Ghosting (26 page)

Days later he awakes in early morning, before sunlight. There are horses to turn out on a farm as a favor to friends of his uncle who have left town for the weekend. He starts the pickup and turns on the defroster and it isn’t until he gets out again with the scraper that he sees the black trash bag sunken against his back tire. Initially he thinks someone vandalized the truck, dumped garbage in the bed, but when he looks he finds only the usual Big Gulp cups and the aluminum crossover toolbox that had been his central perk for buying the truck, though he rarely needs his tools anymore. There’s no movement around the lake in the chill sharp air, he can make out only outlines of houses under the skeletal trees. The bag slouches against the tire, not quite half-full. Cole toes it with his boot. The touch confirms what he had begun to guess already.

He undoes the tie and looks inside and the rich cloying odor assaults him despite that the thing’s triple bagged. On top of the reefer sits a seven-year-old copy of
Leg Show,
but no note. “Mister Hardesty,” he muses aloud. “Too much for one man alone, like you said.”

He slips one red-tipped bud into the magazine and places it on the floorboards before the passenger seat. Then he reties each bag and looks over the landscape again. The sun isn’t up yet but its rays are graying the sky, and frosty vapor burning off the trees seeps into the air. Not even the birds are into it yet. Cole limps to the garbage cans beside the house and drops the bag behind them. Pickup isn’t for two more days, and Lyda isn’t going to take out the trash anyway. He doesn’t want to haul around that much pot unless he knows where he’s going with it.

Back in the driver’s seat the smell is already overwhelming. He rolls down the windows and turns on his heater full blast and still after two miles of driving he feels like he’ll be sweating out the stink for days. Even the horses react to the stink on him, their lips curl and nostrils flare as they nudge at his chest and hair to figure him out. By the time he has their day started the morning is in full bloom. Cole stops at the first pay phone he can find and wakes up Shady. “Girl, you are not going to believe what I have for you.”

She agrees, once she sees the bud for herself: she can’t believe it. But the stuff’s not for her (not all of it), and she insists on keeping it so. You need to learn to think more to your advantage, she tells him. So Cole gets the key to Spunk’s storage shed and after her shift he brings Shady there, and she comes prepared, carrying a postage meter and more boxes of ziplock bags than would seem humanly necessary. Also a variety of mixers—oregano and Italian seasoning shakers, ditchweed yanked from the roadsides, a pouch of loose dark tobacco—but she isn’t truly stepping on the product, she’s adding mixers to the shake to get the weight right. Sheldon waits at school to sell all that he can.

“You’re going to be in the money here,” Shady says.

“With Sheldon? I doubt that. I need to turn up that caretaker to see what he wants.”

“Seems to me if he wanted anything he might let you know without leaving pounds of weed in your driveway.” She measures another quarter ounce of shag and bud and begins to bag it herself as Cole, slow, falls behind with the meter. “Is that really the story here, Cole? Do I get to know that much, since you’ve got me committing felonies?”

“To be honest, I don’t know. Came out this morning and there’s the bag.”

“Just tell me you didn’t pull a Fleece here. This isn’t Greuel’s, right? Am I right? I don’t need those people after me.” She zips shut a ziploc and pulls more out of the box to ready another stack. She had had the wherewithal to bring a deodorizer and candles, eucalyptus, cranberry—some unidentifiable fresh scent mixes with the reefer. The variety of odors makes Cole nauseous and from time to time he gets up to stretch his legs, works his knee out, and puts his face to the ventilator fan.

Shady has also brought her pipe, a glass cylinder of swirling colors. She breaks from bagging to hit, motions Cole to join in as tendrils of smoke draw waving lines above the bowl. He takes the pipe and inhales deeply, intent on the burning embers. Instead of exhaling into the room, he bends low and—one hand gently grasping the base of Shady’s skull, a move that prompts from her the question,
What?
—exhales into her mouth. Her surprise allows this. Simultaneously she giggles and coughs, then mostly coughs as he pulls away.

“See, I don’t understand you,” she says again, reaching for a bottle of Gatorade. “Is this still about Fleece? About your brother and your Mom? Mister Greuel?” She gestures at the small piles of weed, the large trash bag, the quarters and dimes stuffed into a nylon duffel bag Cole had bought that afternoon.

He doesn’t want to think about it and he tells her so. He says, Thinking is what I do for hours and hours on end and I’d rather not think tonight, I’m not driving, I just want
to do
. Fair enough, Shady agrees. He eases onto the couch in a position half-lying, half-sitting, his head resting against her arm. It’s a calculated provocation he would never have the gumption to try were he not high, but hell, Shady (he thinks), how long you want to make a boy wait? There’s a swagger in him tonight—already he can guess the amount of money this gift can bring him—and it pleases Cole how she does not move away or start to bag again. Instead, her free hand begins to finger a path over his scalp, playing with his hair and bringing a feeling like a grin in his belly.

“Your mother has kind of—don’t get me wrong, I like Lyda and I don’t know her life or anything, I’m not judging, but she kind of fucked you up.”

He nods as they stare together at the loot and a life-size poster of Michael Jordan sailing forth with tongue wagging on the otherwise blank wall of concrete blocks across from them. Outside, semis pull along the nearby interstate, small explosions of air brakes punctuating the great wash of speeding cars; briefly the siren of an ambulance or fire truck veers its frantic alarm. The U-Stor-It is not particularly hidden, which causes moments of concentrated listening and an eye at the opening below the roll-top door for any shift of light there; but it’s not a high-traffic location, either. Five rows of sixteen units apiece face one another within a graveled lot that dead-ends against a high fence and the woods behind it. The woods decline into a mosquito ditch and then run back up to the interstate. There’s only the one way in or out.

“That’s okay,” Cole answers after a time. “As long as you’re not judging.”

She surprises him with a long, lingering kiss that fills his mouth. Her tongue is a soft and pliant pleasure to him despite the dryness.
After this brief moment passes he remains as he was, head tilted back and eyes closed, her three-beat laugh—
ha ha ha
—so close to his face he opens his eyes again.

“Maybe what this is about is you,” Cole says.

“Speaking of not understanding somebody. Cole you are a good friend to me, a good friend I don’t want to mess things up with, and we can be friends and have good times too, okay? But don’t mistake for a second that any of this is about me. It’s for you. It’s all about you and your brother and Lyda. And you getting out of here. You know this. What’ve you learned since you dived in undercover or whatever it was you had in mind going to work for Greuel.”

He tells her what he knows. Hearing himself account for such few details underscores a sinking feeling of inadequacy deep in his belly, as though he were still in school and had blown off some important project and was now trying to come up with an excuse before the teacher’s disappointed and disbelieving face. He tells her of the visit with the caretaker and how supposedly Fleece had given the man this trash bag—“But there was way more in there than this,” he says, indicating what’s left—and of how Hardesty said he was being let go from his employment through the Archdiocese because of the property sale. And that Greuel and Noe had something to do with the sale but he doesn’t get what if anything that has to do with Fleece. Otherwise, he admits, he knows nothing more about what Fleece might have done or what has become of him. Even though he feels, driving, delivering, closer to his brother. And like that’s the only way he’s going to get to the bottom of anything, by slipping into his life and gauging the lay of the land. And on those lonesome drives he has felt another impulse, a temptation, that he wonders if his brother struggled with also: you begin to focus so much on not being noticed, not being seen, that it seems natural to believe you can disappear.

It’s an idea Cole likes even as he is uncertain of its meaning. He likes to say aloud in the empty car as he drives,
By then I will have disappeared
. As though he were concocting some diabolical plan, though he knew, in reality, he was only making it up as he went along.

“One thing sticks at me. They say Fleece got off with the October harvest. Spunk says they were dry three months because of that.”

“Yeah?” says Shady. “And what’s that mean?”

“Means I don’t know what. But the weekend after Thanksgiving—we bought at the quarry and it was expensive, remember? And Arley Noe took our money. Arley Noe doesn’t work the quarry, that’s for little guys like me. And the time before that, the night at Greuel’s
before
the holiday, when Greuel gave us lip and got on Spunk too not to take any more reefer out the door with him.”

“They shut down the quarry is what I heard,” Shady says, like a proposition meant to prompt him.

Cole is staring at the ceiling and a large water stain there. “So I guess I’m wrong, they weren’t lying, Arley was there to fill in for Fleece till they dried up.”

“Maybe. Unless he wanted to sell his stuff somewhere else.”

It’s a strange-looking stain; it warps the plasterboard in pools and humps, making a shape that could be likened to a camel. Already he’s losing focus. “Dang, Shady.”

“What?”

“Don’t you think that’s being kind of suspicious? Why sell somewhere else if you can sell all you got right here?”

Shady shrugs. “I’d say maybe you don’t suspect enough. But what do I know?” She picks up the magazine that had come with the trash bag. She leafs through the limp pages, studies the pictures. “This proves this came from the caretaker guy?”

“Don’t know anyone else likely to have a copy of
Leg Show
from August 1987.”

There seems so little Cole can hold in his head at one time; once he snatches a detail he’s already watching it dart away. He wishes he could work like the detectives in movies, identifying clues, employing logic, but he lacks the mental equipment for investigation—in fact movie mysteries baffle him, he’s always surprised when the culprit is exposed at story’s end. No, Cole’s more comfortable moving on instinct and impression: on what
feels
correct with some inner calculus he’s not even sure how he figures. Such as now, with the confluence of Shady Beck and a softcore mag and nobody else around.

He places a hand on her leg and slides it up her thigh, the denim smooth to his palm until he hits the belt loops; for all her face shows
she’s studying an article. He plays with her belt, flicking the tongue of it—the buckle is one of those spring-loaded types that require only a flick to pop open, and he does that, listening to the small chink of metal. Her hands don’t move.

“Here?” she asks into the magazine.

“Here would be excellent.”

“Did you not hear me a minute ago?” Her tone sounds irritated, but she tosses the magazine aside and draws his arm around her. “The door isn’t even all the way closed.”

“I can close it,” he says. No sooner does he move to do so than three hard smacks from outside shake the door in brilliant noise, it hurts deep in his ear canals, it’s like being trapped inside a steel drum. Cole motions to Shady to hide the stash.
Wait wait wait
she repeats in a high-whispering voice. Hoots and cackles meet the rapid skid of tires kicking up gravel, and then someone smacks the door again, the noise jarring Cole to a panicked standstill.

“Open up, damn your hides, it’s the
po
-lice!”

He recognizes Spunk’s hoarse, drunken drawl; the recognition calms him enough to kick the duffel bag out of the light beside the couch. “Hold on,” he says, indicating to Shady again to do something with the trash bag as he pulls on a sweatshirt. Her eyes express the small unit’s lack of options, and it doesn’t matter in the end as the chains start to rattle and Spunk’s unlaced hightops become visible, then the baggy jeans, then the topmost of his three oversized T-shirts present themselves behind the unveiling door. He’s grinning happy as his eyes slur over his storage unit, a six-pack of Little Kings cream ale tucked under one arm. Behind him Grady Creed is leaning back against his tricked-out 4Runner, arms crossed to accentuate the bulge in his biceps, cowboy boots set heel to toe. The rims on his vehicle are shiny new spinners.

“Smells like y’all are having a party,” Spunk says, stepping in and situating the ale in a small styrofoam cooler. “Grady you going to nab that ice?”

Clotted flesh about the eyes of both betrays deep chemical influence. Creed strides in, bedecked in the air of a victor awesomely pleased—with himself, with the scene, with the whole scenario of
walking in on Cole and Shady Beck. On his greasy face is plastered a grin that marks him as an imperturbable keeper of secrets everyone wishes to know, secrets he can’t help but add to, that others would offer much to insure he kept. “Shady is this a one-man show or you gonna take us all on? I been on a dry stretch.” He makes a play at her ribcage and cackles at her slapping hand; already he’s past her and at her pipe on the small particle-board stand beside the couch, sniffing at it like a hound set loose to hunt a man down.

Spunk spouts roundabout forms of apology as he pokes through the CDs beside the boom box. “My bad, you two. I figured y’all’ed be done by now and I couldn’t stall this boy any more.” He settles on a kind of funky metal noise that Cole doesn’t know, guitars and drums lashing out in an assault on them all, Spunk busting ridiculous moves as he pops open a Little King and combines a high falsetto with the singer on the CD.