by Kirby Gann
“Hell James Cole, it’s a witch’s tit out here, I was about to give up on you. I been waiting near an hour and was getting to wonder the fuck my own self was up to.”
The hands fall as Cole recognizes Grady Creed. In the muted light his pale face appears yellow, pocked with shadow due to his bad skin. They each reach forward and tap knuckles gently in greeting.
“What up, Grady.”
“Nobody running me to ground, can’t complain. Been thinking of you is all, thought I might check in on Cole Prather, see how he’s doing.”
He hardly knows Grady Creed save for memories of exceptional cruelty and humiliation to a preteen Spunk back in the day. He’s eager to see Shady and doesn’t have the patience to dodge his own impulses.
“Cole Prather’s just fine. Why? Grady I could count on a hand without its thumb how many times I’ve seen you in this yard.”
“Maybe you should be more sociable. Let a man know he’s got friends.”
Cole pinches the coffee cup’s soft Styrofoam between his teeth, feeling the give without biting through. He stares over the lip at Creed, who used to run with Fleece and even touted for his brother before Fleece started working Greuel’s dope channels on his own. The ropey man’s eyelashes are heavy and long and shadowed, the porch light making it appear his eyes are lined with mascara. Creed smiles his best chummy smile, which isn’t his easiest charm, revealing good straight teeth save for one high canine that twists over the tooth beside it.
“Okay I know you aint for small talk any more than Fleece so I’ll get to it. Listen, I came here to tell you one thing: I am on your side. That’s all. In case you wasn’t sure. I been running with Fleece since we was kids and I love him like a brother too.”
Cole doesn’t nod so much as dip his head, turning the cup to pinch down elsewhere on the Styrofoam. He keeps his quiet, hoping to prompt Creed to continue.
“Okay what you need to know, man, it aint right what’s happened, but you want to play it safe. Let it go. I know it’s near impossible to swallow but there I said it. Just, like, don’t go there.”
“What are you talking about?” Cole’s voice sounds hollow in the coffee cup still pinched between his teeth.
Creed steps back and ducks his head; he looks about them in a show of caution, like others might be hidden behind the trees, in the night shadows listening in. He leans closer to Cole and his voice falls into low register, eyes flitting side to side, never resting on Cole’s own—amped, probably, Creed has a taste for rippers.
“Don’t play me like that, Cole, you don’t need to, I got ears like anybody else. You seen his car burned up. It’s hard to swallow but what else you need to know asides that? Fleece is gone. That’s how it is. I’m telling you don’t go after him. You’re the only son your momma’s got left. Understand?”
“You know my mother, Creed?”
“I aint never been with her if that’s what you’re asking. One of the few.”
Cole drops the cup from his mouth and talks to the ground. “What I hear is Fleece ripped off Greuel and awayed with half the Clay County harvest.”
“Believe that if it makes you feel better. It’s a good story. I say he fucked up. And you said Greuel’s name, not me. Remember that.”
“Hell I’ve known Mister Greuel my whole life, I can go ask him.”
“Damn it all and snowballs, Cole, I just told you not to do that. Said it with my mouth!” Creed stomps hard on the hillside; he jabs a finger toward the earth as if his mouth had been speaking from there and he wants to shut it. His face betrays either frustration or rage, and he is about to speak again, his face suddenly inches from Cole’s own, when his skittering eyes slide past Cole’s shoulder and he ducks his head deep again, turns his back on the house and faces the darkness over the lake. “Shit,” he mutters, crossing his arms.
Cole turns to see. In the double window by the door his mother stands between parted curtains. Another face—a curve of forehead and clean shining hair he takes for Shady—peers out from behind her. He grants a casual wave despite the quickening churn Creed has stoked in him, and forces a grin of assurance. When he turns back, he has to search briefly; Creed has moved further from the light.
“And I should trust you why, Grade?”
“You got to trust somebody. Maybe you don’t get how close you are to real trouble. Maybe my life don’t need any more dead friends in it.”
“When did you start to care what happens to me? You used to shoot bottle rockets at me when I was a kid.”
“That was me being a teenager without whatever, without direction. A stage. Think on what I said. This aint a joke, Cole. Your brother’s a ghost.”
Creed stuffs his hands deep into frayed jean pockets and bows his shoulders, a sudden portrait of complete indifference, looking like he has just been rebuffed after asking for a smoke and nothing more as he starts to shuffle down the hill, navigating by hesitations in the dark.
“Hey Grady. How come you know all this? Maybe I have more questions.”
“I don’t know where you plan asking them, I was never even here,” Creed says without a look back. His shadow melts into the deeper shadows, into the thick growth of trees, a presence known only by his hastening steps upsetting layers of dry dead leaves.
Inside the front room Shady stands with palms pressed together, aligned over lips and nose in a sign of prayer, thumbs against her throat. Cole would not have guessed her eyes could stretch so wide, they’ve become a huge part of her face. He tosses his keys atop the old TV and stops, asking what’s wrong—yet knows already, like his body comprehends before his brain the quick fury in his mother’s steps down the hallway, her closet door slung hard against the plaster wall.
“I didn’t say a word, Cole,” Shady says, “it’s like she knew already.”
Her hands break apart and frame her face for an instant before falling, folding again into a knot below her belly. Lyda’s footsteps clamor again once they leave the carpet of her bedroom to clack on the hardwood and into the kitchen.
“Momma,” Cole says, mustering strength into his voice. “Momma I’m on this. I’m doing what I can.”
Lyda stops him with a single palm raised. “I asked you, Cole. I asked and you told me you didn’t know a thing!”
It’s not true and yet he lowers his gaze to the chipped paint of the baseboard, a repulsive feeling of betrayal surging over him even though he knows himself to be guiltless, suddenly ten years old again and ashamed, chastened for some wrong he hardly understood.
“Have to learn my firstborn’s gone for good from a girl who isn’t even family—no insult to you, Shady—the one thing, the one thing I ever asked my boys is to keep it all at home but look here everyone knows more about my own son than I do.”
She’s all smoke and motion within the kitchen’s narrow confines, snapping open her leather purse and rummaging through its many pockets as she moves into the front room, cracking her hip against the partition with an exclamation and then smacking the wall to punish it for being in her way. An empty glass teeters from the ledge and shatters into the kitchen but she ignores it, surging forward and inspecting every surface in the room (the coffee table of TV Guides and People magazines, the particle board credenza where Fleece’s name remains inscribed by a pocket knife in his six-year-old hand); her eyes alight on Cole’s keys atop the Zenith. The word don’t barely escapes his lips even as the keys ring out in the room’s erstwhile silence as she snatches them up and opens the door.
“The man does not own us, James Cole. I’m not afraid of him and I’ll be hellbound to sit here at home while you taddle around with your tail between your legs. Lawrence Greuel owes us, you understand?”
Cole doesn’t understand. He follows her out onto the dead-grass path to his truck, Shady stalling behind, standing uncertain at the open door.
“Ma, you can’t just go over there, you don’t know what you’re getting into, you don’t know those people anymore.”
“Don’t te
ll your mother what she can’t do.”
There’s a pause before she gets the engine going, ramping through rpms as she gasses the thing in neutral. She shouts through the windshield for Cole to watch his feet but does not wait for him before releasing the brake to roll down the hill—Cole falls as he jumps back. He waits there, hands in the cold grass, watching. The engine will die when she tries to find first gear. His battered transmission will frustrate her to quitting before she even makes it off the lake.
The truck lurches as the tires grab the rough macadam; he winces at the grind in the gears. The truck sputters when Lyda forces second through a dip of the road but then she’s climbing again. At the sloped curve behind a row of black alder the tires squeal, and then he can find her in the dark only once she flips the headlights at the main intersection. He listens through the cranky process again, the lurch and grind, and somehow his truck keeps on going. Soon even the engine’s noise is gone.
“I thought you were the only one who could drive that thing,” Shady says from the porch.
Alone in the yard, Cole looks at her, backlit by the foggy light bulb in a near radiant glow around her hair. He realizes he still holds the champed Styrofoam cup and he crushes the thing, throws it aside with the other trash that gathers against the woods, and then lies back into the crunchy cold grass to stare into the night sky.
This could be real. There’s no seeming to happen here, it’s all happening in real time.
“Cole I’m sorry but she saw you talking to that guy, and who was that anyway? Because seeing you two out here it was like she knew everything at once and she turned on me and—”
He stops her speaking with a swipe of his hand through the air between them as he gets to his feet, and tells her to give him her keys, they’ve got to get moving.
As early evening gave way to late, pinkening (would that be a word?) cloud tissues drifted eastward, retaining a sandstone pallor even once the sun had absconded from heaven. That’s how Erly Diddle would describe it in a book if he were ever to write one. Pinkening? Maybe pinkened. Pinked?
The job requires long hours doing nothing. He’s suited for it. He likes the nighttime quiet on Greuel’s farm, and even if his can clenches cold against the Adirondack chair in these winter months he has the thermos of whisky coffee to keep his belly warm. Seventeen years he’s been sitting here. Seventeen years of humid night-sweat summers or boot-stamping come winter, piss breaks over the patio rail peering out over the fields and random statuary and historic farm equipment—the place looks like an absurd miniature golf course—feeling himself royalty gazing upon his works, eyes hungry for any headlights across 6220, Parker’s Highway, his mind trying to focus on the possibilities of confrontations that never come.
His tricked-out Mossberg is the best firearm he has ever owned, as dear to him as a true friend, though Erly has used it only to splatter squirrels and turkeys. Not much call for shootouts these days.
The shotgun sits across the Adirondack’s armrests like the safety bar on a thrill ride, the barrel anchoring his elbow to steady his hands (clothed in fingerless gloves) as he reads. Spillane and MacDonald novels, mostly, but he’ll take whatever mysteries they got at the secondhand shop in Foster, even the occasional Western. He especially likes accounts of the gangster heyday before the war, the stories of Capone, the Barker-Karpis gang, Pretty Boy Floyd (who was nowhere near pretty, Erly has seen pictures). Stoned or sober he reads deep into the night while Greuel and guests curse and joke over cards and business inside. He reads and then drifts into daydream—wonders if daydream is still the word for it when it occurs after dark—and considers how he might invent a better story than many of the authors he has read. If he were to ever recount on paper the things he has seen! In fact he has composed eventful beginnings, harrowing scenes of suspense, chases that lay waste to entire towns; designed foul murders and extortion schemes and methods of blackmail that would land him lauded in Hollywood if he could set them down, lay them out (what would Greuel and his illiterate cronies have to say to Professor Mule—that odious nickname—then?). But then with sunrise comes sleep. When he awakens his mind is a clear slate, empty of the scenarios conceived the night before. On the rare occasion that he can recall a snatch of story or a line of dialogue it never seems as thrilling as it had in the throes of creation. Characters never seem to get their due. Mule conceives a failure to all the murder mysteries he kills time with in that they center on one person only, an investigator who uncovers clues by clever wit and judicious brawn, and in real life no story works like that. In real life a story occurs among legions; to understand the story you have to know all the people it touches too. The disappointment he feels after finishing a novel is that there’s nothing more than a problem solved, and everyone in it except for the main guy exists to tweak the problem one way or another, they’re either bad or good or torn between the two and have no life outside their brief appearance on the page. These authors narrow the scope too far; even a murderer with the coldest blood has his hopes and dreams.
“Your lips move whenever you’re thinking, you know that?” asks Grady Creed, surprising Erly from the doorway. His knees start up, knocking the Mossberg to the porch boards.
“Dammit Creed, you think I don’t know when I’m being looked at? Maybe I’m putting on a show for your entertainment.”
Creed’s lips part but the teeth keep closed, air hissing out between them. A gesture of sardonic amusement emulated from Arley Noe. These young kids are nothing but footnotes to the originals.
“You guys are sure quiet tonight, what’s going on in there, church?”
“Nothing you need to know, Mule.”
“Watch your tone with me, boy. I’m feeling cranky tonight and I got my toolbox full in the truck.”
Creed whistles in alarm as he shuts the door (more firmly than necessary, Erly decides). It has been some time since the boys coming up were impressed and awed by the legend of Professor Mule and his toolbox and what he could do to a punk strapped to a chair. These kids have had it too easy; they’ll have a hard time of it when competition comes to Pirtle County again, as it undoubtedly will, stuff coming up from Mexico in search of a home.
Creed doesn’t matter; he wants to stay well with Arley Blue Note. Mule’s skills are not widely sought, and Greuel’s going to go some time. “‘Once in the racket you’re always in the racket’: Capone!” he tells the statue of some saint Greuel’s son brought home months ago. The blessing hand is broken at the wrist and he thinks it an unlucky sign.
Twenty-two paces cross the front porch—fourteen if he strides. He’s pissing over the rail when night breaks on the blare of a car horn, his spine snapping erect and left hand soaked at the surprise of it. Headlights at the front gate glare down the drive; how could he have missed that? He stuffs himself into his pants without making it through the fly of his boxers, cursing wait a minute as he forgets to zip up. Because of the headlights he can’t see the make or model but by the set of them he guesses it’s a pickup. Misguided teenagers who have their purchase arrangements wrong. He fingers the mouth of the Mossberg absently, squinting into the light. The horn blasts again and he curses back even as he takes the porch steps sideways for his aching hips and tight back, not bothering with the gun. At the booth he hits the intercom even as the horn lets fly three more long blasts in defiance of any courtesy.
The sight of Creed and Spunk in the front window add a level of stress he could do without and under his breath he curses them, too. Patience has fled the world.
“What,” he spits into the small speaker above a thumbnail gone white with his mass leaned into it.
Releasing the button he expects the giggled apologies of drunk sixteen-year-olds. Instead he encounters only empty air, a static punctuated by the jerky chug of an idling, unwell engine. Four-cylinder at that. Four-cylinder pickups are for children and women. He thumbs the button again.
“State your business,” he says, not three inches from the speaker. People resp
ond to formality, the snap of authority.
No answer? He turns back to the silhouettes in the front window, shrugs—it’s not a long walk, Mister Greuel used to complain the farm’s one drawback was how close the home sat to the road. Erly groans, having accepted long ago that he is not a fast man; he has the aching hips and a cumbersome body with which he has been at odds the entirety of his forty-eight years. Plus that reliable Mossy sits on the porch, and he has to retrieve that before starting up the drive to see what there is about the what.
He’s hardly out of the booth when an angry voice hurls profanities at his lazy ways and declares that he is as reliable as useless and put that thing away and where the hell is that man. The fact of her startles him into a full stop, a beat passes before he thinks to lumber into her path, raising his hands, he’s saying Whoa now Lyda hold on there but his girth and the dark and Greuel’s penchant for eccentric lawn decorations connive against him, he smacks his shin against the rusty metal of some ancient wheeled farm implement he never has been able to identify in all those long hours of porch-bound contemplation, and it’s mayday mayday man going down with sharp pain screaming up his leg, and the ground practically jumps into his face. He lifts his head, belly and exposed penis shocked by the cold wet grass, and reaches for her ankle as she passes, noting a chain of small silver seashells tinkling there, but she is small and spry and dances off. Erly Diddle you are not worth a minute of my day, Lyda says. Another fact he accepted long, long before.
Now Brother Gil Ponder strives to defy convention. It’s what he expects of God and what his God expects of him, and so fundamental to his mission that he totes the claim prominently on his business card: Brother Gil Ponder, Pastor Unorthodox, Christ World Emergent Ministries. He sees nothing wrong with gambling, for instance, so long as it’s played in the proper spirit. To the congregants that inquire (it staggers him how many focus on this issue as if it were the ultimate scourge) he counsels that Christ raged over the gaming tables for their being practiced at temple; games in themselves hold no value to the soul’s pilgrimage through this world. As a spiritual risk gambling’s no different from any other worldly endeavor—its sinful nature lies in whether it compromises one’s duty to Christ.