Ghosting

by Kirby Gann

  The sermon lasts longer than Greuel had expected; his eyelids flutter as he drowses, and in his drowse he pictures the coffee and brunch coming after, the pleasures of food, medicine-sour stomach willing. Since he’s been sentenced to the wheelchair again he no longer cares about dietary concerns or his weight. How’s that for my reward, preacher? Still there is common ground to be found here. He’s guessing this Ponder has an interesting take on that rich man in heaven, camels through the needle’s eye, however that parable went. Common ground. His eyes open again and Greuel leans over to Noe.

  “This boy know anything about horses? He should be on his elbows at the rail.”

  Noe’s mirth is mechanical, functional, and silent. His yellow teeth bare and remain bared. He still betrays marks of the true morphine fiend himself, though he kicked it near twelve years ago and it’s hard to detect due to the blue pallor of his skin. Greuel hopes dope isn’t the link that brought Arley Noe to the preacher. He dismisses the notion as soon as it arises; Noe has too much of the unfeeling night about him, Greuel doesn’t think he feels hunger for anything but the fun of crime anymore. Now Brother Ponder is speaking of laboring to rest, and to sleep without worry because a person’s faith was enough to pluck them from debt, their little mustard seed was going to score them the house of their dreams one day.

  “I like him,” Greuel murmurs, “but I don’t trust the type as a rule. True believers worry. He won’t back out on us?”

  “We get the right signature on the right paper and him and his board can worry all they want, they won’t have a say to back out of,” says Arley.

  “I’ve noticed you’re a big supporter of the law when it’s on your side.”

  “It’s our game; we make the rules. The preacher stays quiet.”

  “It’s your game when I’m no longer around to play. Do we even have a claim on this land?”

  “I am not a believer. By your logic, I am not worried.”

  “Of course you’re not. I’m worried. I put up most the money and get to handle all the worry. We make a donation yet?”

  Noe nods, taps his knee. Brother Gil is still going at it from the stage, having broadened his sermon—is that what stands for worship nowadays, boogie jams and a sermon?—from the individual needs of the congregants to the enveloping needs of his ministry; specifically, the need to build their own Galilee and the fundraising required to make such a move possible. Again with mustard seeds. Greuel peers at his watch, scowling.

  “Thought you said this’d be over by noon.”

  “What the adverts say. Think I been here before?”

  Greuel snorts again, and the coat of flab that is his torso quakes at the precision of the absurd image his mind presents. “Not your style.”

  “I have no style. It’s a conscious decision.”

  Brother Gil stops in the midst of speaking as though he has overheard them, and glances at his own watch. It’s a gleaming timepiece over which Greuel furrows his brow with a curate’s informed inspection—the preacher wears a platinum Bulova encrusted with diamonds. Preaching must pay better than he gave it credit for. He marks a mental note to update his own watch even as he wonders whether later he’ll remember making the note at all. The preacher announces that his sermon needs to stop here.

  “We’ll pick this up another time. I could talk all day, most of you know that already, but you have lives to get back to. Come on, let’s bow these heads.”

  Quickly he runs through the invocation and benediction. Then the band starts up again and Ponder waves as he makes his way beneath the spotlight to the back of the stage, where he disappears. The applause is shortened by the number of people heading to the exits, the wheelchair sailing forth in the lead, Creed pushing from behind, Noe lagging off on his own. It bothers him how easily Noe can abandon him, but this afternoon Greuel has other things on his mind. He has made a decision, and it requires that he figure where he’s going to find the money to make some things happen now that Fleece Skaggs has disappeared with a season’s worth of reefer.

  It’s not like he was raised by wolves but Cole thinks himself half-feral, not exactly raised by anyone, a handful of aphorisms to guide his way. Do not cause waves. Don’t try to get famous. Never knock how a man makes his living. Never start a fight you can’t finish standing up. Never call a man a liar anywhere but to his face. The maxims carry the weight of eternal law. Keep your head to yourself and don’t go around with a greasy eye; there’s always someone slicker than you. Rules of conduct handed down by Fleece; navigating codes for Pirtle County and Lake Holloway; life advice for the little brother from the elder who warned he wouldn’t be around forever.

  Never corner something meaner than you.

  Fleece said: Anyone asks you live on the lake you best investigate why they asking. You may be Prather on paper but you’re still a Skaggs to lots of people here with long memories. Ol’ Bethel didn’t make friends. I haven’t rolled out the red carpet for you here either, come to think of it.

  And where are you now, big brother? What carpet have you rolled out for yourself, where did it lead?

  Already the rumors have started. Fleece Skaggs burned up his own car to throw off the scent. He’s kicking it easy with Mister Greuel’s run in the Panhandle somewhere. California. Fleece Skaggs saw his opening and took it, he’s the one who got away.

  Or: Mister Greuel had someone disappear that upstart and that is one body, man, nobody will ever find.

  His brother used to tease him that just because Cole was half-fool didn’t mean he couldn’t use the little sense he had. But when he was kneeling with Shady and Spunk looking over from the seminary rooftop at the sight of a Chevy Nova burning in the middle of the night he didn’t know what to make of its meaning. He knew only it was his brother’s car and that it meant nothing well.

  Cole says he’s from Lake Holloway but he spent only his first twelve years there. In Montreux, the city where he passed through high school as a guest in his uncle’s family, to say I grew up on the lake meant nothing; anything outside town is hicksville to the people there. In Pirtle County, though, lakers had earned a reputation nobody born to the fact could speak against. You either wrapped yourself in its dirty flag or moved away.

  It was the kind of place people often disappeared from. The manmade lake was originally part of a spa retreat built early in the century for wealthy families, but the spa failed before the Depression. A suspicious fire destroyed the resort hotel in time to help the original investors; then the forest overtook the walks and bungalows over the years, until scavenger types began to sneak in and lay claim, people Cole’s mother Lyda described simply as: us. Men with one pair of cracked leather boots and a duffel bag of laundry, who belt-chained their wallets and could never wash the dirt from their fingernails—the kind of men who fell in love with country whores and brought them back to play house, where the mattress on the floor became a kind of factory production line for bodies that would fill military uniforms or carry cargo or sleep in prison beds. They were the kinds of men that punched clocks at three in the afternoon or seven in the morning and already had some scorched distillation in hand as their tires peeled off factory lots headed far from howling babies and angry wives in dry Pirtle. Those woods rang riot after dark, the night rent by yelps of laughter and cries of pain, gunshot cracks celebrating or warning or something worse. A single bad road winds off Route 9 around the lake and through the hills in total darkness beneath old oaks and conifers, and men roamed from house to hill to hollow looking for something to happen, passing a strummed guitar here to a banjo and fiddle-strangled duet there to a boom box screaming Aerosmith elsewhere, onward to where there might be no music at all, only the low scrapes of boots on planks and the murmur of a bet seen, bet raised, bet called in full.

  For a while Cole had Fleece and Fleece, as much as he needed anyone, had his little half-brother. Childhood was fraught.

  There is what happens, and there’s all that seems to be happening.

  C
ole’s earliest memory is of murder. A stale summer day with sky blanched white, the alder and cottonwoods wilted weary beneath the heat. Even the birds held still. Fleece would have been nine or ten then. They were playing in the shallows of the dingy lake. When they wanted to swim Lyda would come out with two steel buckets of bleach and walk up to her calves in the water, Fleece always begged to let him do it but she snatched at him, No, she barked, you stay put till I tell you. She slopped a wide berth in the water with the bleach and told them to wait. She told them to wait until she said Yes, it always took forever. When forever arrived Fleece and Cole dove with bellies smacking into the bathtub-warm water, and in play Fleece forced Cole down into the soft mud and held him there, in play he would always do whatever it would take to make his little brother cry. Cole’s cheeks tingled if he let the mud stick for long. His nostrils burned, the smell like the kitchen sink where Lyda washed their hair.

  Somebody’s garage radio screeched Jet—woohoohoo wooo-hoohoo wooo-hoohoo—Jet and Fleece sang along with the guitar parts, not the lyrics. The boys were floating low on their backs so the greasy water framed their faces, listening within that strange pressure their voices made with their ears below the surface, both still sweating in the heat. From under the water the gunshot sounded like sharp thunder off a faraway storm. They sat up to neighbors hurrying toward the back of their home.

  Lyda stood on the square of poured concrete outside their back door, what she called a patio though it was too small to hold anything but the charcoal grill. She held motionless, one fist on her hip and the other at her mouth, crooked at the waist with her chin tucked down. To little Cole she looked no more substantial than a small bird dead, all dried out and ready to be taken by the wind.

  A crowd blocked the view. Cole rushed through the high dry grass and slid on his knees between the sprawled legs of the blond giant Morton Fifer, a neighbor he feared without specific reason but under whose legs he felt safe now, Fifer in his yellow wife-beater undershirt and blue sweats spotted with oil, cuffs tucked into heavy black boots left untied; the leather sagged and gray varicose cracks ran to the heel. He pressed Cole with the inside of his leg as a man might shoo a dog. Git. But Cole didn’t move and Fifer paid him no more attention.

  The yard sloped sharply to a creek. At its bank two men formed a scene no one would enter. One, thick and stumpy with shoulders wide as Cole was tall, stood with his back to the crowd, peering past the end of a shotgun at the other, who stretched writhing on the ground with his hands at his throat. A wet noise escaped between his fingers, an unfamiliar noise, and his boot heels dug deep ruts into the mud as though he believed he could push himself away to safety. His mouth worked at every shape of rage and curse but not a word escaped; his dark eyes drew to the man who did this to him, standing silent, and the eyes admitted he did not believe a moment of it.

  His boot leather looked like tender skin of a soft and pliant cognac; everyone in Lake Holloway knew who owned those boots. Bethel Skaggs took great care to show off his boots to anyone who would look, bragging on how he won them in a card game although Lyda told the boys he had paid a fortune she’d never see for them.

  His murderer did not give the boots a glance. He reloaded with calm study, his brown curly hair thinned enough at the crown that the scalp shined, the short curls limp with wet. A straw hat lay upside-down behind him, black-banded and with a frayed hole in the brim open like a dead sparrow’s beak. And then the crowd turned to the shriek of a woman—a woman unknown to Cole—running up the creek. What have you done my god what have you done? she cried, clutching the hem of her skirt above her knees, her other hand out for balance as she worked barefoot against the slick mud. The gunman did not respond. It was as though her arrival didn’t register with him. Instead he clacked the barrel shut again and raised the gun once more, and he did not seem to see her collapse over Bethel Skaggs, whose fingers dug into the earth, and he did not appear to hear her moans and sobs as she placed her palms over the gushing wound in that angry throat. It was more like he was waiting for her to notice him, her to come to him as he stood ready to fire his gun again.

  She would have none of it. You’ve done enough here, she said. You won’t touch this man again do you understand me?

  The man kept his gun on them for a time, a long time, the barrel waving slightly with each breath. He shifted his weight and waited and nobody who was watching moved. And then after a time some thought or feeling must have clicked into place inside him. Maybe he saw the fancy boots had stopped moving, and had locked into the heel-scraped ruts, or that the bloody hands had stilled in the grass. The man lowered the gun and gazed over the scene of his creation. It seemed to Cole he was lightly swaying. He gave a brief nod, the kind of nod a man gives from his porch to passing strangers, to this woman still covering the dead man’s body with her own. The watching crowd held fast and spoke not a word.

  Only the woman’s cries remained. If they registered in the man’s ears he did not show it. He picked up the hat and turned from the spectacle—never acknowledging the gathered crowd—and stepped carefully along the slick bank of the creek, going back the way he must have come, the gun yoked across his shoulders.

  In the woods on the creek’s far side, birds began their meek day songs again. The gunman whistled back to them, out of sight now behind willows and ditchweed, and the sun pushed through the white wash of clouds and bathed again all the people huddled along the slope in ruthless heat.

  Fleece appeared as the crowd disassembled. He closed in on the mourning woman, who seemed confused by what to do with Bethel’s hands: she kept repositioning them, placing them together on his belly, then at his sides, then again on his belly, the hands holding the form of that final clutch made against his wound. Fleece placed his own small hand on her bare shoulder, Fleece not a full head taller than the woman on her knees. He patted her shoulder, tapping his palm against her freckled skin.

  Morton Fifer made a sound like he expected to sneeze and then stifled it. His face tilted from above the massive forearms folded over one another, looking at Cole between his feet. From that angle his features puckered and mashed together to make him unrecognizable save for the straw-straight blond of his hair. He made a face as though ready to spit but thought better, swallowed it down as he turned, and nodded at Cole’s mother.

  Good luck to you, Lyda, he said, and with his going most of the others followed.

  The woman remained atop the body beside the creek. Fleece remained beside her, still patting her shoulder with the flat of his palm as they stared at the mess made of Bethel’s throat, and Lyda still had not moved from where she had watched the entire event unfold. And little Cole did not understand. Who was this woman so full of sorrow? Why wasn’t Lyda in her place? His mother squatted with her skirt tucked between her thighs, elbows resting on bared knees, and fixed herself a cigarette she worked on and off in hotbox puffs before tossing it aside unfinished. Standing then, and without looking at either of her sons but at the kneeling woman, she ordered her boys inside the house, claiming there was no more good for them to see here.

  This happened when he had been so young that often Cole wondered if he had dreamed it, or seen it on TV, or read it somewhere and then had the event sink deep enough into him to believe he owned it. But Fleece remembered the day as well. When Cole would ask their mother about it, she would tell him only that it was a bad story not worth the dwelling on. And besides, it did not matter, it had happened such a very long time ago.

  Lyda sleeps in the bedroom next to his. They share a wall, their heads at rest in proximity. She has her philosophies, too. Lyda says people arrive in the world with a unique part of it readied to welcome them into its limits and expectations—that is why we have to be ripped screaming from a mother’s womb.

  She grew up poor when Pirtle Country was horse farms and lease lots seeded to sharecroppers for tobacco, alfalfa, hay, and corn, the county seat of Renfro Station nothing but a few developed blocks around the rail line,
its city hall reconstructed from the burned remains of a Baptist church. Her father kept a dry goods store that had folded inexplicably during the boom years after the Second World War, when most businesses could not help but thrive. Not even boom years could bring fortune to a man as difficult as Ernst Newcome, Cole’s grandfather. He preferred horses to people, though no one could tell if the horses returned the feeling. He scraped by via sharp jockeyship and boarding the beasts on rented land, in flush times exercising a handful for wealthy farm owners who traveled too often to give them steady runouts. The way he told it to Lyda, he was doing right well again before she came along—screaming into her part of the world in 1951—though her mother told her this was not true, their kitchen had had the same dirt floor before Lyda was even thought of.

  That dirt floor was the stuff of family legend. Lyda believed the fact of it led directly to Fleece getting born. Each morning she had to sweep the floor in one direction to her mother’s satisfaction, and then sweep it again the opposite direction after supper. If it became too dry and powdery she had to sweep the plumes of it out the door before dampening the floor with a rag. Ernst had himself a radio and then a TV he’d managed to find on a fantastic deal before ever setting a floor to Eudora’s kitchen. He worked less once they plugged in the TV. Not long after buying the thing they watched Kennedy’s funeral and Ernst was hooked—calling the assassination of that Catholic impostor one of the best moves the country had made since VE day. Lyda didn’t know what to say about Kennedy, and she didn’t know even if her father might be wrong. By then she’d learned to assume he was.