Ghosting (18 page)

“The man does not own us, James Cole. I’m not afraid of him and I’ll be hellbound to sit here at home while you taddle around with your tail between your legs. Lawrence Greuel
owes
us, you understand?”

Cole doesn’t understand. He follows her out onto the dead-grass path to his truck, Shady stalling behind, standing uncertain at the open door.

“Ma, you can’t just go over there, you don’t know what you’re getting into, you don’t know those people anymore.”

“Don’t tell your mother what she can’t do.”

There’s a pause before she gets the engine going, ramping through rpms as she gasses the thing in neutral. She shouts through the windshield for Cole to watch his feet but does not wait for him before releasing the brake to roll down the hill—Cole falls as he jumps back. He waits there, hands in the cold grass, watching. The engine will die when she tries to find first gear. His battered transmission will frustrate her to quitting before she even makes it off the lake.

The truck lurches as the tires grab the rough macadam; he winces at the grind in the gears. The truck sputters when Lyda forces second through a dip of the road but then she’s climbing again. At the sloped curve behind a row of black alder the tires squeal, and then he can find her in the dark only once she flips the headlights at the main intersection. He listens through the cranky process again, the lurch and grind, and somehow his truck keeps on going. Soon even the engine’s noise is gone.

“I thought you were the only one who could drive that thing,” Shady says from the porch.

Alone in the yard, Cole looks at her, backlit by the foggy light bulb in a near radiant glow around her hair. He realizes he still holds the champed Styrofoam cup and he crushes the thing, throws it aside with the other trash that gathers against the woods, and then lies back into the crunchy cold grass to stare into the night sky.

This could be real. There’s no
seeming
to happen here, it’s all happening in real time.

“Cole I’m sorry but she saw you talking to that guy, and who was that anyway? Because seeing you two out here it was like she knew everything at once and she turned on me and—”

He stops her speaking with a swipe of his hand through the air between them as he gets to his feet, and tells her to give him her keys, they’ve got to get moving.

As early evening gave way to late,
pinkening
(would that be a word?) cloud tissues drifted eastward, retaining a sandstone pallor even once the sun had absconded from heaven.
That’s how Erly Diddle would describe it in a book if he were ever to write one.
Pinkening?
Maybe pinkened. Pinked?

The job requires long hours doing nothing. He’s suited for it. He likes the nighttime quiet on Greuel’s farm, and even if his can clenches cold against the Adirondack chair in these winter months he has the thermos of whisky coffee to keep his belly warm. Seventeen years he’s been sitting here. Seventeen years of humid night-sweat summers or boot-stamping come winter, piss breaks over the patio rail peering out over the fields and random statuary and historic farm equipment—the place looks like an absurd miniature golf course—feeling himself royalty gazing upon his works, eyes hungry for any headlights across 6220, Parker’s Highway, his mind trying to focus on the possibilities of confrontations that never come.

His tricked-out Mossberg is the best firearm he has ever owned, as dear to him as a true friend, though Erly has used it only to splatter squirrels and turkeys. Not much call for shootouts these days.

The shotgun sits across the Adirondack’s armrests like the safety bar on a thrill ride, the barrel anchoring his elbow to steady his hands (clothed in fingerless gloves) as he reads. Spillane and MacDonald novels, mostly, but he’ll take whatever mysteries they got
at the secondhand shop in Foster, even the occasional Western. He especially likes accounts of the gangster heyday before the war, the stories of Capone, the Barker-Karpis gang, Pretty Boy Floyd (who was nowhere near pretty, Erly has seen pictures). Stoned or sober he reads deep into the night while Greuel and guests curse and joke over cards and business inside. He reads and then drifts into daydream—wonders if daydream is still the word for it when it occurs after dark—and considers how he might invent a better story than many of the authors he has read. If he were to ever recount on paper the things he has seen! In fact he
has
composed eventful beginnings, harrowing scenes of suspense, chases that lay waste to entire towns; designed foul murders and extortion schemes and methods of blackmail that would land him lauded in Hollywood if he could set them down, lay them out (what would Greuel and his illiterate cronies have to say to
Professor Mule
—that odious nickname—then?). But then with sunrise comes sleep. When he awakens his mind is a clear slate, empty of the scenarios conceived the night before. On the rare occasion that he can recall a snatch of story or a line of dialogue it never seems as thrilling as it had in
the throes of creation
. Characters never seem to get their due. Mule conceives a failure to all the murder mysteries he kills time with in that they center on one person only, an investigator who uncovers clues by clever wit and judicious brawn, and in real life no story works like that. In real life a story occurs among legions; to understand the story you have to know all the people it touches too. The disappointment he feels after finishing a novel is that there’s nothing more than a problem solved, and everyone in it except for the main guy exists to tweak the problem one way or another, they’re either bad or good or torn between the two and have no life outside their brief appearance on the page. These authors narrow the scope too far; even a murderer with the coldest blood has his hopes and dreams.

“Your lips move whenever you’re thinking, you know that?” asks Grady Creed, surprising Erly from the doorway. His knees start up, knocking the Mossberg to the porch boards.

“Dammit Creed, you think I don’t know when I’m being looked at? Maybe I’m putting on a show for your entertainment.”

Creed’s lips part but the teeth keep closed, air hissing out between them. A gesture of sardonic amusement emulated from Arley Noe. These young kids are nothing but footnotes to the originals.

“You guys are sure quiet tonight, what’s going on in there, church?”

“Nothing you need to know, Mule.”

“Watch your tone with me, boy. I’m feeling cranky tonight and I got my toolbox full in the truck.”

Creed whistles in alarm as he shuts the door (more firmly than necessary, Erly decides). It has been some time since the boys coming up were impressed and awed by the legend of Professor Mule and his toolbox and what he could do to a punk strapped to a chair. These kids have had it too easy; they’ll have a hard time of it when competition comes to Pirtle County again, as it undoubtedly will, stuff coming up from Mexico in search of a home.

Creed doesn’t matter; he wants to stay well with Arley Blue Note. Mule’s skills are not widely sought, and Greuel’s going to go some time. “‘Once in the racket you’re always in the racket’:
Capone!
” he tells the statue of some saint Greuel’s son brought home months ago. The blessing hand is broken at the wrist and he thinks it an unlucky sign.

Twenty-two paces cross the front porch—fourteen if he strides. He’s pissing over the rail when night breaks on the blare of a car horn, his spine snapping erect and left hand soaked at the surprise of it. Headlights at the front gate glare down the drive; how could he have missed that? He stuffs himself into his pants without making it through the fly of his boxers, cursing
wait a minute
as he forgets to zip up. Because of the headlights he can’t see the make or model but by the set of them he guesses it’s a pickup. Misguided teenagers who have their purchase arrangements wrong. He fingers the mouth of the Mossberg absently, squinting into the light. The horn blasts again and he curses back even as he takes the porch steps sideways for his aching hips and tight back, not bothering with the gun. At the booth he hits the intercom even as the horn lets fly three more long blasts in defiance of any courtesy.

The sight of Creed and Spunk in the front window add a level of stress he could do without and under his breath he curses them, too. Patience has fled the world.

“
What
,” he spits into the small speaker above a thumbnail gone white with his mass leaned into it.

Releasing the button he expects the giggled apologies of drunk sixteen-year-olds. Instead he encounters only empty air, a static punctuated by the jerky chug of an idling, unwell engine. Four-cylinder at that. Four-cylinder pickups are for children and women. He thumbs the button again.

“State your business,” he says, not three inches from the speaker. People respond to formality, the snap of authority.

No answer? He turns back to the silhouettes in the front window, shrugs—it’s not a long walk, Mister Greuel used to complain the farm’s one drawback was how close the home sat to the road. Erly groans, having accepted long ago that he is not a fast man; he has the aching hips and a cumbersome body with which he has been at odds the entirety of his forty-eight years. Plus that reliable Mossy sits on the porch, and he has to retrieve that before starting up the drive to see what there is about the what.

He’s hardly out of the booth when an angry voice hurls profanities at his lazy ways and declares that he is as
reliable as useless
and
put that thing away
and
where the hell is that man
. The fact of her startles him into a full stop, a beat passes before he thinks to lumber into her path, raising his hands, he’s saying
Whoa now Lyda hold on there
but his girth and the dark and Greuel’s penchant for eccentric lawn decorations connive against him, he smacks his shin against the rusty metal of some ancient wheeled farm implement he never has been able to identify in all those long hours of porch-bound contemplation, and it’s mayday mayday man going down with sharp pain screaming up his leg, and the ground practically jumps into his face. He lifts his head, belly and exposed penis shocked by the cold wet grass, and reaches for her ankle as she passes, noting a chain of small silver seashells tinkling there, but she is small and spry and dances off.
Erly Diddle you are not worth a minute of my day,
Lyda says. Another fact he accepted long, long before.

Now Brother Gil Ponder strives to defy convention. It’s what he expects of God and what his God expects of him, and so fundamental to his mission that he totes the claim prominently on his business card:
Brother Gil Ponder, Pastor Unorthodox, Christ World Emergent Ministries.
He sees nothing wrong with gambling, for instance, so long as it’s played in the proper spirit. To the congregants that inquire (it staggers him how many focus on this issue as if it were the ultimate scourge) he counsels that Christ raged over the gaming tables for their being practiced
at temple;
games in themselves hold no value to the soul’s pilgrimage through this world. As a spiritual risk gambling’s no different from any other worldly endeavor—its sinful nature lies in whether it compromises one’s duty to Christ.

If he’s wrong, he argues in his short sermons, then capitalism condemns them all. And Ponder stridently believes God’s Will is for His children to succeed. Thus capital is kind of holy. Without the opportunity of credit, wealth becomes attainable to a very elect few—a close metaphor to Calvin’s view that souls are judged before arriving in this world.

Ponder doesn’t think Calvin far off the mark. Nobody can free themselves completely from the culture that formed them, and if—as Luke asserts—the world is under demonic control, then none can free themselves from that nefarious influence. The Gospel of John identifies the devil as “the ruler of the world” as well. Therefore to live in Christ one must exist alongside the demonic and not shrink from it. Gambling-as-sin withers under this kind of examination. A game of poker with hard felonious types like Greuel and associates is no different from Daniel’s night with the lions.

He’s fortunate however that no one here is playing break-me stakes; even at his most lost, before Christ entered his heart, Ponder could not play a card game to save his life. Poker and eight-balls don’t mix, and he had long preferred the eight-balls. Only seven years before, he could have been holding up this entire room for its cash and whatever else they had secreted here that could be carried away and sold. He assumes they know his story and don’t care—which makes him all the more curious to understand their willingness to work so patiently with CWE and its cautiously indecisive (and funding-hungry) board of elders.

Lawrence Greuel, more sallow and gray than Ponder had ever been when copping, still manages to come across as cheerful as he deals the next round. Ponder’s assistant Carolyn Dell cringes in an upholstered chair with her small purse on her knees and hands folded over its wooden handles, spine carefully arched, every bit the high-collared church lady their hosts undoubtedly expected. She bites down upon her bottom lip with small and delicate front teeth. Ponder beams great warmth and holds up his empty bottle of water.