Ghosting (7 page)

For a while Cole had Fleece and Fleece, as much as he needed anyone, had his little half-brother. Childhood was fraught.

Cole’s earliest memory is of murder. A stale summer day with sky blanched white, the alder and cottonwoods wilted weary beneath the heat. Even the birds held still. Fleece would have been nine or ten then. They were playing in the shallows of the dingy lake. When they wanted to swim Lyda would come out with two steel buckets of bleach and walk up to her calves in the water, Fleece always begged to let him do it but she snatched at him,
No,
she barked,
you stay put till I tell you.
She slopped a wide berth in the water with the bleach and told them to wait. She told them to wait until she said
Yes,
it always took forever. When forever arrived Fleece and Cole dove with bellies smacking into the bathtub-warm water, and in play Fleece forced Cole down into the soft mud and held him there, in play he would always do whatever it would take to make his little brother cry. Cole’s cheeks tingled if he let the mud stick for long. His nostrils burned, the smell like the kitchen sink where Lyda washed their hair.

Somebody’s garage radio screeched
Jet—woohoohoo wooo-hoohoo wooo-hoohoo
—
Jet
and Fleece sang along with the guitar parts, not the lyrics. The boys were floating low on their backs so the greasy water framed their faces, listening within that strange pressure their voices made with their ears below the surface, both still sweating in the heat. From under the water the gunshot sounded like sharp thunder off a faraway storm. They sat up to neighbors hurrying toward the back of their home.

Lyda stood on the square of poured concrete outside their back door, what she called a patio though it was too small to hold anything but the charcoal grill. She held motionless, one fist on her hip and the other at her mouth, crooked at the waist with her chin tucked down. To little Cole she looked no more substantial than a small bird dead, all dried out and ready to be taken by the wind.

A crowd blocked the view. Cole rushed through the high dry grass and slid on his knees between the sprawled legs of the blond giant Morton Fifer, a neighbor he feared without specific reason but under whose legs he felt safe now, Fifer in his yellow wife-beater undershirt and blue sweats spotted with oil, cuffs tucked into heavy black boots left untied; the leather sagged and gray varicose cracks ran to the heel. He pressed Cole with the inside of his leg as a man might shoo a dog.
Git
. But Cole didn’t move and Fifer paid him no more attention.

The yard sloped sharply to a creek. At its bank two men formed a scene no one would enter. One, thick and stumpy with shoulders wide as Cole was tall, stood with his back to the crowd, peering past the end of a shotgun at the other, who stretched writhing on the ground with his hands at his throat. A wet noise escaped between his fingers, an unfamiliar noise, and his boot heels dug deep ruts into the mud as though he believed he could push himself away to safety. His mouth worked at every shape of rage and curse but not a word escaped; his dark eyes drew to the man who did this to him, standing silent, and the eyes admitted he did not believe a moment of it.

His boot leather looked like tender skin of a soft and pliant cognac; everyone in Lake Holloway knew who owned those boots. Bethel Skaggs took great care to show off his boots to anyone who would look, bragging on how he won them in a card game although Lyda told the boys he had paid a fortune she’d never see for them.

His murderer did not give the boots a glance. He reloaded with calm study, his brown curly hair thinned enough at the crown that the scalp shined, the short curls limp with wet. A straw hat lay upside-down behind him, black-banded and with a frayed hole in the brim open like a dead sparrow’s beak. And then the crowd turned to the shriek of a woman—a woman unknown to Cole—running up the creek.
What have you done my god what have you done?
she cried,
clutching the hem of her skirt above her knees, her other hand out for balance as she worked barefoot against the slick mud. The gunman did not respond. It was as though her arrival didn’t register with him. Instead he clacked the barrel shut again and raised the gun once more, and he did not seem to see her collapse over Bethel Skaggs, whose fingers dug into the earth, and he did not appear to hear her moans and sobs as she placed her palms over the gushing wound in that angry throat. It was more like he was waiting for her to notice
him,
her to come to
him
as he stood ready to fire his gun again.

She would have none of it.
You’ve done enough here,
she said.
You won’t touch this man again do you understand me?

The man kept his gun on them for a time, a long time, the barrel waving slightly with each breath. He shifted his weight and waited and nobody who was watching moved. And then after a time some thought or feeling must have clicked into place inside him. Maybe he saw the fancy boots had stopped moving, and had locked into the heel-scraped ruts, or that the bloody hands had stilled in the grass. The man lowered the gun and gazed over the scene of his creation. It seemed to Cole he was lightly swaying. He gave a brief nod, the kind of nod a man gives from his porch to passing strangers, to this woman still covering the dead man’s body with her own. The watching crowd held fast and spoke not a word.

Only the woman’s cries remained. If they registered in the man’s ears he did not show it. He picked up the hat and turned from the spectacle—never acknowledging the gathered crowd—and stepped carefully along the slick bank of the creek, going back the way he must have come, the gun yoked across his shoulders.

In the woods on the creek’s far side, birds began their meek day songs again. The gunman whistled back to them, out of sight now behind willows and ditchweed, and the sun pushed through the white wash of clouds and bathed again all the people huddled along the slope in ruthless heat.

Fleece appeared as the crowd disassembled. He closed in on the mourning woman, who seemed confused by what to do with Bethel’s hands: she kept repositioning them, placing them together on his belly, then at his sides, then again on his belly, the hands holding the
form of that final clutch made against his wound. Fleece placed his own small hand on her bare shoulder, Fleece not a full head taller than the woman on her knees. He patted her shoulder, tapping his palm against her freckled skin.

Morton Fifer made a sound like he expected to sneeze and then stifled it. His face tilted from above the massive forearms folded over one another, looking at Cole between his feet. From that angle his features puckered and mashed together to make him unrecognizable save for the straw-straight blond of his hair. He made a face as though ready to spit but thought better, swallowed it down as he turned, and nodded at Cole’s mother.

Good luck to you, Lyda,
he said, and with his going most of the others followed.

The woman remained atop the body beside the creek. Fleece remained beside her, still patting her shoulder with the flat of his palm as they stared at the mess made of Bethel’s throat, and Lyda still had not moved from where she had watched the entire event unfold. And little Cole did not understand. Who was this woman so full of sorrow? Why wasn’t Lyda in her place? His mother squatted with her skirt tucked between her thighs, elbows resting on bared knees, and fixed herself a cigarette she worked on and off in hotbox puffs before tossing it aside unfinished. Standing then, and without looking at either of her sons but at the kneeling woman, she ordered her boys inside the house, claiming there was no more good for them to see here.

This happened when he had been so young that often Cole wondered if he had dreamed it, or seen it on TV, or read it somewhere and then had the event sink deep enough into him to believe he owned it. But Fleece remembered the day as well. When Cole would ask their mother about it, she would tell him only that it was a bad story not worth the dwelling on. And besides, it did not matter, it had happened such a very long time ago.

Lyda sleeps in the bedroom next to his. They share a wall, their heads at rest in proximity. She has her philosophies, too. Lyda says people
arrive in the world with a unique part of it readied to welcome them into its limits and expectations—that is why we have to be ripped screaming from a mother’s womb.

She grew up poor when Pirtle Country was horse farms and lease lots seeded to sharecroppers for tobacco, alfalfa, hay, and corn, the county seat of Renfro Station nothing but a few developed blocks around the rail line, its city hall reconstructed from the burned remains of a Baptist church. Her father kept a dry goods store that had folded inexplicably during the boom years after the Second World War, when most businesses could not help but thrive. Not even boom years could bring fortune to a man as difficult as Ernst Newcome, Cole’s grandfather. He preferred horses to people, though no one could tell if the horses returned the feeling. He scraped by via sharp jockeyship and boarding the beasts on rented land, in flush times exercising a handful for wealthy farm owners who traveled too often to give them steady runouts. The way he told it to Lyda, he was doing right well again before she came along—screaming into her part of the world in 1951—though her mother told her this was not true, their kitchen had had the same dirt floor before Lyda was even thought of.

That dirt floor was the stuff of family legend. Lyda believed the fact of it led directly to Fleece getting born. Each morning she had to sweep the floor in one direction to her mother’s satisfaction, and then sweep it again the opposite direction after supper. If it became too dry and powdery she had to sweep the plumes of it out the door before dampening the floor with a rag. Ernst had himself a radio and then a TV he’d managed to find
on a fantastic deal
before ever setting a floor to Eudora’s kitchen. He worked less once they plugged in the TV. Not long after buying the thing they watched Kennedy’s funeral and Ernst was hooked—calling the assassination of that Catholic impostor one of the best moves the country had made since VE day. Lyda didn’t know what to say about Kennedy, and she didn’t know even if her father might be wrong. By then she’d learned to assume he was.

She had not been farther than Montreux and Cincinnati except for one foiled family trip to D.C. in October 1967—the city writhing, its avenues clogged with protesters intending to levitate the Pentagon. Her father gave up on finding a hotel and in a rage swung the station
wagon around on the beltway, crossing the grass divide as if it were county fairgrounds. They camped in freezing cold in the Shenandoah and shivered miserably as Ernst proclaimed his new conviction that, after the mess of the capital and the mindless inferno engulfing it, he no longer saw sense in ever leaving home.

Bethel Skaggs lifted into Lyda’s view as the worldly traveler who enjoyed the outright disapproval of her father. He had been everywhere, seen the globe, Bethel said, drinking from a pewter flask in dry Pirtle, twenty-five years old and talking up a teenage girl at a dance in a high school gym. Stationed for a year in Berlin during the missile crisis—he said—and got out the second they let him; raised blue-eye huskies in Nebraska until wolves cleared out his stock; painted barns in Georgia, and then took a chance on his fiddle skills, which allowed him to see every inch of this country to help him decide where he didn’t want to be. Her father suspected a man couldn’t play fiddle worth a damn without deceit and immoral leanings in him and that was enough to confirm Bethel as a person of interest for her.

She was sick of sweeping that kitchen floor twice a day and she was ready for a new pair of shoes. And the only thing anyone could agree on about Bethel Skaggs was that he certainly took the strain off a girl’s eyes.

He never did tell her why he came to Pirtle County or Lake Holloway; he had no people there. His littered the mountains in the eastern towns of Tomahawk, Inez, Watergap—places he swore he would never step foot in again. He had a solid job at the fertilizer plant and so she got the new shoes and moved into the small house in the woods behind the lake—where first thing she did on entering was stamp her heels on the kitchen’s linoleum floor tiles—and before their first anniversary Fleece slid screaming into his part of the world. And for two or three months Lyda thought her life exhausting but happy. And then Bethel announced he was leaving. Service rung up, he said, mentioning he still had commitments to the Army Reserves for the first time. In days he was gone, and no one except himself ever learned where he got up to; she knew only the man never served in Vietnam. She checked with the Army herself out of curiosity years after any of this mattered. Her father believed Bethel wanted away from a wife
and squalling baby, damned if it be boy or no, and who could blame a man for that,
I raised her myself
(she could recall Ernst speaking this to young Cole, eyes dancing beneath white brows long enough to braid). Bethel disappeared and sent no word, not a phone call or note, for well over five years. The next time he rounded the lake and walked back up the hill, he found little Cole Prather.