Ghosting. Kirby GannЧитать онлайн книгу.
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