LITMIR.BIZ

       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

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