Ghosting

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

In memory of James E. Tittle II, “Jamie”
October 10, 1965–June 19, 2007

—Jim Harrison,
The Road Home

A Fine Excess: Contemporary Literature at Play
(2001)
(Kristin Herbert, co-editor)

 

The Barbarian Parade
(2003)

 

Our Napoleon in Rags
(2005)

All is sign. But only a piercing light or shriek will penetrate our blunted sight and hearing.... I’ve always been aware of hieroglyphs written across my path and a confused murmur of words in my ear. Till now I didn’t understand them.

—Michel Tournier,
The Ogre

The things people do don’t add up to an edifying story.
There aren’t any morals to this confusion we’re living in.
I mean you can make yourself believe any sort of fable about it.

—Robert Stone,
A Flag for Sunrise

Three shadows steal across a field of forgotten seed corn, stumbling over fallen husks rotted to the ground—three shadows bent low scurry past rough leaves that scrape the skin like cow tongues. Late November, deep night. Misting rain that once hung like fog sharpens into pin needles on great gusts of wind. The loamy mud sucks at their ankles, white breath blooms before their faces, and their bare arms burn with the cold as they surge over the sodden field, wild with trespass.

James Cole Prather comes last in line. He cannot keep pace with the healthy legs of his companions; a misshapen knee makes him list to starboard at each step, his excuse for a run an awkward pole-vaulting motion mastered from childhood. He catches up to where his friends still at the field’s end, hiding out before the cracked cul-de-sac drive. Their giggles and squally hushes spring from the dark stalks, a tiny crew of the stoned and invulnerable scanning for signs of any human figure, for the infamous caretaker making his rounds, the glint of his shotgun in the meager moonlight.

The spectacular ruin of the St. Jerome seminary looms before them. It’s a vast keep: five stories high, the facade as wide as a football field is long, row upon row of shattered mullioned windows gaping sightless over the broken fields. At the summit towers a stone cross; above that, clouds zoom across the moon like river rapids at full rampage.

His companions bolt across the open space and disappear behind a keeling pine. James Cole watches them go as he catches his breath, used to being left behind. He raises his face to the roiling clouds, feels the cold rain mix with the sweat slicking his cheeks. His eyes close at the simple pleasure, and he listens to the swim in his brain and the thousands of sounds that surround: wind on stalks; rain on leaves; a broken shutter attacking its hinges. Each a note sung precisely for him.

By the time he makes it around the pine his friends are gone.

He calls their names, softly; only the wind rises in answer. The basement windows nearest him are securely boarded shut. Above, on the second floor, a single window hangs open not far from the tree’s sturdy center, and he envisions the scene he must have missed only a moment before, Spunk and Shady hauling themselves up the weak extended branches without speaking, sneakers grabbing for toe-holds on the brick ledge.

The rain comes down heavier, in gobs. A shiver wrings his body as three cold drops shock his neck beneath the collar. Up the tree he goes, boots scrape-sliding on the slick trunk, clumps of scratchy bark pulling off in his hands. The climb requires more effort than he had expected, but he makes it to the open window and wiggles through headfirst. The wet linoleum floor shocks when it kisses him hard on the forehead.

They’ve left him here as well; he can feel the absence around him. The dark is such that it swallows the weak beam of his flashlight. Rain sluices noisily in one dark corner, and somewhere there sings a plopping song, an echo as water taps into deeper water, a melody without resolution. The first purl of thunder rolls the length of the sky in a gradual motion that seems to pour far into the distance and then return. And there is a stench—the room smells of piss and rot and wet dog.

The light from his hand works like an intangible guiding rope drawing him behind its lead. He has been in this place many times before, yet at each entry feels utterly lost—even, in some way, bereft; his heart in his throat. It has always struck him as the backdrop to undesirable dreams: inexhaustible in its rooms, tangled by puzzling stairways and corridors, often presenting mystical compartments
with no function he can divine. In dreams he has staggered from hall to hall with slow-thighed dogs panting unseen behind him; he has fled down stairs and stone slides; he has been swallowed altogether into the belly of the earth. As if the building masked a portal that led deep into ancient caverns, sculpted by slicked flues and hidden rivers.

Now here he is again, and, as in every dream, he is alone. But he is not dreaming. What was it the sick man had said just an hour before?
There is always something happening, you just don’t know what it is
. It was a quote from somebody else.

He is twenty-three years old. He has no reason to imagine within a year he might be dead. The serrated butterfly knife folded into his hip pocket is mostly for show. Still he checks to confirm the blade is there. On such scant assurance James Cole Prather gropes forward, half-blind in the darkness, less substantial than the knife at his hip or the light in hand, an obedient and guileless spirit adrift from all familiars.

The idea for the night, Cole’s idea, had been to go it alone with Shady Beck, the two of them alone after much strategizing and manipulation on his part. In his heart and mind Shady Beck was an end in herself. But she needed a little party, some chemical aid she called it—
I shall be in need of chemical aid,
she cooed in exaggerated high-class over the phone, her small-toothed smile a shape in Cole’s ear—as an excuse to be out with him. Or maybe she needed it just to tolerate his presence, he wasn’t sure. And he did not care. For years she had been a figure in the hands-off domain of his brother Fleece, a smile and a wave walking away to her car, a sunny laugh across the room to which he always dipped his head in a kind of bow.

Chemical aid
required a stop at Spunk Greuel’s house, where Cole did not want to go. He
knew
Spunk, had known him most his life, and understood that once with him they might be with him all the night long. The boy was a kind of stink that got on your clothes and in your hair and was near impossible to shake off.

Cole could accept the risk for the chance at spending time with Shady Beck. And it was unavoidable anyway, so no use in lamenting. Mister Greuel was the man to see for pills and pot and any other sin on spec. He led a loose crew—got his weed direct from growers in Clay and Harlan counties, the pills from God knew what Byzantine scams, his crank from his own cooks, most of whom followed Fleece. A dark and entertaining man, Mister Greuel—always with the
Mister
, nobody
called him
Lawrence
—him with his tongue swollen from some strange sickness, goggle eyes awry in a fist of a sweating head. He had a face as rutted and pocked as barnwood. His fat tongue made him spit everywhere and mucked up his words. Listening to him was like sitting witness to the creation of a new language, you had to match terms previously unknown to what you had thought you readily understood. Like Spunk’s real name is William. Cole had called him Billy on the playground. But one night providing the boys with
the gifts of their destruction
—what Mister Greuel called the bottles and blunts—Billy’s dad started to get on his son for not bringing any ass to giggle on his lap. It was for young ass giggling on his lap that Greuel gave freely of his gifts of destruction. Unhappy to see only skinny adolescent boys scouring his stock, Greuel started to mutter over how his own son William was a punk. Except for his fat tongue the word came out
shpunk
. Mix that moment with teenage boys baked on the bomb and Billy Greuel becomes Spunk the rest of his life.

Greuel made the kids laugh but they knew not to mess with him. It was Greuel the guy that took down three Gravy Berserkers (one of the biker gangs from Montreux city) who thought they could reap business from a hick dealer by showing up with no more than chugging fat-boy hogs and a flash of a semiautomatic Glock. Greuel swept them out with nothing but a rifle and a Bowie knife, and he strung those bodies from a town-square tree like so much deer meat left to ripen in winter.

Yet on many occasions this man told little James Cole to think on him as a friend.

The gate code had not changed since the days Cole used to ride up on his bicycle. He punched in the numbers and parked by the stables where the old man ran legit side-business boarding horses for city refugees, rich folk buying into the new bedroom communities mushrooming on either side of the interstate. Shady took his hand and the small gesture thrilled him. Together they navigated the great yard of oxidized farming implements and roadside statuary, a mazy museum of throwaway Americana. They halted at the front steps before a clutch of gar hung gape-mouthed and stinking, their eyes collapsed into folds. Cole had no explanation for the fish.

Professor Mule shouted greetings from his Adirondack chair. He looked nested alongside a column of paperback mysteries, a thermos between his thighs, his Mossberg shotgun in easy reach against the porch rail. They had not seen one another in years but Mule said he would recognize that crazy eye of Cole Prather anywheres. You staying warm, Erly? Cole asked, skipping the man’s nickname, ever uneasy before his grain-sack presence and the gun, though what Cole heard was you only needed to run from Mule if you saw him with his toolbox. Mule nodded and dismissed them, falling into a singsong hum as he returned to his book, a ridiculously fragile looking object in the grip of his pork-belly hands.

“I knew you’d be out here fore too long you wall-eyed rascal!” Spunk burst out, knocking open the screen door. He torched their faces with a breath that bleached the stench of the fish. Presented with someone she recognized, Shady regained composure and was in past Spunk and at the big bowl of reefer by Mister Greuel in his rocking chair before the screen clapped shut. Feeling like a calf roped on the run, Cole felt the Greuel house upon him.

They kept off the main lights by habit, the dim room illuminated by the small blue glow of a silent TV set. That and the headlight Greuel kept at hand, wired to a car battery set on the floor. As visitors arrived he liked to blind them in the glare as he waved the headlight about. Somewhere deeper in the house a transistor radio scratched out lonesome tinny fiddles and nasal harmonies that wailed tales of warning from another day. It was a greeting impossible to get used to and Cole had walked into it a thousand times.

Not Shady; she was on a mission. She pounced into the old man’s lap and had her hands in the bowl, saying, “Mister Greuel how do you do, whyn’t you tell us a story while I roll us up a fat one.”

The old man’s laughter came sick and raspy but it had always sounded that way and he would never die.

“I like her!” he crowed as he shifted in his chair, the weight of them both wrenching complaints from the struts. “Who is she?”

As if he didn’t know. As if anyone in Pirtle County had never heard of Shady Beck, youngest of the three daughters to Doctor Beck (the pediatrician who had booster-shot them all), one-time star of the
volleyball and swim teams, Shady Beck the walker-away from dazzling car wrecks, subject of several profiles in the
Pirtle Notice
paper, she of the hair like vivid champagne bubbling past her shoulders, hair that seemed a celebration whenever Cole saw it freed from its usual ponytail; her gray eyes had boys whispering her name into clutched hands at night before they fell into dream.

Still she introduced herself. As she did so Mister Greuel played the headlight over Cole, the beam driving heat over his face and arms. Spunk had to remind his father twice—
That’s Cole Prather, Papa, come on you know James Cole
—speaking his name louder the second time in a dance with his father’s shouted
What?
and
Goddammit who?
as he shook his head and dug one finger in his ear, lips curled into a snarl. He thumped the headlight against the side table as though to squash a scuttering bug there, the metal casing casting a resonant bell tone.

“Come in here with a pretty girl and you know where my eyes’re at. Been so long since I seen this boy I don’t even know him on sight anymore.” Greuel’s smile unveiled a row of small crooked teeth the color of cooked bacon fat. “Well it’s always good to have a Skaggs around,” he said then, assuming the part of gracious host, “even if all you can get’s the one what run off.” Cole did not correct him. A rattling cough throttled the man and threatened to throw Shady to the floor. Greuel gasped and gulped furiously from a bottle of water and raised one arm; then, once he gathered himself again, he clarified that he knew Cole wasn’t all Skaggs. Not that it mattered anymore in today’s day and age.