Ghosting (13 page)

“Does that lead down to the water?” she asks.

He nods, indicates the money. “Count two hundred from that.”

“Two hundred’s all there is.”

“No, I put some in, you don’t need to front it all.”

He watches out his window as she counts the money out in twenties and tens, and he doesn’t look at her when she places the cash in his hand, and he doesn’t look as he folds the cash and slips it under his right thigh. They wait with the engine gently rocking, long enough that the fan kicks on. Cole cuts his lights as well, in case they are causing a delay. He doesn’t laugh when Shady mentions in a playful high voice how creepy the whole scene is, like in a movie where she would expect the two of them to be killed at any moment now. She’s about to admit she has never seen an actual quarry before, how it’s weird to think a quarry is one of those things you just know what it is. “Down there’s where I got my scuba license,” he tells her. “They’ve got an old police car at the bottom, you have to dive down and bring things up out of it, it’s weird, swimming in all that deep water and not a living thing to see.” He quiets at the hint of a shadow emerging from the deeper shadows. A quiver slithers up the inside of her chest at the surprise of it. Her mother would be truly appalled to see her here. So would her two older sisters. Their disapproval helps legitimize the entire enterprise, her mother and sisters and their unknowing dismay.

He’s a slow walker, this shadow, moving with a rigid, straight-shouldered stride, the left arm snapping at the elbow across the belly in precise rhythm with each step as though the arm works as a kind of metronome. Reaching them, he sets his hands over the threshold of the open window, clenching the door with long burled fingers as he positions himself with his back remaining inordinately erect, keeping his eyes high enough to look down into the cab while keeping in view the hands of both passengers. A large horseshoe ring flashes brightly off the finger of his right hand in the dark; he says nothing, his face relaxed, mouth at rest.

“Well now,” Cole speaks with a forced heartiness Shady has never seen from him before, “Arley Noe. I wouldn’t have expected you down here. Kind of slumming, aren’t you?”

If Noe recognizes Cole she cannot detect it in his face. The hands squeeze and relax, squeeze again as though the door helps him with his balance. He shifts his weight from foot to foot, casual and smooth and serene.

“James . . .
Cole
. . . Prather.” The name rolls in his lipless mouth like he’s trying the sound of it for the first time. His voice hints at faint disappointment. “Not one I expect to find quarry diving of a Saturday night.”

“I’m light. Got a friend in need here, looking for some smiles.”

A grunt pulls from Noe’s throat like a pop of air, a strange tic in his breathing. His lean face sinks pitted over concave cheekbones—emphasized in the frame of the window—his white eyebrows so thin on the orbital ridge as to be invisible, Shady can make out the individual hairs, and his black eyes are set deep with grainy circles of heavy blue beneath them. His skin radiates a pale teal tinge, a pallor accentuated by the dashboard light.

Noe turns his head and brings up something from deep in his chest and spits.

“I know your friend. That there’s Shady Beck out buying wicked weed with James Cole Prather. How about that. I wake up thinking there’s not one more thing in this world to surprise me and I end up surprised near ever-day still. How you doing there Miss Shady?”

She sits pressed entirely against her door, lips parted, consciously willing her eyes not to saucer in fearful freak-out—why do all these men know her name? She feels like a little girl caught trying to pass off as an adult, her hands clutched into a ball between her knees, shoulders bowed even as she reminds herself there’s no reason to be afraid, people come to buy in this quarry all the time.

“I said how you doing there Miss Shady Beck. Lovely night out, wouldn’t you say.”

“It sure is pretty,” she says, except the words feel lost spinning in her throat.

“Going to get real cold soon. Hope I’m not down here taking money then. Can give a man my age the bad aches, that kind of cold around this water.”

“You have to check up on your crew,” Cole offers.

“We got difficulties, you could say. Need three men here, I got only two. You probably heard about that.”

“You could’ve got Spunk out here to handle for you.”

Arley Noe’s features fall apart and then reassemble themselves
slowly, lines and planes of flesh contracting into the semblance of a laugh, though there would be no way to recognize that if she couldn’t hear the dry hissing in his throat. He diddles his wretched fingers on the roof, pushes back from the window to hawk again, then plunges his face deep into the cab, close enough that Cole pulls back to keep their faces from colliding.

“Well now,” Noe says. “I wouldn’t say times are as desperate as all that. I’m looking for two hundred from you. Or you kids come down just to say hello?”

Cole scoops the money from beneath his thigh and displays it, the bill three-folded in a narrow rectangle, and the man’s head withdraws from the window as if drawn by a pulley. His hand swoops down from above like a raptor bird snatching small prey from the ground and into the air without a beat of its wings. He steps back and counts the money in the same hand, the other plunged deep in a coat pocket. It’s enough to curdle anxious doubt in her belly, that hand in that pocket, and she breathes great relief when Noe pulls out a radio like the man before and speaks into it, too quiet to hear over the engine chug. Noe waves them on. Cole hits his lights again and shifts into first and then blurts the simple question:

“Arley, do you know where Fleece might be at?”

Noe has turned his back on them already, he’s walking off in a direction from where he had appeared earlier, toward the water he said he disliked, the left arm marking off each step. Cole calls his name again:
Arley?
He gets no response.

“What, is he deaf?” Shady asks, leaning forward to see. The creeping night has enveloped the man entirely; he’s gone.

A sour look from Cole gets her to sit back again. She brushes her hair from her eyes and wipes her nose with the back of her hand, meaningless gestures that only prove her loss of what to do with herself.

“So where’s the pot?”

“One more stop.”

They leave the gully over heavily pocked road, Cole easing over pits deep enough to scrape the truck’s bottom, and as the land crests again they come upon another stool-bound figure, this one illuminated
by electric lamp. He, too, carries a shotgun, the same (she thinks) as the one held by that Lucas guy lost to her memory, but he keeps away from the truck and calls out over the loud generator powering his light,
Quarter-bag, yeah?
and Cole answers
Two yeah
and the man tosses the bags through the window. “Supposed to tell you,” he says, stepping closer, “you didn’t get this here. In case anyone asks.”

“Since when did you guys turn away business?”

“I’m told we’re not selling any more to you.”

“What’s Mister Greuel got against me that he wouldn’t tell me first?”

“I never said Mister Greuel,” the man says, backing away and waving them on. “I got no truck with you, James Cole. Just saying what I’s told to. You didn’t buy this here.”

With that he kills the generator and flashes into silhouette, the sudden silence striking Shady as something like a distant explosion; it has a palpable impact. She watches him merge into the general dark, unsure at first if he’s walking toward them or away. Enough time passes without Cole moving off that she notices.

“What is that about?” she asks. At the sound of her voice he begins to pull off, but he does not answer.

Shady regains her footing once they hit fraternity row. Here is a world she recognizes. Here all the trees are dying; bits of trash scatter, strewn in the street from an upturned bin at rest over the wet hood of someone’s Pontiac Fiero. The party has spilled onto the street, and on either side of the truck buckle groups of students reluctant to clear a way for Cole to park. More students sit on the porch roof of the DKE house in front of its billboard Greek letters, their cups held aloft in a kind of triumph—the end of term before the holidays—and already she is seized by the surprising remove she feels from this scene. Only six months out of school and her life has moved on from this, from the hulking boys finished with athletics on the field now committed to lifetimes of fandom, strutting among themselves on thick gusts of obscenities; the house rooms shining open through bare windows;
the bass beat of hip-hop clomping in battle against the southern rock chugging from a higher floor. Can six months make such a difference?

They had burned one down on the way and though she doused her eyes with drops she can feel how swollen they’ve become and assumes anyone who cares to look can judge her as brightly lit. She calls Denise on her cell, hoping her friend’s installed in a somewhat quieter place inside, and Denise navigates her through the packed living room and its face-level haze and up the stairs to a door covered by a life-size poster of a voluptuous model in bikini bottoms soaked in the spray of a hose, her dark hair caught in mid-toss, eyes closed and heavy lips pursed in a luxurious expression of release. Someone has written with a Sharpie a single word on a pink post-it stuck to her crotch:
aspire
. Shady raps her knuckles on the model’s face, hard, and when Denise opens the door pulls a lingering Cole from the poster and into the room.

“James Cole!” a boy shouts. That would be Sheldon, his cousin, who Shady doesn’t know but has heard about from both brothers, in muted asides that seemed to share information she was not privy to, and which indicated bemused indifference. He reclines on the far side of the bed with big, bare feet crossed at the ankles atop a small desk cramped into the corner. A 24-ounce gas-mart cup with the scarlet-and-heather school colors tips precariously on his lap as he shouts immediate introductions to the three other girls in the room, announcing this guy here is his cousin James Cole and can y’all believe that, his cousin’s here on campus tonight? Sheldon says he could have come up with twenty different names he might have met up with at this party but his cousin would not have been one of them, no sir, not one. He jumps to give up a high-five to his cousin, holding Cole’s hand in the air a moment longer than seems necessary.

“People sure get scarce when they owe money. You don’t want to see somebody again, loan them cash,” Sheldon laughs. “You bring mine?”

Shady’s talking already to Denise and Tina and turns at the question. It’s the first she’s heard of the debt. Cole had given up some thirty dollars at the quarry, and she was just beginning to tell her friends the story of that, eager to detail the adventure now that she was safely out
of it. Cole’s face draws down and reddens; he’s embarrassed not to have contributed more to their buy and is now caught before her; she’s prepared to be irritated to learn he held out money for his cousin—but Cole confesses he doesn’t have any on him. His truck needs a new clutch.

“You need a new clutch. I need another tattoo to go with this one”—he points to his shoulder bared by the sweatshirt with sleeves torn off, some kind of Norse design Shady can’t imagine wanting forever on her body—“What about my needs?” He flexes both arms like he’s about to attack in a sudden rage—but to see Cole flinch makes him laugh out loud in his cousin’s face. He mocks Cole’s hangdog demeanor, ruffles his hair indelicately, and then pushes him away hard enough to toe the edge between play and real anger.

“Three hundred dollars to help out a brother and this is what I get. We got to work this out, buddy.”

Cole leans his back into the door and turns up his hands. “You know I’m good for it. I didn’t think it would take this long.”

“No good deed goes unpunished, my old man says. Fortunately I am capable of drumming up a little cash on my own.”

Shady takes a closer look at the tattoo. It’s composed of three interlocking horns but the lines vary in thickness, like they were drawn in by magic marker held by a nervous hand. And yet at the sight of Cole’s embarrassment Shady finds herself on the verge of yet another move she will later question, curious as to her own motivations. It’s precisely the kind of behavior her older sisters would chide her for, she’s too unselfish and magnanimous, they say, stressing that even though these are laudable qualities in a person she has to learn not to stretch herself so far, not to obligate herself to such degrees that inevitably lead her to being in great and disappointed need herself (it’s always a mistake to rely on others for help or care). At what point does a helpful, useful person stop being helpful? Where’s the demarcation line between helping enough and helping so much it hurts you?

Sheldon’s one of a dozen campus dealers. He farms out Tina’s Ritalin prescription for top dollar to his fraternity, and Tina says he gets pot and X and a little blow when he can. Never having met him
before she still knew Sheldon dealt, because Fleece wouldn’t sell to him; he believed Cole’s cousin would only get busted and was the type who would talk quickly if it promised to get him out of a jam. But reefer can be found from other sources, it’s only the quality that differs. And though she paid good money for her weed this evening, money that wasn’t really even hers but her father’s . . . maybe because of her father’s generosity (she knows he spoils her, continuing her weekly allowance, at her age!) she can be so generous herself, for what does it cost her in the end?