Ash Falls

by Warren Read

  The crunching of gravel drew Hank’s attention to the long driveway, and he gave the dog a firm pat on the ribs, pushing himself up from the ground. He ambled to the porch where he reached inside the door for his rifle, a Remington with bolt action, standard for the casual hunter, not that Hank would ever put himself in the category of either Casual or Hunter. The squirrely man in Coke-bottle glasses who lorded over the gun counter at Jerry’s Surplus had declared it a good rifle, for taking out deer and whatnot. “Pick that sonofabitch off from a hundred yards,” the man promised, and the latter fact was one that appealed to Hank. He never liked the idea of shooting at anyone but if he had to, he hoped it would at least be from a good distance away.

  He leaned back in to steal a glance at the clock. It was just past twelve. He gave a whistle to the dog, which jogged from the alder cuts to the porch where he took his place dutifully at Hank’s side. Hank rubbed at the dog’s ears and told him he was a good, good boy, but he held his eyes straight down the drive to the dip in the roadway.

  The toothy grill of one ugly Ford wagon rose up over the ridge, a mousy tap coming from its horn. A slender arm unfolded from the window and waved to Hank. At once, his blood seemed to warm and his lips drew back in a smile, and he set the rifle behind him. He raised a hand in mutual greeting, careful to show surprise over happiness. The car came to a rattled stop then knocked a couple of times before giving a final cough.

  The door swung open and Bobbie Luntz stepped out, wearing waffle-soled boots too big for her body, and a red flannel shirt filled well in the chest and tucked into her jeans. The shirtsleeves were cuffed neatly to the elbows. A knit handbag swung heavy over her shoulder, and as she rounded the front of the car there was that lack of symmetry in her walk. The long car ride out of Ash Falls, he imagined. Probably aggravated her leg for her. She gave a squeeze to her hip and leaned against the fender, and his heart fell again.

  “Well I’ll be damned,” she called out. “The Professor lives and speaks.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “You forgot about our date? Figures.”

  “I didn’t forget, but you’re a few hours early. You should have called first,” he said. “I could’ve shot you.”

  “I did call. Twice. Better check your phone line to see if you haven’t cut it again with all your digging.” She pushed off from the fender and walked toward him. “I haven’t seen that famous blue Chevy of yours in town lately. Is there a reason that you’re keeping yourself holed up?”

  “I’ve always got some reason to keep holed up,” he said. He came down from the porch. “Besides, the truck. It’s slipping gears some and I haven’t had a chance to take it in to have it looked at. But I guess I’m gonna have to do it soon. I gotta run down the back side to Darrington at the end of next week. The last thing I need is to get stuck halfway between here and there.”

  “Well, all right. I suppose Benny could use the work.” She dropped the subject of the truck and quickly turned her attention to the scattering of firewood. “I see you’ve been busy.”

  “I’m always busy, you know that, too. That thing nearabout came down on my roof.” He fumbled with his hands, first in his pockets then picking his shirt buttons. He rambled on, filling the air with details about the tree-felling that he knew were neither interesting nor important to her. The cable winch, the reach of the lowest branches. It filled the space more than anything else, since it was the only way he knew to talk to her anymore.

  “It was a tricky thing,” he said, nodding to the pile of wood. “But there she is.”

  “Well, you know. You could have called me, Hank. I’d have come out early and lent a hand.”

  “You’re already early. Just not early enough.”

  This was the Bobbie he’d always known, unfailingly willing to offer herself up for help around the property, wood cutting, brush clearing, whatnot. Ever since the snowy night at the Flume shortly after she’d started at the school, when she slipped his keys from his coat pocket and announced that she was driving him home, whether he liked it or not. That night had been the spar tree. Stripped clean, solitary, and cabled to every other event that had touched his life since.

  “You know, you shouldn’t worry yourself so much about the old man in the woods.”

  She reached up and grabbed hold of his whiskered chin. “You’re not so old. But you could do with a shave. There’s no reason to grow into the mountain like moss, Hank.”

  There was something about her on this day that was different, maybe her hair, not that he knew a thing about that sort of business. It could be the light coming down from the thickness of the canopy. Perhaps everything was just extra bright today. Something. The orange washed from her temples and fell down to the shoulders like the sunrise.

  She reached down and grabbed a few chunks of firewood and tossed them into a nearby wheelbarrow. Hank said, “Come on now,” but she just smiled and shook her head at him.

  “Come on yourself,” she said. “Let me do this one load. Fun first, then business.”

  She commenced to filling the barrow, one piece at a time, while he stood there gawking at her like a waiter.

  “I was flipping through the channels last night,” he said. “Couldn’t sleep. Came across that old horror movie with Steve McQueen. ‘The Blob’.”

  “Oh yeah. That’s a good drive-in picture.”

  “Dumbest thing I ever saw. Big pile of strawberry jam, eats up the whole town.”

  “I forget how it ended.”

  Hank said, “They killed it with a bunch of fire extinguishers.”

  “Oh yeah.” She bit down on her lip. “It was a stupid movie, but you didn’t turn it off.”

  “Well, I was already too far into it to give up. I had to see how it all ended.”

  Hank trucked the barrow into the cedar grove, and Bobbie added each piece neatly to the growing stack, and only when she clapped her hands together did Hank take the wheelbarrow from her and push it back to the alder field next to the house.

  “Okay, now,” he said. “Time for business.”

  Bobbie nodded with conviction and said, “Time for business.” She kicked at a curl of bark and followed him into the house without further discussion.

  There was still the smell of wood smoke in the room, remnants of the morning fire that Hank had built to cut the waking chill. There were a few mismatched plates on the counter, a couple of errant glasses and a red-checked hand towel left draped over the edge of the sink. But for the most part, the place was clean. Hank took pride in being the kind of man who was cognizant of the space around him, a person who appreciated a semblance of order and predictability but who did not demand it.

  The details, as they should be, were in the construction of the house and it showed. Hank had built it over a period of years with his own hands, when he still lived and worked in Ash Falls. It was a mix of Doug Fir, alder and Western Red Cedar, all lumber that he had milled onsite. He was especially proud of the dovetailed cabinetry and hand-routed moldings, the tongue in groove paneling and even the woodstove that he had welded together from a salvaged oil drum, set into a hearth of river rock that he carried in from the nearby riverbed. There was no hint now of what had once been on site, not even a faint scar of the ramshackle cabins and canvas-draped tents that cluttered the land decades earlier, when the entire valley was owned and inhabited first by Hank’s grandfather Malcolm and then, Hank’s father Henry Senior.

  “Damn that thing puts out the heat,” Bobbie said. She undid the button at her neck and pulled her shirt back and forth from her chest. She glanced to the sofa, where the finer clothing that Hank had lain out still waited for the change that would no longer be taking place. “Just like your dad, I suspect. It could be the middle of July and you’d have a fire in the stove.”

  “It gets cold up here in the mornings. You forget that, living down there in the big city. It might only be twelve miles but it’s almost six hundred feet up. These bones freeze easily.”

/>   “Those bones are just fine, Hank.” Bobbie stood in the doorway to the kitchen, her shoulder leaning against the jamb and her hands in her jeans pockets. She looked at Hank in the way she always did when she was poking fun. Deadpan, one eyebrow raised.

  “Business.”

  In the pine-paneled pantry, behind the canisters of black beans and chickpeas and dried cornmeal, and wheat flour, and a false cedar panel, were the tiny gasket jars filled with the Medicine, and that was exactly what he preferred it to be called. Medicine. Anyone who happened to come by his cabin and refer to it as anything else would be given a single correction and then it would be, “Off my land for good and don’t come back.” It was one of several reasons Hank saw so few people at the cabin anymore. It was just too much to ask some people to be respectful of what he did and how he did it. Bobbie got it. She was smart and she kept her priorities in line with Hank’s. She hadn’t needed a reminder at all, not even once.

  “Any of these your own?” Bobbie stood back from the shelves. She peered studiously at the jars, then glanced back over her shoulder, out the front window. “Are you growing yet?”

  “Hell no.” The last thing he needed was the headache of a grow operation. “I don’t need but a little bit here and there, you know that. These down here I got from my guy in Darrington, and the rest are from a grower up in Sedro-Wooley. It’s all good stuff, but this right here is something new.” He pulled two jars from the shelf and handed them to Bobbie, then took two more. They walked to a small table in the kitchen and set them down. “Open that lid there and take a whiff of it.” He motioned to one of the jars closest to Bobbie.

  “This one?”

  “Yeah.”

  She bent down the bracket and popped the glass lid back, and put it to her freckled nose. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. She smiled, the first full, genuine smile he’d seen all afternoon.

  “Grape Kool-Aid.”

  Hank took the jar from her hand and reached in, pulling out a thumbnail-sized nugget and holding it up. It was a tangle of thick, meaty fibers with sparse wisps of purple hairs woven in.

  “They call it Grape Krush. My fella in Sedro-Wooley, he brought in about twenty plants. Gave me first dibs on it.”

  “That’s generous.”

  “He’s that kind of guy.”

  Bobbie took it from him and rolled the nugget between her fingers, and lifted it to her nose to give it another smell.

  “What’s the strain?”

  “Sixty indica, forty sativa. All grown inside, believe it or not. He’s got these new sodium vapor lights. Like something out of NASA. He tells me it cuts grow time almost in half if you can believe it.” The two of them, talking business, science. Like she was any other customer.

  Bobbie picked up the jar and tipped it to one side, and brought it to her nose where she took in a deep breath. She leaned back and exhaled, and ran her hand through her hair, scratching at the back of her neck with her fingers. “What about couch lock?” she said.

  Hank rolled his eyes and whispered, “Couch lock? Come on.”

  But Bobbie held up her hand in defense. “Hank I have to ask. I can’t be giving up my whole day.”

  With the amount of medicine that Bobbie had been buying from him lately, Hank found it hard to believe that she wasn’t already giving up her day. They never talked about how much she used, or whether or not she was sharing with someone else. It was better for Hank to stay in the dark about what his buyers did once the product left his hands, and that went double for Bobbie.

  “No couch lock,” he said. “Christ Almighty. If I have something that’s going to shut you down I’ll tell you up front, you know that. Enough of this couch lock bullshit, you know me better than that.” The sound of his own voice—the rising tone, the slight tremor, the self-righteous indignation—needled him, and he felt the flush of embarrassment rise in his face. Jesus Christ, Hank, he thought. Get it together.

  He took the jar. “This strain right here, this’ll be real nice for you. It’s got a slow build up and a warm blanket for the rest of the night.”

  Bobbie nodded. “Fine Hank. It’s all right.”

  After the metric scale and the plastic baggies, and the cash transaction and the coded notations there came the coffee and the scratching at the door. Bobbie let the dog inside, and Toby knocked against her legs and then Hank’s legs before he found the softness of his bed near the stove. Hank said, “Dumb dog,” and his tail thumped against the floorboards.

  Bobbie leaned back in her chair and took a drink from her mug, and set it down on the table with a smirk and undid another notch on her shirt, and fanned herself. “Damn Hank,” she said. “Every time I forget what pond muck tastes like I just think about that stovetop percolator waiting for me up here on Silver Mountain.” She laughed.

  “Yeah, well,” he said. “It can’t be much worse than that shit they cook up in the staff room. If memory serves, that stuff could melt the spoon before you finished stirring in the sugar.”

  Bobbie laughed again and said, “Oh, it’s still bad but it’d be a far stretch to say that this is much better.”

  Bobbie slid down in her chair, and Hank felt her knee come to rest against his. She was looking at his eyes, and he looked away, to stare at the jars in front of him, not really looking at them at all. Then she took another drink of the wretched black coffee. Their knees stayed as they were, unmoved, neither of them speaking a word.

  In those few moments, a hundred thoughts ran through Hank’s mind, and not all of them pleasant. Hank circled her face with his eyes, studying the tiny crescents hanging over the edges of her mouth, and the glistening sheen of her eyes. There was a pleading there, he thought, a hunger that he both understood and shared. It seemed to rise up from the floor and overtake them both, like that ridiculous thing from the late movie. It had taken three years from the night that Ernie killed Ricky Cordero to be able to face Bobbie in even the most pedestrian of circumstances without feeling as though he should die at her feet. The last thing in the world he thought he could ever do was walk through that door again, to even hope that he’d come out the other side alive.

  “What’s happening here, Bobbie?” he said. “Something’s on your mind. It’s been there ever since you got here.”

  She broke into a pained, forced smile.

  His insides blinked but he held back, stayed put. “You can tell me.”

  Bobbie put her fists over her eyes and shook her head. Her whole body tensed, and she released a heavy sigh.

  “Shit, Hank,” she cried. “I don’t even know where to start.”

  There was a tension in her voice, a rubber band wound up ready to snap. Hank drew his leg back.

  “Is it Patrick?” he asked. “He’s not running off again, is he?” In those months after Erie had gone to jail, Bobbie’s boy would disappear for days at a time, once as long as two weeks. The news came through others, so the details had likely been all mixed up. He’d wanted to call her then, to try and be there for her. But the crevasse between them had grown too wide. Uncrossable.

  “Patrick’s a good boy,” Bobbie said. “He’s fine. He got a job, you know. Some mink farm outside of town.” She nodded quickly. “After school mostly. Sometimes on weekends, if the old guy needs him.”

  “He’s working at Tin Dorsay’s? Damn. Well that’s just great. You know, Tin’s my uncle. That place goes way back.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Sure. Uncle Tin, he’s been running the minkyard on his own since…I don’t know…maybe fifty-five? Used to be a commune back in the old days. A religious group—”

  Bobbie looked past him and it was clear that whatever he might say about this place would fly right over her. She didn’t want to know about the ranch, not now. And it was all just as good, anyway, because he didn’t really want to get into it.

  “Shit, there isn’t enough time left in the day to get started on that story.” Hank leaned onto his elbow. “At any rate, you tell Patrick to keep
his fingers away from the cages.”

  “He knows that already.”

  “Bastards will take ‘em right off without so much as a warning. I’ve seen it.”

  “He knows, Hank.” Bobbie scratched at the table with her thumbnail.

  Hank watched her eyes, waited for her to look up at him. But she wouldn’t. She kept staring at those fingers of hers and working the nail into the varnish, not making progress on anything in particular. Her hair had fallen over her face now. He wanted to reach across and smooth it away, to see what might be happening with her eyes but his own hands felt like lead weights, anchored to the table in front of him.

  “So it’s not Patrick,” he said. “That’s good. But hell sweetie I wish you’d—”

  “It’s Ernie,” she interrupted. She looked up at him finally, eyes welling, nodding slowly as if he had already guessed the answer.

  “Ernie?”

  “Yeah. He’s out. Loose in the world as it would be.”

  Hank pushed himself back from the table, pressing his back against his chair. “You ain’t shitting. When did this come about?”

  “Couple days ago. Some sheriff called.”

  “Goddamn, honey, I’m awful sorry to hear it. I know you don’t need that in your life.”

  “Nobody does.”

  “You tell Patrick yet?”

  “God no.” She got up from the table and went to the kitchen and dumped the coffee down the drain, and rinsed the cup and filled the cup and took a long drink before putting it down again. “I know I have to tell him sometime, but I guess I’m hoping they’ll catch Ernie first.” She stopped and put her hand to her mouth. “He’s been doing so good. Patrick. He just doesn’t need any more to deal with right now.”

  “Well Bobbie, I think he has a right to know. I’m not saying Ernie will come this way but it’d be a hell of thing if he did decide to show up on your stoop one night. You can borrow my gun if you need to.”

  She stood up straight. “I don’t want your gun. Jesus.” Her voice was a tremor and he could tell that the tension struck even her as odd. She closed her eyes and drew in her breath, and held it before letting it out slowly. “I know Ernie’s in a bad place right now. But he wouldn’t hurt us. I know he wouldn’t hurt Patrick, anyway.”