Ghosting (3 page)

“The one run off before I got these down. You might hear word later.”

“I should check emergency rooms.”

“You maybe get something out of that, yeah.”

“Wish you wouldn’t send these kids to the hospital, Mr. Hardesty. I understand your duty but these are just teenagers out here and you’re likely to brand them for life. Kind of a hard cost for a boy out looking for kicks.”

Hardesty turns from the cop and spits. The thick saliva smacks
onto the pavement in a heavy gel that holds its shape until the pattering rain thins the dark phlegm and a yellow strip breaks loose, drains the wad empty. His small rangy hound scoots among the line of captives, shivering under thin brown fur soaked to a fine sheen. Her whirligig tail throws a sparkling spray in the cast of cruiser light that’s fairly pretty to see.

“Get over here, Bone.”

Howls erupt from on high and deep inside the building, yaps and snarls muddling together from one of the floors directly above. The dog raises from where she had her nose in the ear of one boy who dared not turn away and whines a squeaky whine. She puts her nose to him again, and again Hardesty commands her to come. This time she appears to almost nod in agreement—as though to admit her master is of course reasonable and right despite her urge to do differently—and she springs over the boy’s head into the next space over, the throaty whine rising again almost to a drone. She looks up at Hardesty and then back at the kids on their bellies, and then huffs an exasperated complaint. Hardesty speaks her name again, hard. She lowers her chin to her forepaws and the tail slows in waves to a shy, low, wary swing.

“I give him a brush to think about is all. He aint going to die.”

“Salt shot?”

“Gets you the bird without messing the feathers.”

“Damn that has got to burn like hell.”

“Wouldn’t know, myself. I make it a point to be on the right end of the gun.”

Hardesty chins his collarbone. He has yet to look this cop in the face, instead surveying his bounty stilled and silent on the ground, the set of each head indicating they are listening with complete and utter attention to the low voices of the two men. He has to remind himself he is performing a duty and is in his rights; usually around police Hardesty’s more nervous than they are right now. This fact irritates him no end.

“Well, wish you wouldn’t do it.”

“You want me to walk you through this building it is my job to protect and show what these kids come here to do? There is no mercy
for vandals. It is 455 in the A.D. and the sack of Rome in there. I don’t like midnight work anymor’n you, my living room is warm and dry. I give them a warning shot. Sometimes a kid runs right into it.”

The officer tilts his head to greet a colleague who has parked her cruiser by the empty stone fountain in the center of the circular drive, the engine running with the high beams left on. The rain flashes tinsel threads that emerge and disappear in the same instant like the very air is woven from some magical fabric.

Hardesty does not acknowledge the second cop at all. He has nothing against equality but does not believe in women in positions of physical authority. A figure of authority should be able to display some brawn. He has seen big women but none ever big enough to intimidate him into stepping carefully, and this one here’s no bigger than a springtime weed. She asks what kind of fish is that they’ve strung across on the ground. Her voice and the bit of a mirth between the two cops snaps Bone to attention but leaves the caretaker unmoved, in no mood for hilarity that does not arise from him.

He knows they have a routine down for this kind of stop. Still he feels the same dismay once the first woman takes over proceedings and announces to the vandals’ benefit how she is going to turn around and let them get rid of anything they don’t want her to find when she pats them down. She’ll give them thirty seconds. As she turns, Hardesty’s toes flex in his boots until it pains him; the woman is staring straight at the door of his cottage. He has to remind himself that there’s no reason she will ask to go in.

The fat boy lifts his head from the pavement and holds it there. He looks to his left and the other officer makes a vaudeville show of turning his back to them, too, crossing his arms as he faces the break of dead corn. The boy rolls to one side and reaches deep into his jeans, pulls up a plastic bag that shines in the cruiser lights, and tosses the bag into the scrappy boxwoods grown askew along the seminary’s front. A silver spear of rain flashes directly above the bag’s landing and is gone.

At the sight Hardesty’s throat creates a sound that causes the first cop to ask if he’s okay. Hardesty waves him off, feels his eyes burning as the woman starts to search the first of the lot.
Outrageous travesty
of justice,
he mutters. A trespass charge is nothing to keep a kid from coming back. He’ll look at it now like a challenge from the caretaker, a personal offense to his honor. Possession, though—a lost opportunity. The delight of the catch has already withered inside him; lately he has been wondering if he had lost his touch, having come up empty on a number of occasions while making his rounds but finding plenty of evidence that people were running riot over the place.

He recognizes the male officer, forgets his name but he knows the mustache, like two chalk lines etched into the black man’s skin. He has never understood that cop culture of groomed mustaches, why they never wear beards. It’s fishy to him; they try too hard.

The officer touches him high up on the back of his arm with gentle camaraderie, turning him slightly to one side.

“You put a good scare into them tonight, don’t you think? Boys learned a lesson they won’t forget. Especially when they hear from their buddy.”

“He’s still running and don’t even know why,” Hardesty says, the image of a boy running in total panic and spurred by the fifty points of fire in his backside leading him to amusement despite the anger growing from what he knows is coming next.

“Dwayne, listen. If I can call you Dwayne. How about you let me threaten these four here with the cold hand of the law and then we cut them loose? I would consider that a favor. A personal favor.”

Again with the sound in his throat; it’s a small strangled keening sound Hardesty is only half-aware of making. The cop’s eyes widen in concern. Hardesty looks down at the chopped pavement, at Bone who has taken to her feet again but sticks beside him, her temple pressed against his shin. He sucks at his teeth.

“Release the mongrel hordes to the forest so they can return, you’re saying. Y’know, they don’t even
try
to hide, they come slapping feet in the rain without a care.”

“You won’t see these kids again, I bet.”

“Don’t matter, there’s always more to come. Only me and Bone here against every teenager who don’t have nothing to do in two counties and no sense to do it somewhere else. What the church plans to do other than burn this place to the ground I can’t imagine.”

The cop exhales a series of short noiseless puffs Hardesty interprets as blithe showmanship from a man who wants to exhibit how streetwise and seen-it-all he is. He has a lean narrow face with squared cheekbones that press the tight skin, a thin strip of mustache that meets in a sharp sculpted column leading to his nostrils. Hardesty doesn’t understand why a man would put so much effort into the upkeep a mustache like that must require. He just does not understand the desire to put that much labor into your face.

“I have no use for you,” he admits. Ever come to aid a crime victim and heard
that?
he wants to ask.

“Let’s do the right thing here. What do you say? Let me put fear to these kids and we’ll call the parents and send them home to their whippings and every one of us can get out of this rain. What do you say to that?”

“I say these jacklegs broke the law. I say your whole attitude disturbs me and these kids are my opportunity to set an example for vandals everywhere. My apologies if that sucks time away from your work on that fancy mustache but this is your job, aint it?”

Unperturbed, the officer broadens his smile. He strokes the mustache with the back of two fingers.

“Pressing charges isn’t going to make an example of these kids to anybody, Mister Hardesty.”

He appears to enjoy this, his accounting of the kind of wrist-slap the boys have ahead articulated with calm objectivity and near-palpable glee: worst-case scenario, they’ll be sentenced to a few hours of community service, a punishment the kids nowadays only brag about to their peers. Deferred probation, maybe; a record swept clean once the state recognizes them as adults.

Hardesty hardly listens to a bald truth he’s familiar with already, studying instead the second officer performing her search. She pulls a broken broom handle from one pocket, a set of magic markers from another. She throws each item into the bushes as though they never existed, although the caretaker knows they do and will have to be gathered
by him
and eventually taken to the landfill
by him
with all the rest of the garbage that somehow accumulates around this useless place in the middle of nowhere.

He interrupts the cop’s speech by brandishing his shotgun, a simple rising up and down.

“I’m pressing charges and I’ll be there in court when need be. Your badge identifies you as officer number 367. I expect to be notified of a court date and if I don’t I will file a complaint.”

The cop sighs in that slow and deliberate way of one about to embark upon a task that requires patience and that he does not want especially to do. The four boys now sit with elbows on knees, staring in dubious incredulity as the officer explains they’ve no one to blame but themselves for the inconvenience and the caretaker is in his rights and they are all going to the station. Moreover, he does not expect any expressions of attitude from a one of them. The fat boy complains they should press charges against the caretaker, for all they knew they had a friend bleeding out dead in the corn. Hardesty resists his urge to fire the shotgun into the seminary wall to silence everyone, to wield the weapon like a gnarled staff and he some mad prophet returned from the wilderness to warn of imminent perdition for them all. He resists his own impulses until the two officers have the kids cuffed in their cruisers and the spotlights and roof lights are extinguished and they are gone, up the pocked drive past the corn field and onto the county road and out of his life. Then he roars back at the dogs still yapping on the floors above, acquiring the kind of silence he seeks by firing his gun straight into the night air.

Excellent quiet then. The rain has died to a weak drizzle but the wind is up, and the drops needle into the corners of his eyes.

“
Vandal hordes
, Bone. Where do I come up with this shit?” The phrase brings him genuine laughter. He waits to be certain the shotgun doesn’t invite the return of either cruiser and, once satisfied he and the dog are left alone, steps over the boxwoods and picks up the baggie flung there, holding it close in the dark to examine the chalky crystals inside.

Another defeat. Every freaking day, another defeat.

“Least we come out ahead,” he tells the dog, swinging the baggie playfully before her. She begins to duck and sway with the movement, and her tail spirals water into the air again. Hardesty nudges her with his boot. “Get yer coon ass back in that house, bitch. We done our duty this night.”

An hour later lightning strikes the transformer that powers Hardesty’s house. He had been comfortable and almost dozing in the small cottage that smells faintly of mold and Bone’s wet fur and a heady syrup sweetness he tries to ignore—he should be used to it by now—and the hour is deep enough for the TV to be into reruns of detective shows from his childhood that Hardesty can practically recite. Bone lay curled on the wool rug beneath the set, Hardesty had his socked feet on the coffee table that lacks one leg and requires careful placement of his feet to avoid spillage of magazines and candy wrappers and half-empty mason jars, two fingers of vodka tilted on his belly rising in rhythm with his low breathing, when the transformer cracked the sky like a cannon shot. The explosion is already an echo when Hardesty realizes the vodka gone, his table has upended everything onto the floor, and he is standing in the middle of the room with an empty jar.

Through the kitchen he pulls back the threadbare curtain and wipes humidity off a pane of glass with the heel of his hand. Fog hangs heavy outside. He has to crane his neck upward to find the transformer in bright burn—quivering flame licks the steel casing and disappears into the mist, coloring a tiny fogbow; a strand of violet dances up the wooden post harnessed to the building. The flames create a strange, unfamiliar noise he can barely hear, like a radio receiver between direct signals, all crackle and burst. His nostrils tingle with a smell remembered from Army maneuvers and the cottage has fallen entirely dark.

Bone presses into his legs, her frightened whimper winging up to join the howls of Fleece’s dogs in the big seminary itself. Hardesty pats at his chest pockets, not looking for anything but out of habit, and as he turns to seek one overhead cabinet for his power light—a quality instrument with a one-million candlelight beam—he trips over the dog tucked into his legs. He curses and shoves her out of the way with his ankle. In the darkness he doesn’t see her skitter back to his legs again, and Hardesty hears her squeal as his heavy foot lands on what might be her foreleg and he feels her mass against his knee and then
he’s falling, one shoulder cracking into the corner of a chair back, his forehead shucking the edge of the refrigerator door.