Ghosting (35 page)

Beyond the hall she spies Arley Noe above the couch, leaning over where Greuel must be whispering secrets to him, Noe’s head quarter-turned as if listening closely. Because of the position of the sofa she cannot see any part of Lawrence Greuel save for his bare, chopped-up feet, which tremble and jerk in violent spasms, the quilt working its way up his ballooned ankles and hairless legs.

It won’t take another minute, says Arley in that matter-of-fact, side-of-the-mouth way he has, barely moving his lips.

Something thumps the back of the couch, but she cannot see what. The minnows are churning again, deep in the pit of her, and the water’s rush in the kitchen fills her head as though pouring directly into her brain. I’m not supposed to be here anymore, she thinks. I am supposed to be gone. Arley Noe leans further forward, rising, his meager body pressing its full weight down on his arms. I’m supposed to leave, Lyda thinks, but she makes no move. Instead she watches Greuel’s feet toss like a dog’s paws as it undergoes a bad dream, the way a dog digs or claws its way through sleep, whimpering. She watches just as she would watch a show on the TV she has seen before. She watches the feet slow to a stop, the heels come to full rest on the sofa arm; and then the feet part, very slowly, the remaining toes angling outward in the shape of a final V.

Arley sits back. He checks his watch, holding it up for a long time and glancing at Lawrence Greuel and then returning to the watch as a man who counts time waiting for a result. It’s not until he drops the hand, satisfied with whatever calculation he was making there, that he notices Lyda swaying in the hallway.

“You bring me that coffee?”

Lyda doesn’t answer. Noe’s voice snaps her from her trance with the same suddenness of an unexpected slap. She moves fully into the room, stepping around the sofa where the feet lie still on the armrest. Noe does not turn around; he waits for her to come up behind
him to see for herself what her body has already figured out somehow: Lawrence Greuel is gone.

The whites of his eyes glisten flatly beneath the half-open eyelids, and she can make out where the pupils have frozen at two on a clock’s face. A wadded hand towel protrudes from his mouth. Noting her gaze, Arley Noe retracts the towel and begins to fold it carefully, slipping it into the side pocket of his suit jacket. Greuel’s tongue swells to follow the towel out, pushing forth over his bottom teeth.

“Nothing happened that nature wasn’t about to do any time now,” Noe says. “Only so many minutes in a day, I can’t be everywhere.”

He stands and his eyes search for a place to look, landing finally on her hands empty and hanging by her sides. He glances back down the hallway, appears to listen to the water pouring out into the sink back there. The lipless mouth stretches into something akin to amusement.

“I ran into a problem,” Lyda says. “I didn’t make the coffee.”

“You shouldn’t be here. There aint anything left for you to do.”

Again his eyes scan the room, resting briefly—it seems to her—on each object as if making a specific inventory of the room at this precise moment. He takes a step beyond Greuel’s body and stops, kneeling to the floor and raising again with the old address book. He pages through the book as he walks to the dining table and the spread of prescriptions aligned there, sets his finger within the pages to prevent losing his place, and with his other hand he turns the bottles to expose their labels, ticking each aside.

“Those are mine,” Lyda says as Noe appears about to slip one into the same pocket that holds the towel. He looks at the label again.

“So it is,” he says. He returns the bottle to the rows. Now is the first time since she returned that he looks fully upon her, his gray eyes aglow in that strange blue face. “Tell you what. I am going to sit down here and look at this book for ten full minutes. In that time you can take whatever you want that you can carry out. But when I stand up again, you better not be in this house. I don’t want to see you again, Lyda.”

She brings a hand to her face, her arm aching where he had throttled her. Lyda leaves her fingertips against her jaw, looking over the body of the man she had felt so strongly against for so many years and
in so many guises—felt anger, repulsion, resentment, sometimes sympathy, often jealousy; never indifference—and realizes that even with the pathetic tongue swollen past his lip she feels only empty, numb, null. Noe sits at the table and holds up his watch. There’s nothing left for her here. It’s a deal she finds reasonable; Arley Noe is a businessman above all, and there are the amber bottles displayed before her with the sumptuousness of a great wedding buffet. All of it set out just for her, Lawrence Greuel finally making good on what he owed.

On four wheels it’s three hours to Harlan. Halfway through the run and they’re out of conversation, passing Lexington and on the far side of Richmond as sports radio drones away in the Christ World Emergent Econoline. The back burgeons with nylon nets stuffed with soccer balls, orange corner flags, a bright red gym bag stacked on top, high enough to be seen by any fellow drivers who bother to look. In front sit two young ostensible believers, tattoos hidden beneath button-down shirts; nothing about this vehicle or its passengers worth attention.

Something feels wrong in Cole’s stomach and it’s not simply nerves, it’s an intestinal thing. Driving, he catalogues the day’s meals—eggs over easy with home fries for breakfast, a black bean burrito for lunch; the queso had swum within a rim of brown grease; remembering just the image makes his belly lurch again. He tells Creed he might need to make a bathroom stop soon.

Grady Creed is involved with the radio host: no way the Cincinnati Reds will ever compete like they did in the seventies as the Big Red Machine. The large markets on both coasts have all the money, pricing out competitiveness. Take away 1990 and not even Eric Davis in his prime could bring a pennant to Cincinnati, and now he’s fighting colon cancer; that Deion Sanders is something to see but no matter how good one man is he can’t carry a baseball team. Creed’s telling the radio host you can’t do anything without near all the money in
the world. Who’s gonna get the hits, Pete Rose, Jr.?
Junior!?
If Creed expects Cole to second him on this, he doesn’t ask for it. Cole has no opinion to offer. Baseball bores him. He prefers basketball.

“Rule one is we make no stops on this run, that’s rule number one,” Creed says. Creed’s always citing some rule to whatever they’re doing, like there’s a list he should be familiar with, and yet each time Creed stops at rule number one.

The radio talk comes tinny thin in the van’s poor speakers and it feels like a shield, or a warmup, before Creed starts on something real Cole will have to respond to. Why else would he assign him this drive unless he has a discussion in mind? It’s not for talking baseball. Creed has never invited him anywhere, not even for work, never just the two of them. If he wanted ball-talk he could’ve hauled in Spunk, but he told Spunk to stay home—the guy needs to deal with his old man’s death, Creed said. Cole thinks the best thing for Spunk would be to get out of the house where his father died and roll on with his partners and drugs. Maybe Creed understands that bringing Spunk along would mean extra contraband in the van, as Spunk was in a nonstop period of numbing self-medication, and he did not want the aggravation. Or because since Greuel died it seemed like all the boys did anymore was fight. “It’s going to be this way for a while,” Creed had said. “It just gets like this sometimes.”

There are runs Cole has made routine, and then there is The Run, the delivery that speeds an interstate beeline a few miles past Harlan, that carries the kind of briefcase Cole has seen only in movies, code-locked and steel-braced, stashed beneath Grady Creed’s seat. The return will take much longer and he’ll be alone with a two-month supply of reefer to satisfy stoners in three counties. Creed’s to follow in a tracer vehicle—a protocol begun, he said, after Fleece disappeared.

“Your big brother doing what he did, I don’t know why, but what it got me was more work and more driving,” Creed said. “I hate driving more than anything. I don’t see how truckers do it, no wonder so many of them are tweaked. Not that I’m complaining, I mean half my money comes from them. But it’s too much time in the head for me.”

Seeing firsthand how The Run works complicates the questions behind what Fleece allegedly did and what is said to have happened
after. If he had been interested only in theft, then why go down to Harlan at all? He was to pick up the October harvest, the largest of the year and the riskiest to grow, as it was planted outdoors, spread over several locations, and so most treacherous to reap. The amount of cash on him must have been extraordinary—Cole would guess seven- to eight-hundred-thousand dollars at the least. Could you fit that much money into a single case? The radio show ends and Cole asks what Creed thinks. Creed looks like he’s chewing over the question in his mouth—but it’s only him working up spit off his dip. “Your brother wasn’t always the most practical man I ever dealt with. He didn’t know the code to the case, I know that much.”

“He didn’t? How would you know that?” asks Cole. “Because none of us who make this drive ever know the numbers that open the case,” says Creed. “Who does?” asks Cole. “The guy we give it to. Him and Greuel and Arley. Well, not Greuel anymore, obviously.” “Who do we give it to?” asks Cole. “Is that Nate Crutchfield?”

Creed eyes him sideways. He says: “Maybe. Pay attention to your driving, I don’t trust that floater eye of yours, you could roll us into Wolf Gap following that thing and I want to snooze before we bump up, it’s going to be a long night.” Before Cole can ask why the night will be so long Creed adds: “It’s always a long night with the Crutch, you’ll see.”

Dusk arrives like a thin veil thrown from behind the eastern hillsides. Creed shuts down to snores with remarkable speed, light, gentle scrapes that sound like fine sandpaper against unfinished wood. The radio mentions a shootout in Mexico near the border between rival cartels; a hostage was released somewhere in the Middle East; a jury in Denver sentenced that Timothy McVeigh cunt to death. He’s content to hear it but none of the news means anything to him. He checks his speed and his mirrors; traffic’s heavier than he’d expected. Traffic’s always heavier than he would have expected, he’s regularly surprised by how many people live out between Richmond and London. Usually when he drives he likes to zone out, to daydream over which car is going where, who the people are inside, whether they’re kind or maybe complete bastards moving on after ruining somebody’s life.

His gut pinches, and a blade of heat slides out between his legs. They have another hour to go at least. Surely he can hold it together for another hour.

In the rearview a slash of light catches his eye; bright headlights leap from behind a semi well behind him and speed past the trailer, cutting back in with a deft swerve just behind the van, the powerful engine loud enough for Cole to hear over the radio murmur. The car lurches forward as the driver taps the brakes, and there, in that instant, the hair on Cole’s neck and along his arms flare in alarm, his body startled by the recognition—it’s not yet so dark that he can’t see the make and he would know the familiar trim of the Nova coupe any day. Its candy-red finish gleams as new; the flip-out window stands open on the driver’s side, a marker of the same year as Fleece’s car. The Nova revs, slots onto the dividing line, but can’t pass due to another semi, WASH ME scrawled in the film of its scum on the back door parallel to Cole’s eye line, blocking the lane. Interstate lights glare on the Nova’s windshield, it’s impossible to see inside.

He speeds up to pass the semi as the road starts to ascend. The Nova accelerates behind him, so close that its headlights are blocked by the equipment stacked in back, the candy-red canopy all that’s visible to him. “Why you got to be on my ass like that?” he mumbles.

“How fast you going?” asks Creed, not opening his eyes until a time passes without Cole answering. “How fast,” he asks again. “I want to get around this semi to get this guy off my ass,” Cole says. Creed checks his sideview mirror. Then he turns fully around. “Get a load of that,” he says. “Tell me about it,” Cole agrees.

They’ve barely made a car length ahead of the semi when the Nova splits the space into the next lane. Here Cole notes the yellow front fender replacement, not even primed yet, it could have come right off his brother’s car before it burned. The Nova doesn’t roar past; rather, it steadies next to them, the driver pulling into alignment with Cole. He fights the urge to look. He has always resisted looking at another driver directly on the highway in that awkward moment of hurtling forward together, the strange feeling of invasion that acknowledging one another in those few shared seconds invoked. But the Nova keeps pace beside them as they pass first one then another mile marker, long
enough that Cole can’t help but sense the other is trying to gain his attention, to communicate something—and Creed must sense this too as he leans forward, looking. And then Cole looks also. But the windows on the Nova are tinted deep purple and mirror the bluing evening light.

Cole checks the road ahead, then again the car beside him, expecting the window to drop as they careen down another long hillside curving like a flume. The window doesn’t move. As the road bottoms out and begins another ascent the Nova’s engine roars, accelerates, slows down, leaps forward. “What the fuck’s he want?” asks Creed. And then: “Jesus, Cole, you’re going over ninety.”

So he is—he lifts his foot from the accelerator. It’s true, they had been flying. As he watches the speedometer dial down to eighty, then seventy-five, his heartbeat clamors within his head; by the time they hit the summit of the next hill they’ve returned to the speed limit, and it’s not until then that Cole takes a deep breath—realizing at the same time that it’s his first breath in a while. The Nova races on, shooting the lane ahead and zooming past cars that brake and change lanes to allow the wild driver plenty of room to maneuver. When they reach the next downhill slope, a long lightless stretch among walls of dynamited limestone, the Nova’s rear lights are so far ahead as to be indistinguishable from all the others on the road.