by Kirby Gann
Speed up the rising onramp and the landscape turns to Interstate Anyplace USA, Southeast version. Traffic increases the closer he gets to the city and the FM classic rock radio stations come in clearer and soon he’s passing identical suburban plans and waterfront and then the houses grow closer and begin to betray their ages. Cole enters downtown Montreux only as necessary—he doesn’t know the layout well, and the city center creeps him out a little because he knows, by his uncle, his father died here.
The Spackler horses had been stubborn and slow and kind of mean when he turned them out and he’s late pulling in. Everyone’s standing by their trucks, eyeing him as they finish cigarettes.
“Young men don’t care for Saturday work, do they?”
Orval’s the oldest on the crew, older than Ron-Ron and ever ready to sass. His fine white hair is trimmed so short that his five-day beard wanders into it seamlessly, a soft white moss taking over his skull.
“Nobody cares for Saturday work,” says his skinny companion, CD Cooter. “We like Saturday pay, though, aint that right Cole?”
“Truth be told, I don’t even care for the pay that much,” Cole smiling at the banter, relieved they haven’t started the usual ride of him being the boss’s nephew. He’s the youngest of the regulars by almost half and his lack of skill outside of welding is evident and happily acknowledged. He wouldn’t be employed here if not for his status as family relation and though Orval in particular likes to tease him for that Cole can tell he doesn’t hold it against him, Orval himself once admitting a man can’t be held liable for the family he’s born to.
He asks to bum a smoke but the old man shakes his head and starts in. “Boss is already in and we don’t need him to start handling that shit himself”—the joke being that his uncle has lost his touch with carpentry, better with the clipboard these days.
It’s a job and Cole doesn’t really care that it’s Saturday, though he looks forward to the time when he will be welding exclusively and a master at it, unionized and career-bound. Ron-Ron finds him things to weld and farms Cole out for MIG welding when he can, but they have finished all opportunities here, an old firehouse they’ve renovated into a duplex. Mostly he’s been carrying greenboard and plasterboard and hauling debris. His uncle was there then not there, zipping off in his light Japanese truck—another instance of hilarity to the crew—from this job to another and then home again, a boss content to tour sites with sleeves rolled up and hands on hips as he argues sports and politics with radio hosts on the small transistor dangling from his belt. He rarely pays much attention to Cole onsite and today’s no different, Cole ducking his boss for fear his cousin Sheldon (Ron-Ron’s son) had complained about money Cole owes. But his uncle says nothing about it, and he imagines Sheldon, supposedly a college student, doesn’t want his father asking where he found three hundred dollars to lend toward Cole’s scuba training. Cole needs the license to meet his goal of attending a commercial diving school. Swimming with fins is the one thing he’s found where his locked knee is a help and not a hindrance. He foresees a future on oceans he’s never yet seen, living on rigs and welding beneath the waters.
After the second time Ron-Ron checks in and escapes, the men take a break. It’s a bright late autumn day and Cole sidles around the back of the building with CD—a slide guitarist and, in his deep night hours, self-styled composer of advertising jingles who would never admit he is bound forever to a career as laborer—to share a spliff. They burn one down while sharing little in speech, Cooter grunting and humming in appreciation of the herb, both lost in their heads and staring at the high brick wall of the cemetery that backs against the firehouse, and at the clacking bamboo stalks that crane over the edge as though to peer at them.
“You don’t need me to tell you,” CD holds up the jay in one hand and points to it with the other like he’s shilling in some commercial, “but this shit here is money if you want it. You get this off your brother? Wait, no. What am I thinking, man.”
Cole shuffles his feet, smiles. CD’s eyes are bloated into pillows like a soft change purse slit down the middle.
“I used to get my stuff off him all the time back in the day,” he says. “Sorry he aint around no more. Bet you’re sick of hearing people telling you that.”
“Only thing I’m sick of is people asking if I know where he’s off to. I don’t.”
“‘Where he’s off to?’” CD pinches two keys together to clamp the roach, head shaking and lips at work on silent words.
“What.”
“What nothing. But I mean where’re you seeing the question here? He tried to rob Mister Greuel is what I hear. Don’t tell me I’m thinking different from what everybody else’s saying already.”
Above them, the bamboo stalks clack and shush in a breeze they cannot feel in the narrow space between the walls. The movement is sudden enough that Cole’s eyes dart up to see if some creature has landed there, something wild come to inspect them, but there’s nothing but greenery. “People talk just to talk,” Cole says.
“This is true. Suit yourself, little man. I wouldn’t want that ton of shit on my shoulders, neither. Must be awful on your momma, though.”
A shoe scuffs pavement around the corner. Cooter pops the smoldering roach into his mouth and winces as he swallows, both of them turning to see Orval beaming, snapping his suspenders over his great belly as he berates CD as a slacker not worth half the bad pay he gets. “Man I thought I’d gone crazy and was seeing things but I just checked with the measure and CD, you got crown molding set where the chair rail’s supposed to be, you useless teahead.”
“Nah, that can not be the case,” CD says, grabbing the tape measure Orval holds out. “Bull-ee-she-ite,” he says again, backing away to Orval’s laughs with head nodding with emphasis.
“Baby, I shit you not. You may commence taking that crap down, I aint cutting again till the room’s ready.”
“Who made you straw boss?”
“Who told you that you’re a carpenter?”
His merry eyes follow CD as he approaches, waiting for the man’s eyes to meet his own, but Cooter thumps him shoulder to shoulder to knock him out of his way, lips working in disbelief. It’s not Cole’s fault; he hands up what CD asks for. He keeps still, listening to the breezy brattle in the bamboo, like the tick of an irregular clock.
“Don’t listen to that yahoo,” Orval says. “He’s just pissed to be knocked back down to quarry buys without your bro around.”
“How’s an old guy like you know about the quarry?”
He picks two smokes from his pack and offers one, lighting it for him. They lean against opposite walls, sharing the same view of red brick not three feet before their faces. “Well James Cole, I guess when I fell off the truck yesterday my people were already talking about it.”
“You think CD’s speaking true?”
“I don’t believe CD himself knows he’s speaking truth or not half the time. I’ve made it this long believing only half of what I see and none of what I hear. Greuel and Arley aint the worst. One time I was so deep into Arley on bad bets, I thought for certain my days were few. But those boys think. They know you can’t pay money back from Hades.”
“Yeah, well. My brother’s in a different business.”
“I know your brother’s business and I’ll tell you it don’t matter, all business is money business. You go your own way, James Cole. The bone truth is Fleece Skaggs took off or he’s under the river. Either way it’s not on you. Remember that.”
He had asked his brother: You ever wonder at how lakers seem like they’re in on one big secret? I walk these woods and wave hello to people and I wonder, What’s the story there? How’d they end up here instead of somewhere else? You got the Akins place, and Boyle Akins went nuts and killed his wife and even all the dogs. Only time I ever seen police lights in Lake Holloway. What happened in that house, why’d he go nuts like that? Or you pass the Kelso’s and there’s the old man with his glass eye out, turning the thing
over in his one hand because the left hand’s gone, and the side of his face looks melted. How did he lose his eye and his hand? What happened to his face? You can’t ask, and no one ever tells you.
Fleece said he didn’t know but he could guess. Then he said he didn’t care. Later he added he’d heard Boyle Akins ran too long on his own crank. But to most of Cole’s questions he said, It’s their story, not mine.
So why did Bethel get shot? Cole asked. That’s your story, isn’t it?
Fleece rolled his eyes over his brother as he would an empty room he was about to exit. His hands played with his butterfly knife, an all-metal Spiderco Spiderfly, flipping it open in the air and then catching it again, creating a fine percussive rhythm with the repetition.
You think too much, pup.
Don’t you want to know? Don’t you care?
I care enough not to go look for any more trouble than what already finds me.
He lost interest in the knife and flipped it shut and tapped it down into his shirt pocket. He kept his hand over the pocket, palm flat like a shield to cover his heart, looking as though he were swearing an oath if not for the fact that Fleece never pledged allegiance to anything but his own desires.
Sure I’d like to know, sometimes. But what’s the knowing worth? Bethel Skaggs was a hard mean skinny little fucker, a real son of a bitch. Look at Momma—you think she got that way on her own? Hell no, that’s my so-called dad still giving it to her every day.
His palm slid from his heart to his thigh, sliding further to the knee and back, uncertain where to go without the knife to trick.
Not sure it even matters much, who exactly did the deed, he said. Knowing who wouldn’t explain why. Could’ve been the last thing his killer wanted to do.
Or he could have loved every second of it, Cole said. He was whistling, after. I remember.
You got the way you feel, and you got what you want people to think you feel, Fleece said.
Now his hands found their purpose, searching his jeans for the one-hitter box. It was in the breast pocket of his jacket, and he fixed a pinch into the pipe. Say he loved every second of it. Say he sits alone and gloats over each detail of that day and how he got away with killing Bethel Skaggs. What’s changed now? Would we be better off with Bethel alive?
Cole thought, I would have grown up with you, but he knew these words were nothing his brother wanted to hear. He watched the tendril of a flat cloud break away and dissipate into empty sky before admitting he didn’t know if they’d be better off with Bethel alive or no.
The thing is this, Fleece said. The only way to know the truth of a story is you got to go through the whole story yourself. You have to be in Bethel’s shoes and you have to be in the shoes of the guy that shot him. It’s the only way to understand for sure, and nobody can do that. The rest is just the law.
What would you do if you did know for sure, asked Cole.
Fleece handed him the one-hitter and the fixed angle of his eyes indicated he was thinking it over. Cole went through the ritual of pinch, plant, and flame and then took tiny hits off the heated brass, the metal hot on his lips and the raw smoke too harsh, scalding a passage down his young throat to a hot blossom in his chest. Fleece could kill the hit in one deep inhalation; Cole nursed it. His brother, amused, yet not going so far as to tease, watched him baby the cylinder until he finished.
What am I going to do, Fleece said then. Kill him back? I’m off the lake, so I’m supposed to kill him back. Maybe I would if I knew the story ended there, but it wouldn’t, the story just changes, and in that one I’m hiding the rest of my life from any sons or brothers the guy had.
It’s just not right to kill somebody like it cost nothing.
We don’t know what it cost him. He might be paying for it to this day.
You sound like you’re defending him, Cole said. The guy who killed your father, you defend him like you’re his lawyer.
I was just a kid then, Fleece said, no more than sixteen, seventeen himself at the time. I want to believe tomorrow might be just a little bit better than today, and even better the day after that, and on and on. And forget what I come from. Shoot. If it came out right I might even go work for the man.
Fleece smiled at the thought. He drew a moist hand over his face, and then drove a frank stare into Cole that implied how well he knew his brother, that he understood his thoughts and wonder because he himself had been through them already as separate items and as a constellation of issues for a much longer time, wrestling, and had reached some equanimity with the matter that Cole could not yet make. You know, lots of times a story doesn’t have an end, it just changes shape, he said. Then abruptly he stood and stepped one pace away, and by doing so finished the conversation right there, wherever they were, wherever they found themselves together that day; Cole remembers only his brother, their words, the blue sky presenting ropes of snaking clouds in perpetual motion.
I’ll catch up with you later, Fleece had said, exchanging the little wooden box in his pocket for the butterfly knife again, the end of which he stabbed unopened against his thigh as he walked away, leaving little Cole holding the corner of yet another question he assumed he could never resolve on his own.
The statement I’ll catch up with you winds through Cole’s head like a carousel of thought tracing the inside of his skull as he drives the interstate north to Pirtle County. The words scroll across the screen of his mind, turn briefly illegible as they follow one another in a circle and turn backward, as AMBULANCE appears on the hood of one so that it can be read in a rearview mirror, then passing clear before his eyes again. I’ll catch up with you. Cole has always seen it the other way around: catching up with Fleece had been practically his life’s work, all he longed for. To catch up on seventeen, to catch up to his brother, whose way of being was like a pattern Cole had hoped to slip into, to be so much like him as to be him. Sometimes he felt—even then, a young boy—hardly more than a ghost, trailing after his brother’s full incarnation, seeking to be conjured into actual flesh by this brother who understood what Cole needed to be. Yet he knew they were inescapably different as well; Cole was Cole and Fleece was Fleece and no matter how much he might wish otherwise, this fact would remain forever the case. A recognition underscored by Cole’s floating eye and stiff leg, his gimp knee a throbbing alarm in changing weather like any hill-bound geezer, while his brother rioted the night, humming guitar lines as he hot-footed that Nova reckless over bad roads, suffering no doubt or dread, to whatever destination he had in mind.
By the time he hits Lake Holloway the sun has retreated enough to make headlights necessary in the woods, and the shine off the black Audi cabriolet parked behind his mother’s car appears to leap at him from the dusk. The sight strikes a great chord of emotions: first, hopeful expectancy—Shady Beck has come to see him. Or she has already turned up Fleece and wants them to know. Then it’s the realization that Shady Beck is alone with his mother, and he doesn’t know for how long, and his hopefulness withers into anxiety. She won’t have news; she wouldn’t know how to turn up any. He imagines Shady describing abandoned seminary rooms and packs of starving dogs, and his brother’s famous car set afire before their eyes looking down from a rooftop, Lyda grousing how Cole cares nothing for family honor.
He expects the heads of both women to turn as he enters the house, their faces craning to greet him over the half-wall partition that divides the kitchen from the front room, the oak-doored cabinets (pine within, handmade by his father, Mack) blurred behind the haze of Lyda’s cigarettes, a radio playing Lite FM hits of the seventies from where it balances atop the clothes washer; he expects to walk in, perhaps, on their laughter at some shared comment he will not quite hear. He finds he is wrong. The house sits silent, the kitchen table empty, one wooden chair pulled back before a tin cup, speckled green like a leaf under siege by aphids. Three lemon cookies sit on a ceramic plate among crumbs. Cole puts one in his mouth and lets the tart fruit sizzle on his tongue. The women are o
ut back, on the slope facing the woods across the creek. Through the kitchen window he sees his mother amid the recounting of some tale, her hands active, tracing forms through the air. Shady stands attentively in gray cotton sweatpants, her name in purple-and-gold high-school lettering visible from the kitchen light in an arc across the rise of her ass—old warmups he recalls eyeing from the risers years before as the girls did wind sprints on the track, Cole braving this same November cold beside Spunk, their behinds clenched on the aluminum, sharing weed and inventing conquests as they watched.
She turns with Lyda at the high squeak of the back door opening. As he smiles hello he pursues her face, inspects her gray eyes, the corners of her mouth, the tilt of her head, for any hint of why she’s there or what she and Lyda have been talking about, but her face reflects only bland and friendly welcome. Opening his mouth feels like plunging face-first into dark water of uncertain depth.