Ghosting

by Kirby Gann

  Cole tries to grasp what the man is asking, uncertain of what he is on to. More pressingly, he doesn’t know where they are—he wants to ask his own questions, and he wants to be told where to turn. He keeps driving, the van hurtling through the unknown dark. He asks, “You have family?”

  “Like you, had a brother older than me. Beat the tar out of me any time I did what he didn’t want me to, which was about ever other day. My daddy, too. Never held it against either of them. Never felt obliged to stick my neck out for either of them neither.”

  “You got kids?”

  “Nope, never did. My first wife wanted some bad, too. She wanted a whole tribe, but nothing ever come of it. Doctors said I had lazy swimmers. She said she could believe that, no reason for my sperm to be any different from the rest of me. Took up with some other feller with pipes that worked and I don’t blame her, she was still a looker then, any boy would’ve been happy to have her shoes under his bed.”

  He rolls down his window the rest of the way and slaps the tobacco out of his pipe against the door, then retches from deep in his chest and shoots something heavy onto the roadside. “Fair enough,” he says. Cole’s unsure if he’s referring to his wife or to what he spat out the window. Crutchfield tells him to slow on a long curve and take the next left; once he does, they drop beneath the trees again.

  “I like this road,” Nate says. He tells him to turn off the headlights and Cole hesitates; Crutchfield says Go on, turn’em off and he does, slowing to a bicycle pace. The sound of the tires on the road become the single sound; the moonlight streaks down through the dark tree canopy in haphazard spears, luminous pillars of a cool gold that appear almost solid. “Now I will declare that is something to see,” Crutchfield murmurs. And it is: the shafts are formed in such contrast to the dark that they seem to strengthen the blackness; the trees seem nearly uniform, undifferentiated backdrop; the world does not seem the same place as it was moments before.

  The van nearly stalls as they lift from the gully and Cole presses the pedal again; at the top the trees clear and he flips the lights back on, although here the moonlight is enough to get along without them.

  “I suppose I should admire you coming this far into this but in all honesty—no offense meant—I take you for a fool,” Crutchfield says, tapping the pistol against one unlaced boot, contemplating that small movement. “I’ve no business telling a young man what he ought to do with his life so I won’t. But I knew your brother, and I will say one look told me you’re not much like him. You are not stupid enough not to know this. Fleece fit the job. You, though,” and his head moves impossibly slow from side to side. He repeats the phrase: “You, though.”

  The van jimmies and squeaks with the rough surface of the road, and the soccer balls bobble on the boxes behind them. “Don’t get me wrong,” Crutchfield says. “I’m not on your side here. Not against you, either. I owe you nothing, but I figure you don’t need to be stuck in your brother’s life any longer than you have to.”

  “They call you the Truth because that’s all you speak. That’s what you said.”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  “Can you tell me where Fleece is?”

  “No I cannot. And not because I won’t. Because I don’t know.”

  Cole rubs at an ache in his jaw that stretches to his temples. He’s desperately thirsty as well, and wonders how it’s possible, since it feels like they’ve driven twice over all creation, not to have passed so much as a gas-mart. And why is it that whenever he feels he is about to receive an important revelation to why he’s here and what it is he’s supposed to do, he never does?

  “This is what I’m getting at, this right here,” Crutchfield says. “I know some about you. I know your kin. You want one of them four-dollar words of virtue—retribution, atonement. But you don’t know what your brother did or if there’s anything to revenge him for. If Greuel put him down, then now what? There’s no more Lawrence Greuel. And even if he was still here, you have to agree that Fleece knew the risks and Greuel would’ve been justified in his judgment. That truth leaves you going through motions you think you owe your family, to Fleece, a man I’m sorry to tell you but you didn’t even know.” His face slackens and a melancholy gentleness softens his eyes. “You feel some obligation to him because you was kids together a long time ago. Some might hear that story and think you’re an honorable lad. I say it’s sadly misguided affairs.”

  “I’ve never seen you before. How come you think you know me so well?”

  “Would a man in my position let anyone on his property this time of night without knowing where they live and who’s their kin? Fleece never even talked about you, son.”

  They are high above another steep valley lit as bright as dawn. As he drives Cole tries to fit such few details to his brother as he remembers him—the silver chain of his wallet, the unstyled hair always “a cut away from nice-looking,” as Lyda called it, the thick forearms and wrists Cole envied. Snakeskin boots dyed to the warm dun of sand. The way he said you know it whenever he agreed with you. How he looked as natural to the water in the lake when he swam that he could have been just another part of the same water. That was it; that was the key to Fleece: he was natural and expected as a fish in water, perfectly attuned to his environment, he had carried himself with that most natural and yet rarest of gifts—how to be in the world.

  “Let me ask you this. Did you have any clue he was going to steal that run?”

  “No I did not. Well in retrospect maybe so. It’s hard to think what you really knew before something went down you didn’t expect. Understand what I’m saying? I wasn’t looking for a problem, we’d played this gig a thousand times. But after Greuel and Noe got after me I thought well hell, I’m not surprised, of course that’s what Fleece did.”

  “Why did you think that? What was so different?”

  “For one, he come down with a ghost from my younger days, guy by name of Hardesty used to help with a still and had himself a bad morphine habit back then. I understand you know him.”

  “Knew him. Not well.”

  “Knew him, right. That is so. Funny—sometimes you cross paths with another person and you just know, know it in your gut without thinking, that this person is not going to make a ripe old age and that the manner of their ending will be ignoble.”

  “Why did he bring Hardesty?”

  “Said he couldn’t drive with his arm broke. He had a cast that covered his fingers, I didn’t inspect it or anything. Arms get broke.”

  He didn’t have a broken arm when Cole saw him. And if Hardesty had any plans designed against Greuel or Noe he never suggested that when they were alone in his front room; a little paranoid, maybe, but as far as he could tell all the man wanted was to be left alone. Cole figures he must have that situation all wrong or else Hardesty would not have come to the ignoble end—as Crutchfield described it—as he had. Unless all order and form has fled the world. Arley Noe and Mule were murderers but they didn’t go killing people for the fun of it. The fun of it: this phrase brings unsought images of Hardesty’s face in death, how within minutes after he died the color of his face transformed to a cold white closing in on green. The hole above his mustache, the crunch of the shovel against his teeth.

  “There’s this other thing sticks in my head,” says Crutchfield. “Your brother shows up and gives me my money, and then he announces like it’s a decree that this reefer is no longer mine and so therefore I have nothing more to do with it. Sounded like a joke at the time, Hardesty got a big laugh out of it and he said it wasn’t Arley Noe’s neither. But I wonder maybe Fleece was making the situation clear to me. Like he wanted to ease my conscience after it went down, he didn’t want me beating myself up wondering if I’d taken part in something I didn’t want to take part in. Which would’ve been thoughtful of Fleece. I upheld my end of the deal, even Greuel admitted that.”

  “If Fleece was going to steal from Greuel, why bother with the run at all? Didn’t he come down he
re with the cash to pay for it?”

  “He did. I got paid.” Crutchfield’s heavy brow thickens, and he tucks his chin to his chest and frowns. He remains silent for a full minute or more. “Fleece was always square with me, we were almost friends—you don’t really have friends in this show, you’ve learned that by now. But Fleece, maybe he wanted to stay square, I can see him thinking it out that way. It was Greuel and Arley he wanted hurt. He doesn’t bring me that money, all three of us get hurt. I got paid.”

  “I don’t know why Fleece would want to punish either of them.”

  Crutchfield screws up his lips and nods as though Cole has unwittingly confirmed an assumption. Rather than answering immediately, the man digs around in the good pocket of his overalls, and it’s peculiar that he uses only his right hand for everything he needs to do and never lets go of the pistol in his left, as if he’s fused to this ancient gun, or physically reliant upon it in some way. When his fingers grasp what he’s looking for he holds the object before his face close in the dark, his screwed-up lips broadening into a knifelike grin. Yes, he says to himself, and tosses the object onto the dash. It clinks against the windshield and tumbles about, and then rolls to a stop against an air vent.

  “Go ahead,” Crutchfield tells him. “It might be nothing but that right there.”

  Cole picks it up even as he already recognizes the thick gold nugget ring set with a constellation of tiny diamonds bedded into the shape of a horseshoe.

  His face must show his bemusement, because when the Crutch looks at him now, he chuckles.

  “I know,” the man says, “you can walk into any jeweler in Kentucky with a couple grand and come out with that ring or one close to it. It’s not the hunk of jewelry that matters, see, it’s what it signifies. Only three of us got to wear that particular design, with that specific number of diamonds, and it means doors will open and phones will pick up in five states from here to Minnesota. It means silence and safety from the fuckers who want to keep a man from what grows natural in God’s green earth. Fleece wanted one for his finger and I don’t blame him, it’s normal to want to move on up. When you work for Greuel and Arley, you’re never nothing but a mule. Unless you have that ring.”

  Cole studies the band again. Headlights from an oncoming semi wash the van and flash the diamonds into dazzle. It’s pretty to look at, but Cole has never been much interested in precious stones. He would not think it possible that Fleece’s motivation could be so simple. There is nothing Cole can do with that.

  He tosses the ring onto the dashboard. Crutchfield leaves it there, and the ring rolls with the curves of the road, the diamonds winking in small bursts of florid light.

  “People’ve killed for less,” Crutchfield offers.

  A silence descends. Without knowing why, Cole thinks of Fleece as he had known him in childhood; he sees Fleece tossing bleach into the lake shallows so they could swim; sees him placing a blanket over their mother on the couch as she slept; sees him handing Cole a fifty-dollar bill when he was twelve. In each image he cannot picture his brother’s face exactly; it is like Fleece has receded into shadows, somehow avoided the camera in Cole’s eye as he had avoided the cameras at high school.

  Beside him Crutchfield begins to sing another of his old mountain songs. Lord, the water done rushed all over, down old Jackson road. Boy it starched my clothes. I’m goin’ back to the hilly country, won’t be worried no more. He interrupts to give Cole directions, holding the melodic note as he tells Cole to turn, then muttering into the lyrics again. Soon they are among the cow bones at Crutchfield’s property.

  “I do like a long ride of a clear evening,” he says along the rise up the two-track drive. Cole asks why he has the cow bones everywhere and he says that clean bones are beautiful and, even better, bare bones keep superstitious people in line. “All Mexicans are superstitious,” he says, satisfied with the statement as though he has accessed an undeniable truth. “At least all mine are. Doesn’t matter what country they come from. Lay out your farm with bones and nobody fucks with you.”

  The Truth leaves him with the other vehicles parked by the Quonset hut, driving off in the manner of the old man that he is, babying the old pickup at little more than a walking pace among the roadside bones agleam beneath the moon, riding the brakes. The tic of the van’s cooling engine clicks time with the music faintly audible from inside the farmhouse. He stands at the outskirt of the lamps’ wash on the gravel lot and looks to the sky scrubbed of stars by the powerful radiance of the moon that hovers over the land, following him, tracking him like some cosmic spotlight he could not escape if he tried.

  “Brightest moon of the year, they say,” he says for the sake of saying.

  He enters the kitchen through a screen door lost of its screens. Inside, his body reacts in a peculiar fashion—the hair on his neck stands on end. The kitchen is a nasty sight and feels heavy with menace, as though something bad happened there recently and the fumes of the act still linger. Crusty skillets and pans sprawl sideways in a collapsed stack; the sink teems with dishes, filled with a water that glitters oil and brown grease. A dark fungus arcs along the wall between the counter and open cabinets above. On the counter itself stand a number of empty bottles—tequila and rum and beer—and scattered salt lies thick over everything, free munchies for the roaches that flee at his approach.

  Cole opens the refrigerator door; he selects the only brand of beer available, a green bottle of something called Cerveza Hatuey with the profile of an angry Indian warrior on its label. He checks a few drawers for a bottle opener but doesn’t find one, and clacks off the cap with the end of his lighter, not bothering to note where the cap falls to the floor of shaky tiles.

  In the next room he discovers the origins of the music: an out-of-date stereo straddles two large speakers set upon a wide wooden box, the kind of box used for carrying loads of fruit. The room is crowded, but no one is singing anymore. They seem to have fallen under some hypnosis, or sedation, their bodies collapsed unmoving across ramshackle furniture shoved together so tightly it’s tough to maneuver from the doorway. Grady Creed is not among them. Nobody acknowledges or even notices Cole’s entrance. A large TV against the opposite wall flashes skewed images between bursts of white noise and holds everyone’s attention.

  Cigarette and marijuana smoke wafts in great clouds. He glances over the different faces, several men and a trio of women, everyone foreign and the men dressed in similar dungaree outfits that are not quite uniforms, like those who had loaded the van earlier—but he doesn’t recognize anyone. One woman lounges across the laps of two men on the couch, sipping at a lime green drink she holds just below her chin. He feels distinctly exposed and out of place. A general sense of degeneracy and hazard permeates the entire floor. Where else would Creed be?

  Cole sucks a heavy swallow from his beer as one lengthy, thin man, reclined in a La-Z-Boy chair and heavily mustached, gestures at him with his head, smiling a broad smile that lacks one front tooth. The man nods in a way that suggests they share a joke or a familiarity—or maybe he’s only indicating welcome, Cole cannot tell.

  “Grady here?”

  The faces in the room turn. Each appears a mix of melancholy and anger, like they have recently received terrible news for which they are also culpable, their eyes swollen red and faces shining. Or it’s like they are all resting after a fierce brawl and no one’s happy with how the fight ended. Nobody answers his question, either; soon Cole is uncertain he even asked the question aloud. The others return their attention to the flickering TV. One of the women leans forward and sets her drink on the coffee table heavy with bottles and cans and TV Guides and magazines; then she leans further and her long black hair falls to one side of her face as she draws a line of powder from a compact mirror up her nose. She turns to the man beside her and offers the mirror but he does not look from the screen, holds his hand up in refusal.

  Cole looks again at the man in the La-Z-Boy, who continues to nod and smile, leading w
ith his chin, encouraging Cole to something he doesn’t understand. “Any of you people speak English? Grady Creed? White guy about yay tall?” He makes a motion with his hand to indicate Creed’s height.

  The guy with the missing tooth has nothing to add but that inscrutable smile, a weird combination of warmth and mockery. The music ends and the speakers fill with the turntable’s needle dragging at the LP. Nobody gets up to take the needle off the record.

  “If that shit’s supposed to be cocaine then you all got ripped off,” Cole tells the man in the recliner. He merely nods and presents the single-gap smile again.

  The rest of the first floor is empty, hardwood floors beneath scattered trash, discarded boxes (one for the large JVC television set) stuffed with takeout food bags and empty paper cups; unlaced work boots line the base of the wall by the front door. A stall-like bathroom houses a filthy toilet beneath a bowed and stained ceiling.

  Mounting the carpeted stairs he catches sight of the tall man from the La-Z-Boy following him. “I’m looking for my buddy, he up here?” Cole motions to the second floor with his hand. The man glances at him as he passes the stairs. He slips his feet into a pair of boots and heads out the front door. From the TV room, a small cheer and a lone set of hands clapping.

  The carpet on the stairs has a path worn to fibers, but once on the second floor it’s like another house entire, cream walls freshly painted, framed pictures of bucolic farm scenes, a long clean houndstooth rug running to the single door at the hallway’s end. Four other doors, each closed, line the hall on either side. The scent of that cologne from earlier at the barn hangs heavy, an invisible fog of it. The door at the far end opens suddenly and the man who had pushed him in the barn comes out, perhaps it’s Alfaro—yet before Cole can speak he perceives the look of unbridled fury, the man in a quick march, shoulders pulled back, like he is about to launch into a tackle and send them both toppling down the stairs.