The woman he’d been seeing in Berlin had no such qualms about showing off her legs or anything else. Bryga, her name was. She was a Polish-American girl, a waitress he’d met at the soda fountain, a single mother to a small son. The boy’s father had been killed in a logging accident, but she didn’t like to talk about him. She didn’t like to talk much at all, in fact, and at first that was what Cal thought he wanted. It was enough—to help himself to someone young and maybe a little dumb, to someone so close to home who was nothing like it.
At least he’d thought so before this mess with the bus crash. Now his throat closed up every time he recalled his quick conversation with Suzie outside the movie theater in Berlin. In exchange for the girl’s discretion about Bryga, he’d promised to restore her father’s mill job. It had seemed such a simple bargain at the time: her silence for his word of honor. Suzie hadn’t even needed to point out that Nate was sitting a mere fifty yards away, hunched in the dark of the movie theater. That was obvious. Where Suzie led, Nate followed. It had been like that since they were six damn years old. Cal had just forgotten all about the youth-group trip. He’d glanced uneasily at the theater doors, eager to wrap up the transaction.
When he remembered what happened next, his blood ran cold.
“If I hear one whisper about any of this, your father won’t just lose his place at the Titan Mill, he’ll lose his chance at any of them. Do you understand? You have to keep your mouth shut.”
And Suzie, with the same astonishing sass she’d had as a child, sneered. Displaying the sarcasm that only a teenage girl could produce, she’d looked him straight in the eye and made an X over her heart. “I promise,” she said. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”
The floor of the mill was blessedly empty when Cal arrived on the morning of the funeral, the machines gone quiet for Sunday, sculptural in their stillness, industrial hunks of oiled metal and gears that lost all meaning unless they were spinning, whirling, spraying. In the storeroom great rolls of paper sat like blank gravestones or monuments, their significance indeterminable, yet to be written.
Cal made his way to the metal staircase leading up to his office and reached to turn on the light, but when he did, sparks jumped out and burned him, leaving an unpleasant ozone flare lingering about his nostrils. He cursed and examined his hand. There was a dusky brown spot burned into the pad of his thumb, staining the whorls of it. He stuck it in his mouth and pulled it out again, but the mark remained. Cursing even more, Cal clattered up the steps and let himself into his office, opening the blinds for light and throwing the garment bag over the back of a chair, rumpling his funeral suit surely, but he had much larger worries.
Below him the river spread its waters in wintry glory. Cal’s father, Henry, had deliberately relocated his office to this strategic spot, where he could keep an eye on the comings and goings of traffic to and from the mill. At this time of year, the river was well on its way to being iced to calm, but in spring and summer and all through the autumn the currents bubbled and churned. Once, even forty years ago, floats of logs had still been pushed down in this manner, the wood hauled out, dried, and sawed. Cal had seen old tintypes of jams that had gone on for miles and stood as tall as a three-story building. Now the lumber was trucked in, and, honestly, Cal was glad. It made for a quicker and more efficient delivery all the way around, fewer men hurt and less of the end product damaged.
Not that Cal had a call for half as much wood lately. It was hard to churn out roll after roll of clean white paper without making some kind of mess, and where was he supposed to put it? When Cal was in college in the 1970s, the government passed the Clean Water Act, and in the years since, the state had turned ever more draconian about water quality, fining mills at the drop of a hat, for the least transgression. It was bullshit, Cal thought. Here he was paying through the nose to upgrade the converters and he’d still been nailed three times in the past five years for infractions. And he wasn’t alone. The King Mill had closed, he’d heard, and over in Maine the Horne operation was going down faster than a lead fishing lure. When business dropped in a mill, layoffs happened. And when layoffs began, so did union troubles. It was a twin vise that Cal didn’t see how to squirm out of.
He surveyed the icy riverbank below the window. Once again he felt the same pressure on his chest that he’d woken with. He stuck a finger under his collar and loosened it. Ever since the accident, he’d been vacillating between feeling like he was about to choke to death and the opposite, more alarming sensation of his entire existence loosening quickly, of a piece, and without his permission. Sweating a little, he sank into his desk chair and opened a book of accounts, the print swimming before his eyes, the awful truth of the accident filling his head.
So help him, but he’d been the one to pass Fergus on Devil’s Slide Road. He’d been hoping to beat the bus out of Berlin, but he’d had to drop Bryga off all the way at the other end of town and double back on himself, and by the time he’d reached Devil’s Slide Road, there was the old yellow bus wheezing ahead of him, gasping around the icy turns, shuddering along at the pace of a mule.
Cal considered his options. If he stayed behind the bus, he would risk everyone on it seeing him enter into town. June would collect Nate, head to the cabin, and then wonder where the hell he was. Word might get back to her about his late arrival in town, and he’d have to explain. But if he overtook the bus, he could slip into the night, speed down by the mill, and take the road out to the cabin, arriving before June and Nate and leaving himself free of their questions.
He waited for a place where he knew the road stretched straight for a heartbeat and, without any hesitation, gunned his engine and passed the bus, hoping that none of the children—Nate most especially—would recognize his car in the dark. And then he was in front of Fergus. Another curve, more pressure on the accelerator, and he was free, shot into the darkness, the bus headlights having vanished in his rearview mirror.
It was a maneuver he’d done a hundred times before, mostly in the summer, true, and mostly when he was much younger, but never with disastrous consequences. So what had gone wrong? Cal turned a page of the ledger and wondered, his stomach queasy. Had he driven Fergus off the road? Fergus was getting older. His reflexes perhaps weren’t what they used to be. What if, startled, he’d wrenched the wheel too far in the wrong direction? Or had it been as simple as Fergus hitting a stray patch of ice on his side of the road, one he might have driven over anyway, with or without Cal zooming around him?
Cal hadn’t had any idea of the fact of the accident, not until June had come to the cabin with Nate and told him. His first thought had been an overwhelming horror of what he’d caused, followed by a violent flood of relief that Nate was standing in front of him, shaken and scared but physically fine. He listened, knowing he should confess, that he should say something, but before he could, June recounted how Abel had found Zeke Snow’s truck smashed into a tree a little way past the crash and how the boy had gone on the run. Cal hesitated, unsure what to make of this information, for he’d seen that, too, the smoking hulk of Zeke’s pickup pushed up against a tree, steaming in the dark like a wounded animal, and he still hadn’t stopped.
Guilt had overcome him, and he’d been on the verge of doing what he knew he should and confessing everything when June interrupted him and told him about Suzie, sealing his lips forever.
He’d immediately pictured the mitten folded like a lover’s note in his overcoat pocket. Beads of sweat pearled along his spine and began to roll down his back, and the blood pounded in his ears with a single thought: I have to get rid of it. No one can know. Instead he’d gone up to bed feeling sick, and in the morning, when he’d stuck his hand in his pocket, the mitten had been gone. It had taken just one glance at June to ascertain that she’d been the one to dispose of it. A hole in your pocket, she said, her eyes locked on his, the open door she was standing in front of pushing a current of cold air over to him. I patched it up. But both he and she knew there’d n
ever been a hole in the first place.
Cal closed the ledger and shoved it aside. It was useless trying to make heads or tails of the mill’s failing accounts when his personal affairs were so wildly out of order. He’d brought it all on himself, though, first by messing around with Bryga after he’d sworn up and down to June that no infidelities would ever happen again and then by passing the bus and not stopping when he’d spotted Zeke’s wrecked car. He hadn’t offered Fred Flyte his job back either. He wondered again what June had done with the mitten, knowing he would never ask her, and he reassured himself that burying Suzie was the first step in putting the whole mess behind him forever.
It didn’t feel that way, though. He gazed again out the window at the ice sheets on the river, slipping and bumping against one another. For one thing, in searching the crash site Abel had gone and found goddamn Gert Snow’s bones, thereby uncovering a business Cal’s father and Cal himself had tried very hard to keep quiet. And then there was the question of Fergus. If he died, Cal would have even more potential blood on his hands, while if he lived, it could be worse yet. He might remember.
The phone rang, shrill as a crow, and Cal jumped. June was still sleeping. Everyone else was off for the day. There was only one person he could think of who might try to call him here on a Sunday, and he’d vowed that he would never let himself so much as look at her again. The phone continued to ring four, five more times, then fell into defeated silence. Cal opened the ledger book, found his place, and took a deep breath. First to order the mill accounts. Then he’d go to St. Bart’s and take care of his own.
Holding on to saplings and various trees for support, Mercy made her way early on the morning of Suzie’s funeral down what looked like a deer trail to the bottom of the ravine, where the river bent and pooled in a big angry turn, its waters beating back against themselves, putting up a hard fight. With every inch she gained on the river, Mercy stepped more slowly, making sure of her footing. To fall into the maw of the Androscoggin alone out here would be disastrous, she knew. She took off her hat and wiped sweat from her forehead, staring at the churn of the current.
If she followed the bank north a little ways, she’d come to the site of the crash. The bus had since been winched up with no small amount of trouble by a towing crew, snapping branches and uprooting small trees as it went, leaving a long and painful scar gouged into the earth. There were no doubt plenty of things of interest left behind and overlooked, but Mercy wasn’t concerned with them. Thus she chose to walk south, doubling back on her route, but lower down now, skirting the river. The tree line thinned as she stepped along the bank, avoiding the water that so terrified her. She walked for several minutes, then paused and let out a three-beat warble of a whistle.
It was the hunting signal Zeke had taught her, the one that just she and her brother knew. Four days she’d waited to try it, only to hear resounding silence. She pursed her lips and blew again, not expecting anything different, but this time she heard a faint rustle and then looked into the trees just in time to see her brother darting out of them. He motioned her to thicker cover, putting a finger to his lips. “We got to make this fast,” he whispered, looking around nervously. “They’ve had dogs out here.”
“Hey,” Mercy said softly, her eyes widening. One of his eyes was swollen, and the other was bloodshot. His left cheek was bruised, and his bottom lip had a cut with dried blood crusted on it. He slid down onto the ground and tried to smile. “Guess I missed Thanksgiving.”
Mercy shrugged, then took off the pack she was carrying and sank onto the ground as well. She’d brought some stale bread and the last hunk of the government cheese Zeke had scored in Berlin when they’d arrived. “You didn’t miss much.” She thought of the green-bean recipe she’d pilfered from Hazel’s homemaking magazine, which was still folded in her coat pocket. It seemed like a coded fragment from another life—one to which she’d lost the key.
Zeke took the food gratefully, but to her surprise he didn’t immediately begin to devour it. He had to be hungry, though. Four days in the woods. Even if he’d been poaching game, he’d still be starved for bread, for something hot and satisfying. Zeke regarded Mercy warily. He seemed to be waiting for her to speak, and when she didn’t, he went ahead and filled the growing silence. “Did Hazel fire you yet?”
Mercy’s head snapped up. This was so typical of her brother. Here she’d been worried sick about him, and he greeted her not with reciprocal concern, or even with thanks for the food, but with an accusation. That was Zeke, though. He was capable of great tenderness, she knew, but only on his terms.
Zeke nudged her. “Well, did she?”
“No. Of course not.”
He snorted. “You think she still trusts you?”
Mercy jutted her chin and said nothing.
“It’s not bound to last, you know.”
Zeke reached over and gently touched her on the shoulder. “When will you and Hannah be ready to leave? I can manage in the woods fine, but I think for all our sakes it’d be better if we hit the road sooner rather than later. They’re going to string me up if they find me.”
Mercy bent her legs and pressed her lips against the knees of her dirty jeans. Her ass was getting wet from sitting, but that was her own damn fault. She knew better than to plant herself on the bare ground. Zeke had imparted that to her. He’d taught her everything about life in the woods. Which side of trees moss grew on. How to tell when a storm was brewing. Not to dampen your own fool butt by plopping it on the ground. But there was terrain in the world, Mercy was beginning to realize, that only a woman was equipped to navigate.
It wouldn’t be difficult to leave. She could have everything ready in less than an hour. The RV had half a tank of gas, enough to get them some distance. Maybe they could try driving south, down to the warm Gulf waters, or out to the Rockies. They’d have to pick up work on the way, but surely they’d find something. Enough to get by. They were experts in that.
Then Mercy pictured how Hannah’s face would crumple when Mercy told her to gather her things and get a move on. Hannah was counting down the days until she started real school, and she loved the little library in town, where, for the first time, she had a card in her own name.
Mercy chewed a thumbnail. They hadn’t been in Titan Falls long, but already she could feel the beginnings of strings tying them to the place. It wouldn’t be so terribly hard to break them, but Mercy found that she didn’t want to. She thought about the Christmas when Zeke had presented Hannah with those butterflies. This year was bound to be just as lean, but surely they could get a tree and decorate it. Mercy could sew some ornaments from rags, and Zeke could carve Hannah something whimsical out of fir or knotty pine—a cat with a moving tail or a bird you could blow into and make it whistle. He was clever enough with his knife to do it, to make a whole menagerie come to life out of the dullest wood. Hannah was getting to an age where she would benefit from a steady home, but Mercy wasn’t sure she could do it alone. Without Zeke she could provide shelter, but not a real family. And besides, this land was theirs.
She pushed her knees back down onto the wet earth and regarded her brother. Even separated from him by more than a ravine, she would always be able to see the good streak that ran through him, shiny as a seam of metal in a mine, but it pained her that no one else could perceive that. It was as if there were two Zekes superimposed cockeyed on top of each other: the mute and ill-spoken public version versus the loving brother. All Mercy wanted to do was to twist the lens and bring the two together.
She focused back on the ravine. They didn’t have much time if she was going to voice her suspicions about the accident. Ever since she’d seen that mud on Cal McAllister’s car, they’d been building in her like a bank of angry storm clouds. This was her chance to let them go. She turned on her brother, fury growing in her. “Look me in the eye and tell me if you were the one who really caused that crash.”
Zeke slid his gaze away again to some unidentifiable point in t
he middle distance. It was an old trick of his—getting lost in time and space. “Does it matter? You know I’ve done enough bad shit that it was gonna catch up to me sometime.”
Mercy put her hands on her thighs. Her palms were sweating. She opened them, her fingers tingling like they’d fallen asleep. The angrier she grew with her brother, the more her hands burned, and she wondered if this is what Arlene had felt when she laid hands on someone to do a healing. Maybe there was a finer line than Mercy had ever imagined between great anger and great love, and without the one you would never be able to feel the other. “Yours aren’t the only tire prints on that road. I saw that clear as day.”
Zeke clenched his teeth. “Mine are the only ones that matter.”
Mercy sighed, frustrated. Ever since Zeke had come out of jail, it was like he was both here and there all the time, tuned to two channels at once so he never got any kind of clear picture going in his head. One minute he’d be gutting a strung-up deer like he’d done a thousand times before, his jeans sitting low on his hips, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and the next his eyes would go glassy and gray, as if his soul had been swept away in a fierce current and pulled out to a chaotic sea.
Whenever Mercy asked what it had been like while he was locked up, Zeke just said it was nothing she needed to know about, that it was the landscape of a bad dream—scorching in the summer and chilly in winter, gritty the whole fucking time. But something had happened to him, Mercy knew, and she always felt it was all her fault. If Zeke hadn’t stumbled into that clearing in the trees, he never would have half killed those two men, who in the end had walked away as free from guilt as newborn fawns, although physically scarred forever. She sighed. “Do you remember anything from the crash?”
Mercy Snow Page 12
