Ghosting

by Kirby Gann

  “Give me that,” Cole says. He tosses the magazine onto the trash bag and hopes no one bothers to pick it up again and reveal what’s underneath; the unit holds enough random trash that the bag doesn’t look out of place or even recently added.

  “No need to get offensed,” Creed concedes. “Nobody has a say who they come out of.”

  “I take offense every time you open your mouth Grady Creed,” Shady says. She shoots a meaningful glance at Cole, but he has no idea what meaning she is trying to convey. “I guess I should be heading out, let you boys get on with it.”

  “Yeah you probably should. Sorry,” says Creed with no hint of actual apologetic feeling.

  “She came with me. She’s in my truck.”

  “Yeah, well. That part of your evening is over. We come for you, James Cole my young rookie friend, and our business does not concern the pretty lady here. She can drive your truck, she seems capable.”

  “You ever fix that clutch?” asks Spunk.

  Shady gets to her feet. “I can drive it. Let me out, there’s too much testosterone in here all of a sudden.”

  “We could all have some fun first, if you’re up for it. The offer is a good one and it still stands,” taunts Creed. “I swear you’ll still have our respect!” But Shady is out on the gravel marching toward Cole’s truck, duffel bag slung over one shoulder, one middle finger solemnly raised with no looking back.

  When Cole catches up to her she says, “I should take this on to Sheldon now, am I right? Does he know it’s coming?”

  “He knows but he hasn’t paid for it yet. Don’t give him anything he doesn’t pay you for.”

  “I can’t take this stuff home with me, Cole.”

  Off to Sheldon she’ll go, then. Typical of Shady she then rattles off a brief plan concocted while Cole’s head spins and wanders like sparkling motes in a dusty light beam, thoughts mostly lamenting the loss of the two of them alone just some precious minutes before. She informs him she’ll leave his truck at the front of her family property with the keys in the exhaust pipe and that he should get dropped off there; he’s to rap at her window when he returns, and she expects to hear what Creed and Spunk have put him up to. “And none of this is up for negotiation,” she says, “or else I go drop this bag in Grady Creed’s lap and see how he likes you now.”

  “Okay,” he agrees, too stunned to respond with anything more. “I might be out late, mom.”

  “Don’t be like that. I care.” She tiptoes and pecks him beside his mouth. “I’ll be up. Don’t disappoint me,” and as he swallows hard she is in the cab with the engine turned over.

  They watch her maneuver the truck without difficulty, dog-legging it in reverse and speeding forward with a wave of gravel breaking on the slips before the units’ roll-up doors. Creed and Spunk are but bent shapes fluctuating with the candles behind them. Cole believes there’s not much left in the trash bag, that Shady has most all of his morning’s find. He limps back to the garage, accentuating his stiff-knee frailty even as he taps one hip as a reminder of the gravity blade tucked into his ass pocket. As he nears, their smiles transform to masks of glee.

  “What’s so important you had to blue my balls like that?”

  Creed hands over a Little King and briefly drapes a consoling arm over his shoulders as he wags his head with compassion. “You wanted the life, this is the life,” he says. “Duty calls, and she’s a bitch one whole lot uglier than Shady Beck.”

  Creed teems with a savage relish, he’s hopped up and jittering, he can’t sit still and won’t say where they’re headed. He stomps the clutch, slams the gearshift, and fills the Toyota’s interior with unspoken malevolence. What was it Grady had said to him that night, ghosting out of the dark woods around his mother’s house? I’m on your side. Yet now they ride with all the doors locked. Creed announced at the outset that he locks his doors when driving, a safety issue instilled by his parents. He announced too that he did not want to hear any teasing about his listening to the good advice of his parents. And no loud music: he prefers news from the world the three of them have only heard about. “And I don’t like talk, so don’t talk,” he says once they hit the parkway.

  They pass the latest developments and then it’s fields on either side, and darkness, the road cutting through steep shelved hills and the air smells of wet leaves and rain, and he guesses where they are headed about two minutes before they arrive. As Creed slows to turn, his headlights capture the billboard sign at the edge of the drive:

  FUTURE HOME OF

  CHRIST WORLD EMERGENT

  COMMUNITY AND FELLOWSHIP COMPLEX

  BROTHER GIL PONDER, PASTOR UNORTHODOX

  and it’s there only an instant as Creed follows the drive between the building and the caretaker’s cottage, pulling up in the back on the basketball courts. The cinder of Fleece’s Nova, sopped to a darker rust in the wet, glows phosphor after Creed shuts off his headlights.

  “You know all I know about that,” Creed says, “so don’t even start.”

  Arley Noe’s powder-blue Cadillac and Mule’s Toyota truck sit parked directly behind the cottage, half-hidden beneath heavy conifers. Creed kills a Little King with a showy flourish, the bottle held above his mouth unfurling a liquid tongue down his throat, and then he hurls the bottle to shatter up high beside one of the seminary windows. The glass explodes sharply and they listen to the shards sprinkle back to earth. The three stare of them at where the bottle hit the wall.

  “Dang. I was aiming for the window.”

  “You got no arm left, Grady,” from Spunk, in a tone of honest rue, dancing his limbs like a boxer loosening up before a fight. “I remember when you could bust midway games at the fair.”

  Creed shrugs his throwing shoulder, kneads the muscle with his knuckles. “Those days stopped the second I heard that pop against Metcalfe County. I didn’t know it then.”

  Despite the noise of their arrival and the thrown bottle, the building remains silent inside. “Where are the dogs?” asks Cole.

  Spunk sniggers and covers his mouth as he spins away, echoing the question—Yeah, where them dogs, Creed?—and Creed buddies up with him: “Ah-haw haw haw.”

  “Tough world for a dog,” says Spunk.

  “Tell me you didn’t. Where’s yours?”

  “My bitch is fine, James Cole. Turns out you were right the other day—I’m gonna be a daddy. Or a step-daddy, I guess. You want a puppy when they’re ready?”

  “Hush up,” says Creed, “Mule hears you two and there won’t be nothing else to talk about.” Mule is a lover of animals; a dues-paying member of Raptor Rehab and PETA, a keeper of budgies and homefinder for kittens.

  They enter the back door without knocking, hesitating in the lightless kitchen. The far interior door is framed by a thin amber glow. Beneath the quiet Cole hears something soft, a low suspiration muffled and fierce.

  “It’s us,” Creed declares, eyes toward the ceiling. “Finally.”

  The door clicks and glides wide. Mule towers within the frame, backlit, a hulking silhouette. He nods welcome, massaging one red, smeary fist inside the other, catching his breath as he backs up. Arley Noe stands formal and rigid in black suit and felt trilby, his blue face winched against smoke curling from the hand-rolled cigarette clamped in his mouth. He doesn’t acknowledge the boys, keeping his attention instead upon a mass of angry suffering before him, a man sagging heavy against the burden of sitting up despite the duct tape strapped across his bare chest, arms, and shins. It’s the caretaker Dwayne Hardesty. His thick shoulders quiver as he strains forward, but the tape holds firm. Hardesty’s shiny white throat faces them; his head lies back on the chair, and in the wooly brass beard are clots of blood and torn flesh.

  “You started without us,” Creed says, disappointed.

  “He has not been agreeable,” murmurs Noe, narrow features bunching bemused as he evaluates the level of distress in the chair. “Mule got bit.”

  “I can’t remember the last time I got a tetan
us shot,” Mule says, shaking the pain from his hand and tossing splats of blood on the dusty wood floor, “and dammit look at that, now I got to clean that up, too.”

  Noe bends forward and rests his hands on his knees, peering closely at Hardesty’s face with near medical attention. “So everyone’s here, then.”

  Hardesty’s head lifts—both eyes are swollen shut, the left completely, the right with just enough crack to give view within the puckered eyelid. Something black spins in the yolk there. His head tilts, swivels side to side, taking in each of the men around him.

  “That’s him! You ask him,” he shouts, until his voice breaks into coughing.

  Noe raises to full height again. On top of two stacks of magazines and newspapers a large homemade toolbox stands open, displaying tools settled within cloth-lined pockets.

  “Well,” he says. “At present we’re more interested in the how of things. Like how my property disappears from Harlan, say, and ends up here,” his voice a level whisper, as if talking to himself alone. “In this little house.” The blue fingers—deep blue, floral—tap along the tray of tools. They turn over a set of hawks-bill snips, move aside a brad driver. The diamonds in his horseshoe ring flicker and dance with bits of lamplight. He selects a rip hammer and inspects its iron claws through the smoke as he manipulates the cigarette along his lips to the opposite corner, turning the hammer in the faint light of the single table lamp as if searching for evidence of marred craftsmanship. He returns the tool to the cloth, picks up a dovetail saw. “Mule, I can’t decide. You got a preference here?”

  “Probably won’t get much with that baby saw. I can’t grip so well my good hand’s all swole up. Fucker bit clean through to the knuckle, Cole, look at that”—he shows Cole the wounds on both sides of his hand following the curve of Hardesty’s teeth, the skin there purpled and swollen, Mule’s blood running easily down his wrist. “Could probably cast a mold of his mouth off this. Let’s try those locking pliers, see what they get me.”

  Noe picks up the pliers and holds them out even as he continues to inspect the array, lips tight. Just as Mule reaches for the pliers Noe pulls them back, sighs, and hands him the hawks-bill snips. “Try these first. We don’t need to be here all night.”

  Mule takes the tool and tests it, wincing at the spring’s resistance in his injured hand.

  “You want me to do it?” asks Creed.

  Neither answer. With his free hand Mule pulls Hardesty’s lolling head by the hair. The caretaker’s breathing intensifies again, sucking in quick inhalations.

  “I got nothing to say here. I gave you what I got last night, I got nothing to do with this, the boy just up and give it to me and he said it was you”—but he can’t finish because Grady Creed steps forward and with pitcher’s-mound intensity crunches his fist into the man’s chin. Hardesty’s head drops back and stays.

  “Now I don’t see how that was necessary,” says Mule.

  “Why don’t you let a man do his job and wait your turn,” Arley says at the same time.

  Creed hops lightly on his toes, wiggling his arms. “I thought you wanted us here for help. This turd’s lying already.”

  “Simmer down, junior.” Noe stubs out his smoke in a crusty saucer. He inspects the burnt end, twists it between two fingers before depositing the butt in his jacket pocket. Then he returns to Hardesty. “Mule,” he says, “I never understood why a man needs his nipples.”

  “It’s got something to do with how we start out in the womb. Did you know a man can produce milk, get breast cancer, all that?”

  “Mule. A man don’t need his nipples. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “I know the freaking routine, Arley.”

  Gently, Mule spreads Hardesty’s thick chest hair away to expose a surprisingly small and pink aureole. He presses the open edge of the hawks-bill against the man’s breast, steadying it in place despite the rapid heaving of Hardesty’s rib cage.

  “Hold on, boyo,” Mule says. “This’ll hurt.”

  “Wait, what’re you asking me, you’re supposed to ask something before you hurt me, man, what do you want to hear?” Hardesty speaks quickly, then groans deep as the snips bear down, his entire body tensing up, the chair jumping on the floor.

  Where his nipple had been a small mouth snarls stark white. Creed nudges Cole and tells him, quietly, to check it out, give the body time, and even as he tells him this the white mouth quickens with pink; the blood beads up in tiny dots that gradually pool together, then starts to run freely into the hair over his belly. The nipple sits on Hardesty’s thigh. His head angles in contemplation of it, his face seemingly baffled by the ease at which a piece of his body has changed location, moved from where it had existed for years without notice to there, above his knee.

  Arley bends back in close to him. “There’s not much from you I want to hear, honestly. I think I got the how figured out. Not so sure about the why. You steal from me, you steal from Greuel; steal from all of us in this room, in fact. Why? Try again.”

  Hardesty does try, as far as Cole can tell. None of what he says can satisfy Arley Noe. It almost seems as though words are not even what the blue man wants to hear, and it feels like they are there a long time, asking. Cole cannot figure exactly what Noe expects to learn from the man—everything Hardesty says appears to arise from some deep-seated honesty and the utmost desire to be released from this chair and this room, yet with each answer he loses another piece of his flesh. First Noe asks a question, and then Mule comes down with a snip from the hawks-bill, regardless of the response. As though the whole scene is a show; a kind of play-acting.

  But for whose benefit would that be? Whose?

  Certainly not Dwayne Hardesty. The man’s chest and belly has begun to thicken with an extra skin of his own blood, like the scum that gathers on the surface of boiled milk; his ears disassemble into pieces lost from a jigsaw puzzle. Soon the white of his skull gleams from what used to be his left eyebrow. At each cut, Professor Mule places the piece of the man’s flesh onto his thighs for Hardesty to view.

  Helluva way to make fighting weight, Creed says to general silence.

  Through it all Noe never raises his voice, never loses patience. His stare, Cole thinks, is as flat as an owl’s. He sticks to a line of questioning about a man named Crutchfield—was Crutchfield in on this, too? Did Hardesty ever talk to Crutchfield? Did Fleece ever talk about Crutchfield? With the repetition of the name Cole feels an acceleration, the room spins from the house and the ground and whirls into some other dimension, a place of deeds that would fill a heart with shame if they were to occur in real life. The name Crutchfield rings no bells. Hardesty claims he’s never heard of him, either—this even after Creed uses the brad driver to pop a bolt into the tendon below his kneecap. Cole believes him and wants to say so. Yet he shudders when Hardesty calls him out.

  “Cole Skaggs,” Hardesty says, “the little brother, you tell them what I told you”—the caretaker dips forward and a long strand of varied color splashes on the floor between his legs, Cole uncertain of its source—“what I tell you? I ever say anything about the Crutch?”

  “You talked to this guy?” asks Spunk.

  “He didn’t mention anybody to me. He said Fleece gave him a few books in a trash bag. For letting him live up there.”

  Arley Noe casts his strange smile, a smile from stillness, as though the man had adapted human expressions while unable to understand the motives behind them. “I know where my weed’s at. I don’t understand why it got to be there is all.” To the man on whom his gaze has not left he continues: “You say you don’t know anything. How you come to calling this man ‘the Crutch’?”

  A roaring groan erupts then, and Hardesty’s head falls back. He spits and starts again. “Motherfucker I’m from Burnside. I shipped home in seventy-three with a morphine habit and nine hundred and fifteen dollars I could spend in a week. Anybody in Pulaski County like that’s going to learn him Nate Crutchfield if that’s who you’re aski
ng about.”

  Noe straightens again, hands in his pockets; he works his thin lips silently. Mule eyeballs the caretaker as though chewing over the best way to remove a stubborn stump from his yard.

  “It’s James Cole,” Hardesty wheezes at his thighs. “And not all Skaggs. James Cole.”

  Cole looks at him. He wishes Hardesty would stop bringing him into it. He wishes he could tell the man he’s here because he has no say and he has no conception of what to do with himself or with the caretaker and—his head runs empty of thought, fills with a signal close to a dial tone.

  “James Cole, get them off me. Get me out of here. Do I look like I need to be here?”

  “I talked to Crutch,” Arley continues in his quiet drone of a voice. “He described a man—well, way he described him made me think of you, caretaker. He said you drove Fleece down yourself. Some tale about Fleece with a broken hand, cast and all.”

  “Bone,” Hardesty calls out.

  “Lying to spite the nose on his face,” Noe says.

  “Arley I don’t know how much longer we got him, he’s going to black or bleed out soon, one or the other.”

  “Lies to spite the nose on his face. Mule. You understand what I’m saying?”

  He holds out the dovetail saw.

  Lawrence Greuel reclines beneath a mound of woolen blankets and one quilt of sentimental value, the real thing, passed down from the nineteenth century by his grandma. Its ratty resilience impresses him, squares of cloth thinner than paper save for the few patches he had sewn in himself over the years. He fingers the yellowed batting inside a small tear as he squints at the late-night news glowing between his fat feet, two bloated blobs exposed to the air, propped on his sofa’s armrest. Those talking heads have nothing to tell that Greuel needs knowing.

  He used to be the man who made things happen. Now his feet look like something inflated by a clown for the amusement of children. He hates the sight of them, but they burn radiantly even as the rest of him freezes, so he can’t hide the feet beneath his blankets. The right one lacks its little toe, the left has only the first two, both feet white as fish bellies save for the puffy purple amputation scars. He doesn’t even think of them any longer as parts of him: never as my feet, simply the feet. They feel encased, without pores. When he complained of the discomfort, his private nurse—a meaty thumb of Thai attitude that Greuel likes and abhors in equal measure—told him, reassured him, seemed like, that she could do nothing about hot feet. That mean you been bad man, Hell get ready for you, she said. Then she burst with a display of unforeseen hilarity and shook his big toe. “The look on you face, ha! The look on you face, ha ha ha!” until he, too, laughed, struck by this tiny woman so worked up over what she said.