Ghosting (27 page)

Creed collapses into the couch beside Shady, presenting the twisted tooth in his smile; on his lean and narrow face are two small sores puckered scarlet at the rim. He scratches one and it opens a brilliant pinhead of blood, asks, “What d’ya say?” She gets up off the couch and hits the cooler herself. Creed exhales after a hit and rolls his tongue around in his mouth, considering the taste; he eyes Cole and winks once. “I get it now,” he says. “Yeah, I get it now.”

“Get what?”

He points to the smoke as it plumes above his head, then holds up his hands in surrender. “We don’t got to talk about it, we don’t got to say nothing at all!” He sets down the pipe again and Cole sees him note the duffel bag. “Looks like y’all were planning to spend the night here or something.”

“That’s mine, thank you very much,” Shady says, pulling it out from beneath Creed’s hands as he started at the zipper. “As a matter of fact maybe I was.”

“Aw man, now I feel bad. I’m a romantic at heart. I would’ve thought a class girl like you’d want a hotel room somewheres, something nice with a shower. Never would’ve figure you for a
Leg Show
kind of girl, either.” He scans a few pages, finds an explicit beaver shot of a girl touching the floor in spiked heels and torn stockings and her
eyes intent on the camera. “Mmm, look at that. If that don’t just get the ideas going in your head.” Creed presents the spread to Spunk. “Check it out, man, Cole’s mom’s in here.”

“No way!” from Spunk as he wrenches the magazine away. He shakes his head side to side, examining the entire portfolio. “It does kind of look like her. Maybe ten years ago or something when she had more cushion. Your mom ever go for modeling?”

“Give me that,” Cole says. He tosses the magazine onto the trash bag and hopes no one bothers to pick it up again and reveal what’s underneath; the unit holds enough random trash that the bag doesn’t look out of place or even recently added.

“No need to get offensed,” Creed concedes. “Nobody has a say who they come out of.”

“I take offense every time you open your mouth Grady Creed,” Shady says. She shoots a meaningful glance at Cole, but he has no idea what meaning she is trying to convey. “I guess I should be heading out, let you boys get on with it.”

“Yeah you probably should. Sorry,” says Creed with no hint of actual apologetic feeling.

“She came with me. She’s in my truck.”

“Yeah, well. That part of your evening is over. We come
for you,
James Cole my young rookie friend, and our business does not concern the pretty lady here. She can drive your truck, she seems capable.”

“You ever fix that clutch?” asks Spunk.

Shady gets to her feet. “I can drive it. Let me out, there’s too much testosterone in here all of a sudden.”

“We could all have some fun first, if you’re up for it. The offer is a good one and it still stands,” taunts Creed. “I swear you’ll still have our respect!” But Shady is out on the gravel marching toward Cole’s truck, duffel bag slung over one shoulder, one middle finger solemnly raised with no looking back.

When Cole catches up to her she says, “I should take this on to Sheldon now, am I right? Does he know it’s coming?”

“He knows but he hasn’t paid for it yet. Don’t give him anything he doesn’t pay you for.”

“I can’t take this stuff home with me, Cole.”

Off to Sheldon she’ll go, then. Typical of Shady she then rattles off a brief plan concocted while Cole’s head spins and wanders like sparkling motes in a dusty light beam, thoughts mostly lamenting the loss of the two of them alone just some precious minutes before. She informs him she’ll leave his truck at the front of her family property with the keys in the exhaust pipe and that he should get dropped off there; he’s to rap at her window when he returns, and she expects to hear what Creed and Spunk have put him up to. “And none of this is up for negotiation,” she says, “or else I go drop this bag in Grady Creed’s lap and see how he likes you now.”

“Okay,” he agrees, too stunned to respond with anything more. “I might be out late, mom.”

“Don’t be like that. I care.” She tiptoes and pecks him beside his mouth. “I’ll be up. Don’t disappoint me,” and as he swallows hard she is in the cab with the engine turned over.

They watch her maneuver the truck without difficulty, dog-legging it in reverse and speeding forward with a wave of gravel breaking on the slips before the units’ roll-up doors. Creed and Spunk are but bent shapes fluctuating with the candles behind them. Cole believes there’s not much left in the trash bag, that Shady has most all of his morning’s find. He limps back to the garage, accentuating his stiff-knee frailty even as he taps one hip as a reminder of the gravity blade tucked into his ass pocket. As he nears, their smiles transform to masks of glee.

“What’s so important you had to blue my balls like that?”

Creed hands over a Little King and briefly drapes a consoling arm over his shoulders as he wags his head with compassion. “You wanted the life, this is the life,” he says. “Duty calls, and she’s a bitch one whole lot uglier than Shady Beck.”

Creed teems with a savage relish, he’s hopped up and jittering, he can’t sit still and won’t say where they’re headed. He stomps the clutch, slams the gearshift, and fills the Toyota’s interior with unspoken malevolence. What was it Grady had said to him that night, ghosting out of the dark woods around his mother’s house?
I’m on your side.
Yet now they ride with all the doors locked. Creed announced at the outset that he locks his doors when driving, a safety issue instilled by his parents. He announced too that he did not want to hear any teasing about his listening to the good advice of his parents. And no loud music: he prefers news from the world the three of them have only heard about. “And I don’t like talk, so don’t talk,” he says once they hit the parkway.

They pass the latest developments and then it’s fields on either side, and darkness, the road cutting through steep shelved hills and the air smells of wet leaves and rain, and he guesses where they are headed about two minutes before they arrive. As Creed slows to turn, his headlights capture the billboard sign at the edge of the drive:
and it’s there only an instant as Creed follows the drive between the building and the caretaker’s cottage, pulling up in the back on the basketball courts. The cinder of Fleece’s Nova, sopped to a darker rust in the wet, glows phosphor after Creed shuts off his headlights.

“You know all I know about that,” Creed says, “so don’t even start.”

Arley Noe’s powder-blue Cadillac and Mule’s Toyota truck sit parked directly behind the cottage, half-hidden beneath heavy conifers. Creed kills a Little King with a showy flourish, the bottle held above his mouth unfurling a liquid tongue down his throat, and then he hurls the bottle to shatter up high beside one of the seminary windows. The glass explodes sharply and they listen to the shards sprinkle back to earth. The three stare of them at where the bottle hit the wall.

“Dang. I was aiming for the window.”

“You got no arm left, Grady,” from Spunk, in a tone of honest rue, dancing his limbs like a boxer loosening up before a fight. “I remember when you could bust midway games at the fair.”

Creed shrugs his throwing shoulder, kneads the muscle with his knuckles. “Those days stopped the second I heard that pop against Metcalfe County. I didn’t know it then.”

Despite the noise of their arrival and the thrown bottle, the building remains silent inside. “Where are the dogs?” asks Cole.

Spunk sniggers and covers his mouth as he spins away, echoing the question—
Yeah, where them dogs, Creed?
—and Creed buddies up with him: “Ah-haw haw
haw
.”

“Tough world for a dog,” says Spunk.

“Tell me you didn’t. Where’s yours?”

“My bitch is fine, James Cole. Turns out you were right the other day—I’m gonna be a daddy. Or a step-daddy, I guess. You want a puppy when they’re ready?”

“Hush up,” says Creed, “Mule hears you two and there won’t be nothing else to talk about.” Mule is a lover of animals; a dues-paying member of Raptor Rehab and PETA, a keeper of budgies and homefinder for kittens.

They enter the back door without knocking, hesitating in the lightless kitchen. The far interior door is framed by a thin amber glow. Beneath the quiet Cole hears something soft, a low suspiration muffled and fierce.

“It’s us,” Creed declares, eyes toward the ceiling. “Finally.”

The door clicks and glides wide. Mule towers within the frame, backlit, a hulking silhouette. He nods welcome, massaging one red, smeary fist inside the other, catching his breath as he backs up. Arley Noe stands formal and rigid in black suit and felt trilby, his blue face winched against smoke curling from the hand-rolled cigarette clamped in his mouth. He doesn’t acknowledge the boys, keeping his attention instead upon a mass of angry suffering before him, a man sagging heavy against the burden of sitting up despite the duct tape strapped across his bare chest, arms, and shins. It’s the caretaker Dwayne Hardesty. His thick shoulders quiver as he strains forward, but the tape holds firm. Hardesty’s shiny white throat faces them; his head lies back on the chair, and in the wooly brass beard are clots of blood and torn flesh.

“You started without us,” Creed says, disappointed.

“He has not been agreeable,” murmurs Noe, narrow features bunching bemused as he evaluates the level of distress in the chair. “Mule got bit.”

“I can’t remember the last time I got a tetanus shot,” Mule says, shaking the pain from his hand and tossing splats of blood on the dusty wood floor, “and dammit look at that, now I got to clean that up, too.”

Noe bends forward and rests his hands on his knees, peering closely at Hardesty’s face with near medical attention. “So everyone’s here, then.”

Hardesty’s head lifts—both eyes are swollen shut, the left completely, the right with just enough crack to give view within the puckered eyelid. Something black spins in the yolk there. His head tilts, swivels side to side, taking in each of the men around him.

“That’s him! You ask him,” he shouts, until his voice breaks into coughing.

Noe raises to full height again. On top of two stacks of magazines and newspapers a large homemade toolbox stands open, displaying tools settled within cloth-lined pockets.

“Well,” he says. “At present we’re more interested in the how of things. Like how my property disappears from Harlan, say, and ends up here,” his voice a level whisper, as if talking to himself alone. “In this little house.” The blue fingers—deep blue, floral—tap along the tray of tools. They turn over a set of hawks-bill snips, move aside a brad driver. The diamonds in his horseshoe ring flicker and dance with bits of lamplight. He selects a rip hammer and inspects its iron claws through the smoke as he manipulates the cigarette along his lips to the opposite corner, turning the hammer in the faint light of the single table lamp as if searching for evidence of marred craftsmanship. He returns the tool to the cloth, picks up a dovetail saw. “Mule, I can’t decide. You got a preference here?”

“Probably won’t get much with that baby saw. I can’t grip so well my good hand’s all swole up. Fucker bit clean through to the knuckle, Cole, look at that”—he shows Cole the wounds on both sides of his hand following the curve of Hardesty’s teeth, the skin there purpled and swollen, Mule’s blood running easily down his wrist. “Could
probably cast a mold of his mouth off this. Let’s try those locking pliers, see what they get me.”

Noe picks up the pliers and holds them out even as he continues to inspect the array, lips tight. Just as Mule reaches for the pliers Noe pulls them back, sighs, and hands him the hawks-bill snips. “Try these first. We don’t need to be here all night.”

Mule takes the tool and tests it, wincing at the spring’s resistance in his injured hand.

“You want me to do it?” asks Creed.

Neither answer. With his free hand Mule pulls Hardesty’s lolling head by the hair. The caretaker’s breathing intensifies again, sucking in quick inhalations.

“I got nothing to say here. I gave you what I got last night, I got nothing to do with this, the boy just up and give it to me and he said
it was you
”—but he can’t finish because Grady Creed steps forward and with pitcher’s-mound intensity crunches his fist into the man’s chin. Hardesty’s head drops back and stays.

“Now I don’t see how that was necessary,” says Mule.

“Why don’t you let a man do his job and wait your turn,” Arley says at the same time.

Creed hops lightly on his toes, wiggling his arms. “I thought you wanted us here for help. This turd’s lying already.”

“Simmer down, junior.” Noe stubs out his smoke in a crusty saucer. He inspects the burnt end, twists it between two fingers before depositing the butt in his jacket pocket. Then he returns to Hardesty. “Mule,” he says, “I never understood why a man needs his nipples.”