Ash Falls

by Warren Read

  “What do you mean my dad got out?”

  Marcelle’s face froze, a sickly white, her mouth held in a perfect O. The glass door to the store swung open and Eugene stomped out, a purse-sized paper bag at his side. He walked to the other side of the pickup, rattled his keys, and peered around the windshield at Patrick.

  “Getting beauty tips, Luntz?” he said. “Wasting your time there.” He wrenched open the door and climbed inside, tossing the bag onto Marcelle’s lap. The engine cranked and immediately the air was sliced with the jagged assault of an electric guitar and the raw, high-pitched wail of some metal singer. The car shot back from the curb, its rear end swinging outward as Eugene spun the wheel. In the passenger seat, Marcelle’s body rocked from side to side like a doll as the car swerved, stopped hard, then kicked forward again, roaring out of the parking lot out onto the highway toward town.

  His bike was half a ton as he slogged along the sidewalk, and the storefront windows were dark as he watched his own reflection pass over them, a pathetic and wrung-out mink not even good enough to skin and throw into the pile. He lived in a town where not only did things remain the same, people were dead set on things staying firmly and forever in place. The Fotomat still showed the same portraits, pigtailed girls hugging ribboned dogs, men propping limp deer carcasses, dusty, faded remnants of some era prior to his moving there. Louella’s Shear Genius Salon advertised women with hairstyles he’d seen on black-and-white sitcoms, piled high over pearl earrings. The half mannequins in Hinkle’s loomed likes ghosts behind the darkened window, still dressed in last spring’s polo shirts, washed out from two seasons crowding the storefront. The half-hearted effort that Mr. Hinkle had made by tossing in a few paper leaves and cardboard cornucopia barely forced the whole thing into Thanksgiving,

  Patrick wanted out so badly it kept him up nights. His father was out, whatever “out” meant. A cage left open, somebody having failed to double check. Patrick knew his dad would need to be careful of trucks passing too close to the shoulder. He’d need a place to be sleep at night, someplace warm, and he’d have to take food from the garbage, or wait for unfinished pizzas to be put out behind the parlor. He would be coming back to Ash Falls. Somehow. And when he did, Patrick would be ready to say what he had to say.

  He climbed back on his bike and turned hard from the sidewalk to the street, shifting up, working the gears with all his weight and picking up speed before hitting the open road leading out of town. And he cried out as loud as he could, a cry that cleaned him out, pushing until his throat hurt and the blood pulsed behind his eyes. The wind rushed his face as he rode, pulling the tears from his eyes and drawing icy lines to his temples, and wetting his hair before finally making warm pools in the pockets of his ears.

  Hank and Susanna (and Nels)

  The sun had dropped behind the alder grove, and its hard light cut through the naked stands in stinging, white stripes. Hank peered from beneath the visor as he drove along the long, rutted drive. The countless potholes spotting the ground had already begun to frame themselves with thin, papery edges of ice. He passed right over them, sending arcs of mud over the flanks of bracken and sword fern, and then just as he reached the rotted stump with the lichen-choked springboard notches, he turned into her driveway. The gauntlet of overgrown Rhodies raked the sides of his truck as he went, their leaves curled under like cupped hands. Susanna’s place was the last stop of the day.

  In the clearing beside the Elcona singlewide, an old car was propped on stubbed posts of cinder block, its wheels stripped and stacked against the trailer. It was a ‘65 or ‘66 Rambler, or Valiant. Hank wasn’t sure. At any rate, both the car, and the broad-backed, coveralled man bent over its open engine compartment, were not supposed to be there. The glow of a trouble lamp shook against the underside of the hood as the man’s thick arms bucked back and forth.

  Hank stopped and cut the engine, and the man pulled himself from the car’s mouth. He turned to Hank and pulled a blue bandanna from his pocket, and rolled it casually around his bare hands.

  Hank stepped from the pickup and stretched himself to his full height. He slid his Stihl cap onto his head and tucked his bag under his arm, pressing it tight against his body. The man took a few steps toward him and stuffed the rag into his pocket. Hank’s toes curled inside his boots.

  “You lost?” the man asked.

  “I’m here for Susanna. She’s expecting me.”

  “You the caseworker?”

  Hank slipped his hand into his denim jacket and took hold of his car keys and ran his callused finger over the notches. The man’s lower lip hung heavy, showing a cobbled assortment of horsey teeth.

  “Oh I know,” he said. “You’re that guy from up on the mountain. The old teacher.”

  A sudden heat bloomed from Hank’s chest to his shoulders, then raced down his back. He felt his face flush, and his mouth turn to chalk. He glanced over to his pickup truck, then back to the guy. Susanna hadn’t said a goddamned thing about a boyfriend or anyone else being here.

  “I’ll just go on in.” Hank intended to add kick to his words. But the sound was weak, a tremorous ribbon that fluttered limply to the ground.

  “Fine by me.” The man thumbed at the trailer. “She oughta be up.”

  Hank stepped from his truck, keeping the man in his sights. The bulky figure stood guard, hands kneading the blue rag, monitoring Hank as he climbed the mud-slicked steps. Hank slipped his hand from his pocket and pounded at the cold aluminum door. Immediately there was a shout for him to come in. He held the doorknob and breathed in the crisp, clean evening air, letting it fill his lungs and soak into his head. He closed his eyes and drew his concentration to the surrounding forest and its understory, the hanging mosses and composting leaves and dried out cedar springs that blanketed the floor. And only when he felt like he could carry those things with him, did he turn the knob and step through the door.

  Inside, the place was misery, a miasma of mildew and sweat and breath and cat shit, and overripe fruit, all forced into a tepid swirl by the blast of a growling furnace. What had been stacks of clutter on his previous visit were now towers, precarious columns of boxes and magazines, and wadded clothing. Reams of loose, useless papers and unopened mail blanketed every desktop and shelf and window ledge in drifts of specked white. At the same time there was the nauseating sensation of airborne algae clinging to Hank’s skin, as if he was swimming into the depths of an untended fishbowl.

  Susanna was poured into an orange recliner against the far wall, her body a rolling landscape wrapped in paisley. She sat beneath the umbrella of a floor lamp, working a jigsaw puzzle off the surface of a TV tray that straddled her full lap. She studied the scene like a giant owl, eyes darting about, chin swollen and taut, her thin, graying hair swept back clean over her head.

  He slid a chair from the kitchen table. A tabby hissed and launched itself from the seat before scurrying behind a column of trussed newspaper bundles. Hank came to Susanna and set his bag next to the chair. He could feel a beating in his temples. He sat down and took a full breath of the thick, murky air, and found his fingers falling together in knots as he tried to work the zippers on the bag.

  It was moments like these—when things came unexpected, when the money didn’t match the promise, when caterwauling kids wandered from back bedrooms to paw at his things and ask nosy questions, or strangers suddenly showed up from nowhere—moments like these Hank found himself wondering what the hell turn he had taken in life to end up where he was. In a moist tin box dense with the smell of cat piss, choked with water-spotted furniture, shoeboxes coughing out forests of paper, and flaccid houseplants that looked the way he felt.

  “How are things?” he asked.

  “Okay, I guess.” She picked up a small puzzle piece and pressed it to the tray then retrieved it, returning it to its original spot. The orange tabby reappeared from the kitchen and sauntered over to lie at her spongy ankles.

  “Tough time for some folks,” he said.
“All this rain, and now the frost. Hard on the bones.”

  “Well I don’t like to complain.” The woman lifted the tray and set it aside. “I hate this puzzle. Just a bunch of jelly beans. It’s too hard.”

  Hank unpacked his bag and laid an array of jars at his feet. He had a system, very specific and regimented. It was a bit of irony he hated admitting. Lyla had been made almost crazy with her own systems when they were children. Her chest of drawers and crayons and paints, and their shared toys and board games. She could be obsessive, demanding that they be organized by hues, or by name, alphabetically, to the point of little blue veins rising from her neck. Hank had loved that he could drive her to tears simply by refusing to follow her dictate, or by sneaking in after the fact to move things around. And now, here he was.

  He took Susanna through the various selections he’d brought, casting recommendations for her complex, ever-shifting needs.

  “This right here is a good one for the morning,” he said, resting a Mason jar on his knee. He turned it over in his hand as if it was a laboratory specimen. “For getting out of bed. Stiff joints. Sore muscles.”

  She leaned over her lap and snatched a jar from the floor, then sprang back up, holding it to her face. Her eyes narrowed, her lips drawn to a rosebud.

  “What’s a Cinderella?”

  Hank took it from her and returned it to his feet. “That one’s candy,” he said. “Goofy. Not an everyday thing.”

  “What do you like?” She continued to reach for the jars herself, to tip the lids and shake the medicine, and put them all back in the wrong places. Hank reshuffled them and slid the bag closer to his feet.

  “What I like has no bearing on what’s best for you.”

  They moved pinches of medicine from jars to the scale, from the scale to bags. Money was transferred from purse to hand to envelope. Hank took out a pad and wrote down a few numbers and nothing more, and when the transaction was complete, and Hank had the medicine stowed neatly away in his bag, he breathed in the thick air, cupped his hands over his knees and leaned into her.

  “Susanna,” he said. “I don’t want to make a big deal about this. But I need to be frank.”

  She looked up at him with her eyes that were always weepy and yellowed. A heavy mask of worry fell over her face. Hank had set her feelings on edge, as he had intended.

  “That fellow outside,” he said. “Who is he?”

  “Nels. He’s my brother.”

  “Well, your brother Nels threw me for a real loop when I pulled up here. Asked me all kinds of questions. He even called me the old teacher. I just about turned around and drove on out of here.”

  The woman dipped her balloon chin to her chest and pushed out her lower lip.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “He’s only here a couple weeks, till he gets on his feet. He don’t know why you’re here. Probably he was curious is all. He ain’t seen no regular people here.”

  “Regular people?”

  She looked up at Hank, her eyes wide. Glassy droplets sagged from the lower folds. “You know,” she said. “Nice-looking. Hardly no one ever comes around here. Just church people bringing food and puzzles and stuff. Them or my caseworker.”

  “He said teacher, Susanna. You didn’t have to tell him that.”

  The woman rested her chin to her chest and wiped at her eyes. “I’m sorry, Hank. It’s okay if you don’t want to come back, but can I get a little bit more? To hold me over till I find someone else? I’ll give you a check but you gotta hold it—”

  Hank put up his hand. “Susanna just calm down. I never said I wouldn’t come back. But I don’t want Nels or anyone else here when I come. Don’t talk about me, don’t talk about the medicine, not to anyone. Those are the rules.”

  “But Nels—”

  “I don’t care. If he asks, you tell him it’s none of his business. This is your place and you can do that. Okay?”

  “Okay, Hank.” Susanna heaved herself from her chair and took hold of a four-pronged cane that lay propped against the wall. With tiny steps, each one seeming like it was planned out days before, she moved slowly past Hank to the refrigerator. She swung the door wide and began to knock through the shelves.

  “Want something to eat?” she asked. “I got some leftover casserole, or I can cook some eggs if you want. I was gonna make supper for me and Nels anyway.”

  “The roads are icing over,” Hank said. He slid the chair back into the kitchen and traversed the wide path through piles of plastic bags and wadded clothing to the front door.

  Nels leaned against the front bumper of the car, holding a carburetor in his hand, digging at it with a screwdriver. He looked up as Hank closed the door behind him without saying a word. The sound of metal picking metal cut the air.

  Hank climbed in the cab and fired up his engine. Nels came sauntering over. Hank pretended not to notice, but the dull rap on the glass gave him no choice but to roll down the window.

  “All good?” Nels’ lip hung like a cut of raw liver.

  “Fine,” Hank said. He squeezed the steering wheel, cold under his knuckles. “What can I do for you?”

  When the man leaned into the cab, Hank pressed himself against the seat and reached over to take hold of the stick shift. If he were to punch the gas, there might be enough time for Nels to pull back. He might be able to pull back in time to keep from leaving his head behind in Hank’s truck.

  “You hear that?” Nels said.

  “Hear what?”

  Nels cupped his hand to his ear and tilted his head. He waited a few seconds, staring intently at the dashboard. All of a sudden he snapped his thumb and forefinger into a pistol. “There,” he said. “Hear it? Like a little mouse squeak.”

  Hank listened and sure enough, about thirty seconds later, he heard a squeal, high-pitched, barely perceptible. If it hadn’t been pointed out to him, he’d likely have never noticed it.

  “Well how about that.”

  “Better have your belts checked,” he said, pulling his head back out into the evening. “Be a bitch if one of ‘em snapped between here and your house. Be stranded up there. That’s how bears and cougars get fed.” He winked.

  Hank forced a smile then watched Nels amble back to the Rambler or Valiant, his lumpy hand slapping against his thigh in some nonsensical rhythm. The heat began to spill from the vents over Hank’s hands, and the blood slowly returned to his fingers.

  It was well past supper by the time he came into town. The parking lot of the AM/PM was already swarming with high school kids, their cars polished, trunks raised with stands of teenagers passing cigarettes and bags of chips back and forth. Hank recognized Tom Cowan at the pump island, lurking behind the rear fender of his car. He was holding the pump nozzle at his crotch as if he was pissing in his tank, watching the kids, probably deciding whether or not he wanted them to notice he was there. Teachers did that all the time—skated between being cool when encountering students outside of the classroom, and staying completely invisible until Monday forced itself upon them again.

  This had once been Potter’s Bog, and longtime locals still referred to it as such. Potter’s Bog had been his and Lyla’s playground, the site of post-Sunday-school searches for the fat frogs that dwelled among tall, downy cattails and sedge grass. Always, they were searching for the evasive. Lyla at his side, ever hopeful, confident that Hank knew best, even when he didn’t.

  At the base of the lit sign, a teenaged girl sat with her head in her hands. Another knelt at her side, hair ratted out like a halo, staring dreamily at the sky while she rubbed a hand over her friend’s back. None of these people—Tom Cowan included—had the foggiest idea what lay beneath them. Thousands of tadpoles listening for spring, for the moment when that beam of sunlight would finally break through the asphalt and set them free from their slumber.

  He turned off past the minimart, taking the side streets beyond the charred remnants of Mick’s Laundromat, and the Tanner Mill cottages, where all the old timers, the lumberja
cks and blacksmiths sat alone in their kitchen nooks, drinking whiskey and Metamucil, waiting for the last shift whistle to blow. He backtracked from Main Street so that he could wind through the cul-de-sacs littered with hockey sticks and basketballs and toys that, once upon a time, might have been made not of cheap Japanese plastic, but of American-forged metal and hewn wood. This is where the Henderson’s buffalo farms once stood, where young boys separated barbed wire with bare hands, slipping through to run wild among the bison, whooping war cries and racing for the safety of giant, craggy maple trunks. He cut east, over to the power transfer station, with its humming castle-like glass spires, the subject of routine city council meeting diatribes, doomsday prophesies of twenty different kinds of cancer, certain to come. He rolled down his window, pushed out a whole afternoon’s worth of pent up gas, then drove on back to where he’d begun, finally spilling back out onto the highway just at the center of town.

  The vacancy sign out front of the Sleep Inn Motel flickered red, the reader board advertising free HBO and coffee for $29.99. Beneath it, a woman bounced on tennis shoes, pinching her ballooned parka to her chin with one hand. The other hand was stretched out from her like a fishing pole, thumb wiggling away at the end. Even in the pink glow of the motel signs, Hank could see she was no teenager, in spite of the bounce and the too-tight blue jeans, and the little Kewpie doll ponytail that sprouted from the top of her head. It was already nighttime, and it was cold.

  He pulled to the shoulder and reached across, unlatching the door.

  “Where you headed?”

  “Home. Up the highway a ways, but I’ll ride as far as you can take me.” She leaned into the open cab. Her face was gaunt and pockmarked in the hollows of her cheeks. She reached her hands up to her mouth and blew on them.