Ash Falls

by Warren Read

  She got up and walked to the window and looked out over the parking lot. The morning drizzle was supposed to have burned off by now, but yet here it still was, a stubborn, lingering annoyance that refused to loosen its grip on the mountain. Pelting the glass in tiny specks like Tom Cowen’s neck. Still, just across the street, old Mrs. Gilman knelt on a yellow pad in her garden digging up bulbs and laying them in a tidy pile in the middle of her fractured walkway.

  “The sheriff said they got everyone out looking for him,” Bobbie said. “It’s just a matter of time. She looked down past Mrs. Gilman’s house, down the long stretch of Main Street. “He won’t set foot in this town,” she added. “So you can quit worrying about it.”

  Tina came and stood beside her at the window. “I know you’re not trying to minimize this Bobbie. But he killed someone, and half the town was there. Some of them still teach right here in this school.”

  “I know that, Tina. I was there too. Right there.”

  “Yeah, then I know I don’t need to remind you of why he did it, either. Honest to God, I’m not trying to lay guilt on you for that. You say he won’t be coming around here, but you don’t know that for sure. I know men, and I know men who have been away for awhile, if you catch my drift.” She put her hand on Bobbie’s arm. “I don’t want to scare you, Bobbie, but you can’t be sure of anything.”

  Bobbie nodded. Her hair had broken loose from her barrette and was falling down over forehead into her eyes. She worked her knuckles into her palm. “I just don’t want to make a big deal out of it.”

  Tina moved in closer. “Have you talked to Hank?”

  Bobbie shook her head and felt the pressure of blood against the back of her eyes. She glanced over at the men. They were eating again now, and Tom seemed to be on his way back to his natural color. The last thing she wanted—besides involving Patrick—was to drag Hank Kelleher into this hornet’s nest all over again. But she guessed it was unavoidable.

  Tina took hold of Bobbie’s hand now and pressed her thumb to her wrist.

  “Why don’t you just come out for some drinks later? We can talk more about it there, if you want. You don’t want to be alone tonight.”

  The bell signaling the close of lunch drilled on the other side of the wall, and the roar of disappointed voices washed through the door. Bobbie glanced at the men who were now sweeping their trash into their hands, eyes glued to their fingers and feet. They pushed past her, out the door into the rush of teenagers streaming past.

  Patrick Luntz

  He crowded into the phone booth and the overhead light hummed and flickered through a ceiling mosaic of dead flies and fat, downy moths. Names and phone numbers layered the box and beckoned all along the glass and not a single one of them was somebody he knew or had even heard of. It was hard to believe that, in a town as small and dead end as Ash Falls, there was anyone within reach of a local phone number that he didn’t know. He dialed the operator.

  “I’d like to make a collect call.” He recited the nine digits, burned into his memory. “Collect from Spooky.”

  “From who?” The operator had a crisp, short way of speaking, as if she were judging him for even asking. As if this person with the weird name would have to explain himself first, convince her to place the call for him.

  “From Spooky. It’s just a nickname, but they’ll know who it is.”

  The line at the other end rang and rang, and Patrick prayed that the operator would give it time before cutting in, because it always took forever for anyone to pick up there. When at last the receiver clicked and the soft, deep voice on the other side said, “Sure, I’ll accept,” Patrick Luntz leaned against the cold glass of the booth and began to cry.

  He was a mile and a half outside of town before he rebalanced the Supersonics gym bag over his handlebars and veered the Schwinn from the highway onto River Road. He downshifted and drove hard up the swaybacked hill, past the old water tower to the tall, chain link gate that did a decent job keeping wanderers from venturing uninvited onto what was officially the Dorsay property, but what most people in Ash Falls still called The Old Dahlstrom Ranch. He fished the key from his pocket and undid the lock and swung the tall chain link gate, then pushed his bike past the aluminum post, through the salmonberry brambles with their seedy orange nubs, most of them dried up or already picked clean by birds. After closing the gate behind him, he took his gym bag and tossed it into the undergrowth. Then he repositioned himself on his seat and pushed off, lifted his feet from the pedals and let loose, coasting balls-out crazy down the rutted grassy drive to the bottom of the hill.

  This was his favorite part of the trip, the ride down the long drive to the minkyard where the wind could blow his hair back from his face and he could feel the fingers of the forest teasing his arms and legs as he made his descent. Here he flew beneath the low hanging hemlocks with their soft, feathery needles, and a gauntlet of bracken and sword fern and the occasional mammoth fan of a devil’s club with its needled stalks leaning ominously out into the drive. Near the bottom he came out into the bogs at last, where the understory was open and cathedral-like, and giant nurse logs lay rotting beneath blankets of moss and deer fern and pale yellow lichens, and tags of thick, rippled shelf fungus. Here the skunk cabbage grew in occasional stalks, their bright yellow flowers rising like erect dicks poking from behind leafy capes. Here, the sweetness of the long ride began to fade and the heaviness of a dank musk reminded him of the whole purpose of this long journey.

  At the north border of the yard the Stillaguamish River rolled by, icy and sluggish, with occasional pinwheels on the surface that liked to hold up the fallen leaves and errant branches on their journeys to Port Gardner Bay some sixty miles downstream. The waters of the Stilly have the kind of unnatural slate-green that exists only in the deep veins of a glacier fed river, and from this river Tin Dorsay hauled in rainbow and cutthroat, and steelhead, which he usually kept for himself, but sometimes sent home with Patrick, each wrapped in aluminum foil like a heavy bar of silver.

  Old man Tin stood at the tongue of the first mink barn, a pair of chunky saw horses on either side of him and several sun bleached two-by-four planks stretched between. At his feet lay a corded Skilsaw, and a light fall of sawdust scattered down his back and around his boots. Patched denim trousers hung loose from his twig body like paint-splotched drapery while taut, bright blue suspenders looped necessary over his shoulders. The flannel shirttails billowed from his beltline, and he paused between jerks on the tape measurer and hard pencil marks to tip his baseball cap and wipe down his shiny cue-ball head. He kept at this business as if he was a machine, his toothless grimace forming something of a duckbill and when he caught sight of Patrick out of his periphery he laid down the tape and waved him over.

  “Well if it isn’t old skunk head,” he called out. “Get on over here, boy, and let’s get started. Christsakes, where you been the day’s almost over.” He tottered to the door of the barn, legs in a wide gambrel. Patrick laid down the bike and hustled over to him. “What’d you get lost on your way over here?”

  “I’m only a few minutes behind.”

  “Yeah, well, I got things to do.” Tin yanked open the door and the eye-burning odor rolled out with it. “I been wanting to talk to you, kid. We lost a couple at the end. You know anything about it?”

  “They got out, or they’re dead?”

  “If they was dead, I’d of said they was dead,” the old man snapped. “They got out. Gone. Run for the hills. Capeesh? You must have been monkeying with the cage when you was here yesterday.”

  Patrick looked at Tin’s face and he was biting down on his lip, the flesh wrapped down tight over his gummed jaw like it was a dinner plate. The old man looked over the long rows of teeming cages.

  “I don’t mess with the doors. And I always double check them,” Patrick said. “Like you told me.”

  “Yeah, well, you must of no-checked that one cause it was wide open this morning when I come through with the feed
cart. Them sonsofbitches are long gone.”

  He wide-stepped down the aisle between the cages, and all around him the weasely critters twittered and paced, and some snapped at the mesh as he passed them by. Patrick followed him. The boy kept his hands in his pockets the whole way and took pains to avoid eye contact with the minks. Too often they worked their ways into his head at night while he tried to get to sleep, all marbley eyes and razor teeth. The more he could do to keep them at bay, he thought, the better off he was. Just as Tin was turning around one of the minks to his left, a good-sized silver blue male, made a hard lunge at the screen. Tin took a jolt back and gave a raspy report.

  “Yeah, yeah. All piss and vinegar now but we’ll see where you stand in a few weeks.”

  Patrick stole a glance at his watch.

  “You got somewhere you’d rather be?”

  “No. I got a bus to catch is all.”

  “A bus? Where the hell you got to go?”

  “The city.” It just came out, and it seemed okay to Patrick that it did. There wasn’t a reason to lie to Tin. After all, who did he have to tell?

  “Goin all the way into Seattle? Well, with that stripe in that hair of yours I suppose you’ll fit right in.” They got to the last rows and Tin waved a bony hand at the empty cage, its door laid open against the frame. “So what of it? This empty goddamned cage cost me pert near forty dollars. You got forty dollars to pay for it? I ought to make you work the week for free to pay it off.” He slammed the lid closed and latched it rough, like he was showing the cage a lesson more than he was showing the boy.

  The door creaked opened from the far end of the shed. It was Gus the Indian and he froze, staring with his mouth drooped, as if he had walked in on a murder.

  “What do you want?” Tin called.

  “The feeder won’t start.”

  “You check the gas?”

  “Yeah.” He bounced against the open door, casting a strip of outside light that breathed into the shed.

  Tin looked at Patrick again, and at the empty cage. “Goddamn it,” he said.

  Patrick didn’t say a thing. He had better sense than to implicate himself in something that was, more likely, the old man’s fault than his own. Tin Dorsay finally skulked off and Patrick reached into his pocket to switch on his Walkman, dialing up the volume so The Clash filled his head and drowned out the sounds of the squalling mink.

  He took himself from cage to cage, sometimes talking to the creatures, usually to himself, the driving guitar blasting from the headphones and drawing him closer to the memory of the music and the people he wanted so desperately to be with, the people like him, that packed the old church and pressed sweaty against each other as they danced, and climbed on the speakers where they swayed in shorts and no shirts. The musk that wafted up brought him back to bodies and machine smoke, and vortex of spinning lights and the boy Shadow who held his pose against the back wall, one foot propped behind him, two cigarettes hanging from a crooked grin.

  Patrick scooped out the soiled bedding, always tolerating the rips to his gloved fingers, grateful for the protection of leather. On a typical day he might take in a dozen mink bites to his hands and wrists, and at least as many sprays if he let himself face the ass end of any one of them. The first day at work his mother barred him from even coming into the house before stripping down in the mudroom and sealing his clothes in a plastic garbage bag. From then on a knee-length terrycloth robe always waited for him to the right of the kitchen door.

  Tin had brought in a truckload of alder shavings earlier in the week for Patrick to work into the straw for the mink nests. He moved from cage to cage on autopilot, each step and process mindless in its execution. Twist the latch open, sweep the mink out of the way, clean out the soiled bedding, refill with clean. Nasty animals pacing to the rear of their cages, or huddling against the sides, or sometimes hooking teeth into his leathered hands. Do it again. Twist the latch open, fill the bed, latching it closed, tight. One after the other, there wasn’t the slightest amount of thinking even required in a job like this, a monkey could do the same job and still get it right. Goddamned Tin, he thought. Who the hell is he to accuse me? Forty dollars my ass. Only an idiot would have left that cage open and I’m not a fucking idiot.

  In an hour, the minks were pawing through fresh chips, or were curled in the corners of cages, sleeping off the trauma of Patrick’s intrusion. He came back through the rows and double-checked the latches he had already checked once before. Tin walked through with him and did the same, painfully slow, before finally handing over the cash and setting Patrick free.

  The drive was now almost completely dark under the dense canopy, and Patrick barreled up the hill, standing straight up on the pedals and kicking until he thought his chest would rip open. At the gate he fished his bag from the bushes and flung it over his shoulder, then he pushed hard through the chilly drizzle to the open highway. He came into town, zigged through parked cars and alleyways to Junction Service Station, where he ducked into the bathroom and stripped himself naked by the sink. He filled the basin with cold water and hand soap and gave himself what he had once heard called A Whore’s Bath—which if he were to be honest, seemed fitting. As he stood there in the harsh light of the gas station john, toilet paper strewn on the floor and swabbing at his pits and ball sack with soap-soaked paper towels he wondered if the rancid air in his head was the room or his own mink-soaked body. He stuffed the farm clothes into his bag and slid on the bleach-splotched jeans and the Joy Division tee-shirt, which he covered with his heavy winter parka. He put on his red Converse shoes, splashed himself with a coat of cologne and then he was out, was back on the road, right on schedule, racing to the bus stop on Main Street where he shoved his bike deep into the bowels of the giant holly tree that hulked against the post office wall.

  Even though it was already close enough to dark, and the streets were quiet enough, and even though he only had a few minutes to kill he sat in the shadows of the awning behind the columns just in case. In case his mother should happen by or any other person on their way to The Flume who might say I saw your kid waiting for the bus to Everett and I hate to say it, Bobbie, but he looked a little queer to me.

  At six twenty-five, the wheezing transit rounded the corner. Three people stood with hands on dropped ceiling loops, hunched down and peering out the rain-soaked windows. They seemed to be looking right at him, staring at the lone young man with a skunk stripe down his head, a boy desperately waiting to leave the godforsaken mountain behind.

  Hank Kelleher

  Hank Kelleher stood in the center of a circle of gleaming white alder quarter trunks, remnants of a listing tree that he had felled by himself that morning with only a 16-inch Stihl and a tightly stretched cable. The cable he had cinched to a come-along, which then was attached a spar tree of sorts, a big cedar some distance from the cabin. He had winched the thing as far has he could, enough to draw the tree from the cabin toward the cedar spar. He braced his body against the saw, sinking the bar the rest of the way in to the gnarly trunk. There was a sharp crack and the trunk broke loose, kicking back from the stump and almost taking his legs along with it.

  Hank was thrown a few yards, into a clump of sword fern, the whole thing giving him more of a start than anything else. Close calls had happened before. With trees and such. This was his forest and he knew it well. He had for himself a tidy collection of second and third growth Doug Firs and red cedars, and Western Hemlocks and moss-covered stumps of the same with springboard notches that looked out from beneath the underbrush like the toothless grins of old men. The ghosts of men who had lost limbs of their own or whole lives, even, taken down by the errant descent of a widow maker or the man’s own careless action. Or both. He brought down four or five trees on average each year, so to him this situation with the bucking alder was a minor one.

  He took out his pocket watch and flipped back the nickel cover. It was almost noon. He’d split the entire length of the alder already, and by t
wo he had planned to stack it all in the shelter of the cedar grove and cover the whole thing with the new tarp he’d bought at the Coast to Coast that week, to let the wood season for burning the following year. This would give him plenty of time to get cleaned up and changed before she arrived.

  The air was cool and wet, still holding onto what felt like the last bit of the morning’s rain. There were low clouds covering the west face of the mountain and the high peaks poked above like jagged, floating white islands. It was coming down, all of it, the whole sky. In two hours’ time it would be pouring again, and Hank still had probably half a cord of wood to get under cover.

  His dog Toby was a wiry-haired mutt, more hound than terrier, and he scrambled on the west side of the creek bed, pacing the edges of the giant fern-pocked nurse log and scouring its perimeter. He pawed at the bed of oxalis and bleeding hearts and bunchberries with an almost giddy energy. A screwy pinch grabbed Hank’s lower back and he gave out a loud call. The dog stopped what he was doing and cocked his head in Hank’s direction, wagging his tail as if the call had been for him. When Hank took off the canvas work jacket and broke loose the suede gloves and sat down onto an upturned chunk of wood, Toby bounded through the low creek and came to him, and nuzzled his palms and cleaned the callused skin. Hank scrubbed at his ears.

  “Ain’t you the nursemaid,” he sang. “Checking up on the old man.”

  Hank arched his back and worked his fingers into the muscle above his belt loops and Toby climbed onto his lap. Hank felt it everywhere: his back, across his shoulders, even in his damned knees. There was a time when he could buck and split timber all day like this and not feel the least pinch the next morning. Still, he could point to a half-dozen men his age that wouldn’t last an hour with him at the woodpile. He was barely on the north side of sixty. There was still plenty of mileage left in him.