by Kirby Gann
Where the creek bends behind his mother’s house there lies a sinkhole pool, limited in its width but deep enough that the brothers never did locate its bottom. Not even in the times of hard drought when the creek shrank to a trickle—dried to flat warm limestone where brilliantly striped skinks of emerald and ruby flashed away at the boys’ approach—and left exposed a shallow cave secreted beneath the banks, a hovel of clay and slime that stank in the heat. No matter how dry the season this sinkhole remained brim-full with a slow surface whirl spinning dry leaves, bits of dead grass strewn by the mower, specks of dust, and the insects that lived and died there. Into the water the boys would discard any object they could do without and that fired their curiosity: a bird’s stale carcass, model airplanes, soda cans, several bonfires’ worth of oak and linden branches,—one time even Cole’s old tricycle, which he did not believe would fit and so Fleece had to prove him wrong, wrestling the bike down the pool’s gullet until it plunged the rest of the way on its own. The brothers would sit and watch the bird, the airplane, the stick turn slowly on the water until it sank from the surface and disappeared just as if sucked down an enormous drain. Then they would sprint over the knob to the lake and splash about in the shallows certain the object would reappear, for they sensed that somewhere the pool must follow an underground passage that opened into the floor of the lake—they didn’t know then that Holloway had been manmade. Nothing ever came back. Cole imagined the whirlpool must sink straight to the deep heart of the earth, beyond the reach of any light, and he pictures those objects still descending there over the years, still spinning, silent in that dark, obscure quiet found only in deep water, all the abandoned toys and dead animals (thready skeletons now) circling low in that pool to nowhere. A mysterious place where time had not so much ended as come to a standstill. Sometimes they joked and wondered at what some explorer might make of them one distant future day when all of Lake Holloway was gone and the whirlpool had finally dried up and everything they had left there could be rediscovered. But in his secret self Cole believed the water would stay deep and dark forever, the detritus of empty summer days, these bits of their childhood selves, preserved yet hidden away for eternity.
It takes time to get used to what they have him doing; takes even longer to get used to how little there is, in reality, for him to do. Lots of down time in the mule business. Creed staked him for sales in town, first to CD Cooter, an employee of his uncle’s, then to Cooter’s friends. Dealing didn’t eat up the hours either. Over weeks Cole learns a new respect for dim Spunk Greuel because Spunk knows already how to do what Cole’s just beginning to learn. Car rentals—Cole had never rented a car or room before. Navigating Kentucky’s secondary and tertiary routes and figuring where these bypassed the interstates; identifying state patrols’ preferred speed traps and the location of their station outposts. He works sober yet drives as though stoned to the gills, the night late, a cop trailing close in the rearview: Cole pins his hands at ten and two on the steering wheel, speed pegged at five miles faster than the limit, eyes measuring the boundary lines.
Primarily he’s nothing more than a delivery boy. He rarely sees what he carries but is savvy enough to understand it’s not weed. The secondary routes drag out the drives. His first run had him coupled with Spunk in a VW Rabbit picked up from Rent-a-Wreck with a Bette Midler cassette stuck halfway in the stereo and magnetic tape spilling out its mouth. Every few miles Spunk said he was hungry and they would pull over for a candy bar or chips. Twenty minutes later the two were pulling over again for sixty-ounce sodas; another half-hour and it was Spunk complaining he had to piss. “Why don’t you drive, then?” asked Cole. “You can pull over any time you want.”
Spunk cackled and bent to his straw to slurp among the ice left in his huge “souvenir cup.” He shook his head and looked out his window, formed a pistol out of his hand and fired at cows along the road. “It don’t work that way, see. I’m the face man. You, on the other hand, are the driver. You’re the muscle.”
Cole glanced over his mirrors, certain every car behind them had to be an unmarked state trooper. He was starting to think he should cut his hair and shave daily and work toward a generally more upright appearance that wouldn’t hint at his being a roadhound skeech.
“We’re fucked,” he murmured, wondering what sort of muscle they might meet at the other end of delivery. Suddenly Spunk’s enthusiasm for the martial arts began to seem less foolish.
The hatchback carried twelve sealed cardboard boxes that Grady Creed, gun tucked visibly at the front of his waistband, had instructed them not to open or else he would hear about it. The boxes were not labeled. All Cole knew was that they were to ask for a man named Cherokee when they got to where they were going, some place kept secret in Spunk’s head.
They headed south and Spunk turned him at 357, then 224, and Cole was lost among hills and cows until they hit a field topped by an aluminum hangar announcing The World’s Biggest Open-Air Flea Market in the South. The Rabbit ambled in gravel dust kicked up behind a pickup until Spunk motioned him toward a double-wide stall festooned with advertising insignia from the early century, Coca-Cola and Marlboro and German beers Cole had never heard of. Long tables sported bric-a-brac glasses and ceramics, iron skillets shining oiled; beneath the tables rows of cardboard boxes lay open. From the angle of the hill Cole could not see what was inside them.
Spunk, serious now, told him to get out but stay by the car. He tossed his soda cup to the floorboard and waved half-heartedly up the rise to a wiry rawboned man with long and sparse blond hair combed back and gleaming damp, a steel cane leaned against his knee. The man looked like he could be related to Spunk, perhaps a vision of Spunk ten very hard years into his future, shirtless and pink-skinned save for the green eagle’s wings tattooed the width of his chest shoulder to shoulder.
Cole stood by his door and crossed his arms and tried to look the type of guy nobody would find reason to fuck with. A curious, straggling horde of shoppers began to take notice of the car, stopping to inspect the canted Rabbit as if it, too, might be had for a bargain, or maybe pieced apart and purchased item by item, even as another crowd gathered around the stall, some slack-faced and perusing the stall’s goods, others seemingly listening in on the conversation Spunk was holding with his future self, a debate that appeared somewhat heated although Cole could not hear much of it. Something about time, whose was worth the most.
“Can’t you identify a man busy at his work?” the man said as he rose heavily on his cane.
“I got a boss he says you make the time,” from Spunk.
“And your boss, who’s that now?”
“You want me to say his name out loud right here?”
“Word is he aint long for this world,” angling the cane forward, looking over it as if it were not already his.
“Word’s wrong,” Spunk said. “Wouldn’t make a difference for you anyways,” but already the skinny man was limping toward Cole and the car.
“If you want I can do better on that,” he told a woman speculating over a skillet as he gimped down the incline to where Cole stood sweating in the not-quite-spring’s clammy air, his eyes on a number of large and meaty men who seemed to have congealed from the general crowd for the sole purpose of suggestive menace. “Open up that car and let me see what you brought.”
“Your name is Cherokee?” Cole situated himself between the man and the hatchback; Spunk remained up beside the stall, watching.
“What, you need to see an ID?”
“I guess I expected somebody different,” Cole said.
“Bet you did. Not every Indian wears buckskin and sells blankets, you know.”
“You don’t look real Cherokee-like to me, that’s all.”
“Boy if ever-body who says they got Cherokee blood really had it then there must’ve never been no Trail of Tears. My mamaw was full Cherokee. I got Norway blood from my old man’s side.” Cherokee spun back at Spunk, thumb cocked over his shoulder, his back tatto
oed with the same pair of wings. “I don’t care for people with eyes like that. You don’t know where to look. Makes you nervous whether you’re a criminal or not.” He returned to Cole and the matter at hand as though Cole could not have heard him speak. “Open up that hatchback and let me see them boxes and stop stereotyping my people. It’s a form of exploitation.”
Cole checked Spunk for a signal, some advisory gesture—but Spunk was no longer paying attention, holding two pint glass like binoculars over his eyes, speaking to a girl with no more clothes on than she could mop a floor with.
“Here?” he asked, nodding at the public nature of their location.
“You under the impression I got me a receiving dock?”
Cole opened the hatch and stepped back. Cherokee pulled out a penknife and unsealed the nearest box, removed the heavy paper packaging at its top, and uncovered a stack of what looked like videotapes—until he lifted one out and Cole saw how thin the box was. Movie titles on the covers. Cherokee shrugged and told him to bring them on up. To Spunk he shouted, “What can I do with a bunch of DVDs? Nary a body out here can play these things.”
“You’ll get players, they just haven’t fallen off the truck yet,” Spunk said, prompting laughter from the little girl looking through those tall glasses herself. Once Cherokee met him the two slapped hands, Cherokee nodding toward an old Advo Gold Medal coffee tin beneath his foldout chair. Cole followed him up carrying three of the boxes.
“Take that coffee on home and send your daddy my best regards. But get that wall-eyed motherfucker out of my sight before I scalp him one,” Cherokee said, grinning madly and waving his cane in the air above Cole like an ax.
Soon he is driving on his own. Never has he seen so much of Kentucky; he’s never been farther than two counties from Pirtle, and this, the traveling—exploration of lands unknown, yet close enough to fill him with sentimental feelings of home—is the part he likes best. That and driving so many different vehicles: he rents GMC passenger vans, Saturn wagons, and Toyota 4Runners that Professor Mule encouraged him to use since the company had opened a plant in Georgetown and thus, to Mule’s reasoning, driving Toyotas in any fashion was good for the commonwealth.
Creed stakes him again with weed and crank for Sheldon at the college. Sheldon tells him business is excellent, but the money passes through Cole’s hands and back to Creed like the bills are nothing more than secret messages the messenger is not allowed to open.
Sometimes his deliveries require cash in hand and some times they do not. Sometimes he knows what he’s carrying and other times he does not. Often he makes no human contact at all, crossing the entire state to Prestonburg or Pikeville and abandoning the rental in an unpaved lot behind a dry cleaners or an antique store, after which he walks six retail doors south, finds a similar minivan waiting, and drives away north. He takes interstates when not hauling but sticks to secondaries and rural highways when laden, a state map quickly tearing along the fold lines as he maneuvers routes, hours on hours lost in his head, wrestling between the urge to gauge the precise degree of paranoia he should permit himself and trying not to speculate how many years in prison the haul might net him. He wonders if his brother ever rented these same vans, if his hands were placed on the wheel precisely where Fleece had held his, and he wonders what went through his brother’s mind alone on these long drives—a woman? His seminary dogs? Did he ever think of Cole and their mother? Or was he always planning, figuring a strategy for what he would do one day that would cut him from every link to the life he had lived? Cole tries to re-imagine talks they had shared but in truth they had never talked much about more than whatever matter was at hand. After a time his mind simply blanks: he admires the deep wooded mountains, speculates how far those woods go on, or how far they reached before humanity cut them up. He tries to imagine Fleece hidden in those backwood hollers, the strip-malled towns, where it’s like every other yard has the Ten Commandments posted over a tiny American flag and everyone’s struggling with weight. His brother is not here. The land’s worth the marveling but Cole can see it only as land to escape from, not to.
His drives take him past lonesome cabins, or else expansive mansions crowning hills, and the intermittent thoroughbred farms. Cattle, winter-fallow fields. At these times he thinks his brother stupid for ever wanting away, that Cole himself is stupid to dream of a future far elsewhere, sunken beneath heavy ocean and shoveling current, trapped off-land nine months a year. The sight of horses brings him both relief at being past their four a.m. mornings and stinking stalls, the sticky vitamin solution he shot down the foals’ gullets with a syringe (the smell always made him think of hot urine), but also a nostalgia for the feeling of a horse barn, the animals’ earthy sounds echoing off the brick floors, the ridiculous curiosities a young foal could get itself into. Tools secured neatly in place on the walls, hoses rolled into tight loops. And then the turning out, walking pairs by hand into the fields, banks of mist over the grass. The sight of the fields’ expanse to the tree line, or the land’s sweep to the river at Greuel’s farm, always evoked a poignant feeling he never quite understood—as though the land was his and he had been a part of it for years and years.
But the land always belonged to someone else. It’s his single insight into what his brother might have been thinking: none of this was his own; none of it ever would be so long as he stayed.
Cole drives and thinks of Fleece and debates his obligations, as his brother. What he owes Lyda as a son. Fleece would say Cole owes nothing to his name, that if he had any sense at all he would get on to what he wants to do. He thinks of that time on the seminary rooftop talking about blank headstones in the cemetery, Fleece proclaiming he wanted it like that: Once I’m gone it’ll be like I was never even here. Yet if the situation were reversed, Cole knows without hint of doubt, his brother would wreak havoc until the world had been set as straight as he could make it again.
A sudden, powerful, strange love for his brother fills him, a deep connection beyond shared blood, a fastening that breaches the supernatural. So he’s gone now but to Cole Fleece hasn’t disappeared, he’s everywhere, each step Cole takes is one his brother stepped before him. Maybe his awareness of this means Fleece did get away; if he were dead then Cole would know this somehow, in his gut—wouldn’t he? He would have felt some shift in the world. It’s enough to convince him that he is doing exactly as he should.
Mostly, though, on these drives Cole thinks of Shady Beck.
She had become scarce. The night Cole pledged himself to Mister Greuel Shady had stabbed another scare through him, scratching a fingernail across the storm screen of his bedroom window not an hour after he had put his mother to bed. He had been lying awake at the end of a night that had felt endless already, not knowing what he had got himself into or how he would get out of it, wondering too what Creed or Noe thought of him now, if they went to sleep easy as you please with thoughts that tomorrow is another day. Or did they lie awake like he was, staring into the dark without a plan?
He was surveying the stack of diving gear accumulated over the past year, each item purchased at a discount, used: the mask and exo hood, fins, the paint-chipped tank and shining compressor. He still needed another $1200 for a dry suit. And then there were the actual tools for welding underwater as well. He had planned come summer to contact the Montreux dive shop for cave and lake dives if he wasn’t already in Jersey or Louisiana for commercial training—a future that once had seemed possible, attainable, a murky daydream now.
The leaves outside rustled with human steps. Cole leapt to the window, his gravity blade whirling to the bare floor in midswing and clattering there. Then her voice: Are you going to let me in?
The screen screeched in its moorings as he raised it. She joined him on the floor, their backs against his bed, the window left open and February air bracing their skin.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she confessed, softly, followed by a yawn she didn’t bother to cover. “I didn’t even go home. Well no
, I went home and sat in our driveway and looked at our house with all its lights off except the porch, which Dad leaves on because he worries I might trip on the steps, or that some creep could be hiding in the hemlocks. And I didn’t know what to do with myself. I mean because it’s very sweet on his part that he thinks of things like that, and I am one lucky girl to have the family I have, but how could I go to bed after tonight? Greuel’s house, your mom—I don’t know what to do with this.”
She looked to him for an answer he didn’t have. Then she said, “I’m more than a little angry with you, you know. What do you think you’re doing? I just drove around awhile. I drove nowhere and felt really paranoid that cops were going to pull me over for nothing, like they could sense it wasn’t normal for me to be out alone this time of night and they’d know I was guilty of something—somehow—and pull me over and ask questions and I would end up crying to them, telling everything that happened tonight, and this made me think of myself as being a stupid girl, stupid, stupid, stupid.” With each instance of stupid she smacked her palm against her forehead. “Were you sleeping?”
Cole had retrieved the butterfly knife—a poor excuse for a weapon, with a rusted washer and dull blade, but he liked the heft of it—and was running the flat edge along the inside seam of his knee, the gimp knee he kept extended for comfort. Shady considered the object silently.
“You’re scared,” she said, one hand touching the inside of his wrist, the single raised tendon there. “I’m not stupid, am I. For being freaked out.”