Ghosting (17 page)

Hardesty’s face is in his beard but his eyes look to be scanning the dirty webs drifting high in the ceiling’s corners. “You ever tear into an old haystack? Possums, coons, one time for real I opened up on a timber rattler really unhappy to lose his home. You never can know what you’ll find when you go in not even imagining what you should be ready for.”

Did he not ask this man a question? What was he talking about only a few seconds before? Cole feels like a wanderer on the edge of somebody else’s story, a story that does not include him and may have already passed by. The story he wants is his brother’s; his brother’s story
has
to include him. And this caretaker sits there with his eyes, one pale and the other that queer autumn gold, like some mystic in a creepy fairy tale, speaking riddles.

“Me and Bone, we’ll find something farther from the crowd. Been talking about doing that for a while. It’s getting hard to find someplace not run over by people trying to get away from other people. Pirtle’s come to be—man, I can get nostalgic for five years ago. I remember when the whole county didn’t have a single street light and I’m not that old. Used to be deer all around the cemetery walking out the Possler woods. Now it’s no deer and lots of suits.”

As though to press the point there comes the distant hammering of a neighbor on a rooftop. Cole stands and stretches languorously. It feels good to move his muscles, to feel his body. The room briefly wobbles and then rights itself, a subtle echo pulling at his eyes. He shuts them to stop the sensation. When he opens them again the caretaker appears to be sculpted into place.

“I could probably move some of the weed for you. I know some people.”

“Don’t take it personal if I want to think on that.”

He says he won’t and means it, it’s hard to be offended by the man who just got him this high. He holds out his hand but Hardesty does not appear to notice. The dog gets animated again with her tail wagging, her breaths rushing faster and harder over a squeaking whine as she lopes toward the front door. Hardesty appears to have switched off—his mismatched eyes have locked in space, he sits on his knees with lips parted and jowls slack, one hand splayed flat on a girlie mag. As though in meditation, or in midst of a coronary. As Cole begins to pull back his hand, however, the caretaker’s snaps up and their fingers touch.

“You okay?” Cole asks.

“I have more in my mind than you will ever fathom. Options, opportunities missed and to come. Women and dogs. The information trapped in these walls”—he gestures at the papers and books, then taps his skull with two fingers—“is nothing compared to the info in here. How you feeling about now?”

“Aw, you know. Wondering who it was made the sky so high.”

It’s a good answer and Hardesty cackles in agreement. He tells Cole this reefer is worth serious philosophy. And then he pronounces: “May you find safe shelter under an angel’s eyelid.”

The caretaker cackles again at Cole’s inability to respond to that. “Listen, I am not one to give advice. But I wouldn’t chase hard after your brother. If he wanted you to know what he’s up to, then you’d know. You got no need to get up under Mister Greuel. Frankly I never thought much of him, it’s his partner the one to watch with your hand on the holster, hear me?”

“Blue Note? You’re talking about Arley Noe.”

“Well, now, I did not say that. I’m not talking about anyone. I might not even be talking about anyone either of us knows.”

The visit to the caretaker provokes a response more quickly than Cole would have imagined. At least he thinks it’s a response; possibly he is imagining links where there are none: Greuel’s illness and his brother disappearing; Cole’s banishment from quarry buys and Arley Noe ignoring his questions—there could be connections and there might not be any at all. When he drives home from work the next night he decides to take the long way, following snaking roads and avoiding traffic where he can, thinking the while of what Hardesty had told him and coming to no conclusions. What would Greuel and Noe want with that old place, and what did it have to do with Fleece? He stops for gas-mart coffee and then wanders past Shady Beck’s house, slowing to check for her Audi. Only a Jeep Cherokee and her father’s Mercedes in the two-car garage. He doesn’t feel like looking up Spunk.

Up the gravel hillside drive to home he smiles, pleased to discover Shady’s car again at rest behind his mother’s. For a girl who doesn’t seem sure what she wants of him she certainly comes around a lot. He pulls to a stop behind the cabriolet and blocks her in, feeling crafty. He’s halfway up the yard when he hears a gruff voice deadpan from the dark.

“There he is.”

Cole spins at the sound. Barely perceptible against the dense woods, outside the reach of the porch light dim behind cobwebbed glass, the faint outline of a man approaching takes shape. His palms are turned out, level with his chest, making a show of threat’s absence.

“Hell James Cole, it’s a witch’s tit out here, I was about to give up on you. I been waiting near an hour and was getting to wonder the fuck my own self was up to.”

The hands fall as Cole recognizes Grady Creed. In the muted light his pale face appears yellow, pocked with shadow due to his bad skin. They each reach forward and tap knuckles gently in greeting.

“What up, Grady.”

“Nobody running me to ground, can’t complain. Been thinking of you is all, thought I might check in on Cole Prather, see how he’s doing.”

He hardly knows Grady Creed save for memories of exceptional cruelty and humiliation to a preteen Spunk back in the day. He’s eager to see Shady and doesn’t have the patience to dodge his own impulses.

“Cole Prather’s just fine. Why? Grady I could count on a hand without its thumb how many times I’ve seen you in this yard.”

“Maybe you should be more sociable. Let a man know he’s got friends.”

Cole pinches the coffee cup’s soft Styrofoam between his teeth, feeling the give without biting through. He stares over the lip at Creed, who used to run with Fleece and even touted for his brother before Fleece started working Greuel’s dope channels on his own. The ropey man’s eyelashes are heavy and long and shadowed, the porch light making it appear his eyes are lined with mascara. Creed smiles his best chummy smile, which isn’t his easiest charm, revealing good straight teeth save for one high canine that twists over the tooth beside it.

“Okay I know you aint for small talk any more than Fleece so I’ll get to it. Listen, I came here to tell you one thing:
I am on your side.
That’s all. In case you wasn’t sure. I been running with Fleece since we was kids and I love him like a brother too.”

Cole doesn’t nod so much as dip his head, turning the cup to pinch down elsewhere on the Styrofoam. He keeps his quiet, hoping to prompt Creed to continue.

“Okay what you need to know, man, it aint right what’s happened, but you want to play it safe. Let it go. I know it’s near impossible to swallow but there I said it. Just, like, don’t go there.”

“What are you talking about?” Cole’s voice sounds hollow in the coffee cup still pinched between his teeth.

Creed steps back and ducks his head; he looks about them in a show of caution, like others might be hidden behind the trees, in the night shadows listening in. He leans closer to Cole and his voice falls into low register, eyes flitting side to side, never resting on Cole’s own—amped, probably, Creed has a taste for rippers.

“Don’t play me like that, Cole, you don’t need to, I got ears like anybody else. You seen his car burned up. It’s hard to swallow but
what else you need to know asides that? Fleece is gone. That’s how it is. I’m telling you don’t go after him. You’re the only son your momma’s got left. Understand?”

“You know my mother, Creed?”

“I aint never
been
with her if that’s what you’re asking. One of the few.”

Cole drops the cup from his mouth and talks to the ground. “What I hear is Fleece ripped off Greuel and awayed with half the Clay County harvest.”

“Believe that if it makes you feel better. It’s a good story. I say he fucked up. And you said Greuel’s name, not me. Remember that.”

“Hell I’ve known Mister Greuel my whole life, I can go ask him.”

“Damn it all and snowballs, Cole, I just told you not to do that. Said it with my mouth!” Creed stomps hard on the hillside; he jabs a finger toward the earth as if his mouth had been speaking from there and he wants to shut it. His face betrays either frustration or rage, and he is about to speak again, his face suddenly inches from Cole’s own, when his skittering eyes slide past Cole’s shoulder and he ducks his head deep again, turns his back on the house and faces the darkness over the lake. “Shit,” he mutters, crossing his arms.

Cole turns to see. In the double window by the door his mother stands between parted curtains. Another face—a curve of forehead and clean shining hair he takes for Shady—peers out from behind her. He grants a casual wave despite the quickening churn Creed has stoked in him, and forces a grin of assurance. When he turns back, he has to search briefly; Creed has moved further from the light.

“And I should trust you why, Grade?”

“You got to trust somebody. Maybe you don’t get how close you are to real trouble. Maybe my life don’t need any more dead friends in it.”

“When did you start to care what happens to me? You used to shoot bottle rockets at me when I was a kid.”

“That was me being a teenager without whatever, without direction. A stage. Think on what I said. This aint a joke, Cole. Your brother’s a ghost.”

Creed stuffs his hands deep into frayed jean pockets and bows his shoulders, a sudden portrait of complete indifference, looking like he
has just been rebuffed after asking for a smoke and nothing more as he starts to shuffle down the hill, navigating by hesitations in the dark.

“Hey Grady. How come you know all this? Maybe I have more questions.”

“I don’t know where you plan asking them, I was never even here,” Creed says without a look back. His shadow melts into the deeper shadows, into the thick growth of trees, a presence known only by his hastening steps upsetting layers of dry dead leaves.

Inside the front room Shady stands with palms pressed together, aligned over lips and nose in a sign of prayer, thumbs against her throat. Cole would not have guessed her eyes could stretch so wide, they’ve become a huge part of her face. He tosses his keys atop the old TV and stops, asking what’s wrong—yet knows already, like his body comprehends before his brain the quick fury in his mother’s steps down the hallway, her closet door slung hard against the plaster wall.

“I didn’t say a word, Cole,” Shady says, “it’s like she knew already.”

Her hands break apart and frame her face for an instant before falling, folding again into a knot below her belly. Lyda’s footsteps clamor again once they leave the carpet of her bedroom to clack on the hardwood and into the kitchen.

“Momma,” Cole says, mustering strength into his voice. “Momma I’m on this. I’m doing what I can.”

Lyda stops him with a single palm raised. “I
asked
you, Cole. I asked and you told me you didn’t know a thing!”

It’s not true and yet he lowers his gaze to the chipped paint of the baseboard, a repulsive feeling of betrayal surging over him even though he knows himself to be guiltless, suddenly ten years old again and ashamed, chastened for some wrong he hardly understood.

“Have to learn my firstborn’s gone for good from a girl who isn’t even family—no insult to you, Shady—the one thing,
the one thing
I ever asked my boys is to keep it all at home but look here everyone knows more about my own son than I do.”

She’s all smoke and motion within the kitchen’s narrow confines, snapping open her leather purse and rummaging through its many pockets as she moves into the front room, cracking her hip against the partition with an exclamation and then smacking the wall to punish it for being in her way. An empty glass teeters from the ledge and shatters into the kitchen but she ignores it, surging forward and inspecting every surface in the room (the coffee table of
TV Guides
and
People
magazines, the particle board credenza where Fleece’s name remains inscribed by a pocket knife in his six-year-old hand); her eyes alight on Cole’s keys atop the Zenith. The word
don’t
barely escapes his lips even as the keys ring out in the room’s erstwhile silence as she snatches them up and opens the door.