Ghosting

by Kirby Gann

  “Hell, yeah,” she murmurs, and closes her eyes. Then she appears almost about to ask them when they got there.

  Instead, she stands up again, and, very slowly, starts to sway down the hallway toward her bedroom, her left hand raising a slow-motion goodbye until it stills upright, held stupidly in the air.

  “You two get out awhile,” she says. “Whyn’t you stay out late or something? I might have my suitor over and I won’t want to share the TV or worry about the noise.”

  His mother glides on into her room without waiting for an answer. When Cole looks to Shady, he finds her eyes in an expression mixed of wonder and perplexed appeal. He can see she will not speak one more word in this house tonight. With a tilt of his head he indicates the front door. Shady does not hesitate—her body fairly leaps from its chair and she is out before Cole can finish a final pull from his cold cup.

  She’s at odds with herself, with the whole situation. She’s not even certain she understands her own motivations. I am a girl at odds with my self and my situation, she thinks. Yes indeedy. Did she have an honest reason for looking up Cole at home tonight? And has she not been hoping to discover a little of Fleece in his younger brother? Or even, tonight—miraculously—Fleece himself?

  She doesn’t question what Cole wants from her. Shady digs being around boys a little harder, a little wilder, than the boys she knew from school in Sewanee. The lives in Lake Holloway seem more real, more authentic, than the prudent and secure life planned for her by her loving pediatrician/gentleman-farmer dad and self-anointed Super Mom. And yet after an hour alone with Lyda, she’s not certain how real she wants life to be. Harsh reality, she thinks: okay for short visits.

  On the road they lurch and toss due to a tricky clutch in Cole’s truck until they hit a flat stretch and he doesn’t have to change gears for a spell. With the smoother ride she feels a relative calm settle over her. It’s nice to have some quiet after Lyda. It’s nice to have a moment to think. One of the things she likes about this boy is the calm around him, a quiet in reserve, a hint of reflection she might describe to girlfriends as brooding to make him sound more impressive. His brother had been similar but from Fleece she felt it more like indifference; part of her teenage-girl attraction to Fleece had sprung from his air of unconcern, his inscrutable code, his heedlessness toward what anyone thought of him—like nectar on a sweet tooth to a fifteen-year-old Shady Beck. She thinks of herself as much more mature nowadays.

  “I have questions,” she says.

  Cole’s response could be counted, possibly, as a nod; he inclines his head, and his chin—his jawline makes him almost handsome, from certain angles—closes over his throat as though he’s trying to swallow something difficult.

  “Bethel Skaggs. That’s Fleece’s father, am I right?”

  “So I hear.”

  “And she’s saying Mister Greuel . . . ?”

  He prefaces the story with a wince, saying he doesn’t know whether she should believe his mother or whether this was one of those stories they could only talk around without getting to the truth of the matter, but here is what he remembers, and he had been such a little kid then. And then she learns about Bethel Skaggs being shot down in the same back yard she had been standing in with Lyda just hours before. Which she finds impossible to get her head around—Cole a child witnessing murder in his own back yard among a crowd doing nothing to stop it. And what’s truly weird is that’s the part of the story that nearly makes sense to her. The rest sounds like a story from long ago, before cars or telephones or maybe even jurisprudence, in another country or on the frontier, maybe. Or in the Bible. So Cole instructs her in a bizarre matter-of-fact tone on how money and rendered service can offset crimes of passion around the lake, if a man’s willing to own up to what he’s done. He sounds unsurprised but she can see him trying to make sense of the concept himself, describing the day Arley Noe arrived on Lake Holloway months after Bethel’s death. They’d nicknamed him Blue Note for the blue tinge of his skin, some kind of blood disorder. His body moved with the stiff precision of those paper dolls with hinges for joints. He showed up and announced he was going to be Fleece’s new friend. Cole told of how after that day his brother had a job of sorts running gopher around Greuel’s bookie offices, an innocent lookout for the card games and free-flow liquor Greuel and Noe hosted in a bunker-like shack off the river. Later he drove horse trailers (once old enough) from one owner to another and assisted in breeding sessions. Then he was keeping the workers at those horse farms sedated and happy, and the kids at school happy too—even a few of the teachers, according to Fleece—but Shady already knew this part, she’d lived through it.

  “I had no idea how profoundly fucked up your family really is,” Shady tells the windshield.

  He shrugs, keeps his eyes on the road. He appears to hold his breath as if about to speak and she feels sad for him, sorry for him. She feels blunted and dulled and obligated to help—it’s her nature, a part of her she likes and dislikes at once, and which often gets her into jams that often require entire personal-eras of concentration, composure, and headaches to extricate herself from. Such as the time she tried to be friendly with a younger teammate struggling to find her place on the track team, only to be the last to discover that the girl was obsessed with her to the point of hospitalization. Or the time she recognized her biology professor’s special encouragements, an interest she parlayed into better lab times and research projects, only to learn she couldn’t string along a tenured professor the way one strung along boys her age. She had only been seeking advantage in her already pre-advantaged life; as one of her older sisters put it to her, she has trouble understanding consequences if the consequence isn’t square in her face at the time. Hence her large credit card debt, for example.

  Her difficulties seem so strangely separate from those she’s observed with Lyda’s boys. Here on the road beside Cole, headed nowhere specific as far as she knows, she thinks on his brother, whom she did once love, desperately, that kind of love possible only a girl sixteen-going-on-seventeen can give to a boy already out of high school. With Fleece it had always been adventure, many times no further than the confines of a single hotel room as he introduced her to rush and X and acid, and there had always been a great deal of laughter, not all of it encouraged by drugs. But he was never someone she could talk to whenever she felt sad, or lost, or lonely (which is, admittedly, often); whenever she tried to she could see the irritation draw over his face as he struggled and failed to understand, advising in each instance that she shouldn’t waste her time worrying over whatever issue currently worried her. He was the kind of boyfriend that a girl would be proud to go to prom with, because not only was he handsome and older, but he pissed off her father and got her mother drinking double martinis. And then he was the kind who would conspire to never make the actual dance—unavoidable obstacles ensued, missed connections. Early on she thought she understood him; over time she thought she could understand him, if he would help her. By the end, however, she had become a person who tried his patience. He never needed her until the moment he needed her.

  She has no idea where they are going. They seem to be exploring Pirtle County by headlight.

  “I figured we could run by the quarry,” Cole says. “Isn’t that why you came to the house? You wanted me to hook you up?”

  “That is so not the case, James Cole. I can’t believe you would even think that, I came to see you. I was around, thought I’d come to see you.”

  He grins, his chin tucked down again. Was she right to have said this? A pang of guilt wings through her belly—he was mostly right and, worse, he recognized as much. It’s true she had been hoping to bring some pot to a party off-campus in Montreux, where a couple of high-school girlfriends were going before they started their Christmas break.

  “I came to see you,” she repeats, and again feels at odds with why she does the things she does, says the things she says—she’s unsure how much of a door she wants to open here.<
br />
  “You got money? I’m not sure how much the quarry costs now.”

  “Yes, I have money,” Shady replies. This she can usually supply, and without guilt.

  Off Parker Highway they follow a dual-track road through fields of grass and horseweed she recalls as thick with alfalfa and soybeans before she left for freshman year at Sewanee. They roll into the settling dust of another vehicle far enough ahead that the brake lights appear like sudden brush fires, Shady gone silent and listening to the crunch of the tires, radio off as they climb a steady incline and then down again. Over the crest the land stretches for bare acres on either side save for random plates of limestone and feeble stands of buckshot trees, until the wooded break that shields the interstate on the other side. The moon is up, looming huge over limestone cliffs, but the fallen sun isn’t entirely finished and the sky scans in grades of blue, the quarry water a warm green that contradicts the December chill. Cole slows to a stop at the base of a white weather-beaten tree; she doesn’t see the man sitting atop a stool there until Cole rolls down his window.

  The vision of him strikes her as important as a marker, placed at the gateway to some progressing revelation she had not known they sought. He appears as sudden and as unexpected as in a dream: one hand over the heel of a choked shotgun, the other tapping a walkie-talkie against a coveralled thigh. His face looks familiar—a face from high school or even earlier maybe, someone she would have forgotten until coming across his picture in a yearbook, remembering then a certain walk in school hallways, something offensive he might have yelled to the girls. Yet he looks too old to have attended school with her, with dark lines as prominent as scars weeping from his eyes and bracketing his mouth. He peers into the truck and Cole leans back to give a view.

  “Shady Beck in the quarry with little Prather? Honey you can’t get enough of them laker boys, can ye? What’s your daddy say to that?”

  “We need two quarters, Lucas,” Cole says. “Can you help us out?”

  “How you doing tonight, sugar?”

  Shady waves hello as she speaks it, but she cannot place the name Lucas or the face. That he recognizes her elicits a chagrin she would not have expected. She would have preferred to get through this anonymously, feeling something like a first-time john cruising hookers and hearing one call him by name, and he turns to recognize a girl he had a crush on in fourth grade (this story comes from her father, Shady listening in on a party downstairs years ago).... She sinks back into the corner of her seat against the door.

  “Two quarters,” Cole says again. “And maybe a dime. How much is that here?”

  “All we gots is quarters tonight. Hundred per.”

  Cole balks at the price and says so.

  “Steep, aint it. We had to reach deep to get stuff here. You prolly heard. It is good, though, shit you not.”

  Cole leans over to confer with Shady and they try to quickly figure how much money they have between them; a bit more than two hundred dollars, nearly all of it hers.

  “You can’t break a bag for us?”

  Lucas taps the bottom of his walkie-talkie on the roof. “Prather, you know this here aint no opportunity to haggle. Hundred per or I send you back out the same rut road you come in on.”

  “We’re just trying to help out some friends of mine,” Shady says, offended that this Lucas-Whoever might send them away with nothing.

  “Find yourself friends who give money up front, then.”

  Cole tells him they’ll take the two quarters. Lucas raps the cab roof with his knuckles in agreement with the deal done.

  “Now that’s all I’m talking about, easy-sleazy. You got to show me you got the money, though. You got it? You know where to go?”

  Cole nods as Shady holds up the folded bills. Lucas tells her that’s not how to do it, she needs to show the actual bills so he sees exactly how much is there but he’ll let it go tonight since he knows them and always thought she was something to see in her track shorts back in the day. Again she tries to place him and for the life of her cannot. Maybe it’s the shotgun, which she notes he keeps angled to the ground, hand light on the stock as he speaks into his radio, which is rather friendly of him to do. He waves them on.

  They descend almost level with the water and the high quarry walls blot out the moon, Cole’s headlights giving the only light down here. They pass stacks of junked cars in a makeshift lot, hood-dented and fender-smashed and windowless, forlorn frames set at haphazard angles she can imagine falling over without warning, and as she thinks this they pass a stack where exactly such had happened, the cars in a distended row on their sides and with wheels up. Past here the road splits. Cole stops.

  “Does that lead down to the water?” she asks.

  He nods, indicates the money. “Count two hundred from that.”

  “Two hundred’s all there is.”

  “No, I put some in, you don’t need to front it all.”

  He watches out his window as she counts the money out in twenties and tens, and he doesn’t look at her when she places the cash in his hand, and he doesn’t look as he folds the cash and slips it under his right thigh. They wait with the engine gently rocking, long enough that the fan kicks on. Cole cuts his lights as well, in case they are causing a delay. He doesn’t laugh when Shady mentions in a playful high voice how creepy the whole scene is, like in a movie where she would expect the two of them to be killed at any moment now. She’s about to admit she has never seen an actual quarry before, how it’s weird to think a quarry is one of those things you just know what it is. “Down there’s where I got my scuba license,” he tells her. “They’ve got an old police car at the bottom, you have to dive down and bring things up out of it, it’s weird, swimming in all that deep water and not a living thing to see.” He quiets at the hint of a shadow emerging from the deeper shadows. A quiver slithers up the inside of her chest at the surprise of it. Her mother would be truly appalled to see her here. So would her two older sisters. Their disapproval helps legitimize the entire enterprise, her mother and sisters and their unknowing dismay.

  He’s a slow walker, this shadow, moving with a rigid, straight-shouldered stride, the left arm snapping at the elbow across the belly in precise rhythm with each step as though the arm works as a kind of metronome. Reaching them, he sets his hands over the threshold of the open window, clenching the door with long burled fingers as he positions himself with his back remaining inordinately erect, keeping his eyes high enough to look down into the cab while keeping in view the hands of both passengers. A large horseshoe ring flashes brightly off the finger of his right hand in the dark; he says nothing, his face relaxed, mouth at rest.

  “Well now,” Cole speaks with a forced heartiness Shady has never seen from him before, “Arley Noe. I wouldn’t have expected you down here. Kind of slumming, aren’t you?”

  If Noe recognizes Cole she cannot detect it in his face. The hands squeeze and relax, squeeze again as though the door helps him with his balance. He shifts his weight from foot to foot, casual and smooth and serene.

  “James . . . Cole . . . Prather.” The name rolls in his lipless mouth like he’s trying the sound of it for the first time. His voice hints at faint disappointment. “Not one I expect to find quarry diving of a Saturday night.”

  “I’m light. Got a friend in need here, looking for some smiles.”

  A grunt pulls from Noe’s throat like a pop of air, a strange tic in his breathing. His lean face sinks pitted over concave cheekbones—emphasized in the frame of the window—his white eyebrows so thin on the orbital ridge as to be invisible, Shady can make out the individual hairs, and his black eyes are set deep with grainy circles of heavy blue beneath them. His skin radiates a pale teal tinge, a pallor accentuated by the dashboard light.

  Noe turns his head and brings up something from deep in his chest and spits.

  “I know your friend. That there’s Shady Beck out buying wicked weed with James Cole Prather. How about that. I wake up thinking there’s no
t one more thing in this world to surprise me and I end up surprised near ever-day still. How you doing there Miss Shady?”

  She sits pressed entirely against her door, lips parted, consciously willing her eyes not to saucer in fearful freak-out—why do all these men know her name? She feels like a little girl caught trying to pass off as an adult, her hands clutched into a ball between her knees, shoulders bowed even as she reminds herself there’s no reason to be afraid, people come to buy in this quarry all the time.

  “I said how you doing there Miss Shady Beck. Lovely night out, wouldn’t you say.”

  “It sure is pretty,” she says, except the words feel lost spinning in her throat.

  “Going to get real cold soon. Hope I’m not down here taking money then. Can give a man my age the bad aches, that kind of cold around this water.”

  “You have to check up on your crew,” Cole offers.

  “We got difficulties, you could say. Need three men here, I got only two. You probably heard about that.”

  “You could’ve got Spunk out here to handle for you.”

  Arley Noe’s features fall apart and then reassemble themselves slowly, lines and planes of flesh contracting into the semblance of a laugh, though there would be no way to recognize that if she couldn’t hear the dry hissing in his throat. He diddles his wretched fingers on the roof, pushes back from the window to hawk again, then plunges his face deep into the cab, close enough that Cole pulls back to keep their faces from colliding.

  “Well now,” Noe says. “I wouldn’t say times are as desperate as all that. I’m looking for two hundred from you. Or you kids come down just to say hello?”

  Cole scoops the money from beneath his thigh and displays it, the bill three-folded in a narrow rectangle, and the man’s head withdraws from the window as if drawn by a pulley. His hand swoops down from above like a raptor bird snatching small prey from the ground and into the air without a beat of its wings. He steps back and counts the money in the same hand, the other plunged deep in a coat pocket. It’s enough to curdle anxious doubt in her belly, that hand in that pocket, and she breathes great relief when Noe pulls out a radio like the man before and speaks into it, too quiet to hear over the engine chug. Noe waves them on. Cole hits his lights again and shifts into first and then blurts the simple question: