Ghosting (9 page)

Lyda doesn’t answer. She reaches forward, plucks dry petals from the hydrangea and grinds them into confetti falling brightly from her fingers.

“Make what right, Lyda? Tell me, ’cause I don’t know.”

“That man don’t own us. He might act like he does but he owes me, he owes me and he knows it.”

Cole watches the show and refuses to be pulled in. His mother grinds her teeth and wires of muscle braid and weave along her jaw; she clamps shut her eyes, snaps them open, says in a rawboned, hard pioneer-type voice: “I don’t get out like I used to but I still hear what goes on out there—”

“Maybe I should be asking you the questions. You know something I don’t, tell me. All I know’s Fleece aint around. That’s no different from life as I know it. What do you want me to do?”

“You shouldn’t need me to tell you. You’re all grown up. You’ll do right.”

She makes a display of relenting. She repeats to the grass edging the walk that she thought she raised her boys to know better. She pulls more dry petals from the hydrangea, grinding them in her fingers and catching the crumbs in her palm and staring at the pile as though a fortune could be divined there.

“That boy just is as he does,” Cole says, and mother and son share nostalgic smiles at the line, a family saying coined by Lyda one night telling police at the door how sorry she was for what Fleece had done, twelve years old, brought home for egging the cop’s car miles away.
I’m trying to raise him officer but the boy just is as he does,
she had said.

“You see your brother you tell him I want to talk to him. He don’t just take off on me like that.”

From over one shoulder he tells her he will though he doesn’t expect gossip from Spackler’s horses, and this gets a laugh from Lyda. Sometimes—when he was much younger and when his mother had more energy and clarity—they used to take long walks through the woods, not quite losing themselves in its hidden cavities and hollows, occasionally happening upon a secluded sward of grass that appeared to have no reason to be empty of trees. They would circle Lake Holloway
and his mother might step out of her shoes and roll up her cuffs to tramp into the sheltered corners overgrown with rushes and shush the croaking psalms chanted by frogs, where she might laugh like a woman without a care, striking out at the water’s surface with an elegantly curved foot, the ruby polish fresh on her nails. Once she had been a woman renowned for dancing on rooftops. So Cole had heard.

He leaves her sitting on the two short steps to the little house, where dark green moss sprouts beneath curling shingles and the brick needs tuck-pointing in many places. She looks frail, barefoot in Fleece’s old high-school football jersey and baggy flannel pajama pants, a figure he feels sorry for as much as she enrages him—even, he would admit, disgusts him at times and on a variety of levels along some murky inner scale. He backs out the narrow gravel drive. His compassion turns to mild surprise as he sees too the figure of a man in the doorway behind her, Lyda half-turned and smiling as she mouths words, her posture suddenly charged, different, astounding Cole with her ability to still be charming and flirtatious as required.

After the horses he hits Montreux. The city isn’t forty minutes away, and even though the counties are connected by interstate, rail, and road, the drive from Lake Holloway feels like a passage from one distinct time to another. Passing through the lake again his small truck thumps over a road that’s more pothole than pavement, passing swampy lawns, rust-streaked muscle cars on concrete blocks, an engine block that has dangled from its tree chain at least three weeks, houses walled in tar paper and concrete and asphalt shingles. A mile along 29 and a strip of shops appears on the right. He never has been able to figure the original purpose of the place, a series of small one-story structures connected in a line, each slightly taller than the next until the corner building, which is two stories. Like a square-moduled retractable telescope fully extended. The two-story used to be a garage and motor oil still stains the lot about it; now a man called Boonie Ed keeps a handful of jalopies there for sale. The other storefronts are inhabited on and off—nail salons and short-loan offices—but otherwise
house “For Lease” signs with the name and phone number of the father of a kid Cole knew in grade school. A miscellany of shotgun churches with diverse long names bursts from the woody roadsides at uneven intervals. Then he hits the modern era of gas marts and fast-food hovels with NOW FRYING neon signs, and a small strip of upscale boutiques along Main Street in Renfro, where the rails still divide the road.

Speed up the rising onramp and the landscape turns to Interstate Anyplace USA, Southeast version. Traffic increases the closer he gets to the city and the FM classic rock radio stations come in clearer and soon he’s passing identical suburban plans and waterfront and then the houses grow closer and begin to betray their ages. Cole enters downtown Montreux only as necessary—he doesn’t know the layout well, and the city center creeps him out a little because he knows, by his uncle, his father died here.

The Spackler horses had been stubborn and slow and kind of mean when he turned them out and he’s late pulling in. Everyone’s standing by their trucks, eyeing him as they finish cigarettes.

“Young men don’t care for Saturday work, do they?”

Orval’s the oldest on the crew, older than Ron-Ron and ever ready to sass. His fine white hair is trimmed so short that his five-day beard wanders into it seamlessly, a soft white moss taking over his skull.

“Nobody cares for Saturday work,” says his skinny companion, CD Cooter. “We like Saturday pay, though, aint that right Cole?”

“Truth be told, I don’t even care for the pay that much,” Cole smiling at the banter, relieved they haven’t started the usual ride of him being the boss’s nephew. He’s the youngest of the regulars by almost half and his lack of skill outside of welding is evident and happily acknowledged. He wouldn’t be employed here if not for his status as family relation and though Orval in particular likes to tease him for that Cole can tell he doesn’t hold it against him, Orval himself once admitting a man can’t be held liable for the family he’s born to.

He asks to bum a smoke but the old man shakes his head and starts in. “Boss is already in and we don’t need him to start handling that shit himself”—the joke being that his uncle has lost his touch with carpentry, better with the clipboard these days.

It’s a job and Cole doesn’t really care that it’s Saturday, though he looks forward to the time when he will be welding exclusively and a master at it, unionized and career-bound. Ron-Ron finds him things to weld and farms Cole out for MIG welding when he can, but they have finished all opportunities here, an old firehouse they’ve renovated into a duplex. Mostly he’s been carrying greenboard and plasterboard and hauling debris. His uncle was there then not there, zipping off in his light Japanese truck—another instance of hilarity to the crew—from this job to another and then home again, a boss content to tour sites with sleeves rolled up and hands on hips as he argues sports and politics with radio hosts on the small transistor dangling from his belt. He rarely pays much attention to Cole onsite and today’s no different, Cole ducking his boss for fear his cousin Sheldon (Ron-Ron’s son) had complained about money Cole owes. But his uncle says nothing about it, and he imagines Sheldon, supposedly a college student, doesn’t want his father asking where he found three hundred dollars to lend toward Cole’s scuba training. Cole needs the license to meet his goal of attending a commercial diving school. Swimming with fins is the one thing he’s found where his locked knee is a help and not a hindrance. He foresees a future on oceans he’s never yet seen, living on rigs and welding beneath the waters.

After the second time Ron-Ron checks in and escapes, the men take a break. It’s a bright late autumn day and Cole sidles around the back of the building with CD—a slide guitarist and, in his deep night hours, self-styled composer of advertising jingles who would never admit he is bound forever to a career as laborer—to share a spliff. They burn one down while sharing little in speech, Cooter grunting and humming in appreciation of the herb, both lost in their heads and staring at the high brick wall of the cemetery that backs against the firehouse, and at the clacking bamboo stalks that crane over the edge as though to peer at them.

“You don’t need me to tell you,” CD holds up the jay in one hand and points to it with the other like he’s shilling in some commercial, “but this shit here is money if you want it. You get this off your brother? Wait, no. What am I thinking, man.”

Cole shuffles his feet, smiles. CD’s eyes are bloated into pillows like a soft change purse slit down the middle.

“I used to get my stuff off him all the time back in the day,” he says. “Sorry he aint around no more. Bet you’re sick of hearing people telling you that.”

“Only thing I’m sick of is people asking if I know where he’s off to. I don’t.”

“‘Where he’s off to?’” CD pinches two keys together to clamp the roach, head shaking and lips at work on silent words.

“What.”

“What nothing. But I mean where’re you seeing the question here? He tried to rob Mister Greuel is what I hear. Don’t tell me I’m thinking different from what everybody else’s saying already.”

Above them, the bamboo stalks clack and shush in a breeze they cannot feel in the narrow space between the walls. The movement is sudden enough that Cole’s eyes dart up to see if some creature has landed there, something wild come to inspect them, but there’s nothing but greenery. “People talk just to talk,” Cole says.

“This is true. Suit yourself, little man. I wouldn’t want that ton of shit on my shoulders, neither. Must be awful on your momma, though.”

A shoe scuffs pavement around the corner. Cooter pops the smoldering roach into his mouth and winces as he swallows, both of them turning to see Orval beaming, snapping his suspenders over his great belly as he berates CD as a slacker not worth half the bad pay he gets. “Man I thought I’d gone crazy and was seeing things but I just checked with the measure and CD, you got crown molding set where the chair rail’s supposed to be, you useless teahead.”

“Nah, that can
not
be the case,” CD says, grabbing the tape measure Orval holds out. “Bull-ee-she
-ite,
” he says again, backing away to Orval’s laughs with head nodding with emphasis.

“Baby, I shit you not. You may commence taking that crap down, I aint cutting again till the room’s ready.”

“Who made you straw boss?”

“Who told you that you’re a carpenter?”

His merry eyes follow CD as he approaches, waiting for the man’s eyes to meet his own, but Cooter thumps him shoulder to shoulder to knock him out of his way, lips working in disbelief. It’s not Cole’s fault; he hands up what CD asks for. He keeps still, listening to the breezy brattle in the bamboo, like the tick of an irregular clock.

“Don’t listen to that yahoo,” Orval says. “He’s just pissed to be knocked back down to quarry buys without your bro around.”

“How’s an old guy like you know about the quarry?”

He picks two smokes from his pack and offers one, lighting it for him. They lean against opposite walls, sharing the same view of red brick not three feet before their faces. “Well James Cole, I guess when I fell off the truck yesterday my people were already talking about it.”

“You think CD’s speaking true?”

“I don’t believe CD himself knows he’s speaking truth or not half the time. I’ve made it this long believing only half of what I see and none of what I hear. Greuel and Arley aint the worst. One time I was so deep into Arley on bad bets, I thought for certain my days were few. But those boys think. They know you can’t pay money back from Hades.”

“Yeah, well. My brother’s in a different business.”

“I know your brother’s business and I’ll tell you it don’t matter, all business is money business. You go your own way, James Cole. The bone truth is Fleece Skaggs took off or he’s under the river. Either way it’s not on you. Remember that.”