Ghosting (16 page)

“Shut it Bone, you coward, I see him,” the caretaker says, shrugging on a canvas jacket torn at the shoulder, flannel plaid winking from underneath.

Bone spins circles and rises again on her hind legs, the soft black of her muzzle tightening like a human about to whistle, and she bays long and righteously again. But she doesn’t creep any closer; her tail
flings side to side and her ears are up. As the caretaker nears he gives the hound a stamping kick to her hindquarters, sending her into a tailspin that shushes her howling instantly.

“What am I supposed to do with you now?”

He is a large and heavy man, his hair and beard long overgrown and drastically unkempt. His eyes shine very blue, swaddled in a field of pink that suggests a history of difficulties past routine understanding, a history seconded by a nose well-formed and broad that could be called handsome save for the web of fine violet lines that run his cheeks from the russet undergrowth—a beard so dense it could be inhabited—and the flared nostrils wide enough to pocket marbles. The size of the man seems to intensify the act of breathing, which he does through his mouth, gliding on a faint wheeze after an offhand, unusually productive cough.

“Like what I said, we need to talk.”

“A man makes an oath, forsakes the world and all it offers, and damned if the world don’t just come right in after with its hat and ass a-floppin.”

He doesn’t appear to be addressing Cole—his eyes jump from the seminary to the dog and to somewhere near Cole’s chest, and then squint off into the sky.

“I wanted to get a look at that car you got back here. What’s left of it.”

The caretaker makes no signal that suggests he is listening. “Used to be we never got much even in the way of mail. Nowadays anyone with a notion grants himself a visitor pass. Me and Bone, whole reason we come here’s to get away from people, used to be nobody but punk kids at night, like
you
and your kind snooping around. . . .”

His voice drifts off as though he lost his train of thought as his eyes settle on Cole. And then the caretaker’s flat expression claims finality, and maybe threat, and he’s a tall one, at least six-foot-four and an easy 125 pounds over Cole as well. Cole holds his gaze until the caretaker seems taken by another thought, squinting up to where the dogs inside the seminary continue to bark and holler.

“I’m not looking for trouble. You know my brother. Nobody knows where he is. That’s his car.”

He rounds the building without waiting for a response, and there it is: the sooty husk half-draped by the seminary’s shadow. It’s easy to identify as a Nova, but the car has lost all color save for a chrome-blue arc flaking over the rear fender. The rest is a spectrum of oily grays that fracture along ornate chemical designs. He cannot tell if the car is raked like Fleece’s, or if this car once sported his beautiful mag wheels; even the tires have melted into clotted mounds. The trunk gapes at them as if the car itself is in shock over what’s become of it.

“You don’t look much a Skaggs to me,” the caretaker says.

“You know what a Skaggs looks like, do you?”

“Might know a bit about those Pirtle County Skaggs, yeah, you could say.”

Cole inspects the open trunk with hands clasped behind his back and is hit by a deeply offensive mephitic odor, strong enough that he turns away with eyes burning. He covers his nose and mouth with the collar of his sweatshirt and bends to it again, examining the interior as objectively as he can think to, but the trunk has no secrets to declare. He’s not even sure what exactly
is
in there—the molding appears to have softened like putty, and it surprises him when he ventures a touch to find it’s cold and firm. A tire iron lies angled behind the signal light, carbonized to oyster shell.

“It’s a long story. I’m not all Skaggs,” Cole says, and explains all.

“Me and Fleece, we have the same mother.”

“Fleece Skaggs never said word one to me about a little brother. How about that.”

The cab stinks worse than the trunk, a reek like bacon left too long on the burner and stewed with some synthetic chemical compound—still, after two-plus months exposed to the elements. Breaches in the floorboard reveal soft earth gone to hard clay. He pulls back to blink away tears stinging from the interior’s smell, and takes in a great gulp of cleaner air.

“Listen man, he’s my brother and he’s gone. You know him, right? Do I look like the cops?”

He continues to inspect the Nova though he understands he would have to be like the FBI with a full investigative team of forensic scientists to glean anything from this scalded shell.

“Well he aint in this car, I can tell you that much. Boy covers himself pretty well.”

“Covers himself?”

“He’s your brother and honest truth, you don’t know where he’s at, do you?” Hardesty says, and hucks up a laugh from deep in his chest. His eyes turn merry and his bottom lip lifts over the top to suck in the copper strands of the mustache. “Never told me nothing about no brother, now aint that the devil. What I liked about Fleece, he didn’t eat up the air, told you what you needed to know and let you keep your ears on. Get away from that, Bone.”

The hound had been sniffing at the open passenger door but jumps at the sound of her name; her paws toss the surrounding calx into tiny clouds about Cole’s feet. Atop the dash parts of the windshield have collapsed and congealed into tobacco-spit pools. The glove compartment hangs open but whatever papers Fleece kept there are part of the weather now.

“There’s nothing for you in that car. I done looked it over and there’s nothing to do but let the raccoons move in.”

“It’s Fleece’s Nova, isn’t it.”

“Makes you sore to look at that bit of spent charcoal and think how that thing could just shit and get.”

“You say he took off. You don’t think something bad got to him?”

Hardesty tilts his head to one side and gives a look much like a dog spoken to, that look of curious speculation like the dog can almost understand what’s being said to it. He breaks the image by turning his mouth into a thoughtful frown. “I didn’t say. He could’ve took off like you said and then had something bad happen. I mean, as an example of concerns you might not be entertaining already. Bad shit you don’t see coming happens all the time. Hard to figure he’d torch that jewel after the money he sunk into her.” He pulls one hand from deep in a coat pocket and rubs the crown of his head, dipping his chin to do so and exposing the bald area there as smooth-bordered as a tonsure, the pink skin flecked with light earthy spots. “But naw, I’m playing on your worries. Seems he was leaving, to me. This here being me thinking. Giving out gifts and all, cleaning up his place upstairs.”

“Gifts?”

The throaty laugh erupts again, roupy and kind of sick.

“You and your brother aint all that close.”

Above them the seminary dogs have stopped barking. A heavy thump sounds against a boarded window and Cole can almost see it, the dog’s front paws smacking the barrier, frustrated to get out, to see. Hardesty speaks to the sky again: “Can’t say I care for his leaving them beasts behind. That does surprise me, Fleece Skaggs should’ve been man above that. Leaving them to me, he knows what I’ll have to do before they cut my rope.”

“What gifts you talking about, Mister Hardesty?”

The caretaker’s eyes snap narrow and intent to Cole’s face.

“I aint much for sharing.”

Cole returns to the car again. He can feel the man inspecting him, considering some point Cole cannot fathom, turning it over in the rusty pinwheels of his mind—pinwheels reflected in the eyes Cole returns to, eyes he notes now are of two distinct colors: the left a pale, washed-out blue, the right a deep chestnut. He would have sworn the moment before both eyes had been blue. Yet in the steep angle of sun the chestnut iris beams flecks of yet other colors: luminous gold streaks and greenish spatter.

“Aw hell. You’re cool, right? Little brother to Fleece Skaggs? Come on.”

He whistles out the corners of his mouth and the hound is on her feet and past them both, leading the way to the back door of the small outbuilding the two call home. In the cramped kitchen Hardesty mumbles that he has already pardoned the mess so he hopes Cole will as well—the counters browned with coffee and splotches of dried food, cabinets splatched with the tracks of spills; a junkyard tower of crusty dishes tilts in the sink. Magazines, newspapers, books cover every surface. They cover the front room as well; the TV sags on its particleboard stand with the extra weight and the room stinks of musty paper. Hardesty checks the fields through the windows, scans left and right up the drive and the frozen corn at either side. Cole looks over the magazine covers:
Popular Mechanics, Nature, National Geographic,
most dated twenty years or more before.

“You read a lot,” he tells the wide back bent deeply inside a stand-alone
closet, the canvas jacket large enough to be a tent for a solitary camper. Inside the closet magazines tumble and Hardesty curses the mother of god. He digs around in crinkling plastic. With a long groan and then tight grunt of final effort, Hardesty pulls back and the magazines inside shift like tectonic plates, a loud crash there sending Bone tuck-tailed scurrying briefly back to the kitchen.

Instantly Cole recognizes the heavy, sweet-as-syrup odor that overtakes the musty paper.

“I read to impress the girls,” Hardesty says, nodding at the spread of cover photos on the coffee table:
Leg Fetish, Juggs, Cheri.
“Let me be the one to tell you, good women can’t refuse a learnéd man.”

He holds up, straight-armed with the same sense of triumph as a warrior hoisting the enemy’s head, a weighted and bulbous black trash bag that twists and sheds fine green dust. “Your brother’s generosity. Got any zig-zags on you?”

Cole does not. He left his one-hitter in the door pocket of his truck, but he doesn’t mention this out of a weird telling sense that if he were to leave the house then Hardesty would make it difficult for him to come back in. The big man shrugs, rips a page of old newspaper, and kicks himself some room at the table. The reefer-stink blossoms so sweet and heavy that Cole’s head swims with it.

“When did this happen? Him giving you the bag I mean.”

“Couple months ago. What are we now, January? Would’ve been November then.”

“So he did make with Greuel’s run.”

Hardesty lifts his shoulders, turns down the corners of his mouth theatrically, and holds the pose. A moment later he sighs that anything’s possible, either one of them could keel over and die in the next minute for all he knows. “I don’t make claims. If this here was Mister Greuel’s property it wouldn’t make sense for me to have it. So it aint his property then, is it.”

Hardesty’s chapped hands and brute fingers are the opposite of nimble yet he knows what he’s doing. Before long he presents Cole with an expertly-wound spliff the size of a rich man’s cigar. They get it going and pass it back and forth, the smoke a ruminative ghost silent between them. Soon the caretaker turns talkative.

“The shit is fancy good, isn’t it,” he says, and Cole feels the intense and familiar waves roll through his skull and down his neck and over his shoulders, seeping slowly the length of his spine; briefly he envisions a precise image of his nervous system singing with the drug before the rest of his body brightens into a happy and welcome softness. He nods, slowly, and it is all he feels capable of doing, and the doing seems to require an extraordinary amount of time.

“Don’t know what to do with it all, to be honest,” Hardesty continues. “Thoughtful of Fleece of course, but it’s too much for one man alone. Keep all this I’ll end up crazier than I is already. Just the other night had me talking to gnomes and shit. Poor Bone there could read my mind. She hasn’t been right since.”

“Fleece drops a trash bag on you—what is that, six, seven pounds? Can I?” Cole asks, indicating the bag even as Hardesty nods him on. “That’s got to be fifteen, twenty thousand dollars there and I mean if you don’t even bother with shake. What did he say?”

“Said ‘Enjoy, brother, and thanks.’ He owed me a few favors. Goes to show you never can suspect another man’s generosity. He always talked about Carolina’s outer banks, you know. Said one day he’d decide eight hours driving was too long to get him to the beach. Two tokes of this shit and I knew I did not want to advertise what he give me. But like I said, it’s too much for one man alone.”

Cole considers the wildfire pace of the dry newspaper’s burning. He
knows
this pot; he knows you only get this sitting with Mister Greuel in his own house. And then it occurs to him that no, this stuff is stronger than he’s ever had: his stomach lurches on queasy tides, and bright streaks of light race across his eyes. “You said he cleaned out his rooms upstairs?” His voice seems to emanate from the wall opposite.

“I did say. You’ve been up there, I’m sure. They’re empty, aint they? I didn’t do it.” Hardesty indicates the bag again with his head. “Hell I know what that’s worth. But I can’t move reefer, wouldn’t know where to go. Can’t even figure how to get it out of the house with me when I leave.”

“You’re going to leave?” Cole asks.

“Boy you are nothing like your brother at all, are you? Don’t listen well. They told me not two days ago. Greuel’s blue man shows up with
a couple of suits, they’ve got the deed in hand and they’re walking around pointing to this and that, we’ll build here, the sewer line must run there.... They stepped around that Nova like it was nothing but a tree and didn’t blink an eye. My services here ‘are no longer warranted,’ as they say.”

“What’s Greuel and Arley Noe want with the St. Jerome Seminary?”

“Fixing to sell it again, I gather. I hear Greuel’s too sick to do much else with it.”

For once Cole wishes not to be as stoned as he finds himself currently. It’s some powerful weed and he cannot think clearly with it in him; it makes him want to close his eyes, ease his head against the wall (the surface there looks welcome, and pliant); the room feels too warm. A swipe of his hand across his forehead brings back a palmful of sweat, and his heart beats in his temples. “How do you know these guys,” he asks.