Читать книгу Ghosting - Kirby Gann - Страница 9

1996

The idea for the night, Cole’s idea, had been to go it alone with Shady Beck, the two of them alone after much strategizing and manipulation on his part. In his heart and mind Shady Beck was an end in herself. But she needed a little party, some chemical aid she called it—I shall be in need of chemical aid, she cooed in exaggerated high-class over the phone, her small-toothed smile a shape in Cole’s ear—as an excuse to be out with him. Or maybe she needed it just to tolerate his presence, he wasn’t sure. And he did not care. For years she had been a figure in the hands-off domain of his brother Fleece, a smile and a wave walking away to her car, a sunny laugh across the room to which he always dipped his head in a kind of bow.

Chemical aid required a stop at Spunk Greuel’s house, where Cole did not want to go. He knew Spunk, had known him most his life, and understood that once with him they might be with him all the night long. The boy was a kind of stink that got on your clothes and in your hair and was near impossible to shake off.

Cole could accept the risk for the chance at spending time with Shady Beck. And it was unavoidable anyway, so no use in lamenting. Mister Greuel was the man to see for pills and pot and any other sin on spec. He led a loose crew—got his weed direct from growers in Clay and Harlan counties, the pills from God knew what Byzantine scams, his crank from his own cooks, most of whom followed Fleece. A dark and entertaining man, Mister Greuel—always with the Mister, nobody called him Lawrence—him with his tongue swollen from some strange sickness, goggle eyes awry in a fist of a sweating head. He had a face as rutted and pocked as barnwood. His fat tongue made him spit everywhere and mucked up his words. Listening to him was like sitting witness to the creation of a new language, you had to match terms previously unknown to what you had thought you readily understood. Like Spunk’s real name is William. Cole had called him Billy on the playground. But one night providing the boys with the gifts of their destruction—what Mister Greuel called the bottles and blunts—Billy’s dad started to get on his son for not bringing any ass to giggle on his lap. It was for young ass giggling on his lap that Greuel gave freely of his gifts of destruction. Unhappy to see only skinny adolescent boys scouring his stock, Greuel started to mutter over how his own son William was a punk. Except for his fat tongue the word came out shpunk. Mix that moment with teenage boys baked on the bomb and Billy Greuel becomes Spunk the rest of his life.

Greuel made the kids laugh but they knew not to mess with him. It was Greuel the guy that took down three Gravy Berserkers (one of the biker gangs from Montreux city) who thought they could reap business from a hick dealer by showing up with no more than chugging fat-boy hogs and a flash of a semiautomatic Glock. Greuel swept them out with nothing but a rifle and a Bowie knife, and he strung those bodies from a town-square tree like so much deer meat left to ripen in winter.

Yet on many occasions this man told little James Cole to think on him as a friend.

The gate code had not changed since the days Cole used to ride up on his bicycle. He punched in the numbers and parked by the stables where the old man ran legit side-business boarding horses for city refugees, rich folk buying into the new bedroom communities mushrooming on either side of the interstate. Shady took his hand and the small gesture thrilled him. Together they navigated the great yard of oxidized farming implements and roadside statuary, a mazy museum of throwaway Americana. They halted at the front steps before a clutch of gar hung gape-mouthed and stinking, their eyes collapsed into folds. Cole had no explanation for the fish.

Professor Mule shouted greetings from his Adirondack chair. He looked nested alongside a column of paperback mysteries, a thermos between his thighs, his Mossberg shotgun in easy reach against the porch rail. They had not seen one another in years but Mule said he would recognize that crazy eye of Cole Prather anywheres. You staying warm, Erly? Cole asked, skipping the man’s nickname, ever uneasy before his grain-sack presence and the gun, though what Cole heard was you only needed to run from Mule if you saw him with his toolbox. Mule nodded and dismissed them, falling into a singsong hum as he returned to his book, a ridiculously fragile looking object in the grip of his pork-belly hands.

“I knew you’d be out here fore too long you wall-eyed rascal!” Spunk burst out, knocking open the screen door. He torched their faces with a breath that bleached the stench of the fish. Presented with someone she recognized, Shady regained composure and was in past Spunk and at the big bowl of reefer by Mister Greuel in his rocking chair before the screen clapped shut. Feeling like a calf roped on the run, Cole felt the Greuel house upon him.

They kept off the main lights by habit, the dim room illuminated by the small blue glow of a silent TV set. That and the headlight Greuel kept at hand, wired to a car battery set on the floor. As visitors arrived he liked to blind them in the glare as he waved the headlight about. Somewhere deeper in the house a transistor radio scratched out lonesome tinny fiddles and nasal harmonies that wailed tales of warning from another day. It was a greeting impossible to get used to and Cole had walked into it a thousand times.

Not Shady; she was on a mission. She pounced into the old man’s lap and had her hands in the bowl, saying, “Mister Greuel how do you do, whyn’t you tell us a story while I roll us up a fat one.”

The old man’s laughter came sick and raspy but it had always sounded that way and he would never die.

“I like her!” he crowed as he shifted in his chair, the weight of them both wrenching complaints from the struts. “Who is she?”

As if he didn’t know. As if anyone in Pirtle County had never heard of Shady Beck, youngest of the three daughters to Doctor Beck (the pediatrician who had booster-shot them all), one-time star of the volleyball and swim teams, Shady Beck the walker-away from dazzling car wrecks, subject of several profiles in the Pirtle Notice paper, she of the hair like vivid champagne bubbling past her shoulders, hair that seemed a celebration whenever Cole saw it freed from its usual ponytail; her gray eyes had boys whispering her name into clutched hands at night before they fell into dream.

Still she introduced herself. As she did so Mister Greuel played the headlight over Cole, the beam driving heat over his face and arms. Spunk had to remind his father twice—That’s Cole Prather, Papa, come on you know James Cole—speaking his name louder the second time in a dance with his father’s shouted What? and Goddammit who? as he shook his head and dug one finger in his ear, lips curled into a snarl. He thumped the headlight against the side table as though to squash a scuttering bug there, the metal casing casting a resonant bell tone.

“Come in here with a pretty girl and you know where my eyes’re at. Been so long since I seen this boy I don’t even know him on sight anymore.” Greuel’s smile unveiled a row of small crooked teeth the color of cooked bacon fat. “Well it’s always good to have a Skaggs around,” he said then, assuming the part of gracious host, “even if all you can get’s the one what run off.” Cole did not correct him. A rattling cough throttled the man and threatened to throw Shady to the floor. Greuel gasped and gulped furiously from a bottle of water and raised one arm; then, once he gathered himself again, he clarified that he knew Cole wasn’t all Skaggs. Not that it mattered anymore in today’s day and age.

“How is that mother of yours? Still splitting meds with patients at the clinic?”

Cole shook his head. “You know she’s not. She quit that place first day she could.”

“Why would I know that?”

It was nothing more than his game, Mister Greuel showing off before an attractive guest. He was nodding and smiling to spur Cole on to what he wanted him to say.

“You got her the job,” Cole said to the floor. “It was you the one got her hooked up with that lawyer for the disability.”

“Lyda Skaggs working a rehab hospital,” Greuel smacking his lips at the tasty ironies, “that there’s the fox guarding the henhouse if I ever heard. Now how come I never see her anymore?”

Cole raised his shoulders and held them. He didn’t know what made his mother do any of the things she did.

“Must not need anything,” Greuel purred into Shady’s neck, as quiet and murmurous as a lover whispering.

Dishes clacked in the back of the house from the kitchen down the hallway. The radio back there had changed over to a basketball game. The front room shuddered with the changes on the silent TV screen, a general dark closing down and then pulling back. Shady, comfortable in most all situations, ignored the awkward stretch of silence; she asked and said at the same time (which was her way), “You want to talk to Miss Skaggs, why don’t you just call her,” and ran her tongue the length of a rolling paper. Mister Greuel patted her thigh just above the knee, his single ornament—a large gold-nugget ring set with diamonds that followed a curve into the shape of a horseshoe—glittering blue fire.

“Now I have never cared for telephones. No point in them, nobody can understand a thing I say if they don’t see me say it.” He wagged the mustard-gray eel of his fat tongue; Shady peered at the lighter she used to fire up the joint.

“She’ll come around,” he added. “You can count Lyda a loyal friend when in need. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, James Cole?”

Cole wasn’t there to discuss his mother. They had argued earlier that evening and her voice still stung in his ears the way only a mother’s voice can sting. She had mocked his moving in, calling him her honored guest; she had called him lukewarm water in the mouth of God. It stung and he could not say why, or why she would even use those last words, Lyda being nowhere near religious. Her head was so blended in roofers and goofballs that no one could explain half of what came out of it. Still the insults pricked.

Lyda had asked why he was pursuing Fleece’s girl. She’s not Fleece’s girl anymore, Momma, they broke up years ago. She said, You can’t do better than pick up where your brother left off? He’s your brother. Cole reminded her he was only half his brother, as everyone in the county liked to remind him they knew. She said they both dropped out of her belly so that made them all brother in her eyes. Cole said the gulf between the way she saw things and the way things were was wide enough to march an army through. A really big army, he stressed. Some time soon after this she came up with lukewarm water and the mouth of God.

The joint made its rounds. Cole held in the smoke for as long as his lungs would allow, as if his doing so could prevent everyone else from talking.

“You seen that Fleece of late?” Mister Greuel asked.

Cole raised his shoulders again, dropped them—he was beginning to feel self-conscious about this gesture—and passed the joint. “You see Fleece more than I do.”

“That may be but maybe I haven’t seen him lately, is what I’m saying. And maybe you have. That’s why I asked the question.”

Cole started to shrug his shoulders but caught himself, and turned up empty hands. He did not understand the why behind what the man was asking.

“I can spell it out. My business is such a fine-tuned machine you’d think it was designed by NASA. Fleece is my Mr. Reliable, works for me like there’s no other reason for him to even be. Now you move back to the lake with momma. And last night I had delivery due from your fine reliable brother, but I don’t hear from him. This is odd to my logic: you come home—your brother, suddenly he’s nowhere to be found. I hate coincidence. Makes everybody look guilty. I hate that.”

Everyone looked to Cole, even Shady, as though he should have the answer to his brother’s whereabouts, as though Fleece and Cole were close confidants—which everyone in that room knew they were not. His body flushed with heat, and it felt like the skin on his face and neck exhaled, all the small veins that fed the skin rinsing themselves. His eyes watered and he pinched them shut with thumb and two fingers. He was the only person standing in this room. He had always had trouble with nervousness for no reason. Especially when attention turned to him. He said, “Well Fleece does what he wants.”

“I bet he’s cooling it at St. Jerome by now,” came Spunk’s voice, foggy as he held in his hit and passed the jay to his father, who skipped his turn.

This was certainly possible. The seminary of Saint Jerome sat far out in the northern ridge of the county, behind fields of seed corn backing all the way up to the Possler Woods. It was said to be haunted; to house the rituals of devil worshippers; to be a hideout for dangerous men on the lam from the law, family, their lives. A mad caretaker protected the place and supposedly shot trespassers on sight. Many of these stories were no more than legends created by Fleece Skaggs—except for the caretaker, a guy he had assured his younger brother was truly unhinged. Fleece sold the man reefer and crank and squatted on the top floor. They shot bottles together off the stone cemetery wall out back of the seminary grounds.

“Always been a young man I could trust, I practically raised him,” Greuel frowning at the headlight, “so I worry. Anything can happen on a country road. What if he tumbled over the shoulder and he’s lying there upside-down in the Cumberland?”

No one answered. Whoever was back there in the kitchen scraped a plate and turned up the radio, two broadcasters speaking with dramatic urgency over the roused crowd. Mister Greuel tilted his head as if listening, or straining to listen. In time he turned to the corridor and shouted: Hey now. It’s near ten already.

The crowd cheered loud enough to fuzz the small speakers and the announcer’s voice accelerated, hoarse with excitement. Boots shuffled on the kitchen tile and someone ran the tap briefly and then the radio shut off. The house stiffened in silence. The back screen door smacking shut clattered like a gunshot. Mister Greuel returned his attention to his guests, and began to talk again as outside a car engine revved to life, tires soon rolling over gravel.

Shady started work on another blunt, her glassy eyes narrowing to slits. She swayed her hips in Mister Greuel’s lap for reasons Cole could not fathom.

“Honest truth, you can’t name a place your brother might go without word to me?”

Honest truth he did not know. Spunk jumped to his feet, decided aloud they should head to the old seminary to see what turned up. His father grunted and sliced the air with his hand, said he wasn’t asking him. It was a vicious gesture that cut the length behind Shady’s back, and his son turned as though struck across the face, and rushed his own head into the corner of the fireplace mantel.

Seconds passed before he cried out. Like the pain needed time to alarm his brain. From above one eye blood gushed from a gash as if its entire reason for being was to be freed of his veins. Spunk clutched the wound with the hem of his T-shirt and slumped into the couch. His father shook his head and stared at the floor; Shady looked on with vague interest. Nobody moved to help him. It was like no one was sure what they had witnessed had actually happened. After a silence, he moaned.

All this transpired within seconds. Yet it seemed to take forever to Cole, and a pressure built within him, a gradual rise that swelled until it broke, setting him into the generous sniggers of the greatly stoned. He started to shake and laugh in I’m-so-high wiggin’ giggles, an act that moved Shady and Mister Greuel from stares of blank inverted fixity to ones of mild concern, but an act too that he could not stop. And still no one moved to ask Spunk if he was all right; nobody there expected anything less of him than his smacking his head into the most convenient sharp corner. As though Spunk had survived this long, made it to twenty-two despite the parade of self-inflicted accidents and mishaps that composed his brief lifetime, the broken fingers and toes and collarbones and splintered teeth, the burns from incompetent engine work (four-wheeler, minibike, motorcycle), the concussions from irritated horses, the mishandling of knives and saws and throwing stars, the metal grinder that caught his shirt and then the rest of his torso within it—with such veteran experience behind him it was rational to assume no mantel corner could do serious damage to that head. Cole pressed his hand over his mouth and nose to cram down the laughter, it felt like his eyes were hosing streams over his cheeks, and the laughter only punched at his chest that much harder. The hell’s got into this boy? Mister Greuel wondered aloud. Cole could not answer. All he could manage was to clamp one hand tighter over his mouth and wave away the room with the other, begging to be ignored.

“I love pot but some people it just makes stupid,” Shady said. Instantly this shut him up somehow.

Mister Greuel fiddled with his headlight. He turned it one way and then another, often staring into the beam below his chin. By now Spunk had removed his shirt entirely and held it wadded against his eyes. He mumbled the word stitches and his father mumbled back that such could be found in a kitchen drawer. Spunk brought away the shirt and looked at the blood spattered there, pressed it to his brow again. This was not a cheap article of clothing, he complained. I bought this at—he couldn’t remember. Then he yawned, resigned to the ruined fact of it.

“A lot of blood in the human face,” Shady said.

“I thought you knew everything,” Cole said to Greuel. “I thought you never let a man drive a harvest alone.”

Greuel passed his headlight over the walls and ceiling. He said there had been complications with this run, his tailer had another item of business to take care of on the way back, they’d done it before in a pinch and never had any difficulties. “But you don’t need to know my problems,” he added. Again Spunk reasoned that Fleece was fine and probably fixed up with some tail—he excused himself to Shady from beneath the bloodied shirt—and was cooling it easy in his seminary digs.

“I’d like to think if he’s in this county he would have sense enough to bring me my money or my goods or else have a damn good reason to be walking around. A man has standards to keep, a reputation to uphold.”

At this Greuel appeared to fall into pensive rumination, gazing absently as the shape of the room changed with the movement of his hand. Dark veils swung opposite the wash of light and the whole room swayed; shadows dipped forward to listen in, leapt back. By now Cole’s eyes felt swollen and gritty, and it seemed he could note each half-thought as it rose and floated away without his grasping it. Perhaps that was why he felt so naked and unprepared when Greuel stilled the light fully upon him.

Events have a way of fooling, the man said. You’re in it and you think they’re one way but turns out they were steadfastly another. There’s always what’s happening below what seems to be happening. It’s enough to drive a man batshit crazy. You have to ask questions, you have to ask why you ask the questions you ask, it just goes on and on. And every time, the questions take you where you don’t want to go. Every freaking time.

“I have no idea what you are saying to me,” admitted Cole. Greuel dismissed him from behind Shady again. He smacked his lips as though he did not like the taste in his mouth.

“You kids get out of here. Why not show some loyalty to the old man who takes such care of you? Get out to that old place and see what sign of Fleece you can rustle up before I forget him.” Another raspberry cough erupted then, along with another squeeze to Shady’s thigh that went unremarked by her and set Cole to cringing. “Get off me hon, I got pills to take. And son don’t you take any more that reefer, I’m short in the pocket as of right this now.”

Shady staggered up as Greuel struggled to rise, using the beveled edge of the table for stability. It had not been so long since Cole had seen him last but he could tell the man had much declined. Whatever illness that was at him had managed a great deal of work over the past several months.

From the hallway Mister Greuel bid farewell as though already his emissaries were a long distance off on their journey, and the bacon-fat teeth unveiled themselves again. With that simple gesture, any hope Cole had with Shady this night was effectively over. Spunk stood waiting outside the door in his bloody T-shirt, holding up a snagged dime bag he shook at Shady with glee. All three glided out and over the porch and through the littered yard, Spunk slithering, skeletal, and cackling in the lead.

The first cop to show nods at Dwayne Hardesty and stands beside him at the feet of four kids who lie spread-eagled face-down on the muddy portico steps leading to the graffiti-strewn boards that shield the seminary entrance. The wash of the cruiser’s spot frescoes their captive forms in hard outline, three underfed and thin and the fourth a fat block squeezed into a Kentucky basketball sweatshirt that strains to withstand his heavy nervous breathing, the grommets in their jeans and an occasional earring flashing agleam in the white light; four pairs of white sneakers, expensive and rain-wet, shine stark and severe and unworldly. The caretaker always struggles to prevent himself from gloating too much over this aspect of his job.

“I count four,” the cop says low, to Hardesty’s shoulder.

“Yep, four’s where I stop at too.”

“Thought you called in five?”

“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.

He’s unsure if he passed out or not. It feels like a discovery when he realizes his back against the refrigerator, Bone licking his cheek. Get, he says, moving his hand between her mouth and his face, but his speaking only makes the dog lick with more enthusiasm and he has to shove her away.

He doesn’t rise from the floor immediately. One hand cups his knee; the other feels accumulated dirt on the peeling linoleum. Through the kitchen window the glow has turned the bluish white of moonbeams. Perhaps the fire burned itself out.

“Aw, let the old thing burn, Bone, what do you say?”

She takes it as invitation and dives at his face again with her tongue, forcing him to his feet, the nails of her paws a scramble-scratching on the withered tiles. Hardesty leaves her inside and slams the door behind him, power light in hand.

He doesn’t like to exit his home without his boots and gun but he’s halfway to the building before he realizes he has left with neither. Midnight lies quiet, a gentle hushing amid the crowns of trees a hundred yards away in the old cemetery. The crooked moon shines over what has turned into a cold clear night, a few clouds aglow in ghostly hues passing slow beneath the stars. Smoke blankets the rooftop with moody shifts of the wind, an odor of burned rubber and singed plastic heavy within it.

He shines the power light up to the transformer, over the scorched steel and melted cable insulation, and with a lethargic sigh drags the beam down the length of the wall to his cold feet, where he takes his finger off the button and the night surrounds him again. He’ll be eating off the charcoal grill for a few days; the power company does not place a high priority on this transformer.

Hardesty digs his fingernails into the flesh just beneath his jawbone and starts to backstep carefully over the gravel again but then stops short: something is off about the sounds around him. He stills himself with head askew, tongue fingering small gaps in his molars, wary, senses keen, listening. The low chug of a powerful engine idles nearby, behind the seminary; a radio scratches out old country music, the high trebly kind of curdled yawps and wails that rise into the quiet and toil with the wind in the trees.

Are kids so brazen these days that they would start to tailgate back here? He keeps close to the wall and crosses the width of the east wing, socks soaked, toes numb; the unseen engine coughs out but the radio continues, and then it’s the rough hinge of a car door pushed open. Hardesty flattens himself against the brick where a gap between the building’s wing and center chapel forms a deep courtyard, a space for the cement island that used to be a basketball court.

The car door clicks shut softly. A groan from what must be the trunk opens then, another hinge in need of oil. Must be an old car. Hardesty presses into the brick and listens to a woman’s forlorn voice sing from the radio:

Where you’ve gone I’ll follow

Who you were I’ll be

I’ll become your shadow

if you no longer think of me

no, you no longer think of me

and a man (for it could be only a man, to Hardesty’s mind) whistles a counterpoint that doesn’t agree with her melody. Beneath the whistling comes a slosh from liquid poured, a heavy gushing that splashes loud over the flex and gulp from some pliable container. Hardesty looks back toward home, weighing the cost and opportunity to retrieve his gun, his boots. But he does not go. Instead he chances a glimpse past the corner to see.

A man there, looking nothing more than a humanoid shadow. He works the length of the vehicle, emptying two large jugs over the cowl and hood. It doesn’t take long, and once he finishes he steps back and looks over the car, continuing to whistle as he tosses the jugs into high grass Hardesty never gets around to mowing. The man begins to fiddle in his pockets as the singer’s voice fades to silence, a brief quiet enduring until the opening guitar strum of another song begins.

Hardesty is about to shine his power light on the scene when the man strikes a match. It’s a sudden firefly in the air and then a soft whup like a great gas oven firing overcomes the music. Blue flame washes over the chassis. Behind that ethereal blue, a color found in flame only that has fascinated him since childhood, high capes of yellow and gold race to catch up, and in another instant the entire car is rapidly burning, a single coal visible through the flames. The gentle lament of a song can still be heard beneath the crackle of fire. The man shades his face from the heat as he begins to walk a distant perimeter, admiring the success of his handiwork. In that light Hardesty can make out a dark sport coat and tie, a shuffling thin body moving like a boxer. The flames start to eat at the interior. One tire detonates from the heat—sparks spiral into the dark—and Hardesty can’t see the man on the far side of the flames. It gives him the courage to step from his hiding place, and as he does he catches sight of the man again, tail-turned and flatfoot running toward the distant Possler Woods, the gated cemetery.

Only then does the caretaker find his voice: “Hey! Hey you there!” he calls, directing his light over the great lawn behind the looming building. But even a million candlelights cannot sight the figure fleeing the scene. Like that, he has vanished.

Hardesty jumps at the touch of something live against his leg and he drops the power light—Bone has managed to open the unlocked back door. She cowers from him, expecting a kick. But Hardesty reaches to pet her gently as he looks back toward the cemetery and the Possler Woods and the moonlight that etches the outlines of forms. All he can discern now is the refuse abandoned back there, old refrigerators with the doors still connected, rusted bedsprings and engine blocks, piles of bottles and cans.

“What kind of guard dog are you?” he asks, toeing her ribs, her fur as soaked as his sock. “I mean really. What you good for?”

Bone glances at him with apparent wariness. She sits back on her haunches, and peers into the same direction as Hardesty as he strains to descry any movement within the moonlight shadows there.

Another soft detonation as another tire blows out; Hardesty scratches at the flesh under his jaw again and watches the flames curl through the windows and thrive on the seats and dash. Transmission fluid boils on the cracked cement court.

“Neither one of us did all that good tonight,” he tells Bone. “Damn if sometimes I don’t believe we can’t make a caretaker worth the name between the both of us.”

They had fled a pack of dogs on one floor and then before they had caught their breaths behind the stairwell door, slammed shut behind them and still echoing through the corridors, they were sent into flight again at the blast from the caretaker’s shotgun outside. This took them as high in the building as they could go, which also happened to be where Fleece kept what he called his penthouse. It had been a suite of offices at one time but he had made a home there and now as they stumbled into it they found the rooms nearly barren again, no different from any of the others falling apart throughout the building. A pleather desk chair faced one corner, an arm rest torn off. A few books were stacked spines-out on a windowsill—mostly Catholic theology texts that he must have found somewhere in the building, but a few mystery novels as well—and they were warped from water and stank when opened. Beside them on the sill paper clips burned to a copper shine stood posed in models of twisted disfigurement. Through a second door slumped on its highest hinge they discovered bed sheets wadded in the corner and a pair of mismatched socks. Spunk asked if Cole was sure they had the right place and Cole told him angrily that sure he was sure and the three followed the two flashlights illuminating empty corners.

“Well by the evidence I’d judge he is not here now,” Spunk said.

It took a moment for his words to sink in to start their snorts of laughter at his stating the obvious. He put his flashlight on the floor and pulled out the baggie he’d stolen from his father and they all three sat down while he made his preparations and they could smoke up again in the dark, waiting until the police lights flashing outside had disappeared before moving on.

Somehow they end up on the roof. The seminary’s shaped like a capital E with the facade stacked one floor higher than the two wings that extend out either end, the chapel in the building’s center. Spunk has wandered off on his own. Alone for the first time, Shady and Cole follow a gray glow that wavers within a long passageway—a passage, he thinks, like what people are said to see when they die, an obscure light at the end of the darkness. In this case the light turns out to be the night visible through the window in a steel door. The door wings open with a retch onto the rooftop, and the cool fresh wind feels as necessary then as longed-for water. Shady squeals in stoned delight; she jumps down two wooden steps and skips the length of the roof some fifty feet, her shoes scattering wet gravel over tarpaper to the far ledge, her white top glowing phosphor beneath silent lightning flares.

Thunder follows the lightning and lingers in such a continuous roll it could be a jet circling overhead. Cole doesn’t join her until she motions to him. The drugs in his body, his success in tracking down his friends after they had abandoned him, have instilled a weird confidence in him tonight and he wraps his arms around her waist from behind, rests his chin on her shoulder. Wind shushes the trees in the distant Possler Woods, and it is good wind, wind as God must imagine it, pure and singing.

“What are you doing,” Shady says. Softly. He can hear the smile in her voice as she leans into him, presses one hand into the back of his head to keep him there.

The smell of her up close jumps in his blood like another heavy and wondrous drug; he could pass out in it, his nose against her neck, inhaling the moist heat off her skin. His hand moves toward her breast, drawn there by the arch in her back—but then his eyes part, and the view stops him still. He has been in this very spot before. Yes, he had been here with his brother. When? They had sat with their legs dangling over the edge on a bright afternoon, taking in the old cemetery and its crumbling stone perimeter, listening for the gravel they tossed into the air to hit the asphalt court below. This would have been before their mother sent Cole to live with his dead father’s family. He remembered it had been maybe the third or fourth time he had ever smoked weed and he was still cataloging the effects it made in his body, trying to note the difference between stoned and not-stoned, between cottonmouth and thirst, and he was smiling stupidly when Fleece declared that in that cemetery stood headstones so old they had been rained blank and smooth.

No names or dates, nothing left, he said. Nothing but an old stone to mark somebody down there that nobody remembers.

He gestured again as if directing Cole toward specific headstones even though they were too far away to see more than the suggestion of stones, winking white beneath the dense trees’ dipping limbs. He said something about how the bodies lying buried there, how the lives those bodies had once led, which must have seemed very important to them in their time, may as well have never happened at all. Know what I mean? he asked.

No, Cole did not know. He had been eleven or twelve. Fleece always seemed to be on to things Cole was too young or too dull to come upon on his own.

That’s pretty sad, Cole said.

What is?

Being forgotten like that. Being so forgotten it’s like you never even lived here.

Fleece turned from the cemetery toward the horizon of trees that, at that time, appeared to go on forever, before old man Possler sold to developers who began to carve out the woods into bedroom communities and condos and office parks. Naw, it’s not sad, that’s not what I mean, Fleece said. It’s beautiful. It’s only sad because life is kind of sad. And still beautiful.

I’ll remember you.

You do that, puppy. But then one day you’ll be gone too, won’t you?

A sound like a pigeon’s coo rises in Shady’s throat. She asks what’s on his mind.

“Do you miss him?”

Power lines lift to the rooftop from a pole in the meadow; a rusty transformer hums hanging at one corner. It seems strange that live power connects to this empty place, and again Cole can only shrug at what he doesn’t understand, which appears to be many many things as his head glides off to imagine electrical grids covering these acres and this land and off to the townships and county after county, stretching over the entire nation and all of it connected, all of it coordinated by hands and minds he will never see and leading to this small forgotten cylinder to throb with it.

“Fleece never needed me. That’s no fun for any girl I know,” Shady says.

“Still, you miss him?”

“Sure I miss him, sometimes. Not always. Sometimes I miss being a little kid, too. Doesn’t mean I want to be five again.” She turns in his arms and politely breaks their embrace. She moves to the inside of the roof over the campus interior, where a basketball court crumbles surrounded and broken by high grass, leaving Cole to stare at the trees where the cemetery would be.

What could Fleece have got up to? It’s odd that Greuel would confess so much of his trouble to Cole unless he was genuinely perplexed by the situation, honestly at a loss as to what has happened, a parent unsure whether to be angry or worried at a child yet to come home. That seems hard to imagine; Greuel always knows what he’s doing, and who could guess what he’s thinking? Could Fleece vanish and leave no sign behind? Is that even possible? That day with his brother on this same ledge they held in one of their casual drawn-out silences—when he thinks of time with his brother there is a typical silence attached to it, so much time passed with neither of them speaking a word, just staring out at fields or the car window, listening to music or to the Nova’s engine—Fleece had stood on the raised ledge near where Shady stands now, arms raised at his sides, eyes closed, his face contorted in this combination of grin and grimace as he leaned back as far as his strength allowed. The breeze that day feathered his smooth dark hair as if he were already falling, and he waved his hands dramatically.

Stop it! Cole yelled. Stop it! and he kept yelling until his brother stepped from the edge.

Relax, pup, nothing’s going to happen to me.

The picture of Fleece swaying on the ledge near Shady hovers in his eyes like a ghost image, the afterglow of a camera flash. The transformer hums nearby—it’s almost like a fizz—and the cemetery stands out only as a heavier darkness within the night’s ambient dark, and there is nothing more to see. He asks if Shady wants to go back inside. She responds with a slight shake of her torso he takes to mean no, her hands clasping either shoulder and her back to him. Cole watches her for a moment from the steps of the doorway. A sad feeling suffuses his gut and his chest and neck and he feels very alone, and wishes he knew how to make something happen, to force the world closer to how he wants it to be, to act with the momentum of certainty behind him. And as if the world were listening to his head the wind and rain starts again with new urgency, the sweep of it loud in the trees. Shady sprints back to join him under the rusted awning, laughing and extravagant. Within seconds lightning is peeling seams through the sky again, the thunder coming in giant claps.

Like something out of a movie, they decide. And romantic, thinks Cole. But every dulled insulated nerve in him understands she does not want to be touched. He tells her they should leave soon now that the police lights out front are gone. She wants to stay a little longer and watch the storm.

“Find your buddy if you can,” she says, and he turns to go. “Don’t get shot,” she adds, and that her concern for him is enough to speak of it buoys his mood.

He finds Spunk not far behind them, a spidery shadow standing outside the glow of his flashlight propped on the floor. Despite the fresh air flowing in from behind, the humidity in the corridor closes in and Cole’s skin bursts with sweat all over. This room must have been intended for prayer or meditation of some kind; a gallery of statues is set into the wall along one side with knee-wide benches before them. Spunk has torn one statue from its base and is trying to stand the thing up but it won’t stay put—to extract it he had broken off the feet. In his grasp the saint shines a milky blue, one hand clasping its robe, the other extended in blessing.

“You get on that?” he asks. Cole shakes his head even though his friend isn’t looking at him. “Figured you all wanted some privacy. Since we didn’t find your brother I figured I’d take this back to Daddy. Put it in the yard.” He releases the statue and it tips forward and he grabs it again before it falls. He twists his hand over the head and spins the saint like a top.

“What you think you’ll tell him?”

“Fleece don’t live here no more. Dude I do not believe Fleece Skaggs would ever try to rip off my daddy. I do not believe that. And if he did then there’s a whole shit-hurricane going to happen. My daddy is going to want to know.”

A deep intuition makes itself felt in Cole with surprising conviction. “He already knows,” he says. As he says it he realizes it must be true.

“Yeah? He knows so much then how come he sends us out here?”

Cole watches the bony hands batting the saint back and forth, a sculpted metronome. It’s hard to breathe in here after the time outside. Spunk begins to speak of other things, as he does when he doesn’t want to delve deeper into a matter, and Cole falls into his own thoughts, hypnotized by the movement of the footless statue ticking side to side. He cannot choose why Spunk would not tell him that his father knew plenty, that they are out here because the old man wants Cole to see for himself. He cannot put a why to this but again he feels convinced nevertheless.

“I don’t know what it is but something bad is happening, right here now as we stand doing nothing,” Spunk says.

The room fills with light. Cole hears no sound, it’s like he is a piece of film cut out of time and reinserted moments later, with his back sore on the floor and his head aching. An awful ring clangs in his ears, and when he moves his head it sloshes with crushed glass. His elbow is soaking in a puddle of rainwater and some of the pain seems to originate there. Several feet away, Spunk lies flat near the statue, the white saint spinning silent on the grimy floor.

Suddenly Spunk shoots to his feet. Cole can see his mouth moving rapidly but cannot quite dial in the frequency of his voice: the mouth moves but the words cannot get past the klaxon ringing in his ears. Spunk nears him and then retreats; dips near again but seems suddenly fascinated with his widespread hands. When his words eventually become clear Cole hears lightning, Spunk is chanting lightend-ing . He starts to dance in the room’s faint illumination, a dusky glow about them that Cole is unsure is hallucinated or actually in the world. Again Spunk holds out his hands, turning them back and forth and marveling at the fact of them. His face wrenches, his mouth curls into a mad scream, his feet hop as if over hot coals—until Cole’s hearing returns in a great wash and he recognizes Spunk laughing, laughing a feral laughter of the thunderstruck.

It takes time for him to regain his feet, his balance is skewed, but in time he rises with the help of a windowsill. Spunk kicks the head of his saint and sends it spinning faster, screeching laughter, when Cole thinks of Shady alone outside. And then, just as he starts out to find her, her high giggling squeal comes scurrying down the corridor in the dark. He can see her coming, too, her silhouette defined by a throbbing glow that confuses him, where could it come from, we are in the middle of the night, it’s as if some basic element of darkness has changed in a way he cannot identify. She skids to a playful stop and stands herself before him, her body haloed by pulses of light.

Come see, she says.

Of a Sunday morning Lawrence Greuel finds himself, somewhat to his own dismay and great amusement, seated in church—a renovated warehouse he remembers housing tobacco auctions when he was a kid—among over a thousand worshipful nabobs. And this is just the day’s first of three services, he understands, each near to standing-room-only. Above the stage, where a conventional church would have its proscenium, a video screen hangs for the benefit of those sitting in the back rows. A light show commences in garish primary colors: laser-bright pillars of choleric red, fertile green, and shucked-corn yellow track over faces and into the rafters as the band starts a boogie-woogie rhythm, grooving on a bass-driven blues riff and deep conga drums unlike any hymn Greuel has ever heard. Not that he remembers many. He has come partly out of malicious nostalgia; he has come to silently mock; most of all he has come for the tingle of a deal, the opportunity to make money, at the urging of his associate Arley Noe. Because Lawrence Greuel is on the downward curve of life—no, it’s more of a wild plummet from the high-dive—and he has a son who disappoints and embarrasses him. Yet he feels it incumbent upon him as a father to do what he can for the boy’s future once he, Lawrence Greuel, has become ashes.

He knew there was money in these new churches, but to see it on display . . . Arley Noe can spot an opportunity. Plenty of business still to be done on a Sunday.

The horn section joins in and the crowd starts to stamp and holler; the overhead pots dim; a white spotlight draws still on a corner of the stage constructed from carpeted risers. Then a stringy man springs into the light with arms raised high and open hands waving, a featherweight boxer entering the stadium for a championship bout. Welcome! he shouts joyfully, his voice through the headset microphone too loud for the speakers, booming with fuzz. I welcome—YOU! he shouts again, one finger drawing over the audience, the arm ramrod straight and sweeping across space, legs braced as though to keep him from stage-diving into the aisles. I welcome you, Christ welcomes you! Christ World Emergent welcomes you all to the prosperity promised in His name, amen!

The atmosphere is more like a midnight roadhouse than a ten AM worship service. The attendees are going nuts as the lights spiral and wheel with the magic of God’s miracles, and the musicians, Greuel must admit, jam like pros. The fulsome energy of Brother Gil Ponder is familiar to listeners of his weekly radio show, his face recognizable by the towering billboards that grace the interstates in three counties (Are You Thriving as God Promised His Children? Visit Christ World Emergent and Embrace the Abundant Life), but to see the man in the flesh stirs even Lawrence Greuel’s indifferent heart. Ponder bounds past a podium and snatches a leather-bound book that he shakes above his head, then tucks beneath one arm as he makes the stairs to the first floor rows, not far from Greuel’s wheelchair, and where Noe and Grady Creed remain conspicuously seated. The preacher jogs across the front row, slapping hands and pumping his fist, stopping suddenly to cheers as he embraces an elderly woman on whom he bestows a kiss to the forehead, and she clutches his shoulders as if to hold on for all that life has left behind her. From this close vantage Greuel can discern the ex-junkie he knows Ponder to be and that no manner of good living can make up for; his eyes may sparkle blue in the spotlight but they are set deep in shadowed sockets and betray to Greuel’s experienced eye that indefatigable hunger that draws from the addict’s insides, that fanatical madness begging to be consoled. Ponder’s skull is a map set in relief beneath its lean skin, and he looks well older, up close, than his forty-two years.

Greuel vaguely recognizes the elderly woman’s escort though he can’t recall why—which he finds bothersome, as he’s the kind of man who prides himself on his ability to remember names and faces. It’s all the medications they’ve got him on, his brain’s turned to grated cheese. With careful indulgence the man rests a tan and manicured hand on the woman’s shoulder; in the next instant he is helping Brother Gil extricate himself from her grasp.

“Tell me who that man is,” Greuel tells Arley Noe.

“Well hell, that’s the preacher. That’s Gil Ponder.”

“I’m not talking about him, you blueskin hick bastard. The guy next to him.”

Noe follows Greuel’s nod to spot the man standing formal with his hand again on the woman’s shoulder. He’s tall, and completely bald in the hip urban fashion of the day, immaculately presented. Noe elbows Grady Creed beside him, who sits slumped low with his legs extended into the aisle, eyes half-shut and ankles crossed. The preacher moves into another aisle between sections, saluting some, handshakes or kisses to others, and Greuel is impressed by the stamina of the crowd’s gusto. He wonders if this preacher plans to greet each individual on the floor—in which case he’s out of here, he isn’t going to sit through that.

“Creed says he’s with some morning show, the funny one.”

“They bring out the celebrities, huh?”

“Like I told you,” Noe says.

“Like Creed told you,” snorts Greuel.

“We are here and it’s all happening,” he answers, the thing about him being that Arley Noe can’t be surprised or offended.

Greuel smiles. His scanning eyes alight on yet another recognized face, the young woman who had been in his home a week before: her bright hair, like a pat of apricot jam in sunlight, is impossible to miss. How girlish and pretty she looks now, with her hair down. Why would she ever sport a ponytail if she could look like that any time she wants to? A grievous shame, Greuel decides. She probably doesn’t realize how beautiful she is. His wife had been like that; her disavowal of her own beauty had made him sad. But why doll up? When you get down to it, is church the place for a woman to look her sexy best? Her name comes to him now: Beck. Something Beck, a friend of his son’s. He remembers her saying she was down with Hay-seuss, and he had been charmed. He smiles to see this wasn’t a put-on. Then he frowns. That’s the problem with kids—they believe in things.

Ponder quits the hands-on approach and waves to the seats in back as he returns to the stage, and Greuel has not heard this kind of bleacher stomping since a state-final basketball game. The musicians watch Ponder raise his arms again, Bible in one hand, fingers splayed in the other. With a nod to the band he turns back to the audience, and when his arms fall the music stops and the house lights come up. The applause continues in a great surge, then begins to teeter and fall, a stream trickling over many rocks, as Ponder pats the air with his hands, repeating that they should get this party started. He thanks them all for being there, for just being. The crowd doesn’t quiet until he announces, Let us pray, and begins the invocation.

“Dear God look at these beautiful people. Look at these folks in their finest come to honor Your name and Your Word on this beautiful Sunday morning with which You have blessed us. We ask You to watch over our congregation and to guide us in Your name and show us the way. Lead us to Your promised prosperity. Let me hear you say Amen.”

The audience complies as one. Greuel and Noe snigger as Grady Creed, surprising even himself, chimes in.

“What?” Creed shrugs them off, pouting, “Caint hurt can it?” He leans forward in his foldout chair as though wanting to hear the preacher better.

“The Lord guides us, friends. Even at those times we don’t think we can feel Him, He’s there looking over us all. I don’t know about you but I can feel His benevolent gaze right now, His all-seeing eyes on this house of worship. You know what He wants us to know? He wants us to know He’s there, guiding. He wants us to know that each one of us is precious to Him. I’ve been contemplating this for some time now, after meetings with so many of our members, good people who find themselves in a bind they didn’t ask for. A financial bind. Who here can’t relate to that business?”

Affirmative murmurs wave through the audience.

“People ask me about bankruptcy. That’s a spirit-killer right there, I don’t have to tell you. Bankruptcy. I listened to one gentleman the other day, a good man you can be sure, works two or three jobs, he could be sitting next to you just now. He was talking about his debts, the difficulties of making ends meet, balloon payments on too much house and the kids going to good schools—we all know if you want a child educated right you can’t chance that public school might send home some day some indoctrinated stranger who’s there to tell you everything you believe and been guided by is wrong. Am I right? And those private schools aren’t cheap, are they? Big government is happy to take our tax money and put it in every cause you don’t believe in, but you’re on your own if you want to give your child the best education money can buy, some place where you have a say in what he learns. I am right.”

Hurrahs scatter through the congregation, patches of applause flare and flutter about. Greuel’s attention is wandering already. On the altar up there, beside an untouched, empty chalice and what looks like a cross bound in leather, sets of car keys hang from a small stand, the logos of luxury manufacturers recognizable even from this distance: Acura, BMW, Audi, Mercedes-Benz. He understands none of it but likes the spirit of the place.

“It hurt my heart to see this good man,” Ponder continues. “We prayed together, went over his options—how do we do that? Come on, you know already. We opened our hearts together to the Lord. You know what happened then? God came into my heart. He spoke to me as He often does, and I’m not the only one. He said, ‘Hey there Brother Gil’ (that’s what He calls me, Brother Gil, He never says Mr. Ponder or anything formal like that), He says, ‘Why are you so concerned for this man and his situation? Sans souci, my child. I’ve got it taken care of.’ I said to him, ‘God I don’t doubt that, you know I don’t, but could you show me how to bring this man some peace so he can sleep at night?’ And then God points out that He addressed just this same issue a long time ago. He told me to check out Psalm sixty-six twelve.”

The preacher hoists his book aloft and sifts the pages. Around Greuel various attendees sift pages through their own bibles. When Ponder finds the desired verse he raises his free hand and signals to the audience with splayed fingers again.

“Thou hast caused men to ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water: but thou broughtest us out into a wealthy place. ‘How’s that strike you,’ God asked. I told Him He was the Man. He reminded me: God’s Will never leads you where God’s Grace will not protect you. And He reminded me again, ‘Check Deuteronomy eight-eighteen.’ But remember the Lord your God, for it is He who gives you the ability to produce wealth.”

Brother Ponder snaps his book shut and drops it on the podium with a resounding thud, satisfied to have argued an airtight case. His hands settle on each hip, elbows akimbo, and he bends toward his congregation. Stretched in this way, a spiking dark blue tattoo stripe creeps over his collar from beneath a swath of makeup. Greuel snorts.

“Doesn’t that make you feel a little bit better? Think about it: God made each of us—that’s a given. He doesn’t create us just to watch us flail and fail. That’s what mice and all His other little creatures are for. He made us in His image. What God wants for those in His image is a successful—no, not just successful, but victorious—course in this life. He’s always reminding His dim creations that if we would listen to Him, we are going to be all right. We’re going to be just fine, He’s already got it all figured out for us. ‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for’—that was said by a man I think a few of you here have heard of. His name was Jesus and he’s saying: Sow your faith in Him. What’s that mean? It means: Don’t go hoping you’re going to change your situation overnight, buying lottery tickets with the chance you’ll score. Lottery winners, that’s just poor people with money. They get it only a while before it’s gone, because they’re not wealthy in the Holy Spirit. You have to be smarter than that.

“I want to get results.” He points his finger at the audience, allowing his words to ring around the open auditorium. Then he continues. “Isn’t that what we’re asking? Well God’s got the answer. He’s been telling us since Adam and Eve: ‘You want results? Come to Me.’ He’s saying, plant a little mustard seed—come on, folks, we all know the parable—plant a little mustard seed of faith. Sow your faith and reap great rewards. . . .”

The sermon lasts longer than Greuel had expected; his eyelids flutter as he drowses, and in his drowse he pictures the coffee and brunch coming after, the pleasures of food, medicine-sour stomach willing. Since he’s been sentenced to the wheelchair again he no longer cares about dietary concerns or his weight. How’s that for my reward, preacher? Still there is common ground to be found here. He’s guessing this Ponder has an interesting take on that rich man in heaven, camels through the needle’s eye, however that parable went. Common ground. His eyes open again and Greuel leans over to Noe.

“This boy know anything about horses? He should be on his elbows at the rail.”

Noe’s mirth is mechanical, functional, and silent. His yellow teeth bare and remain bared. He still betrays marks of the true morphine fiend himself, though he kicked it near twelve years ago and it’s hard to detect due to the blue pallor of his skin. Greuel hopes dope isn’t the link that brought Arley Noe to the preacher. He dismisses the notion as soon as it arises; Noe has too much of the unfeeling night about him, Greuel doesn’t think he feels hunger for anything but the fun of crime anymore. Now Brother Ponder is speaking of laboring to rest, and to sleep without worry because a person’s faith was enough to pluck them from debt, their little mustard seed was going to score them the house of their dreams one day.

“I like him,” Greuel murmurs, “but I don’t trust the type as a rule. True believers worry. He won’t back out on us?”

“We get the right signature on the right paper and him and his board can worry all they want, they won’t have a say to back out of,” says Arley.

“I’ve noticed you’re a big supporter of the law when it’s on your side.”

“It’s our game; we make the rules. The preacher stays quiet.”

“It’s your game when I’m no longer around to play. Do we even have a claim on this land?”

“I am not a believer. By your logic, I am not worried.”

“Of course you’re not. I’m worried. I put up most the money and get to handle all the worry. We make a donation yet?”

Noe nods, taps his knee. Brother Gil is still going at it from the stage, having broadened his sermon—is that what stands for worship nowadays, boogie jams and a sermon?—from the individual needs of the congregants to the enveloping needs of his ministry; specifically, the need to build their own Galilee and the fundraising required to make such a move possible. Again with mustard seeds. Greuel peers at his watch, scowling.

“Thought you said this’d be over by noon.”

“What the adverts say. Think I been here before?”

Greuel snorts again, and the coat of flab that is his torso quakes at the precision of the absurd image his mind presents. “Not your style.”

“I have no style. It’s a conscious decision.”

Brother Gil stops in the midst of speaking as though he has overheard them, and glances at his own watch. It’s a gleaming timepiece over which Greuel furrows his brow with a curate’s informed inspection—the preacher wears a platinum Bulova encrusted with diamonds. Preaching must pay better than he gave it credit for. He marks a mental note to update his own watch even as he wonders whether later he’ll remember making the note at all. The preacher announces that his sermon needs to stop here.

“We’ll pick this up another time. I could talk all day, most of you know that already, but you have lives to get back to. Come on, let’s bow these heads.”

Quickly he runs through the invocation and benediction. Then the band starts up again and Ponder waves as he makes his way beneath the spotlight to the back of the stage, where he disappears. The applause is shortened by the number of people heading to the exits, the wheelchair sailing forth in the lead, Creed pushing from behind, Noe lagging off on his own. It bothers him how easily Noe can abandon him, but this afternoon Greuel has other things on his mind. He has made a decision, and it requires that he figure where he’s going to find the money to make some things happen now that Fleece Skaggs has disappeared with a season’s worth of reefer.

It’s not like he was raised by wolves but Cole thinks himself half-feral, not exactly raised by anyone, a handful of aphorisms to guide his way. Do not cause waves. Don’t try to get famous. Never knock how a man makes his living. Never start a fight you can’t finish standing up. Never call a man a liar anywhere but to his face. The maxims carry the weight of eternal law. Keep your head to yourself and don’t go around with a greasy eye; there’s always someone slicker than you. Rules of conduct handed down by Fleece; navigating codes for Pirtle County and Lake Holloway; life advice for the little brother from the elder who warned he wouldn’t be around forever.

Never corner something meaner than you.

Fleece said: Anyone asks you live on the lake you best investigate why they asking. You may be Prather on paper but you’re still a Skaggs to lots of people here with long memories. Ol’ Bethel didn’t make friends. I haven’t rolled out the red carpet for you here either, come to think of it.

And where are you now, big brother? What carpet have you rolled out for yourself, where did it lead?

Already the rumors have started. Fleece Skaggs burned up his own car to throw off the scent. He’s kicking it easy with Mister Greuel’s run in the Panhandle somewhere. California. Fleece Skaggs saw his opening and took it, he’s the one who got away.

Or: Mister Greuel had someone disappear that upstart and that is one body, man, nobody will ever find.

His brother used to tease him that just because Cole was half-fool didn’t mean he couldn’t use the little sense he had. But when he was kneeling with Shady and Spunk looking over from the seminary rooftop at the sight of a Chevy Nova burning in the middle of the night he didn’t know what to make of its meaning. He knew only it was his brother’s car and that it meant nothing well.

Cole says he’s from Lake Holloway but he spent only his first twelve years there. In Montreux, the city where he passed through high school as a guest in his uncle’s family, to say I grew up on the lake meant nothing; anything outside town is hicksville to the people there. In Pirtle County, though, lakers had earned a reputation nobody born to the fact could speak against. You either wrapped yourself in its dirty flag or moved away.

It was the kind of place people often disappeared from. The manmade lake was originally part of a spa retreat built early in the century for wealthy families, but the spa failed before the Depression. A suspicious fire destroyed the resort hotel in time to help the original investors; then the forest overtook the walks and bungalows over the years, until scavenger types began to sneak in and lay claim, people Cole’s mother Lyda described simply as: us. Men with one pair of cracked leather boots and a duffel bag of laundry, who belt-chained their wallets and could never wash the dirt from their fingernails—the kind of men who fell in love with country whores and brought them back to play house, where the mattress on the floor became a kind of factory production line for bodies that would fill military uniforms or carry cargo or sleep in prison beds. They were the kinds of men that punched clocks at three in the afternoon or seven in the morning and already had some scorched distillation in hand as their tires peeled off factory lots headed far from howling babies and angry wives in dry Pirtle. Those woods rang riot after dark, the night rent by yelps of laughter and cries of pain, gunshot cracks celebrating or warning or something worse. A single bad road winds off Route 9 around the lake and through the hills in total darkness beneath old oaks and conifers, and men roamed from house to hill to hollow looking for something to happen, passing a strummed guitar here to a banjo and fiddle-strangled duet there to a boom box screaming Aerosmith elsewhere, onward to where there might be no music at all, only the low scrapes of boots on planks and the murmur of a bet seen, bet raised, bet called in full.

For a while Cole had Fleece and Fleece, as much as he needed anyone, had his little half-brother. Childhood was fraught.

There is what happens, and there’s all that seems to be happening.

Cole’s earliest memory is of murder. A stale summer day with sky blanched white, the alder and cottonwoods wilted weary beneath the heat. Even the birds held still. Fleece would have been nine or ten then. They were playing in the shallows of the dingy lake. When they wanted to swim Lyda would come out with two steel buckets of bleach and walk up to her calves in the water, Fleece always begged to let him do it but she snatched at him, No, she barked, you stay put till I tell you. She slopped a wide berth in the water with the bleach and told them to wait. She told them to wait until she said Yes, it always took forever. When forever arrived Fleece and Cole dove with bellies smacking into the bathtub-warm water, and in play Fleece forced Cole down into the soft mud and held him there, in play he would always do whatever it would take to make his little brother cry. Cole’s cheeks tingled if he let the mud stick for long. His nostrils burned, the smell like the kitchen sink where Lyda washed their hair.

Somebody’s garage radio screeched Jet—woohoohoo wooo-hoohoo wooo-hoohoo—Jet and Fleece sang along with the guitar parts, not the lyrics. The boys were floating low on their backs so the greasy water framed their faces, listening within that strange pressure their voices made with their ears below the surface, both still sweating in the heat. From under the water the gunshot sounded like sharp thunder off a faraway storm. They sat up to neighbors hurrying toward the back of their home.

Lyda stood on the square of poured concrete outside their back door, what she called a patio though it was too small to hold anything but the charcoal grill. She held motionless, one fist on her hip and the other at her mouth, crooked at the waist with her chin tucked down. To little Cole she looked no more substantial than a small bird dead, all dried out and ready to be taken by the wind.

A crowd blocked the view. Cole rushed through the high dry grass and slid on his knees between the sprawled legs of the blond giant Morton Fifer, a neighbor he feared without specific reason but under whose legs he felt safe now, Fifer in his yellow wife-beater undershirt and blue sweats spotted with oil, cuffs tucked into heavy black boots left untied; the leather sagged and gray varicose cracks ran to the heel. He pressed Cole with the inside of his leg as a man might shoo a dog. Git. But Cole didn’t move and Fifer paid him no more attention.

The yard sloped sharply to a creek. At its bank two men formed a scene no one would enter. One, thick and stumpy with shoulders wide as Cole was tall, stood with his back to the crowd, peering past the end of a shotgun at the other, who stretched writhing on the ground with his hands at his throat. A wet noise escaped between his fingers, an unfamiliar noise, and his boot heels dug deep ruts into the mud as though he believed he could push himself away to safety. His mouth worked at every shape of rage and curse but not a word escaped; his dark eyes drew to the man who did this to him, standing silent, and the eyes admitted he did not believe a moment of it.

His boot leather looked like tender skin of a soft and pliant cognac; everyone in Lake Holloway knew who owned those boots. Bethel Skaggs took great care to show off his boots to anyone who would look, bragging on how he won them in a card game although Lyda told the boys he had paid a fortune she’d never see for them.

His murderer did not give the boots a glance. He reloaded with calm study, his brown curly hair thinned enough at the crown that the scalp shined, the short curls limp with wet. A straw hat lay upside-down behind him, black-banded and with a frayed hole in the brim open like a dead sparrow’s beak. And then the crowd turned to the shriek of a woman—a woman unknown to Cole—running up the creek. What have you done my god what have you done? she cried, clutching the hem of her skirt above her knees, her other hand out for balance as she worked barefoot against the slick mud. The gunman did not respond. It was as though her arrival didn’t register with him. Instead he clacked the barrel shut again and raised the gun once more, and he did not seem to see her collapse over Bethel Skaggs, whose fingers dug into the earth, and he did not appear to hear her moans and sobs as she placed her palms over the gushing wound in that angry throat. It was more like he was waiting for her to notice him, her to come to him as he stood ready to fire his gun again.

She would have none of it. You’ve done enough here, she said. You won’t touch this man again do you understand me?

The man kept his gun on them for a time, a long time, the barrel waving slightly with each breath. He shifted his weight and waited and nobody who was watching moved. And then after a time some thought or feeling must have clicked into place inside him. Maybe he saw the fancy boots had stopped moving, and had locked into the heel-scraped ruts, or that the bloody hands had stilled in the grass. The man lowered the gun and gazed over the scene of his creation. It seemed to Cole he was lightly swaying. He gave a brief nod, the kind of nod a man gives from his porch to passing strangers, to this woman still covering the dead man’s body with her own. The watching crowd held fast and spoke not a word.

Only the woman’s cries remained. If they registered in the man’s ears he did not show it. He picked up the hat and turned from the spectacle—never acknowledging the gathered crowd—and stepped carefully along the slick bank of the creek, going back the way he must have come, the gun yoked across his shoulders.

In the woods on the creek’s far side, birds began their meek day songs again. The gunman whistled back to them, out of sight now behind willows and ditchweed, and the sun pushed through the white wash of clouds and bathed again all the people huddled along the slope in ruthless heat.

Fleece appeared as the crowd disassembled. He closed in on the mourning woman, who seemed confused by what to do with Bethel’s hands: she kept repositioning them, placing them together on his belly, then at his sides, then again on his belly, the hands holding the form of that final clutch made against his wound. Fleece placed his own small hand on her bare shoulder, Fleece not a full head taller than the woman on her knees. He patted her shoulder, tapping his palm against her freckled skin.

Morton Fifer made a sound like he expected to sneeze and then stifled it. His face tilted from above the massive forearms folded over one another, looking at Cole between his feet. From that angle his features puckered and mashed together to make him unrecognizable save for the straw-straight blond of his hair. He made a face as though ready to spit but thought better, swallowed it down as he turned, and nodded at Cole’s mother.

Good luck to you, Lyda, he said, and with his going most of the others followed.

The woman remained atop the body beside the creek. Fleece remained beside her, still patting her shoulder with the flat of his palm as they stared at the mess made of Bethel’s throat, and Lyda still had not moved from where she had watched the entire event unfold. And little Cole did not understand. Who was this woman so full of sorrow? Why wasn’t Lyda in her place? His mother squatted with her skirt tucked between her thighs, elbows resting on bared knees, and fixed herself a cigarette she worked on and off in hotbox puffs before tossing it aside unfinished. Standing then, and without looking at either of her sons but at the kneeling woman, she ordered her boys inside the house, claiming there was no more good for them to see here.

This happened when he had been so young that often Cole wondered if he had dreamed it, or seen it on TV, or read it somewhere and then had the event sink deep enough into him to believe he owned it. But Fleece remembered the day as well. When Cole would ask their mother about it, she would tell him only that it was a bad story not worth the dwelling on. And besides, it did not matter, it had happened such a very long time ago.

Lyda sleeps in the bedroom next to his. They share a wall, their heads at rest in proximity. She has her philosophies, too. Lyda says people arrive in the world with a unique part of it readied to welcome them into its limits and expectations—that is why we have to be ripped screaming from a mother’s womb.

She grew up poor when Pirtle Country was horse farms and lease lots seeded to sharecroppers for tobacco, alfalfa, hay, and corn, the county seat of Renfro Station nothing but a few developed blocks around the rail line, its city hall reconstructed from the burned remains of a Baptist church. Her father kept a dry goods store that had folded inexplicably during the boom years after the Second World War, when most businesses could not help but thrive. Not even boom years could bring fortune to a man as difficult as Ernst Newcome, Cole’s grandfather. He preferred horses to people, though no one could tell if the horses returned the feeling. He scraped by via sharp jockeyship and boarding the beasts on rented land, in flush times exercising a handful for wealthy farm owners who traveled too often to give them steady runouts. The way he told it to Lyda, he was doing right well again before she came along—screaming into her part of the world in 1951—though her mother told her this was not true, their kitchen had had the same dirt floor before Lyda was even thought of.

That dirt floor was the stuff of family legend. Lyda believed the fact of it led directly to Fleece getting born. Each morning she had to sweep the floor in one direction to her mother’s satisfaction, and then sweep it again the opposite direction after supper. If it became too dry and powdery she had to sweep the plumes of it out the door before dampening the floor with a rag. Ernst had himself a radio and then a TV he’d managed to find on a fantastic deal before ever setting a floor to Eudora’s kitchen. He worked less once they plugged in the TV. Not long after buying the thing they watched Kennedy’s funeral and Ernst was hooked—calling the assassination of that Catholic impostor one of the best moves the country had made since VE day. Lyda didn’t know what to say about Kennedy, and she didn’t know even if her father might be wrong. By then she’d learned to assume he was.

She had not been farther than Montreux and Cincinnati except for one foiled family trip to D.C. in October 1967—the city writhing, its avenues clogged with protesters intending to levitate the Pentagon. Her father gave up on finding a hotel and in a rage swung the station wagon around on the beltway, crossing the grass divide as if it were county fairgrounds. They camped in freezing cold in the Shenandoah and shivered miserably as Ernst proclaimed his new conviction that, after the mess of the capital and the mindless inferno engulfing it, he no longer saw sense in ever leaving home.

Bethel Skaggs lifted into Lyda’s view as the worldly traveler who enjoyed the outright disapproval of her father. He had been everywhere, seen the globe, Bethel said, drinking from a pewter flask in dry Pirtle, twenty-five years old and talking up a teenage girl at a dance in a high school gym. Stationed for a year in Berlin during the missile crisis—he said—and got out the second they let him; raised blue-eye huskies in Nebraska until wolves cleared out his stock; painted barns in Georgia, and then took a chance on his fiddle skills, which allowed him to see every inch of this country to help him decide where he didn’t want to be. Her father suspected a man couldn’t play fiddle worth a damn without deceit and immoral leanings in him and that was enough to confirm Bethel as a person of interest for her.

She was sick of sweeping that kitchen floor twice a day and she was ready for a new pair of shoes. And the only thing anyone could agree on about Bethel Skaggs was that he certainly took the strain off a girl’s eyes.

He never did tell her why he came to Pirtle County or Lake Holloway; he had no people there. His littered the mountains in the eastern towns of Tomahawk, Inez, Watergap—places he swore he would never step foot in again. He had a solid job at the fertilizer plant and so she got the new shoes and moved into the small house in the woods behind the lake—where first thing she did on entering was stamp her heels on the kitchen’s linoleum floor tiles—and before their first anniversary Fleece slid screaming into his part of the world. And for two or three months Lyda thought her life exhausting but happy. And then Bethel announced he was leaving. Service rung up, he said, mentioning he still had commitments to the Army Reserves for the first time. In days he was gone, and no one except himself ever learned where he got up to; she knew only the man never served in Vietnam. She checked with the Army herself out of curiosity years after any of this mattered. Her father believed Bethel wanted away from a wife and squalling baby, damned if it be boy or no, and who could blame a man for that, I raised her myself (she could recall Ernst speaking this to young Cole, eyes dancing beneath white brows long enough to braid). Bethel disappeared and sent no word, not a phone call or note, for well over five years. The next time he rounded the lake and walked back up the hill, he found little Cole Prather.

Lyda wished she had a picture of Bethel’s face the day he found her holding the toddler—stricken, she said; sincere confusion scattering his eyes. As though he could not understand how his son had not grown a tat since he left. Then Fleece ran in through the back door (Fleece ran everywhere then, never walked, his feet scamper-wild from the day he discovered them) and the argument began. She thought, He thinks it’s no different than if he stepped out moments ago, like my life could be stuffed in a footlocker for him to pull out whenever he wants.

She dared her husband to explain her wrong. Five years without word—it wasn’t like she moved to Whore Holler after he left (though she could have, she reminded him, for all he left her with; no one who knew her story would have blamed her). Lyda had been a teenage mother trying to do right, one who went to church on Sundays like any girl trying to do right would. Despite the nature of her effort she still met Mack Prather there, at First Pirtle Baptist. Now he was a man everybody liked, once they noticed him; quiet at first, he didn’t jump into conversation but stood ready with a grin and some funny comment to prove he had been listening close. He was not rascal-handsome like Bethel but he wasn’t ugly, either, though his thin hair, a dun brown like crispy leaves, was already moving to a combover at twenty-four. His eyes were nothing to cry over and his jaw was soft, but he did like to talk once he felt comfortable, and more importantly he liked to listen to Lyda talk. They first started talking and listening to one another at an after-service brunch, he made her laugh on a day she was feeling blue, they were looking over the table spread with bacon and eggs and Mack said from just behind her shoulder, Well I see the chicken made a contribution, but it looks like the pig gave us his full commitment. Then he tumbled her coffee while reaching for cream.

Bethel had been gone two years by then and she was lonely. She wasn’t looking to park her shoes under anyone’s bed; she was trying to be good. Sex had got her into this tough spot and she wanted a future with fewer spots as tough as this. But it helped to have a man around the house whether one lay with him or not. Mack could frame a door; he connected PVC pipe from the house to the county water system instead of the lake’s, which did not use filters and made the sink smell dingy. He played ball with Fleece as well, setting him up with the basketball goal where the hill flattened out near the road until some laker boys stole it away or threw it into the lake, they never knew which.

Mack called himself a developer but that was only ambition talking. Truth was he did construction, a carpenter willing to take on more than he could handle, certain he stood only a loan or two away from drastic and enviable success. Sometimes he helped Lyda by picking up Fleece from her parents’ house before she finished her shift at the clinic. Sometimes he picked her up, too. Her mother Eudora was a practical woman and did not blame her girl when she finally landed in bed with Mack after so long with a wandered-away husband—no, Eudora got upset only when Lyda got knocked up again so quickly. Eudora did not take gossip unless it covered somebody else’s family, and Lyda getting pregnant with her husband gone gave everyone at First Pirtle Baptist much to chew on happy. Her own mama asking if she didn’t know how to keep from getting pregnant! Lyda told her it was a little late to discuss it now.

Mack, sweet, welcomed the news. He told her: We roll with what comes. They did not talk about what they might do if Bethel returned. Lyda tried hard to believe he was gone forever. As her belly grew she admonished herself to stop looking out the front of the house for any unwanted sign of him. Superstitiously she wondered if by ceasing to keep an eye out she was somehow encouraging Bethel to show up. Mack told her she was too young for such old-woman silliness; maybe she lied about her age? She slapped his shoulder. They never had one sign of his coming back, no hint of any homecoming until Bethel was already home.

He arrived to find Lyda as he had left her: alone, carrying a toddler at her shoulder. The front door stood open to invite the breeze. She had finished setting the washed breakfast dishes on the dry rack. Bethel walked in without a hello standing in the doorway as he waited for her to notice him. When she did, his eyes were on the baby—and then Fleece ran in through the back door, calling her to come see a kill he’d made with his bare hand. He stilled at the sight of Bethel, too. Didn’t know who the man could be.

Bethel, Lyda said.

Well Lyda Skaggs, Bethel said. He tossed his small bindle bag and cardboard suitcase onto the couch.

He said he could not accept such outright betrayal. He had come all this way, he said, through near-starvation and miles on his feet, only to find himself obliged to kill the bastard who give her that baby? Lyda assured him he didn’t have to kill anyone, Mack was already dead. I’ll kill his brother then, Bethel said. But the hard smile on his creased face suggested maybe he wouldn’t if she told him he did not have to.

With Cole on the way Mack had redoubled his efforts to realize his ambitions and gone in with his younger brother Ronnie on a rental property in downtown Montreux, a shotgun that required renovations before listing. They ripped out soiled carpets and refinished the floors, only to have a rainstorm reveal the roof needed repair. Ronnie held the ladder while Mack climbed with a bucket of tar pitch and neither noticed the worn lining on the wire connecting the house to powerlines overhead. A small misstep with the bucket, and the ladder shifted; Ronnie flew back against the house next door where the wind blew out of him. By the time he recovered and reached to where Mack had fallen, his brother’s skin looked like an overripe plum.

The insurance went to his brother. Ronnie did not particularly care for Lyda; he had no trouble (he made clear) telling her as much, but he promised to do right by his brother’s child. And eventually he did; he did try. Years later when a twelve-going-on-thirteen James Cole got himself arrested (chasing after Fleece in his way), Ronnie discovered Lyda harrowing deep into her own pitched spiral, and his own wife agreed they were honor-bound to get young impressionable Cole off the lake. Lyda thought they did try to do right; they all did. But they succeeded only in making the boy a stranger to both houses.

Morning blues the cheap thin valance in Cole’s bedroom window. By habit he stays still as long as he can, refusing even the smallest move despite knowing he’s not asleep anymore. It’s dawn early, he can tell by the modesty in the twitters and calls of the birds outside, like they’re struggling to wake up after a rough night. Cole remains in the cool cotton safety of the bed, eyes and ears open in a room still cloudy from his cloudy dreams. Over long minutes he watches the outlines of his few pieces of furniture begin to form in the steepening light—a dresser with one drawer missing, a footlocker stood on end—bringing with their growing shadows a strange dread. Sleep: so far and hard to come from, a good place.

He listens to the house. Lyda’s one to always have her ear to the rails; she knows what train is coming in and whether it’s on time.

He listens to the house, his ear exploring the short hallway past Lyda’s room and into the kitchen (the refrigerator humming), through the kitchen and into the living room. There the TV sits silent. He backtracks to her bedroom and listens for any sound in the sheets, a rustle, snore, or sigh, or even the murmured complaint he often catches through the wall separating their heads, Lyda ready to set straight some imagined or remembered companion even in her dreams. Nothing there.

On his feet then for a sweatshirt from the drawer, he peeks out the window. She still drives the old Country Sedan, proudly displaying its historic plates even as rust claims the fenders, duct-taped cardboard replaces one rear window, and the suspension angles high on one side. She doesn’t have money for a newer car and insists she doesn’t need one, the Country starts every time she turns the key and she hardly drives anywhere anyways. The Country sits parked behind his truck in the driveway. He sock-foots through the house and does not see her as he rinses his mouth in the bathroom sink—not bothering to brush his teeth, he’ll be gulping gas-mart coffee and cake in a few minutes—and runs icy tap water over his hands and through his short hair and into his eyes.

On the concrete porch with boots in hand Cole’s spacey fatigue carries him through morning ritual. It’s Saturday, he has horses to feed and turn out at the Spackler farm, and then he’ll work a handful of hours in the city with Uncle Ron-Ron’s crew. He sets to lacing the leather boots, malleable cowhide and once his father’s, boots Fleece wore briefly before bequeathing them to Cole once box-toes came into fashion and his brother splurged on a beautiful black pair from Johnston & Murphy. Cole resoled his father’s boots with tire-tread rubber and by now the leather has conformed to his feet, sinking outward for the bulge of his ankle bones and following the outward spread to his calves, not quite erasing the material’s memory of his father’s form, undecided between the two. There are moments when he believes he cannot love anything as much as these boots—moments such as this one, alone, on the front porch of his mother’s house, starting another day.

It is winter-morning cold but not so cold he needs to complain about it.

He feels her standing behind him; she must have slunk into his wake when he wasn’t paying attention. He feels her staring into the back of his head, into his shoulders tight beneath the hooded gray sweatshirt still smelling of the dryer sheet, a scent he likes.

He double-knots the laces of his left boot and asks what’s on her mind.

“You know my burden, pup,” she says, her voice worn. She clears her throat. “Your big brother. You and your big brother.” Her tone implies exasperation and lassitude, as though she could have launched into a list of numerous instances in which Fleece and Cole have disappointed her, perhaps even hurt her deeply, but there are so many known between the three of them already she saw no point in listing them yet again.

“What about us?”

“You only come back for yourself? I mean who’s looking out for who here?” The wire mesh of the screen door sings a faint song against her scratching nails. “I raised you boys better than to have to wonder. Blood is blood. You got to have each other’s back.”

“I never had to have Fleece’s back. He didn’t need me to. I was just a kid.”

“You would have if he asked. How I raised you both.”

Cole ties the right boot in the same double-knot; he needs to get on the road. He plants both feet square together and looks over them, at how small they seem compared to the rest of his body. Just like his father, Lyda used to say.

“Not sure how you’d say you raised us, Ma.”

He sits facing away from the house, appearing to anyone who happened to notice as a strange young man debating aloud to himself. The hinges on the screen squeal and as the door smacks back into its frame his mother’s bare foot taps his hip for Cole to scoot over, the dark burgundy polish on her big toe chipped white along the inside edge. He makes room.

“Now I tried my best, hon. You’ll see, you ever get a child in this world. Only so much you can do, they end up how they end up anyways.”

It’s not a conversation he wants to have—or, it’s a conversation he would like to have some other time, the opportunity for such conversations being a great reason for his return to the lake—but not now, not with the fatigue of four hours of sleep, no soda in his belly, a day of work he dislikes ahead of him. Cole stands and jangles his keys from a pocket and looks down at his mother on the step, her choppy, saloned hair exposing a little gray at the roots.

“Guess I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Tell me you got your brother’s back.”

“Is he asking?”

“He’s not here to ask. I am. I’m your mother and I am asking you. Make it right.”

“Jesus, make what right?”

Lyda doesn’t answer. She reaches forward, plucks dry petals from the hydrangea and grinds them into confetti falling brightly from her fingers.

“Make what right, Lyda? Tell me, ’cause I don’t know.”

“That man don’t own us. He might act like he does but he owes me, he owes me and he knows it.”

Cole watches the show and refuses to be pulled in. His mother grinds her teeth and wires of muscle braid and weave along her jaw; she clamps shut her eyes, snaps them open, says in a rawboned, hard pioneer-type voice: “I don’t get out like I used to but I still hear what goes on out there—”

“Maybe I should be asking you the questions. You know something I don’t, tell me. All I know’s Fleece aint around. That’s no different from life as I know it. What do you want me to do?”

“You shouldn’t need me to tell you. You’re all grown up. You’ll do right.”

She makes a display of relenting. She repeats to the grass edging the walk that she thought she raised her boys to know better. She pulls more dry petals from the hydrangea, grinding them in her fingers and catching the crumbs in her palm and staring at the pile as though a fortune could be divined there.

“That boy just is as he does,” Cole says, and mother and son share nostalgic smiles at the line, a family saying coined by Lyda one night telling police at the door how sorry she was for what Fleece had done, twelve years old, brought home for egging the cop’s car miles away. I’m trying to raise him officer but the boy just is as he does, she had said.

“You see your brother you tell him I want to talk to him. He don’t just take off on me like that.”

From over one shoulder he tells her he will though he doesn’t expect gossip from Spackler’s horses, and this gets a laugh from Lyda. Sometimes—when he was much younger and when his mother had more energy and clarity—they used to take long walks through the woods, not quite losing themselves in its hidden cavities and hollows, occasionally happening upon a secluded sward of grass that appeared to have no reason to be empty of trees. They would circle Lake Holloway and his mother might step out of her shoes and roll up her cuffs to tramp into the sheltered corners overgrown with rushes and shush the croaking psalms chanted by frogs, where she might laugh like a woman without a care, striking out at the water’s surface with an elegantly curved foot, the ruby polish fresh on her nails. Once she had been a woman renowned for dancing on rooftops. So Cole had heard.

He leaves her sitting on the two short steps to the little house, where dark green moss sprouts beneath curling shingles and the brick needs tuck-pointing in many places. She looks frail, barefoot in Fleece’s old high-school football jersey and baggy flannel pajama pants, a figure he feels sorry for as much as she enrages him—even, he would admit, disgusts him at times and on a variety of levels along some murky inner scale. He backs out the narrow gravel drive. His compassion turns to mild surprise as he sees too the figure of a man in the doorway behind her, Lyda half-turned and smiling as she mouths words, her posture suddenly charged, different, astounding Cole with her ability to still be charming and flirtatious as required.

After the horses he hits Montreux. The city isn’t forty minutes away, and even though the counties are connected by interstate, rail, and road, the drive from Lake Holloway feels like a passage from one distinct time to another. Passing through the lake again his small truck thumps over a road that’s more pothole than pavement, passing swampy lawns, rust-streaked muscle cars on concrete blocks, an engine block that has dangled from its tree chain at least three weeks, houses walled in tar paper and concrete and asphalt shingles. A mile along 29 and a strip of shops appears on the right. He never has been able to figure the original purpose of the place, a series of small one-story structures connected in a line, each slightly taller than the next until the corner building, which is two stories. Like a square-moduled retractable telescope fully extended. The two-story used to be a garage and motor oil still stains the lot about it; now a man called Boonie Ed keeps a handful of jalopies there for sale. The other storefronts are inhabited on and off—nail salons and short-loan offices—but otherwise house “For Lease” signs with the name and phone number of the father of a kid Cole knew in grade school. A miscellany of shotgun churches with diverse long names bursts from the woody roadsides at uneven intervals. Then he hits the modern era of gas marts and fast-food hovels with NOW FRYING neon signs, and a small strip of upscale boutiques along Main Street in Renfro, where the rails still divide the road.

Speed up the rising onramp and the landscape turns to Interstate Anyplace USA, Southeast version. Traffic increases the closer he gets to the city and the FM classic rock radio stations come in clearer and soon he’s passing identical suburban plans and waterfront and then the houses grow closer and begin to betray their ages. Cole enters downtown Montreux only as necessary—he doesn’t know the layout well, and the city center creeps him out a little because he knows, by his uncle, his father died here.

The Spackler horses had been stubborn and slow and kind of mean when he turned them out and he’s late pulling in. Everyone’s standing by their trucks, eyeing him as they finish cigarettes.

“Young men don’t care for Saturday work, do they?”

Orval’s the oldest on the crew, older than Ron-Ron and ever ready to sass. His fine white hair is trimmed so short that his five-day beard wanders into it seamlessly, a soft white moss taking over his skull.

“Nobody cares for Saturday work,” says his skinny companion, CD Cooter. “We like Saturday pay, though, aint that right Cole?”

“Truth be told, I don’t even care for the pay that much,” Cole smiling at the banter, relieved they haven’t started the usual ride of him being the boss’s nephew. He’s the youngest of the regulars by almost half and his lack of skill outside of welding is evident and happily acknowledged. He wouldn’t be employed here if not for his status as family relation and though Orval in particular likes to tease him for that Cole can tell he doesn’t hold it against him, Orval himself once admitting a man can’t be held liable for the family he’s born to.

He asks to bum a smoke but the old man shakes his head and starts in. “Boss is already in and we don’t need him to start handling that shit himself”—the joke being that his uncle has lost his touch with carpentry, better with the clipboard these days.

It’s a job and Cole doesn’t really care that it’s Saturday, though he looks forward to the time when he will be welding exclusively and a master at it, unionized and career-bound. Ron-Ron finds him things to weld and farms Cole out for MIG welding when he can, but they have finished all opportunities here, an old firehouse they’ve renovated into a duplex. Mostly he’s been carrying greenboard and plasterboard and hauling debris. His uncle was there then not there, zipping off in his light Japanese truck—another instance of hilarity to the crew—from this job to another and then home again, a boss content to tour sites with sleeves rolled up and hands on hips as he argues sports and politics with radio hosts on the small transistor dangling from his belt. He rarely pays much attention to Cole onsite and today’s no different, Cole ducking his boss for fear his cousin Sheldon (Ron-Ron’s son) had complained about money Cole owes. But his uncle says nothing about it, and he imagines Sheldon, supposedly a college student, doesn’t want his father asking where he found three hundred dollars to lend toward Cole’s scuba training. Cole needs the license to meet his goal of attending a commercial diving school. Swimming with fins is the one thing he’s found where his locked knee is a help and not a hindrance. He foresees a future on oceans he’s never yet seen, living on rigs and welding beneath the waters.

After the second time Ron-Ron checks in and escapes, the men take a break. It’s a bright late autumn day and Cole sidles around the back of the building with CD—a slide guitarist and, in his deep night hours, self-styled composer of advertising jingles who would never admit he is bound forever to a career as laborer—to share a spliff. They burn one down while sharing little in speech, Cooter grunting and humming in appreciation of the herb, both lost in their heads and staring at the high brick wall of the cemetery that backs against the firehouse, and at the clacking bamboo stalks that crane over the edge as though to peer at them.

“You don’t need me to tell you,” CD holds up the jay in one hand and points to it with the other like he’s shilling in some commercial, “but this shit here is money if you want it. You get this off your brother? Wait, no. What am I thinking, man.”

Cole shuffles his feet, smiles. CD’s eyes are bloated into pillows like a soft change purse slit down the middle.

“I used to get my stuff off him all the time back in the day,” he says. “Sorry he aint around no more. Bet you’re sick of hearing people telling you that.”

“Only thing I’m sick of is people asking if I know where he’s off to. I don’t.”

“‘Where he’s off to?’” CD pinches two keys together to clamp the roach, head shaking and lips at work on silent words.

“What.”

“What nothing. But I mean where’re you seeing the question here? He tried to rob Mister Greuel is what I hear. Don’t tell me I’m thinking different from what everybody else’s saying already.”

Above them, the bamboo stalks clack and shush in a breeze they cannot feel in the narrow space between the walls. The movement is sudden enough that Cole’s eyes dart up to see if some creature has landed there, something wild come to inspect them, but there’s nothing but greenery. “People talk just to talk,” Cole says.

“This is true. Suit yourself, little man. I wouldn’t want that ton of shit on my shoulders, neither. Must be awful on your momma, though.”

A shoe scuffs pavement around the corner. Cooter pops the smoldering roach into his mouth and winces as he swallows, both of them turning to see Orval beaming, snapping his suspenders over his great belly as he berates CD as a slacker not worth half the bad pay he gets. “Man I thought I’d gone crazy and was seeing things but I just checked with the measure and CD, you got crown molding set where the chair rail’s supposed to be, you useless teahead.”

“Nah, that can not be the case,” CD says, grabbing the tape measure Orval holds out. “Bull-ee-she-ite,” he says again, backing away to Orval’s laughs with head nodding with emphasis.

“Baby, I shit you not. You may commence taking that crap down, I aint cutting again till the room’s ready.”

“Who made you straw boss?”

“Who told you that you’re a carpenter?”

His merry eyes follow CD as he approaches, waiting for the man’s eyes to meet his own, but Cooter thumps him shoulder to shoulder to knock him out of his way, lips working in disbelief. It’s not Cole’s fault; he hands up what CD asks for. He keeps still, listening to the breezy brattle in the bamboo, like the tick of an irregular clock.

“Don’t listen to that yahoo,” Orval says. “He’s just pissed to be knocked back down to quarry buys without your bro around.”

“How’s an old guy like you know about the quarry?”

He picks two smokes from his pack and offers one, lighting it for him. They lean against opposite walls, sharing the same view of red brick not three feet before their faces. “Well James Cole, I guess when I fell off the truck yesterday my people were already talking about it.”

“You think CD’s speaking true?”

“I don’t believe CD himself knows he’s speaking truth or not half the time. I’ve made it this long believing only half of what I see and none of what I hear. Greuel and Arley aint the worst. One time I was so deep into Arley on bad bets, I thought for certain my days were few. But those boys think. They know you can’t pay money back from Hades.”

“Yeah, well. My brother’s in a different business.”

“I know your brother’s business and I’ll tell you it don’t matter, all business is money business. You go your own way, James Cole. The bone truth is Fleece Skaggs took off or he’s under the river. Either way it’s not on you. Remember that.”

He had asked his brother: You ever wonder at how lakers seem like they’re in on one big secret? I walk these woods and wave hello to people and I wonder, What’s the story there? How’d they end up here instead of somewhere else? You got the Akins place, and Boyle Akins went nuts and killed his wife and even all the dogs. Only time I ever seen police lights in Lake Holloway. What happened in that house, why’d he go nuts like that? Or you pass the Kelso’s and there’s the old man with his glass eye out, turning the thing over in his one hand because the left hand’s gone, and the side of his face looks melted. How did he lose his eye and his hand? What happened to his face? You can’t ask, and no one ever tells you.

Fleece said he didn’t know but he could guess. Then he said he didn’t care. Later he added he’d heard Boyle Akins ran too long on his own crank. But to most of Cole’s questions he said, It’s their story, not mine.

So why did Bethel get shot? Cole asked. That’s your story, isn’t it?

Fleece rolled his eyes over his brother as he would an empty room he was about to exit. His hands played with his butterfly knife, an all-metal Spiderco Spiderfly, flipping it open in the air and then catching it again, creating a fine percussive rhythm with the repetition.

You think too much, pup.

Don’t you want to know? Don’t you care?

I care enough not to go look for any more trouble than what already finds me.

He lost interest in the knife and flipped it shut and tapped it down into his shirt pocket. He kept his hand over the pocket, palm flat like a shield to cover his heart, looking as though he were swearing an oath if not for the fact that Fleece never pledged allegiance to anything but his own desires.

Sure I’d like to know, sometimes. But what’s the knowing worth? Bethel Skaggs was a hard mean skinny little fucker, a real son of a bitch. Look at Momma—you think she got that way on her own? Hell no, that’s my so-called dad still giving it to her every day.

His palm slid from his heart to his thigh, sliding further to the knee and back, uncertain where to go without the knife to trick.

Not sure it even matters much, who exactly did the deed, he said. Knowing who wouldn’t explain why. Could’ve been the last thing his killer wanted to do.

Or he could have loved every second of it, Cole said. He was whistling, after. I remember.

You got the way you feel, and you got what you want people to think you feel, Fleece said.

Now his hands found their purpose, searching his jeans for the one-hitter box. It was in the breast pocket of his jacket, and he fixed a pinch into the pipe. Say he loved every second of it. Say he sits alone and gloats over each detail of that day and how he got away with killing Bethel Skaggs. What’s changed now? Would we be better off with Bethel alive?

Cole thought, I would have grown up with you, but he knew these words were nothing his brother wanted to hear. He watched the tendril of a flat cloud break away and dissipate into empty sky before admitting he didn’t know if they’d be better off with Bethel alive or no.

The thing is this, Fleece said. The only way to know the truth of a story is you got to go through the whole story yourself. You have to be in Bethel’s shoes and you have to be in the shoes of the guy that shot him. It’s the only way to understand for sure, and nobody can do that. The rest is just the law.

What would you do if you did know for sure, asked Cole.

Fleece handed him the one-hitter and the fixed angle of his eyes indicated he was thinking it over. Cole went through the ritual of pinch, plant, and flame and then took tiny hits off the heated brass, the metal hot on his lips and the raw smoke too harsh, scalding a passage down his young throat to a hot blossom in his chest. Fleece could kill the hit in one deep inhalation; Cole nursed it. His brother, amused, yet not going so far as to tease, watched him baby the cylinder until he finished.

What am I going to do, Fleece said then. Kill him back? I’m off the lake, so I’m supposed to kill him back. Maybe I would if I knew the story ended there, but it wouldn’t, the story just changes, and in that one I’m hiding the rest of my life from any sons or brothers the guy had.

It’s just not right to kill somebody like it cost nothing.

We don’t know what it cost him. He might be paying for it to this day.

You sound like you’re defending him, Cole said. The guy who killed your father, you defend him like you’re his lawyer.

I was just a kid then, Fleece said, no more than sixteen, seventeen himself at the time. I want to believe tomorrow might be just a little bit better than today, and even better the day after that, and on and on. And forget what I come from. Shoot. If it came out right I might even go work for the man.

Fleece smiled at the thought. He drew a moist hand over his face, and then drove a frank stare into Cole that implied how well he knew his brother, that he understood his thoughts and wonder because he himself had been through them already as separate items and as a constellation of issues for a much longer time, wrestling, and had reached some equanimity with the matter that Cole could not yet make. You know, lots of times a story doesn’t have an end, it just changes shape, he said. Then abruptly he stood and stepped one pace away, and by doing so finished the conversation right there, wherever they were, wherever they found themselves together that day; Cole remembers only his brother, their words, the blue sky presenting ropes of snaking clouds in perpetual motion.

I’ll catch up with you later, Fleece had said, exchanging the little wooden box in his pocket for the butterfly knife again, the end of which he stabbed unopened against his thigh as he walked away, leaving little Cole holding the corner of yet another question he assumed he could never resolve on his own.

The statement I’ll catch up with you winds through Cole’s head like a carousel of thought tracing the inside of his skull as he drives the interstate north to Pirtle County. The words scroll across the screen of his mind, turn briefly illegible as they follow one another in a circle and turn backward, as AMBULANCE appears on the hood of one so that it can be read in a rearview mirror, then passing clear before his eyes again. I’ll catch up with you. Cole has always seen it the other way around: catching up with Fleece had been practically his life’s work, all he longed for. To catch up on seventeen, to catch up to his brother, whose way of being was like a pattern Cole had hoped to slip into, to be so much like him as to be him. Sometimes he felt—even then, a young boy—hardly more than a ghost, trailing after his brother’s full incarnation, seeking to be conjured into actual flesh by this brother who understood what Cole needed to be. Yet he knew they were inescapably different as well; Cole was Cole and Fleece was Fleece and no matter how much he might wish otherwise, this fact would remain forever the case. A recognition underscored by Cole’s floating eye and stiff leg, his gimp knee a throbbing alarm in changing weather like any hill-bound geezer, while his brother rioted the night, humming guitar lines as he hot-footed that Nova reckless over bad roads, suffering no doubt or dread, to whatever destination he had in mind.

By the time he hits Lake Holloway the sun has retreated enough to make headlights necessary in the woods, and the shine off the black Audi cabriolet parked behind his mother’s car appears to leap at him from the dusk. The sight strikes a great chord of emotions: first, hopeful expectancy—Shady Beck has come to see him. Or she has already turned up Fleece and wants them to know. Then it’s the realization that Shady Beck is alone with his mother, and he doesn’t know for how long, and his hopefulness withers into anxiety. She won’t have news; she wouldn’t know how to turn up any. He imagines Shady describing abandoned seminary rooms and packs of starving dogs, and his brother’s famous car set afire before their eyes looking down from a rooftop, Lyda grousing how Cole cares nothing for family honor.

He expects the heads of both women to turn as he enters the house, their faces craning to greet him over the half-wall partition that divides the kitchen from the front room, the oak-doored cabinets (pine within, handmade by his father, Mack) blurred behind the haze of Lyda’s cigarettes, a radio playing Lite FM hits of the seventies from where it balances atop the clothes washer; he expects to walk in, perhaps, on their laughter at some shared comment he will not quite hear. He finds he is wrong. The house sits silent, the kitchen table empty, one wooden chair pulled back before a tin cup, speckled green like a leaf under siege by aphids. Three lemon cookies sit on a ceramic plate among crumbs. Cole puts one in his mouth and lets the tart fruit sizzle on his tongue. The women are out back, on the slope facing the woods across the creek. Through the kitchen window he sees his mother amid the recounting of some tale, her hands active, tracing forms through the air. Shady stands attentively in gray cotton sweatpants, her name in purple-and-gold high-school lettering visible from the kitchen light in an arc across the rise of her ass—old warmups he recalls eyeing from the risers years before as the girls did wind sprints on the track, Cole braving this same November cold beside Spunk, their behinds clenched on the aluminum, sharing weed and inventing conquests as they watched.

She turns with Lyda at the high squeak of the back door opening. As he smiles hello he pursues her face, inspects her gray eyes, the corners of her mouth, the tilt of her head, for any hint of why she’s there or what she and Lyda have been talking about, but her face reflects only bland and friendly welcome. Opening his mouth feels like plunging face-first into dark water of uncertain depth.

Shady beats him to it. “We thought you’d be home an hour ago,” she says, pressing to her sternum a blue tin cup speckled to match the one in the kitchen, above her breasts lost in the baggy, hooded sweatshirt.

“That was a long day, sugar, you do it all yourself?” Lyda’s voice is slow, soft over consonants.

“All by myself,” Cole says. “Any coffee left?”

Together the women announce, as if in celebration, that they are drinking tea. As she starts up the slope his mother says she’ll make coffee if he wants some. Her hair, colored mahogany (she calls it “strawberry jam”) but grown out to show dark roots with bands of gray, froths in a wild flurry about her head, perhaps originally styled as a kind of bun or twist but since harassed beyond recognition. He can tell she has massaged the day past concern in a blend of pills on the couch with her Doral Golds and daytime TV, with long breaks before the bathroom mirror examining her look. A day off from her life of days off. She stabs out her smoke in the matted grass by her bare foot and throws the filter into the plastic bucket by the door, the bowl yellowed and soiled by rain and sand mixing weeks’ worth of spent butts. She brushes past him with a kiss to his cheek and he smells the tobacco over sweaty perfume. He asks if she’s going out tonight.

“Not tonight, I’m plumb wore out—my back’s up again, and my neck,” she says, reciting symptoms gleaned from her Merck Manual used to pull prescriptions, manifestations practiced to the point that they have become a kind of truth. “I can only do so much,” she adds from behind the closing door.

A lot of work goes into scoring meds. No one would describe Lyda as a nervous busybody, but she does possess abundant physical energy, a drive that, without an outlet, easily transforms to anxiety and paranoia; she needs to keep her hands busy. Oxy, Nembutal, Flexeril, Dilaudid if she can get it, keep her steady—so she tells Cole. Who takes most statements at face value and wishes he didn’t. But when the pills wear off, the skittish edge trills apparent about her. Sober, his mother trembles as though some inner engine has broken its mount. She complains of spinal bursitis, bulging discs, a pinched nerve; she moans at random. Yet tonight is liquid calm, moving smooth and deliberate as the gentle creek running below the yard’s slope. She has been more or less smooth and deliberate since he learned to talk—and often as inscrutable as that creek’s voice tumbling over mute stones.

He can’t get anything from Shady’s face. He nears her and asks, furtive and quiet, masking indifference, what brings her to Lake Holloway early on a Saturday night. Shady ignores his conspiratorial air, and answers in a voice that hails Lyda already in the house: “Dad says I can’t sit around the house just ’cause I’m between schools, I got to find a job. So I’m out looking for one, far as he knows.”

“You told me that already,” Lyda calls from behind the open door. “Now what you going to do with that fancy degree, Miss Prettier-Than-I-Am?”

His mother has always liked Shady. She had held hopes the girl might turn Fleece around, making her son into the man he was not. Mothers live on wishes and hope, she would say.

“Your momma’s in a new dress,” Shady whispers on their way up the yard. “She said you wouldn’t notice but you might surprise her if you did.” She answers Lyda once they are in the kitchen. “I don’t know. Sit around and deal some solitaire? Stare out the window? Whatever a girl in crisis is supposed to do. Go to church?”

Lyda snorts derision. And then quickly apologizes, as though her mockery had burst out as unexpectedly as a belch. “Never had much use for church myself. All they wanted was me to sing His praises and keep these knees squeezed tight. You can see how that worked out.”

They laugh, but the entire scene feels false to Cole, a performance he is expected to play along with without question.

“It’s not like that where I go,” Shady says. “Brother Ponder at CWE, he’s about the positives God wants us to nourish in ourselves. God didn’t put us here to fail. It’s a good message, good to be reminded of sometimes.”

“If you say so, hon.”

Lyda sets a pot of water on the stove and the topic dies. The three awaiting the burner to light is like the commencement of some other deep ritual, each silent and respectful of the abeyant silence. It’s Lyda who breaks it, telling Shady she should check the rehab clinic if she’s serious about picking up a job. “I still have friends there”—now it’s Cole’s turn to snort, but she ignores him—“they’re always hiring clerks and orderlies. Turnover’s high, you can imagine.”

Cole does imagine, or more precisely, remembers. He had visited the clinic many times as a kid. He remembers blood on tile floors, trembling hands and grinding jaws, zombie-shuffles down antiseptic hallways. A population of strange adults somehow absent from themselves, their feet wrapped in paper. Slow-healing, self-inflicted wounds on skin the color of lime pulp.

“Didn’t you say you were studying pre-med, anyway?”

“Biology. But yeah, med school’s in the Beck family plan. More and more school as far as a girl can see.”

“Better than being out there on minimum wage far as you can see. You’re too young to understand how important opportunities are. How rare they are.”

“Cole seems fine without it, without school I mean,” Shady answers in a way that betrays the effort to keep her voice playful.

“Oh honey we don’t want to go there, do we, Cole?”

“What?” Cole says. He hadn’t been paying attention, lost on the shivers of blue flame trembling from the stove jets.

Lyda sighs. “I wish you boys would’ve took a chance at college. Your daddy’s brother could’ve helped there. Not that either of you was any good at school. All I could do to get them to even go.”

The thought amuses her and her smile predicts a laugh that does not quite arrive while she dumps out spoonfuls of coffee into the filter taken from the broken percolator. She sets it above the mouth of a teapot made of the same speckled tin as the cups. It’s not a memory Cole can find, Lyda hurrying the boys off to any school bus.

“That a new dress, Momma?”

The laugh breaks forth, then. She dismisses him with a wave. “This little thing? A gift from my new suitor! The girls look pretty good in this, don’t they?”

She sways her hips back and forth, a move she calls ‘ringing the bell.’ “Ding, ding. Ring a ding ding.” She laughs again and Shady joins her. “I’m not so far gone I don’t know my son, you two. She already telling you what to say, sugar?”

Shady denies advising anything even as Cole insists it’s still a nice dress. Lyda flicks at the hem above her knee, slumps one hip against the stove.

“Oh, he’ll do for now. They always mean well at first.” She pours the rest of the boiled water into the filter and sets down the pot. “Honestly I’d rather hear me a story. What’s this adventure you all got into the other night? Shady was telling me.”

His mouth falls open; blood heats his neck. He turns at Shady in dismay, smacking into what rushes off her tongue before he can find words of his own: The transformer, she says.

“Oh. Yeah,” Cole says. He slumps into the table and sets a foot on a chair. He presses hand to forehead, gathers warm sweat in his palm. “Yeah, that was something to see.”

“What is it with you two?” Lyda asks, squinting at both.

“What?” Cole asks.

“Nothing,” Shady says at the same time.

His mother studies their faces with sporting suspicion, a rusty streak of hair falling from its nest and framing the curve of her jaw. She tucks the lock behind her ear. “Don’t either of you think I don’t know when something’s up. You two are acting tighter than a cat in a bread basket. You’re up to something.”

“What are we up to?”

“Running around like vandals tearing up statues, from what I hear. Lawrence Greuel, that man must be near sixty and you’d think he’d have bigger things to do than make delinquents out of good kids.”

“That was Spunk. You know Spunk. Mister Greuel wanted us to scare up Fleece.”

“I could’ve saved you both the trouble and told you you wouldn’t have found him. Lawrence Greuel could’ve told you the same.”

She gets a new cigarette going and makes a show of looking for an ashtray. Not finding one, she ashes into her hand, and then her tin cup, as her eyes sweep her son’s.

“His dogs are running the place now,” Cole speaks wearily into his hands. “Fleece was out.”

“Out.”