by Kirby Gann
“Arley, do you know where Fleece might be at?”
Noe has turned his back on them already, he’s walking off in a direction from where he had appeared earlier, toward the water he said he disliked, the left arm marking off each step. Cole calls his name again: Arley? He gets no response.
“What, is he deaf?” Shady asks, leaning forward to see. The creeping night has enveloped the man entirely; he’s gone.
A sour look from Cole gets her to sit back again. She brushes her hair from her eyes and wipes her nose with the back of her hand, meaningless gestures that only prove her loss of what to do with herself.
“So where’s the pot?”
“One more stop.”
They leave the gully over heavily pocked road, Cole easing over pits deep enough to scrape the truck’s bottom, and as the land crests again they come upon another stool-bound figure, this one illuminated by electric lamp. He, too, carries a shotgun, the same (she thinks) as the one held by that Lucas guy lost to her memory, but he keeps away from the truck and calls out over the loud generator powering his light, Quarter-bag, yeah? and Cole answers Two yeah and the man tosses the bags through the window. “Supposed to tell you,” he says, stepping closer, “you didn’t get this here. In case anyone asks.”
“Since when did you guys turn away business?”
“I’m told we’re not selling any more to you.”
“What’s Mister Greuel got against me that he wouldn’t tell me first?”
“I never said Mister Greuel,” the man says, backing away and waving them on. “I got no truck with you, James Cole. Just saying what I’s told to. You didn’t buy this here.”
With that he kills the generator and flashes into silhouette, the sudden silence striking Shady as something like a distant explosion; it has a palpable impact. She watches him merge into the general dark, unsure at first if he’s walking toward them or away. Enough time passes without Cole moving off that she notices.
“What is that about?” she asks. At the sound of her voice he begins to pull off, but he does not answer.
Shady regains her footing once they hit fraternity row. Here is a world she recognizes. Here all the trees are dying; bits of trash scatter, strewn in the street from an upturned bin at rest over the wet hood of someone’s Pontiac Fiero. The party has spilled onto the street, and on either side of the truck buckle groups of students reluctant to clear a way for Cole to park. More students sit on the porch roof of the DKE house in front of its billboard Greek letters, their cups held aloft in a kind of triumph—the end of term before the holidays—and already she is seized by the surprising remove she feels from this scene. Only six months out of school and her life has moved on from this, from the hulking boys finished with athletics on the field now committed to lifetimes of fandom, strutting among themselves on thick gusts of obscenities; the house rooms shining open through bare windows; the bass beat of hip-hop clomping in battle against the southern rock chugging from a higher floor. Can six months make such a difference?
They had burned one down on the way and though she doused her eyes with drops she can feel how swollen they’ve become and assumes anyone who cares to look can judge her as brightly lit. She calls Denise on her cell, hoping her friend’s installed in a somewhat quieter place inside, and Denise navigates her through the packed living room and its face-level haze and up the stairs to a door covered by a life-size poster of a voluptuous model in bikini bottoms soaked in the spray of a hose, her dark hair caught in mid-toss, eyes closed and heavy lips pursed in a luxurious expression of release. Someone has written with a Sharpie a single word on a pink post-it stuck to her crotch: aspire. Shady raps her knuckles on the model’s face, hard, and when Denise opens the door pulls a lingering Cole from the poster and into the room.
“James Cole!” a boy shouts. That would be Sheldon, his cousin, who Shady doesn’t know but has heard about from both brothers, in muted asides that seemed to share information she was not privy to, and which indicated bemused indifference. He reclines on the far side of the bed with big, bare feet crossed at the ankles atop a small desk cramped into the corner. A 24-ounce gas-mart cup with the scarlet-and-heather school colors tips precariously on his lap as he shouts immediate introductions to the three other girls in the room, announcing this guy here is his cousin James Cole and can y’all believe that, his cousin’s here on campus tonight? Sheldon says he could have come up with twenty different names he might have met up with at this party but his cousin would not have been one of them, no sir, not one. He jumps to give up a high-five to his cousin, holding Cole’s hand in the air a moment longer than seems necessary.
“People sure get scarce when they owe money. You don’t want to see somebody again, loan them cash,” Sheldon laughs. “You bring mine?”
Shady’s talking already to Denise and Tina and turns at the question. It’s the first she’s heard of the debt. Cole had given up some thirty dollars at the quarry, and she was just beginning to tell her friends the story of that, eager to detail the adventure now that she was safely out of it. Cole’s face draws down and reddens; he’s embarrassed not to have contributed more to their buy and is now caught before her; she’s prepared to be irritated to learn he held out money for his cousin—but Cole confesses he doesn’t have any on him. His truck needs a new clutch.
“You need a new clutch. I need another tattoo to go with this one”—he points to his shoulder bared by the sweatshirt with sleeves torn off, some kind of Norse design Shady can’t imagine wanting forever on her body—“What about my needs?” He flexes both arms like he’s about to attack in a sudden rage—but to see Cole flinch makes him laugh out loud in his cousin’s face. He mocks Cole’s hangdog demeanor, ruffles his hair indelicately, and then pushes him away hard enough to toe the edge between play and real anger.
“Three hundred dollars to help out a brother and this is what I get. We got to work this out, buddy.”
Cole leans his back into the door and turns up his hands. “You know I’m good for it. I didn’t think it would take this long.”
“No good deed goes unpunished, my old man says. Fortunately I am capable of drumming up a little cash on my own.”
Shady takes a closer look at the tattoo. It’s composed of three interlocking horns but the lines vary in thickness, like they were drawn in by magic marker held by a nervous hand. And yet at the sight of Cole’s embarrassment Shady finds herself on the verge of yet another move she will later question, curious as to her own motivations. It’s precisely the kind of behavior her older sisters would chide her for, she’s too unselfish and magnanimous, they say, stressing that even though these are laudable qualities in a person she has to learn not to stretch herself so far, not to obligate herself to such degrees that inevitably lead her to being in great and disappointed need herself (it’s always a mistake to rely on others for help or care). At what point does a helpful, useful person stop being helpful? Where’s the demarcation line between helping enough and helping so much it hurts you?
Sheldon’s one of a dozen campus dealers. He farms out Tina’s Ritalin prescription for top dollar to his fraternity, and Tina says he gets pot and X and a little blow when he can. Never having met him before she still knew Sheldon dealt, because Fleece wouldn’t sell to him; he believed Cole’s cousin would only get busted and was the type who would talk quickly if it promised to get him out of a jam. But reefer can be found from other sources, it’s only the quality that differs. And though she paid good money for her weed this evening, money that wasn’t really even hers but her father’s . . . maybe because of her father’s generosity (she knows he spoils her, continuing her weekly allowance, at her age!) she can be so generous herself, for what does it cost her in the end?
This is how she thinks, seeing the present situation and its ramifications and the motivations of herself and the people who have molded her into the person she is, all at once, even as she acts. The whole routine is exhausting.
“We come bearing gifts,
” she announces, mentally thanking her father and apologizing to him for being so irresponsible with his money as she pulls the two quarter-bags from her purse.
“Shady,” says Cole.
“You can’t pay me cash but you can get me weed? How thoughtful.”
“That’s not mine to give, Sheldon.”
“It’s okay,” Shady says, and thinks: It is. Doing this pleases her. “How much does he owe? I’ll bet you clear near three hundred selling this stuff. It’s fantastic. And I speak from experience.”
Sheldon holds up a bag and shakes it, examining the contents with the air of a jeweler evaluating a precious but unpolished stone. “The key here is can I sell this off before I smoke it all myself,” he says.
“You’ll have to be disciplined, Shel,” from Tina.
Cole retreats to the desk chair by the bed. His reaction to her sudden offer is not quite what she would have expected—although he doesn’t surprise her, either. It’s like he chose one of the ways this could go and he chose wrong (to her mind). He sits with his forehead in his hand, turning away from where Sheldon begins to pack a clay pipe, saying he’ll try it first before he agrees to this arrangement—and that he’s not saying these two bags are enough to erase Cole’s debt—but his cousin does not appear to be listening. Cole is staring at a ceramic plate on which two white pills sit by a small pile of powder and a metal spoon. He draws his finger through the powder absently, touches the finger to his tongue. And as his cousin lights up and the girls begin to talk, Shady believes she can hear what he’s thinking, and she wants to send him a message to break up those dark thoughts—you owe me nothing for this, it’s perfectly okay, this hasn’t cost me a thing—even as she wonders where the impulse to have made the offer at all comes from. More importantly she feels the strong desire to let Cole know she believes in her heart everything is okay, Fleece is out there somewhere and he’s okay, and Cole does not have to worry: the way the world works in the end is with everything coming out all right when you believe you can make it so.
Later she tries to reiterate this line of reasoning as they sit in Cole’s truck in a park halfway between Montreux and home. It’s a remote place at night, abandoned on the bank of the Ohio River, several acres of rutted athletic fields with a single gravel road and lot by the shoreline, separated from a cement plant by swaybacked junk trees lassoed in thick vines. Before them, at the river’s edge, humps of alluvial deadwood shiver with garbage, remnants of recent flooding. A coal barge pushes upstream, unseen but somehow felt, or heard, sifting long roods of water to collapse on the muddy bank, whispering what sounds to her as please . . . please . . . please. She’s not certain why they’ve stopped.
“You should drop the med school idea and go in for business, maybe. You’re half in business already,” Cole says. His wrists are crossed over the steering wheel, two fingers extended onto the edge of the dash; his fingernails scrape softly at the gray plastic there, a sound like the small waves against the graveled bank.
“I’m trying to help you get what you want. You know how to go about these things, I know you do. But maybe you need a little push.”
“I get plenty of pushing.”
“Sheldon, guys like him, they just want some fun. You can make tuition off that and the people you know. Get to that Jersey diving school you talk about.”
“Actually Louisiana’s probably better. They got oil rigs right there in the Gulf, so.” He runs a finger over the dust gathered on the ledge before the gauges. “Listen, I appreciate what you’re doing, don’t get me wrong. What you did.”
“It’s what friends do for one another.”
“I’m going to pay you back,” he says, repeating it over her as she tells him he doesn’t have to. After the pause, she changes the subject.
“How long will it take to come up with the money for a diving school?”
Cole shrugs with a distinct indifference she has learned to identify as a defensive pose, his way of indicating what he doesn’t want to think about.
“There’s the issue of them saying they won’t sell to me anymore.”
“The quarry isn’t the only place to make a buy. The guy even said it wasn’t Mister Greuel who told him to tell you. What about Spunk?”
Cole guffaws, snorts it back. “I’m not so desperate to put myself in the position of imminent arrest, now.”
Shady’s hands move to the drawstrings of her sweatpants. She extends the strings to full length, untying the bow and letting them fall again. She starts a burl knot into the end of one and speaks to it: “You’re the careful type. You’ll do just fine. You don’t want to live on the lake forever, do you?”
She peers out at the dark water, at a white form lifting near the bank. At first she doesn’t know what to make of it, thinking the white came from the top furl of a wave, but it’s too high to be of the river. A bird of some kind, then; a blanket. Then she realizes it’s only a plastic bag caught in the branches of a fallen tree. The dull ordinariness of that—garbage on the riverbank, as common as bird shit on a car—returns her eyes to her lap. She wishes something extraordinary would happen to her, if only she could decide on what kind of extraordinary it should be.
“Fleece got off the lake,” Cole says.
“Do you think Greuel would do something to him?”
“Fleece bolted and they’re pissed. That’s why they won’t sell to me at the quarry. One more thing my brother has left me to sort out. Kind of puts a damper on your plans for financing my education.”
“That’s not what your mama thinks.”
“Lyda doesn’t think so much as free-associate, know what I mean? If she had her way I’d have already been over at Greuel’s with a shotgun and a noose.”
“You wouldn’t do that.”
“A laker would.”
Lakers. Lake Holloway isn’t three miles from Laurel Estates where she grew up. She thinks it strange to have grown up in the county, a place to her so wide open and peaceful with its farms and traffic slowed by tractors, the Episcopal church she grew up in and the youth group activities in which she took part; sleepovers and riding lessons and athletic camps every summer—that was Pirtle County to her, that is her home, it’s where she comes from. She used to bristle any time she heard her mother and friends gossiping over the latest newsworthy arrest, always some laker running riot where he wasn’t supposed to be, and her mother might say the place should be burned so that it could start over, or else bought out and its inhabitants evicted to somewhere else.... Shady would tell her mother, You don’t get to choose where you’re born, just because you live on the lake doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, and her mother would smile with her masterful condescension and tell her daughter of course she might be right, you can believe anything if you want to hard enough.
“What are you thinking?” she asks.
His response is not quite laughter, but more a flurry of rapid exhalations through his nostrils. He tilts his head toward the riverbank, says, “Speaking honest, right now I’m just wondering where the plastic sheet on that tree there came from.”
Her eyes follow his to the white sheet, or bag (she’s unsure), modulating its shape on the river breeze. She twines a drawstring tight over her finger as she laughs: “Boy, you are high.”
“I’m not so bad, not after Tina’s Ritalin. You’re high.”
Her laughter comes harder now, full from her belly. “I am high, so. What time is it? Why did you bring me down here, anyway?”
Cole studies his hands on the steering wheel; she detects tremors in his fingers. As though he realized her noticing, he moves his hands and clutches the steering wheel as if they’re driving 100 miles an hour over gully roads.
“I guess I was kind of thinking we might make out or something.”
“‘Or something?’ That old cement factory got you feeling all romantic?”
“Well now, there’s the river. . . .”
Her laughter is loud and she knows this isn’t the best response b
ut she’s feeling good, she’s comfortable around Cole, he understands how awkward the moment is and so she just lets go, has her laugh. Still she’s aware he’s waiting until the fit subsides, and he isn’t joining in; he is staring through the windshield at the river again. Suddenly she touches his arm.
“Oh honey, I’m sorry. You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Would it be so fucking bad? Why are you hanging around me so much if you’re not interested?”
“Well.”
“Well what?”
“Well you have to admit the whole idea is kind of weird.”
And it is, it is weird. She gave her virginity to his brother. She won’t deny she likes Cole, though she’s still uncertain how close she wants to be with him. Why can’t she come out and say this as clearly as she feels it?
The bag or sheet or whatever it is out there starts to flutter and quake, shuddering on spasms of wind. It folds over the branches of the dead tree as though presenting a neat bow, a diver moving into pike position, and its underside catches the air and the entire sheet lifts with a loud complaint. Sailing above the water it turns silent and rises, flexing and expanding, and then stills like a kite capable of choosing its direction, until another gust whips the thing from sight. Cole starts the truck and throws it into reverse.
“Hey,” Shady says, softly.
“I should get you home before it gets too weird in here. Fleece probably wouldn’t approve anyway, would he.”