Ghosting (29 page)

Not a soul worth his missing toes. From the inside cover pocket he pulls out more pages, most weathered by time to tissue, and they sprawl floating across his chest. He selects one yellowed scrap forgotten long ago. Forgotten, but on sight of the number he recognizes it perfectly, recalls
perfectly
the day he watched a half-literate boy scrawl it down for him, that would have been, what, seventy-six or seventy-seven? Is it possible the number’s still good? What a shock to her. Goddamn if ever there was a woman who owed him her time and attention whether or not she accepted the fact.

I am a man who makes things happen.
He pulls the phone to him, a heavy rotary thing. None of this bullshit hand-wrung wondering where people are when I crave company. The other end rings and rings, so the line’s good and he’s going to wake up somebody who evidently does not own an answering machine. He counts twelve rings
but there may have been more, his attention keeps blanking (or feels like it does), he’ll give it twenty, twenty-four if he can keep track that long. Or he could go all night—but a sleepy voice, husky as a drinking man’s, answers.

“Who is this?”

“I bear untold gifts and surprises,” Greuel croaks as clearly as he can, and smiles satisfied into the mouthpiece.

Her voice perks, wakes: he can see her sitting up in bed. “Is it Fleece? Did you find him, where is he?”

“What? No, it’s, wait a second—”

“Cole? Have you done something to James Cole now you fucking, where is he, what’s happening?”

“Lady, calm down. This is nothing to do with either your boys. I came across your number.”

“What time is this?” Her voice softens, falls sleepy again. “What do you want?”

“You. I want the presence of an old friend and fellow conspirator. Get up and get yourself over, we got everything you could want for the taking, it’s an open pharmacy over here.”

“You wake me in the middle of the night out of the blue and think I’ll jump right to it?”

Greuel chuckles, feels the front of his teeth with his thick tongue. On the TV there’s a mother lion teaching its young how to tear apart a carcass.

“Yeah, Lyda, I do. In fact I know you will,” he says, and hangs up.

It had not occurred to her before because she had never thought about it, but after very few moments alone with Sheldon Prather, Shady realized a dislike for him that frightened her with its depth; she loathed him with a repugnance that stabbed like shards in her gut. She didn’t like how sharply he dismissed her caution on the phone, or her suggestion they meet elsewhere than his frat-house room. She didn’t like his gratuitous use of the word
bitch.
Okay she could look past that, it wasn’t like she had to marry him; but she did have to take him seriously on behalf of Cole. She had to deal with him seriously and she had to do it with extra caution, too; since her dream routine gave her an extra perception into the workings of the world she’s felt more confident in her intuitions about others, her insights into which side they were on, knowingly or unknowingly, because what she comprehends as well as her own needs is that different sides are at work all around them. Sheldon didn’t give a deuce that Cole was family. Sheldon cared only for whomever he could get to do him favors.

And she was helping
him,
too. Sheldon Prather was about to be one popular boy. As long as he did not get caught—and Shady doubted he could keep from bragging about what he had and how much. She voiced this concern from the truck-stop pay phone: “I’m telling you I have this bag wrapped tight and every window open and the stink is still making me dizzy. Trust me on this, you don’t want it in your
room.” Sheldon told her he would meet her out front and walk her up and not to be such a stupid bitch.

“Do you even have the money to buy?”

“In my business this is what we call ‘stupid-bitch behavior’; I asked you to avoid that. I
asked
this,” and he hung up.

She was neither stupid nor a bitch but she was used to the tiresome wacked machismo of fraternity boys longing for street cred and histories of economic suffering and violence they would never have to actually undergo. She never understood why women bothered with them. Maybe many did not, and that’s why frats tended to have access to great drugs. A Darwinian scenario: selfish jerks who don’t want to grow up have to entice girls somehow. Like rock bands and the sex musicians allegedly get (she had discussed this with her sisters): girls like to dance; good music feels good; naturally a girl might be interested in whoever creates this music that makes her feel good. She had lots of theories, lots of notions. When she was high her mind raced with them, she didn’t know why.

She stuffed three quarters in her purse and left the rest in the truck. Sheldon led her in without greeting, swatting at fruit flies that swarmed in the parlor of the old house, past a group watching TV in the front room (she avoided looking at the screen), Sheldon moving shifty like in a stop-motion film—he turned several times to check she was still following, catching her eye each time and then tittering in a nervous, high pitch. His pale face with its scattering of dark whiskers sported one angry pimple on his jaw line and he was clenching his teeth in a pulsating rhythm. In his room he had replaced the desk lamp with a black light; it was all the light on offer.

“You must be chewing up the books in here,” she said.

“I’m allowing myself a long-deserved vacation. Make money—no,
create wealth
—have fun, blow off the semester and make up for it once they drop me to probation.” He broke into a fit of deep coughs and then asked to see what she had, his white shirt aglow, teeth flashing creepy neon. Already the fan was in the window blowing out into the world. He stood with a hand on the back of his head and one leg jiggling. She placed the three quarter-bags on his desk. He did not move from the door.

“From our phone conversation I was under the impression you had more than that.”

“I do have more. I didn’t know how much you wanted to buy.”

“If it’s as good as you said it is, I want it all. You’re going to let me try it out, right?”

“Have at it,” she said. “Seems like you could use a bit of bring-me-down.” He laughed his nervous staccato and, with a friendly face of disbelief, admitted he was on hour fifty-six without sleep. “An experiment,” he added, and then he leered at her a broad, demented smile of infinite self-assurance. Shady said she could use a bump herself for the drive home, wondering if he had any of Tina’s Ritalin left, but if he heard her Sheldon let it ride without comment.

He made a show of loading a new copper pipe he was proud to have crafted from his father’s leftover building materials. She asked if he had used it yet and he shook his head. She watched as he filled the bowl and then lit it, and she waited as with a child to learn for himself: the steel soon burned his lips and he dropped the pipe with a howl. Now it was Shady’s turn to laugh. He pinched his lips with thumb and three fingers, purring a combination whine/hum as he waited for the pain to subside.

“A new lesson, one I will never forget,” he said, fishing out a juice from the fridge beneath his desk. “Now it is inscribed into the synapses of my drug-addled brain!” In spite of herself she laughed at this, too; he held the cold can against his lips, murmuring that all this was part of his whole experiment, he was continually garnering useful information that had nothing to do with school. Shady took out her ceramic one-hitter and packed it for herself, burned it down, and then packed it again for Sheldon even as it felt as though her body was sailing away from her. She dismissed his offers of more, dizzy and light and impatient to get the transaction over with so she could go home.

Sheldon lay back on the bed, kicking off his unlaced high-tops and setting his bare bony feet crossed at the heel on Shady’s knee as he exhaled, languorously, toward the ceiling.

“Fuck . . . me,” he said, drawn out and solemn.

“What I’m telling you,” she said. She pushed back the rolling desk chair and Sheldon’s feet dropped to the carpet with a heavy thud.
On the ceiling glowed an array of stars and planets as in a child’s nursery. She sat patiently, staring mostly at the fan but watching Sheldon from the corner of her eye, noting his lack of movement from where he reclined on his elbows, head thrown back. Time passed; she lost track of whether it was passing quickly or not.

“So how do you want to do this?”

On the floor above, a stereo came on so loud that the door and window buzzed in their frames.

“I’m considering a sort of partnership, you could say.”

“Cole doesn’t need a partner, he needs this off his hands. You’re his family. Help him out.”

“I am willing to move it off his hands. As any good family member should.”

“You’re short on cash at the moment.”

“You’ve got money. Isn’t your dad a doctor or something?”

“He’s not going to invest in you dealing, if that’s where you’re going with this.”

“Doesn’t any of that doctor money trickle down to you? I bet it does. You have really nice hair.”

“Look, Sheldon, how much can you buy tonight? I’m tired and it’s a long drive home.”

He continued to stare at the ceiling with its tiny stars and milky ways and handful of suns. If he had placed them there alone it must have taken hours, but Shady found it hard to imagine Sheldon taking up any tedious task, however small, alone. He would have had a phalanx of girls to take part, having convinced them that placing day-glo stickers of stars onto his ceiling would be their best bet of an evening.

“I am conceiving a plan even as we banter,” he said.

This much Shady tells him up front. As agreed, she had left his truck at the front of her family property with the key in the muffler, though she worried he had already been by the house. Though she felt exhausted by the driving and the hour and the weed she felt a deep urge to see Cole, contriving a compromise with sleep and waking, positioning a
rocking chair before her window from where she could view the truck past the far fence, a spoon in her hand. When she drifted and the spoon fell to her hardwood floor, she would awaken and look out front again. The truck was always there.

She’s uncertain how many times she did this, her thoughts scrambling each time with doubts and motivational inquisitions and those surveys of one’s life that occur only at such groggy and anxious moments in the middle of the night. When morning sun warmed her face she awoke to an awful taste in her mouth and the spoon on the bed behind her. The truck remained. She worried.

Ditching her mother’s queries she changed clothes and scrubbed her face with a rough towel, olive oil soap, and water, and said she had to meet a friend before her next shift. She drove the truck to Lake Holloway with the sun beyond the hills burning the clouds from within, a crimson ember-like glow that looked like the morning-after scene of a great medieval battlefield, the entire eastern horizon on fire. Why medieval? She didn’t know, and she wondered. She found Cole filthy and asleep on the front porch, flat on his back with his feet on the lower steps. She wakes him by tossing the keys onto his face.

“I forgot you had the truck until after the boys dropped me here,” he says. “I sat down to figure out what to do. I fell asleep.”

“You look a mess. What did they have you do?” Mud and grass streak his damp jeans from boots to thighs, a smear of mahogany-colored filth stripes him cheek to his chin, and bits of leaves mat his hair. The hand that gestures at her question is chapped and blackened. A faint odor, like sewage, wafts from his clothes.

“What time is it?”

“Are you in trouble about the pot?”

He wrings one hand as though it hurts. “What did Sheldon say?”

She relates what she feels is relevant. She hands over three hundred dollars rolled up in twenties, and before he can begin to protest—his face closes at the sight of the thin roll—she stops him with her hand in the air: “You knew he wouldn’t have enough for all of it, right? He said you knew. He bought eight quarters at what he called wholesale. The rest he promises to pay as he sells. Spring Break starts in another week, it’ll all be gone by then.”

“What did you do with the rest?”

“Sheldon has it.” That wakes him as she knew it would.

“Shady, come on! You gave him a pound of weed on his promise to pay for it later?”

“Well what would you have had me do? Three hundred is what he could get, I even went to the ATM with him and saw the receipt. Feel free to school me on what other choice I may have had. You want me driving over two counties with your drugs and a porno mag in that excuse for a truck that, by the way, Sheldon was alert enough to point out it’s got expired tags? I’m not going to jail for you, Cole. You’re no kingpin daddy and I’m no mule, or whatever.”

She didn’t mean to sound harsh but she doesn’t soften the edge in her voice, either. He sits with his elbows on his knees, hands clasped behind his head; his eyes close, and such a still calm overcomes him that briefly she wonders if he has fallen asleep again. She fights a sudden urge to slap him awake. She wonders if his mother is up yet, and only then notices her car isn’t in the driveway. She thought Lyda never left the house.