Ghosting (38 page)

They ride along the country roads without a single identifier to location save a bridge, a certain sharp curve, the glomming mass of trees creating an illusory uniformity to either side of the lane. He directs Cole to turn left and at another bend the road rises and the hills part and the bright moon captures them with the clear focus of a spotlight. “I know who you are,” Crutchfield says, settling back in his seat, one hand firm on the pistol. “Know your type, too. The dutiful son and brother. You’re of a kind that goes all the way back to the Bible. Not that its long history helps me understand the type, though. The motivation.”

Before the windshield the road unfolds on banks and angles that lift and guide the van through curves and inclines, and it feels like the road is constantly rising.

“I don’t get what you’re talking about.”

“You don’t want to be here, James Cole.”

It’s true. A sour rush wells within him as he realizes this—yes, it’s true.

“First time I ever met your kind up close was in the service. I used to fly those C-54s, the transport planes? Wasn’t much older than you are now. One time a civvie comes to recruit a few of us to take part in some scheme, CIA wanted to overthrow Cuba—they didn’t tell us that then, but that’s what it was for. You ever hear of the Bay of Pigs?”

Cole has heard of it. He doesn’t know exactly what it was about and admits as much.

“It was a turd on a plate was what it was. And no reason for anybody to raise his hand and say ‘I’m in,’ but still some went. I know it is so because I watched them go. That amazed me. I had this buddy Angus, he volunteered. I didn’t want any part of some
secret mission
, hell I was only there because I didn’t know what else to do with myself. Got to ask him before he went off to his island training, I asked him, ‘Gus’—that’s what we called him,
Gus
, he hated his given name being a kind of beef—I says, ‘Gus, why volunteer for a mission you don’t have to do what might get you killed?’ And he says to me, he looks at me like I just fell from the moon. Like we never bunked together or spoke English from our own two mouths. He says, ‘Duty calls, Nate.’”

Crutchfield lifts his pistol and pokes the barrel into the dashboard, hard enough to leave small indentations in the plastic. It doesn’t look like the kind of mark that will fade, and Cole wonders what softball-playing churchgoers will make of it—wonders if they’ll even notice or wonder where it came from. Crutchfield feigns two shots out the windshield and sets the gun down again. The pipe swirls smoke throughout the cab; he seems hardly to pull any smoke from the pipe himself, enough only to keep it going, otherwise gesturing with it in the air, a priest swinging incense.

“Course I knew what
duty
was, and I understand
honor
and
duty
are supposed to be virtues. Especially family honor. But I never understood why anyone would die for it. Anytime I hear duty calling, that’s the time I need my ears checked, you get what I’m saying? You don’t ask to be born, not one of us do, and for years you don’t get one say in how your family is going about making you the person you are. Then by the time you
do
have a say—suddenly everbody’s got expectations on what your obligations are to them. Most people, they just go along. I don’t get it. Never have. Can you explain it?”

Cole tries to grasp what the man is asking, uncertain of what he is on to. More pressingly, he doesn’t know where they are—he wants to ask his own questions, and he wants to be told where to turn. He keeps driving, the van hurtling through the unknown dark. He asks, “You have family?”

“Like you, had a brother older than me. Beat the tar out of me any time I did what he didn’t want me to, which was about ever other day. My daddy, too. Never held it against either of them. Never felt obliged to stick my neck out for either of them neither.”

“You got kids?”

“Nope, never did. My first wife wanted some bad, too. She wanted a whole tribe, but nothing ever come of it. Doctors said I had lazy swimmers. She said she could believe that, no reason for my sperm to be any different from the rest of me. Took up with some other feller with pipes that worked and I don’t blame her, she was still a looker then, any boy would’ve been happy to have her shoes under his bed.”

He rolls down his window the rest of the way and slaps the tobacco out of his pipe against the door, then retches from deep in his chest and shoots something heavy onto the roadside. “Fair enough,” he says. Cole’s unsure if he’s referring to his wife or to what he spat out the window. Crutchfield tells him to slow on a long curve and take the next left; once he does, they drop beneath the trees again.

“I like this road,” Nate says. He tells him to turn off the headlights and Cole hesitates; Crutchfield says
Go on, turn’em off
and he does, slowing to a bicycle pace. The sound of the tires on the road become the single sound; the moonlight streaks down through the dark tree canopy in haphazard spears, luminous pillars of a cool gold that appear almost solid. “Now I will declare that is something to see,” Crutchfield murmurs. And it is: the shafts are formed in such contrast to the dark that they seem to strengthen the blackness; the trees seem nearly uniform, undifferentiated backdrop; the world does not seem the same place as it was moments before.

The van nearly stalls as they lift from the gully and Cole presses the pedal again; at the top the trees clear and he flips the lights back on, although here the moonlight is enough to get along without them.

“I suppose I should admire you coming this far into this but in all honesty—no offense meant—I take you for a fool,” Crutchfield says, tapping the pistol against one unlaced boot, contemplating that small movement. “I’ve no business telling a young man what he ought to do with his life so I won’t. But I knew your brother, and I will say one look told me you’re not much like him. You are not stupid enough not to
know this. Fleece fit the job. You, though,” and his head moves impossibly slow from side to side. He repeats the phrase: “You, though.”

The van jimmies and squeaks with the rough surface of the road, and the soccer balls bobble on the boxes behind them. “Don’t get me wrong,” Crutchfield says. “I’m not on your side here. Not against you, either. I owe you nothing, but I figure you don’t need to be stuck in your brother’s life any longer than you have to.”

“They call you the Truth because that’s all you speak. That’s what you said.”

“Now you’re talking.”

“Can you tell me where Fleece is?”

“No I cannot. And not because I won’t. Because I don’t know.”

Cole rubs at an ache in his jaw that stretches to his temples. He’s desperately thirsty as well, and wonders how it’s possible, since it feels like they’ve driven twice over all creation, not to have passed so much as a gas-mart. And why is it that whenever he feels he is about to receive an important revelation to why he’s here and what it is he’s supposed to do, he never does?

“This is what I’m getting at, this right here,” Crutchfield says. “I know some about you. I know your kin. You want one of them four-dollar words of virtue—retribution, atonement. But you don’t know what your brother did or if there’s anything to revenge him for. If Greuel put him down, then now what? There’s no more Lawrence Greuel. And even if he was still here, you have to agree that Fleece knew the risks and Greuel would’ve been justified in his judgment. That truth leaves you going through motions you think you owe your family, to Fleece, a man I’m sorry to tell you but you didn’t even know.” His face slackens and a melancholy gentleness softens his eyes. “You feel some obligation to him because you was kids together a long time ago. Some might hear that story and think you’re an honorable lad. I say it’s sadly misguided affairs.”

“I’ve never seen you before. How come you think you know me so well?”

“Would a man in my position let anyone on his property this time of night without knowing where they live and who’s their kin? Fleece never even talked about you, son.”

They are high above another steep valley lit as bright as dawn. As he drives Cole tries to fit such few details to his brother as he remembers him—the silver chain of his wallet, the unstyled hair always “a cut away from nice-looking,” as Lyda called it, the thick forearms and wrists Cole envied. Snakeskin boots dyed to the warm dun of sand. The way he said
you know it
whenever he agreed with you. How he looked as natural to the water in the lake when he swam that he could have been just another part of the same water. That was it; that was the key to Fleece: he was natural and expected as a fish in water, perfectly attuned to his environment, he had carried himself with that most natural and yet rarest of gifts—how to be in the world.

“Let me ask you this. Did you have any clue he was going to steal that run?”

“No I did not. Well in retrospect maybe so. It’s hard to think what you really knew before something went down you didn’t expect. Understand what I’m saying? I wasn’t looking for a problem, we’d played this gig a thousand times. But after Greuel and Noe got after me I thought well hell, I’m not surprised, of course that’s what Fleece did.”

“Why did you think that? What was so different?”

“For one, he come down with a ghost from my younger days, guy by name of Hardesty used to help with a still and had himself a bad morphine habit back then. I understand you know him.”

“Knew him. Not well.”

“Knew him, right. That is so. Funny—sometimes you cross paths with another person and you just know, know it in your gut without thinking, that this person is not going to make a ripe old age and that the manner of their ending will be ignoble.”

“Why did he bring Hardesty?”

“Said he couldn’t drive with his arm broke. He had a cast that covered his fingers, I didn’t inspect it or anything. Arms get broke.”

He didn’t have a broken arm when Cole saw him. And if Hardesty had any plans designed against Greuel or Noe he never suggested that when they were alone in his front room; a little paranoid, maybe, but as far as he could tell all the man wanted was to be left alone. Cole figures he must have that situation all wrong or else Hardesty would not
have come to the
ignoble end
—as Crutchfield described it—as he had. Unless all order and form has fled the world. Arley Noe and Mule were murderers but they didn’t go killing people for the fun of it.
The fun of it:
this phrase brings unsought images of Hardesty’s face in death, how within minutes after he died the color of his face transformed to a cold white closing in on green. The hole above his mustache, the crunch of the shovel against his teeth.

“There’s this other thing sticks in my head,” says Crutchfield. “Your brother shows up and gives me my money, and then he announces like it’s a decree that this reefer is no longer mine and so therefore I have nothing more to do with it. Sounded like a joke at the time, Hardesty got a big laugh out of it and he said it wasn’t Arley Noe’s neither. But I wonder maybe Fleece was making the situation clear to me. Like he wanted to ease my conscience after it went down, he didn’t want me beating myself up wondering if I’d taken part in something I didn’t want to take part in. Which would’ve been thoughtful of Fleece. I upheld my end of the deal, even Greuel admitted that.”

“If Fleece was going to steal from Greuel, why bother with the run at all? Didn’t he come down here with the cash to pay for it?”

“He did. I got paid.” Crutchfield’s heavy brow thickens, and he tucks his chin to his chest and frowns. He remains silent for a full minute or more. “Fleece was always square with me, we were almost friends—you don’t really have friends in this show, you’ve learned that by now. But Fleece, maybe he wanted to stay square, I can see him thinking it out that way. It was Greuel and Arley he wanted hurt. He doesn’t bring me that money, all three of us get hurt. I got paid.”

“I don’t know why Fleece would want to punish either of them.”

Crutchfield screws up his lips and nods as though Cole has unwittingly confirmed an assumption. Rather than answering immediately, the man digs around in the good pocket of his overalls, and it’s peculiar that he uses only his right hand for everything he needs to do and never lets go of the pistol in his left, as if he’s fused to this ancient gun, or physically reliant upon it in some way. When his fingers grasp what he’s looking for he holds the object before his face close in the dark, his screwed-up lips broadening into a knifelike grin.
Yes,
he says
to himself, and tosses the object onto the dash. It clinks against the windshield and tumbles about, and then rolls to a stop against an air vent.

“Go ahead,” Crutchfield tells him. “It might be nothing but that right there.”

Cole picks it up even as he already recognizes the thick gold nugget ring set with a constellation of tiny diamonds bedded into the shape of a horseshoe.

His face must show his bemusement, because when the Crutch looks at him now, he chuckles.

“I know,” the man says, “you can walk into any jeweler in Kentucky with a couple grand and come out with that ring or one close to it. It’s not the hunk of jewelry that matters, see, it’s what it signifies. Only three of us got to wear that particular design, with that specific number of diamonds, and it means doors will open and phones will pick up in five states from here to Minnesota. It means silence and safety from the fuckers who want to keep a man from what grows natural in God’s green earth. Fleece wanted one for his finger and I don’t blame him, it’s normal to want to move on up. When you work for Greuel and Arley, you’re never nothing but a mule. Unless you have that ring.”

Cole studies the band again. Headlights from an oncoming semi wash the van and flash the diamonds into dazzle. It’s pretty to look at, but Cole has never been much interested in precious stones. He would not think it possible that Fleece’s motivation could be so simple. There is nothing Cole can do with
that.