Ghosting (34 page)

He looked to see who had spoken and saw he was alone. I’m not hiding, he thought—and understood his own thoughts were lying to him. Each car that passed or pedestrian that strode by above his head, were they to look, would find him as nothing less than hiding. But he was in full morning sunlight. Yet he felt he was in hiding and too felt dread at being found—by whom? By the sun, it seemed. All this starting a message from the Holy Spirit direct to Gilly Ponder, junkie city ham, near twelve years ago.

So no high-speed kisses into sturdy walls tonight. God sends trials he expects us to overcome. Often opportunities arrive in the guise of trial. He eases off the accelerator and listens to the engine’s sighing down to purring revolutions; waits for some hint from the Holy Spirit or his subconscious (sometimes he wonders what the difference between them is) as to what he should do next. And as he marks that moment of call and communion he spots the looming glow high afloat in the starry night sky, a beacon burning orange near the interstate ramp, beckoning travelers to pull in for food, fuel, showers.

Ghostly luminescence haloes the gas pumps and quik-mart entrance, that cold blue-tinted halide light that makes everyone look like they’re on chemo. He winds past the pump islands toward the long skirt where semis sit dark save for amber running lights. He parks in that near-seclusion—shielded from the main building by an eighteen-wheeler carrying a bevy of makes and models and, if he’s correct, even different years—and quits the engine, window down, listening to soft-pop hits of the seventies from the station’s speakers warp and woof on the interstate winds.

The music stops for a bored voice to announce
Pump six ready for fillup thank you,
and then after a static clap that shivers his spine the music returns, Glenn Frey counseling them all to take it easy.

Past the semi he hears rough laughter, young boys ribbing one another over tall tales. Ponder can’t see them but he hears one voice,
animated, perhaps acting out a story. Then the harsh laughter again. When Ponder opens his door and the bell chimes he hesitates, uncertain what exactly he intends to do; he’s neither hungry nor thirsty, doesn’t need a Kentucky ball cap or T-shirt, and never made use of pep pills. Once he shuts the door with his hip, the laughter stops. From behind the semi two thin shadows and another round one appear, backlit by a hovering light, mounds of drift stone pocked with weeds and cement chunks bright behind them.

“Evening, gentlemen,” says Ponder, flipping his keys around his ring finger.

“You miss the lot, mister? You can park closer to the grocery there,” one says, arm aloft pointing the way, a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor dangling half full.

Brother Ponder leans his elbow on the Acura’s hood. Now these are boys he knows. Although he can’t see their faces he could guess each one’s life and family history with fair accuracy, homegrown roads to quiet failure as much as his own had been. “I wasn’t looking for groceries,” he says. “Thought I’d stretch my legs a bit. They sell forties in there now? Pirtle County’s still dry isn’t it?”

“We’re not selling if you’re asking,” the boy answers.

Ponder takes the risk and walks toward them. “Anything else you might be selling, then?” He pulls out the gold money clip, the bills folded thick enough to impress any kid who lives by five and twenties. He counts out forty dollars and asks what that might get him. The boys eye the money. “Take it, finger it, there’s nothing wrong with good American bills.” The boys scan the lot, Ponder’s car, their eyes practiced in catching any hint of authority or badge interference. A silence extends between them.

Oh, but this is what he needed; this is what he is here on this plane of reality to do. The boy shakes his head and shrugs. “You some kind of strange dude,” he says, but the three of them begin moving back to the mound of cement blocks and broken concrete, Brother Gil following. He welcomes the thrill of recognition, elated—it has been ages since he got to work like this, one on one,
fishing for men
as it were.
Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share,
Timothy wrote. “Where around here you from?” one of the boys
thinks to ask. It’s then that Brother Gil takes out his business card and begins to tell them his story. “From the city, but it doesn’t matter where I come from. What matters is the prosperity in which I’m living. I always have a pocket full of money because I’ve learned to live in grace with the Almighty, who wants to see his children enjoy the abundance of His creation. Wouldn’t you boys like to own a car like mine? What if I told you I can prove God wants you to have one, too?”

She lists deep in restless dream, a dream teeming with morning light, blinding columns of honey gold embracing her body where she lies in a verdant meadow on lush grass, grass as dense as the hair of her first-born son, grass she fingers for the scratch of their parchment blades. She grips a tuft in her fist and tests the roots. Trees shush nearby, she feels their proximity but cannot seem to open her eyes enough to see them.

I got a phone call today. Sitting there eating good eggs and the phone rings. You know about that.

How would I know who calls you? Look at me.

Because of the light—that peculiar light specific to dreams, so bright it bleaches out all shadow, she cannot unfold her eyes. Spring is a smell, a lime green pixie dust in her nose, it feels like an army of tiny miners chipping away in there.

You used to be able to take a joke.

I never. Not when I’m about making money.

She cannot get her eyes open to see what’s happening around her. All she can make out is light filling her half-open eyes, the grass faded beneath her hands in the bright morning of it. That, and voices. Her head swims, struggling against a current.

Look at that. The woman sleeps more than I do.

She sleeping now? She with us?

“I’m here,” Lyda says. One corner of her mouth drags warm and novocaine-numb. A stiffness plagues her neck, and she wonders how long she drowsed with her head thrown back. “I was just in the nicest place. Why did you take me from there?”

Arley Noe stands over Greuel buried on the couch beneath two blankets and his heirloom quilt. Noe’s hands hide in his pockets, his wide cheekbones as prominent as welts, lips a wadded purple bloom; his gray eyes scan her face with disinterest. Lyda yawns, scratches at the itch in her nose—the single effect of painkillers she does not like.

“What time is it?”

“Late enough for me to wonder the point in talking to a dead man about his troubles,” Arley says. “Whyn’t you make some coffee.”

Her body responds automatically to the command, Lyda rising to her feet; as soon as she’s up she understands something is wrong, there’s a tweak in her equilibrium, and the house lurches as a boat battling storm-thrown seas—no sooner is she upright than a wave knocks her down again.

Arley Noe steps out of her fall with a grace and dexterity she would not have expected to be in him. Her shoulder takes the full impact. His blue face peering down at her displays all its crannies, the hoods of his eyes so deep from this perspective that he seems to have no eyes at all.

“Excuse me,” she says. “I don’t feel quite right.”

A hiss fissures Noe’s mouth in place of laughter. He reaches down and grabs her just beneath the injured shoulder, squeezing hard as he wrenches her up. The intensity of the pain surprises her and she cries out something, she’s not sure what, she cries it again until he lets go. She massages the muscle where his hand had been, contemplating its soreness as she tries to diffuse it. There will be a bruise there tomorrow. She can handle a bruise.

“I take mine black,” Arley says.

“Somehow I knew,” Lyda answers. Her voice does not feel completely her own; it greets her face a few steps before her—her throat, tongue, teeth absolved of all responsibility and sensation. She hears that voice tell Greuel she’ll fetch him water as well.

The two men, the couch, the IV tower slip past as though taken by conveyor belt. The journey to the kitchen is arduous and distressing and unconscionably long. It’s true, there’s something not quite right about her. She cannot even feel her soles on the floor. But none of this is unpleasant. How long has she been like this?

The clock on the stove shows two-nineteen. The past six hours are lost to her, aside from the meadow and bright morning dreamlight. Her own body feels at one remove, cocooned in some soft pliant substance. Scooping grounds into the coffee filter provides great amusement. It’s so lovely to drift like this, to see her hands act without her willing them. Like watching yourself on the TV while you lounge beneath favorite blankets, and you don’t have to question the why or the how to anything, it’s on the TV and whatever happens there is already written, it’s finished and composed, the show will end as it always ends, every time. Lyda starts the percolator and then goes to the back window, drawn by night wind cool through the storm window.

Nothing out there but the dark. And then from within its depths a long rasping screech serrates the air, increasing in volume and intensity before it ceases abruptly. The sudden end to the cry makes the silence after feel weighted, wary. Lyda presses her nose against the fine steel mesh, catches the scent of rust. The wires pattern a waffle imprint on her skin. That there’s a barn owl, she speaks aloud, her voice towed out through the screen onto the breeze. Again the harsh screech sounds, ratcheting high and and then ceasing. This time she finds the owl’s eyes reflecting copper from the kitchen light: it perches on the lowest branch of some tree not ten feet away. As her eyes adjust to the dark out there she begins to make out its placid white face shaped into a valentine, the copper eyes unequivocal and remote, mirroring her stare. The owl lifts one claw and holds it raised, talons clutched. Its head dips, and a loud hiss emanates from deep in its throat.

“Little buddy, how you going to find a nice girl with a call like that?”

Minnows surge and twist in her belly. As if he has heard and understood her, the owl extends himself to full height and splays his wings at their widest expanse, arches his back upward, his face transforming—she would swear—to the picture of righteous indignation.

Her nose tingles fierce again and she rubs it hard against the screen. But it’s not the same tingle inside, it’s a sting, a stench. Something is burning. Something is on fire. The coffee machine coughs clouds of
gray vapor and she runs for it, yanks the cord from the wall socket unaware it is her voice saying
shit shit shit
and
no no no
in quick repeating chants. She pulls the decanter from the machine and discovers, impossibly, nothing swishing around inside, nothing’s been brewed. And yet the kitchen reeks of scalded coffee. Lyda opens the top of the machine and finds no water there—apparently she’s been trying to brew off condensation. The stench of old grounds seizes her face and slips one hot finger down her throat.

The minnows swim up so quickly she hardly makes the two steps to vomit into the sink. Six cruel heaves throttle her, hard enough that she grasps the counter with all she has so as not to be thrown to the floor again. The pliant tissues in her mouth burn as she holds panting over the mess she’s made, drenched in a burst of warm sweat, staring into the dire expulsion from her stomach: a viscous, yellow, pancake-like substance expands slowly across the basin, streaked with pink. Floating within she sees several small, half-digested pills; foamy and soft marshmallows on the surface of a hot chocolate.

She turns on the faucet and watches the water begin to draw her mess toward the drain—and then smacks the spout aside to the next basin, unable to allow what’s left of her pills to go down with the rest. She splashes her face several times and the water is good and cold. Then she tries not to think about what she is doing; she pokes among the muck with her little finger, the only nail not chewed to the quick. She scoops up four of the least-dissolved pills, creating a line on the median between the sink’s two basins.

From the front of the house comes a sound like a cross between a gasp and a belch; Lyda raises her head to listen, straining to hear above the water. That owl again. Still, the sound focuses her and she feels suddenly she has been in this kitchen a long time, she’s not even certain Arley Noe is still around. Quickly she forms a bowl with one hand and piles the foamy pills within and then fills the bowl with as much water as she can without allowing the pills to run away, and she does not look at what she brings to her mouth, and she swallows with a deep shudder, bile hot again on her tongue, and the minnows swim back down her throat to their home in her belly.

Lyda braces herself against the sink, ready to heave again; the
smell is starting to get to her. She holds her breath and waits. Then, once she’s certain she can manage, she returns the spout to pour over her vomit and leaves it running as she steps to the hallway, no longer concerned with—no longer remembering—why she had gone into the kitchen in the first place.