Ghosting

by Kirby Gann

  “Honey it is a wicked world out there and I don’t have to tell you.” She hands him the flashlight with a slurry smile, swaying; she leans back into the hallway wall, and by the flush in her cheeks and the rime rimming her eyes he can tell pharmaceuticals are filling her with love. “But sometimes you can almost think, maybe it’s not so wicked in spots. You wouldn’t believe what I’ve been up to. And you wouldn’t approve.”

  “Try me,” Cole says, but her eyes close and her head glides in off-measure from side to side, her coy smile making her a young girl keeping a secret she will wait to tell.

  “It’s a new day. Spring is here and can’t you just feel it? I hardly slept. Everything might be all right after all.”

  “What everything? Fleece?”

  She shrugs as though suddenly sleepy. A great yawn reddens her face and she doesn’t cover her mouth until the yawn is finished. Her hand dismisses him from there. “You get the heat going. I’m thinking a cup of tea, myself.”

  Her purse sits open on the kitchen table; among the sundries he spots the black film case where she keeps pills on the go. Within the assortment of sizes, shapes, and colors, he recognizes a few oxy-eighties and swallows two with water so cold it hurts his teeth. His body feels tender from what he put it through last night, and the little sleep he caught on the concrete out front only settled the soreness deeper into his bones. He left his sweatshirt in the bathroom and he’s too lazy to go for his boots. Outside he quick-steps across the wet grass in loose socks and under the thin T-shirt his skin tightens with the rude cold of the March morning.

  Beneath the house the air is dank and chilly as an icebox. Cole hasn’t felt properly warm since he and Shady were at it on Spunk’s couch. He rubs his hands over bare arms. Here it’s the same smell as by the river last night: moist, mineral, silty. A shiver runs through him. He dismisses images from his mind as they come.

  He never knew Hardesty. The man had been more of a dark specter over his childhood rather than an actual person, a bogeyman he should feel relieved to have lifted from his spirit.

  The pilot lighter rests on the brick ledge that gives to the crawl space accessing the pipes. Cole kills the gas and waits for the air to clear. He squats with the small of his back against the brick, then sits to ease the pressure on his frail knee, and stares into the dark. The chill against his back starts an ache in his lungs and he coughs into the damp.

  The body had been heavier than he would have imagined. Hardesty was a big man, well over six feet tall and thick across the shoulders and torso, a body of hefty muscle gone slack, age-fatted into simple bulk. His head was large and wide-boned as the rest of him, great in diameter and with teeth that looked chiseled from some dense material found in deep woodside, stone or clay or live oak hewn by rough tools. It was difficult to carry him. Creed had left the task to Cole and Spunk, leading them into a field of tall saw-grasses, a spade slung over his shoulder as casual as a kid with a baseball bat. He moved in lumbering spurts, preoccupied, as though trying to divine a specific location from hints on the wind.

  “Could’ve pulled us up closer,” Spunk complained. “What four-wheel-drive’s for, I thought.” Silently Cole agreed; his knee burned like a tight ball of fire, and with each step Hardesty’s bare heels, sticking out of the rolled tarp, thumped against his neck like clubs. “It’s all grass, you could make this ground easy.”

  “Yeah—we could cut a nice new trail for anyone to explore, right on,” Creed answered, searching. “They should put you in charge. I always slept real sound in jail.”

  Their shoes sank in a loamy gumbo that sucked harder at their soles the closer they got to the river; Cole smelled the Ohio before he could hear it. By the time the grass cleared around an oxbow of stagnant black water, so still its surface perfectly mirrored the bone-bright gash of moon, they were all high-stepping against the pull of the mud. Twice they dropped the body, Hardesty and the tarp taking on water and weight each time. Cole’s back was shrieking.

  “Smells like a sewer out here,” Spunk said. “We going to sink him in the river?”

  The Ohio appeared as an expanse of pure black stretching endlessly before them, and they set the body on the rocky outcropping—gently, as if now they were afraid of hurting him. Above, the naked branches of white sycamores and other trees Cole couldn’t identify rose and dipped in the wind, like giant fingers conjuring spells, or curses, he couldn’t guess which. The wind itself moved like a bodied presence through the grasses and it was much colder here. His sweaty skin crawled where his clothing stuck to him. Hardesty’s great teeth gleamed in the moonlight beneath the cavity where his nose should have been; a sight that made him queasy each time he ventured a look at it. Yet he couldn’t stop stealing glimpses of it.

  Grady Creed stood on a berm with fists at his waist, facing the river as though in survey of a great victory that had occurred there, the spade angled from his hip sharp-edged and silhouetted like a dangerous tail. He set one foot on the bleached trunk of an elm weather-stripped of bark and gleaming like prehistoric bone. Cole and Spunk both clutched their thighs in each hand, bent and gasping. Creed sniggered.

  “Sink him in the river? Boys,” he said cheerfully, hoisting the spade, “this county sits on limestone bedrock. Now you’ll find limestone bedrock is a great natural accomplice to criminal mischief. Tonight you learn the proper method of body disposal in a river environment.”

  He told them to pay attention because this would be quick. Sinkholes provide readymade graves, he explained, with half the work done already. “But what makes a sinkhole—either of you know?” Neither of them did. “Water erosion. Sinkholes let rainwater find its way underground. For us that means once the body’s out of sight you got to worry it might still move around down there, end up on a fishhook or in some noodler’s hands. We don’t want to encourage this thing to float. Why’s a body float?”

  “Gas,” Cole said.

  Creed nodded as he set a foot near Hardesty’s hip. “Basically we’re whisky stills full of fermenting juice. I’ve seen it, blows you up like fuckdoll. You want to allow a place for the gas to get out, like this.” He plunged the spade into Hardesty’s belly. Then he widened the cut by shunting the blade back and forth, an earthy squish and suck sound that Cole knew instantly was in his head now and forever. “But shit still moves down there, we get floods and all, right? You got to make sure that if anybody ever finds this they still can’t figure out who it was. How you think we do that?”

  “Fingerprints?” from Spunk.

  “Good. We take the fingers. And?”

  He turned his attention to Cole, enjoying his personification of the attentive professor in the field, but Cole was hardly there anymore. He was hardly anywhere, he felt as empty and purposeful as anything else around them that wasn’t speaking: the wind, the grass, the moving river. A rain owl hooted its strange and unique call.

  “Teeth, good. You don’t have to take everything, just mess it up enough so nobody can match this mouth with a record somewheres. Though I doubt our caretaker spent a lot of time at the dentist. Still.”

  He handed Spunk the spade and told him to gather the fingers, a job Spunk applied himself to with merry diligence. Sick! he exclaimed at the feel of the first thumb falling away. Quickly he finished one hand, and then inspected the small pile gathered beside his boot. “You know what, these would make a real fancy and powerful necklace,” he said. “I should make me a necklace and hang it over my bedroom door, keep away the evil spirits.”

  “No, you’re not. You’ll give them to me, you demented fuck,” Creed said, shaking out a plastic bag. “Cole, you get the teeth.”

  Cole snapped to at the sound of his name. “I don’t think so, man.”

  “Sure you are. You’re going to do his teeth or I send you in there after him.” Creed stepped up to Cole’s face, his forehead closing in near enough to press against his own. He smelled tobacco and ale over the river stench.

  “C’mon, Cole,” Spunk said. “Co
me on, man, he’s dead already.”

  Cole remained bent at the waist with his hands clutching his knees, breathing deeply through his mouth. Breathing had become difficult for him, a deep wheeze had begun to web in the back of his lungs. He didn’t move.

  “See, now’s when it’s good to have some Little Kings in the belly,” said Creed. When he spoke again, after a pause, his voice had lost its mocking tone, turning almost brotherly, almost gentle and commiserating. “First time’s always a bitch. But you got to do it, every man does his share. Arley told me to make sure you do something. Specific instructions.”

  “Carrying the body aint enough?”

  In his home Hardesty had remained with his head thrown back, lips smacking at something tasteless, his throat working noisily. He blinked at the ceiling, and Cole had watched as the blinking slowed. Nobody spoke for some time. As if for no reason save to break the silence, Hardesty murmured, “My nose.”

  Mule was cleaning the saw with a paper towel; he had begun to wipe down each of his tools with some kind of bleach solution that sharpened the air, returning each piece to its respective pocket. Arley Noe hovered nearby, out of Mule’s way.

  “Goddamn you, Arley Noe.” Hardesty’s voice sounded strange, flatter than before. “My very own nose.”

  “You don’t need it no more,” Arley said. He sniffed the air above the man, who continued to face the ceiling as though lost of the energy to raise his head. “Smells bad in here anyway, you’re not missing a thing.”

  “God damn you. Arley. Just—God damn you.”

  His head jerked up as he coughed out a clump of what looked like blackberry compote. The jelly caught and hung pendulous from the whorls of beard even as his head fell back again. The substance rolled over itself slow and hypnotic, shifting shape as it wormed from whisker to whisker, the lamp light shifting over the surface as it wandered, wavered, until its own weight pulled it onto the floor with a dull splat. Noe patted him on the shoulder, several times, finally leaving his hand there, squeezing the shoulder in gentle rhythm, in some lost gesture of consolation.

  “Don’t you worry about me and God, caretaker,” he said. “We damned one another a long time ago.”

  Beside the sinkhole Creed handed Cole the spade. He hardly felt the tool in his hands; his hands were only tangentially his anymore, as if the cold had taken all feeling from them. Creed nudged him forward and Cole obeyed. He felt for the body through the extension of the steel tool, straddled it, and located the dull and hefty teeth within the open mouth. With the spade’s edge he pushed back Hardesty’s hoary upper lip and settled it on his gums. He braced one foot on the back of the blade.

  “Go on, Cole, we’re watching,” Spunk said.

  In the quiet of their waiting, the single rain owl called out: who spooks you, who spooks you-all?

  He pressed down with all his weight. The bones gave so easily that he fell forward past the body, Creed catching him with a hoot and then passing him on with a hearty smack on the back. Cole continued forward and did not turn around; he made the edge of the water and stood in the gaps between the rocks, inhaling deeply sludgy river fumes. The cold river began to seep into his boots, paining the bones in his feet. He wrapped his arms about his head like a kerchief, chinned his chest. The rain owl called again.

  Who spooks you? Who spooks you-all?

  It used to feel so damn good to breathe, Lawrence Greuel thinking how nostalgic a man can get for all the little things he took for granted once they’re gone forever. Now he’s no longer sure he feels gratitude to even be breathing. He exhales a chorus of high pitches, a swarm of distant seagulls range throughout his lungs, his chest sounds as if he’s got the friggin’ Gulf of Mexico trapped in there—inhale, and it’s juddering waves against the shore; exhale, and the seabirds take flight, raging riot, their beaks gnashing at one another’s wings. Yet he feels no pain. There is a not-unpleasant numbness, a disassociation; he’s surprised, when he moves, to see his limbs respond. Like the entirety of Lawrence Greuel has retreated into this soft blur within his head, and only in his head does he perceive sensation: a firm and disagreeable pinch pressing his skull cap. Like it’s been forced into a hat too small. That, and the constant watering of his eyes—particularly the left, which stings to boot. Who knew the eyes could be so prodigious, so productive.

  He blinks, and a puddle expands against the bridge of his nose. A tissue comes into view and sops it gently; he pinches the eye shut and the tissue drags over the skin and lashes with evident care. A woman’s touch.

  “Was I asleep?” Honestly unsure, and the fact frightens him. Gray light fills the thin curtains over the window where he could swear it had been dark a moment before, the Tiffany lamp casting a rose blush against the beige linen there. Now it’s gray light luminous behind the curtain and no lamp at all.

  “Only about a day,” Lyda says. She lifts his arm as though to take his pulse, but she’s only turning his wrist to check his watch. “Near a day and a half, truth be.”

  She crosses the room to toss the tissue into the trashcan by the bureau near the window. She wears cutoffs and sandal-toed heels, a woman who always shied from sensible shoes when she bothered to wear them at all. Between her knees he sees the trashcan overfilled with tissues and Lyda bends from the waist to pull out the bag, giving Greuel a cheesecake shot of her legs and fine calves, the form-fitting shorts outlining her vulva swollen as a primate’s; he’d heard tales of Lyda’s fat pussy and the sight of it outlined there fills him with unfettered gratitude. How could a pill junkie still look that good, and at her age? Goddamn if God was indiscriminate in wasting great genes on useless people.

  The tears stream freely past his cheek and into his ear. “I remember when you ran around without enough clothes on to wad a shotgun.”

  “Ha,” she says, caught midstride.

  “Don’t look like you’ve found much more to wear since then.”

  “I wore this in high school. Any lady my age would be proud to show that off.” She spins on the floor with the garbage bag held out, a swaying silent bell, then tugs at the cuffs of her shorts. “These jeans were my daddy’s. He used to call me Little Old Nasty Thing.”

  “Clara was like that. Not nasty—we buried her in a dress she said was her favorite from high school.”

  “Clara wasn’t forty years old, that’s nothing to brag on. Maybe not nasty but she was no Virgin Mary either. And I don’t care to hear about her even if I’m standing in her house.”

  “My house,” Greuel coughs, and the coughs rake him over for a full minute. His body shudders and quakes and unfortunately feels all his own again. “Everything from the gate out front to the river is mine, heaven high and hell deep.” He settles back, sucks for breath, listens to the seagulls deep inside. Lyda’s heels clack down the hallway. “That was near twenty years ago, you still hold that against her?”

  “You don’t?”

  He must have passed out again. He didn’t hear her leave or return but there Lyda is, standing empty-handed and smelling of cigarettes, a silhouette haloed entirely by outside light.

  “I don’t like talking about your wife. I know it worked out best for me in the end, but still. You talk like she was some kind of saint and she sure was not that.”

  “Don’t I know it!” He coughs again, once, and hesitates with his fist before his mouth, expectant—but his lungs settle. “Can’t tell you how much I wished you’d wanted to balance the cheat. But nah, you were too crafty for that, you saw your way out. One wicked crafty lady.”

  “Don’t blame me for what you wanted to do.”

  He looks at his watch but cannot read the face of it, his vision too blurry even if he shuts the running eye. He looks down the blanket that covers him, molded to his naked body in relief. He is very thin. His bare feet on the armrest display purple sores he hasn’t seen before. He wiggles the remaining toes, sees them move, amazed he controls them somehow still.

  Lyda bends again, this time shaking a smoke out of
her pack by the window. “It’s not the doing that bothered me. It was the acting like he wasn’t, like it wasn’t none of my business.”

  “Dumbest thing Bethel Skaggs ever did, out of a lifetime of dumb things, was take out an insurance policy.”

  “You silly man, you think he ever thought of insurance? Any wife knows how to sign her husband’s name.”

  He admires this, her worldliness as matter-of-fact as weather. But talk of the past tires him—it’s all over and will never change. He wonders how many days, hours, are still allotted him. Time feels like a bank account with dwindling funds and no further deposits.

  “Why don’t you sidle over here and drop your daddy’s britches, let me get a good sniff of something other than all this medicine?”

  She doesn’t even turn, searching for her lighter. “Old man, you are in no shape to be thinking on snatch.” She gives her hips a little one-two shake and winks at him as she heads for the door, and secretly he’s relieved by her refusal, resigned to empty bravado.

  “Got nothing else worth thinking about.” Greuel shifts his eyes back to his covers and the tears, emotionless, emptied of any signifier save biological process, run onto his cheeks. “All my life I resented not being a thinner handsome man and now look at me, bet I could fit in one leg of my trousers and but all I can do is piss honey.”

  “I believe it do smell like it,” Lyda laughs. She holds up her cigarette, says she’s going outside.

  The sulfur of a lit match fills his nostrils. Pakpao is speaking quick in that half-talk, half-song speech of hers. That she’s here means dialysis and he’s glad for it, he feels better for hours after, almost normal, like normal and just getting over the flu. It’s the best he can hope for, it’s what passes for normal now. He says as much to Arley Noe, though he can’t locate him exactly. He recognizes the dark tobacco.