Ghosting (24 page)

Following instructions from Arley Noe, he meets Creed in the strip-mall parking lot where CWE Ministries holds services. No rental this time; instead Creed hands him keys to a ministry van, an Econoline with bus seats. “For our purposes, the safest rig on the road has got to be a church van,” Creed mumble-mouths, pushing a magenta toothpick from side to side. “This is a experiment. You got a seven-point-three liter V8 under the hood if you need it. Try not to get pulled over.”

Behind the last row of seats a large net holds soccer balls.
These are not full of air, okay?
Creed says. Cole is to deliver the balls to Morehead. There he’ll exchange vehicles and drive to Prestonburg to deliver, then over to Ashland to deliver, and then back to Morehead to pick up the ministry van again.

Looking over the van he can see Creed’s point: these are not the kind of wheels anyone would pay attention to. On each side, beneath the CWE insignia, the slogan CHART A PROSPEROUS COURSE THROUGH
LIFE spans fender to fender, the two
T
’s amended into an image of the Cross. Cole looks over at the old warehouse storefront where the church continues to hold services.

“Don’t think so much,” Grady says. “Nobody’s watching you.”

“Shady goes to that church sometimes. She says I should go.”

“Then you best be careful, young man. A girl gets you into church with her then it won’t be long before she’s either marrying or burying you in the same place.”

“Well.”

“Don’t think too hard on it. That preacher’s street-schooled sure as me and one day I’m going to figure him out. Now get a move on ’fore I decide to make this run myself just to get off this lot. What’s your momma do when you’re gone? She alone tonight?”

“You’re a sick fuck, Grady.”

“It’s a sick world. Don’t you worry over Lyda, I’ll certify nobody hurts her any way she don’t want to be hurt.”

He can’t think of a good comeback. He hops into the driver’s seat and snaps the chew foil from Creed’s shirt pocket and shuts the door before Creed can grab it back. He doesn’t roll down the window until Creed has thumped it several times, the two of them staring one another down.

“Promise you’ll keep your dick out of my mom. That’s all I ask. She’s got it rough enough as it is.”

Creed’s face betrays a brief interior consideration. Then he shakes his head, decided. “You keep my chew then. Don’t spit on the floor less you’re keen on cleaning it up, we have to return this van when you’re done,” and he slaps the fender twice to send Cole on his way.

Shady had said she’d hook up with him on Wednesday night, but when he returns on Tuesday she calls and says she can’t make it tomorrow night after all. The trips leave him beleaguered and forlorn and when she calls he’s already suffering a vicious dehydration headache, belly aswim from Grady’s chew. He feels too unwell to analyze what she is saying. He tells her all is cool and he understands how things get in
the way. I’m sorry I won’t see you then but let’s get together soon, he says, and she says okay.

Yet on Wednesday a sudden impulse prompts him to call. Just to see how she’s doing. Her mother answers and Cole feels dirty, creepy and stalkerish. He almost hangs up when she tells him to hang on, she’s unsure if Shady’s still home or not and she’ll have to look. He hears her call out to her daughter, and a long time passes in which he feels nakedly stupid, absurdly obvious, filled with that horrible word—NEED—and then Shady’s there and short of breath like she had sprinted to the phone, asking, Yes? and he shuts his eyes: “Hey Shady. I was just calling to say hey, see if you needed a ride anywhere.” As if the girl would prefer being driven in his go-cart quality pickup rather than her own fine Audi.

That’s sweet Cole but you’re going to make me late to work, remember?

He apologizes, already bored with the conversation and angry at himself.

Oh forget it. You all right?

Yeah of course I’m fine. I’m always fine. I’ll see you soon.

Count on it.

Not real often but sometimes Shady likes to get high alone. At night, alone, not doing anything else and she’s not going to call anyone or get in the car to wake up a girlfriend because she’s lonesome, just some time alone in her room with the window open, preferably on cold winter air but any time of year will do, like now, nearly April and with March this year holding winter longer than usual, and with the porch light below her window lending the only light to her room. The type of light is important; smoking up in a bright room isn’t the same. Her father has his martinis and her mother her Librium and Klonopin and Shady doesn’t think that choosing a bowl that she doesn’t even smoke every night, not even once a week unless she happens to have a whole lot on hand, which isn’t often, in fact it’s almost never that there’s more than a dime in her underwear drawer and even less in her purse, she doesn’t think it’s any different from what either of her parents do to relax. She’s not a wake’n’bake kind of girl. She’s not high all the time nor does she allow it to run her life. She doesn’t even really do any other drugs, doesn’t even like to drink, particularly—the occasional pop of X on nights with her friends clubbing back at school. But that was nearly a year ago now.

But late and when she’s alone and it’s so quiet in her neighborhood (if it can be called a neighborhood; the properties are all so large that it feels like the middle of nowhere at night) and her parents are asleep, she likes it like nothing else. She likes how good pot, when she’s
alone and in this certain frame of mind that seems to come only late at night, seems to open her to certain avenues of thought she doesn’t have otherwise—and somehow having the room dark except for that soft porch light outside encourages this—she likes how she kind of slides into self-conversation about her current place and moment in life, where she is and where she’s going, the kind of questions she tends to avoid because they make her all anxious. She looks over the trees out front and thinks,
Where are you going, Shady Beck? What will you do, little girl?
Like the doing so allows her to almost touch on some special knowledge or insight into secrets she may be keeping even from herself. Maybe it’s only that she’s relaxed and it’s quiet with that feeling that the world is asleep and soon she will be too but not quite yet. A sort of meditation-slash-prayer routine. And she’s high. When talking about this with her girlfriends back in school they decided it’s something like what Indians used to do, maybe. She calls these little sessions her dream routines, and often that’s just how it feels, like she’s dreaming but awake in it and it’s good and as she looks through her window at the darkness out there—there are only a few distant house lights visible, mostly it’s trees—she can be filled with such an overwhelming love of life and the world even as she comprehends that she doesn’t understand any of it.

Something happened during her routine several weeks ago that haunts her. There’s a small TV in her room and she had smoked up after watching Letterman (who she doesn’t care for much but this TV doesn’t have cable and there was nothing else on and even though he’s kind of a dick Letterman sometimes can make her laugh). She turned off the TV before the musical guest played. She opened the window and took two deep hits off her pipe, it was this strong stuff Spunk Greuel had given her that night she had been running around with him and Cole at the abandoned seminary; she thought it special stuff and had been holding on to it, parsing out only small amounts to herself. Everything felt fine as she entered her little dream routine and there was no wind outside and she admired the single pine among the hemlocks in the yard standing straight and strong like honorable dignified sentinels sworn to protect the house. She felt fine;
excellent
, even, but soon got sleepy too and so
lay back on her bed with the window open, protecting herself from the cold with the duvet wrapped around her (a luxurious thing filled with real goose down, she had missed its warmth and felt guilty for missing it the night she stayed under the threadbare quilt at Cole’s house), and looked at the dim bluish rhomboid of porch light on the ceiling and part of the wall. That’s the last she remembers.

Later (she’s unsure how much later, unsure how long she was out) she awoke in complete terror. The room no longer felt like her room, and it was filled with this incredible dark, a dark like she had never seen or experienced before, a dark like the deepest cave at the deepest bottom of the sea, it wrapped her up in this mass of dark that light could never penetrate, and even more frightening was the realization that it was impossible to move: her arms and legs had become unresponsive, she could hardly feel them. She had never felt such an absolute fear like that moment before. What made it worse was that she couldn’t understand
why
she felt so afraid—she was safe at home in her own bed. It seemed that the room had been taken over by this pure
cancellation of life
. Which what little part of her mind was working at the time interpreted as
evil
. Like evil as a pure element.

It was so dark she couldn’t see the digital clock on the bedstand. She didn’t know how long she had been asleep. Though she couldn’t move her head, the position she woke up in allowed her to see the television set, and there the screen gave off a peculiar horrifying glow, soft and dim but perceptibly radiant. Like the glow that comes up immediately after a TV set is turned off, except this glow was the negative of that, a glowing darkness, and it did not die down but instead grew forward and unfurled into the air like the way water spills into fabric—the glow being water and the air fabric. This glow, from what she could surmise, fed the heavy darkness that kept her paralyzed. There was no more light from the porch light; no discernible air; her room had become a coffin stuffed full with this black stuff, this evil stuff that seemed to
want
her. To want to
erase her
.

Her mind raced in a panic she did not know she had the capacity to feel. On the bent antenna above the TV she had hung a necklace of charms, tokens and gifts she had added over the years as she picked them up: a heart from her mother; a broken coin from Fleece Skaggs;
a small silver cross bought for her by Brother Gil Ponder from a tiny gift shop inside the church, her “emblem of gratitude” given for attending a second Christ World Emergent service. The cross dangled above the area that was filling up with dark and she concentrated on that. The sight of it seemed to snap the entire situation into focus: she understood that this was a religious moment, having to do with her very soul—that something demonic was making a play for her soul. An idea she would later find difficult to sustain as credible, she had studied biology, she was a scientist, but at that instant it made perfect sense. Instinctively she began to pray. She started to pray manically, nothing formal to it, just started to repeat over and over that
Jesus is our savior
and
He is my savior
and
I accept him in my heart
and therefore whatever that was streaming out of that television set had no claim on her, it could not touch Shady Beck.

This did not seem to work. She became yet more terrified, terrified like she imagines she would be to find herself strapped down naked on a table with a room full of men she couldn’t see except for the glint of light off their scalpels. Or more precisely like being tied down to railroad tracks and you can only watch the train’s spotlight grow as it speeds nearer and nearer, your head’s vibrating on the rail with the rhythm of the wheels churning closer and here comes the thundering noise. . . .

The darkness vanished the instant her ceiling light flickered on. She found her limbs and bolted upright; her feet slapped the floor; she found her mother standing in the doorway in a thick flannel nightgown, puffy and dull-faced from pill-aided sleep and half-inside the room, her hand on the light switch.
You were whimpering,
she said.
Bad dreams?
Shady didn’t know how to answer her and so said nothing. She looked at the television set. With the whole room bright again it looked like a normal TV set.

Her mother was still standing there in the doorway so Shady mumbled something like
Yeah it must have been bad dreams
and after flashing one of those “I worry about my little girl but I’m exhausted” faces (a face Shady has provoked often enough to recognize easily), her mother left her alone. But in fact the state of dreaming seemed the exact opposite of the experience. It did not feel like some weird
post-hypnagogic state, either (though she considered this possibility and read up on it). She does not consider herself an irrational girl prone to wild imagining. Naturally, and despite the intensity of the terror, she assumed the pot had something to do with what had happened.

She intuited, however, that the pot wasn’t the only factor involved here; contact of some kind had been made. The problem was that she didn’t know what it was that was contacting her, what it signified, what it was trying to say. Perhaps because the pot came from Spunk, and because of her eye falling upon the broken coin given to her by Fleece hanging next to Brother Ponder’s silver cross, she connected this experience to Cole Prather. A warning to her? A warning to warn him? It all felt so mysterious and yet the more she weighed that night in her head the more certain she felt she had been opened to something that was linked to Cole.