Valley of Ashes

by Cornelia Read

  That got me a wink.

  He bit the cap off his felt-tip, spiral pad flipped open against one raised knee. “So you’ve got a garage, two cars out on Baseline, and now the gas station.”

  He started jotting. “Right… right… Any link to those brush fires last month?”

  A squeal of protest from the other end of the line.

  “Don’t get your panties in a knot, Benjamin…”

  Rapid chatter in response to that.

  “Come on, it’s the classic pattern—start with a couple of fields… shove burning cardboard under a few doors, see if anything catches… but we both know he’s fucking with you.”

  Benny sighed, loud and clear from wherever he was in real life.

  “What do you have on accelerants?”

  Silence.

  “Benny,” said McNally, “the goddamn cars were serious escalation. And that gas station would’ve been a nightmare if you hadn’t caught it so fast. Kudos by the way, seriously.”

  Another sigh as he looked up at me, his expression telegraphing gratitude for my patience.

  “Look,” he told Benny, “you and me both know where this train’s headed. We’re not talking about some teenage stoner playing Ring-Around-the-Dumpster with a fistful of matchbooks.”

  His pal’s Charlie-Brown-grown-up wah-wah grew stentorian at that. Downright affronted.

  “Benny… He’s already tipped his hand, this guy. There’s gonna be a history. Not here, but somewhere. This isn’t after-school fledgling angst, it’s a grown-up getting the lay of the land, checking to see who’s paying attention.”

  More phone noise.

  “Right… right…”

  A question.

  “Of course not. Come on, how long we known each other?”

  McNally tilted back again, tucking the pen behind his ear. “But I find out you gave those smug Daily Camera pricks a damn thing before me, you’re blackballed straight out of poker night.”

  That got him a good laugh from Benny.

  “Yeah, yeah… kiss Ellen for me. Tell her I’m still waiting to sweep her off into the sunset the minute she realizes how little you deserve her.”

  He sat up straight and dropped the phone in its cradle. “Sorry about that, Madeline.”

  I shrugged. “Hey, permission to eavesdrop on talent is always a treat.”

  I could tell he liked me for that.

  “You’ve known this guy awhile,” I said.

  “Benny? We were smoke-jumpers together, summers back in college.”

  “Leaping out of a plane when the ground’s on fire? Now, there’s a job requiring serious balls.”

  “Benny stuck with it, went through the academy. Now he’s a muckety-muck here. Just made chief.”

  “While you opted for the big-money glories of journalism?”

  He snorted, hooking a thumb over one shoulder, southward toward Golden. “School of Mines. Geology.”

  “How’d you end up here?”

  “Got tired of fucking people over for the benefit of petroleum companies, couple years back.”

  I watched him ruffle through one of the stacks of papers on his desk. He located a sheet of stiff ivory woven and pulled it out: my résumé.

  McNally ran his eyes down the thing, lips pursed.

  I cleared my throat. “What’d Benny tell you about accelerants, speaking of petroleum? It doesn’t sound like this guy’s dabbling in explosives yet.”

  He looked up and cocked an eyebrow at me, curious.

  This was probably not the time to bring up the guy who’d tried offing me in a fire, back in upstate New York.

  I shrugged again, eliding over that with a sideways head-tilt. “I used to teach high school. One of my kids was into arson. Eventually he started blowing shit up.”

  “ ‘Shit’ like what?”

  I looked out the window. “His grand finale was a helicopter.”

  “Anyone in it?”

  I turned back toward him, nodded, dropped my eyes. “One guy. Not exactly the world’s foremost humanitarian.”

  McNally whistled through his teeth, tilting the chair back. “What’d the kid use?”

  “A big wad of C-4, remotely detonated with a soldered-together fistful of crap shoplifted from Radio Shack.”

  He smiled, waiting for more.

  I shrugged. “Allegedly.”

  9

  C-4,” said McNally. “Allegedly.”

  I crossed my arms, still looking him dead in the eye. “I’d resigned from the school by then. Being a teacher… well, let’s just say secondary school education wasn’t exactly my calling.”

  “Uh-huh.” He smiled, tapping the upper-right corner of my résumé slowly with the side of his index fingertip. “And you want to be a restaurant critic?”

  “Damn straight,” I said, thinking of Parrish and India.

  No crime beats, nothing stupid or dangerous. I was a mother, for chrissake.

  “You have someplace in mind, to start?” he asked.

  “Daddy Bruce’s Bar-B-Que, out on Arapahoe.”

  He liked that. “These pieces go about seven hundred and fifty words.”

  “Great.”

  “By Tuesday?”

  I nodded.

  He leaned back again, fingers steepled in front of his mouth.

  I waited.

  “On spec,” he said.

  “Oh joy, oh rapture unforeseen.”

  “You don’t sound surprised.”

  I shrugged again. “This isn’t the first time I’ve worked for an erstwhile hippie free weekly.”

  McNally cackled.

  Yeah, dude, you like me already.

  I crossed my arms. “And what do you pay if you actually have the wit to appreciate my deathless prose?”

  “Forty bucks. And we’ll reimburse for the meal.”

  “Look at me,” I replied, “living the goddamn dream.”

  I woke up the next morning to sunshine, birdsong, and my mother bringing me breakfast in bed.

  “Happy birthday, dear Madeline,” she said, carrying in a tray on which she’d arranged a croissant, a linen napkin, a butter plate, and a bud vase filled with sprigs of forsythia that I was pretty sure our neighbors wouldn’t begrudge me, considering.

  “Oh, Mom, how glorious!”

  “I would’ve made you coffee, but I have no idea how to work that ridiculous contraption in your kitchen.”

  She brought in a box of presents and then the girls, so they could cavort on the duvet next to me while I opened everything.

  For lunch, I pitched the idea of barbecue.

  It was so warm and sunny out that we decided to put Parrish and India in their little red wagon and walk to Daddy Bruce’s, before Mom hit the road again for California.

  The sky overhead was pristine and deep and cloudless, its hue so rich I pointed up and said to Mom, “If egg yolks were blue instead of yellow, that’s what they’d look like.”

  We smelled the place blocks before we could see it, the dry mountain air perfumed with meat-rich smoke. Daddy Bruce’s tiny white shack was banked with cords of split hardwood and set in the middle of a parking lot beside one tree that was just starting to leaf out.

  Squint and this was rural-route backwoods: Carolina, Alabama, East Texas. Some green crossroads place where the first drops of afternoon rain sizzled to steamy nothing on hot metal roofs and pairs of old hounds drowsed in the shade of every sagging roadside porch.

  I parked the red wagon and hoisted Parrish to my hip as Mom reached down for India.

  There were two four-top tables, two bar stools, and a battered upright piano crowded inside, all four walls fluttering with thumb-tacked-up Bible verses and newspaper clippings in the front door’s draft.

  The man himself smiled from behind the back counter at all of us—grease-spattered white sleeves rolled to his elbows, baggy trousers belted with packing twine. I perused the menu and then asked for a pair of three-meat plates with coleslaw and beans.

  “Now,
aren’t those the two prettiest little girls,” said Daddy Bruce, grinning at Parrish and India in turn. “Are they twins?”

  I nodded, smiling back at him. “We just celebrated their first birthday.”

  “You have your hands full, young lady,” he said. “I’ll bring everything over when it’s ready, all right?”

  I thanked him profusely, shifting Parrish to my other hip as she crowed “Meow!” and grabbed at my hair.

  “And whatever you’d care to drink, please just help yourself from that there,” he said, laughing, as he pointed toward a grimy Styrofoam cooler on the floor beside the piano.

  Then he picked up a cleaver and went to work on ribs and chicken and a big hunk of brisket.

  I walked back toward the table Mom had chosen, stopping off at the drinks cooler. “Do you want anything?”

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  I grabbed a couple of Sprites anyway. “Hey, live large. I’m getting reimbursed.”

  When I’d settled into a chair with Parrish on my lap, I opened both sodas and handed one to Mom.

  “To the revolution,” I said, raising mine in the air.

  “Wherever it may be,” my mother replied, clinking my Sprite with hers.

  As we each took a sip, Daddy B came out from behind the counter with our meat-laden paper plates held high.

  “I hope you all enjoy your meal,” he said, depositing them on the table before us.

  “Oh, this looks wonderful,” said Mom, smiling up at him.

  I thanked him, too, as Parrish reached out to grab a slice of Wonder Bread, toppling a rib off my groaning plate.

  Mom sampled a bite of brisket, then put her fork down and looked at me, suddenly serious. “Madeline, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

  She cleared her throat.

  I pulled Parrish tighter against my belly, the rib I was about to take a bite out of paused in midair. “Is everything okay?”

  “Well,” she said, “I got married. Three months ago.”

  India slapped her hands into Mom’s baked beans and started paddling around in them. Neither of us moved to stop her.

  “Um,” I said. “Wow.”

  Mom’s fourth marriage, commenced on a Valentine’s Day, had lasted all of ten months. Considering it was to this straight preppy Republican guy who lived in the most uptight and schmancy part of Maine, we offspring had been stunned the union endured through the subsequent Fourth of July.

  After that divorce she’d often joked that she should found Marriage Anonymous, so that if she ever again felt a wedding coming on she could call a friend to talk her out of it.

  But she’d never gotten married secretly before. And her waiting three months for the big reveal didn’t exactly make me want to know who Bachelor Number Five was.

  I put the rib down, untouched. “To whom?”

  “Bill Garrison.”

  Bill Garrison: my mother’s death-row pen pal, currently residing at San Quentin. He’d spent the last twelve years appealing his conviction for the murder of two pawnbrokers in Joshua Tree, California—an event the biker friend who’d testified against him at trial claimed had been inspired by Garrison’s lack of funds to cover the eight hundred bucks he owed some local meth wholesalers.

  On the bright side, my siblings and I wouldn’t have to worry about generating the usual awkward new-stepdad small talk, come Thanksgiving or Christmas.

  But an appropriate response for my mother here and now wasn’t exactly something Emily Post could help me with.

  I wondered why Mom never seemed to marry anyone cool.

  Like, say, Daddy Bruce, who’d just plopped himself down at the piano and started in on the keys with some serious boogie-woogie chops.

  Sure, the man’s wardrobe could use an upgrade, Mom had never dated anyone black, and he had to be closing in on eighty—but he was charming, gainfully employed, probably not a predicate felon, and God knows he could cook.

  “Mazel tov,” I said anyway, toasting her with my bottle of Sprite and all the enthusiasm I could fake. “And may you both enjoy every happiness.”

  “We’ve already had two conjugal visits,” she confided, giggling. “And since he’s been in jail for twelve years, I know he doesn’t have AIDS.”

  I bit my tongue, literally, at that sheer departure from logic—then scootched my plastic fork under the coleslaw, circumventing a sudden and overwhelming desire to stab its tines into my right eyeball, repeatedly.

  But then I looked up at her, and realized how relieved she was to have let me in on her secret.

  My mother was beaming, damn it—as truly happy as I’d seen her since the death three years earlier of her greatest love, Bonwit.

  And, okay, Bonwit had been a total asshole, but still… Who the hell was I to take potshots at my mother’s joy?

  I reached across the table to squeeze her hand. “Good for you, Mom.”

  Admittedly, I was still a teensy bit bummed that her first après-Bonwit marriage—to the guy from Maine, who always urged us to order shrimp cocktails when he took us out for dinner—had lasted a mere ten months.

  Mom walked out without taking a dime from this man. She’d even given the chunky-sapphire engagement ring back.

  When the guy’s mother died several months later, his cut of the familial chemical-dynasty inheritance had been $187 million. After taxes.

  Oh fucking well.

  I pulled a notepad and pencil out of the diaper bag by my feet and stood up. “You got the girls for a minute, Mom? I need to get a couple of quotes from Mr. Bruce.”

  Just after I’d hugged Mom good-bye on our front porch, she reached into her bag and pulled out a check.

  “When you guys were little,” she said, handing it to me, “Mummie and Daddy started giving me an allowance of a hundred dollars a month. I’d like to do the same for you. Maybe you can use it for a little babysitting while you’re doing this newspaper job, or so you and Dean can go out for dinner.”

  I kissed her cheek and hugged her again. “You’re amazing, Mom. Thank you.”

  “I remember how it was,” she said. “Having a little something of your own really matters.”

  Before I tucked the girls into their cribs that night, I gave them each an extra kiss. “That’s from your dad,” I said. “He is apparently having too much fun partying in expense-account New Orleans to remember his wife’s birthday, and that, as such, it might have been a good idea to call home.”

  India murmured and shifted onto her side, her eyes already closed.

  I was officially an ancient thirty-two-year-old with an AWOL husband and a brand-new stepfather on death row, but my little daughters totally fucking rocked.

  And I figured I might as well write up the Daddy Bruce piece, since there was nothing decent on TV and the girls were asleep.

  My friend Melissa, back in New York, insisted that placentas were composed pretty much entirely of maternal brain cells, “which is why we’ve all gotten so goddamn stupid now that we’ve given birth.”

  Her point was borne home to me once more when I sat down in front of the computer in our laundry room closet and tried to start writing about lunch.

  I had vestigial inklings of how to write an article, don’t get me wrong. It was just that all the little gobbets of quotable triviana orbited my head like some Elmer Fudd halo of stars and bluebirds, chirping and whirling in the wake of Bugs Bunny’s sledgehammer.

  I stared at the blinky cursor, thinking about how Carolina-style barbecue was vinegar-rather than tomato-based… how Daddy Bruce helped his father (Daddy-Daddy?) dish up several thousand free meals in Denver, every Thanksgiving… how I’d found his culinary artistry more uplifting than a truckload of Prozac…

  And then I just started typing and free-associating: Melville’s Ishmael blathering about his “hypos,” Robert Johnson’s rosy-crossroads fixation (hat tip to Henry Miller best left only implied), nation sacks and John-the-Conqueror root, hardwood smoke and blue-tick hounds, Delta dia
sporas and the Great Migration, alienation and Angola and Alan Lomax and our collective yearning for authenticity… I mean, fuck it, why let a good liberal-arts education go to waste?

  By the time I was ready for bed, I had my word count—and at least a hint of my mojo back.

  10

  This has voice in spades,” said McNally, suede cowboy boots slung across his desk as he read through my draft the next day. “A little over the top, but I’d sure as shit rather rein you in than crowbar style into the usual flat blather.”

  He looked up at me, tapping the page ends square against his thighs. “Job’s yours if you want it.”

  “Excellent,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “You have little kids, right?”

  I nodded. “Twin girls.”

  He squinted at his watch. “Any way you might have a couple of hours free this afternoon?”

  Parrish and India were already at a drop-in day care center, run out of the same building that hosted the mother-and-toddler meetings I’d blown off for the last three weeks.

  The allowance check would cover at least a few more hours of babysitting there.

  Thank you, Mom.

  “I might be able to swing that,” I finally answered McNally. “What’ve you got in mind?”

  “Another fire. My pal Benny’s meeting me over there in twenty minutes, and I need a wingman to write the sidebar.”

  “About?”

  “Q and A with the arson investigator.”

  “What’s it pay?”

  “Twenty bucks.”

  “Babysitting’s gonna cost me more than that, McNally.”

  “Thirty,” he said, extending his hand.

  I shook it. “Can I borrow your phone?”

  McNally’s old Land Cruiser was splotchy-primer gray, cabbage roses of rust blooming through at the doorsills.

  The thing about SUVs in Boulder is that people actually need four-wheel drive, especially up in the canyons. I mean, navigating Fourmile or Sunshine or Lefthand in your Camry, September-to-June? Might as well RSVP “delighted” for the Donner Party, God help you.

  “Sweet ride,” I said, hauling myself up into the passenger seat.

  There was a VISUALIZE WHIRLED PEAS bumper sticker across the cracked door of his glove compartment and serious guy-smell: wet dog and neat’s-foot oil, maybe a hint of roll-your-own Bugler tobacco.