Ghosting (36 page)

“I didn’t realize I was driving so fast,” Cole says.

“Dude’s probably wondering what those church boys was trying to prove, racing him like that,” muses Creed. He pinches a wad of chew from the can, pulls out his bottom lip to set it in place. His face tightens a moment with the sting of the minty tobacco and he smacks the dash with the flat of his hand. “Poor Cole boy, your face was like you just swallowed my spit cup, you must’ve felt like you seen a ghost. I mean, yellow fender and everything. I mean,
damn.”

He’s shaking his head as he scans the radio for another station worth the listening. He switches from AM to FM and peruses the entire spectrum of the dial, finding nothing but commercials or the New Country they both despise. Eventually he gives up, shuts the radio off as he points Cole off the interstate to the Hal Rogers that crosses Boone National Forest.

“It was the wrong side,” Cole says.

“Who is?”

“The fender on that Nova. It wasn’t the same side. Fleece’s was on the driver side.”

Creed stares at the cliff walls outside his window without comment. And Cole begins to wonder at the possible connection between things, between different lives lived far apart, how you might almost meet a person at several junctures in your life and yet never do. Like someone out there’s living a mirror image of your own life. That yellow fender—could it be possible that it had come from the same yellow Nova as his brother’s? And if so, then what’s the story behind that yellow car, who had owned it, what forced it into some junkyard to be pieced out as needed? How many candy-red ’76 Nova coupes were left in Kentucky?

There must be a number of them; it was a fast car with pieces cheaply found and car nuts love their Mustangs and Novas. Still, Creed’s right: it felt like he had been brushed by a ghost. He had driven alongside the thing, struggling with the van to keep pace, his head reeling with
What? What? What?
as he awaited some communication to come, to signal something important, something essential—why else the coincidence of
this
run, his brother’s last? What was it trying to tell him?

Why does he feel like it was trying to give warning?

He shakes his head and runs his palm over his face. That entire time beside the Nova he had wondered—no, he had been seeking to know—what it had wanted from him; but it was only his own foot on the gas pedal keeping the two vehicles aligned. It had been Cole himself creating the connection where there was none.

Fleece had told him it was a stupid idea, back when Cole had called to say he was moving back to the lake. “Pirtle County’s got nothing for you—I thought you were heading to the coast somewhere, diving school,” Fleece said. Cole pleaded poverty. And then Fleece said: “You can’t find a better job in the city?” And then he said: “Living
with Lyda aint going to change a thing, puppy. You can’t help someone fine with the problems they got.”

The day Cole reclaimed their old bedroom in the house was the single time he saw his brother before he disappeared. Fleece watched Cole carry in his few belongings, thumb hooked to the waist of his jeans and making no offers to help, not so much as even holding a door open. With Cole installed, Lyda clapped her hands and exclaimed, “I’m one happy mother hen with a full nest right now!” standing between the boys and squeezing their shoulders. Fleece pulled off. “I still got my own place,” he said.

“Either my boys can live with me long as they like,” said Lyda.

Cole felt his brother was somehow disappointed and only wanted him out of there, he didn’t understand why. The feeling had hurt him then. But maybe Fleece had been trying to look out for his brother in his own halfhearted way. Maybe he knew already—he
must
have known—what he was about to do.

Later that night Cole had looked over the three low shelves on the partition dividing the kitchen from the main room and found, among coil-spined cookbooks and drugstore paperbacks and the Merck Manual Lyda used to memorize symptoms she needed to present to obtain a prescription, the Pirtle County High yearbooks of Fleece’s junior and senior years. The endpapers had few signatures or notes, and these only from girls whose names Cole did not recognize. Invariably they referred to how each would
always cherish
their
special times together
with Fleece, and expressed hope that they would remain close. As Cole paged through the yearbooks themselves he had to smile at his brother’s ability to make it through without notice or record. He was missing from the class picture taken on the school’s front steps; he hadn’t joined any extracurricular groups since getting cut from the basketball team his sophomore year. The only mention of him at all was among the individual student photos, his name listed beneath an empty frame where there should have been his portrait, identified as “missing.”

If his brother is dead then Cole has failed him, now with Greuel gone. If he’s alive, then Cole has no reason for what he’s doing, and the ground crumbles beneath his feet.

Creed directs him onto 421 toward Harlan. “Not far now,” he says. It is close to full night now and the van’s interior is dark, the dashboard lights dim. “Your belly all right?”

“I’m fine.” At the mention of it his insides cramp, and he tightens his gut until the pain passes.

“I paid a visit to that cousin of yours,” Creed says. “That kid’s a bigger mess than Spunk. You sure he’s kin to you and Fleece?”

“He’s no kin to Fleece. His father was brother to my father. Fleece and me share our mother.” He explains this quietly, knowing it doesn’t matter, that Creed doesn’t care one way or the other.

“That kid’s a storyteller, he’s a whatyoucallit—a myth-o-maniac. Right? Got big plans for himself and us and don’t even know his own brain’s telling him lies.”

“What did you do to him?”

Creed’s hands rise in innocent surrender. “I didn’t touch the kid! I got a right to see where my money’s going to come from, don’t I? Keep an eye on that boy, though. You know that, right?”

“This why you had me make this drive with you? To tell me that?”

Again the hands surrender. “No, man, why you got to be always suspicious like that? Fleece never believed in anybody neither, not even his best pal who wanted to do a favor. I got a sweet side. You ask Lyda, she knows.” He snickers at Cole’s reaction to his mother’s name. “Yeah, you heard me say it. She’s a good woman, your mother, I aint going to do nothing to hurt her. Or you, ’less you give me reason to. Pull over, we’re almost there.”

He doesn’t understand why they left so late, insuring they wouldn’t reach Harlan until after dark, instead of first thing in the morning and thus having time to make the buy, load the van, and return home by nightfall. All done in daylight, with less time in Eastern Kentucky where the Feds operate. But he has been at this long enough to learn that a procedure exists behind every delivery run he makes, refined over time by trial and error (he guesses), and he is no one to be suggesting different modes of operation.

The radio had said tonight would show the brightest moon of the year but there’s no sign of one yet. They travel a lightless two-lane road pressed upon by trees. He pulls over where Creed says, stopping
on a gravel drive that appears like a natural tunnel in their headlights, pines, oaks, elms forming a tight colonnade on either side, their branches closing off the sky; moths gleam white before the windshield and then flicker into the darkness again. “Turn off your headlights,” he says. “Keep your foot off the brake.”

The trees and gravel road evaporate. The darkness is as total as if the drive had been scored through a mountain, until Cole’s eyes adjust and he begins to make out a distant bluing where the trees must end. He rolls down his window; the cacophony of woodland life fills the van with its noise of tiny saws, minute screams. His gut lurches again, and again he tightens his thighs to keep in whatever’s going on down there.

“I’ve got to find a toilet here soon,” Cole says.

“We don’t need but a minute, we’re not far.” From his front pocket Creed pulls out and unfolds a small ziplock. From another pocket he pulls a small steel plate no bigger than an index card, a fancy engineer’s pocket protector, and shakes from the bag a thick scar of powder. Then he closes the ziplock again and shoves it back into his pocket. Using a small straight razor and steadying his hand against the dash, he thins the scar into three short lines, telling Cole he’ll want some of this, too, but only a little, it’s pure and clean as you can get, you watch, it’ll help your stomach. He sheaths the razor in its fitted cardboard and drops it into his shirt pocket, takes out a cut straw, and inhales a full line. Creed’s head pops back; he winces, pinches his nose shut with the straw stuck between his middle and ring fingers. “Who?” he asks with a groan. Then he slams his hand against the dash. “
Hoo boy
but if that aint a kick.”

An eighteen-wheeler rushing along the two-lane behind them rocks the van with its afterwash. The movement calls Cole’s eyes to the rearview mirror, his thumbnail a different razor against his palm as he keeps watch, expecting somehow the appearance of figures, blue lights; he doesn’t take his eyes away until Creed prods him with a knuckle.

“That shit is poison,” Cole says.

“Yeah, well. Poison fuels our game.” Creed proffers the plate near Cole’s chin. “It’ll dry up that gut, I promise. You don’t want to see me
angry on this. I claim no responsibility for my actions for the rest of this night.”

With the powder this close he can see it’s a only small amount. Creed’s staring adds a thoughtless urgency. “Go on, now,” he says. “If I was Shady Beck here you wouldn’t stop a second, would you.” It confounds Cole to feel Creed making sense. He snorts hard and a blade thrusts up his skull into a star directly above his right eye, and his head shoots back as if taking a blind punch. An expanding, steady burn flares the circumference of the eye and he pinches his nose. Soon then the pain starts to subside; his heart beats in his cranium, and he feels entirely new: alert, strong, the best version of Cole Prather he’s likely to ever get. Each tree aligned by the gravel drive turns and acknowledges his arrival. Cole smiles; he wets his finger and wipes up the rest of the remaining powder, sucks it onto his tongue. He hands the plate back to Creed, who nods in aggressive affirmation and tells him
What I’m saying
as if they’d been discussing some grave issue and he wanted it to be clear that they were in agreement. “Awrighty James Cole,” he says, “let’s get to work.”

Harlan looks like a nineteenth-century river town preserved under glass. They leave the state highway at the next exit and head toward Black Mountain. Cole has never seen Black Mountain and his skull feels carved out and he has always wanted to hike the highest mountain in the state someday. The thought launches from casual idea to committed goal, an experience he
must
have, essentially now. Better yet he should take Shady, wouldn’t it be great if he turned around and sped through the night to fetch her so the two of them could enjoy Black Mountain together?

He checks the speedometer to see if he is speeding again and it’s hard to reconcile the tempered needle locked on its judicious number with his certainty that they’re flying but there the needle sits at 43 mph, two below the law. Maybe they’re to meet on Black Mountain, he would definitely like to see Shady again, she’s taken an apartment in Montreux he hasn’t even seen yet; she’s already started the summer’s
first-term semester, remedial courses in anatomy or something to get back into the swing of things before beginning med school proper in the fall and he’s unsure what this means for him, for them, for the two of them together—Creed directs him to another road that winds hills and demands concentration. Every detail suddenly matters. To his left begins one of those slave-stacked stone walls (or else a fabricated one, he forgets how many actual slave-made walls are said to exist, but this one appears old enough to amaze him—and no mortar that he can see), it runs nearly a half-mile before giving to a three-plank fence working as a dam to the thick woods cascading behind. Here Creed leans forward and tells Cole to slow down, which allows him to gather that the fence isn’t planked after all but crossed with hewn logs, many of which have fallen, pushed from their posts by the encroaching trees. The entry they turn into is less a gate than a gap in the woods, no postal box, two ruts of dirt road angled up to the night sky.