Ghosting (39 page)

He tosses the ring onto the dashboard. Crutchfield leaves it there, and the ring rolls with the curves of the road, the diamonds winking in small bursts of florid light.

“People’ve killed for less,” Crutchfield offers.

A silence descends. Without knowing why, Cole thinks of Fleece as he had known him in childhood; he sees Fleece tossing bleach into the lake shallows so they could swim; sees him placing a blanket over their mother on the couch as she slept; sees him handing Cole a fifty-dollar bill when he was twelve. In each image he cannot picture his brother’s face exactly; it is like Fleece has receded into shadows,
somehow avoided the camera in Cole’s eye as he had avoided the cameras at high school.

Beside him Crutchfield begins to sing another of his old mountain songs.
Lord, the water done rushed all over, down old Jackson road. Boy it starched my clothes. I’m goin’ back to the hilly country, won’t be worried no more.
He interrupts to give Cole directions, holding the melodic note as he tells Cole to turn, then muttering into the lyrics again. Soon they are among the cow bones at Crutchfield’s property.

“I do like a long ride of a clear evening,” he says along the rise up the two-track drive. Cole asks why he has the cow bones everywhere and he says that clean bones are beautiful and, even better, bare bones keep superstitious people in line. “All Mexicans are superstitious,” he says, satisfied with the statement as though he has accessed an undeniable truth. “At least all mine are. Doesn’t matter what country they come from. Lay out your farm with bones and nobody fucks with you.”

The Truth leaves him with the other vehicles parked by the Quonset hut, driving off in the manner of the old man that he is, babying the old pickup at little more than a walking pace among the roadside bones agleam beneath the moon, riding the brakes. The tic of the van’s cooling engine clicks time with the music faintly audible from inside the farmhouse. He stands at the outskirt of the lamps’ wash on the gravel lot and looks to the sky scrubbed of stars by the powerful radiance of the moon that hovers over the land, following him, tracking him like some cosmic spotlight he could not escape if he tried.

“Brightest moon of the year, they say,” he says for the sake of saying.

He enters the kitchen through a screen door lost of its screens. Inside, his body reacts in a peculiar fashion—the hair on his neck stands on end. The kitchen is a nasty sight and feels heavy with menace, as though something bad happened there recently and the fumes of the act still linger. Crusty skillets and pans sprawl sideways in a collapsed stack; the sink teems with dishes, filled with a water that glitters oil and brown grease. A dark fungus arcs along the wall between
the counter and open cabinets above. On the counter itself stand a number of empty bottles—tequila and rum and beer—and scattered salt lies thick over everything, free munchies for the roaches that flee at his approach.

Cole opens the refrigerator door; he selects the only brand of beer available, a green bottle of something called Cerveza Hatuey with the profile of an angry Indian warrior on its label. He checks a few drawers for a bottle opener but doesn’t find one, and clacks off the cap with the end of his lighter, not bothering to note where the cap falls to the floor of shaky tiles.

In the next room he discovers the origins of the music: an out-of-date stereo straddles two large speakers set upon a wide wooden box, the kind of box used for carrying loads of fruit. The room is crowded, but no one is singing anymore. They seem to have fallen under some hypnosis, or sedation, their bodies collapsed unmoving across ramshackle furniture shoved together so tightly it’s tough to maneuver from the doorway. Grady Creed is not among them. Nobody acknowledges or even notices Cole’s entrance. A large TV against the opposite wall flashes skewed images between bursts of white noise and holds everyone’s attention.

Cigarette and marijuana smoke wafts in great clouds. He glances over the different faces, several men and a trio of women, everyone foreign and the men dressed in similar dungaree outfits that are not quite uniforms, like those who had loaded the van earlier—but he doesn’t recognize anyone. One woman lounges across the laps of two men on the couch, sipping at a lime green drink she holds just below her chin. He feels distinctly exposed and out of place. A general sense of degeneracy and hazard permeates the entire floor. Where else would Creed be?

Cole sucks a heavy swallow from his beer as one lengthy, thin man, reclined in a La-Z-Boy chair and heavily mustached, gestures at him with his head, smiling a broad smile that lacks one front tooth. The man nods in a way that suggests they share a joke or a familiarity—or maybe he’s only indicating welcome, Cole cannot tell.

“Grady here?”

The faces in the room turn. Each appears a mix of melancholy and
anger, like they have recently received terrible news for which they are also culpable, their eyes swollen red and faces shining. Or it’s like they are all resting after a fierce brawl and no one’s happy with how the fight ended. Nobody answers his question, either; soon Cole is uncertain he even asked the question aloud. The others return their attention to the flickering TV. One of the women leans forward and sets her drink on the coffee table heavy with bottles and cans and TV Guides and magazines; then she leans further and her long black hair falls to one side of her face as she draws a line of powder from a compact mirror up her nose. She turns to the man beside her and offers the mirror but he does not look from the screen, holds his hand up in refusal.

Cole looks again at the man in the La-Z-Boy, who continues to nod and smile, leading with his chin, encouraging Cole to something he doesn’t understand. “Any of you people speak English? Grady Creed? White guy about yay tall?” He makes a motion with his hand to indicate Creed’s height.

The guy with the missing tooth has nothing to add but that inscrutable smile, a weird combination of warmth and mockery. The music ends and the speakers fill with the turntable’s needle dragging at the LP. Nobody gets up to take the needle off the record.

“If that shit’s supposed to be cocaine then you all got ripped off,” Cole tells the man in the recliner. He merely nods and presents the single-gap smile again.

The rest of the first floor is empty, hardwood floors beneath scattered trash, discarded boxes (one for the large JVC television set) stuffed with takeout food bags and empty paper cups; unlaced work boots line the base of the wall by the front door. A stall-like bathroom houses a filthy toilet beneath a bowed and stained ceiling.

Mounting the carpeted stairs he catches sight of the tall man from the La-Z-Boy following him. “I’m looking for my buddy, he up here?” Cole motions to the second floor with his hand. The man glances at him as he passes the stairs. He slips his feet into a pair of boots and heads out the front door. From the TV room, a small cheer and a lone set of hands clapping.

The carpet on the stairs has a path worn to fibers, but once on the second floor it’s like another house entire, cream walls freshly painted,
framed pictures of bucolic farm scenes, a long clean houndstooth rug running to the single door at the hallway’s end. Four other doors, each closed, line the hall on either side. The scent of that cologne from earlier at the barn hangs heavy, an invisible fog of it. The door at the far end opens suddenly and the man who had pushed him in the barn comes out, perhaps it’s Alfaro—yet before Cole can speak he perceives the look of unbridled fury, the man in a quick march, shoulders pulled back, like he is about to launch into a tackle and send them both toppling down the stairs.

Cole surrenders, hands up and palms out as he presses his back against a wall. Alfaro sweeps past—the broad fireplug of a man strides down the stairs without so much as a glance or nod. It’s like Cole is not really here, invisible to the people in this house. A strange floating sense of unreality overrides everything here, the little bump of crank left still pulsing in his body like a star about to explode yet he’s a star within a vacuum, he’s the proverbial tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it. Downstairs it seems a full melee has broken out. A woman’s voice cries out and another screeches into a quick and sustained patter that increases in volume until something happens, unheard by Cole, that silences them all. Heavy furniture groans across the bare floor and ends with some grave impact that shakes the very walls. Beside him, a small framed needlepoint of yellow flowers tilts askew above the light switch.

Cole moves. He lists his ear against the first door he comes upon, taps it twice with a knuckle, hears nothing, and tries the knob. A small bedroom furnished with a single metal-framed bed, the floor covered by sleeping bags, two rows of them set out neatly, they must sleep here on the floor side by side; which one gets the bed?

Now there is laughter swelling from downstairs after the lengthy silence, too loud and not quite believable; canned television laughter, TV volume turned way up. Otherwise it sounds as though everyone has left, the slushy drone of the turntable still audible beneath the TV.

At another door Cole hears sheets shifting and a woman’s throaty groan, or maybe she’s speaking something, an almost familiar chant. He knocks and the woman quiets. He can picture her head in the room on the other side, chin raised, listening. He taps the door again.

“Fuck off.
Vete al carajo.
” A male voice.

“Grady, it’s Cole.”

“Fuck off, Cole. I’m busy here.”

“Grady. Let’s go.” He looks back down the hallway at the door where the man he took to be Alfaro had come from. “I want to split. Let’s go.”

“You’ll go when I say we go.”

The door is painted white but has cracked in the grooves of the wood, revealing a pale pea green beneath. He scrapes a flake from the white with his thumbnail. When he tries the knob it turns and the door opens easily.

Creed voices rage. He’s out of the bed and at the door as Cole steps in, blinded by the room’s darkness after the light in the hallway, and now it’s Creed pushing him back and across the hall to the opposite wall, pinning him there with surprising force, a forearm beneath his chin and the other hand at Cole’s belt, lifting him.

“The fuck you think you’re doing? Why you always got to act like I’m playing?”

His forearm presses into Cole’s throat hard enough that he can’t speak. Liquor and cigarettes swoon across his face on Creed’s breath, the pungent smell of a woman on his hand. Creed’s gray eyes search his and Cole recognizes the familiar struggle, Creed does not know where to look to meet his gaze. The man’s pupils are as small as pencil points. He shoves him against the wall again, harder. “I said I’s busy. I meant what I said.” He shoves Cole again and a picture frame falls off the wall nearby. “You wait for me till we go.”

He smacks Cole twice across the face—forehand and backhand—but the blow isn’t hard enough to mean anything more than a shaming. Creed is bare-ass naked. A few cheap blue tattoos have blurred with time over his neck, collarbone, and arms. Three diagonal striped wounds sit precisely apart on the inside of his left pectoral, parting the dark patch of hair over his heart, some kind of intended scarring that looks like the logo for Adidas, Cole has no idea what it might mean. Creed half-turns back to the bedroom; his erection bobs and shifts, shining in the hall light, and on the bed inside Cole now sees two dark-haired women, one holding a sheet over herself and the other
naked without care and lighting a cigarette as she watches the two men as indifferently as a commercial break on the television, waiting for her program to begin again.

“Crutchfield left,” Cole says.

“Course he did, you think he lives here in a house full of Mexicans?” Creed dismisses him with his hand and slams the door shut. “Go find your own fun,” he says, and pushes the door hard into its frame, the lock on the knob slipping into place. One of the women inside giggles, lightly.

Downstairs in the filthy bathroom Cole runs cold water over his hands and splashes his face and looks at himself in the mirror: his hair is wet and matted, skin pale as paper except for the purplish raccoon mask circling his eye-flesh, his jaw drawn down with the first reddish stubble of beard. He rubs his teeth together and they squeak and he shivers at the sound. He cannot tell from his eyes what he is thinking.