by Kirby Gann
“Rule one is we make no stops on this run, that’s rule number one,” Creed says. Creed’s always citing some rule to whatever they’re doing, like there’s a list he should be familiar with, and yet each time Creed stops at rule number one.
The radio talk comes tinny thin in the van’s poor speakers and it feels like a shield, or a warmup, before Creed starts on something real Cole will have to respond to. Why else would he assign him this drive unless he has a discussion in mind? It’s not for talking baseball. Creed has never invited him anywhere, not even for work, never just the two of them. If he wanted ball-talk he could’ve hauled in Spunk, but he told Spunk to stay home—the guy needs to deal with his old man’s death, Creed said. Cole thinks the best thing for Spunk would be to get out of the house where his father died and roll on with his partners and drugs. Maybe Creed understands that bringing Spunk along would mean extra contraband in the van, as Spunk was in a nonstop period of numbing self-medication, and he did not want the aggravation. Or because since Greuel died it seemed like all the boys did anymore was fight. “It’s going to be this way for a while,” Creed had said. “It just gets like this sometimes.”
There are runs Cole has made routine, and then there is The Run, the delivery that speeds an interstate beeline a few miles past Harlan, that carries the kind of briefcase Cole has seen only in movies, code-locked and steel-braced, stashed beneath Grady Creed’s seat. The return will take much longer and he’ll be alone with a two-month supply of reefer to satisfy stoners in three counties. Creed’s to follow in a tracer vehicle—a protocol begun, he said, after Fleece disappeared.
“Your big brother doing what he did, I don’t know why, but what it got me was more work and more driving,” Creed said. “I hate driving more than anything. I don’t see how truckers do it, no wonder so many of them are tweaked. Not that I’m complaining, I mean half my money comes from them. But it’s too much time in the head for me.”
Seeing firsthand how The Run works complicates the questions behind what Fleece allegedly did and what is said to have happened after. If he had been interested only in theft, then why go down to Harlan at all? He was to pick up the October harvest, the largest of the year and the riskiest to grow, as it was planted outdoors, spread over several locations, and so most treacherous to reap. The amount of cash on him must have been extraordinary—Cole would guess seven- to eight-hundred-thousand dollars at the least. Could you fit that much money into a single case? The radio show ends and Cole asks what Creed thinks. Creed looks like he’s chewing over the question in his mouth—but it’s only him working up spit off his dip. “Your brother wasn’t always the most practical man I ever dealt with. He didn’t know the code to the case, I know that much.”
“He didn’t? How would you know that?” asks Cole. “Because none of us who make this drive ever know the numbers that open the case,” says Creed. “Who does?” asks Cole. “The guy we give it to. Him and Greuel and Arley. Well, not Greuel anymore, obviously.” “Who do we give it to?” asks Cole. “Is that Nate Crutchfield?”
Creed eyes him sideways. He says: “Maybe. Pay attention to your driving, I don’t trust that floater eye of yours, you could roll us into Wolf Gap following that thing and I want to snooze before we bump up, it’s going to be a long night.” Before Cole can ask why the night will be so long Creed adds: “It’s always a long night with the Crutch, you’ll see.”
Dusk arrives like a thin veil thrown from behind the eastern hillsides. Creed shuts down to snores with remarkable speed, light, gentle scrapes that sound like fine sandpaper against unfinished wood. The radio mentions a shootout in Mexico near the border between rival cartels; a hostage was released somewhere in the Middle East; a jury in Denver sentenced that Timothy McVeigh cunt to death. He’s content to hear it but none of the news means anything to him. He checks his speed and his mirrors; traffic’s heavier than he’d expected. Traffic’s always heavier than he would have expected, he’s regularly surprised by how many people live out between Richmond and London. Usually when he drives he likes to zone out, to daydream over which car is going where, who the people are inside, whether they’re kind or maybe complete bastards moving on after ruining somebody’s life.
His gut pinches, and a blade of heat slides out between his legs. They have another hour to go at least. Surely he can hold it together for another hour.
In the rearview a slash of light catches his eye; bright headlights leap from behind a semi well behind him and speed past the trailer, cutting back in with a deft swerve just behind the van, the powerful engine loud enough for Cole to hear over the radio murmur. The car lurches forward as the driver taps the brakes, and there, in that instant, the hair on Cole’s neck and along his arms flare in alarm, his body startled by the recognition—it’s not yet so dark that he can’t see the make and he would know the familiar trim of the Nova coupe any day. Its candy-red finish gleams as new; the flip-out window stands open on the driver’s side, a marker of the same year as Fleece’s car. The Nova revs, slots onto the dividing line, but can’t pass due to another semi, WASH ME scrawled in the film of its scum on the back door parallel to Cole’s eye line, blocking the lane. Interstate lights glare on the Nova’s windshield, it’s impossible to see inside.
He speeds up to pass the semi as the road starts to ascend. The Nova accelerates behind him, so close that its headlights are blocked by the equipment stacked in back, the candy-red canopy all that’s visible to him. “Why you got to be on my ass like that?” he mumbles.
“How fast you going?” asks Creed, not opening his eyes until a time passes without Cole answering. “How fast,” he asks again. “I want to get around this semi to get this guy off my ass,” Cole says. Creed checks his sideview mirror. Then he turns fully around. “Get a load of that,” he says. “Tell me about it,” Cole agrees.
They’ve barely made a car length ahead of the semi when the Nova splits the space into the next lane. Here Cole notes the yellow front fender replacement, not even primed yet, it could have come right off his brother’s car before it burned. The Nova doesn’t roar past; rather, it steadies next to them, the driver pulling into alignment with Cole. He fights the urge to look. He has always resisted looking at another driver directly on the highway in that awkward moment of hurtling forward together, the strange feeling of invasion that acknowledging one another in those few shared seconds invoked. But the Nova keeps pace beside them as they pass first one then another mile marker, long enough that Cole can’t help but sense the other is trying to gain his attention, to communicate something—and Creed must sense this too as he leans forward, looking. And then Cole looks also. But the windows on the Nova are tinted deep purple and mirror the bluing evening light.
Cole checks the road ahead, then again the car beside him, expecting the window to drop as they careen down another long hillside curving like a flume. The window doesn’t move. As the road bottoms out and begins another ascent the Nova’s engine roars, accelerates, slows down, leaps forward. “What the fuck’s he want?” asks Creed. And then: “Jesus, Cole, you’re going over ninety.”
So he is—he lifts his foot from the accelerator. It’s true, they had been flying. As he watches the speedometer dial down to eighty, then seventy-five, his heartbeat clamors within his head; by the time they hit the summit of the next hill they’ve returned to the speed limit, and it’s not until then that Cole takes a deep breath—realizing at the same time that it’s his first breath in a while. The Nova races on, shooting the lane ahead and zooming past cars that brake and change lanes to allow the wild driver plenty of room to maneuver. When they reach the next downhill slope, a long lightless stretch among walls of dynamited limestone, the Nova’s rear lights are so far ahead as to be indistinguishable from all the others on the road.
“I didn’t realize I was driving so fast,” Cole says.
“Dude’s probably wondering what those church boys was trying to prove, racing him like that,” muses Creed. He pinches a wad of chew from
the can, pulls out his bottom lip to set it in place. His face tightens a moment with the sting of the minty tobacco and he smacks the dash with the flat of his hand. “Poor Cole boy, your face was like you just swallowed my spit cup, you must’ve felt like you seen a ghost. I mean, yellow fender and everything. I mean, damn.”
He’s shaking his head as he scans the radio for another station worth the listening. He switches from AM to FM and peruses the entire spectrum of the dial, finding nothing but commercials or the New Country they both despise. Eventually he gives up, shuts the radio off as he points Cole off the interstate to the Hal Rogers that crosses Boone National Forest.
“It was the wrong side,” Cole says.
“Who is?”
“The fender on that Nova. It wasn’t the same side. Fleece’s was on the driver side.”
Creed stares at the cliff walls outside his window without comment. And Cole begins to wonder at the possible connection between things, between different lives lived far apart, how you might almost meet a person at several junctures in your life and yet never do. Like someone out there’s living a mirror image of your own life. That yellow fender—could it be possible that it had come from the same yellow Nova as his brother’s? And if so, then what’s the story behind that yellow car, who had owned it, what forced it into some junkyard to be pieced out as needed? How many candy-red ’76 Nova coupes were left in Kentucky?
There must be a number of them; it was a fast car with pieces cheaply found and car nuts love their Mustangs and Novas. Still, Creed’s right: it felt like he had been brushed by a ghost. He had driven alongside the thing, struggling with the van to keep pace, his head reeling with What? What? What? as he awaited some communication to come, to signal something important, something essential—why else the coincidence of this run, his brother’s last? What was it trying to tell him?
Why does he feel like it was trying to give warning?
He shakes his head and runs his palm over his face. That entire time beside the Nova he had wondered—no, he had been seeking to know—what it had wanted from him; but it was only his own foot on the gas pedal keeping the two vehicles aligned. It had been Cole himself creating the connection where there was none.
Fleece had told him it was a stupid idea, back when Cole had called to say he was moving back to the lake. “Pirtle County’s got nothing for you—I thought you were heading to the coast somewhere, diving school,” Fleece said. Cole pleaded poverty. And then Fleece said: “You can’t find a better job in the city?” And then he said: “Living with Lyda aint going to change a thing, puppy. You can’t help someone fine with the problems they got.”
The day Cole reclaimed their old bedroom in the house was the single time he saw his brother before he disappeared. Fleece watched Cole carry in his few belongings, thumb hooked to the waist of his jeans and making no offers to help, not so much as even holding a door open. With Cole installed, Lyda clapped her hands and exclaimed, “I’m one happy mother hen with a full nest right now!” standing between the boys and squeezing their shoulders. Fleece pulled off. “I still got my own place,” he said.
“Either my boys can live with me long as they like,” said Lyda.
Cole felt his brother was somehow disappointed and only wanted him out of there, he didn’t understand why. The feeling had hurt him then. But maybe Fleece had been trying to look out for his brother in his own halfhearted way. Maybe he knew already—he must have known—what he was about to do.
Later that night Cole had looked over the three low shelves on the partition dividing the kitchen from the main room and found, among coil-spined cookbooks and drugstore paperbacks and the Merck Manual Lyda used to memorize symptoms she needed to present to obtain a prescription, the Pirtle County High yearbooks of Fleece’s junior and senior years. The endpapers had few signatures or notes, and these only from girls whose names Cole did not recognize. Invariably they referred to how each would always cherish their special times together with Fleece, and expressed hope that they would remain close. As Cole paged through the yearbooks themselves he had to smile at his brother’s ability to make it through without notice or record. He was missing from the class picture taken on the school’s front steps; he hadn’t joined any extracurricular groups since getting cut from the basketball team his sophomore year. The only mention of him at all was among the individual student photos, his name listed beneath an empty frame where there should have been his portrait, identified as “missing.”
If his brother is dead then Cole has failed him, now with Greuel gone. If he’s alive, then Cole has no reason for what he’s doing, and the ground crumbles beneath his feet.
Creed directs him onto 421 toward Harlan. “Not far now,” he says. It is close to full night now and the van’s interior is dark, the dashboard lights dim. “Your belly all right?”
“I’m fine.” At the mention of it his insides cramp, and he tightens his gut until the pain passes.
“I paid a visit to that cousin of yours,” Creed says. “That kid’s a bigger mess than Spunk. You sure he’s kin to you and Fleece?”
“He’s no kin to Fleece. His father was brother to my father. Fleece and me share our mother.” He explains this quietly, knowing it doesn’t matter, that Creed doesn’t care one way or the other.
“That kid’s a storyteller, he’s a whatyoucallit—a myth-o-maniac. Right? Got big plans for himself and us and don’t even know his own brain’s telling him lies.”
“What did you do to him?”
Creed’s hands rise in innocent surrender. “I didn’t touch the kid! I got a right to see where my money’s going to come from, don’t I? Keep an eye on that boy, though. You know that, right?”
“This why you had me make this drive with you? To tell me that?”
Again the hands surrender. “No, man, why you got to be always suspicious like that? Fleece never believed in anybody neither, not even his best pal who wanted to do a favor. I got a sweet side. You ask Lyda, she knows.” He snickers at Cole’s reaction to his mother’s name. “Yeah, you heard me say it. She’s a good woman, your mother, I aint going to do nothing to hurt her. Or you, ’less you give me reason to. Pull over, we’re almost there.”
He doesn’t understand why they left so late, insuring they wouldn’t reach Harlan until after dark, instead of first thing in the morning and thus having time to make the buy, load the van, and return home by nightfall. All done in daylight, with less time in Eastern Kentucky where the Feds operate. But he has been at this long enough to learn that a procedure exists behind every delivery run he makes, refined over time by trial and error (he guesses), and he is no one to be suggesting different modes of operation.
The radio had said tonight would show the brightest moon of the year but there’s no sign of one yet. They travel a lightless two-lane road pressed upon by trees. He pulls over where Creed says, stopping on a gravel drive that appears like a natural tunnel in their headlights, pines, oaks, elms forming a tight colonnade on either side, their branches closing off the sky; moths gleam white before the windshield and then flicker into the darkness again. “Turn off your headlights,” he says. “Keep your foot off the brake.”
The trees and gravel road evaporate. The darkness is as total as if the drive had been scored through a mountain, until Cole’s eyes adjust and he begins to make out a distant bluing where the trees must end. He rolls down his window; the cacophony of woodland life fills the van with its noise of tiny saws, minute screams. His gut lurches again, and again he tightens his thighs to keep in whatever’s going on down there.
“I’ve got to find a toilet here soon,” Cole says.
“We don’t need but a minute, we’re not far.” From his front pocket Creed pulls out and unfolds a small ziplock. From another pocket he pulls a small steel plate no bigger than an index card, a fancy engineer’s pocket protector, and shakes from the bag a thick scar of powder. Then he closes the ziplock again and shoves it back into his pocket. Using a small straight razor and
steadying his hand against the dash, he thins the scar into three short lines, telling Cole he’ll want some of this, too, but only a little, it’s pure and clean as you can get, you watch, it’ll help your stomach. He sheaths the razor in its fitted cardboard and drops it into his shirt pocket, takes out a cut straw, and inhales a full line. Creed’s head pops back; he winces, pinches his nose shut with the straw stuck between his middle and ring fingers. “Who?” he asks with a groan. Then he slams his hand against the dash. “Hoo boy but if that aint a kick.”
An eighteen-wheeler rushing along the two-lane behind them rocks the van with its afterwash. The movement calls Cole’s eyes to the rearview mirror, his thumbnail a different razor against his palm as he keeps watch, expecting somehow the appearance of figures, blue lights; he doesn’t take his eyes away until Creed prods him with a knuckle.
“That shit is poison,” Cole says.
“Yeah, well. Poison fuels our game.” Creed proffers the plate near Cole’s chin. “It’ll dry up that gut, I promise. You don’t want to see me angry on this. I claim no responsibility for my actions for the rest of this night.”
With the powder this close he can see it’s a only small amount. Creed’s staring adds a thoughtless urgency. “Go on, now,” he says. “If I was Shady Beck here you wouldn’t stop a second, would you.” It confounds Cole to feel Creed making sense. He snorts hard and a blade thrusts up his skull into a star directly above his right eye, and his head shoots back as if taking a blind punch. An expanding, steady burn flares the circumference of the eye and he pinches his nose. Soon then the pain starts to subside; his heart beats in his cranium, and he feels entirely new: alert, strong, the best version of Cole Prather he’s likely to ever get. Each tree aligned by the gravel drive turns and acknowledges his arrival. Cole smiles; he wets his finger and wipes up the rest of the remaining powder, sucks it onto his tongue. He hands the plate back to Creed, who nods in aggressive affirmation and tells him What I’m saying as if they’d been discussing some grave issue and he wanted it to be clear that they were in agreement. “Awrighty James Cole,” he says, “let’s get to work.”