grady Creed. Then the voices fall too low for him to tease out. His gummy eyes make the room look like it’s behind distended glass. They’ve left him alone in here. He hates being alone and they know it and they’ve left him, sick as he is. Everyone sticking around to see what can be plucked from the carcass.

The realization hurts him. It’s no surprise and he would be the same if it were one of them stinking on this couch. Still he snorts at how hurtful this is. Of all the things to be affected by . . .

A few words outside make it to his ears:
I don’t care what you need to talk to him about—.
That one’s Lyda, she’ll stay reliable as a dog as long as his amber-bottle array supplies her reward.

“I am not dead yet,” Greuel calls out as loudly as he can. The coughs wring his body like he’s enclosed in some great angry fist. He pulls up further in the couch, covers his hideous feet. “Where the hell is everybody?”

The front door opens. Out there the night’s black is entire. That preacher boy enters first, decked out in a light gray double-breasted suit bought off the rack, no tie, hair cut close almost in military style. At the sight of Greuel in the pullout bed Ponder hesitates, his
fingertips against the doorframe as though he needs to haul himself in. Mule’s long face appears above and behind him, eyebrows curled curious over what to make of the boss.

“You got him up, may as well go in, then,” he says, nudging the preacher hard enough to force him right up to Greuel’s feet.

Lyda slips in and shuts the door in Mule’s towering face. “You want I get rid of this guy?”

“Grab yourself a chair, preacher. Grab me a bottle of water while you’re at it, why don’t you.”