by Kirby Gann
“Are you in trouble about the pot?”
He wrings one hand as though it hurts. “What did Sheldon say?”
She relates what she feels is relevant. She hands over three hundred dollars rolled up in twenties, and before he can begin to protest—his face closes at the sight of the thin roll—she stops him with her hand in the air: “You knew he wouldn’t have enough for all of it, right? He said you knew. He bought eight quarters at what he called wholesale. The rest he promises to pay as he sells. Spring Break starts in another week, it’ll all be gone by then.”
“What did you do with the rest?”
“Sheldon has it.” That wakes him as she knew it would.
“Shady, come on! You gave him a pound of weed on his promise to pay for it later?”
“Well what would you have had me do? Three hundred is what he could get, I even went to the ATM with him and saw the receipt. Feel free to school me on what other choice I may have had. You want me driving over two counties with your drugs and a porno mag in that excuse for a truck that, by the way, Sheldon was alert enough to point out it’s got expired tags? I’m not going to jail for you, Cole. You’re no kingpin daddy and I’m no mule, or whatever.”
She didn’t mean to sound harsh but she doesn’t soften the edge in her voice, either. He sits with his elbows on his knees, hands clasped behind his head; his eyes close, and such a still calm overcomes him that briefly she wonders if he has fallen asleep again. She fights a sudden urge to slap him awake. She wonders if his mother is up yet, and only then notices her car isn’t in the driveway. She thought Lyda never left the house.
“Aren’t you going to at least ask how I am?” Shady asks.
His face raises and his mouth opens, a dazed look. The pads beneath his eyes are swollen, the eyes themselves rimmed pink, and she feels sorry for him—but then again she’s tired, too, and what is she to get out of any of this? She hasn’t asked for a thing. She’s only in because she cares; because his whole story seems to matter to her.
“You okay?” he says finally.
“I’m fine, just take me back home. I’ve got to be getting on.”
“Where do you have to be?”
“I have a job, Cole.”
Again it sounds harder than she means but else-wise is beyond her, she’s exhausted and feels suddenly done with all this—even as she knows she is not done, knows she cares about this boy (she can’t think of him as a man; men are her father’s age), and there’s something sweet and pathetic about him that she feels the need to protect, to aid. Positive energy (the good angels) shielding against the negative, the anti-, the evil. With his shoulders slumped forward and hands hanging limp between his legs, he looks like a beaten and abandoned dog. Cole nods weakly as he takes in what she has said, but doesn’t appear ready to say anything in response to it.
Both straighten at the rev of a car engine accelerating up the hill. She recognizes the vehicle the moment she spins to see: Grady Creed in his 4Runner. He skids to a halt behind the truck, chrome rims spinning gaily in the morning sunlight; the black paint job gleams as if newly waxed. He is clean-shaven and freshly showered; his high-top basketball shoes look new out of the box, and the expression on his face is as though he has just heard a fantastic joke.
“Morning, sunshine! I’m really beginning to think yawl should get yourselves your own place together!”
“What is he doing here at eight in the a.m. on a Sunday?”
“Meet the new boss,” Cole says.
“Same as the old boss!” Creed sings, windmilling his arm across an air guitar in the trademark Townsend swing. “You got my scratch?”
Cole still holds the roll of twenties; he hasn’t even counted it out yet. He raises the money on his open palm like some mendicant friar making an offering to his order. Creed swipes the cash and weighs it in his fist as he grins at Shady, his jaw exercising the same thin tendons as Sheldon’s had the night before. He smells of strong aftershave, and his gray eyes seem wholesomely clear in the morning light. He squeezes the roll in his grip without looking, and to Shady he tips his chin, says, “This does not feel worth a gym bag of reefer to me. Feels like”—and here he guides a thumbnail across the paper edges—“feels like I don’t have even half a grand in my hand. That can’t be right. Can that be right?” He slips off the rubber band and begins to count silently.
“It’s three hundred dollars,” Shady tells him.
“So it is. Someone explain to me why I drove over here for three hundred. We have some fire sale I didn’t know about?”
Again Shady starts into the arrangement she’d managed but Cole interrupts her and takes over the story himself, saying it was the best she could get with Sheldon and he wouldn’t have done any better and so Creed should leave her out of any problems he might have with the order of things. Creed disagrees.
“Okay, first: fuck this cousin of yours. This is more work than I want on a Sunday, but whatever, you’re new at this. Let’s split up the bag and I’ll move everything else.”
Cole and Shady take turns looking at one another, at Creed; their gazes join over a similar patch of ground.
Creed clasps his head as if to hold in an exploding brain. His fingers pull at his features as he drags the hands slowly down his face. “No you did not. Tell me you did not do what I am thinking you did. You do not leave product with anybody without pay, I don’t care if it’s your own mother and she gets paid tomorrow. That’s like,—I can’t believe I am hearing this. That’s like dealing lesson number one.”
“Where do you get off, Grady Creed?” Shady says. “It’s Cole’s stuff, his money, right, Cole? That caretaker left the bag for you. It was a gift, right?”
Before Cole can respond Creed begins his own tired explanations, speaking slowly and with distinct enunciation as if to a dim and struggling child that he has lectured countless times before. “Shady. What you are failing to understand is that this caretaker’s pot was never his, see? It was mine, me as a representative of a community interest much larger than me—right?—and that crazy mofo just happened to have it on him because of certain mistakes made along the line of supply, certain unfortunate events perpetrated by somebody we all three know. I’m the one what left the bag for Cole—you get me, little girl? That’s on me. Trying to help the little man. See how he handles a bit of good fortune.”
“Then it was Greuel’s, not yours,” she says, and then Shady finger-quotes the air, “‘Dealing lesson number one, never leave product without getting paid.’”
Creed ducks his head and spins away. His hand clutching the money slaps against his black-jeaned thigh, and his fingernails, strangely long and scrubbed clean, scratch at the back of his neck as he turns to her again. A tremor shakes through his shoulders.
“Cole and me came to an agreement last night. So I thought. Jesus this is like we don’t none of us speak the same language here.” He steps between them and taps his leg again, looks off into the woods. The muscle on his jaw beats a fast metronome, and Shady is struck by how thin and insubstantial the skin there is before it thickens coarsely into his neck. He starts to bob on the balls of his feet. Instinctively she backs up a step.
“And this is what I get. This is what I get for helping out a kid because I like him, feel like I owe him a hand up because of his brother. And this is how you’re going to do me, freak eyes?” He glares at Cole, who doesn’t look up. “Why don’t you say anything? You so weak you have to let your girl here do the talking for you?”
Creed lunges forward, he smacks Cole across the forehead and sends him back onto one elbow. Cole raises his other arm to defend against the next blow but already Shady cannot stop herself, she’s shoving Creed with both hands, shouting What the fuck, Grady?! and Back the fuck off! It’s enough to get him to stop, and he stares at Shady with complete incomprehension.
“We’re not alone out here, you asshole,” she chokes out, and it’s blessedly true: from across the gully falls the stare of a neighbor—a tall t
owering mountain of a man with long blond-and-gray hair past his shoulders. He stands with a tool of iron as long as her arm, beside a pendular auto engine that twists on a chain from a thick tree branch. They all three turn to look at him. He moves behind the engine, begins to look it over.
Creed wrenches his arm from where she continued to grasp it. “I don’t care if he’s the mayor of the friggin’ holler, that old man don’t mean shit to me,” he says loudly, as if he wants the man to hear him. But he does step back from Cole and the porch.
Across the way, the neighbor steadies the chain and solemnly considers the tool in his hand; he appears to be actively ignoring them now, intent on whatever he expects to do to that engine block. Creed sneers as he starts to return to the 4Runner in earnest, backward stepping. “Only reason I’m not cracking heads and taking the three of us to this cousin is ’cause Fleece was my main man, little brother,” he says. “Neither one of you would want to even hear my name if this was any different. You picking up what I’m putting down?”
Cole is getting to his feet, swiping at the debris on his jeans. “I’m down with it, Grady.”
“I hope that cousin comes through for you, I really do. But you best think how your brother was solid money ever time.”
“If that’s so true then where is he now?” Shady asks.
“Free as a bird or dead like I don’t want to be. Do you all really want to fuckin’ know? ’Cause I don’t.”
He slams his door and revs the engine once it starts, stereo blasting at aneurysm-promotion volume. He wheels backward out of the drive without a look behind him and purees the pavement once he hits the road.
It’s a sullen silence in the truck, Cole driving. She’s embarrassed to have left the bag with his cousin, but Shady’s angry at Cole as well (she would like to tell him) for not knowing how to arrange things properly—angry at him for not knowing things he has no way to know. She stews over what she could tell him: that his cousin Sheldon is no partner; that it’s a result of her own pluck and perseverance to have squeezed out the money she did manage to get. “How does my wall-eyed cousin pull a sweet piece of ass like you? You’re doing him, right?” Sheldon had asked her. “It isn’t your business but no, we’re not,” she’d said, and her saying it embarrassed her for some reason. “Cole is my friend, he’s your family. You should be his friend, too.” Sheldon had suggested she might like to screw a man who could bend both legs and meet her eyes with both of his. When she laughed in his face he persisted, describing how attentive and generous sex with him would be, and in the pall of that black-lighted room she had taken longer than usual to realize he was serious, and that they were alone. Sheldon was big enough to make her think twice over how quickly she could get out his door; upstairs the music boomed loud enough to cover a struggle.
What I could tell you, Cole Prather.
What she doesn’t tell him is the transparency with which her life had appeared to her on the long drive back to Pirtle County. Since the dream routine every experience—even the most routine—had been thrown into stark relief; every action she took, every thought she had was imbued with ramification and meaning. She had driven through the night between tears and a flat numbness that overcame her in fits, Shady freezing with the windows down but nauseated still by the heavy stink from a bag that was no longer even there. What did she think she was doing? Two-forty in the morning alone on the highway in a junk-heap of a truck with expired tags on behalf of a boy for whom she was still unclear how she felt. And this was it, if she wasn’t careful this could be happening to her for the rest of her life, riding the tail end of a high in a rattling old pickup in the middle of the night with nerves frazzled from bad encounters with people who wished her not ill will, not good will, but no will at all.
It was like her father’s admonitions and advice had merged into the voice within her own skull. She feared she’d become caught in some dread loop; rather than growing up she moved only from inexperience to inexperience. And Shady Beck was better than this; the better angels expected more of Shady Beck than this. All winter her mother had been gathering—quietly, on her youngest’s behalf—course catalogs and applications for schools close to home, keeping the books within view on the kitchen counter but never alluding to them explicitly, never adding additional pressure to a daughter who, her mother would tacitly admit, she could see was in a delicate situation, and at a tender age, and who should take the time she needs. Several times her mother has voiced her desire to be supportive, within reason.
She had not been to worship in weeks. Even though Shady never considered herself a fervent Christian she did believe, and she did miss the fellowship—missed too the feeling that overtook her in the midst of congregational song, the sweep of a thousand voices singing in unison, and that sense of being part of a spirit much larger than her own. A good church service inspired in her sincere gratitude and a wholesome solidarity with whatever it was out there beyond her own paltry self; a something she knew now was certain to exist, no matter how abstract, for she had seen and touched its opposite, and she wanted to be on the side of the good. Yet she felt, vividly, the lack of goodness within her; felt it as distinctly and with as much yearning as how Cole must feel for his vanished brother. A brother who, she would like to point out, no matter how much you idolized him, had always been ready to abandon you.
What was it Grady Creed had said? I don’t want to know. Do you?
She glances over at Cole. She doesn’t think he’s made any progress in discovering clue one about Fleece’s fate. Could it be he did not really want to? She had believed he was different, but here he is, now, swimming furiously in the wake of his brother’s life and taking it on as his own. On his exhausted face she can already begin to discern the pathways of future fatigue and worry lines. Rather than uncovering the truth and enacting some kind of vague vengeful justice, it’s like Cole’s carefully building an illusion he can live with, or in.
She’s aware he knows none of what she is thinking; in his eyes her silence is simply Shady being emotional and intransigent, a girl who will get over her mood with sleep and time away. Recognizing this doesn’t annoy her; rather, it spurs a tenderness that surprises her with its sudden intensity. How young they both are. Both of them are only getting started, each with a future ahead. Yet today counts (her father’s voice again), this isn’t the time for mistakes, today shapes who and where they’ll be twenty years from now. If he could only adjust the lens through which he sees his world. If only he would step to one side and look, he would realize he owes nothing to Fleece or his mother. Shady almost reaches across the gearshift to pass the back of her hand against the rusty stubble of his face, a gesture she knows would change the air between them entirely, cause him to turn and smile.
But she doesn’t. She’s too worn to make that small gesture. She thought to do it, and that’s enough. He leans over to kiss her but she’s already out. He says he’ll call her later; she tells him to do what he wants. She does not look back as she hurries to the house, even though she can hear the truck’s coughing idle linger in the drive, waiting expectantly for her to turn and wave goodbye. But Shady’s gone already. She doesn’t feel like she should have to say so.
Lyda’s wagon is in the driveway when he returns home. The man she slept with must have been something special for her to stay the night—usually she gave some stranger run of the house for a weekend or two, until the inevitable blew up and she kicked him out. Whatever. All Cole wants is a long, scalding shower, and to shove the night he just lived through into some hidden and forgotten cranny in his mind. He wants the water hotter than he can stand it, so hot the ceiling’s loose plaster shines with steam and the walls run amber from his mother’s nicotine. The mirror so clouded he won’t have to look at himself.
She’s not in the kitchen and he doesn’t call out. He tosses his mud-caked boots to the corner on the pile of accumulated diving gear and does not think over how long it has been since he used it. In the bathroom he flips o
n the shower to get the hot water going. The spray is freezing when he tests it and he pulls back to wait, takes off his sweatshirt (noting then the sticky grime on his hands) and rests his backside against the sink, the mirror out of his line of sight. He studies the mold settled in the corners of the shower stand, it looks like discarded coffee grinds, most likely something off of him—pill-head swinger ride or not, Lyda is a woman who likes her bathroom clean.
No steam yet. Sometimes it takes a while. He switches off the cold water entirely, leaves on only the hot.
He can’t blame Shady; he shouldn’t have sent her to Sheldon, and she shouldn’t have seen Grady Creed smack him like a disobedient child while Cole sat there and took it. Everything is beginning to feel like a test he’s unprepared for and fails at with each new, unforeseen level. He is learning about Fleece in ways he would prefer not to have learned; unsettling things that, however vaguely, make him feel somewhat better about himself—at some fundamental level he has a conscience. He’s unsure his brother does, or did. But he knows Fleece never involved Shady in the work.
He tests the water again and the cold shocks his hand. He switches the water off and stares at the handle for a time as though he can will it to find heat. Then, opening the bathroom door, he meets his mother nearly chest to chest.
“Pilot’s out,” she says, already holding up a flashlight. “Do your mom a favor?”
As he reaches for the flashlight she steps back, taking him in. “Whoa, baby, let me get a look at you. What did you get into last night, weren’t you with Shady? Where’d you all hide the body?”
It’s like a crucial piece of rigging behind his face snaps from the strain of keeping it in place. He can’t find his voice for a moment, though his mouth hangs open large enough to pop a golf ball into it.
His mother titters, pats his cheek several times. “Did you two at least put a blanket down? Don’t you have a place to go?”
“I should be asking you, ma. What brings you home after morning sunlight?” It’s a phrase she used to say with feigned admonishment to Fleece when he was barely a teenager, rampant on the terra with a will of his own Lyda never tried to rein in.