Ash Falls

by Warren Read

  The crash itself was finished in the time it took him to lose a single breath. One moment his body was being jerked in all directions and the next he was hanging like a fish, still hooked tightly to the belt. He looked up into a swirl of dust and grit. A hard pang stabbed his side, and his legs felt as if they were just coming out of a coma. From the front seat, one of the men mumbled in low tones; Ernie could see through the turning cloud the tangle of arms and legs, bare skin feathered with crimson. The right rear door looked straight up into the sky. He undid his buckle and leaned to the front headrest to see the redhead crumpled over the driver, thick neck glaring through settling dirt. His body shifted and his arm moved from his side, ever slightly.

  “Oh Jesus!” He wailed like a stung child. “Jesus oh Jesus!”

  Ernie reached forward and put his hand on the guy’s side.

  “Don’t you fucking go anywhere,” he said to Ernie.

  Red dust churned the interior, the taste of iron and grass settling in Ernie’s mouth. His movements seemed to come without thought, his belly over the seat back, hands snatching wallets from pockets, swatting the redhead’s feeble hand away. A .45 pistol sat in the glove compartment, the safety still engaged.

  “Don’t you do it,” the passenger said, a voice flooded, washed in spit or blood, Ernie made no effort to check which. He took the gun and sat back on his haunches and pulled the cash from the billfolds.

  “I never hurt you,” he said, tossing the wallets back to the front. He tucked the pistol into his waistband. “No matter what, you make sure they know I never hurt either one of you.”

  Wire spilled in through the broken window, and he separated the strands with care and intention, as if it might explode in his hands. He slid through the shattered window, the scratch of glass against his jeans and the metal teeth of the barbs biting at his skin. And when he hit the ground he scurried the slope to the road that was ice against his palms, and a breeze crept its fingers down the front of his shirt.

  It was wide open; in all directions there was nothing but sage and boulders and sky. In the distance behind him, where the blue and red chevron glowed over the little cinderblock station, a big rig was just pulling out from the pumps. It swung a wide left and took to the road, stuttering into gear as it climbed the hill toward them.

  The shouting from the car faded as he ran on, every step over rocks and the sandy soil a drumbeat into the bottoms of his sneakers. There came a flash vision of An Khe again, of endless rice fields and the crying of insects, and his throat burned as he fought to pull air into his lungs. He thought of the place west of the mountains, the weeping green cedars and clouds of moss, of the whisper of Patrick’s voice at the other end of the phone and the feel of Bobbie’s hair as he wound it loosely through his fingers.

  Taking the pistol from his hip, he held it, feeling the smooth steel against his palm. He was no stranger to guns, but it had been a long time, and he sure didn’t remember the weight being so noticeable. He reached back as far as he could, as far as Walla Walla maybe, and launched it through the air. It sailed in a grand arc, almost disappearing against the ashen sky before finally dropping behind a swale of rock. Behind him, the noise of a big rig swelled as it came closer, and he picked up his pace, stumbling over the raw terrain as he trained his eyes on the tiny farmhouses freckling the far horizon.

  Marcelle Foster (Otherwise Known as Marcelle Henry)

  The girl who had waited almost a full year to take the name Mrs. Eugene Henry pushed her husband’s leg from her own and slipped carefully from beneath the sheets. She dropped the cotton robe over herself and took the staircase from the basement to the kitchen in a complete darkness, her hand sliding along the wood paneling all the way until she felt the light switch near the top. She moved through the doorway like she was air, and then she tiptoed through the dimly lit space to the sink. Turning the cold halfway around, she let the water run freely down the drain so that the swirl and the lapping would echo throughout the small kitchen and hopefully mask the noise she would soon be making.

  Outside it was full night. The cone of light from the streetlamp did nothing more than illuminate a gray-blue spot beneath it, but the neat line of houses across the street, the strip of contorted, half naked Japanese cherries, and the serration of low mountains that stood behind them all gave but thin hints of their presence. Marcelle pulled back the drapes, and a vaporous light seeped in.

  Her stomach rolled. She was wearing the threadbare cotton robe over drugstore-bought underpants and an old t-shirt that belonged to Eugene. Her hand lay over her ample belly, and she peered back at the closed basement door. She glanced to the pantry then stared back into the silver shimmer of the moving sink pan. Marcelle considered how the kitchen felt cleaner in the fog of night when she was up and around and everyone else was in bed, dead to the world. The business of stained, daisy-riddled wallpaper and mismatched hand towels hanging from cabinet and oven handles and mugs dangling from knobby racks all blended into a muted background of random shapes and shadows of the kitchen that was not her own. The whole world was sound asleep. The people in this house, and outside, all down Shale Street probably clear into town and as far as anyone could go. Nobody was up. Only her, like she was the last human standing alive in the world.

  She was so damned hungry.

  “What if I went into the pantry,” she asked herself. “Just opened the damn door and took whatever I wanted, ate every last thing in there and to hell with them all. They could kiss my big round ass,” she said with only the curling of a smile, and she leaned back against the counter and bounced herself from its edge a few times thinking about what she should do next. She wanted to eat. She wanted to eat something, anything, and then go back to bed not with Eugene but next to him. Then she wanted to sleep in a little, and she didn’t know what should come next. “It’d be nice,” she thought, “if I could get dressed up and go to school today.” Of all the stupid ideas she had been violated with repeatedly over the years, the last thing she ever imagined would come back to get her would be that she would actually miss school. But it was true. To be back in Mr. Walner’s biology class with all her friends, or any friend, whatever friend might be left there, to just sit there and listen would be wonderful. And she would write the important things down and eat her lunch on a tray in the cafeteria and talk to her teachers. Real conversations this time, though. No arguing.

  But the thing was, married girls didn’t still go to high school. She had said these very words to as many people as would listen, and a few who told her to just shut the hell up and go already. She’d left school for the pure reason of proving to everyone just how much she was ready to settle down like a grown woman and be married to Eugene Calvin Henry from over on Shale Street in the cedar-shingled house with the Japanese Cherries across the street. Did they know Eugene Henry, she would ask, and they’d roll their eyes and say, “Oh yeah, we know him. Everyone knows Eugene.” But at the time Marcelle had only been in Ash Falls just over a year. She had no way of knowing the trail of dirt her boyfriend had left behind him in that town.

  “But we’re in love.” She caught herself saying this aloud, as she searched the dimly lit pantry for what she wanted right then. They were in love, she had insisted to others. And people in love should get married, no matter if they’re sixteen or twenty-three or whatever.

  And even though her own mother said, “Marcelle, you’re too young to be even thinking about moving out, much less getting married,” Marcelle would not cave. Her mother began to cry then, and in turn, Marcelle cried louder, and when her mother repeated, “You’re not old enough to get married,” Marcelle coughed out, “I am too old enough!” Her mother whimpered some more before she got up from the sofa and walked to the kitchen.

  When she took her keys from the counter she swung them by the ring and sighed. “Well, Marcelle’s going to do what Marcelle’s going to do, so I suppose there isn’t a whole hell of a lot I can say about it. Just don’t expect me to keep your room m
ade up for you.”

  And she didn’t. Even more, Marcelle’s mother cleaned the whole apartment out within a month after the wedding, leaving Ash Falls altogether, gone over the mountains to Spokane where her sister and her husband ran a biker bar that needed a waitress to work the swing shift.

  There was a hard clanging, and the furnace kicked, and a rush of warm air spilled out from the grate in the wall across the floor and over Marcelle’s socked feet. It then rose in a pleasant updraft, tickling the thin hem of her bathrobe and rising to warm her naked skin.

  The plastic on the cookie bag was so loud, like snapping kindling in a fire, louder even than the running faucet. Her stomach rumbled again, and her mouth was watered, and when she moved from the pantry to the sink her socks skated easily over the linoleum. Still, everything she did now made far too much noise for someone standing in the kitchen in the middle of the night. She considered going all out, all at once, just ripping open the package like it was a bandage over a scab. Fast as a blink and then it would all be done.

  She managed to tear it enough to slip out a half-dozen cookies from the tray, and then she quickly returned the package to its shelf. He would ask about it, probably, the next day as he packed his lunch for work. He would blame her, but she would play dumb when he held the package into the air and accused her of eating them. “Maybe it was your mom or dad that got into them,” she would say then add, “How am I supposed to know what they do during the day, I don’t watch their every move.” They would deny it if he asked, but he would have no compulsion to trust one over the other, so Marcelle would at least be in a three-way possibility, and she could live with that until the weekend when he’d finally let it go.

  If Marcelle’s mother had raised the roof over the marriage, Eugene’s own parents barely issued a word. Mr. Henry asked Eugene what his plans were after the wedding, how he thought he would support a wife and children. “Because kids,” he said, “have a way of showing up whether you want them to or not.”

  “I’ll figure it out,” Eugene said, and then Mr. Henry just laughed and repeated what Eugene had said.

  “You’ll figure it out, huh?” he said. He looked at Marcelle then, shook his head as if she had just been swindled of everything she owned, and walked out the door to his job in Lake Stevens, where he worked the drive-through window at a bank.

  When they told Mrs. Henry not a half hour later, Oh Dear was all she seemed to have the capacity to say. She’d been making lace at the round table in the dining room, the wood bobbins fanned out in front of her like the rays of the sun. And she just stopped short, gone from a live movie to a snapshot on a page. Her dry lips pushed themselves out, and her brow caved like a skinny old screech owl, and she stared hard at her hands that still held tightly to the bobbins. She blinked a few times, and then just as quickly she broke loose from her trance, continued lacing and spinning out that tangle of a doily that might as well have been her own private web.

  “I suppose that means you’ll both be staying in the basement then,” she said.

  Eugene answered, “Where the hell else would we stay?”

  “Well all right then.”

  There was a sudden creaking behind Marcelle. “What’s the matter, you can’t sleep?” The voice was dry and sickly, and Marcelle knocked her knee against the cabinet when she heard it. She tried to shove whatever cookies she hadn’t eaten into the clutter of canisters and small appliances that sat at the far reaches of the countertop. Mrs. Henry stood in the kitchen alcove, thick terrycloth robe nearly smothering her tiny body as it seemed to wrap itself twice around her and then some.

  “You get hungry all of a sudden?”

  “No.”

  “There’s oranges in the wood bowl, probably some chicken in the fridge still from dinner unless Mr. Henry ate it all before bed.”

  She came into the kitchen, and the blue light from the window washed over her and made her a ghost. She always reminded Marcelle of a giant bird, always pinched tight and nervous, her movements clumsy and random, and little comma-like eyes that darted from one place to another when she talked. Sometimes Marcelle would make sudden noises on purpose, drop a book or slam a drawer, just so she could see Mrs. Henry jump and fan herself with her bony hands. She reached behind Marcelle and found a cookie that had been too slow to escape.

  “Marcelle,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “You know what. I know Eugene’s been on you about your weight.”

  “Not so much.”

  “Oh come on, now. Eugene doesn’t do anything not so much.” She tucked the cookie into her robe pocket and shut off the running water. “You know, it’s normal for a wife to put on a little weight after getting married, but you don’t want to let it get out of hand. You should have an orange.” She glanced nervously around the kitchen. “Is everything on schedule?”

  “On schedule?”

  “You know.” She jutted her chin out and peered at Marcelle’s stomach. “With your monthly.”

  “Yes ma’am.” Marcelle hoped it was. Things had been normal so far, but her next period wasn’t due to come for another couple weeks or so, so anything was possible. They were being careful. Most of the time.

  “Well, you’re going to drive yourself crazy sneaking around like this,” Mrs. Henry said. “But I guess you’re still learning.”

  Marcelle wrapped her arms around the fullness of her waist and fiddled with the elastic band of her underpants. Her cheeks felt hot and her heart pounded below her dropped chin. Mrs. Henry had taken the sponge and was wiping the crumbs from the tile.

  Finally Marcelle asked, “Learning what?”

  “Learning what,” Mrs. Henry mimicked her. She shook her head and tossed the sponge back into the sink. Her beady eyes gleamed black in the dull light and her head moved in little tics as she talked. “Learning how to be a wife. You kids think married life is like playing house, nothing more than dating with no curfew. But it’s not, young lady. Boys will put up with things in the back seat of their car that they won’t tolerate in their own house.”

  Marcelle didn’t know what Mrs. Henry was saying, but she thought it sounded like she was talking about sex, even though sex was something Mrs. Henry would never talk about, not to anyone much less her son’s wife. Marcelle looked to the robe pocket and wondered what the plans for that cookie might be.

  “Eugene doesn’t have to put up with that much from me,” she said.

  “Well,” Mrs. Henry said with a tilt of her head, “It’s best to keep it that way.” She walked past Marcelle and stopped at the doorway to the hall. “I won’t say anything to him about the cookies. But, honey, it would be a good idea if you’d try harder. Pay attention to what he says more and stop sneaking around like this. It would make things easier all the way around.”

  Marcelle listened to the bedroom door close, and then she retrieved the two cookies that had made it into the shelter of the dry goods canisters. As she rolled the chocolate and cream with her tongue she added up the numbers again, and she figured that it had been almost five months since the wedding.

  It had been held here, in this house, on a spring day that was overcast and sickly gray. The vows were read from a book riddled with paper note cards, on the other side of the wall, in the living room, among a small collective of family members and just a few friends.

  It was quiet, more a funeral than a wedding really. The minister was someone they didn’t even know, from East Monroe, as no minister in Ash Falls would marry them. They’d considered the justice of the peace, but the one thing that Mr. and Mrs. Henry had wanted out of the wedding was that the two kids be joined by a man of God. The bouquet of carnations and baby’s breath had come from Marcelle’s mother, and the white veil was the only genuine wedding touch that Marcelle had been allowed to wear. Eugene’s mother gave it to her to borrow, but only because Eugene had insisted.

  The kitchen had been something else altogether, though. The food—green sherbet and soda punch, Jello salad
with pears and whipped cream, twice-baked potatoes, tuna casserole, and chicken fingers. And then there was the spinach dip in the giant dugout bread loaf—it had all been positioned over the expanse of the white hexagon counter tiles like a promise of the bounty that would surely come to such a beautiful young couple. And the cake. Marcelle had drawn it out herself on paper, wrote the poem, and made up the intricacies of the curled border, and brought it to Stan Halvorson at the Red Apple on her own. She asked him to bake it just as she had drawn it, and while he hadn’t been exact, it was close enough. She was able to brag to everyone that it had all been her. It was the best part of the whole wedding.

  It was cold in the basement where the furnace lived its loud life yet refused to share its heat. Eugene had splayed himself over the entire width of the mattress, and when she prodded his thigh he snorted and raised his head from the pillow.

  “What’s going on,” he mumbled. “Why are you up?”

  “I had to pee.”

  She crawled under the layers of quilt and afghans and he leaned into her not to kiss her, but to smell her. “You been eating chocolate.” His voice was clear now, and hard.

  “No,” she lied.

  “You must think I’m stupid.” And then he took his index finger that still had the odor and grit of engine grease, and he dug into her mouth, ran his callused skin over her gums until she snapped her head to the side. She heard the click of his lips kissing away his finger, and he said, “I can taste it Marcelle. Bad enough you’ve got to sneak out of bed in the middle of the night so you can stuff your fat face with my cookies, but then you got to lie to me like I’m some retard, like I don’t know Oreos when I smell them.”

  He went on, only quieter or maybe it was because Marcelle began to close her ears to his voice. It was just the same, and she was used to it, and it was probably what married people did anyway. Fight, curse, cry, and then go to sleep, and wake up in the morning like nothing ever happened, like the whole sad thing had been only a dream.