Ghosting (37 page)

A constant whisper of tall grass drags against the undercarriage. On either side gleam white spiny sculptures, vaguely figural, spectral forms at the edge of the headlights stilled in fields of high fescue teetering in the wind. Atop the ridge, a white scalloped curb runs along the rutted track and another fence begins on his left, close enough for Cole to identify what swings between the planks, bleached canes forming tripods around each post. The rim of the moon far across the valley rises behind the next ridge like a sun.

“These are bones?” he asks. The road banks right to descend the hill in earnest.

“Them be the Truth’s cow bones,” Creed half-mutters, half-sings, without further elucidation.

Cole can make out their destination some way still ahead and below them, where vapor lights illuminate a compound of cleared land between a two-story farmhouse and a few low outbuildings rounded as Quonset huts. There’s a gathering of vehicles—old battleship cars and late-model pickups—parked in a tight mass of no discernible order. The fence follows the drive along various slow serpentine curves, adorned with the chalky bones smooth and bright and swaying in Cole’s headlights, lending the fence the semblance of breathing, of being alive in some way.

The lot’s packed gravel grinds beneath the van, a sound that, met with the crank fueling his veins, Cole takes for his grinding teeth. Creed points between the house and the first Quonset and they pass lit windows, but see no one inside. Then they turn behind the long low building and Cole has to step hard on the brake: a lone figure stands before them, eyes set above the headlights.

Dangling from his left hand is the longest pistol Cole has ever seen. The girth of the barrel implies large caliber. The man himself is small: narrow-shouldered, lean as the parade of bones they just passed, a skinny chest naked beneath a set of denim overalls a size too large, overalls weathered to a blue wash punctuated by an explosion of white fibers where the chest pocket had been. He’s small but looms bald and pale, made top-heavy by a thick and weighty brow that juts a shelf over the eyes, shading them, masking the face like one glimpsed at the edge of an inscrutable dream.

Creed makes no remark. The van idles long enough that the exhaust turns nauseating. Cole keeps his hands visible on the steering wheel even as it occurs to him that he can’t be seen above the headlights’ glare. The man appears to be breathing hard, his reedy shoulders drawn back and heaving, his mouth contorted in a furious snarl.

After another moment Creed begins to cackle. He rolls down his window and leans out. “We gone do this or not you fuckin’ hillbilly?” he shouts, slapping the outside of his door.

The man breaks into a smile; his teeth glisten with metal. He steps toward Creed’s side of the van using the pistol against the gravel as a cane and he’s cackling, too. “Did I get you or not?” he asks. “I’m a hell of a scary sight aint I?”

Creed hops out and the two embrace with the closeness of brothers separated during a protracted war, both happy to have made it through alive. With the door open, exhaust fills the van and Cole cups his hand over his mouth, and music blares from the house, some kind of cantina or mariachi tune compounded by the voices of guests joining in to sing along. It sounds like a raucous party back there, but he cannot see anyone through the windows. The van’s slide door opens and the man with the pistol takes a seat in back, setting the gun across his lap, his face cheery.

“I love breaking me in new boys,” he says with a wink. “Welcome to Wolf Stills, James Cole. Now get me the hell out of here.”

The man guides them along another two-track deeper into the property, dropping into the valley until it joins a paved road that Cole follows with increasing dismay at each added turn and curve—it seems they looped back through a dense thicket of woods at one point (he believed he recognized a small bridge crossing a feeder creek)—and even with the rising moon’s bright light he is soon at a complete loss for direction. Through gully and hillock and dense woods heavy with new leaves the world is sightless beyond his headlights. Meanwhile the man behind him mutters a melody about murder by the sylvan brink, a song that sounds very old. They pass twenty minutes in this way.

“What county are we in?” Cole asks. The comment fuels general sniggering but no answer.

They make another farm and a weathered barn there and park beside a rusted pickup pulled up close to the barn door. Inside, three Latinos stand before the horse stalls cooing to a few nags. A dull yellow light set high on a beam makes even the bushels of hay look sick. At the sight of them, the Latinos set to work immediately and without word, carrying packing boxes from a stall to the van. Creed and the bald man disappear with the suitcase. Already the reefer is in books, surrounded by packing material and wrapped tight in tinted cellophane. Cole bends down to pick up a box, and one of the men bursts from where he was kneeling and shoves him backward, not quite violently, but still showering him in a torrent of angry language and with a finger in his face, Cole back-stepping until stacked hay bales hit his legs and he sits. The man, small but powerfully built, glares over him to make his point; he stinks of heavy cologne. Each of the Latinos reek of it, the same cologne, a vigorous dusky smell that tickles the throat and hangs about inside the barn.

He ends up holding the van’s doors open as the three workers—dressed entirely in soft blue denim—remove the athletic gear and
unlatch the back bench and fill the van neatly with cargo. Once the van is full, they rearrange the gear as a covering, and then the workers return to their pickup, two squatting in the bed and the third, the one who had become so angry with him, taking the driver’s seat. The man starts cigarettes and passes them on to the guys in back. Cole waits, uneasy and silent against the barn planks, not knowing what to say to these strange foreigners, who seem now with their work done to have forgotten him, content to smoke with their heads back, contemplating the dead light of spring stars above and the brightness of the huge moon hovering above the trees.

He thinks to look for a toilet in the barn even as he realizes Creed had been right, he no longer feels the need. More than anything he’s thirsty, and the surge from the crank has settled as an insistent reverberation in his tricky knee, where it aches and glows in rhythm with the fireflies pulsating everywhere. He decides it’s not a bad drug, except for a faint unrelenting feeling of panic.

Creed and the bald man reappear from around the barn without the suitcase. Creed’s spitting a happy patter low into the other’s ear, pointing emphasis with his hand before them and then giggling at what he’d said. The man swings and plants his long pistol, and as they near him Cole can feel himself grow apparent beneath the moonlight, feels himself the subject of close scrutiny even as the man appears to be ignoring him.

Creed tells him he’s proud of Cole for making it halfway through the job without fucking them up. He smacks him once on the shoulder in a comradely fashion unusual in him, and then announces that he’ll ride with the river-runners. “The Truth rides with you. Now you don’t want to get lost with twenty-five-to-life in the van,” he adds, “so stay close to these guys. I sure as hell don’t know where we’re at.” He hops into the back of the pickup and slaps the thigh of one of the workers in welcome: “What up, Pancho?”

Already the Truth is in the van with his window down, filling a long curved pipe in his lap. And again Cole feels the scrutiny—like he is being surveyed, examined—even though the man seems focused on something else entirely, lighting the tobacco. Beside them the pickup roars into reverse; pauses; and then with a hard spin it peppers the
van with gravel, its rear end veering wildly before the truck steadies and vaults forth into the night, running lights blurred by the dust behind it.

“And they ask why they don’t get to make runs,” the man beside Cole sighs, watching the truck by the large sideview mirror, the dust beginning to mix with the odor of burning plums.

“The Truth. Why does Creed call you that?” Cole asks. He eases the van into reverse, wary, his voice chippy from the crank and too much silence.

The man clamps his mouth onto the pipe and stares around the vicinity of Cole’s right leg. “It could be because Mister Creed is what my old man, lost to this world these many years now, would have called an
im-bee-cile
”—he draws out the word with long disgust—“but I’ll grant he can carry money. Or it could be that truth is what everyone gets from me. It is all I deliver.”

He smiles the degree that his eyes shut and Cole is charmed, comforted by the man’s steady cadence and general grandfatherly calm, a calm he feels particularly sensitive to just now as his own body thrums along the opposite end of the spectrum. The pickup’s taillights disappear over a rise in the land as they pull out. “Can I ask your real name then?”

“Surely. My name is Nathan Crutchfield.”

Cole touches the brakes and their momentum carries both men forward in a lurch. “You’re the Crutch?”

“That is not the name my old man give me. Mostly I think of myself as Nate.”

“Okay, Nate. Wow. Man do I have a lot I want to ask you. But I guess first thing is how do we get back to where we’re supposed to be? It feels like we’re on another planet out here.”

“I bet it do. If I was you I’d do as your man Creed said and hightail it after them Mexicans. I don’t know quite where we are myself.”

Cole grins at what he hopes to be a joke but speeds up just the same. At the top of the ridge he can see the taillights have moved very far ahead of them.

“I try to stay home mostly,” Crutchfield says. “Now if we had all day and was walking I could deliver us no trouble, I know these hills
like the back of my eyelids. But we have to take roads, we’re fastened to them you could say, and it is night. You might want to accelerate.”

Cole presses the gas. He doesn’t believe the van can go very fast over this kind of terrain—the chassis shudders and lurches with the speed over the two-track and the wheel fights him even as he despairs at the sight of the taillights turning off the farm way ahead. “Do they know I’m following them?” Cole shouts over the noise of squinched shocks and creaking steel, the soccer balls bouncing from one side to the other.

“I believe so. My Spanish is not good, and they are Mexicans with a party to get to, so it’s easy to imagine I did not express myself clearly enough for them to understand.”

Cole pushes the van as best he can. It’s an automatic and he stamps the pedal to the floor once he makes the paved road—but he does not want to put the van in the trees, either. His heartbeat churns into a thrash-metal percussion in his head.

“I am not being fair.”

“What?” The van’s laments overpower Crutchfield’s voice.

“I said I’m not being fair. Alfaro, the driver, he’s no Mexican, he’s from El Salvador. That’s bad country there, you can’t blame him for making his way to the bluegrass. And now I think of it, Humberto, the one with the cologne”—his shoulder bumps Cole’s on a steep curve, Cole thinking it impossible that only one of the men had been wearing that powerful cologne—“Humberto’s from Honduras. Only one of those scamps come from Mexico, I think. But they’re all Mexicans to me. Why is that?”

They bank out of one hollow and rocket to the top of another and briefly sail over a railed bridge hardly wide enough for two vehicles. At the top of the next hill Cole slams the brakes, surprised by a T-section stop sign, and the balls surge forward in their net and clap both men on the back of the head. He hardly notices the impact in his searching: he looks left and right down the long stretch of empty country road. He cranes forward and scans both directions again, but there’s no sign of any truck, no glow from fleeing taillights. He slumps back into the seat and his hands fall from the wheel. They ache from the grip he’d had them in.

“Can’t say it matters much where your driver Alfaro comes from now, Mister Crutchfield. Alfaro is far, far away.”

Crutchfield reenacts Cole’s search in a slow-motion pantomime: he leans forward, peering left down one end of the road, peering right the other way, eyes asquint against the smoke of his stinking-plum pipe. Then he, too, eases back into his seat. He stares a moment at the windshield without speaking, and again Cole feels that odd sidelong scrutiny in which his core fiber seems to be under measure. What is he supposed to be doing here? What does the man expect of him? Crutchfield bleats a puff of disappointed air through rubbery lips.

“James Cole, you didn’t think we were really going to catch that truck, did you?”