“How is that mother of yours? Still splitting meds with patients at the clinic?”
Cole shook his head. “You know she’s not. She quit that place first day she could.”
“Why would I know that?”
It was nothing more than his game, Mister Greuel showing off before an attractive guest. He was nodding and smiling to spur Cole on to what he wanted him to say.
“You got her the job,” Cole said to the floor. “It was you the one got her hooked up with that lawyer for the disability.”
“Lyda Skaggs working a rehab hospital,” Greuel smacking his lips at the tasty ironies, “that there’s the fox guarding the henhouse if I ever heard. Now how come I never see her anymore?”
Cole raised his shoulders and held them. He didn’t know what made his mother do any of the things she did.
“Must not need anything,” Greuel purred into Shady’s neck, as quiet and murmurous as a lover whispering.
Dishes clacked in the back of the house from the kitchen down the hallway. The radio back there had changed over to a basketball game. The front room shuddered with the changes on the silent TV screen, a general dark closing down and then pulling back. Shady, comfortable in most all situations, ignored the awkward stretch of silence; she asked and said at the same time (which was her way), “You want to talk to Miss Skaggs, why don’t you just call her,” and ran her tongue the length of a rolling paper. Mister Greuel patted her thigh just above the knee, his single ornament—a large gold-nugget ring set with diamonds that followed a curve into the shape of a horseshoe—glittering blue fire.
“Now I have never cared for telephones. No point in them, nobody can understand a thing I say if they don’t see me say it.” He wagged the mustard-gray eel of his fat tongue; Shady peered at the lighter she used to fire up the joint.
“She’ll come around,” he added. “You can count Lyda a loyal friend when in need. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, James Cole?”
Cole wasn’t there to discuss his mother. They had argued earlier that evening and her voice still stung in his ears the way only a mother’s voice can sting. She had mocked his moving in, calling him her
honored guest;
she had called him lukewarm water in the mouth of God. It stung and he could not say why, or why she would even use those last words, Lyda being nowhere near religious. Her head was so blended in roofers and goofballs that no one could explain half of what came out of it. Still the insults pricked.
Lyda had asked why he was pursuing Fleece’s girl. She’s not Fleece’s girl anymore, Momma, they broke up years ago. She said, You can’t do better than pick up where your brother left off? He’s
your
brother
. Cole reminded her he was only half his brother, as everyone in the county liked to remind him they knew. She said they both dropped out of her belly so that made them all brother in her eyes. Cole said the gulf between the way she saw things and the way things were was wide enough to march an army through.
A really big army,
he stressed. Some time soon after this she came up with lukewarm water and the mouth of God.
The joint made its rounds. Cole held in the smoke for as long as his lungs would allow, as if his doing so could prevent everyone else from talking.
“You seen that Fleece of late?” Mister Greuel asked.
Cole raised his shoulders again, dropped them—he was beginning to feel self-conscious about this gesture—and passed the joint. “You see Fleece more than I do.”
“That may be but maybe I haven’t seen him
lately
, is what I’m saying. And maybe
you
have. That’s why I asked the
question
.”
Cole started to shrug his shoulders but caught himself, and turned up empty hands. He did not understand the why behind what the man was asking.
“I can spell it out. My business is such a fine-tuned machine you’d think it was designed by NASA. Fleece is my Mr. Reliable, works for me like there’s no other reason for him to even
be
. Now you move back to the lake with momma. And last night I had delivery due from your fine reliable brother, but I don’t hear from him. This is odd to my logic: you come home—your brother, suddenly he’s nowhere to be found. I hate coincidence. Makes everybody look guilty. I hate that.”
Everyone looked to Cole, even Shady, as though he should have the answer to his brother’s whereabouts, as though Fleece and Cole were close confidants—which everyone in that room knew they were not. His body flushed with heat, and it felt like the skin on his face and neck exhaled, all the small veins that fed the skin rinsing themselves. His eyes watered and he pinched them shut with thumb and two fingers. He was the only person standing in this room. He had always had trouble with nervousness for no reason. Especially when attention turned to him. He said, “Well Fleece does what he wants.”
“I bet he’s cooling it at St. Jerome by now,” came Spunk’s voice, foggy as he held in his hit and passed the jay to his father, who skipped his turn.
This was certainly possible. The seminary of Saint Jerome sat far out in the northern ridge of the county, behind fields of seed corn backing all the way up to the Possler Woods. It was said to be haunted; to house the rituals of devil worshippers; to be a hideout for dangerous men on the lam from the law, family, their lives. A mad caretaker protected the place and supposedly shot trespassers on sight. Many of these stories were no more than legends created by Fleece Skaggs—except for the caretaker, a guy he had assured his younger brother was truly unhinged. Fleece sold the man reefer and crank and squatted on the top floor. They shot bottles together off the stone cemetery wall out back of the seminary grounds.
“Always been a young man I could trust, I practically raised him,” Greuel frowning at the headlight, “so I worry. Anything can happen on a country road. What if he tumbled over the shoulder and he’s lying there upside-down in the Cumberland?”
No one answered. Whoever was back there in the kitchen scraped a plate and turned up the radio, two broadcasters speaking with dramatic urgency over the roused crowd. Mister Greuel tilted his head as if listening, or straining to listen. In time he turned to the corridor and shouted:
Hey now. It’s near ten already.
The crowd cheered loud enough to fuzz the small speakers and the announcer’s voice accelerated, hoarse with excitement. Boots shuffled on the kitchen tile and someone ran the tap briefly and then the radio shut off. The house stiffened in silence. The back screen door smacking shut clattered like a gunshot. Mister Greuel returned his attention to his guests, and began to talk again as outside a car engine revved to life, tires soon rolling over gravel.
Shady started work on another blunt, her glassy eyes narrowing to slits. She swayed her hips in Mister Greuel’s lap for reasons Cole could not fathom.
“Honest truth, you can’t name a place your brother might go without word to me?”
Honest truth he did not know. Spunk jumped to his feet, decided
aloud they should head to the old seminary to see what turned up. His father grunted and sliced the air with his hand, said he wasn’t asking him. It was a vicious gesture that cut the length behind Shady’s back, and his son turned as though struck across the face, and rushed his own head into the corner of the fireplace mantel.
Seconds passed before he cried out. Like the pain needed time to alarm his brain. From above one eye blood gushed from a gash as if its entire reason for being was to be freed of his veins. Spunk clutched the wound with the hem of his T-shirt and slumped into the couch. His father shook his head and stared at the floor; Shady looked on with vague interest. Nobody moved to help him. It was like no one was sure what they had witnessed had actually happened. After a silence, he moaned.
All this transpired within seconds. Yet it seemed to take forever to Cole, and a pressure built within him, a gradual rise that swelled until it broke, setting him into the generous sniggers of the greatly stoned. He started to shake and laugh in
I’m-so-high
wiggin’ giggles, an act that moved Shady and Mister Greuel from stares of blank inverted fixity to ones of mild concern, but an act too that he could not stop. And still no one moved to ask Spunk if he was all right; nobody there expected anything less of him than his smacking his head into the most convenient sharp corner. As though Spunk had survived this long, made it to twenty-two despite the parade of self-inflicted accidents and mishaps that composed his brief lifetime, the broken fingers and toes and collarbones and splintered teeth, the burns from incompetent engine work (four-wheeler, minibike, motorcycle), the concussions from irritated horses, the mishandling of knives and saws and throwing stars, the metal grinder that caught his shirt and then the rest of his torso within it—with such veteran experience behind him it was rational to assume no mantel corner could do serious damage to that head. Cole pressed his hand over his mouth and nose to cram down the laughter, it felt like his eyes were hosing streams over his cheeks, and the laughter only punched at his chest that much harder.
The hell’s got into this boy?
Mister Greuel wondered aloud. Cole could not answer. All he could manage was to clamp one hand tighter over his mouth and wave away the room with the other, begging to be ignored.
“I love pot but some people it just makes stupid,” Shady said. Instantly this shut him up somehow.
Mister Greuel fiddled with his headlight. He turned it one way and then another, often staring into the beam below his chin. By now Spunk had removed his shirt entirely and held it wadded against his eyes. He mumbled the word
stitches
and his father mumbled back that such could be found in a kitchen drawer. Spunk brought away the shirt and looked at the blood spattered there, pressed it to his brow again. This was not a cheap article of clothing, he complained.
I bought this at
—he couldn’t remember. Then he yawned, resigned to the ruined fact of it.
“A lot of blood in the human face,” Shady said.
“I thought you knew everything,” Cole said to Greuel. “I thought you never let a man drive a harvest alone.”
Greuel passed his headlight over the walls and ceiling. He said there had been complications with this run, his tailer had another item of business to take care of on the way back, they’d done it before in a pinch and never had any difficulties. “But you don’t need to know my problems,” he added. Again Spunk reasoned that Fleece was fine and probably fixed up with some tail—he excused himself to Shady from beneath the bloodied shirt—and was cooling it easy in his seminary digs.
“I’d like to think if he’s in this county he would have sense enough to bring me my money or my goods or else have a damn good reason to be walking around. A man has standards to keep, a reputation to uphold.”
At this Greuel appeared to fall into pensive rumination, gazing absently as the shape of the room changed with the movement of his hand. Dark veils swung opposite the wash of light and the whole room swayed; shadows dipped forward to listen in, leapt back. By now Cole’s eyes felt swollen and gritty, and it seemed he could note each half-thought as it rose and floated away without his grasping it. Perhaps that was why he felt so naked and unprepared when Greuel stilled the light fully upon him.
Events have a way of fooling, the man said. You’re in it and you think they’re one way but turns out they were steadfastly another.
There’s always what’s happening below what
seems
to be happening. It’s enough to drive a man batshit crazy. You have to ask questions, you have to ask
why
you ask the questions you ask, it just goes on and on. And every time, the questions take you where you don’t want to go. Every freaking time.
“I have no idea what you are saying to me,” admitted Cole. Greuel dismissed him from behind Shady again. He smacked his lips as though he did not like the taste in his mouth.
“You kids get out of here. Why not show some loyalty to the old man who takes such care of you? Get out to that old place and see what sign of Fleece you can rustle up before I forget him.” Another raspberry cough erupted then, along with another squeeze to Shady’s thigh that went unremarked by her and set Cole to cringing. “Get off me hon, I got pills to take. And son don’t you take any more that reefer, I’m short in the pocket as of right this now.”
Shady staggered up as Greuel struggled to rise, using the beveled edge of the table for stability. It had not been so long since Cole had seen him last but he could tell the man had much declined. Whatever illness that was at him had managed a great deal of work over the past several months.
From the hallway Mister Greuel bid farewell as though already his emissaries were a long distance off on their journey, and the bacon-fat teeth unveiled themselves again. With that simple gesture, any hope Cole had with Shady this night was effectively over. Spunk stood waiting outside the door in his bloody T-shirt, holding up a snagged dime bag he shook at Shady with glee. All three glided out and over the porch and through the littered yard, Spunk slithering, skeletal, and cackling in the lead.
The first cop to show nods at Dwayne Hardesty and stands beside him at the feet of four kids who lie spread-eagled face-down on the muddy portico steps leading to the graffiti-strewn boards that shield the seminary entrance. The wash of the cruiser’s spot frescoes their captive forms in hard outline, three underfed and thin and the fourth a fat block squeezed into a Kentucky basketball sweatshirt that strains to withstand his heavy nervous breathing, the grommets in their jeans and an occasional earring flashing agleam in the white light; four pairs of white sneakers, expensive and rain-wet, shine stark and severe and unworldly. The caretaker always struggles to prevent himself from gloating too much over this aspect of his job.
“I count four,” the cop says low, to Hardesty’s shoulder.
“Yep, four’s where I stop at too.”
“Thought you called in five?”