Ghosting (15 page)

He stands with care, using the table for balance, testing his weight. Arley Blue Note does him the service of turning to watch the video game before the kids, the one with the blond Axel and brunette Blaze fighting hand to hand through the streets of Blackpool—
the once peaceful city fallen into the hands of a secret criminal syndicate.
The storyline has always pleased him, though the one time he tried to share a father-son moment and play he ended up throwing the hand console against the TV screen hard enough to crack it. Now Greuel’s feet pulse with an alarm, not quite piercing pain; in fact he kind of likes this degree of pain, it has become familiar enough that he feels friendly with it, sometimes he presses his surgical wounds against the floor to sharpen the pain’s edge, doubly enjoying the relief when he eases off. He stares a moment at his fat hands splayed on the papers.

“Want your walker, Daddy?” Spunk asks without looking from the set, game controller raised high, thumb and fingers working it like a mini drum kit in an extended solo.

“Goddamn it no, I don’t want the goddamn walker,” Greuel breathes out. He eyes the girl beside his son, who glances at him with a face of sympathy he refuses to accept could be directed his way. “I’m no invalid yet.” He winks at her and she smiles, turns back to his son.

He takes the cane instead. It’s a quad cane with rubber stoppers but he has added a hand-carved ivory stallion’s head to give the object a glimpse at dignity. The walker doesn’t imply anything other than a desperate cry for mercy. He heads for the door with as much gimping speed as he can muster in hopes he can exit before the girl sees him hobbling. Vanity, he knows, yet vanity can keep a man going when all else has fled him.

Fortunately Blue Note moves slow by inclination. They ignore Mule’s offer of assistance—the three steps from the porch intimidate him but without word Arley clasps his arm, helps him down. Once on the ground Greuel’s fine, he’s moving, nothing to it, one foot before the other.

Full winter feels excellent after the stuffy heat of the house, the teenage hormones a greasy musk in the warmth of the fire. He welcomes the cold burn to his lungs. The sun shines a hard diamond up there, set in the sky’s blue swirl—a bright crisp winter day. Bric-a-brac and gewgaws glint and throb in the light and he likes how they crowd the yard; Greuel thinks himself a country boy at heart but he has never liked open spaces, he likes to fill them up. His gaze alights upon a dull and unfamiliar statue fallen across his path.

“The hell is this thing?” he asks. He pokes the figure with a corner foot of his cane. Some footless saint in sealed plaster missing a hand. “Where did this come from?” He stabs at it again but the thing feels frozen to the mud.

“I don’t keep your yard,” says Arley Noe.

“I wasn’t asking you. That was me
thinking
, me thinking my thoughts out loud.”

He inspects the saint’s muddy face, wonders which hallowed soul this one was supposed to be. At one time he had been interested in such information. Then one day it had occurred to him all the saints were dead. So why bother? Like the saints had existed to give names to places, and to holidays no one recognized anymore but were still listed on calendars. These new saints the Vatican keeps coming up with don’t count; there
are
no more saints or angels, he’s certain of that. He had helped to make it that way in his world.

They approach the paddock closest to the horse barn. Mule turns them out every morning now. Only five horses left, and only two of those are his own. The paint, Sadie Dame, had been his wife Clara’s. She’s an old mare he knows would not bring much more than lunch money at sale. His bay Arabian, Cosmo, however, has been stalwart for breeding and he’s only nine, Greuel could grab some good cash for him. He hates the idea of selling Cosmo even if he knows he will never get up to ride him again. It pleases him still to watch the horse in the next paddock, all to himself, sniffing clover and shaking out his mane.

To gaze at a powerful horse in his glory stirs dreamy and romantic notions. Greuel looks away. Some forty yards off, three turkey vultures line a fence and he wishes for his rifle, from here he could drop them like it’s a carny game. One of the birds lurches side to side, lifting a
pendulous claw and flexing its talons. Then the one beside it does the same. Ridiculous creatures, bulbous and clumsy and ugly with their wizened withered faces, a blight on the planet despite their usefulness.

And damn if I don’t look just the same, he thinks.

“I am a man with burdens, Arl. It wears me out, carrying them.”

What faint sound escapes from Noe Greuel takes for empathic affirmation.

“Can I trust you in this?”

“Thirty-four years and you still ask me that?”

Greuel chuckles. His own laugh makes him uneasy, he doesn’t know the sounds from his own body anymore, he doesn’t recognize a one of them.

“Thirty-six almost, truth be told. Which gets me wondering why you got money and I don’t. You’ve ripped me off before—nothing outrageous, but still. How come?”

He speaks without facing his accomplice, his supposed right-hand man, the second-in-command to the big hillbilly gangster
Mistah Greuel,
but that was all for rumor, they’ve been partners for decades. Half of Greuel’s killings would never have worked out if it not for the blue-skin from Hindman, Arley Blue Note so indifferent to stress and nerves as to seem Vulcan, a
Star Trek
alien arrived to exploit the yokel race. The vultures sit absolute and still upon the top plank of the far fence, they seem to have become one with the boards. Do they sleep like that, he wonders.

“I don’t buy into horses, for one,” Arley Noe says. “Leave my bet at the booth. The other stuff”—he lifts and turns out his hand as though throwing feed to pigs—“that was a long time ago, never enough to mention. Surprised you’d mention it now.”

It’s true Greuel has spent a fortune on horses in his lifetime—on shares with trainers, on feed, veterinary care, farrier fees, delivery fees, stakes fees. And it has been a thrill to lose it all. Arley Noe isn’t hard-boot horse people; you couldn’t expect him to understand. But that isn’t what Greuel is asking.

“’Cause
now
is what I’m talking about. Fleece in the wind with Crutchfield’s load and me with nothing to sell. I got this little voice in my head, and this voice, it keeps pointing out you’re not around so
much. Maybe you’re not around due to me being sick and so you have to pull for two. But that aint it. You got shit to move.”

“I keep busy. As any man has a right to. You want me to apologize for that?”

Greuel leans his weight against the fence and sighs with the relief off his legs. Sadie Dame stands not ten feet away, belly sagging, eyeing the two men. Arley Noe touches nothing, he keeps his hands in his pockets, eyes on the mud caking his expensive shoes. He hates everything about a farm; this was one of the reasons Greuel wanted to walk with him.

“I am tired and unwell and I’m not accusing you of anything. I don’t get why our boy would steal so much from me, that’s all. After everything we done for him. He was like a son to me. Really, Blue Note, he was.”

“Not so much that you’d put him in your will though, huh.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Word’s out you’re sick. Ever-body’s trying to figure what’ll change after, how they going to take care of themselves.”

“You’ll take everything of mine once I’m gone, won’t you.”

Noe makes an ugly pop in his throat, an unconscious habit (Greuel believes) that has annoyed Greuel since two hours after they first met. Like he’s part turkey vulture himself, getting ready to throw up on his food, preparing himself a nasty feast.

“I don’t plan to fall out of business. Don’t plan on getting so sick I’ll die, neither.”

Greuel snorts at that. Like the great misfortune that has befallen him is his own fault, a lifetime of fantastic appetites returned to wreak havoc on this body that had pursued all that pleased him. And maybe it is. So what. Or just maybe, if one were to step back and see the big picture, one could say Lawrence Greuel is simply unlucky.

“I only ask you keep my boy on. He’s no good for anything else.”

“He’s no good at what we do, either,” Noe says. Greuel smiles tightly at the truth of this. “Creed will keep an eye on him. He’ll get something.”

Already Greuel has moved the farm into his son’s name; all two hundred and forty acres are his though the boy doesn’t know it and
he shudders to think what Spunk will make of the property over the years, yet this is the best Greuel can do for his only child. Lifelong, his goal has been to die comfortably, in wealth, while owing much to the IRS, and in that he appears to have succeeded. But there’s not a lot of cash for his son after Greuel is gone, and Noe has the line on a wonder of a land deal, the kind of deal it is beyond Greuel’s nature to resist—Arley has always had a wet finger raised to the air not only for making money, but for tweaking the noses of the world’s squares in the process. Such impudent gall inspires Greuel’s admiration.

He tells Noe to sell off his shares in the few racehorses he still holds an interest in; Greuel himself will sell Cosmo and Sadie Dame (some young girl can learn to ride on her, he thinks) and his Cadillac; he will agree to the terms of Arley’s personal loan and sign off on that.

“Forgive me invoking here our thirty-plus years as partners and one might even say friendship,” Greuel says. “This is serious shit I’m talking. You will not fuck me on this, Arley. You will not, all right?”

Noe raises one foot and scrapes the mud off his shoe against the bottom rail of the paddock fence, maintaining a delicate balance with his hands still plunged deep into his trouser pockets.

“Not so it’ll hurt, I’d say.”

Greuel seeks his face to find him smiling, the blue bruise of his skin darkening in the folds.
Get out of here,
Greuel dismisses him, and Arley bows slightly, mockingly, his uncommon laugh beating out in chippy breaths, low and quiet. Always has been business with that guy, thirty-six years and still Greuel knows any question between them will be decided by the bottom line.

He doesn’t watch Arley step off or fire up his own Caddy. Instead, Greuel rests his chin on the pillow of his hand against the fence. Two of the turkey vultures remain out there as still as before. Hadn’t there been three? He studies the sky, squinting against the sharp winter light, and spots half a dozen in the air above the far fields, the birds circling over something there, something weak and dying or, for all Greuel knows, some poor beast already dead.

Fleece had told him he got along with the caretaker just fine. He said the key was to accept the man was unhinged. As long as you understood Hardesty was capable of saying or doing whatever came to him, and Hardesty understood you did as well, then you had no problem. Like a scrap with a wild dog—
don’t let him feel you’re afraid or it’s going to hurt.

Full winter these days, sunlight angled at the eyes. He guides the truck between withered corn stalks at either side, objects cast in hard outline, shadows engraved as by a scriber. He parks in full view of the caretaker’s cottage and then picks his way over scrims of ice, walking into plumes of his own breath, dragging his feet on the stones so that the man can note his coming. The ice and remnant snow brighten the world into a balloon-headed clarity, all nature seemingly polished to the finest detail by some great and unseen hand.

Howls razor high over a wind heard but unfelt on the ground. How do the dogs survive in that building without Fleece to feed them? His brother claimed to have named them all. Have they turned on one another, or is the caretaker feeding them? It’s a question to ask Hardesty, whose own dog launches into pitched yelps as Cole nears the door, her claws rasping frantic below two rows of small paned glass.

He stops short with his hand about to knock the frame of a flimsy screen, surprised by the impassive face gazing through the highest of the tiered windows. Its wide and prominent bones look carved of
driftwood, the eyes set deep beneath a heavy brow being near all the face he can make out within the mess of burled beard and coppery hair. The dog’s scratching turns more insistent against the door, intense in bursts as its throat explores an entire range of hullabaloo alarm.

“I need to talk to you,” Cole says.

At his voice the dog vaults into overdrive and sounds about to tear clear through the wood and screen and be at him. The face, however, does not move—the eyes remain open and unblinking long enough for Cole to wonder if it is in fact a live man he is looking at after all.

He tries again. He explains that he’s brother to Fleece Skaggs and wants nothing here but to scare his brother up. And yet still the caretaker remains impassive and unreadable, he doesn’t even allow for the slightest narrowing of curious eyes. Cole shuts up and waits, uncertain of the next step. He returns the man’s stare. Eventually the absurdity of the scene overcomes him, two men staring at one another while a dog yaps wild at their feet. He tosses his hands into the air, suddenly furious, and starts around the corner of the house to see, in hard daylight, what he assumes remains hidden behind the bulk of the empty seminary.

On the walk he spots a small gray stone encased in white ice and with his boot sends it skidding. From deep in the building the dogs clamor to new heights of outrage and he wonders if they know a way out, if he should he worry. They harrow the high broken windows as if packed into a single room up there beneath the gleaming new transformer. Passing the cottage, he hears the suction of plastic against frame as the back door opens. When he turns, the weasel-bodied hound is almost on him, leaping in long strides across the slush, clumped bola balls of saliva spinning from its mouth. Just as Cole braces for the attack the dog halts, stands tall on her hind legs, and wails a single long note of indignation.